90 Plus: Aging in the Future

Everyone knows the population in the United States is growing. Because of advances in medicine there are more people over sixty-five alive today than at any time in our history. But there is more to this than most realize. Be aware, change is fast coming to the geriatric population, and thus to every one of us.

You may wonder what is going on, take a breath and allow me a minute to tell you. Some think that the Census Bureau only amasses numbers when it counts everything it can about American society. Instead of letting those statistic lie fallow, when done, experts turn them into useful numbers on which to understand our present and to help us see into the future. One of those reports by the Census Bureau called 90+ in the United States 2006-2008 will surely make life for many of our legislators and politicians, whether nationally or at the state level, very difficult over the next forty years. The number of people 90 and over tripled over the last 3 decades, reaching almost 2 million. Today, those 90 and over comprise 4.7 percent of those 65 and older. Eight-eight percent are white. Eighty percent of the women are widows. Forty percent are married men. Over the next four decades, this part of the population might more than quadruple. By 2050, the 90 plus age group could be as high as 10 percent of America’s older population, meaning those older than 65 years. That is a significant number. With many of the women widows, more women than men will be alive. Strikingly, many more of the men and women in that age group will be living in poverty than the general population. In no surprise, the oldest men and women will have higher disabilities. That is inevitable as people age. These people will live in nursing homes or alone. Some may be fortunate to live out their days with family. Interestingly, today 99.5 percent of the 90 and over population have health insurance. Under Republicans, I fear that percentage will surely decrease dramatically. The concern is that in time people who are that old may overwhelm us with their growing numbers. Be warned.

Where will the needed money come from to support this population? Right-wing fiscal forces are mounting attacks against all government supported health care as the federal government and the states wrestle with how they might best handle what many call entitlements, but what people who have been paying into the system all their lives only expect. They are not entitlements. They are due bills. It is worth repeating that Republicans in general and those Republicans specifically running for president all want to change Social Security, some by creating personal accounts through private insurance or even with accounts tied to the stock market. Imagine where those schemes would have left people today if they ever had become law. Many Republicans also want to revamp Medicaid by giving what they call block grants to the states. The question is who will monitor those grants to make sure the states use the money properly. All this brings me to more about the growing 90-plus generation.

Those on the far right such as the Tea Party and the libertarians, and worse, the centrist so-called compassionate conservatives, know they will have to devise ways either to curtail the growth in numbers of those 90 and over now, or stop in their tracks those on the verge of becoming 90. Whatever those on the right choose to do will have serious consequences for everyone, not only the aged. The Republican mantra is that every man, and woman, must fend for him or herself. If people cannot, the consequences will be dire. Most of the time when people reach beyond the traditional retirement age of say, 65, only a few are fortunate to have the means to take care of themselves without help from the federal government, especially today with state and private pensions often reduced or dropped. If people cannot have Social Security, and that includes most of American society, they face a very dark future. The odds are that their final years will be tragic. And the tragedy will manifest itself not only to the elderly, but family members who care for them and professional caretakers as well.

The information in the Census report will test the humanity of all conservatives. As you can see, I am less worried about the humanity of Democrats and liberals. Traditionally, they have bigger hearts. How each acts and how each proposes to handle the needs of the elderly in the future will reveal how those politicians feel about an increasingly aging population growing bigger all the time, and that is not going away. Unless attitudes change and we learn to treat this coming crisis of old age, I fear the worse will happen to our sisters and brothers as they inextricably advance into the unknown years of 90 plus. There is no doubt that caring for the elderly will put a strain on how the federal and state governments function. Money to govern will always be in short supply. We really have no choice but to do what is right for those who manage to live long in our society. There was a time a few years ago, when people who could not care for the elderly in their families, took their wheel-chair bound relatives and quietly deposited them at malls or on the sides of highways where they might die out of sight and out of mind, at best dumping them on society in general in the hopes that someone else would care for them. The tactic failed. But the scandal lives on. If we do not properly care for those who have long life, will that type of tactic again rear its ugly head? Only time will tell.

