Road to the Oscars, 2024. This movie is nominated for 1 award, and it's documentary short.
The Last Repair shop is of course gripping and heartwarming. A little slice of life documentary about human connection and life, or alt least that's what it wants to be. A seemingly normal backdrop that would make sense for the documentary kind of falls apart when half the stories don't really make much sense in the same doc, and trying to make a red thread where there is barely one. This is still a good enough watch, but more than a collection of stories it's not.
We hear about a repair shop for instruments. The people that use it and the people behind making instruments.
This is a documentary about human connections and how we as people can feel connected through something even if we don't think about it. How repair people think of us and thinks about our beloved possessions. Sadly the documentary don't really but much focus into this, rather than telling the stories of the repair shops members, that barely have something to do with must or connection half the time, and it just turns into 4 interviews with some kids cut in between to try to make a loosely red thread you really are forcing into the doc.
The stories told are interesting and enjoyable, but in the end it ends up being nothing but 4 people highlighting their lives and nothing more. They are all nice people and doing great work, but the documentary really needed to focus more on maybe the repairing, or the people that get their instruments repaired to make the doc make fully sense, since it ends up meaning not much by the end.
The score was pretty good, which is to be expected from a doc about instruments. The music also works great with the stories told.
I ended up liking what I saw, but never really connected or found it profoundly important to tell. It's interesting enough and fun to hear about people and a place like this, but in the end it's something I quickly shrug off as nothing more than a short doc in a sea of them.
Oscar Predictions: I have seen 3 of the 4 nominated short documentaries and I can say now that this might have a chance, purely for being a Disney produced one. I would rather have the others I saw win, Island In Between (2023) and The Barber of Little Rock (2023) as their subject matter feels more important to tell than this. While this isn't bad, it's just not a movie you sit back and really think about.
The Last Repair shop is of course gripping and heartwarming. A little slice of life documentary about human connection and life, or alt least that's what it wants to be. A seemingly normal backdrop that would make sense for the documentary kind of falls apart when half the stories don't really make much sense in the same doc, and trying to make a red thread where there is barely one. This is still a good enough watch, but more than a collection of stories it's not.
We hear about a repair shop for instruments. The people that use it and the people behind making instruments.
This is a documentary about human connections and how we as people can feel connected through something even if we don't think about it. How repair people think of us and thinks about our beloved possessions. Sadly the documentary don't really but much focus into this, rather than telling the stories of the repair shops members, that barely have something to do with must or connection half the time, and it just turns into 4 interviews with some kids cut in between to try to make a loosely red thread you really are forcing into the doc.
The stories told are interesting and enjoyable, but in the end it ends up being nothing but 4 people highlighting their lives and nothing more. They are all nice people and doing great work, but the documentary really needed to focus more on maybe the repairing, or the people that get their instruments repaired to make the doc make fully sense, since it ends up meaning not much by the end.
The score was pretty good, which is to be expected from a doc about instruments. The music also works great with the stories told.
I ended up liking what I saw, but never really connected or found it profoundly important to tell. It's interesting enough and fun to hear about people and a place like this, but in the end it's something I quickly shrug off as nothing more than a short doc in a sea of them.
Oscar Predictions: I have seen 3 of the 4 nominated short documentaries and I can say now that this might have a chance, purely for being a Disney produced one. I would rather have the others I saw win, Island In Between (2023) and The Barber of Little Rock (2023) as their subject matter feels more important to tell than this. While this isn't bad, it's just not a movie you sit back and really think about.