What I Think About Movies I've Seen

45365 is a zip code for Sidney, Ohio, and also the name of a documentary meant to depict life in a small town. However, with a population of about 20,000, I have trouble really identifying it as a small town. I grew up in a town of under 900 people, and you'd have to drive nearly an hour and a half to get anywhere as large as Sidney. In fact, Sidney is larger than about 90% of the other towns in Ohio. It's not a huge metropolis, but it's also not a town where everybody knows everybody.

This is perhaps a documentary in the purest sense of the word, because it is only silent observation. It doesn't have any commentary or interviews, nor is there any message as far as I can tell. What we see is a kind of hodgepodge of events, often with no connection to each other. There are some recurring themes (e.g., we see or hear about the high school football team at various stages of the season, a judge running for re-election, and several people in various kinds of trouble with the law), but there are also a lot of isolated events with no connection to anything else other than the town in which they occurred.

The end result is something which is pretty boring. Most of the events shown are things which are completely uninteresting to me, and I would expect to most other people who don't have any connection to them. Even in those cases in which there might be some kind of story to tell, things were left largely unresolved. We don't know how the football team did. We don't know whether the judge won the election. What little attempt there was to make us interested in anything happening in that town was left without any kind of a payoff. I honestly can't see how this film won any of the awards that it did, because I don't see anything noteworthy about it. If anything, I'd say it gives small town life an unfairly negative representation.