Machines on the Verge by Ron Steinman

In the United States there are now almost 340 million devices connected to only the ether (and, ultimately, each other depending on your need) through small but very powerful chips that control and guide smart phones, normal cell phones, tablets and even the less portable laptop. That means for the first time there are more devices in the United States than there are people. And there is every reason to believe the gap will continue to grow. This is according to CTIA –The Wireless Association in it semi-annual survey of what it calls wireless subscribers, penetration, usage and revenue. All large. All growing. All with no place to go but up.
Are the machines finally in charge of our lives? Probably not, but without doubt, we as individuals are individuals no more. We have become slaves to the tiny, almost invisible chips that give these devices their power over us. Give the machines a few more years and who knows to what lengths the techies will have gone to take away, usually without our knowing it, what remains of our freedom.
I am not a Luddite. Far from it. I enjoy a handheld computer at my disposal but I work very hard not to give it the chance to dominate my life, the same way I see people’s lives dominated by technology everywhere I turn. Couples at dinner spend more time on their smart phones than they do looking at each other. Fathers and mothers wheeling baby carriages who may rarely look down at their child, so dominated are they by the smart phone in their hands. Some people have a phone for work and one for personal use. None of this comes cheap. And, oddly enough, despite the seriousness of the recession, people are still buying the latest gadgets and subscribing to the most intricate plans. Then there those who assume the retro look as plumbers or electricians that we see everywhere with mobile device upon mobile device strapped in a leather carrying case around waists, a belt meant usually to help keep their pants from falling down.
For sheer numbers smart phones and the old-fashioned mobile phones are in the majority. Tablets are creeping up but very slowly. From all the advertisements and publicity, you would think tablets make up most of the market. Wrong. Though they are gaining, they still only hold about 5 % of all mobile device sales.
Apps can do many things and many things they do are worth having as part of one’s mobile device. But apps have limitations. Can an app open a bottle of wine? Can an app test your taste buds with a new chocolate? Can an app allow you to fall in love with the girl next door by sniffing the lovely perfume she wears? At least not yet but I will bet that some smart start-up is now hard at work to enable those things to take place. Keep buying those mobile computers. Keep adding as many apps as you want. Keep paying bills that grow higher by the day. Have we finally found a recession-proof industry? Maybe. Only time will tell. One thing is for sure – the reliance on portable computers is not a fad. It is real and about the only thing that really is in control of many lives.

The End of the Internet by Ron Steinman

It seems that the broadcast networks won a major victory in 2010 when a Federal Appeals court said directly, that the Federal Communications Commission had no right legislate equal treatment for those who use the Internet. In its decision, a federal court may have closed off what until now has been an open Internet. With this ruling, we may be witnessing the end of net neutrality. So for the multi millions who use the Internet, tariffs and tolls, money paid for using the Web, may be the future of what until now has been free and something of a Wild West atmosphere on the World Wide Web. Wild West? Good or bad, creative or not, freedom of expression along with freedom to create and to be at the forefront of innovative technology, will surely suffer if the ruling stands.

The ruling that temporarily favors these giants is about greed, not free enterprise or creativity. All the providers of news, entertainment and sports, in the future will be free to charge different rates for different services that have been free on the Internet. After all, those companies provide the pipelines that allow entertainment and information to flow unimpeded to TV sets, laptops, tablets and all mobile devices. Therefore, they believe they can also control the flow and quality of what goes through the “pipes.” Once they accomplish that, meaning when they can control the content, they automatically quash the freedom to create. Those who freely used the Web in the past will know the meaning of clogged. No amount of Liquid Plumber will unclog the clutter, unless of course, you can pay the toll.

Comcast said it “remains committed to . . . open Internet principles. . . “ and that it will continue to work with the FCC, I remain skeptical that over time Comcast and the other broadcast entities will change how they think they will make money from increased broadband traffic. Now that Comcast completely controls NBC Universal, I am betting that the company will not be able to let us think of them as the good guy. Collusion is not the issue. Thinking the same as one’s competitor is not unusual when it comes to squeezing the public for every cent it can.

