This documentary has been like a sadness virus spreading throughout our circle of friends. I think I was the last one infected, so I think it's up to me to pass it on to someone else.

Well, the first thing I think about with documentaries is their purpose. Typically, you can assume a Ken Burns documentary has an honest purpose: to shed light on some cultural or historical item and flesh out the stuff you may not have thought about before. Also typically, you can assume a Michael Moore documentary has an agenda based on the filmmaker's opinions, and its purpose is to disseminate them.

Thusly I sort of break down documentaries into two umbrella categories: essays and persuasive essays. Neither inherently better than the other, but I tend to like the straightforward "essay" type documentaries more than the alternative - even though, frankly, it's a hazy distinction. For instance, I wouldn't immediately think to put King of Kong in the "persuasive" column with Bowing for Columbine, but I do wonder if Billy Mitchell is the utter prick he appears to be in the movie. It seems conveniently dastardly, and while the documentary could be completely honest, I have no way of knowing if they're playing an angle on me. Hazy. And even if they are, is that enough to put it in with the likes of Super Size Me or Sicko?

We might need to bring in the Doty guns on that one.

On the subject of Dear Zachary, I would describe it as a very compelling, slightly cheesy documentary, obviously incredibly dear to the filmmaker's heart - but occasionally to the detriment of the story its trying to tell. He gets a little too pissed off in the edit - not in his opinion of the situation, which you'd completely expect and understand, but in the actual film. He's a little punchy and color correcty and TLC cold case murder special-y about it in the gut wrenching montage bits, that I think was a decision made because he felt the best way to get you to agree with him was to trick you with an editing style that he thinks will make you the saddest, instead of just laying it out there. (For the record, the latter would have worked just as well for me.)

The triumph of Dear Zachary, as a viewing experience, is in his structure for telling you the story and the absolute horror of the sucker punch it brings up later. (Y'all know, if you've seen it.) That, as a delivery mechanism, is what makes this so unbearably sad. Anything above and beyond that feels a bit disingenuous to me.

Ultimately, whatever. It's nitpicking. I look forward to seeing where this thread goes, and in the mean time, here's a list of some of my favorite documentaries.

Exit Through The Gift Shop (at the very least an exercise in satire with the documentary form, if not legit history)
King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
The Bridge
Helvetica (this is a font bias, the film itself isn't particularly special)
Man on Wire
F for Fake (again with the "not-sure-how-much-but-fuck-it" uncertainty, with additional Orsony Wellesy goodness)

I'm forgetting just as many right now, but I guess that truly means these are my favorites. I think I've fully exhausted (and maintained an exhaustion) on the documentaries section of Netflix for the last couple of years.

Yeah, I watched this one as a direct result of Teague and another DIF-er (Michael maybe) Twitter-ing about it.   "Hmm, it's on Netflix Instant, might as well see what this is abou - "  BOOM.

Two things about it that especially struck me - first, the sorta-main character (who isn't Zachary, but it'll all make sense if you see it) was a guy just like a lot of us here - he made fan-films for pete's sake.    I related to the story on a very personal level that way.

The other thing - and I give the filmmaker credit for this, even though I can't say I ENJOYED it - is that even though it's a real-life story, the way the story gets told makes it a perfect example of the "surprising yet inevitable" conclusion.   I didn't see the ending coming at all, but then immediately realized that I should have.   And it was the same for the people who actually lived it, so the movie actually gives you a sense of what it was like for them.   

So in the end, DZ is just a filmmaker telling a very personal story because he simply had to get it out somehow.    You don't come away from it thinking "Yes, that's a messed-up thing and we need to do something about it!"  because there really isn't anything to be done in this case.    It's just a documentary in the purest sense of the word - a visual document, a record of a thing that happened.  But damn, that's all it needed to be.

I almost watched that a while back when netflix was aggressively insisting that I would love it every time I logged on. "Dude, you are so gonna love this movie. We think you'd rate it like 4.5 stars. You HAVE to watch this." But the description sounded so dull, and there are very few documentaries that manage to keep up a decent pace for a couple hours and don't resort to padding and shit, so I never watched it. But since you guys said it's good, I watched it.

And now I don't know how to feel. As a documentary it's fucking amazing. The content in the movie makes me feel really bad about saying anything positive about it, tho, cause I'd honestly rather the thing had never had to get made in the first place.