heart of the game Tagged Articles at Cinematical

When I'm in the mood to get good and depressed, I just take a look at the weekend box office numbers. There are few things more guaranteed to send me into the depths of despair than seeing how many people lined up to see the latest Tyler Perry flick or Adam Sandler comedy (and I use that term very loosely when applied to Sandler, who ranks just marginally below David Spade on my list of people I wish would never, ever make another movie). I swear, every time I see Sandler on the screen, I just want to hurt him -- and I'm a peace-loving, non-violent person under ordinary circumstances. I'm sure he's a perfectly nice person in real life, and he's probably a blast at parties, but I'd rather get my gums scraped without numbing medication than sit through his films. Perplexingly, though, his tend to do okay at the box office, so apparently a lot of people actually like him.

Sandler's latest effort, Click, about a man who buys a remote with the power to affect reality, dominated the top weekend box office slot, with an estimated take of $40 million. The film is going to need some good word-of-mouth to get past its budget of $70 million and into the black, but I expect it will make it over the hump. Jack Black vehicle Nacho Libre, in theaters for 10 days now, has raked in $52.7 million off a relatively small $35 million budget, already putting the flick in the black for Paramount and pretty much guaranteeing we'll be seeing more of Black in the future. For some reason, Black doesn't tend to irritate me nearly so much as Sandler, but neither do I find him particularly appealing. I think what it comes down to for me is that Sandler's roles often have this streak of meanness running through the surface comedy, which I really dislike. Black, on the other hand, tends to have this innocence and naivete about him that's just charming, even when he's running around in tights.

Normally I don't pay much attention to newswire critics, but Tuesday's article by Christy Lemire (Associated Press & Canadian Press) put me in a defensive mood. Lemire has written a piece in which she reflects on the movies she's seen in the first half of 2006, and realizes that her current top ten list is made up primarily of documentaries. I don't reject the declaration that we're experiencing another good year for docs, but since critics have been making this same observation for the pasts several years, it makes you wonder if it's the docs that are getting better or simply the fiction films that are getting worse. Or is it a little of both?

I say that it's neither. Documentaries just always seem universally better than narratives. Because they typically lack artificial elements like acting, plot and dialogue, on which viewers most easily judge the qualities of fiction films, docs are more difficult to analyze. Despite the fact that some docs are misleading and may distort or completely fabricate facts, they always have the perception of reality, and for most people, reality means truth and truth means good.

With most documentaries, the audience is given more than mere entertainment, whether it is taught something, is convinced of something, or prompted to think about something further.  In this way, docs are rarely a waste of time, and therefore critics may find it difficult to give them bad reviews. But what about when a doc isn't intent on being educational or insightful? How is it that Dave Chappelle's Block Party is a great film for someone (me) who doesn't necessarily favor the comedy of Chappelle of the music of the film's featured artists?