Bama Rush

"Poor me" story from the director who made the entire doc about herself and lazily tries to equate her alopecia with Bama Rush. If you're saying, "huh?", then believe me, the disaster of watching it is actually worse than it sounds. Glosses over important issues such as racism, eating disorders, etc. In favor of non-stop flashy pop ups of Tik Toks. Literally 30 minutes of the doc is dedicated to the directors own plight with alopecia. Sloppy filmmaking with no point of view or really anything to say. If you're looking for saliciousness, there isn't any, and ditto if you're looking to learn anything.

This is marketed as a window into Greek life at Alabama, but I have no idea what is happening here. There is virtually nothing about fraternities and sororities, and a lot of scenes of the director re-saying information that's already been said, more or less verbatim. For example, first they tell you what a NY Times article says, and then they'll pan to the director saying, "There was a New York Times article..." This is when she's not talking about alopecia, begging the question: Why didn't you make a movie about alopecia? It seems to be what she actually wants to talk about, and uses a handful of awkward people pursuing sorority life to talk a lot about her trauma from wearing wigs. Honestly, it's baffling.

Unless you have absolutely no idea what Greek life is this documentary is worthless. Half of it was about the director and her personal struggles with alopecia that she (poorly) attempted to relate to Greek life. Focuses mostly on the girls lives way before they're even on campus. Did not document the girls during the rush process and most of the girls ended up dropping out. Shout out to the one active member that said her house was bottom tier lol. The girls that they chose to interview seemed nice but they were generally not the typical girls seen on rush tik tok that most people were hoping for.

The director really wanted an inside look into sororities rushing, however it was very apparent she couldn't get anyone to really talk about it. So it turned into a boring character story where the director made the terrible mistake of making themselves apart of the story where they was no correlation to do so whatsoever. If you couldn't get any of the students to talk, then shift the story more to the sorority consultants or previous graduates. Easily could have been cut down to 60 minutes.

And the first 3 minute intro is an absolute piss poor start to give the viewer a false expectation of what they perceive to expect.

Interesting documentary about a fascinating, layered topic.

However the pacing was stilted, with only a very small part of the documentary focused on covering the rush process.

The director also interjected into the film multiple times about her experiences with alopecia, and how those experiences paralleled to the experiences of the girls pursuing a sorority. Her experiences and stories with alopecia were extremely important and meaningful, however they didn't relate super directly to the main content of the documentary in an obvious way, and the interjections broke up the pacing and emotional swell of the film.