The East (***)

Brit Marling is an actress who took to writing in order to create interesting parts for herself. This comes soon after her small role in Robert Redford’s The Company You Keep, a suspense drama that, like this movie, implicitly raised the question of what actions are justified in opposing injustice. The East, which features Marling in nearly every scene and which she wrote with director Zal Batmanglij, has her playing an up-and-comer at a private intelligence firm. She’s hired to go undercover and find out about “The East,” a collective whose own speciality is giving corporate wrongdoers a taste of their own medicine. (Marling and Batmanglij’s other collaboration, Sound of My Voice, also had her character going undercover.)

The story obviously places the spy in the position of sympathizing with her new comrades, but does it in a skillful way. Probably in a more effective way than the Redford movie, where the radicalism is placed in the past, it puts the viewer in the position of the central character. Their corporate victims are undoubtedly portrayed in a simplistic way. While the viewer is asked to think about whether the drug-company executives in the film deserve their fate, there is no question that they’re villains. The group members themselves, played by Ellen Page and Alexander Skarsgård, among others, are not all that complex either, but at least they are diverse in their motivations and level of militancy.


IMDb link

viewed 6/26/13 7:10 pm at Ritz 5 and reviewed 6/26/13

Surviving Progress (**1/4)

This liberal feel-good (or feel-bad) documentary, adapted from a book by Ronald Wright, makes the case that our society is a kind of bubble that may soon burst. Specifically, Wright argues that modern humans have fallen into a “progress trap.” As with ancient hunters who became so adept at slaughtering mammoths that they killed off the source of their wealth, we have become so adept at exploiting natural resources that we are exceeding the capacity of Earth to regenerate them. He gives 1980 as the date when we began to do this on a global scale, although the film echoes people like Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich, whose warnings of catastrophe began 40 years ago and proved, at least, premature. It’s not quite clear why 1980 is the key date, but perhaps it’s not coincidental that that’s when Ronald Reagan was elected. That’s also when the United States began to experience an increasing concentration of wealth that continues. The film implies, not entirely correctly, that this is a phenomenon everywhere. Economist Michael Hudson links wealth concentration to the fall of the Roman Empire and says “that’s what’s threatening to bring in the Dark Ages again.”

Only the fiercest anti-environmentalists would deny that the explosive growth in output and wasteful use of resources in the last decades brings challenges with it. But to declare, as the film does, that a phenomenon that has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty in Asia since 1980s is a “failed experiment” is at best premature and overstated. Geneticist David Suzuki broadly criticize economics, which is “not a science,” for ignoring pollution and other societal costs. “Economists call these externalities…that’s nuts.” However, plenty of economists, including Nobel Prize-winner Paul Krugman, have written about the problems of externalities. Suzuki seems to disparage the profession for having created the very term. Repeatedly, the documentary argues by such assertion, rather than proof, wielding very little empirical data. A detour to Brazil provides some detail about deforestation, but, generally, I longed for more specificity.

To be fair, proving such a bold thesis is well beyond the purview of a feature-length documentary. Wright’s book, which I have not read, dwells more on past civilizations than our current one. Given that it’s far easier to explain the past than predict the future, perhaps the directors, Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks, should have followed that path. Alternately, they might have deeply delved into some specific areas where the negative effects of human activity are undeniable. There’s a lot of talent on hand here—the talking heads include Jane Goodall, Stephen and Hawking, and authors Robert Wright and Margaret Atwood—and building a film around any one of them might have been better than giving each a few sound bites. One participant, writer-engineer Colin Beavan, actually made his own film about his and his wife’s experiment in nonconsumption. Though based on a gimmick, Beavan’s No Impact Man: The Documentary nonetheless seriously grapples with the idea of conservation in a more concrete (and entertaining) way.

