Viewed in
2010
Premise
Part of ESPN's 30 for 30 series, a documentary about the very eventful sports day of the title, headlined by O.J. Simpson's car chase.
Loved
The juxtaposition between Arnold Palmer and O.J. Simpson's career twists, the off-the-air footage.
Liked
The story-telling style.
Thoughts
An interesting film that was surprisingly interesting and haunting.
The film makers used a unique approach of telling the story without narrators nor interview testimonies. It was simply a well-edited collage of footage in mostly chronological order.
Being in chronological order, the film was about to superimpose different events over each other, and giving new subtext to what we're watching. The most powerful example was the juxtaposition between Arnold Palmer's graceful swan song at the U.S. Open with Simpson's monumental fall from grace. This was my favorite part.
In addition to revisiting those famous images, there was a wealth of off-the-air footage from various newscasters that showed unseen angles of those events. It was fascinating to watch unflappable Bob Costas sorting out of all the real-time chaos of the Simpson chase while juggling an NBA Finals game.
I had never heard the phone conversations between Simpson and the police, and it was haunting to hear him speaking in such a desperate and surrendered state of mind.
When that day unfolded, I was too young to understand what was happening. Watching this also served as a quick history lesson for me.
Clearly, the film makers believed this was the dawn of a new era, when America became a celebrity-obsessed nation. I disagree; we've always been obsessed. Instead, I saw it as the dawn of lack of information derived from 24-hour news channels and around-the-clock news coverage. This was when media fueled the fires as much as the stories, similar to how Network and Ace in the Hole warned about. It was arguable if it was the dawn of reality television of the 2000's, though it made sense that a Kardashian was involved.
Speaking of, this leads to a boring "what if" question: if Simpson had not (allegedly) done it, would Laker Lamar Odom be married to Khloe?
Before watching, I thought this would be a boring, exploitative rehashing of that hectic day. Instead it was an intriguing and haunting experience. Re-watching these events in 2010 subtext was quite insightful.
What I would change
Nothing.
