zkiko

It is a very nice watch and very fast paced not stuck in supergeneric dialogues and plottwists yada yada. It just has a nice offbeat'ish flow and it flows well.

Patricia Arqueutte really nails this role, which surpsided me. I was a but skeptical at first, but when you catch your depressed semi-cynical self laughing about her ways of personifying the character than you just have to give it up.

Sadly they chose to go a bit less offbeat/weird as it could be, with some safe commercial mainstream ingredients in it, and some generic acting from others. If that was different it could have been even great. But I dig it.

This and White House Plumbers kind of share some of the same quirkiness, and I'm down for it.

Also, I'm a sucker for the desert town scenery.

Too many times the voiceless have been used (and still are on) as a subject for privileged people in need of a story so they can be a 'maker'. (See some of my other reviews concerning this).

When it comes to the marginalised, rarely documentaries have been done ethically and sincerely. The power ratio is off kilter and without integrity the process and result is often cliché, one dimensional and narrow. The caucasian in power often thinks he is doing something good for the poor brown and black, but not (willingly) conscious enough to see that it's an act of selfishness. The marginalised used as a tool, yet again. A terrible irony.

If the calling to shed light on them was sincere, they could easily facilitate the means for them to produce it themselves, for themselves. But no.

Baldwin here in 1970, very intelligent, sharp and conscious. He took the invitation of what would have him be subjected to the makers paradigm. He flipped it on him and shifted it into vulnerable reality, the portrayal of a fierce naked marginalised soul with piercing screaming eyes conscious of his major voice as a minority... shouting loudly for those without, way up above the narrow and limited subjective box of what would have been.

So many (actual)documentaries already cover all the topics here. But Kamau Bell lazily, typically and passively used (many generics including a 'youtube uploader' of old black films, a very dim Godfrey and some of his elitist pc friends) people as a tool - many of them who have no link with this story at all - to interview. Kamau Bell used his rich network he has gathered as the generic safe 'comedian' (so ironic) he is, slapped a colourful poster on the whole thing and bam : here you are, keeping your own name 'relevant' by abusing someone else's disaster - be it of the victims or of the perpetrator.

An evening conversation you would imagine a pc elitists group with the odd tokens seated at a table with vintage wine discussing the topic in a cliché, biased and generic manner.

Let's record that and call it a 'documentary'!

So cheap, so safe, so cowardly done. And above all, it does not add anything that has not been documented already.

The rule of adding 'content' should be : If you don't have anything original or new to add, just fall back and let someone with urgency speak up. Just because you can grab the mic, doesn't mean you should. Be kind.