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The Nowhere Artist (2017)
Stunningly Bad
I wanted to watch this because I find Beatrice Curnew to be an interesting actress. Unfortunately, it is difficult to rate the acting because everything else about this film is bad, really bad. The script is pathetic and virtually aimless, the direction seems to be non-existent, the lighting is awful, and the camera seems to be a cheap home video job, wobbling all over the place - if you don't have a steady hand, you need a SteadyCam!
This looks like a very amateur job, not even Film School standard. If this is the best that Matt Bentley can do as an actor, then his acting career is doomed.
37 Uses for a Dead Sheep (2006)
Interesting Documentary with a Silly Title
The most unfortunate thing about this documentary is the title - most people will skip it because it has a silly title, which it has. However, the documentary makes for interesting viewing about a little known culture that will have disappeared within a generation or two.
It is about a little known tribe of nomadic Turkic peoples, the Pamir Kirghiz. Originally they existed in the far North-West mountainous region of what is today Afghanistan, subsisting primarily on their livestock of sheep and yak. The film attempts to tell their story from about the late 19th century up to the present day. How they were forced to move from one region to another due to racial and cultural oppression, especially, and most cruelly, by the Soviets.
Admittedly the reenactments are somewhat amateurish, but they also help explain how the Pamir Kirghiz come to be where they are today.
This is not a big budget documentary, so don't expect professional narration or a well structured historical time-line. It shows a small slice of the (hard) life of these people, soon to be swallowed up by globalization. It would have been even more interesting if the filmmaker had researched further back into the history of these people, but we must accept his limitations and take what we get. For anyone with an interest in history and vanishing culture, this film is certainly worth watching.