MovieChat Forums > While We're Young (2015) Discussion > Moral of the story is screw everyone ove...

Moral of the story is screw everyone over and there are no consequences?


What exactly are we supposed to think at the end? Making documentary films (somehow tied up as "showbiz") is all about doing whatever the hell you want and using people? Not being a psychopath makes you naive and old fashioned? This film gave me the exact opposite of a catharsis. It left me angry. Even if that's not how I believe reality is, it's depressing that the director thinks it is, and he got enough people to agree with him to make a film out of it and spread that awful message.

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I thought about Andrew Jarecki ("Jinx") and Nev Schulman ("Catfish") a lot while watching this movie. These guys manipulated timelines a lot in their respective documentaries but that doesn't make their films any less powerful or intriguing. Ultimately, in case of "Jinx", information uncovered in the film helped bring a man to justice - a very wealthy man who got away with murder more than once during his lifetime.

Regardless of that, documentaries are usually very one sided and I never rely on a documentary as an only source of information about a case or topic. Reading more about a topic usually shows that a documentary omitted some information in order to create a smoother narrative - that's what all the documentary filmmakers do, even if they don't serve an agenda. I don't know if things were different in the 'good old days' - maybe people believed in objectivity of the reporter back then, although we know now that "objectivity" is just a construct and I think that documentary filmmakers are being more honest about that these days.

On a side note, I really loved "While We're Young" because it doesn't patronize the viewers and it's truly postmodernist. A very good movie. Usually with Baumbauch I don't know what to expect, I disliked his editing in some other movies but this one is almost perfect.


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“Daydreaming subverts the world.” ~ Raoul Vaneigem

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This movie is full of mixed messages.

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