Comments on: DOC NYC Review: Kooky But Uneven ‘Love And Terror On The Howling Plains Of Nowhere’ https://staging2.theplaylist.net/doc-nyc-review-kooky-but-uneven-love-and-terror-on-the-howling-plains-of-nowhere-20141117/ Mon, 23 May 2016 04:55:25 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.2 By: Tom McCauley https://staging2.theplaylist.net/doc-nyc-review-kooky-but-uneven-love-and-terror-on-the-howling-plains-of-nowhere-20141117/#comment-140688 Mon, 23 May 2016 04:55:25 +0000 http://www.indiewire.com/2014/more/uncategorized/doc-nyc-review-kooky-but-uneven-love-and-terror-on-the-howling-plains-of-nowhere-270002/#comment-140688 Is this a write-by-numbers review? While it’s true that the mystery at the heart of this story “requires a requisite build-up” (sic), we do not learn “the horrible truth” in this film, and that is what ultimately chills and disturbs us. No, the sections devoted to Ballantine’s wife and child do not “detract from the momentum of the growing mystery”; they are necessary for the story (if the reviewer had watched the film closely enough to understand, he would understand the movie is as much about Ballantine’s obsession with the ultimately unknowable fate of Haataja as Haataja himself). Though the reviewer asserts that the connection between Ballantine and Haataja, who are next-door neighbors in a desolate state college town of about 5,000, “never feels as tangible as it should to the audience”, the audience can easily understand Ballantine’s identification with the talented, eccentric, frustrated Haataja, thanks to what we come to know about Ballantine.

The technical details are not “ungainly”, as the reviewer alleges. The score is not “head-scratching”; it is effective, because it doesn’t try to direct our feelings or add melodrama (aside from the very last minute or so, and even then it never quite reaches the depths of bathos of most documentary scores). The typewritten excerpts from Ballantine’s book pull double-duty: they offer thought-provoking tidbits, and they further develop our understanding of Ballantine. The animations, while not as essential to the film as the score or the text, are hardly intrusive.

Also, what woods? This is high-plains territory. The reviewer seems to be confusing scrub and farmland for woods, which might explain his tone-deaf reading of the (gasp) un-kitschy, un-ironic townspeople. (Though I find it ironic that the reviewer doesn’t pick up on the deadpan college town irony evinced by the interviewees and the film itself).

Anyway, good try.

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