This incredibly well made documentary marks my first entry in both my twitter account (twitter.com/thedailyfilm) and this blog here.  I have decided that documenting my motion picture adventures would be a great idea.  Actually, I was talking about what my future held and it was my good friend, Eric Limarenko, who gave me a nice solid kick in the ass to go out and do something about it.  For that, this blog entry is dedicated to you.

To begin, no one watches enough documentaries.  It’s true.  When was the last time any of you saw a documentary at the theater?  Now, it’s not necessarily your fault.  Many of us live in small towns which are lucky to have a movie theater with more than one screen, much less one willing to spend money to show films they think no one wants to see.  Since the dawn of film and especially during the bleak days of the great depression, film has been the release and escape for the American people,  That said, documentaries are generally about REAL LIFE and movie goers with the intent of escaping and releasing don’t want to here about real life. 

However, that was then.  This is now.  Although we are in one of worst recessions since the great depression that’s still no excuse to not be watching documentaries.  In some respects documentaries can be much more fulfilling than their fictional counterparts.  A good documentary can teach, inform, and entertain all at the same time.  A great documentary can somehow take the most innocent, benign or boring concept and turn it into a riveting avalanche of harrowing exciting.  This happened for me with Marsh’s Man on Wire about Phillippe Petit walking between the world trade center towers on a tight rope.  Don’t get me wrong, balancing on a tight rope on top of two of the taller buildings in America is certainly exciting, but Marsh takes this already exiting story and tells it like a heist film.  You know how the movie ends.  The cover of the DVD shows how the movie ends.  BUT IT DOESN’T matter, you’re STILL on the edge of your seat the entire time you’re watching the film.  THAT is what a good documentary can do to you.

To get the point: tonight I watched Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts which was directed AND photographed by Scott Hicks.  Many musicians are familiar with Philip Glass due to his large contribution to the area of music known as “minimalism”.  Many film studies academics are familiar with Philip Glass due to his involvement with many ground breaking films including: Koyaanisqatsi, The Hours, and The Truman Show.  The film is broken up into 12 parts (as indicated by the title) that focus on a different part of Glass’ life.  The interesting thing about these pieces is their purposeful lack of connection.  They are not chronological or sequential in any way.  Each segment (mostly) stands on it’s own.  There is an episode about his past, one about his most famous opera, one about his summer home in Canada, and one about his painter buddy in downtown New York City.

One of my favorite things about this doc is how informal it is at certain points.  The director, who is also holding the camera the entire film, asks questions and gets direct answers from Glass (who is never sure whether to look at the camera or Hicks, by the way).  In one scene Glass is explaining when, during the creative process, he “knows” what the piece is about, and right in the middle of his really deep explanation, one of his children breaks a glass.  Instead of filming the segment again, Hicks leaves it in, cuts to a shot of Glass picking up small pieces of glass, cuts again to Glass’ wife pulling out the vacuum, and FINALLY gets back to the original question before the debacle.  Near the end of the film, Glass is explaining his favorite part of an opera he wrote the music for when he cell phone begins to ring.  Again, the director deliberately leaves in the “mistake” of the phone going off.  There are three or four more examples of this throughout the film.

Now here’s the question.  Why did the director choose to leave in these “mistakes”?  He could have EASILY re-shot each of these scenes and made his documentary that much “smoother”.  So why not?  I believe it is because Hicks didn’t want to portray Glass as a perfect man.  Too often are the famous and well-known put up on pedestals of perfection, usually on cable reality television.  I think this doc is an honest look into the life of a man who writes music for a living.  In fact, much of the movie isn’t about writing music at all.  There is an entire segment about his various spiritual beliefs and how the combination of multiple faiths is what keeps his mind at peace throughout his struggles. 

Overall, a fantastic look into the man behind the music.  Highly recommended.  88