With
the explosion in documentaries over the past decade or so, we’ve also witnessed
a rise in what in my less generous moments I like to call the “promotional doc.”
You often see it in music documentaries – movies about, essentially, how
awesome or unique a band is. The kind of thing that would probably work best as
a DVD extra, where you wonder if part of the impetus behind making the film
wasn’t because it told an amazing story but because it offered the chance to piggyback on the popularity of the chosen subject. This is not always
necessarily a bad thing – some of these movies are pretty enjoyable,
especially if you’re a fan of the musician or photographer or politician or
whatever it is that they’re glorifying. But then every once in a while you get
something like Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, which was supposed to be a promotional
film for Metallica and turned into an epic about an entire band’s
collective neurosis, and you suddenly realize what it looks like when a
documentary really uses the full power of its medium.
