Just Do It Documentary - Bikes as tools of civil disobedience

it's early in the morning Mr Schick. your facetiousness radar not warmed up yet?

that girl is a pain in the arse though. there are recorded confrontations like this all over the net. some ring true and warrant admiration; others just smack of self-importance and arrogance.

any documentary about the need for protest arguably benefits from some scenes of confrontation. but the inclusion of this particular confrontation - a directorial descision - hampers the whole sequence. the rest of the bike bloc camp are mellow and affable and despite the daftness of the modern-day minstrel they come across well; the girl ruins it for everyone by being argumentative and full of herself, however valid she may have thought she was. If this film is to exist for any other reason than to preach to the converted, she will send a village hall audience's sympathies for bike bloc plummetting. no-one likes a bleater.

In the editing room it's always exciting to create dramatic tension through the manipulation of assembly footage. But if this film is trying to celebrate and increase interest in today's protest movement rather than show the spiky earnestness of some of its activists, the director should have discarded the girl-cop scene.

Everyone knows protests are disrupted before they happen; what is difficult is getting people off their arse to become protesters. In my opinion the only way protests will have any real capacity for change is if the people who have disengaged because they have seen protesters to be whiny, arrogant troublemakers are persuaded otherwise. There are enough examples fed out by news channels to have established the prejudice already; a film trying to be a rallying cry shouldn't include any more.