Detropia (2012)

Hyped documentary by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, Detropia (a somewhat clumsy portmanteau if you ask me) chronicles the decline of Detroit by following the downtrodden residents as they go about their lives in a dying city.  The directors seem to take a page from Frederick Wiseman's book by just pointing the camera at people as they talk and flounder (This at times reminded me of Wiseman's devastating documentary Public Housing, another kind of "dying city").  While maybe not ethnic cleansing, class cleansing seems to be occurring.  I have a hunch that Detroit has become so cheap to live in that it'll soon be overrun by artist and hippie types, turning it into some sort of Fruitopia.  This isn't focused enough, just an assemblage of footage.  There's a moment in Gary Hustwit's 2011 doc Urbanized that manages to say more in three minutes than this does in ninety:  Wordless footage of a ride on the Detroit Monorail from thirty years ago, then that exact same ride today...it looks like an atom bomb had been detonated.  I'd recommend watching an Urbanized/Roger & Me double feature instead.