Hey, in the world of Dallas country music radio Brett Dillion may be a gem and stand-out kind of guy, but in this documentary he comes across as just, well... ho hum.
It isn't Dillion himself, it's the endless slow pans, zoom-ins and zoom-outs, false color substitutions, frame dropouts, unrelated jump cuts, flickering time-lapse, extreme close-ups, etc., the filmmaker employs that makes this, for me, practically unwatchable.
Longs cuts of Dillion lighting cigarettes and strolling through backyards and ruined buildings and over-enhanced by the visual tricks of every music-video director ever doesn't create the instant iconography that the filmmaker, Dean J. Augustin, seems to intend. Rather, it's as if your young son and mine were trapped together in a windowless room for 43 straight hours with nothing but a PowerBook, a dated copy of iMovie, a pack of unfiltered Camels and two hours of Augustin's uncut video.
One scene is a single slow pan —way slow— of Dillion standing backlit by two large windows in an empty building, sound-tracked with an unnamed song by an unnamed band. Another scene has Dillion wandering slump-backed and forlorn through a roofless and windowless building with flickercuts of Dillion slumped shirtless in the corner of a small room, apparently recovering from a dose of heroin and suffering desolate ruined-building flashbacks.
Brett Dillion's message is simple: that we're losing too much through the use of technology and the consolidation of radio stations by media conglomerates, but his message stands completely antithetical to Augustin's overuse of technology, by his "unique method of filmmaking."
In documentary filmmaking it's better to delve into the life and beliefs of a man through study and cinematic reflection, rather than attempt to make that man fit into your own jump-cut false-color "vision."