I am all for free enterprise. It is the American way. However, big broadcasters whose fingers are in every aspect of providing entertainment, sports and news seek to destroy one of our only remaining places where we can and do develop new ideas– the Internet. It does not mean that every idea that grows on the Web bursts forth like a rocket carrying the next greatest “thing.” Most of what is on the Internet is not worth talking about, thinking about or even looking at. It is worth repeating that the giants are mainly pipelines. Let me be absolutely clear, as clear as clear can be. It is about any media giant that seeks to control the boundaries of where our creativity can go. These businesses rarely create anything worthwhile for the audience. They push shows and events created by real producers of mostly popular entertainment over the airways through their “pipes” and are indifferent about the quality that slips onto our TV and PC screens. Whether these shows provide material created by people with artistic ideas is not my brief. I may not always agree with the much of what people produce. I often deride the quality of what I see on TV and on the Web, but at least those who produce it have the choice to do as they wish. Once a production is on TV and cable or just on the Web, the marketplace – meaning the audience – will decide how long a product survives. The audience will also have a choice of what it will watch or not. The viewer must be the final judge, not a court or even a regulatory agency.

Somethings Never Change: Words, Words by Ron Steinman

We live in age of talk, talk, talk and the unbridled, constant avalanche of words that we face on the page or screen, and that we hear every second of every day. The sources include talk radio and talk TV, Skype and phones, and every social network where words are currency as posts, tweets, and the next new thing where words come cheap. It is worth taking a look at Jonathan Swift and something he wrote 234 years ago. Read carefully. Think that the attitude we have toward some things never changes.

“Gulliver’s Travels
Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World (1776) By Jonathan Swift

“Part III, Chapter V:

The Grand Academy of LagadoWe next went to the school of languages, where three professors sat in consultation upon improving that of their own country.The first project was to shorten discourse by cutting polysyllables into one, and leaving out verbs and participles, because in reality all things imaginable are but nouns.

The other project was a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever, and this was urged as a great advantage in point of health as well as brevity. For it is plain that every word we speak is in some degree a diminution of our lungs by corrosion and consequently contributes to the shortening of our lives. An expedient was therefore offered, that since words are only names of things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express the particular business they are to discourse on. And this invention would certainly have taken place, to the great ease as well as health of the subject, if the women, in connection with the vulgar and illiterate, had not threatened to raise a rebellion, unless they might be allowed the liberty to speak with their tongues, after the manner of their ancestors; such constant irreconcilable enemies to science are the common people. However, many of the most learned and wise adhere to the new scheme of expressing themselves by things, which hath only this inconvenience attending it, that if a man’s business be very great, and of various kinds he must be obliged in proportion to carry a greater bundle of things upon his back, unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him. I have often beheld two of those sages almost sinking under the weight of their packs, like two pedlars among us; who when they met in the streets, would lay down their loads, open their sacks, and hold conversation for an hour together’ then put up their implements, help each other to resume their burthens, and take their leave.

But for short conversations a man may carry implements in his pockets and under his arms, enough to supply him, and in is house he cannot be at a loss. Therefore the room where company meet who practice this art, is full of all things ready at hand, requisite to furnish matter for this kind of artificial converse.”










