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"I’ve never been one for visual anthropology, and I’m totally uninterested in pushing the boundaries of what constitutes ‘ethnography’. As a fieldworker, I’m fascinated by the micro-dynamics of human behavior and how we create roles for each other to inhabit in everyday life. When I watch documentaries, then, I’m usually trying to imagine the human situations involved in production and let me tell you, there is a whole lot of that stuff in Captains, William Shattner’s documentary on the different actors who have portrayed captains in the sprawling Star Trek franchise."
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Things get interesting quickly because it becomes obvious that the subject of the documentary is not the interviewees but the interviewer: Shattner’s real intention is clearly to make a documentary about himself and the long road he’s trod in life, and particularly to let the entire world know that he was once a classical thespian in the mould of Olivier and Gieldgud. The other major theme is how ennobled and wise he has become being forced to carry the entire weight of the Star Trek franchise on his back across the course of his career.
As a result the show focuses prominently on the fact that the other captains also started out in theater, mostly so Shattner can ask tell them about his time treading the boards. He asks them how Star Trek has changed them, so he can tell them how it has changed him. He asks them their views on life after death and the nature of infinity so that he can brood over his inevitable mortality. It is, in short, a clinic on how not to interview people, with special focus on the preoccupied and narcissistic interviewer. Absolutely fascinating to watch.
"One way I teach students the philosophy of science is by using the documentary "The King of Kong: A fist full of quarters.""
"Zack Snyder's "Sucker Punch" is like the Nietzschean Superman of CGI action movies. It's so far beyond good and evil as to make its morality irrelevant, and to undermine any verdicts you might render about its meaning or quality. A ridiculously ambitious and perhaps fatally flawed mashup of ideas, themes and influences, it's more like a Quentin Tarantino movie -- or more like the platonic ideal of a Tarantino movie -- than any movie Tarantino has ever personally made. I can't be sure whether it's brilliant or idiotic, although I'm pretty confident it's both, and not always in different places or at different moments."
"I'm betting this was as much the case in Capra's time as it is in our own. He loved America but was watching the triumph of Pottersville. That's why, in the last scene, George looks at his friends with terror. He's happy to be alive, but he's disillusioned, wised up in just the worst way. He finally knows the world as it really is, what his friends are capable of, the dark potential coiled in each of them. His wife is a spinster in Pottersville because, if she's not with George, she cannot be anything. She's just one of two characters who are, in fact, the same in both worlds, the other being Mr. Potter. Everyone else is two-faced, masked. Simply put, George has been cursed with knowledge, shown the truth of the world -- seen hidden things. It's the sort of vision that makes a person go insane."
When so many public figures are deliberately shocking and offensive because they want us to join them in being small and mean and petty and tribal -- I’m thinking of the likes of Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh -- Baron Cohen is doing so for the very opposite reasons. And that is a good thing, and a thing very much worth celebrating.
Paul's attempts to act like a real police officer and to convince other people to respond to him as if he is a real police officer are ridiculous and pathetic. But the pathos comes not from the difference between his pretensions and the reality of his life. It comes from our being able to see that Paul would be a good police officer and from our knowledge that in real life there are thousands, millions, of Pauls and Paulettes who would be good at other, better jobs than the ones they're stuck in but which they will never be able to leave except for other dead-end, soul-deadening jobs.
Transformative and revelatory character arcs.
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A transformative arc is the classic feel good "a bad person becomes a good person." This is the Disney arc, the classic arc, although frankly many people confuse a character's circumstances changing with a transformative arc. Star Wars is the perfect example. "Luke Skywalker is a farm boy who becomes a hero." Well, sure. But he wasn't a cowardly farm boy. He wasn't an insecure farm boy. As soon as holo-Lea shows up, he is on-mission. He didn't leave his loving family behind, he was burnt out of his shitty hut he hated anyway.
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A revelatory arc # is one in which the story of the movie is revealing how the hero (and the virtues he represents, which you the writer wish to highlight) is exactly the right person to solve the movie's problem. It's more an echo of the old school morality play. "Behold how misfortune comes unto the world. Now see what kind of man may set it right!" The protagonist of this sort of movie triumphs by holding on to whatever virtues he has, and often by becoming even more confident in them.
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