Daily Howler - March 30, 2005

SOMETHING TO ASPIRE TO! A documentary’s “involving ideas” help show what the press corps is not

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 30, 2005

SOMETHING TO ASPIRE TO: We’ll join the pro critics in strongly recommending The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. Amazing! A small documentary about a little-known man who turns out to be the rarest of breeds—a deeply interesting person! Wesley Morris makes the key point in his Boston Globe review:

MORRIS: Judy Irving's terrific documentary "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill" is ostensibly about birds, but only in the way that a game of Scrabble is about tiles. The movie's actually about Mark Bittner, a sensitive specimen of West Coast humanity whose eccentricity is something to aspire to.