Sugar and Spies

If you've checked out my Reel Life series you know I have a deep interest in relating real-world happenings with on-screen possibilities. As much as I enjoy considering which underreported news stories could blossom into captivating films, though, I also love hearing new updates on particular issues after movies have covered them. Recently I read two articles that related to films from 2009, and what I learned in both instances was surprising and disappointing. 

Last spring, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's little-seen baseball drama, Sugar, had what anyone would consider a rather poor public reception. The film received a healthy dose of buzz when it played Sundance back in January 2008, but by the time it landed in theaters last spring (advantageously right at the beginning of baseball season), some kind of moviegoing malaise had descended on American audiences. Oh, wait, nevermind - turns out people were just flocking in record numbers to Fast & Furious, because, you know, you can never see Vin Diesel smirk from behind the wheel of a sports car enough times. And so, while Sugar earned a superb 93% RT/82 Metacritic rating it only grossed a paltry $1.1 million at the worldwide box office. 

It was this disappointing show of interest from Americans (wasn't baseball once the national pastime?) that made a recent article I read in TIME all the more frustrating. Sean Gregory wrote a well-balanced piece about the professional baseball industry farmed out of the Dominican Republic ("Baseball Dreams: Striking Out in the Dominican Republic", 7/26/10), but not once did he mention Sugar, which, if you don't know, examines the professional baseball industry farmed out of the Dominican Republic. How is that possible? How do you write an article on this subject for a mass audience without discussing a recently acclaimed film that was shot on location in the very place you're researching your story?

REVIEW: Crude (A)

As I see it, the disappointing increase in popularity and production of Michael Moore-style "agit-docs" (agit, short for agitating) over the last few years has seriously threatened to diminish the credibility of actual documentary films. These days I unfortunately flinch whenever I hear about any new documentary that even appears to be about a social issue, because chances are it's going to be much more style than substance. 

Consider Hoop Dreams as an example, and think about how that same film would be produced in 2009. It would not be Steve James patiently and unobtrusively observing William Gates and Arthur Agee as two young boys trying to discover their potential. It would be an activist filmmaker abandoning their story in order to apply a blurry lens to the salacious societal ills on display on Chicago's South Side. There would be interviews with experts and celebrities and certainly Oprah, and a tidy list of "what you can do" chores would precede the credits. Everybody would leave feeling simultaneously horrified and puffed up with pride, but you'd have almost no insight into the actual life experiences of Gates and Agee.

I say all of this to explain why, almost regardless of who made it or what it's about, I am automatically suspicious that a "socially conscious" documentary in 2009 won't actually document a story so much as create one; propaganda is the tool that leads people to action, so people must be force-fed any message a filmmaker thinks we are too dense to understand on our own. As such, when I saw the ominous tagline for Crude ("The real price of oil."), I was ready to lump it in with the rest as an over-stylized, under-educating "call to action". Thankfully, I was completely wrong.