Caesar's Park (2000) User Reviews

I think Caesar's Park is an intimate, fascinating, often amusing study of Sarah Price's neighbors, done with lots of creativity and compassion.

[bellinghm · 10/10 · 4 August 2004]

Myself and my entire family have been in the film business for generations, and I found Caesar's Park to be so fascinating, I watched it twice in a row, which says a lot! In the beginning of the movie, Ms. Price states that she wants to meet some of the neighbors in her new home of Caesar's Park, and she does that -- and more -- without ever being condescending, no matter what the situation. It is an intimate film done in such a way that I felt Ms. Price has a unique compassion, and knack for putting herself in her subjects shoes (a quality that I find few have) -- how else could she achieve the task of getting them to relax and show their true colors, as they so obviously did? The affection and respect she felt for her subjects was very clear in the way she conducted her interviews and presented her movie, and as a viewer, I felt it was infectious. By the end of Caesar's Park I felt I had gotten to know each and every one of those neighbors, and I wanted to see them again and again. I highly recommend this documentary.

A great documentary

[dreamfool · 8/10 · 29 May 2002]

I never had great interests in watching documentaries because they always made me fell asleep. The doc filmmakers always throw in too much than not enough, and that may serve the purpose of documentaries but lose the aesthetic side of it.

"Caeser's Park" put in a relatively small amount of visible content/ stories, along with the humor and invisible neighbor interactions, makes this movie real and alive. It expands the dimensions of conventional documentaries without fancy tricks, and I appreciate the craft behind this film.

A glorified episode of COPS by an untalented director

[cdoelle · 3/10 · 8 December 2003]

Caesar's Park was very interesting - but it felt more like an episode of COPS without the violence than a documentary. There was not much of a point to the whole thing as the filmmaker originally set out to document a small park in a working-class section of Milwaukee and instead told the story of a small group of neighbors. The feeling of the film was that Price thought of the people as lower class, unambitious dullards as she spent her entire life travelling the world prior to making the film. It was interesting to watch - much like an accident on the freeway is an interesting gawk. I was left with the feeling that the director was a snob and was making fun of her subjects. The story is the hard-working middle class people - the story is how Sarah Price and the media has convinced us that unless you are one of the "pretty people" you are an oddity. It is a sad, non-film.