toddbradley

I don't know why IMDb says this film is still in production. The film is finished, and it has screened at the DOCUTAH festival and for some audiences in Kansas City. Earlier this week, I attended a free screening in KC, sponsored by the non-profit organization shown in the film.

The story is great, and the way the multiple stories are woven together is very effective. The music and sound are also very good, especially for a low budget documentary. Where the film suffers is in the picture. Most of it was shot hand-held without any sort of camera stabilizer, so it has the nauseating look of a smart phone video. That's made a thousand times worse when blown up onto a big screen. The focus is all over the place, too, but almost never on the person who's talking. I think the filmmaker was really going for the popular "shallow depth of field" look, but didn't have the skill or equipment to pull focus expertly. There are also way too many dizzying hand-held whip pans. The end result is hard to watch, which is very sad because the topic and the stories are all very important.

The film follows six people who have bipolar disorder, each who has been affected in a different way and copes in a different way. Some have gotten better with medical care, and some have not. In a poignant and unfortunate twist, one of the characters who seems to be coping very well during the film died before the film was released. The story discusses the highs and lows of suffering from bipolar disorder, as well as some of the medical background on the disease itself, making the point that really it is a spectrum of disorders, and not just one single thing.

I'd recommend the film for people affected by the disease or curious about it. I hope the filmmaker continues to make more films, because I'm sure he learned a lot from this one and will improve his technical skills. He certainly has a good sense of putting a compelling story together, and that's rare in amateur filmmakers.

A flying saucer crashes near the home of an old man on the Navajo reservation. The man is abducted by federal agents. His grandson Lyle is a recently-returned US Army veteran, who goes on a quest to find him. In the course of his search, Lyle encounters a government conspiracy, supernatural forces, a wacko federal bureaucrat and his bumbling henchmen, friends and family who won't or can't help, and an ancient secret society.

This independent film has great cinematography, sub-par writing, and mediocre directing. But there aren't very many films with this much dialogue in the Navajo language, so it's got that going for it. It could've been a better film given some more work on the script, but as it is there are a lot of characters and plot elements that are just too far-fetched to believe, and unfortunately too much overacting.

IMDb categorizes the film as sci-fi, but it's not. There's really nothing sci-fi about this, and it's better thought of as a drama or action film. Maybe that's a marketing thing.

I loved seeing the Navajo Nation as the setting for a feature film, and appreciated seeing so many Navajos playing Navajo roles. And it was a gutsy move to have a good chunk of the dialogue in Navajo. In fact, I think the only film I've seen with more Navajo dialogue was the dubbed version of Star Wars that came out a couple years ago.

As a fan of kung fu movies, I enjoyed this trip through the ages of kung fu movies. Yeah, the title would have you believe the documentary is about action films in general, but it's not. It would have you believe it's about martial arts films in general, but - as before - it's not. They're really just focused on the kung fu movies that came out of Hong Kong, and other films influenced from those.

The film is "hosted" by Samuel L. Jackson, but I sure don't know why. He doesn't have the credentials to lend anything to the narration. And his taped narrative segments were awkward, read from a teleprompter, and distractingly shot by someone with an infatuation with gratuitous camera movement. The production company could've saved a lot of money by hiring a film historian to just narrate from a static angle or all in voice-over.

This film was a gift from a friend who found it in the bargain bin at the video store for $3, so I guess it's worth that. But don't pay $20 for it. I'll give it a 4 out of 10.