Fun movie "Star Wait"

[Tim O'Connor]

On the commentary track (which I haven't finished, one of three commentary tracks

on this DVD) the director Michael Rotman says that he wouldn't like this to be called a

documentary.

 

Whatever you would call it, it's an entertaining look at the fans who camped out in shifts

for six weeks in 2002 to buy tickets for the "Attack of the Clones" Star Wars movie.

 

What is really a kick though is that it was shot with a PD-150, using the on-camera

microphone (the credits do mention some audio sweetening) and apparently no lights

or separate audio person and was edited on a maxxed-out home computer with

Final Cut Pro.

 

So, for everybody who's slugging it out with Mini-DV, wishing that they had more pixels

or bigger chips or could shoot in film, take heart in how spending a lot of time but

maybe not a lot of money can still result in a pretty good film (movie, video, DVD?)

[Leo Anthony Vale]

On the commentary track (which I haven't finished, one of three commentary tracks

on this DVD) the director Michael Rotman says that he wouldn't like this to be called a

documentary.

 

PBS/Frontline is giving the genre a bad name.

[Tim O'Connor]

PBS/Frontline is giving the genre a bad name.

 

I wonder if also a different name or connotation. The term documentary

seemed to mean that a fair length of time was spent documenting something

and now it seems that there are documentaries that are really something else,

essays perhaps.

 

Of course, a documentary like Ken Burns Civil War series deserves the

description because of its scope but otherwise it seems that a documentary

used to be the term for a film culled from lots and lots of footage shot in

an environement or environments in which over a period

of time, with the camera present or not, the truth revealed itself.