The positives of the film include some nifty time-lapse simulations and the opening and closing segments, in which gorillas trying to solve a logic problem. (This sort of ties into the idea that our brains have not evolved too far beyond that of apes, so we’re lousy at anticipating long-term consequences.) But the most worthwhile portion of the documentary is the one about solutions, which includes the expected warnings (by Beavan and others) about the need to conserve but also interviews with geneticists, notably Craig Ventner, about the possibility of generating artificial organisms to repair damage or even improve upon human physiology. Like everything else here, it’s quite speculative, but since the turf is less familiar, also fascinating.

IMDb link

viewed 5/22/12 7:20 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 5/23/12 and 5/25/12

Edge of Darkness (**3/4)

Movies about murdered and imperiled children are often stories about grief when the main character’s a mother (e.g. Changeling, The Deep End of the Ocean, Dead Girl), but are usually about revenge when it’s a man. Liam Neeson in Taken and Denzel Washington in Man on Fire, for example, follow a line that goes back at least to Charles Bronson’s vigilante in Death Wish and through another Gibson thriller, Ransom. Unlike in that movie, the kid can’t be rescued, because she’s been shot by someone apparently targeting Thomas Craven, Gibson’s police detective character. I should say that the “kid” is Craven’s adult daughter. Murdering actual children seems to be one of the few things that are still off limits in mainstream thrillers. Adapted from an acclaimed 25-year-old British miniseries (by the same director, Martin Campbell), this isn’t a slick action film like Taken, or even Live Free or Die Hard, but neither does it weave the murder into a broad narrative, as in, say, Mystic River. Instead, it’s a midtempo potboiler in which a stoic Craven solves the crime as a means to work through his grief, which slowly curdles into rage, with payback his goal. (Gibson once did star in a movie called Payback.)

While nothing seems to be obviously out-of-place or missing from having distilled the five-hour-plus BBC film into a mere 117 minutes, there are hints of condensed storylines. The scheme Craven discovers, involving a corrupt senator and a government contractor, might have been meant as some kind of comment about rapacious corporations, environmentalism, or the role of money in politics, but pretty much gets reduced to a generic paranoid fantasy. (Gibson once did star in a movie called Conspiracy Theory.) One suspects that the mysterious “fixer” played here by Ray Winstone probably made a little more sense in the original production. And when another character implies that Craven hadn’t stayed that close to his daughter before she was killed, that’s another thread that gets dropped. Instead, we see repeated home-movie flashbacks of Craven and the pre-teen version of his daughter. Who knows what happened to the family camcorder in her teen years, or to the girl’s mother, for that matter.

Campbell (The Mask of Zorro, Casino Royale) films his remake with the somber tone of one trying to make a serious movie, but merely winds up with a modestly diverting, occasionally unpredictable mystery.

IMDB link

viewed 1/30/2010 at Riverview and reviewed 2/1–4/10

No Impact Man (***)

This documentary embodies several trends. First is the universal idea of intentional deprivation. Major religions incorporate it (Lent, Ramadan, Yom Kippur…), and maybe the sort of exercise nonfiction writer Colin Beavan and his wife, Michelle Conlin, undertake here is what modern secular humanist types do to replace religious rituals. In wealthy societies, the idea of voluntary deprivation becomes all the more fascinating. (Hence the success of TV series such as Survivor.)

And then there is the idea of the self-experiment as artistic project. One of the highest-grossing documentaries has been Supersize Me, built around Morgan Spurlock’s willingness to eat only McDonald’s for 30 days, and A.J. Jacobs seems to be building a literary career on stunts like following every biblical precept for a year. A year is also the period in which Manhattanite Beavan vows not to have any environmental impact, although it takes six months to work up to the point where Beavan and Conlin actually turn off the electricity. (Before that, they cut out car trips, buy local food, compost, and avoid elevators.)

