This made-for-television documentary develops a simple premise, and it develops it so simply that anyone with a basic familiarity of film and American culture will likely not learn anything that justifies the time it takes to watch this.
The underlying problem is that the film exists on a plane of rigidly narrow superficiality, unvarying in tempo or tone. Its rapid editing leaves only enough time to register the existence of costumes or fashion presented, not study or contemplate them. The same is true for all the interviews. The comments are kept light and quick, and never leave the commercially viable zone of the self-evident or non-challenging. The same opinions by different people are voiced too many times, either due to editing oversight or as if the filmmaker thought he were honing in on some documentarian's profound discovery of truth. E.g., movies influence fashion and vice versa.
The student of fashion and costume will find nothing of interest here. Who will? I suspect it's the grotesque species of American--the six-hours-a-day television watcher, an obese couch slug, globally clueless and utterly unaware of the fact.
This is television, will be the retort. What do you expect?
I and others expect that some modicum of resistance will be offered to the machine, that in this short life you'll somehow find it within yourselves to dare to imagine a media environment that rises above sugary nothingness and the ever present commercial drive to dumb down. Do you always like taking it from The Man, or have you come to share his assumptions?
