What a waste of my time!!!
It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.
View MoreAmazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.
View MoreThrough painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable
View MoreAs some of the other reviews will unintentionally tell you, if you don't already feel sympathetic to registered sex offenders who are shunned by society, this documentary will do little to change any of that. Sure, flashing children on the street is not the same as molesting your own child for years on end. They don't merit the same reaction from society - that is true. But this documentary does nothing but present a narrative with which we aren't already familiar. Sex offenders were so often victims of trauma themselves, violence breeds violence, when in Rome, etc., etc. But child abuse is wrong!, etc., etc. To make matters worse, the offenders didn't seem to care about the victims, they only wanted to protect their own reputation - leading me to ask the wrong questions, the ones the documentary wanted me to avoid. Like, what kind of therapy they were receiving? How can they move along without true regret? What exactly have they learned? The place was only run by other sex offenders, should they even be giving each other therapy? What I really wanted from this documentary, was a more objective look at what happens to the offender ones they have served their time in prison. I wanted the documentary to tell us how poor - on average - their chances of living a normal life afterwards would be. Maybe compare this to what happens murderers, or drug dealers, etc., to present this as the complex moral issue it truly is. Sure, we can torment the offenders 'till the day they die, but what good will it do? Is it really that reasonable to prevent these people from becoming contributing members of society? Isn't it a waste of human life, or just plain ressources, to let them be outcasts forever and ever? I think so. This problem won't be solved by looking away, no problem ever will, no matter how ugly it is. I wish people would talk about pedophilia more often. I wish there were ressources for people who had these wrong thoughts, I wish they were allowed to talk about them - so we could prevent them from taking actions, so we could give them the mental strength to do right. But the documentary made a bad case for this, focused on the wrong ways to emit sympathy, and a murky way of presenting facts. It didn't provoke the kind of rational thought that would counter the terrifying feeling of knowing, that you are looking at a room full of people who have probably raped someone. Quite a shame, really. This documentary gets 6 stars, primarily because it is one of the only ones of it's kind.
View MoreI found it very hard to sit through this. Very one sided and slanted. While it might be possible for a small percentage of these people to be rehabilitated, I believe most will not. If living away from other people will help, then I think it should be done. What I don't see in many of these people is any kind of real remorse, with the exception of the woman. They all sit around and bitch about how no one will hire them. Never once do you hear anything about how they harmed their young victim, possibly for life. Have they tried to make any amends to their victims? None of that is discussed. I don't have children and if I did I would feel little compassion for these folks. I think they need to live in their own communities, with no contact with society. You did the crime, I don't care if you were abused, I know people who suffered sexual abuse and they did not go on to victimize others. I do hope some of them will see the light and not go on to re-offend.
View MoreThis is an empathetic documentary portrait of a group of convicted sex offenders who live together in a trailer park because laws restricting where they can live after release from prison has made it almost impossible to find shelter. The residents support each other in a society that has spurned them. We sit in on their group therapy sessions which are a mix of heartbreaking and chilling. It's not easy to watch someone – even someone who seems to feel terrible remorse – relate the story of how he came to rape a 5 year old girl. But it's also powerful and sad to realize that almost to a person, all these men (and a couple of women) were themselves terribly sexually abused as children. And that one of their children whom they abused has now gone on to be convicted of a sex crime as well. The film posits that these people are certainly criminals, but they are also certainly victims as well, and that only through compassionate treatment can the cycle be broken. It also makes clear that lumping so many offenders with crimes of wildly different seriousness in the same heading of 'registered sex offender', publishing their names and addresses, not allowing them to live or work in huge swaths of the areas they live in is - for many - a highly unfair practice, and actually endanger all the offenders, allowing those out to frighten or harm them easy access. It's an uncomfortable film to watch – it's hard to find oneself empathetic to people who have done terrible things. But it's also an important questioning of how we treat other human beings, no matter what their past holds. One flaw - I was frustrated that the film sites statistics that go against what most of us have heard so many times – stating that sex criminals are actually among the least likely to offend again, not the most – but then fails to say where those statistics come from, or why most people have heard the opposite. If you're going to challenge people's fears and conventional wisdom, you need more than an unattributed title card.
View MorePeople nowadays can rationalize everything. From bizarre religious beliefs, weird sexual practices to outrageous political ideas...Everything in relative and if one uses the right words and the correct approach everything becomes legit, OK, mainstream, acceptable.Pervert Park is one more example of this abominable trend. The directors/producers cherry-picked a few sex offenders, transformed them in victims instead of perpetrators...showing that underneath the monster face there is a human being who needs an opportunity, a chance at redemption.OK. I agree that a few, a small percentage of these guys can improve but what about the majority of them for whom there is no solution? The only thing I ask myself is whether the directors and producers of this documentary would trust these guys to care for their 5-year daughters...
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