While this might not be a film in its traditional sense, seeing that I write a thesis about interactive documentary, I thought it would be nice to include this project in my diary as well. It presents itself as world's first 360° documentary, which means that it is a documentary where the user is able to rotate the screen at will during the story. The story tells us about people living around the polar sea and their experience about the receding ice cap. We hear different sides of the story, because we are presented with natives recollecting about their lives 50, 60 years ago and we hear the captain and the chef of a strangly decadent cruise ship that travels the polar sea. What I found striking was that an old inuit woman did not believe that the warming of the climate could be the result of human doing, because human beings are too insignificant according to her. A younger inuit woman said she was happy with the warming of the climate, because she hopes to find trees on her soil one day. Both of these views are something you do not expect to hear and already make the project worthwhile. Besides this, I think that the option to rotate the screen suits the project very well since it really provides you with a sense of immersion in the polar landscape in a way that I have not experienced it before. There is a certain time lapsed scene of different types of weather rapidly following each other, while the image stares out over the sea. This combined with a slowly rotating screen felt really special to me. I hope more projects similar to this will be developed in the future!
Night and the City (3,5*)
While this is a good film-noir, I feel it lacks a little bit of everything to be a true classic. The story is about a young hustler who "just wants to be someone" and scams his way around town to become the most important wrestling promoter in town. Obviously, doing this gives him a lot of enemies which eventually leads to his demise. The cinematography is good and the black and white chiaroscuro is nice, but not as spectacular as in The Third Man. The rise-and-inevitable-fall narrative is appealing, and probably the best asset of the film, but has been done better in other noirs. The protagonist, played by Richard Widmark, is cool, but not as remarkable as a Burt Lancaster or Humphrey Bogart. The acting in general is actually quite poor in this film. Negative as this all may sound, this was actually an entertaining watch that is recommended for everyone who loves the dark and eerie quality of film noir. Additionally, RYM made me find out about the term film gris which apparently is a subgenre of film noir where the boundary between good and bad is blurred. Seems like an appropriate term for this film, because every character in this film has something likeable and evil about them, even the woman who seems to love Widmark forever betrays him in the end.
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