Where have all the Photos Gone? by Ron Steinman

With the democratization of picture taking, do photos have the same meaning they once had?
As you read this, millions of people are snapping pictures with either a digital camera or the digital camera attached to their smart phone. Millions more are figuring out how to store those photos, whether on memory sticks, on their computer hard drives, or more recently in the cloud. Most people probably do not know how many digital images they have or where they store them. Often, they destroy images in their camera to make room for new images that catch their eye. Photos end up on Facebook, and other social media sites because that is where people share what they shot.
A reminder. It was not always that way. At one time in the not distant past, digital did not exist. Film did exist. We developed the shots we took in one of the many labs, stores if you will, that dotted every neighborhood. When the developed pictures came back to us, we looked at them and sometimes ordered extra prints from the negatives, yes, negatives. Then we duly stored the original prints and the negatives in a closet, the back of a desk drawer or in a box that lay in the dark under a bed or a bureau. Sometimes, if we were ambitious, we put the photos in an album and noted the dates and circumstances when we first shot the photos. In many cases, whether black and white or color, over time the pictures faded and lost their depth and contrast. They looked thin and, frankly, were thin in terms how they appeared to the naked eye.
In my family as a young boy, from what I recall, my father had the usual Brownie camera and nothing else. In my family, we reserved picture snapping for important events: births, Bar Mitzvahs, engagements, and weddings. Rarely did we take a photo because we could or there was some other kind of event that warranted taking pictures.
By the time I was married with children we used every kind of camera imaginable. When I moved from the suburbs to Manhattan about eight years ago, among the things I put in storage were many, many boxes of still photos and negatives that I and my family produced over more than 45 years living in one place or another using several kinds of Nikon, an Olympus, a Canon, and a variety of point and shoot cameras that were easy to use and took little expertise. Those cameras are mostly gone now, except for a few lenses that I still have.
Today this is all changed. Cameras are not only cheaper, but almost every new cell phone and especially every smart phone has a camera as part of the apps to help the photographer do a better (or different) job of taking a picture. No negatives exist today. With digital negatives are a dead issue. With every picture one takes, there are ways to store every image made for fun, on the run or just because the camera was available.
Back in the day, the quality of the family still photo was rarely important. Photos then existed as records. It did not matter how poorly anything looked, as long as the image defined the people and the event. Call me a dinosaur, but I still get a thrill when I hold a photo of someone my family or I shot, that I recreated from a negative. This does not mean I am against digital, but I wonder where all those millions of digital of photos are going, and if, indeed they are somewhere in a cloud or buried deep in a hard drive, do they have the same meaning as those old photos on paper have and for some, always will.
Footnote. Someday I will convert my thousands of negatives into digital and place them on a DVD. But I will never toss the negatives. Who knows when we will see their likes again?

Tongue in Cheek Maybe by Ron Steinman

If you love literature and giants of writing, David Foster Wallace has to be close to the top. I wonder if the critics who revere him, bestow too much of his work with god-like status and go overboard by accepting almost everything he wrote with awe when they review his work.
Infinite Jest David Foster Wallace’s remarkable novel is just that, remarkable in more ways than I can explain no matter how many words I may use. Also, it is very long. There is a small battle among intellectuals on the back pages of The New York Times Magazine and at Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab. It concerns the idea that Wallace invented, if not the whole shebang, at least he had a hand in creating the language used on the Internet. Contrary to folklore, Al Gore, as he says, or the Pentagon, as it would like to think, did not invent the Internet. I may be missing something in a number of recent columns and posting about the art of David Foster Wallace. Some of these musings are akin to parody, always difficult to write and not something that easily makes its desired effect. Posting my essay on The Digital Filmmaker about Infinite Jest though the subject is not specifically about filmmaking or any of its residual parts, and is not parody, makes sense to me.
I have been reading Infinite Jest for many months. Despite this, I can only read a few pages at a time without my eyes glazing over. I cannot say Wallace has his fingerprints all over how people think and write for the Web. I can say, though, that I have never read so much about so many subjects, things, people, and events, all from an author who does not know when to stop. After a lifetime of reading, I wish that Wallace could somehow have put his foot on the brake pedal, at least occasionally. If his writing pioneers how people write for the Web, or even how they think while using the Web, somehow I am not getting those signals. I do not know if Wallace knew that so many critics were ascribing so much to his use of language regarding the Web. Imagine the pressure he would be under had he known how others saw his writing. In every sentence of his, there is more information than a literate person can easily parse. Wallace tells the reader everything he knows about all things and then some. And it never stops. He hems and haws. He pauses and lurches forward. He spews information out with impunity and he never looks back. Perhaps all this is a sign of genius. It takes him a long time to say what he wants. It is as if he cannot make up his mind about what he is describing. He piles on adjectives. He never runs out of nouns. I know there are readers who worship his every utterance. Until I finish reading Infinite Jest, as I said a remarkable work, I am not among them.
Writing for the Web as I do, I know through practice that long sentences do not work. Complicated ideas are worse. Patience is not a virtue for readers who exist in a world of self-indulgence, and if on Facebook, self-promotion. Readers have no time to reread, sometimes necessary with a difficult subject. In other words, if one wants to write successfully on the Web, David Foster Wallace, despite his genius, should not be your guide.

