Film: Project Nim
Year: 2011
Director: James Marsh
Starring: Nim Chimpsky, Renne Falitz, Bob Ingersoll, Stephanie LaFarge, Jenny Lee, James Mahoney, Laura-Ann Petitto, Herbert Terrace, Bill Tynan.
Running time: 93 min.
As I sit down to tap away at this review of Project Nim, an excellent documentary about a chimp named Nim, I am faced with one considerable dilemma: I don't really know how to review a documentary. This is entirely due to the fact that I don't generally watch documentaries. I could probably count the amount of documentaries I've seen on one set of fingers. I'm not nearly well versed enough to know the ins and outs of documentary making, so I don't know how I'm supposed to critique that. I also don't know how you 'dislike' a documentary. Aside from the fact that all of the documentaries I've seen have been great (and Senna is a big advocate for that), I can easily get involved in things that I had no interest in beforehand. Mainly because documentaries usually tell stories that actually happened, so how am I supposed to critique that? I'll probably just get interested anyway. Such is the case with Project Nim, so don't laugh at me when I can't give you a review filled with technical terms and passages about lighting. But hey, that's not what I do anyway.
