Invisible Children • part 1

When I started to blog I made the decision to not blog about films. Watching movies is one of my favorite things to do. I watch somewhere between four and six movies a week on average.
Sometimes way more. I've been known to have marathon Saturdays where I'll watch six movies in a day. I didn't want to blog about films because that would be all that I do and it would rob time from watching more films. Besides, there are already a ton of blogs that already do that. There is nothing I can say about films that AICN hasn't already covered.

So why make an exception? Why blog about this film?
Because this is more than a film. This is a movement. I sat down with Michael to watch the film that many people had told me I needed to see. For those who don't know me real well, the way I'm wired is to be completely counter-cultural. I have no idea why I am this way. I just always have been. So the more people told me I needed to see this film the more uninterested I became. It was all over myspace and youtube for the last year. Another contributing factor to not seeing this film was I didn't know how to get a hold of it other than purchasing it from their website or tracking down a screening and crashing it. Recently my friend Ben purchased the film and had a screening party. I was bummed because I had a previous engagement. He lent me a copy after the party. Now I had the film in my possession and no more excuses. I wanted to watch the film with Michael since I know it would encourage and inspire both of us to dig in and push on with the band's drive for global change.

The first 25 to 30 minutes could definitely be chopped down. It almost seems like a homemade version of Jackass. They could lose the whole puking montage, the shot of the chicken getting it's head cut off in a sawing motion, and the snake killing sequence. The introduction to the characters is so disconnected from the rest of the entire film. I almost didn't want to continue to watch save for the fact that my friend Ben recommended it and said it was powerful. He was right. After getting though the first chapter or so the story that the filmmakers stumbled upon is incredibly moving and heart wrenching (in a good way) There were things I have never seen before that would never make the nightly news because of their graphic nature. However that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist in the world that we live in.