Finally, there is the newest trend of turning blogs into movies, like Julie and Julia and the Korean My Sassy Girl (both highly recommended). But those were narrative films that came after the unexpected success of their source material. Whereas here, as Beavan freely admits, the inspiration is as much the writer creating work for himself as putting his environmental beliefs into action. (He blogs with a solar-powered computer.) And he obviously knows he is being filmed. So whether you like this movie depends a lot on your tolerance for the obvious artificiality of the exercise. Since few viewers will be inclined to repeat the exercise, the film is more inspirational (if anything) than a practical guide, although it does show some of the ways the couple and their preschool daughter find substitutes for wasteful rituals like buying prepackaged food and watching television.

As it turns out, Conlin is the film’s saving grace. She must be called incredibly supportive for going along with her husband’s project, even though she does complain. A writer for BusinessWeek who goes vegetarian for the year, among other small sacrifices, she’s easier to relate to than Beavan, and directors Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein wisely make her more or less the star of the film. Notwithstanding the wholesome lifestyle the family adopt, what seems most organic about the exercise is the depiction of the family dynamic and the way the experiment permanently changes them, not the best way to find a substitute for refrigeration.

IMDB link

viewed 8/26/09 [screening at Ritz East] and reviewed between then and 9/24/09

Food Inc. (***3/4)

In the last 50 years, the way Americans eat has been quietly transformed, mostly for the worse, and this riveting documentary is part of a small-but-growing effort to change things. At this point, it’s common knowledge that what is often called the Western diet is not ideal from a health standpoint. Super Size Me (2004) became one of the highest-grossing documentaries by demonstrating the effects of too much fast food. Somewhat less well-known is how the family farm of the popular imagination has almost entirely given way to a system built on the model of big business. Director Robert Kenner shows how and why this has occurred, and the unique effects of this model as applied to food.

Kenner covers ground explored in the nonfiction of Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma), among others. These two are among the experts who appear (Schlosser is a co-producer), and for people familiar with their work, much here will be familiar, but the visuals and the testimonials from individuals are still valuable. For those new to the subject, the information here is likely to surprise and shock. Along with contributing to an epidemic of obesity and poor nutrition, the current system results in unnecessary animal abuse, food-borne illnesses, and industrial pollution. The film looks at all of these aspects with the organizing principle being the increasing control of production by a few large companies, often subsized by taxpayers.

Kenner condenses a lot of information into the space of a single feature, with a good mix of solid facts and individual testimonials. Anyone who eats should see this.

IMDB link

viewed (Philadelphia Film Festival) and reviewed 6/19/09

The Happening (***)

People are going to disagree with me about this M. Night Shyamalan movie, I realize that, but I liked it. They’ll disagree because it has pretty much no ending, more pseudoscience than an astrology textbook, and precious little action. But I still marveled at Shyamalan’s ability to conjure up creepiness out of stillness and silence, out of amber Pennsylvania fields and widescreen Americana. Even the opening, a time-lapse shot of clouds moving against a darkening sky to the James Horner score, is creepy.

In the 1960s, the term “happening” gained currency as a term applied to large gatherings of people for some hip purpose. Here, something is attacking large crowds and turning them into suicidal automatons. The movie’s R rating comes from some of the gruesome ways they off themselves. As for the cause, I won’t give that away, and really, the movie doesn’t either with any degree of specificity, which is one of the things that will probably annoy a lot of people. Let’s just put it this way. Mark Wahlberg is supposed to be a science teacher at “Philadelphia High School,” and in one of the first scenes we see him telling his students that nature is something “beyond our understanding” and that reasons science posits will be “just a theory,” thereby echoing the language creationists use to disparage evolution. At this point I rolled my eyes, and not for the last time. This is a science teacher?

Yet I was enthralled by the way Shyamalan depicts the frightened people trying to figure out what is happening as they fan out from Philly to the countryside, where loonies live. (That’s the director’s apparent opinion, not mine.) Shymalan focuses primarily on the teacher and his googly-eyed wife (Zooey Deschanel), who seem to have grown apart. To Shyamalan, a continental catastrophe is worth years of $150-an-hour counseling. At least he doesn’t (overtly) suggest that it was God’s plan, which just ruined Signs for me (along with lame aliens). Think of this as Signs with an anticlimactic ending instead of a stupid one. I mean, you don’t even get to see how many people die. All that matters is whether one married couple get over their rough patch.

