Tag: reviews
In The Midst Of Life: The Oscar-Nominated Short Docs

In The Midst Of Life: The Oscar-Nominated Short Docs

WhiteEarth

White Earth, directed by J. Christian Jensen (via WhiteEarthMovie.com)

The five short documentaries nominated for the Academy Award — ranging from roughly 20 to 40 minutes in length — represent an international cross-section of filmmakers pointing their cameras on the otherwise ignored or unexamined. In a short-form documentary, you cannot diagnose a social ill, attempt to topple a dictator, or crack open the kind of sociopolitical can of worms that a feature-length doc, like fellow nominee Citizenfour, can examine. What the format is well suited to is capturing minutiae, and building itself out of quiet observations instead of sweeping declarations. Each of the five films focuses on the domestic, mundane, workaday elements of life that don’t register on a bigger canvas.

White Earth (dir. J. Christian Jensen), a portrait of a small North Dakota town impacted by an oil boom, is the least successful at connecting with its human subjects, but the most successful at conjuring visual poetry from its material. Any environmental, social, or cultural ramifications of the oil boom lie outside the film’s scope of interest, but if White Earth is sparse on humanity, it is generous with its imagery: plumes of fire flaring into the fog, oil wells glowing auburn in the sunset, impossibly long trains of jet-black tanker cars snaking through the whiteout of prairies in winter. In any final analysis, it cannot be denied that the film is astonishingly beautiful.

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Finding The Best Doctor Can Be Difficult

Finding The Best Doctor Can Be Difficult

Whether for routine care or a special situation or condition, it can be difficult to find the right doctor.  And finding the best in a particular field is even a bigger crap shoot.

Conventional wisdom dictates that the best way to find a specialist is from your primary care doctor, another health professional, or a referral from someone who has had a good experience. Of course sometimes that’s not possible, so many people turn to various top-doctor directories for answers. Unfortunately, some of the information contained in those sources is not exactly accurate.  According to The New York Times each source uses a different method to come up with their list.  Believe it or not, some just use phone directories; others poll actual doctors to get the names of whomever they consider tops in their field; and some use patient reviews.

“In fact, nobody knows who the top doctors are, not even the doctors themselves. It is safe to say that the very topmost doctors, confusingly, are probably not top doctors. They have become media stars and household names through efforts that presumably leave them little time to hone those top-doctor skills.”

Photo: Pixabay.com