I'm out of town for the weekend, so I was going to let posting duties slip for a couple days, that was until I sat down last night and watched one of the most entertainingly nerdy documentaries ever created. Between The Folds explores the mistakenly simple and often trivialized world of paper folding -- or for most of us, origami.
Chosen off NetFlix for its comic potential (a la Word Wars), I had little to no expectations, aside from a good laugh -- I couldn't have been more wrong. As it turns out, the only laughs came after the conclusion of the film when I thought back to how intense my look of captivation must've appeared. Sure, most of us have folded a piece of paper into a frog or a dollar bill into a shirt, but few of us have folded a single piece of paper into a form capable of fighting cancer or a shape so complex, NASA bought the rights to it. As pointed out in the film, most artistic mediums are either added to or taken away from, but paper merely changes shape, but always remains a sheet of paper.
From the automotive industry to free-form mathematics to saving lives, a single piece of paper is capable of nearly anything when folded in on itself. The Into The Wild-esque narrative aside, the film is surprisingly as entertaining as it is educational. Okay, I'm done nerding out over a movie about guys folding paper... rent the film for free on NetFlix, or just watch the trailer and forget about it.
