...or, How to Ruin an Engaging Doc with Commercials.
I didn't catch Dear Zachary at SXSW this year or anywhere else, and I wish I had. My only shot at seeing it was tonight's showing on MSNBC prior to an expected DVD release at some point. If you can put up with commercials, see it as soon as you can. I did fine for the first little bit (20-25 minutes or so), until the first commercial break, which lasted around 6 minutes. Commercials destroy momentum, and it's a great testament to Kurt Kuenne's film that even the lengthy breaks to sell the elderly hearing headsets or car insurance don't lose you.
The movie is only 95 minutes long, and I get the bricks of time in which the universe exists in the cable realm don't fit that at all, even with "limited commercial interruption." 95 minutes of movie and 25 minutes of commercials, though...is excessive, even to the most indoctrinated cable zombie. MSNBC would be wise to chop the commercials in half and plug a 15 minute newsbreak in at the end of each screening of the movie.
The movie itself, I can say without spoiling things for those who haven't seen it, is a far more scathing indictment of government and justice systems than Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. Dear Zachary is a movie about how miscarriage of justice by any officiated body can affect one individual directly and leave irreparable damage to the many, many people connected to them and consequently, human society as a whole. There are tons upon tons of docs and TV specials out there about the horrible things that happen to people, but Dear Zachary really feels like it happened to you or a person you know, and on top of that, it makes you appreciate what you have more than you could believe before you're on the other side of its 95 minutes (2 hours including liquor commercials).
I'm rewatching it as we speak, and at a particularly involving moment, we cut to a quick Advil commercial, and then...ShamWOW! When is the US going to get on the bandwagon with IP TV and cut this crap out? Fine, front-load me with 12 minutes of ads straight, just don't chop the content up for crying out loud!
This movie should have been on that shortlist. I assumed that was the case before, but I'm angry about it now. It is reassuring that an enormous number of people will see it by virtue of being on cable TV "for free," which will give it a bigger potential audience than anything shy of Fahrenheit 9/11 hype, which is not the case with docs in any case other than that one movie.
Austinites can see it theatrically thanks to the Austin Film Society in February, I'm told, with director Kurt Kuenne in attendance. More details as they come on that front.