{"id":1923,"date":"2013-04-22T21:25:54","date_gmt":"2013-04-23T01:25:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/smugfilm.com\/?p=1923"},"modified":"2013-04-26T13:58:17","modified_gmt":"2013-04-26T17:58:17","slug":"connected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/connected\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Connected’: I Don’t Caaaaare!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"tiffany\"
\n

\nConnected<\/a> (2011)
\n<\/b>Directed by Tiffany Shlain
\nWritten by Tiffany Shlain, Ken Goldberg, Carlton Evans, and Sawyer Steele
\n82 min.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a great scene in Dumb and Dumber<\/a> where Jim Carrey has been waiting for Mary Samsonite at the bar for hours, and the black woman from The Young and the Restless<\/a> (I know this because my mom watches it) comes and sits next to him.\u00a0 When we cut back hours later, she\u2019s in the middle of a long, boring story about her ex-boyfriend.\u00a0 Being an idiot, Lloyd makes no attempt to hide his annoyance when asked, with chipper enthusiasm, \u201cAnd do you know what he said next?\u201d He responds: \u201cNooo, and I don\u2019t caaare!\u201d<\/p>\n

Watching this movie is like sitting next to that woman.
\n
\nThe fact that I finished Connected is amazing.\u00a0 I don\u2019t usually waste time on Netflix with things that suck this bad\u2014especially since it\u2019s so easy to move on to the next piece of junk\u2014but sometimes a movie is so blindingly bad that all you can do is sit there for ninety minutes, mouth agape, staring in wonderment at the utter catastrophe.<\/p>\n

I love documentaries.\u00a0 I\u2019m a documentary junkie.\u00a0 I don\u2019t even like the delineation people make between documentaries and ‘real\u00a0movies’.\u00a0 A documentary is a form of narrative storytelling.\u00a0 Even commentary-based thesis documentaries\u2014which are essentially filmed essays\u2014still must follow a linear structure.\u00a0 A documentary is as much of a movie as any other movie.\u00a0 And in many cases, much better.\u00a0 The King of Kong<\/a> is one of the most well told stories ever made, and it\u2019s certainly more compelling and a lot funnier than 99.9% of all other movies.\u00a0 The arbitrary separation between a documentary and a ‘real movie’ means nothing\u2014it is in fact simply a marketing tool used to explain to audiences that \u2018this piece doesn’t have a script and there are no actors\u2019.\u00a0 I personally don\u2019t think anybody cares, and I long for a day when The King of Kong is presented next to Transformers 2<\/a> at your local AMC.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, we have to suffer through shit like Connected.\u00a0 The problem, or triumph, of documentaries (the commentary kind) lies in the thesis.\u00a0 Your movie has to be about something.\u00a0 March of the Penguins<\/a> is about penguins\u2014the goal is to teach people about penguins. \u00a0Fahrenheit 9\/11<\/a>\u00a0is about how President George W. Bush is a bad person.\u00a0 And so on.\u00a0 If you fail at having a thesis, your entire movie won\u2019t work.\u00a0 It\u2019s like building the roof of a house and then just thinking you\u2019re done.<\/p>\n

Connected opens with a woman talking to the camera about how we are so dependent on our cell phones.\u00a0 She tells a very relatable story about being at lunch with a friend and faking going to the bathroom in order to check her email.\u00a0 Her presentation is a little stagey, but it works.\u00a0 It\u2019s kind of a useless and obvious topic, but it\u2019s clear\u2014this is a movie about how Facebook and Twitter and texting have taken over our lives, and we’re likely in store for candid interviews with likable laypeople telling stories about ferocious twittering, and seeing local news clips about people who tweeted themselves to death somehow.<\/p>\n

To my shock and chagrin, what followed instead was literally 80 minutes of this woman narrating a boring and vapid story about her relationship with her father, who was some kind of intellectual heavyweight, or so she says.<\/p>\n

