A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Release Date:
March 7, 2017
Original Title:
Vigil
Genres:
Documentary
Production Countries:
Australia
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
Close-up stills of white Hollywood stars – including Elizabeth Taylor, Cary Grant, Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, looking aghast and horrified – are intercut with news shots of boats crowded with refugees. Peering through slatted blinds and homing in with binoculars, the wide-eyed and troubled movie characters seem to survey crowded decks. The images of the refugees are manipulated, cropped, recoloured, sometimes reduced to almost abstract blobs. Vigil is short, terse and, with its increasing tempo, extremely powerful. The more you watch, the worse it gets. Stuck in their roles and behind their windows, the stars act out their emotions. Meanwhile, genuine human misery goes on, visibly manipulated for our consumption.
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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:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
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).
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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.