Time Of Fear

-This was a standard PBS documentary. Not mind blowing, but simply meant to just educate you on a subject. I was interested to watch this one because I watched one of those It Gets Better videos with George Takei, looked up his history, and his Wikipedia page mentioned that he was in a Japanese Interment camp….which is insane to think about. Really, what was FDR thinking?!

-This was such a fucked up moment in American history. The government took a bunch of people from the same country, most whom were now citizens, took them away from their homes, had them burn their family pictures, letters, priceless mementos, and got them all together and put them in a camp. That's incredible. That's an incredible scar on our nation's history here. And it's really a shame because WWII is known as being one of the "noble wars" (if that makes sense and is not a complete oxymoron), but with this huge scar on it, it's really tarnished forever. It sort of brings to mind the recent Presidential election which was happy and momentous, but then you think about how Prop 8 passed and that will forever tarnish a great night in American history.

-I tell you what, though, it's interesting to watch this and see how conservative and paranoid the media, press and government were. Implying that all the Japanese in America should go back to Japan and never come back, implying that every Japanese person, citizen or not, was probably working undercover against the United Staes as some kind of sleeper agent. And then to NOW see how times have changed with conservatives constantly complaining that the media is too liberal. Liberal media this and liberal media that. I guess something like this would be what they'd have in mind? A close comparison you can draw to this situation is with the current war and the way this country treats and view Muslims as if they're automatic enemies of the state. To imagine the kind of government that would then take all those people, round them up, put them in a camp (basically for safe keeping), only to be backed up by all the media outlets in the country with little to no protesting on the subject until way later…that is just something I can't even fathom. Of course there's still Fox News and other ridiculous outlets that perpetuate the same hate and fear that I saw in this film. But at least there are now checks and balance when it comes to the media. To imagine prejudice like this just being backed up. At the risk of sounding completely melodramatic, it really makes me kind of sick yo my stomach.

-"I remember our parents telling us we had to do well in school because we would have to try twice as hard to get jobs and things." Well that's a funny perspective of it. And it's ver interesting, once they got to the camps, the wages for teachers inside he camps was almost double what they would make in the public schools. So the camp was staking all the good teachers, basically. And it's incredible that the Arkansas residents actually resented the Japanese in the internment camp because they're provided food, or they're getting hospital stays, or they can go to school. But they're in a camp!! There is no comparison. Absolutely none.

-When it comes to the filmmaking, it was pretty standard PBS kind of stuff. Voice over and archive footage. I tell you what, though, it's pretty tricky to cut a bunch of archive footage together as a narrative. It's like not being around during filming, and going into something completely blind without knowing what it's about or anything that was filmed. That basically is what it is.

-"Americanism is not a matter of blood and color. Americanism has always been a matter of mind and heart." Says the guy that put them in the camps in the first place; that's FDR.

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.

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.

No End In Sight

Wow. Some heavy stuff. I feel so much smarter now. That's why I got into this. To learn things I didn't know before. I feel like getting into a debate with someone about the goings on of this war. I still find it crazy that I've been raised during war time. And it's so frustrating that these things are happening that no common human civilian can even do anything about. We're just stuck. They're just stuck. It sucks.

This one utilized a lot of documentary techniques. Voice overs, text, interviewer speaking on camera to the interviewees, separated sections. There's not much score really, which I think really works. It's used in a meaningful way when used. It all worked together, but at some times, each technique had its weakness. The titles sometimes were unnecessary at times when they footage could have spoken for itself. But also, I like that they weren't afraid to jump cut the interviews. Sometimes you just gotta jump cut.

Even after watching all of this, I still fail to understand how it's possible for a country to come into another country, mess it up, kill their dictator as if he's their dictator, and then go on to rule it like they have any any sort of jurisdiction within that country

This documentary watching project that I'm doing should be renamed "No room to complain" project. Cause everything I watch that explores the hardships of different countries and cultures other than my own, just gives me another reason that, by comparison, I have no reason to complain. Sad to think that this movie was made 3 years ago, but we're still in this situation today. It's insane. It's insane too that Obama inherited this problem.

I'd like to say more about this one, but it was pretty much just as depressing and hopeless seeming as I expected.