Small is Not Beautiful by Ron Steinman

In 1973, E.F. Schumacher wrote, “Small is Beautiful,” subtitled, “Economics as if people mattered.” The book’s theme resonated with people because the concept made a good life seem possible in a world quickly running away with bigness. Yes, even then. In many ways his work defied traditional economics. The book had lines in it such as, “Man is small. Therefore small is beautiful.” Schumacher’s work attracted conservatives, libertarians and even tree huggers. Were E.F. Schumacher alive today I wonder what he would think about the recent move to downsize all visual media, not because small is beautiful, but in the hopes of attracting an audience only for the sake of making money.
This is about the movies of course from Hollywood and independent filmmakers. It is about the real world and the virtual world. It is about some of the people who any visual that moves for whatever device is current and fashionable. Movies only succeed for the bean counters when they make money. Art works in the world of media when the box office in whatever form responds to a visual story of the receipts are high. The goal of almost all movie making is to amortize and maximize. The goal is to make the most of money spent, effort put forth, and time in production from beginning to end and perhaps the hope for art instead of popular schlock. Lately in Hollywood and in TV, it seems the goal is to minimize, that is fit the product into the smallest possible frame to get the biggest possible audience and hopefully not to lose money along the way. Hand-held devices, whether smart phones or the new tablet computers, might some day cut into box office receipts in movie theaters.
But because the attitudes of younger consumers might be changing toward viewing moving images on hand-held devices– and I say that cautiously because all the results are not yet in – it does not mean it is how I want to view movies, TV shows, sports or even commercials. Sports scores work. The weather works. Stock market quotes work. Faces and subtle movement do not work, but I’ll come back to that in a moment. I grew up in an age before TV when the biggest changes in movies came with the development of cameras that Hollywood used to record and then project images on a wide screen. The old West came to life on the big screen, as did many epics and historical dramas. Everything on the screen had meaning from the deepest view in the center to the so-called peripheral images on the sides and in the corners. Coming from an era where almost all we had were black and white films with limited picture value, as the new techniques came before us, the fun then was to see much more in the theater than I and everyone else I knew could ever have dreamed possible.
Let me be perfectly clear, as a consumer of films, TV shows, sporting events, concerts of all sorts, seeing movement of any kind on a cell phone, a smart phone or new tablet
seriously limits my involvement, thus my enjoyment. On most small two or two and half inch screens, because the canvas is so tiny, I lose much of the detail. It is impossible to see everything captured by the camera, how the actors perform, and how the editor made the movie come together. This, then, is the loss of my vision of esthetics. Can I see the face, the lips, the eyes, even a possible tic and the emotion an actor brings to his or her part? Can I see the broad vistas that opened my young eyes to the excitement of places I saw for the first time — a desert, a mountain or a flowing river? Will I be able to observe the background of the movie; its depth, width and breadth, so I can better understand its context, its sense of place? Will I see the cornerback hit the quarterback and how each man reacts? What about seeing the ball striking the bat and flying over the wall for a homerun to win the game? All that and just about any detail you name is beyond what one’s eyes can take in on the small screen. Of course, the new pads are bigger and can provide more material for the pleasure of viewing. But not that much more. If anyone can tell me that all those details and more will be possible on the tiny screen that is part of my cell phone, I will give up my fight for more space. Somehow, I doubt anyone can do that, and then where am I and the enjoyment I seek from the surrounding visual world?

Watching You by Ron Steinman

In the world of digital, everything changes almost too fast for us to properly analyze. Today many of us carry cell phones that are really hand-held computers, but the premise of this piece before the full advent of smart phones that I originally wrote for The Digital Filmmaker in October 2006 is little changed. For this edition, though there are changes, the main idea behind the piece is the same. We should be ever vigilant about how the many eyes of the many devices in our lives affect who we are and how we act. Does it matter? I think it does. It is my reason for posting this on my Notebooks blog in 2011. Enjoy, but keep smiling.

