Too much of everything

Instant Favorite.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

One of the most difficult things to come to terms with in life is the way a seemingly nice, soft-spoken, accomplished person can actually be a monster. Can the alter ego even be likable? Are there good characteristics alongside the evil ones? That said, I came out at the end of the movie not knowing how to feel and not having a gut feeling about the reality either way.For all intents and purposes, this was a model family and every home movie reflects smiles and affection. The inner workings of the relationships are strange to me and the personalities are certainly unusual, but still, there seems to be love. And being unusual isn't indicative of evil doings in and of itself.It's hard to think about but fascinating to imagine the possibility of it all being a planted idea.

Capturing the Friedmans is about the Friedmans; an upper-middle class Jewish family in upstate New York. One day, the police come to the home of the Friedmans and search for child pornography. The police uncover a number of magazines belonging to Arnold Friedman. A retired high school teacher, he, with the help of his son Jesse, hold computer classes and piano lessons for young children. Once the police realize this, they start investigating Arnold for child abuse. Before long, he and his son are charged with around a hundred counts of sexual assault.I have a lot of fun watching documentaries; I can spend roughly two hours watching a movie on the grounds that I am learning something. Over time I've come to realize that it isn't just what the documentary is saying but how. Sometimes documentaries are clearly biased.If you are a fan of documentaries, there is a website called Documentary Heaven which has lots of documentaries you can watch for free. I remember one that was about secret government cloud seeding experiments. Cloud seeding is, more or less, controlling rainfall and weather patterns. For that documentary, there was just the director, one person that was interviewed, and only about a dozen pictures that faded in and out of the frame. Towards the end of the hour and forty-five minute snoozefest, the director comes out from behind the camera and shouts to the camera, "If he has had so much success cloud seeding, why isn't the government spending millions doing further testing!?" It detracts from the feeling that you are learning something. Instead it feels like you are spending time hearing propaganda.The only other documentary I've seen more than once was Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man (2005) and that was because I saw it for a film class. I watched it once at home and once in the class. I don't usually watch documentaries more than once because, well, hearing it once is usually enough. It's like attending a lecture more than once. You don't unless you have to. I saw Capturing the Friedmans twice so far because, again, I saw it for a class. But I will, however, most certainly be seeing it again. Capturing the Friedmans is an example of amazing storytelling.The plot thickens at every turn. With documentaries about crimes, I read them like a detective novel. You decipher the film maker's bias and then anticipate the details of the crime to make up your mind. In this case, whenever I solved the mystery, if you will, the movie would cut to another interview that threw me off.Jarecki juxtaposes interviews to create fascinating dialogs. For example, we hear from the District Attorney about the process for conducting interviews with children. He explains that the children may be frightened so one doesn't want to put words in their mouths. Instead of saying "we know he assaulted you," one should say, "what happened next?" The movie then cuts over to one of the detectives who conducted many of the interviews for the Friedman case: "We went through the whole line of questions...'We know you were in these computer classes and we know that there was a good chance he sexually assaulted you..." the camera then fades out. It's an example of how the movie can steer us toward reaching a particular conclusion. Better still, the movie can make us realize how we could never know the truth of the Friedman case. Towards the end of the movie, Jesse and his attorney provide radically different accounts of the same event. Who can we trust?A major source of information comes from the Friedman's home movies. The family shot a lot of home movies particularly around the time of the investigations. The footage provides a great balance to the interviews. Some shots from their ordinary cameras are eerily good too which add to the experience. At one point, Arnold is playing the piano and his son moves in for a close up. We listen to upbeat music (though it is made darker given the circumstance) and watch his glasses which reflect his hands on the piano keys.I highly recommend you see Capturing the Friedmans. The subject matter is solidly depressing but it is a really well done documentary.

Documentary film-makers are required to be somewhat voyeuristic in their attempts to capture the truth, but when first time film-maker Andrew Jarecki was working on a documentary on New York's number one clown 'Silly Billy' David Friedman, he stumbled upon a shocking story, and found that most of his work had already been done for him. Not to say that Capturing the Friedmans isn't a well-structured and well-made film - it certainly is - but what Jarecki stumbled upon was something so intimate that even the very best of film-makers could not have captured footage so startling and devastating.The footage I'm referring to is the wealth of home footage captured by David Friedman, his brothers Seth and Jesse, and his father Arnold, before and during Arnold's trial for child molestation. What we witness is an apparently happy, picture-postcard middle-class Jewish family fall apart before our eyes, unravelling a history of tension, sadness and sexual frustration between Arnold and wife Elaine, and a dysfunction that inevitably rubbed off on the children. Aside from this, Capturing the Friedmans also documents the arrest, trial and incarceration of Arnold and youngest son Jesse, revealing possible police ineptitude and holes in the American Justice System.When a federal sting operation results in the arrest of Arnold Friedman following the delivery of child pornography, the respected teacher finds himself questioned further when police find out he taught computer classes at home to kids. Soon enough, children are appearing out of the woodwork making claims of sexual abuse and humiliation at the hands of Arnold and Jesse, and the story becomes a media frenzy. Jarecki unearths flaws in the investigations, even recording some of the former pupils denying that there was any abuse at all, as well as pointing at the obvious fact that there was no physical evidence or anything noticed by the parents at the time.The film doesn't offer any answers, nor does it attempt to as it's not the point of the film. It puts the viewer in the role of judge, jury and executioner, forcing you to ask yourself if this is really justice, and whether Jesse (Arnold's guilt of paedophilia is certain), as annoying as you may find him, really got what he deserved based on suspicion and child testimony alone. Capturing the Friedmans is many things - a condemnation of American justice, a devastating record of family dysfunction - but whatever you get out of it, it is an expertly pieced- together documentary, frustrating and shocking throughout, and telling a great story at the same time.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

Seemingly ordinary family in the Great Neck suburb of Long Island, New York are torn apart by child molestation allegations, which may or may not have been fabricated by underage witnesses coerced by the authorities. A retired teacher-turned-computer instructor is put in the legal hot-spot after a underage pornographic magazine is delivered to him undercover; his students are then interviewed for any possible misconduct, and soon the married father of three and his youngest son are arrested on sex abuse charges. Quietly devastating documentary from Andrew Jarecki weaves both vintage and recent home movie footage of the family with revealing interviews of the former Friedman matriarch (who had fallen out of love with her accused husband and failed to stand by him) and two of her sons. Jarecki is very careful not to paint the 'victims' as villains but, in trying to be somewhat non-subjective, he clouds some of the legal ramifications in mystery (why is the son's attorney completely contradicting his client's statements? Is the attorney lying--and if so, what did he have to gain?). Eldest son David tries so hard to be the voice of reason--while feeling victimized himself--that he inadvertently becomes the star of the movie, the glue which is barely holding the family together. It's a portrait of lives destroyed by contagious hysteria...and by personal demons and repressed sexuality. The film is by turns tragic, unfair, rueful, frustrating, incredibly human, and incredibly moving. *** from ****