"Nobelity" Impressions Post-Viewing

Our class recently finished viewing the film Nobelity. After this viewing, I looked back and thought about the film: what had struck me before (see below post) and what struck me now. If I had to describe Nobelity using three adjectives, I would choose "idealistic", "vague", and "confusing" (note: some might disagree with these descriptors, but I am writing my personal view of the film). In Nobelity, Turk Pipkin intermittently interrupts his interviews with Nobel laureates to discuss and show film clips of his two daughters. Pipkin appears to be trying to communicate how the whole idea for the Nobelity film relates to his daughters asking him questions about the world, but this is never fully fleshed out and often acts as an unnecessary interruption to the interviews. Another interruption to the interviews is Pipkin's struggle to learn how to juggle five balls at once. I personally have no idea of what Pipkin was even trying to communicate with that anecdote. And then we reach the interviews themselves. Alone, a single interview clip would seem to be cohesive, thought-provoking, and make sense. However, Pipkin asks Nobel Laureates from different fields many different questions, preventing the film from being cohesive as a whole. The interview clips jump back and forth between why knowledge is key to how cancer could be cured in the near future to why landmines are very dangerous to how we need more energy to how we need to empower women more and plant more trees to why religion isn't always a barrier to how all humans are part of the same family to how nuclear arsenals should be reduced worldwide. While viewing this, I got only the overall sense that there are many world problems and many potential solutions, but none of them are, in my opinion, looked at enough in-depth. On the bright side, within this "mish-mash" of a film are some interesting quotes that can, by themselves, be thought-provoking: "On 9/11, more people died of AIDS than of terrorism acts", "The sea is actually made up of drops of water: individual actions matter", "It's going to be simple, but it's not going to be easy". If I had to give Nobelity a rating, it would be four out of ten stars. Overall, Nobelity is a film that succeeded in its goal of getting me to think about world problems. However, it did not succeed further than that, becoming a disorienting whirlwind of moving images and sounds that left me very confused by the film's end.