The Hottest August was received with confusion and bewilderment at SXSW Film Festival. It is an incoherent film and the director should find another line of work. It was supposed to be about climate change, but it wasn't. Basically, the director walked around Brooklyn (mostly along the beach) during the month of August 2017 and asked ordinary people what they thought about the future. The various individuals (who are all unnamed until the credits) talked about their anxiety about economics, race, and occasionally about the climate. Some gave sophisticated intellectual answers, some gave vaguely racist answers, and some offered total incoherent nonsense. Some just talked about ordinary challenges that they were facing in their daily lives. The film could be called a slice of life, but mostly it is bad film-making. The interviews are directionless, and the film is poorly edited. While some of the individual interviewee are interesting and insightful, there is no argument tying together the different interviews or any apparent order to the order in which they were edited together. A film requires a narrative and this one doesn't have one. Frankly, I'm surprised that the SXSW staff accepted the film. I've seen hundreds of documentaries and this is among the worst that I've encountered.
Review of The Hottest August