She doesn\u2019t even talk about the internet again until 23 minutes in, and we have to wait till just past the one hour mark to hear anything<\/em> that relates back to her proposed thesis. \u00a0And then it\u2019s hastily brushed through so as not to distract too long from her nonsensical, hazy meanderings.<\/p>\n

Connected is a self-indulgent vanity project cobbled out of useless, pandering, left-wing agendas and uninteresting autobiographical narrative.\u00a0 Tiffany Shlain, quite simply, has no ideas.\u00a0 She keeps referring to \u201cour problems\u2019\u2019, but instead of defining them, she just shows footage of a factory\u2014as if we\u2019re all supposed to understand that smoke coming from a factory is so unanimously evil that it needs to further explanation.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the epitome of bankrupt intellectualism that uses sentimentality to mask its lack of relevance. \u00a0‘We\u2019re all connected by the internet so love your family.’ Right. Got it.\u00a0 These are the kinds of sweeping generalizations asserted by Connected\u2014a movie whose title is made ironic by the fact that it fails to connect any one of its shallow ideas.<\/p>\n

For the most part, the notions cast are harmless (albeit confusing and wishy washy) but they are occasionally dangerous.\u00a0 At one point, it is asserted that the subjugation of women is the result of left-brain dominance.\u00a0 The movie proposes that males are better at left-brain thinking, and that when written communication became the major roadway of ideas, women were left behind because they weren\u2019t smart enough.\u00a0 This assertion is made with audacious casualness, and it even ignores the fact that left and right brain thinking is now considered by many scientists to be an obsolete understanding of how the brain works.\u00a0 For all I know, the data (if you can call it that) put forth in the movie is true\u2014maybe males do<\/em> have a genetic predisposition to comprehending written information better than females. \u00a0(I personally am willing to admit that I don\u2019t know so for a fact, rather than just make the claim as though it is a given.) \u00a0That kind of brash purporting of information is not only lazy and stupid, it\u2019s irresponsible.<\/p>\n

I would add that this leaves everything else in the movie suspect and open to further scrutiny, but there is barely anything else to even scrutinize.\u00a0 If you don\u2019t believe me, go watch it.\u00a0 It really is just 80 minutes of a woman talking about the beauty (or harm\u2014it\u2019s never clear) of our connected world, the problems we face (nuclear bombs, of course\u2014how often do we have to see that fucking footage?\u2014and factories) and, of course, her dying father.\u00a0 The movie doesn\u2019t even really try to have a point, and is basically just a home movie that somebody spruced up with lots of fancy graphics.<\/p>\n

Which leads me to my next point.\u00a0 Michael Moore created the modern incarnation of the documentary.\u00a0 With Roger & Me<\/a>, he made the commentary-thesis documentary fun and interesting.\u00a0 It was a huge departure from all previous docs, which were bland and clinical (except for the v\u00e9rit\u00e9\u00a0stuff forged by the Maysles and others, yes, I know). \u00a0What Michael Moore did was captivate his audience by mixing the provocative (a woman killing a rabbit with a bat in her backyard) with the comical (a candid interview with Bob Eubanks).\u00a0 The comedy heightened the drama and vice versa, and whether you agree with the thesis or process or whatever, there is no denying that it\u2019s effective, expert filmmaking.<\/p>\n

However, what Michael Moore also did was use stock and found footage, comically, to represent his ideas\u2014and for that he should be strangled to death. \u00a0Nobody can forget the hilarious corporate welcome video in Bowling For Columbine<\/a>, or the cartoon everybody wrongfully attributes to the South Park guys. \u00a0And everyone since then has tried to emulate both.<\/p>\n

