The Thin Blue Line
This week's film is Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line (1988). Morris recently won teh Academy Award for best documentary film for The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. Comments are welcome about either film.
Also, The Thin Blue Line may not be as easy to find as Citizen Kane, so be sure to attend one of the screenings.
Some trivia on Morris: he often directs commercials between documentary projects, and recently directed some of teh commercials for Apple's "Switch" campaign.
3 Comments:
Thank god this movie was decent, because the last 2 were brutal. I thought this was a very well done documentary. I rather enjoy documentaries on The Discovery Channel and The History Channel, so this movie was right up my alley. I liked how the director supplemented the actual story with real interviews, maps, reenactments, etc. I too thought that half way into the movie it began to drag on. I was hooked and wanted to know what else was going to happen - but I was becoming impatient. I would say overall though that this documentary did a good job at presenting the story in interesting unconventional means.
-John R.
I really enjoyed this documentary - all of the "characters" were presented as complex individuals. Even David Harris had some very quotable lines, especially about the blind scales of justice.
I think its interesting that the Academy did not recognize this film because they said it crossed the line of "documentary". This brings up vital points about history and truth. As the facts get muddled and the truth is lost, how does Justice work? If District Attourneys hold power over life and death and twist the truth at will, how is Morris' work any worse?
Also, was this a poineer of crime re-enactment, cause it certainly is in wide use in the dozen crime shows on TV (America's most wanted, etc).
I was happy to learn that Randall Adams was freed in 1989 after the film was released.
-Tim Donlan
Did anyone notice that Randall Adams in the movie is wearing a white uniform, while David Harris is wearing the more common orange one? I'm wondering if these were just the standard issue clothes of the prisons they were in, or if Morris had Adams wear white as a kind of symbolic sign of innocence.
-Steve S.
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