Spoken like someone who wants to be invited over to my place to watch the Blu-Ray of COCKTAIL.

The film is actually pretty good at capturing the pith of Wright's book, which is quite comprehensive. But yeah, Gibney isn't exactly Steve James. Gibney docs do kind of come off as fact sheets on the topic. The film does take a more morally outraged tone than Wright does in print. Wright is pretty mild, even when he's describing how the Scientology legal team showed up to the New Yorker offices (one of the funnier bits in the book).

I was surprised by the raves as well. The whole social commentary aspect was half-hearted. It's a film most interested in seeing how well it can make its own cool-looking storyboards come to life, not social commentary.

Bogart might've been able to open a dispensary.

*shrug* I kind of like Top Gun.

This is the key difference, yeah. It just wasn't a level playing field.

Every moment Poitras spent communicating with Snowden, receiving information from him, meeting with him --  every moment of that put her at serious risk of being prosecuted. And not being prosecuted for jaywalking, either. That matters. Obviously, yeah, it means she probably can't haul around tons of equipment for elaborate lighting setups (which, I mean, duh), but it also means she did what she did under enormous pressure. Fact is, the Justice Department wasn't hot to prosecute Maloof for making his Maier doc (a film I adored just as much). She wasn't just making a doc about Snowden; she was literally documenting her own (technically) criminal conduct.

Well, it's not true that anyone with sufficient experience could have done this--because Poitras is the only documentarian who was contacted personally by Snowden and granted this kind of access. Poitras herself is both part of the story and literally the only documentarian who had the ability to point the camera and film these interactions. That's not her fault. Sometimes the story comes to you. If you feel she did it in an artless way, well, that's not an unheard of opinion (others have suggested that maybe she could have put a bit more meat on the bones), but it's not her fault she was the only documentarian who had the access.

To me that's what so unique about the film. In a sense, Snowden picked Poitras, not the other way around.

Better Call Saul is good. I had serious reservations,  but they nailed it.

The DP on Nightcrawler was Bob Elswit, not Lubezki.

I missed the airing but caught it on the website just now.

http://www.history.com/shows/brad-meltz … ornerstone

I'm a huge sucker for exactly these kinds of in-depth narratives of murder cases (the eight-hour documentary The Stair Case is one I re-watch all the time). Serial is exactly my bag. Just did the whole thing in one gulp. Fascinating case.

Koenig's commitment to her this-is-all-so-perplexing schtick really did get tiresome. She overstates her actual level of ambivalence for effect, I believe. She's kind of playing a character herself, in a way--that of the veteran reporter who has a complicated case fall in her lap and keeps changing her mind each time she discovers a new bit of information. It's not so much that she's that flip-floppy herself (maybe she is, IDK) but that she's modeling for the audience the ideal reaction she wants them to have, which is basically Ooh you thought X last week, but watch as this week's episode makes you shift back to Y! She's doing a show. But it's NPR, so she does it in a soothing, Sleepytime tea voice. But a show just the same.

My favorite episode was episode 10, the one about Adnan's (now dead) defense attorney Christina Gutierrez, who sounds like about the most complicated/fun-at-parties person ever.

"Llewyn Davis in an X-wing" was going to be the title of my latest fan-fiction novel until J.J. plagiarized me...