8: The Mormon Proposition

This movie was controversial for some for various reasons. Documentaries are interesting. When you watch a doc, you take at face value that what you're being told is the truth. You want to believe that the filmmakers did their homework and are giving you the facts. I've watched enough of them to know (and actually exist in the world), that that's definitely not always the case. There can be manipulative editing, manipulative narration, and just over all skewing of the facts. I'm going to ignore that where this movie is concerned and just take it for what I saw.

Unfortunately, the way the Mormons went about it was great planning and great organization. It was really pretty impecable, the ways they went about campaigning against gay marriage with commercials, with door to door, with word of mouth. It was exactly like the said, they were a little army.

It did get a bit hard to watch once we got into the sad stories about all the young Mormon people who were thrown out of their houses simply for being gay. It's hard to imagine any parent reacting to their child in such a way. Their flesh and blood. I can't wrap my head around that.

The good thing about tis movie is that we know now it was mostly over turned...sort of. It's getting there.

Red Without Blue

I loved the idea of this documentary. I was really excited to watch it because it had such a fascinating premise. I decided to watch this because as a twin and an ally, and I was really interested to see what was going on with this family. It sounded like a really intriguing story. Something that just had to be put on film.

Unfortunately, it turned out to basically be a representation of my fear in filmmaking. Which was a bummer. Every once in a while, you see a movie that just falls together. It makes it look like filmmaking is so easy. Everything just works. But then you come across something like this where you can tell the team was really passionate about the project and the content and the characters, but it just really doesn't really come together, exactly. The summary said this takes place over a year, but it didn't really feel like that. It felt like we were talking about everything happening in the past. I didn't like that. There didn't seem like there was forward momentum with the narrative, however pompous that sounds.

After I watched it, the feeling sort of became...maybe it should have been a feature. It's a sort of "truth is than fiction" sort of story. And the way they went about it as a doc didn't really work, for me. I feel like there were much better ways to tell that story.

Enough bitching though. The story is definitely an interesting one. Sexuality is really freaking tricky. It's complicated and is in no way black and white. This was a clear example of that. It was disappointing how the family sort of fell apart and never really came back together. Even the end, which seemed like some things got resolved, showed that nothing will ever go back to being like those happy times of their childhood.