Question: Who is Doug Block and why is his col lege-bound daughter, Lucy, so annoyed with him? Answer: Block is a documentary filmmaker who keeps sticking his camera in Lucy’s face.
“I’m really tired of it,” the dark-haired teenager complains. Dad says he’s sorry, but he doesn’t stop recording.
As we learn in his documentary “The Kids Grow Up” (not to be confused with “The Kids Are All Right”), he’s been filming Lucy since she was born.
In fact, he’s constantly recording the daily lives of what he annoyingly calls “the family unit” (what’s wrong with just “family”?) — his patient wife, his aging father and assorted other kin and friends.
Block is so obsessed that he insists on sticking a camera in his wife’s face while she is bed-bound with her fourth major bout of depression. Could it be that the constant surveillance contributes to her illness?
Maybe being able to look back in time is comforting for Block and company, but what makes him think complete strangers give a damn about his not-especially-interesting family? I certainly don’t.