Sunday, January 25, 2009

That’s so dirty.

Refusing my own advice to lay off environmentally themed documentaries, I decided to see a screening of Dirt! The Movie. The show (which is narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis who really doesn’t have a great documentary voice) offers some interesting information; I learned a fair amount. But the movie didn’t work.

First, the film is didactic, coming across as preachy, even morally superior. So while I should have been guilted into refusing to eat commercially farmed mono crops, I was kinda like, “whatever.”

And I know it’s all the rage these days to use cutesy animations to make documentaries more approachable (thanks Morgan Spurlock). But the animations in this movie are embarrassing, really embarrassing. And they have no visual consistency. Someone needed a good art director. I’ll be surprised if Dirt! The Movie has much of reach beyond the film-festival circuit.

1 comment:

Kara said...

It was bound to happen. That one of them was going to be rotten.