Another snowday: nerdy documentaries

Frontrunners

I thought I’d love this because I enjoyed Spellbound. I am starting to sound like Netflix, or Pandora. The fact is, subject matter isn’t always a great predictor. I did love looking into the lives of Stuyvesant, perhaps New York City’s most prestigious high school, students. But the documentary, which follows 2 candidate’s run for Student Union President, fails to create the driving anticipation I hoped to feel. It clearly thinks it’s suspenseful—it invests a lot of time in dragging out the results with emotional and contemplative shots of the candidates. In the end, however, the race is at every point a total landslide. There’s no question who will win, and the movie fails to make me feel like a high school presidential campaign is important. Isn’t that what these movies are supposed to do? Help us see, for two hours, why something so inconsequential is of such great consequence to a small and loveable motley crew of Very Human characters? It was nice enough, but it didn’t.

Helvetica



The movie about typeface! I loved it. I loved having a whole two hours dedicated to how typeface changed advertising, and to how advertising followed the advent of high modernism and facilitated the establishment of one unified voice for the commercial language of countless corporations and at least two nations. It’s a great introduction to modern design trends and a wonderful survey of some of the contemporary artists who work primarily with commercial media—products we all use every day.

The true success of the film is its ability to make wholly compelling arguments both for and against Helvetica. As much as I love design I have always considered it the art of aesthetic choice, of selection and revision, not (because design and content can be isolated from one another) of social, political, or personal consequence. This film convinced me, at least to some degree, that the question is not so simple.

My favorite moment in the movie, without a doubt, occurs when a design artist is tasked with choosing the font for a book on his work and, because he finds the text boring and badly written, selects zap dingbats.