Nobody's Business (1996)

          I had mixed feelings about Nobody’s Business.  I liked the style of it.  I found it interesting to see archival footage, along with home movies and photographs, paired with the interview.  This technique placed Oscar in a certain point in history.  It grounded his life in reality.  It made Oscar and others in his family real people, instead of just someone from a story.

          I also liked the rapid cutting, the sound effects and other similar techniques.  It made the film more lively.  I also think that it matched Oscar’s and Alan’s driven personalities.  However, I think it would have worked much better on a shorter documentary than a feature length one.  After a while, it started to get repetitive; it also started to lose its novelty.

          I also felt that the constant boxing footage was a little heavy handed.  It does set up the nature of the interview, which I felt was effective, but he overuses it.  I can understand once at the beginning and once at the end, but he uses it like three or four times.

          And I did feel a little manipulated with the interview.  Most of the time only the audio is used; we only briefly see Oscar.  I couldn’t help myself but think that Alan was splicing together sound bits, out of context, to get his father to say what he wanted him to say.  I am no audio expert, so I couldn’t tell for sure,  but I did recognize some parts that sounded like they didn’t go together.

          How the two interacted bothered me a little too, but that just might be how they naturally interact.  It seemed like Alan would raise his voice and “yell” at his dad to get a reaction out of him, like he was manipulating him.  Oscar also kept saying “I don’t care” or “I don’t know” over and over again.  Sometimes it didn’t feel natural.

          Overall, it was an interesting documentary with some good aesthetic choices.  But I felt that those choices would have worked better on a shorter film.  And I sense something fishy between Alan and Oscar, but that could be their natural relationship.