Fifth about The Seventh

Val

Val: as Ting Poo and Leo Scott’s documentary evolves, one may be impressed how its subject, Val Kilmer, someone so obsessed with his self-image he has been recording his own life for decades, shreds any sense of vanity to show the broken figure he became after fighting with severe illness. However, that feels like a calculated move: aware that his physicality won’t be again what it once was, he is trying to build something else in its place. The documentary has some interesting and poetic moments, but it confuses access to the trove of recordings with real access to the person; it is mostly a factual and superficial access to Kilmer’s trajectory. Poo and Scott, who double as editors, create the narrative thread out of a large stock of footage, but mostly fail to create something emotionally engaging.

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