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Documentaries: It’s Either a Crisis or a Boom. BlogNosh 05/07/08

Karina Longworth
By Karina Longworth posted 4 months ago
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  • Wildly divergent posts on the State of Documentary today. At Film.com, Eric D. Snider comes up with four “possible explanations” for why reality television is more popular than documentary film; scale of distribution (ie: the fact that most documentaries play in just a handful of cities, if they get traditional theatrical distribution at all) is not mentioned, but the “lighthearted” nature of reality TV vs. non-fiction film is. Meanwhile, AJ Schnack points out that the crowd-pleasing Young@Heart is the fourth doc to cross the $1 million mark at the box office so far this year, putting 2008 on track to be the biggest year for docs since 2003. The second-highest grossing doc of this banner year thus far is Expelled; in a Pop Matters post about why that film is “the essence of bullshit”, George Reisch dismisses its success by claiming that “early box-office indications are that it’s a fizzle.” I know reality is subjective and everything, but when it’s *this* subjective, it starts to seem like a bad joke.
  • Rainbow Media, the Cablevision-owned company that in turn owns IFC and the AMC network, has purchased the Sundance Channel. Bloggy bits from Matt Dentler, Nikki Finke, Jason Guerrasio and Alison Willmore.
  • Anthony Miccio at Idolator bemoans the lack of a “a critical backlash” to I’m Not There (what can I say––I tried), then rants for a bit about why it sucks. A salient point: “[T]here’s a TV movie from the ’70s that equally reveled in ’60s iconography, while revealing a little more about the music itself and throwing in a bunch of jokes to boot. Maybe not taking their marvelous meta seriously is why The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash doesn’t get the same boot-licking treatment I’m Not There is enjoying.”
  • Netflix and Blockbuster “subscribers are stuck somewhere between the years 2004 and 2006, unaware that movies like Juno and No Country for Old Men are out on DVD,” posits Chris Albrecht at NewTeeVee. “How else to explain the dearth of anything remotely resembling a “new release” in their respective Top 100 lists?”
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  • Chuck said 4 months ago

    I’m no fan of Expelled, but the film has made approximately $7 million at this point (according to Box Office Mojo), so to call it a fizzle really misses the point.

    If anything, Expelled (which will easily clear $10 million with ancillary sales) licenses future investment in star-powered conservative disinformation.

    In fact, I can just imagine the sequels: Expelled 2: The Reality-Based Community Strikes Back, and so on.

  • The Chutry Experiment » First Day of Summer Links said 3 months ago

    [...] has links to a number of blog posts debating the state of the documentary, with Eric Snider arguing that [...]