Saturday, April 16, 2011

Waste Land (2010)

Director: Lucy Walker. Cast: Vik Muniz. 99 min. Brazil/UK. Documentary.

O, the places movies take us. Otherwise, how would you ever know about the life of a professional garbage-picker? Rio de Janeiro has plenty of them, working at the world's largest landfill. Modern artist Vik Muniz sees a simple beauty in their smelly lives, and creates huge canvasses of them, using actual pieces of garbage as paint. Watch this as a definite new experience, but don't expect the 100% Tomatometer satisfaction.

(PS: This and Man on Wire (another movie that achieved a 100% score) demonstrate the fault of the Rottentomatoes website scoring system - because obviously these are not the greatest movies of all time to get a 100% score. I'm assuming the system uses a binary qualitative scoring; e.g. if a critic has given a movie 2.5 stars out of 4, it's considered "fresh", or good, even though it only got 2.5 stars (vice-versa for a "rotten" movies). The correct way would be to make the critics review-based scoring as quantitative; if 100 critics give a movie 3 stars out of 4, it would get a 75% score on the Tomatometer, not 100% as the binary system would result in.)

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