It's a line from Jurassic Park. Just because we *can* clone dinosaurs, doesn't mean we *should*. Here, just because you can stitch together a bunch of video footage of famous people in the '90s and sell it to Hulu, doesn't mean you should.
I grew up in the same decade and also always had a camera with me. VHS, VHS-C, Hi-8, and finally mini-DV. It all looks like crap. The '90s, unfortunately, straddled the line between shooting on film and shooting on high def. So here is a jittery mess of pixellated people.
But that's the least of the reasons why this documentary didn't work.
It didn't work because there was no story. Even a doc needs some narrative flow. This jumped haplessly from one thing to the next. Each time it started to get interesting, it backed away. Any sort of cohesion or narrative or insight just dissolved back into a hodgepodge of images. I kept thinking "And...?" There would be a build up, but suddenly nothing. On to the next shot of Soleil wiping a tear from her eye.
The modern-day interviews were very clipped. Perry Farrell would say one line, Stephen Dorf would grunt a couple of words. Mark-Paul Gosselear had some interesting things to say about not wanting to have his kids work in Hollywood, though. Should have been more of him.
But Even Soleil taking about her own rape (?), terrible as it must've been, was muddled and confusing. It seemed to blend, too, with the story about her losing her virginity. That's how confused I was. I shut it off.
I grew up in the same decade and also always had a camera with me. VHS, VHS-C, Hi-8, and finally mini-DV. It all looks like crap. The '90s, unfortunately, straddled the line between shooting on film and shooting on high def. So here is a jittery mess of pixellated people.
But that's the least of the reasons why this documentary didn't work.
It didn't work because there was no story. Even a doc needs some narrative flow. This jumped haplessly from one thing to the next. Each time it started to get interesting, it backed away. Any sort of cohesion or narrative or insight just dissolved back into a hodgepodge of images. I kept thinking "And...?" There would be a build up, but suddenly nothing. On to the next shot of Soleil wiping a tear from her eye.
The modern-day interviews were very clipped. Perry Farrell would say one line, Stephen Dorf would grunt a couple of words. Mark-Paul Gosselear had some interesting things to say about not wanting to have his kids work in Hollywood, though. Should have been more of him.
But Even Soleil taking about her own rape (?), terrible as it must've been, was muddled and confusing. It seemed to blend, too, with the story about her losing her virginity. That's how confused I was. I shut it off.