Thursday, January 27, 2011

Grizzly Man

I watched this last night and can't make my mind up about it at all. It's a very sad story of Timothy Treadwell, who lives with grizzly bears in Alaska every summer in a make shift camp. Unfortunately, during the 13th season of his doing this, he gets attacked by a rogue bear and dies. His girlfriend who had gone to visit him, also died. It's an extremely sad story and is very interesting, due to most of the film using his original footage that was recovered from his camp.



The film also interviews his friends, one of whom found his remains while searching for him, another being an ex-girlfriend, who runs a charity for the conservation of grizzly bears with him. The coroner who dealt with their deaths and his parents, among others.

I think my issues started when the coroner starting to appear extremely dramatic, it seemed unprofessional and creepy, the way he talks and deals with the interviews, left me feeling like I was watching a Christopher Guest style mockumentary. There are various factors to why I felt this way, not only the coroner, but Timothy's ex-girlfriend/colleague seems uncomfortable in front of the camera, this in turn makes me feel awkward. And I guess mainly, Timothy himself, there is a period where he has obviously been alone for a while and has a bit of a Wilson moment (Castaway with Tom Hanks), he also has this persona who he uses when he's filming, which makes me feel as though I was watching a film, rather than personal homemade films (there is no awkward voyeuristic feeling, as there normally is when watching other's home videos). The whole thing just made me feel indifferent and unsure about it.

I would recommend it to others, purely to gather other people's perspective on it. I just can not place how I feel about it. I loved how passionate Timothy is, that was truly inspiring to see and yet how he shelters from humanity and blames humans for all the wrong in the world, made me feel he was deluded for all the wrong reasons. The film maker Werner, is as considerate as he can be about such a tender subject and portrays Timothy in a very compassionate light, with Timothy's original ideals as the main focus of the documentary.

I just couldn't wrap my head around it and still feel indifferent!

Plus, I don't think it helps that I saw this film a few days before and this clip kept on popping into my head, when Werner talked.

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