My suspicion that this would be a polarizing movie was confirmed by looking at the IMDB score, which confirmed a higher-than-usual percentage of both 1 and 10 ratings. I admit that the movie is dumber than Britney Spears’s last baby, but the small details and atmosphere made it work for me. Or maybe I was just glad not to be re-watching Shyamalan’s last effort, the godawful fairy tale Lady in the Water. Sometimes these things are just beyond understanding.

IMDB link

viewed 6/14/08; reviewed 6/17/08

Arctic Tale (***1/2)

This is an interesting sort of hybrid movie, though it could be mistaken for a March of the Penguins-style documentary. Directors Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson set out to film the Arctic, but not to make a feature film. Over the course of 15 years, their footage began to suggest a storyline about a walrus and a polar bear, and they eventually got the backing of National Geographic. I had to watch the disclaimer at the end to be sure it wasn’t actually a documentary, but, according to Robertson, it wouldn’t have been feasible to follow the same individual animals year after year. However, that is what we appear to see, a story of what happens to one polar bear cub named Nanu and one walrus calf named Seela.

A friendly sounding Queen Latifah tells the tale. The narration written for her occasionally gets cute, as when it refers to a polar bear “boot camp” that Nanu’s mother puts her through, but for the most part is helpfully explanatory and easy to follow. Probably I could have done without Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” playing over one sequence of mother and daughter, but that’s as close as the movie gets to Disney fare. We don’t hear voices come out of the animals’ mouths, and we see the realities of predation in a way that animated movies about animals tend to dance around. In fact, a scene where a couple of walruses fight for their lives is among the most awesome footage here.

And make no mistake. The footage is frequently stunning. The story makes it family friendly, but anyone with even a mild interest in the subject will be enthralled. The subtext of the film is the effect of climate change on the animals of the arctic. Although it wasn’t their original intent to make a movie about global warming, the filmmakers’ observations turned it into one. For walruses and polar bears alike, the less-intense winters mean longer trips across open seas with no solid ice on which to alight. (Incidentally, Al Gore’s daughter Kristen is one of the three credited writers.) You don’t need to watch Arctic Tale as an environmentalist. The natural beauty and its inherent drama are enough reason.

IMDB link

reviewed 8/5/07

The Simpsons Movie (***1/4)

Which is more likely, that it would take 20 years for The Simpsons to make it to the movieplexes, or that, with 400-plus half-hour episodes in the can, it would still be on the air as USA’s longest-running comedy series? But whether on small screen or large, the animated family is always pretty much the same.

Whereas the South Park movie was, unlike its TV progenitor, an animated musical, The Simpsons Movie wouldn’t have seemed out of place as a three-part episode on Fox. To be sure, the animation is a notch better, and they’d be three, or at least two, of the funnier episodes, but it doesn’t feel very new. And that’s okay.

As has been true of most episodes in recent years, the main plot’s driven by hapless household head Homer, while wife Marge’s choice winds up, as many times before, being deciding how much she can put up with. This time, Homer provokes a crisis so great that the whole town of Springfield’s angry at him, not just his family. Meanwhile, bratty son Bart finds a soft spot for goody-two-shoes neighbor Ned Flanders, while ordinarily mopey Lisa meets a boy. But these are minor subplots on the road to Alaska, of all places. If there is anything surprising about the movie, it’s the relatively straightforward storyline. There’s an environmental theme, and even a religious one, which doesn’t stop the movie from making fun of environmentalism, religion, and anything else that came into the screenwriters’—15 are credited—heads. (A certain environmental documentary is spoofed as An Irritating Truth.) At the end, Homer learns the same sort of lesson about selfishness that he learns and forgets with regularity on the series.

