Documentaries Are Good, Except When They’re Bad

The Good: Page One: Inside the New York Times is just as good as Eli says it was. I wish they asked harder questions of the journalists, and followed specific stories a little more closely, but there’s only so much ground you can cover in an hour and a half (I think this would be a killer reality television show, frankly). I interviewed David Carr at the library when his memoir came out, and he’s just as charming on the big screen as he is in real life. (If you saw this documentary, and you laughed as hard at Carr’s saucy asides as the audience at the Everett screening of Page One laughed, you should definitely pick up Night of the Gun.) It’s my favorite documentary I’ve seen at SIFF so far this year, and I have no doubt it’ll be back through town on a major theatrical release; you should see it then. After Page One, my second-favorite SIFF documentary so far is Lesson Plan, which screens one last time at the Harvard Exit in about an hour. I was not expecting to enjoy it as much as I did; you should abandon your computer and go see it right now.

The Bad: A few weeks ago, I called the trailer for Shut Up, Little Man! “maybe the worst trailer I have ever seen.” The movie—a documentary about two young men who recorded their neighbors’ over-the-top arguments and then released the tapes to pre-internet viral fame—is not much better when you watch it in full. It screened on Monday at the Egyptian, with one of the previously young men (an adult who calls himself Eddie Sausage) in attendance. The movie documented the way Sausage and his friend Mitchell D at first released the tapes as a copyright-free source of amusement, encouraging people to make art from them. When they realized that a movie version could make some money, though, they set to work trying to edge other people out of the profits.

The movie fails because it floats along in an amoral void, unable—or unwilling—to point accusatory fingers at the people who deserve it. Sausage fails as a human being because in the post-movie Q&A he shit-talked everyone in the movie—including the people who made the movie—for trying to “exploit” him. He seemed blissfully unaware of the fact that he had made a tidy sum of money and enjoyed years of minor celebrity because he exploited a trio of old drunks. (They tried to get the men they recorded to sign away their rights for a couple hundred dollars, and Sausage even sells their death certificates on his website.) The movie ends with tired middle-aged men in ugly clothing trying to justify the lifetimes they’ve wasted mocking these recordings by making stupid claims that we learn something about ourselves by listening to the tapes. It’s not true. You want something terrible to happen to all of them, to shut up all of these little men, but instead the movie just ends, leaving you with a suck lurch in the center of your gut.