Detropia

I was hoping this was gonna be better.

You want documentaries about the city you live in to be good. Still waiting on a great one for Detroit. The best I've seen so far is the portion of Urbanized that deals with the D. Anyway, here we have a doc' about Detroit called Detropia. It's by a couple of women from the east coast. It's not very good and I'll tell ya why...

You remember those people in art school who never listened to the instructor or did what the assignment asked? The art-fags who did their own thing...and it was crap. The art-fags who did their own thing because they didn't have the talent to do what the instructor asked? That's what this documentary reminds me. Ok, that's a harsher comparison than this actually deserves, but whatever.

The documentary could have been recut and reedited 10 different ways and it wouldn't have affected the narrative. That's the problem. It's just one scene after another. There's very little in the way of beginning, middle, or ending. There's not much of an arc or denouement. It's too flighty and too loose.

I liked the opening montage quite a bit, but then I realized that the whole 82 minutes was gonna be like that and I was actually bummed. I was thinking it was a cool way to begin a film and at any moment we'd hear a narrator's voice or something. Nope. It just drifts between different people in Detroit. It checks in on the UAW, an urban explorer/vlogger, some out-of-town art-fags, and the owner of the Raven Lounge. Evidently it's a blues bar in Detroit. Never been, but the owner seems like a rad dude. Hell, the president of the UAW is pretty damn funny himself. You meet some good characters along the way.

This topic has a lot of potential but I'd like to see it handled by someone with a much stronger handle on story-telling. Client 9? Now that was a good fucking doc'.

I wouldn't recommend this. Blah.