That Guy...Who Was In That Thing
Summary: There are many actors in Hollywood and only a handful will continuously capture the public's attention. As for the rest, well, they're playing smaller roles and even big roles but they're never quite as memorable, they're always just "that guy".
The Good: The way this movie was "pitched" to me was that it was about a group of character actors talking about the business which interested me, since character actors often look quite distinct, although as the actors themselves point out rather quickly that term doesn't quite mean what it used to. They were less "character" actors and more small to medium stars and it was interesting to be reminded of how small the pool of big name actors really is and just how many of the mainstream roles they get. Anime is similar, even though you can have smaller actors like these guys playing lots of guest roles on tv, or even a number or being part of the main cast of quite a few, if their not in the spotlight all the time it's easy to forget about them and that was interesting to think about.
The Bad: There are two big problems with this, it's too long and has too many people. There are 16 people interviewed here, all male, and 15 of them are white, I think most people can see what the problem here is (and when I saw the recommendation on twitter I also saw some people noting that it was all male and someone else saying that they had seen a similar movie recently but it had included some women, no idea on what the title of that production is sadly). And even when you have 16 people all talking about some of the troubles, both in general and personal, with becoming a recognized name in the industry that's just not enough to fill up 78 minutes without getting repetitive around the 45 minute mark. Sadly, between those two problems, plus a slew of technical problems I'm about to dive into, I just can't recommend this and was bored by a lot of this film.
Production Values: Normally I don't have much to say about the production values of a documentary (partially because most people are unwilling to do anything extremely stylistic) beyond "okay they were competent, good!" However here, wow technically this was terrible. I wanted to give the filmmaker a tripod since they clearly didn't have one, for some reason they liked to zoom in and out on the speaker and sometimes didn't aim the camera quite right (I swear at one point we were accidentally staring at a grey wall for a few seconds), there was a shot or two where the actor was in front of a window and the poor camera was trying to figure out what exposure to shoot for and was changing as they were recording, I even heard an airplane in the background for one outside shot! Guys, I've made videos and yes it's frustrating to record something, see that, and have to rerecord but as it stands I, and most of my classmates from that class, have all made technically better videos with rather low level equipment, no budget, and almost no time, that's pretty terrible!
Sorry for no photo tonight guys, apparently Photobucket is down and I'll edit that in in the morning. In any case, I'm giving this movie just 2 out of 5 stars for being entirely too long, white, male, and for making me question the camera-person's technical abilities. If I can find the name of that other film I'll edit the review and put it in, for right now all I can say is that you can surely find something better to watch with your time.
