Product: Dirty Pictures (2011)
Rating: 2.0
Bad Title, Meek Director
I mainly watch documentaries and informative films and left `dirty pictures' thinking, "what was that?" I think the root of the problem is a director who didn't try to direct anyone to make this a film about the Shulgins (or any specific message), and so people started off by describing their own work, and finished with their self-reflections. The result is that everyone in the film is a star, and instead of a flowing story that builds on a central theme you get it all piled up like so many short stories chopped up and shuffled into one deck.Some of the clips were taken from other documentaries that were freely available on the Internet even before this film was released, so some of the Shulgin content in this film is actually being resold at an inflated price. Even the name `dirty pictures' is a serious let down, if anything it's misleading, and at best it's a title that was used by MGM for a film they released on DVD in 2000.My painful honesty is pretty much lost on the Shulgins huge and loving fan base; if you don't like the Shulgins then you probably don't like people in general, but this isn't just about them, it's also about many other people which forces it's scope to be shallow, and for that the film seems to run too long; and not far enough into the lives of the amazing Shulgins.I think the worst thing a documentary can do is to move the general public to indifference so for that the film earns one star, but because I have a deep affection for the Shulgins I'm adding on one star to the film for them actually being in it; it's my personal bias.