First Position Review

Blog Post: Documentary Review

First Position (2011), directed by Bess Kargman, is an emotionally compelling observational documentary that sheds a new light on the youth ballet industry. Kargman manages to create a dramatic and almost inspiring story by following six young aspiring ballet dancers competing in the Youth America Grand Prix in hopes of winning scholarship money. The film shows the strains and overwhelming time commitments that young dancers and their families endure in order to pursue their dream. 

The real appeal of the documentary, to me, was the amount of depth in each different young dancer. The literary aspects of the film really got my attention. All of the different dancers, with various different life stories and point of views made the movie’s charm. Aran Bell, an American army brat, manages to dance even though he lives in Naples with his family. He travels everyday to train, maintaining an innocent friendship with an Israeli dancer, Gaya Yemini. In contrast, Joan Samora left his country, Columbia, and lives alone, with few contacts in New York while he trains. Miko Fogarty, a young girl with an overbearing dance mom, has had to completely change her lifestyle (diet, school and all) to train.

As with most dance competitions, the dancers wear extravagant and expensive costumes and make-u to appeal to the judges (dramatic aspects). The most climatic parts of the movie take place on the stage. The documentary, in other aspects, is very simple. The cinematography is nothing special and the sound effects are mostly diegetic sound.

I would recommend this movie to anyone with free time on their hands, it is not one to go out of your way for. The human interest stories of the young ballet dancers are moving, especially that of Joan Samora (it doesn’t hurt that he’s handsome). The dances are interesting, and by the end, I found myself really routing for all six dancers to win awards at the Grand Prix.

The Dark Knight Rises...

Why must he be so dreamy? Christian Bale. Time to marry me.

To experiment with Diigo, I annotated a movie review by David Edelstein titled "As Class Warfare Brews, A 'Dark Knight Rises.'" The review mostly focuses on the themes, motifs and plot of the movie, rather than going into great detail concerning the dramatic cinematography and special effects.

The movie review begins by focusing on the parallels that Nolan, The Dark Knight's producer, drew between his movies and America today with an emphasis on the social hierarchy displayed in the movie. Then most of the body of the review is focused on the plot-line of the movie and how it relates tothe previous Dark Knight films- there is only a little room for discussion concerning Dramatic Aspects and close to none for discussion concerning Cinematic Aspects.
Other than praising Anne Hatheway in his depiction of Cat Woman, Edelstein rarely touches upon acting or costumes. I could not find even a couple sentences about Nolan's execution of cinematography, sound or special effects.
In the first phrase, the author sums up his feelings for the movie- that "the canvas is epic, the themes are profound, the execution is...clunky." The review does not recommend the movie; however, after reading it, I got the feeling that, rather than really opposing the movie, the author is simply indifferent to it.

In terms of our own quarterly movie reviews, I think that we should have a certain amount of creative freedom on what we write. Each movie is an individual production, thus not every question or qualification may apply to it. Of course, we should have a very basic structure to follow- such as touching upon each film aspect in the review; however, we should be allowed to choose how much we focus on each one and what we write about each one. I'm sure that if we were allowed to write the review as we see fit, the assignment would be a lot more interesting for all of us- I know I'd be more motivated!