This column it is about life in the digital age. For me the problem started with a red light that suddenly appeared one night in September mysteriously and without warning on both my TV sets. When I could not sleep, I looked over to the TV set in my bedroom and a red light I had not noticed before, stared me in the face. I tried turning the set on and off several times. The red light remained. I went into my living room and the red light also shown brightly on that TV set. Doing what I did in the bedroom made no difference. The red lights remained.
Then I looked around my apartment. I have broadband through my cable provider. Attached to one TV I have a cable box, a CD/DVD player and a fast becoming obsolete VHS player. I have more wires in and around the rooms I live in than I ever imagined I would need. A green light was on the VHS player. As much as I tried, I could not turn it off. I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. My apartment is small, but comfortable. Along with the just mentioned digital devices, I have two telephones and two power strips that are always on, their red lights happily glowing. There are two digital clocks that are part of my TV sets. My broadband connection, part of which is on my desk and the other part of which is on the floor blink continuously. The light that shines through most of my necessary gadgets is green, not a real green, mind, but a bright green as if from another planet.
When I lived in the suburbs in a six-bedroom house, I had even more digital devices. There were at least eight telephones, 2 microwaves, five TV sets, four digital clocks, a automatic garage opener, an automatic in-ground watering system, several computers, computerized washer and dryer, a full alarm system for every window and every door, and probably a few more devices that have slipped through the cracks that were always on.
Those red lights, my blinking clock and actually all things digital are still invading my space and I do not know how to stop the onslaught. All things digital is the key. Everything is always on. I cannot turn anything off unless I pull one of the many plugs controlling the various devices. Each lighted appliance uses tiny, almost infinitesimal watts of power that we ignore because alone we think their use does not add up to very much. But think of all the devices over the whole world that uses these small bits of power. Think, too, and how the watts they use add up, especially with the high price of oil that never seems to stop rising. You get the idea. Or I hope you do.
That is only part of my problem. I cannot help but think of Franz Kafka, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe, Philip K Dick, and Thomas M Disch, and, yes, even Stephen King. Truth, the truth I am witnessing, is stranger than fiction. Consider the following theory. I wonder if the devices that we bring into our homes and into our lives, many of which are necessary are there for another purpose. Are they quietly and secretly watching us? Are they recording our every move? If they are, what are they doing with the information? Are they storing it for future use? Are they cataloguing it? Are they selling it to marketing experts or to another planet? Could they be enjoying everything they see for their own pleasure? Unless those watchers have empty lives, I do not see what they could be getting from all those vacant hours and all those straight on views of mostly mundane lives. I do believe that in each location, my past home and my current home, in hotels and restaurants where these devices abound, each one records everything we do.
You may not believe any of this. If you do not, I will not argue with you. Who is to say I am wrong and you are right. Why, though, are those lights, both the red and the green, always on? If they are not watching me and you, your friends, family and neighbors, what are they doing? I refuse to believe they are there to remind us of their machine’s presence. There has to be something more.
The energy these billions of digital devices use are beyond calculation. Think of all the barrels of oil wasted on listening in and recording mostly dull lives. Do people know this is happening? I doubt it. I know those eyes peering out from the innards of all modern machines use far more energy than anyone realizes. I have a suggestion how you can find the answer to how much energy the digital machines in your home use. This is a story worth pursuing for an enterprising reporter. There are others far better equipped to handle the machinery of statistics than I can. They should chase this story. Advanced math, physics and chemistry are important here.
We are in a vicious circle, though. For every new invention, there is another digital device quickly in use. Pre-digital devices in homes and offices are fast becoming obsolete. Those red and green lights are following everyone everywhere. Can we halt the invasion of the energy suckers? Probably not. Perhaps it is time to bring back the slide rule, the plastic pocket case and leaky ballpoint pens. Perhaps. No matter. It is always worth invoking the spirit of Kafka, Poe, Lovecraft and their kind. I am certain these geniuses of the absurd and weird would have a great time working these elements into their stories.
Wait. Remember the red lights on my TV sets that stayed on no matter what. Before I could call my broadband provider, I woke up the other morning to see that they had disappeared. Gone. There were no more red lights on my TV sets. Days later as I write, the red lights are still gone. I will not make that phone call. I plan to leave well enough alone, at least for now. I am sure the red lights are recharging, getting ready for another onslaught. Until the red lights return, which they surely will, I will leave well enough alone. Only time will tell. Then I will cry for help. If I can.
I spoke too soon. The other morning I woke with a start. Just when I thought everything was fine, once again, staring at me from my TV in the bedroom, there was the tiny red light, again. The red light was also on the TV set in my empty living room. That is two for two. In the bedroom, the red light had nothing interesting to watch except my Shih Tzu, Lacey, and me, both of us mostly asleep. Point is, the red light is on, still is here, still watching whatever I do. I will never get used to it.

