Purple: Organized Crime in a Small Town (2012) User Reviews

This doc needs professional editing & another 20 minutes

[tadpole-596-918256 · 6/10 · 11 February 2013]

I try to attend at least 400 film festivals annually, which is why I sometimes find myself in backwaters such as Mount Pleasant, Michigan, attending shin-dings with names which don't necessarily sound very promising, such as the Central Michigan University Film Festival. The fact that the Ferret state still gives legal cover for this school's sports teams to use a name deemed racist nationally (i.e., The Chippewas) should have served as a forewarning to me, had I only known. When I got to this "middle-of-the-mitten" burg, I soon learned that 19 of the "film fests" 20 offerings were simply DVDs from yesteryear that some guy who fancies himself a "Professor of Film" rented for free from the local library (also called by the Chippewa moniker, of course). Worse yet, 18 of these were projected by a DVD player on a tiny screen in classroom with old-fashioned seating where people's heads block half the view if anyone is directly in front of you in the next two rows.) I chose this documentary as my obligatory sampling of this "extravaganza," and was saddened to find it ran just 61 minutes. Tickets cost $4, and I guess you get what you pay for (the one blessing was that I did NOT bite on the tempting "10 for $10" ticket package, which sounded good on paper). Further, though PURPLE consists primarily of the standard two dozen local talking head old-timer interviews punctuated by the occasional pan and scans of archival still photographs, there's tons of repetition, and the pieces seem to be assembled in random order. Further, the filmmaker apparently has a phobia of being accused of anti-Semitism, since he never mentions that the titular Purple Gang was an assembly of Jewish gangsters, which I've heard is one of the main claims to historical fame from my contacts in this group of Michiganites.