As a movie, this pretty much met my expectations. Despite being a work-in-progress for four years, it doesn’t feel worked over and processed. There’s only one celebrity voice cameo, excepting the band Green Day’s appearance in a pretty funny opening sequence. The mildly ballyhooed shot of young Bart’s private part turns out to be brief fodder for a clever sight gag. But we get to see Mr. Burns, Krusty the Clown, Moe, Lenny and Carl, and most of the other endearingly foolish residents of Springfield. (Sorry, Sideshow Bob fans.) So, after 20 years, Matt Groening, Jim Brooks, et al haven’t broken new ground, but have made a movie to please people who’ve seen the series and liked it. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s a good starting point.

IMDB link

reviewed 8/2/07

Evan Almighty (**)

About twenty years ago, there was a comedy called Ishtar that was famous for costing about $55 million and making much less. Nowadays, people have gotten use to enormous sums being spent making movies, and so word that this is supposedly the costliest comedy ever made, once something a studio might have tried to hush, becomes something like a selling point. But it remains true that a hundred million dollars worth of effects won’t save a $29.95 script. That’s not literally what we have here, of course. Actually, a bundle was spent on a script, and that script was junked and rewritten by Steve Oedekerk, who turned it into a sequel to a 2003 hit he’d helped to write. It may be because the original script wasn’t supposed to be a sequel that this doesn’t feel much like Bruce Almighty, the Jim Carrey comedy.

Notwithstanding the title, Evan Baxter (Steve Carrell) doesn’t get to play God as Bruce did. God, again played with a wry approachability by Morgan Freeman, forces Evan to play Noah. Whereas Bruce was somewhat driven by the on-edge personality of its star, Evan is a blander creation, a career-driven husband and father with too little time. In other words, he’s the same character as the fathers in three quarters of the Hollywood “family” movies in the last ten years, not unlike the Cheaper by the Dozen remake, whose screenwriters helped out Oedekerk this time around. The movie also reminded me in a way of Signs, where God apparently lets aliens kill millions of people just so Mel Gibson can regain his faith. Here, the suggestion is that a devastating flood is just the thing to give Evan the opportunity to become closer to his wife (Lauren Graham) and three sons. God hates seeing the breakup of the wealthy suburban family.

Right off the bat, things look dodgy as Evan, the anchorman seen briefly in Bruce Almighty, bids viewers and Buffalo farewell to begin his new job as a US congressman. Let me get this straight. He’s been allowed to do the news during and after his campaign? Okay, it’s a point that can be overlooked in a comedy, but the movie is full of them. Later, Evan wakes up one morning with a scraggly beard that instantly grows back when he shaves; his unusual appearance is one thing that compels him to admit to his wife that he’s spoken to God, but she’s skeptical. Now, if you were Evan, what would you do to prove there’s been some divine madness? Shave in front of her, right? But Evan doesn’t do this.

Evan even gets its theology wrong. Running away from his record like a presidential candidate, the Freeman version of the Deity tells Evan that, when He decided to “destroy all flesh,” as the trusty King James puts it, with the first great flood, He wasn’t angry. Whereas Bruce Almighty made a valiant stab at explaining why there was unhappiness on earth, Evan just raises new questions, like, why does God always choose to look like Morgan Freeman? Oedekerk and director Tom Shadyc seem to want to soften God’s rough edges for a family audience, for this is much the family movie compared to its sarcastic predecessor. Typically, this means there’s a lot of jokes centered around various animal expulsions. When not directed at Evan, these land on the closest thing to a Devil character, a congressman (John Goodman) who wants Evan to cosponsor a bill to open up federal lands for development. We don’t get to find out if God (or Evan) is a Republican or a Democrat, but he definitely doesn’t dig suburban sprawl.

Subtract the poop jokes and the hairiness jokes and the jokes about all the animals mysteriously following Evan around and there’s not much to recommend this as a comedy. Wanda Sykes gets the most laughs as Evan’s congressional aide. The lapses in logic ruin it as a fantasy movie, too. I’m not sure if all million-plus animal species are represented on Evan’s ark, but it doesn’t matter, as their major purpose would seem to be those poop jokes. In terms of the story, their presence turns out to be almost entirely superfluous.

