cineastFGD
I really enjoyed watching this film, be it now a true doc or not. The experiment really happened and that's the only thing that matters. Being a minimalist myself, I can totally relate with the movie's core message and I find it wonderful that someone did dare to take up this subject and make it a the central theme in a film. The film is a sweet, slow story with a good portion of self irony and many great insights. A must-watch for everybody who's attracted by minimalism but doesn't dare to live it. The soundtrack is nice and the camera work excellent. The film is itself a tribute to minimalism, because it tries to reduce the number of cuts and scenes to the bare necessary. This stands in wonderful contrast to what we are served from Hollyweird these days, where the frame frequency has increased tremendously in the last 20 years, the sound effects have become more dramatic, and constant action is the only premise. How refreshing to be able to just watch a scene or camera angle for more than a few seconds. A great piece of work!
yamachin
I do not think that, as one other reviewer here obviously does, this documentary is staged. Of course he has to "catch himself" at the beginning of a scene, whatever that means, as it is an extremely personal movie. One example that underlines the realness of the movie and the effort undertaken by all involved, in my opinion, is how the girlfriend is filmed only minimally. Tell me one reason why to do this if it were staged!? Also other aspects, that only make sense as a documentary. THIS FILM IS NOT STAGED. The director (and star) compiled this documentary out of many, many hours of material, after the experiment was finished(think of the grandmother), and it is well documented in newspaper articles and such that he really undertook this experiment (he became a semi-celebrity in his native country). If all that were fake, it seems just a little less effort than the real deal, and therefore I find it hard to believe that this isn't sincere. Don't believe the naysayer (singular, I am sure).Generally speaking, this movie is a must-watch for people who love any kind of documentary and are interested how different mindsets navigate through our, let's face it, more and more materialistic world. It not only shows (doesn't tell) the viewer how the most important things can not be bought, which is something almost everyone knows, but still ignores in daily life, and also at the same time asserting the importance that things do, after all, have in our lives, as memorabilia, nostalgic things that are "useless" but we hold on to nevertheless, and so almost this documentary becomes an elegy for a kind of overlap of material and immaterial realms of humankind, likable to the overlap between the material vinyl record (nowadays nostalgic, because non-CD & non-digital) and the immaterial music, which then remains, connotation-like, as part of the silent-again record.Because, as the poet Robert Duncan (1919-1988) once wrote so aptly:When silence / Blooms in the house, all the paraphernalia of our existence / Shed the twitterings of value and reappear as heraldic devices.What value has the life of a homeless man compared to the life of a millionaire? Surely the latter hast more "twitterings" of value in his mansion, but maybe, just maybe, the homeless will one day HAVE just what he needs, not more, nor less, and BE just what he wants to be, not less, whereas the millionaire more often than not can very well BE less than he wants to be, despite all his wealth-induced prestige. Therefore for further reading I (strongly) recommend:"To Have or to Be?" by the social psychologist ERICH FROMM, first published in 1976.This movie, this EXPERIMENT, made more than a 35 years after Fromm's insights, represents nothing less than a psychological self-experiment with philosophical implications - and it is a very entertaining one, too.
Molly Jay
This is a great idea for either a movie (comedy) or a documentary but to me the problem is that the filmmaker/star/subject just can not seem to decide which one of those genres of movies he actually wants to make.The way the camera is set up, the way he "catches himself" at the beginning of scenes, the way his (and he apparently has only one) camera is set up inside a room before others/he enter, and then perform in front of the camera pretending it is not there... these things all tell me that this is a movie, which maybe doesn't have a script but at the very least has an idea where this is going and what they need to do in each scene.On the other hand it's clearly not just a scripted movie or at the very least is trying so hard to present itself as a straight up documentary, so it's not as funny or enjoyable as it could have been in that regard either.Great effort and an amazing premise but they just didn't pull it off which is a shame. If they tried it again as a real documentary or as the premise of a movie I would watch that in a heartbeat!
