Food, inc is the worst kind of documentary trash. Maybe I am just nostalgic for the days when documentaries actually documented things as opposed to simply using cinematic techniques to overwhelmingly bias an issue. It's even turned me off causes I agree with, like Jesus Camps' tactical use of tense, slasher flick music and dramatic editing to portray an admittedly retarded Christian camp as Jonestown redux. Or Micheal Moore's recent abuse of "dramatic license." Bottom line is, most documentaries pick topics which are simply too complex to be adequately portrayed in a 90m film, 1/3rd of which is always taken up by totally irrelevant inserts, and end up doing a piss poor job as a result. But because documentary film producers know their market, usually people who are too lazy to actually look into an issue but want to appear smart, and cater their messages accordingly nobody ever gives a damn. The modern documentary is only one step above a comic book as an educational tool.
On the topic of good movies, I've been trying to catch up on my quotient of horror flicks. The one really stand out film was Let the Right One In, a Swedish romantic-vampire movie (that isn't made for 14 year old girls, I might add). The acting is great, the story exciting and the characters surprisingly personable. I just watched Teeth, a black-comedy about a teenager with vagina dentata. I'm not sure if I'm really the target demographic (who is the target demographic for a vagina dentata based horror? unkempt feminists?), but I think the movie was as well done as its genre allowed it to be. Worth a watch at least. Also, Thirst is quite decent. It's by the guy who did Oldboy (Park Chan Wook) so it brings a certain style to the otherwise banal genre of vampire movies. Anyways, the overriding lesson is that foreigners are doing more with the often cliche vampire genre than our Twillight loving asses are. The one promising case of originality in the genre, True Blood, is circling the drain of grocery store grade romantic pseudo-porn.
