Life and Debt

-This made me want to never visit Jamaica or any third world country that depends on tourism. Which I guess doesn't help. It would hep more to give them that money. But jeez, the guilt. It's like double edged guilt. I feel like the subtext of voice over narrating the Americans on vacation is like "you're an elitist privileged douche who takes what they have for granted." But it really just makes me sad seeing the employees put on their happy faces and talk to the vacationers like they're idiots who've never been on vacation. I tell you what though, if I had to hear just one more Bob Marley song over that footage, I was going to cut a bitch.

-On a similar note, I feel like I should never buy a banana again! The Honduran workers were forced by gun to go back to work during their strike. Buying Chiquita bananas seems like a carpool lane to Hell. But not buying them and getting others to not buy them has a chances of tanking a job that many people want and many people don't even have in these third world countries. It does most definitely help their economy. What a pickle.

-The way this was cut when it first started, it seemed like it was a feature and not a documentary. The shots used. And the look of it is interesting. It was clearly shot in the same time as Sound and Fury. This feels like a doc that could really only come out of the 90s. A definite product of that decade of documentary filmmaking. The way it was cut, the Day-O part in black and white and slo-mo reminded me of watching the Up series change it's doc style before my very eyes as we catch up with, not just the children, but the filmmaking crew every 7 years. Or similar to seeing Grey Gardens take shape as narrative docs just started to rise in popularity and prevalence in the United States.

-The parts of the doc that were just living just seemed like living. It was interesting to see how that came off. It seems like something that's hard to do. To set a tone like that with the b-roll scenes as if there was absolutely no camera, no releases signed, no boom mic, etc.

-Overall, I wish this were a little more...cohesive and understandable. I still don't really know what the IMF is or how it operates or why. They started out sort of introducing it, but them dropped it midway. I guess the point of this wasn't exactly to spell that out, but they could have spelled that out. What is the IMF and why do they hate Jamaica. After watching, I still don't get what the beef is. Where's the beef?

-This movie really made us come off as villains..which I supposed we are. Just ask North Korea. I mean, we don't pay taxes on the underwear we make them put together in Kingston Free Zone. We have one of the highest proportion of the IMF votes. We don't buy their bananas. We don't pay them right for their work when we outsource everything. We generally don't help them out. And no unions. But I guess England is their mother. Maybe we expect them to worry more about them.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster*

This gave me what I want from docs. I learned something. I love that. People are attempting to shit on this because they think of it as a pro-steroids doc, but I didn't see it that way, really. This was pretty fair in trying to examine and trying to present both sides. It was also, in some way, probably trying to excuse Chris Bell's brother's behavior in some way n the same way anyone else would want to explain away a siblings bad behavior. Very similar to something I can see myself making and HAVE attempted to make in the past. In fact, this opening reminded me so much of some of the stuff we used to make when I worked at 360. The pop music. The montage of pop culture movies and tv shows with a voice over that I did myself because there was really not anyone else who would do it the way I had it in my head. Unfortunately, this dudes voice was kind of grating.

This made me feel bad again for Marion Jones all over again, who didn't even go to jail for doping, but for lying about doping. Also, makes me think about the Olympics and the fact that so many of those athletes take performance enhancing drugs. It's a slippery slope. You don't want to se drugs because their illegal and you'll feel like you're cheating, but you have to use steroids because if you don't, everyone else who's using them (which is literally almost EVERYONE else) will outplay you in every way.

It's funny, I assumed this guy wasn't into filmmaking, just because he didn't seem all that into and it seemed kind of green with the whole thing. Like he doesn't know shit about filmmaking and he'd have to get a lot of help with the editing. he'd be over your shoulder like, "can we, like, do this one effect were the screen zooms in? oh yeah, that looks pretty good." Then I come to find out he went to USC and graduated from the film program. Whoops. One thing I appreciated was that he attempted to ask the tough questions but in a sensitive way. Tiptoing up to Carl Lewis to question him about his positive test for steroids BEFORE the controversial 1988 Olympics. Talking to the Hooton dad (who I'm guessing was probably not very happy with how the doc turned out) about his son's suicide having to possibly do with the anti-dpressants he was on. He did a good job in attempting to get those controversial answers.

That does make me wonder though. Do people forget that they're on film and this little video he's making is going to be turned into a movie or something? They question his brother's students about whether or not their coach (his brother) takes steroids and those kids say that he himself told them no. He said to their faces that he did not do steroids. He lied to them and yet, now, when the movie comes out, everyone's going to know. They sit at the dinner table and try not to say anything to their parents, but the when the movie comes out, everyone' s going to know. It's hard not to take that into account when watching. It's in the back of your mind the whole time. Like when two costars are dating in a feature and it's in your mind during the whole movie.

I like that this didn't solve any problems or give any answers. It wasn't really like Super Size Me in that way. It just was what it was. There really IS no right answer in all of this. It's a complicated matter. I'll leave you with this, though: "Peanuts are dangerous. There are people who eat a Peanut and they go into anaphylactic shock. Does that mean we ban peanuts and sue God for making them?"

The Business of Being Born

I don't know what I expected when I went into this, but I really really liked what I found. One of my top five that I've watched so far. This was made for a particular reason. To open people's eyes about hospital births vs home briths. And I will admit that my eyes have been opened. And I liked that feeling. Be warned, though. This is a movie about giving birth at home, so there are many many on camera births in this movie.

I kind of enjoyed how they showed the doctor's perspective and bounced back and forth between the midwife's opinions. Maybe it was supposed to be used to show both perspectives, but the argument on their side seems so strong that it really just made the doctors sound like Aholes.

It's interesting for something like this, though. At what point is something a biased one sided story and at what point is it a movie that's trying to open your eyes to the realities of the maternity care system just by revealing of facts? I think it did a great job at presenting facts as true but not making them absolute. The hospital works for some cases, as we definitely see later on in the film.

This movie was super uplifting every time a baby was born. Smile from ear to ear. It was awesome. Almost made me want to have a baby. I didn't care for staring at so many vaginas, really. That's just not a thing that I make it a habit of doing all the time, but that's part of birth and I know that it would be. I remember in middle school we had the option of watching a real birth in Mr. Love's health class, and my 12 year old self chose to watch, for curiosities sake. I was scarred for the rest of middle school I think.

Abby Epstein did a great job with this one. Really kept my attention and I felt like I was learning the whole way through.