impressions: religulous

What does Borat and the 9/11 documentary have in common?
You would say, not much. Actually they do; they're both entertaining, well known and reasonably welcomed by critics - and something else. Though this post isn't about them, no really.

What this post is, is a response to another made by greven on his blog at Paintbits.
I thought it best to write my opinion here, rather than flood his comments.

In brief, Religulous is a documentary film about religion and its current state in the world (or: how 'out there' it can get, depending on how you read). Check out the trailer link on greven's post while you read it, or check it out on Youtube. You might like to have a look at Bill Maher's interview on Larry King.

Before diving into it, I should add that I have NOT seen the actual film yet, so these comments are very likely to not reflect it accurately at all.

Watching the trailer, first shivers (in a bad way) I get are at "from the studio that brought --". In my mind, if a program such as this wants to call itself a documentary, it'd be better off being unbiased and able to stand on its own. Maybe it does, but this sort of referencing to already known "pop documentaries" for a lack of a better term seems to me like it's trying to kiss ass and appeal to those who expect the style of the more recently surfaced documentaries...made by americans, for americans.

I'm certainly not of the opinion that documentaries can't be informative and entertaining at the same time, in fact I strongly support making documentaries that are 'beefed up' with the tools that drama utilizes to get to the viewer.

Next shivers are from "from the director of Borat". Need I say more? Sure it's an interesting piece of entertainment - Borat, that is - once again, but what does it really have to do with this? Why is it important to know this? Could it be because the name Borat is easily linked to being funny, hawt and interesting. This only further enforces the feeling I was trying to convey in the beginning. Starting off like this feels to me like the style and agenda have been set and instead of looking at the subject of religion in a reasonable and nonjudgemental spirit.

The rest of the trailer is pretty much what you'd expect from it after the first impressions have been made. Bits and pieces from different types of people that are trying to give us an overall picture of what the film is like and about. It's interesting since it deals with a very delicate subject to say the least, so will definitely be something to look at once it's possible here, at the arctic circle. I just can't shake the feeling that it's trying to balance between being a 'real-drama' and being a documentary film. That's just my impression.

Again, it's very likely this view is misguided when applied to the actual film, as it is based solely on a couple of minutes of trailer material, so I hope that's how you've been reading it. As a genre of video itself Trailers have the tendency of being edited in a very particular and gripping way that sometimes ends up producing a very different picture than what the source material itself is like. Often it's clearly calculated and well planned, sometimes not so much.

Actually, it would be interesting to find out who the people behind trailers are, are they specialized in that only and what sort of tools do they use. Are there many people with backgrounds in advertising? that would link them to psychology very tightly...hmm. I'm sure most would agree that on general trailers seem like copies of eachother, but still manage to have achieve some level of gripping magic that makes almost any degree of filmy delicasy - or filth - seem more or less interesting.

Anyway, I'll be sure to write about the actual documentary once I've had a chance to see it.