The New Documentary: Sacred or Profane by Ron Steinman

Assume with me that the documentary film as we once knew it for some filmmakers no longer exists. I believe that the classic form of the documentary film best serves the public. I am unhappy with what a number of filmmakers are doing to a genre once thought of as being sacred. I am not against change, but change only for the sake of change means nothing. Younger filmmakers who lack tradition and a sense of history are putting what they believe is their truth on film or on video in ways that could quicken the death of a once honored class.
Except for PBS, and occasionally the pay TV channels such as HBO and Showtime, and some independent films, the classic documentary is under assault.
A recent report from a Canadian film festival reveals that there are directors who now use actors to recite pre-recorded words from interviewees, some of whom might be dead, and thus unavailable for an interview. In some cases an actor mouths the words because the subject is unable to recite his or her own words. Done slickly as to make the viewer believe he or she is hearing and seeing the original person speak endangers the truth. It makes the audience believe the person on camera is real, which is a lie. Might as well do a fiction film, a narrative, and toss out the pretense of honest reality. The techniques now used to produce these films are a violation. Reincarnation becomes reality. Is it generational or simply perverse that these changes are taking place? Worse is that unschooled critics on the Web accept the changes in the non-fiction film and think those are worthy of high praise for the reason that, of all things, they are different. Because something is different does not mean it is of high quality. I am not against change when it advances an art form such as the documentary. But when change triumphs over content, as it sometimes does when new techniques replace the older ones, there is no place for it at my table. Importantly, consumers who seek truth are poorer for the lack of it.
Documentary producers work hard to clarify reality. It is no secret that documentary filmmakers re-order interviews to make the film flow. Whatever the style of the documentary film, interviews must make sense. But the subject must always speak for him or her self. The film should not falsify images. The film should not add shots or sequences that are lies. At the very least, the documentary film must present solid information, the filmmaker’s truth, as clearly as possible. That is what the documentary film is about. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Empty Kingdom by Ron Steinman

Showtime, the pay channel that spends much of its time putting on programs that try to eat into HBO’s dominance in the world of pay TV, has been showing a documentary called Talihina Sky, The Story of Kings of Leon. I can only think Showtime put the film on in the hope that it would pick up an audience that otherwise would spend its time elsewhere, and should. Poor choice. The documentary is a mess of home videos, poorly shot, so-called behind the scenes interviews, some of which run on for what seems forever, bad editing, a poorly conceived story line, not nearly enough music or concert footage, too much boozing and marijuana sucking and everything else crude that goes into making a film. It is a form of documentary filmmaking that has the filmmaker throw what he has against the wall to see how it sticks. Obviously when this happens, no matter how stylish or creative one thinks one is, it never really comes together in any coherent fashion.
Two brothers started Kings of Leon in 1999 in the backwoods in rural Oklahoma where poverty and Pentecostal evangelicalism dominated life. TV and rock and roll were sinful and the real world was inherently evil. The film centers on an annual family reunion in Followill, Oklahoma where the band members and their extended families gather once a year to drink, eat, play and enjoy each other. Not a bad hook to hang a film on to develop the background of the lives once lived by the band members, and in many ways still lived. It is always good to understand creativity, to see and experience the wellspring of success, in this case, in the highly competitive world of rock and roll. But first time director Stephen C. Mitchell puts up too many barriers to a coherent understanding of who the band members really are,
There is occasional valuable insight from the mother and father of the bandleaders and even a few, too few, relevant comments by members of the band. but there is almost no variety in where or how we see them. This is a slice of life movie, so messily sliced that it is impossible to get a handle on the why of the band’s lyrics, the band’s current success or the band’s future. Perhaps the director thought that by seeing the extended family in all its glory, drinking and carousing, the audience would come away with a sense of who they are and where they come from. From watching the film, it is easy to see where the band members come from, even partly to understand why they write and play as they do, but it takes great effort to get inside the heads of the main players and I am not sure the effort is worth it. Finally, there is no character in the film for whom I have any sympathy, and without a feeling of empathy for anyone on screen, for me, watching the movie was a waste of time