Movies

I can't remember ever sitting through a movie in a theater before where at various points throughout a single movie, my fellow audience members had such a range of shared reactions: laughter, shocked audible gasps, angry wtfs, disgust, empathy.

This is the only movie where I've said out loud "oh my god" and "what the fuck" in reaction to what was being said on screen. I was so genuinely surprised at some of the reveals.

Because an Indian distributor hasn't purchased it.

Because they want you to pirate it

Lance Oppenheim documentaries are usually very well received, and this one is co-directed and hosted by a very popular celebrity comedian following a famously crazy person. It's kind of the perfect recipe to make a very popular and well liked documentary.

The breathless hype this movie is receiving is making me angry, and I’m not entirely certain why.

Possibly because on a superficial level it comes off as another celebration of an evil doer who actively did truly shitty things, and we're all bone fucking tired of that.

I only say that because for myself I've been skipping the above Guardian article for several days based on the subject alone, and that is my own reason why. Good to hear there's more to the movie than that. I like a good documentary, maybe this will be worth watching when it gets to streaming.

This will probably piss you off more, but it's one of those things where it's kind of impossible to predict what your expectations should be going in and that's a big part of why it's enjoyable.

Don't want to spoil it for you but you should leave the movie with broad questions about truth, human nature, memory, and bias/perception in general moreso than gaining definitive answers about the subject of the documentary.

Will you be able to go about life just fine if you don't see it or wait until it's streaming? Yes.

Is it a surprisingly good movie that's worth the cost of a ticket and 3 hours of attention? Yes.

Honestly would like to know if you do end up seeing it and manage to still hold on to that singular feeling of anger while sitting through this movie.

You're right to be a little bit skeptical that a movie could actually be as groundbreaking as people seem to be claiming. But I think it lives up to the hype. It's a documentary, but it's a documentary like no other I've ever seen. It's a Nathan Fielder work, and there are all sorts of Nathan Fielder characteristics to this film, but the collision between the subject of this documentary and Nathan Fielder's style is just such an interesting lighting in a bottle type situation, like when physicists finally develop the technology to smash subatomic particles at high momentums against each other, and seeing what comes out of it.

I can't see how something like this could ever be made again.