Documentaries Galore / 嘘つかない

Apparently I am holding my own private documentary film festival, seeing as how the last three movies I've watched (in about as many days) are all documentaries. The reason, though, isn't because I like documentaries (even though I do); it's because I mainly watch movies that run 90 minutes or less, and with that criterion, most feature films on my Netflix Instant Queue can't cut it. (Bachelorette (2012), of course, is an exception—it's next on my list.)

I remember back when I was working (and so had "free time" after I left the office) I had 30 days each of free Netflix and Blockbuster trials thanks to my sister. That basically meant a movie every other night for those months, making a small dent in my "Movies to Watch" list. I could stay up late into the night with a movie on in my apartment, and even if I fell asleep watching it, I could wake up at 3 AM and finish the last 20 minutes.

Of course that was over six years ago, when I was still young. Now I fall asleep a lot earlier, and once I fall asleep I don't wake up until morning. Old age... But the point is, I want to be selective about what I watch, and I am developing my own taste for the kinds of documentaries I enjoy. It's by watching things I don't like, that I can get excited about the things I do.

Take, for example, Roger Sherman's The Restaurateur (2010), a documentary that follows Danny Meyer and his team as they work to open two new restaurants in New York City. But...that was all it did. It followed the people over the years, captured the challenges they had to overcome, and documented the progress of these restaurants from conception to realization. But once it was over, all I could say was, "Well then."

I'd been wanting to see Bess Kargman's First Position (2011) for a while now, and it didn't disappoint. The young ballet dancers that the film follows as they prepare for the Youth America Grand Prix are phenomenal—they are mature, disciplined, passionate, and critical of themselves to the nth degree. I cried when they won; I cried when they lost. (I also cried when one of the mothers cried...because I felt so sad that she felt so sad that her son quit ballet. Oh, parents.) But after the film ended, I didn't have anything to take away with me. I watched beautiful dancing for 90 minutes; but afterwards, what was I to learn from it?

But then I saw Neil Diamond's Reel Injun (2009), a documentary tracing the representation of Native Americans in American film, and it hit me—ah, this is the kind of dissertation I want to write. (No, I don't mean that I want to make a film tracing the representation of women in Japanese imperialist literature...) In tracing that film history, Diamond manages to tie together so many different complex issues: racial hierarchy in North America over the century; internalization and resistance of stereotypes among minority communities; poverty and issues of abuse and alcoholism in Native American (or is it "American Indian"?) societies today; homogenization and appropriation of the richly diverse cultures among the various tribes by American capitalist culture; and so much more. Yes, tell me about all the important films, actors, and directors of Native American cinema—but I want to learn more about why this stuff matters, why we have to keep talking about it today. That's what Reel Injun did for me. (It even included a kickass analysis of Disney's Pocahontas (1995) by Ethnic Studies scholar Melinda Micco, which just about made my day.)

I admit that watching a movie while doing the dishes isn't as easy as listening to music—but with all the sorting through junk mail, hanging up the laundry, and stretching my muscles that I have to do every day, a documentary a day (or every other day) doesn't seem all that impossible.