This movie is composed of two - or three - parts of varying interest, at least to me.
The largest, and to me the most interesting, is composed of excerpts from various interviews with Morrison herself. It's not surprising that, master of language that she was, she chooses her words carefully and is a joy to listen to. She knows what she did well, and does not hesitate to say so. But she also has a wonderful sense of humor about herself. Very engaging.
The rest of this movie consists of other people talking about her and her work. When they are people who knew her, they often provide interesting context.
When some of them talked about her work, it sometimes got very exalted in a very abstract way. That I found much less interesting. The movie is 2 hours long, and if there were any cutting to be done, it would be there.
I have only a few very minor caveats.
1. There are a fair number of talking heads. We see some often, others just once or twice. But we only see their name and role the first time they appear. For the ones I knew already, like Oprah Winfrey and Angela Davis, that was not a problem. For the others, it was.
2. The editor, Johanna Giebelhaus, had obviously gone to the Ken Burns school of documentary editing, which teaches that no image can be allowed to remain still for more than a few seconds. That's not a problem with photos: she pans up or down them in the best Burns style. But she can't leave the talking heads alone either. Sometimes she switches from one perspective to another, which is fine. But most often, she jumps in or out, in quick jerky steps. Once or twice would have been alright for variety. But she does it over and over for two hours, and that annoyed me.
But, as I said, those are both very small caveats.
This movie is certainly worth seeing. I learned a lot from it.
