The Best of the Best Musical movie
One of my all time favourite documentary films is Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing: an experiment where the director (and co-filmmaker Christine Cynn, along an anonymous Indonesian director) traveled to Indonesia to not just interview monsters who partook in the mass killings of 1965 and 1966, but allow them to tell their story through cinema. In fact, these genocidal men were granted the opportunity to use a number of classic film genres and movements, from your typical crime and gangster flick, to a Golden Age Hollywood musical. That second example leads us to Oppenheimer's first narrative feature film, The End, but before we get ahead of ourselves, I want to circle back to why this experience worked in The Act of Killing: this documentary provided us with angles of hatred and occasional guilt that we've never seen in a film before. No one who is evil knows that they are. They believe that they are part of the greater good. This is how monstrosities work in reality, and not the phoned-in drive to be sinful that stories teach us. By the end of The Act of Killing, there's no turning back, either for the unchanged, terrible murderers of countless lives, or for the one lone person who fights back vomiting because he finally realizes the atrocities of his ways.
