Overnight

Shayla asked me to watch a documentary about education, and just by luck I found one of the only ones on instant watch about education and it was only an hour. This one was more like an expose you'd find on the new. I started it and it wasn't anything that I was interested in so I had to stop it and try something else.

So, I changed it up and started watching Paperclips. An education doc about a small town school in Tennessee educating its students about the Holocaust. Then that was super boring too (I guess I'll just wait for Waiting for Superman to come out), so I decided to to watch Overnight, the dissolution of Troy Duffy's career as it happens.

I really dug this one. It wasn't very polished, the editing wasn't great and the camera was definitely not awesome, but it really kept my attention. The ultimate Hollywood unsuccess story. And wow. He's a douche. An absolute abhorrent personality. I don't know who wins the terrible award, Billy Mitchell of The King of Kong, or this asshole here. Probably Duffy, though ("They put up a quarter of a million dollars, but that's chicken feed to them. And they're being so Jewish about it" -Troy Duffy.) At least Billy Mitchell was really just a caricature of an over the top human being.

It's crazy to think he was going to get that much control over a movie with no filmmaking experience and from working in a bar. How did the Weinstiens put this much trust in him? Just like they basically let Ben and Matt do Good Will Hunting the way they wanted when they were just nobodies. And it's funny how, even with Troy being horrible and the movie being, in my opinion super bad and incredibly overrated, I still wasn't sure if I actually wanted the whole thing to tank and blow up in all their faces. Troy deserved it, but the other guys didn't. Maybe because he's an actual real person, not a fictional evil villain. Even if he is a clinical narcissist.

This thing was clearly made by people who didn't care about making him look terrible. From the edits they make, to the way they cut Troy, he's just a tool form start to finish. Maybe that's the whole idea. He looks like a dick and nothing else.

This one had a lot of titles explaining what was going on. There was a lot of organized chaos. I liked that it seemed to kind of be like the sort of thing where they just shot the footage to have the footage, but later had to turn it into an actual movie. That's probably not what happened, but that's how it seemed because the footage was so sort of raw and sloppy and freehand. It's interesting because a lot times in a doc, it's hard to get the person you're following to act naturally, forget the camera and just behave the way they would regardless. What's funny about this is that I feel like this really was Troy Duffy at this time. And that is bad news for him. As we saw.

They caught some really great moments on camera. This is a great doc in that it's not manufactured action. The stuff just falls into place. The camera caught what it caught and that was enough. It's a day to day real life account of a story that's being documented as it happens. The car accident? Lucky stuff. And it's funny how we have the perspective of hindsight being 20/20. We know the future and this was just showing the inside look on how it happened. That's always fun to see. It was fun to finally hear the joke because I already knew the punchline.