Home

Postcard from Sun City, Arizona (2004) [N/A]

Release Date:
May 1, 2004

Original Title:
Postcard from Sun City, Arizona

Genres:
Documentary

Ratings / Certifications:
 N/A

Runtime: 3

Overview from TheMovieDB

Joshua Oppenheimer sets images of life in a retirement community in Arizona (as seen through television commercials) to a talk radio interview with a female convict extolling the benefits of her time on Sherriff Joe Arpaio's chain gang. It is two different kinds of sale jobs working at cross-purposes. Oppenheimer takes the luster off the idealistic advertising images through video distortion and electronic interference and cuts-up both the video and audio tracks until the weird poetry of the chain gang prisoner's lessons in life and death gives the commercial presentation a creepy disconnection from any kind of living ideal. It follows A BRIEF HISTORY OF PARADISE AS TOLD BY THE COCKROACHES and MARKET UPDATE as another sharp jab at consumerism as an illusory promise.

Click the heading above to show or hide the text.

Additional information:

The Search Form


Production

Director:
Joshua Oppenheimer

Click the heading above to show or hide the list.

About the Movie Section

Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).

Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.

Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)

While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:

  • I added "runners up" to Top 10 lists, treating them as ties where applicable and numbering them accordingly at the bottom of each list.
  • Regarding those polls wherein "franchise" movies were submitted as one project until BFI's policy changed to regard them separately, I treated them as ties and renumbered the affected lists accordingly (e.g. the Godfather films).

Regarding profile removals and data corrections:

  • If you would like your profile removed from this site, please contact the source of this data directly, TheMovieDB. My assumption is: once it's gone from their site, it should soon be gone from this site.
  • If you would like to correct movie data on this site, please contact the source of this data directly, TheMovieDB. My assumption is: once it's corrected on their site, it should soon be corrected on this site.
  • For additional corrections and profile removals, please e-mail The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).

Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.

Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.