groggo The biggest rap I have against this 'documentary' is not its veracity, but the way it was handled, particularly in its exposition. After recently watching 'The Love Machine,' an obvious fake doc that insulted the intelligence, I was in a snarly mood when I picked this up with all due innocence. I soon found I was being hoodwinked again, and my snarly mood returned.Making a really believable faux doc requires tremendous skill, and first-time filmmaker Murray just can't deliver the goods. This is just too tall a tale, and there are a lot of ham-fisted clunks and cracks in the delivery of its story. I was struck right at the beginning, when there seemed to be no real media coverage of this event, which surely is so unusual that it verges on the sensational. In this hysterical age of pop-cultured 'news,' this incident, if real, surely should have generated heavy-duty news in many newspapers and on many network news programs. The very absence of such hoopla made me smell a rat early on in the flick. The film progresses with friends, family and girlfriends, but they just didn't engage me at all. I found the whole exercise rather boring. I honestly didn't much care if this guy was authentic or not, and I honestly don't believe he was.The problem with docs like this, for me at least, is that the director must have an interesting character to begin with, and he/she must be able to sustain the artifice through clever plot twists and talented co-conspirators. Doug (a rather dull subject) and his gang just couldn't pull this off. A director must be able to float an improbable story and make it highly believable. And he/she must, most of all, have superb actors to propel the story and keep us guessing. This film didn't have those ingredients. In the end, I just found it all very irritating.I recently saw an interesting faux documentary called 'Missing Victor Pellerin,' which sets up an elaborate story about an artist in Montreal who gives it all up and disappears. It really captures your imagination, and it's so skillfully done that you're just never sure down to the last frame whether you've been had or not, and even then you can't be sure. This film was also made by a first-time filmmaker, and it was a brilliant film that worked on many levels.

lgarrick-1 One of the most interesting movies I've seen in ages. Not the usual over-dramatized Hollywood fare, this film moves like nature with a pace that is not contrived.I am a psychologist and from that perspective I found it to be truly amazing. The story is of a young man who loses his episodic memory. These cases are rare, and what this means is that he loses the meaning of things as learned through experience. In fact, our perspectives on the world are self-constructed as we grow and experience the world. In this case the main character has lost that kind of memory and therefore people, places and things lack any kind of meaning - it's the most complete kind of loss I can imagine.At first he is terrified, as one would be, but as he reconstructs his life, you find yourself a little envious of his appreciation of the most ordinary things, something that is available to us only when we can deconstruct the meaning we have created for something. There is an innocence and wonder that is not ignorant or naive, rather it is pure and without baggage.It would be scary to have this experience, but a great opportunity as well.

suzibeanwood The video account in Unknown White Male was brilliant.I have watched different movies about amnesia, which is always a good story line but this one was very different and very real. It reduced me to tears as I had suffered almost the same thing in the late sixties. This was without doubt the closest account I'd come across. The memory holds many facets, numerical, verbal, pictorial, humour, love, jokes, innuendos, the subtleties within our language, age old phrases, the list goes on.It's as though you're from another planet. This is something impossible to fake as your whole identity is lost, and you come, in time, to accept that no one really understands, not even doctors. It's not a general thing, that others can comprehend within their own life experiences. It has taken me nearly thirty years to come to terms with what happened to me, as at the time, understanding of the psychological long term effects of amnesia was very limited. I found this young man's story an inspiration and could relate with him in so many ways. The need to tape it, to remember, to have some data when there's nothing else. I wrote diaries and even put little pictures of the weather in the corner to keep remembering.

jambotembo Thoroughly compelling documentation of the re-emergence of a person. Images and sequences well-photographed and chosen to convey emotional impact; the viewer "feels" this story acutely. A rare medical mystery with no scientific explanation, but perhaps more clear from a spiritual perspective; a blessing in disguise, whereby a person gets to live two lives for the price of one, with potential character improvement. The new Doug appears to have deeper emotional sincerity than the former. What begins as a terrifying disability may in time yield many some enviable advantages. I hope the soundtrack will be made available (a beautifully eerie series of pieces.) P.S., The pretty brunette with the scarf (Nadine ?) has, for lack of a better description, a "scintillating countenance."