La belleza y el dolor

You would think, as an enterpreneur who had created/developed this product, as you saw that it was contributing to 100s of thousands of deaths throughout the world, you would attempt to do something, anything, to reign in the misuse and misapplication of the product. Maybe you would put some money into combatting the misuse and consequences of misuse, of your product. But no, the family put money, lots of it, into entertainment for the wealthy, the educated, the priviliged few who attend the Louvre, the Met, the Guggenheim, etc. After all, they believed "no one is forcing them to misuse our product". The film is powerful. It shows the power of people who come together to fight evil and apathy, in spite of themselves. I enjoyed the film and I would have joined them on their march for justice.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed can join Fire of Love in the club of Oscar-nominated documentaries from 2022 that would have been more worthy winners than Navalny. It's admittedly a small club, but I feel like both of those movies have moments that demonstrate documentary filmmaking at its best.

In the case of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, it's probably the final 15-20 minutes that shines the brightest. It can be a slow and somewhat uneven feeling documentary at some points, but it builds to some phenomenal and emotionally hard hitting final scenes. The rest of the documentary still tends to hit far more often than it misses, but I did get the sense it may have been a tiny bit too long, and while I respect the choice not to tie together its two primary narratives more explicitly, part of me was waiting for them to collide more directly at a point. Still, leaving some of that up to the viewer felt like a deliberate choice, and I can respect that.

It follows Nan Goldin, with the film both recounting her life story from the 1950s to the 1990s and detailing her activism against the Sackler family and their role in the opioid epidemic in the 2010s. The latter might be more interesting narratively, but the former has the more interesting presentation, seeing as Goldin's an accomplished artist/photographer, and the documentary frequently relies on her work to serve as visuals.

It's a heavy and often sad documentary, dealing with mental illness, addiction, corruption, censorship, the AIDS crisis, discrimination, and domestic violence. It might be upsetting to some viewers as a result, but I think it was best not to pull punches (so long as people know what they're in for before deciding to watch it). It's a largely powerful documentary that I think will stick with me. Not perfect, but it has some amazing sequences that were very striking and moving.

It still amazes me how evolved the documentary film genre has become over the years.

The amount of freedom you can experiment within a documentary has become more noticeable. In this one particularly, you see a bunch of different styles and even story branches.

There is a mix of themes such as topical activism, what can be classified as art, a determination for justice and accountability, a woman's struggling life and the power of family.

The central character I had no idea about and we certainly got a thorough look into her life both as an artist and as a daughter.

It felt very definitive as I felt it gave you the perfect portrait of this person's upbringing and how certain traumas lead to this groundbreaking change in the art world.

I also liked at how they told each aspect of her life in a parallel style. The timings of shift to a different part of her life felt well-timed and gave us a very satisfying conclusion.

This was pretty interesting and while I wasn't overwhelmed by it, I can see others feeling that way.

It's well made, the content and imagery is strong and the central character was not afraid to open herself up to her life story.

I read the review by CinemaSerf and had similar reaction: I had expected much more of an exposé of the Sacklers. The documentary assumed that viewers would just take the side of the protesters against Sackler, but anyone with an enquiring mind might just wonder what the evidence was. I was in the fortunate position of having read Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe, which does a thorough and gripping account of the origins of the Sackler family and all their dodgy dealings, pushing opioid drugs to physicians, and recommending alarmingly high doses while arguing that only certain types of people got addicted. Once you have that background, any doubts about Nan Goldin's activism are dispelled, and you look in awe at what she's done. In effect, this film, which is quirky and relies mainly on vision and sound rather than words to convey messages, complements the scholarly verbal account in Empire of Pain. The Sackler story is only part of it - it sits in the context of Nan Goldin's remarkable life and career as photographer documenting the underground life of unconventional people after she escaped her dysfunctional family. It's an important film documenting an era in history, and showing how individuals can take on the rich and powerful. Nan features in Patrick Radden Keefe's book, and he features in her film, but I think that if you put the two together, it's perfect and the whole is greater than the parts.

The film attempts a profile of a photographer, but without laying groundwork to make the case for why she is, in thee filmmaker's perspective, a great artist. Viewers are shown a few slideshows of her work, images that are often uninteresting on their own -- without first being contextualized -- and then sequences of B-roll of the photographer shuffling around her studio and directing installations of her work. I got the the impression that if I were already enamored with the photographer, then I might have watched these sequences with rapt attention. Instead, knowing next to nothing about the artist, I found them boring -- and this was all within the first 15 minutes!

There are vastly more powerful films about photographers, searing works about the opioid epidemic, beautiful films about artistic process. This film intersects with each of those genres, but in an insubstantial and unmemorable way.

The buzz around this work -- and there is a lot of buzz -- seems rooted in the celebrity of the filmmaker and its subject. That's ironic, for the film appears to seek its power from themes larger than any individual, yet winds up relevant only if underpinned by the fame surrounding its maker and central character. Like the reviewer here PedroPires90 wrote ("Unfocused," March 3, 2023), "honestly it was hard to find the strength to finish it."