Michael Moore does it in small doses to punctuate things, and he does it well because he has an understanding of how he wants to convey information.\u00a0 Every other two-bit documentarian since uses these methods to \u2018enhance\u2019 their film and mask their filmmaking ineptitude.\u00a0 Every documentary ever now has to have tons of HILARIOUS stock footage from the 50’s or clips some kitschy educational film strip like\u00a0Reefer Madness<\/a>.\u00a0 And the graphics, don\u2019t even get me started on the graphics.\u00a0 If you started a graphics house in 2002 you put a down payment on your mansion by \u201809.\u00a0 It seems that every documentary that comes out is just a graphics jerk off fest, so much so that the ones that don\u2019t even need it have them too.\u00a0 Take American Teen<\/a>, a decent v\u00e9rit\u00e9 movie that follows the lives of four high school seniors in 2006.\u00a0 Everything is going fine until, for no reason, it is taken over by \u2018artsy\u2019 computer animated cartoons, with the kids left as mere narrators. Why? Do you not believe in your own material that much?<\/p>\n

Connected doesn\u2019t take the cake, but it\u2019s as guilty as any other.\u00a0 It\u2019s got graphics coming out of its ears.\u00a0 And the funny thing is, for a movie that is literally just 80 minutes of narration with footage over it, you\u2019d think it would be an easy thing to make. \u00a0However, I can\u2019t imagine the hours spent on finding stock footage. \u00a0I can just see the delight on the intern’s face when he found the perfect clip of a couple kissing\u2014\u2018\u2018That\u2019ll work just great when I say that bit about love, Billy! Good job! You get a coke!\u201d (Said Tiffany, excitedly.)<\/p>\n

Between the score, sound design, editing lab, and all those damn graphics, the movie must\u2019ve cost a fortune.\u00a0 Hell, they even got Peter Coyote to narrate the arbitrary sections where they start at the big bang and take you through the history of everything. (Because of the internet, we\u2019re all connected now, so you know, history, and computers, and Nazis, etc.)<\/p>\n

There are a lot of documentaries like Connected because there are a lot of shallow people that want to be filmmakers but don\u2019t have any ideas.\u00a0 Connected proves that making movies is easy.\u00a0 It may cost a lot and take a ton of time, but you don\u2019t have to even try to have an idea. \u00a0As long as you have the time, and can afford to pay people to cut out Einstein\u2019s head and shadow it and make it look like it\u2019s walking on a cartoon body, you\u2019re all set. \u00a0Good job, dickhead.\u00a0 It\u2019ll even get on Netflix.<\/p>\n

0 out of 1 stars.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"tiffany\"
\n

\nConnected<\/a> (2011)
\n<\/b>Directed by Tiffany Shlain
\nWritten by Tiffany Shlain, Ken Goldberg, Carlton Evans, and Sawyer Steele
\n82 min.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a great scene in Dumb and Dumber<\/a> where Jim Carrey has been waiting for Mary Samsonite at the bar for hours, and the black woman from The Young and the Restless<\/a> (I know this because my mom watches it) comes and sits next to him.\u00a0 When we cut back hours later, she\u2019s in the middle of a long, boring story about her ex-boyfriend.\u00a0 Being an idiot, Lloyd makes no attempt to hide his annoyance when asked \u201cAnd do you know what he said next?\u201d He responds, with chipper enthusiasm, \u201cNooo, and I don\u2019t caaare!\u201d<\/p>\n

Watching this movie is like sitting next to that woman.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,15],"tags":[509,1337,1332,1333,1334,1339,1344,883,1336,1343,173,1294,1348,1347,1346,1345,1338,845,1340,1335,1331,1342,1341],"class_list":["post-1923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts","category-gregsreviews","tag-american-teen","tag-carlton-evans","tag-connected","tag-connected-movie-review","tag-connected-review","tag-dumb-and-dumber","tag-fahrenheit-911","tag-jim-carrey","tag-ken-goldberg","tag-march-of-the-penguins","tag-netflix","tag-netflix-documentaries","tag-peter-coyote","tag-reefer-madness","tag-roger-me","tag-roger-and-me","tag-sawyer-steele","tag-the-king-of-kong","tag-the-young-and-the-restless","tag-tiffany-shlain","tag-tiffany-shlain-connected","tag-transformers-2","tag-young-and-the-restless"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1923"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1923\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1963,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1923\/revisions\/1963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}