As for all the money, it isn’t entirely wasted. The producers really built a biblical-scale ark, and it was admittedly a miraculous thing to watch it flow through the flooded mall in downtown Washington, DC. Thus, a not-funny cookie-cutter comedy with a heavy-handed environmental message and six really cool minutes. Be sure to look for those six minutes on cable. On the whole, though, I’d rather watch Ishtar.

IMDB link

Who Killed the Electric Car (***1/2)

-->  Filmmaker Chris Paine delves into the curious mystery behind GM’s decision to produce, then recall, its entire fleet of EV1 electric vehicles.

When I was growing up, I remember hearing a story that there actually existed a tire that would never wear out, only the tire companies had bought the rights so as to preserve their profits. This movie documents a true-life story something like that. The “killed” in the title is no hyperbole, as most of the cars in question were literally crushed between 2003 and 2005. You might be forgiven for not knowing that there had been any electric cars marketed since the internal combustion engine became the technology of choice in the 1920s. The movie mostly tells the story of the EV1, the General Motors vehicle that was designed from the ground up and represented the first entry in the potential new market. It was GM’s prototype that originally inspired California to pass since-revoked legislation requiring 10% of vehicles sold in the state to have zero emissions by 2003. Interviews with some people involved in the GM project, politicians, automotive experts, and EV1 owners (most notably Mel Gibson) form the basis of the film. What the movie lacks in innovative techniques it makes up for in the story it tells and the way it’s carefully structured as a mystery. The oil companies and recent presidential administrations come in for predictable criticism, but the more interesting question answered in the movie is why the automaker would create a car and then do so little to sell it to the public. Whoever did this killing, I came away from the movie mourning the loss.

IMDb link

An Inconvenient Truth (***1/4)

Considering that it’s basically just a film version of ex-Vice President Al Gore giving his standard lecture about global warming, this is a surprisingly engaging documentary that makes its complex subject easy to understand.

Al Gore’s not running for anything, but he’s still campaigning. Timed to coincide with the publication of his book of the same name, An Inconvenient Truth is not so much a standard documentary as a concert film designed to motivate the faithful and convince the skeptics about the dangers of global warming. Most of the movie is taken up by the former vice president’s “stage show,” a lecture he’s given around the world, by his own estimation, over a thousand times. A “global warning,” you might say. The Gore seen here is passionate, engaging, and even occasionally funny. (His standard line that he “used to be the next president of the United States” got a laugh from both the on-screen audience and the one at the preview screening I saw, after which Gore took questions.) The “behind-the scenes” footage consists of moderately interesting vignettes about Gore’s environmental awakening as well as striking examples of global melting. Photos showing how much snow has melted from various mountains were among the most memorable parts of the film. (NPR science reporter Richard Harris has noted that the melting on Mt. Kilimanjaro may result mostly from drought. He also criticized the film for showing long-term projections without clarifying the time frame, but, as with other scientific commentators on the film, said that it gets the science largely right.) The most compelling of the facts the film musters relates to an analysis, published in Science magazine, of peer-reviewed journal articles on climate change. The author found none of the 928 articles, dating from 1993 to 2003, disputed the “consensus position” on climate change. Given its format, this isn’t the most cinematic of films, but it’s much less dry than I would have thought if you’d told me it was a filmed lecture. In fact, the pizzazz-y charts and graphs Gore uses do an excellent job of making a complex subject understandable.

IMDb link

viewed at PFS screening; posted 8/16/13

Hoot (***)

A faithful, modestly likeable version of Carl Hiassen’s teen novel about a Florida kid who stumbles his way into some activism of behalf of endangered owls.

“Tween” novels don’t get made into movies that often (Holes is one that comes to mind), so this faithful adaptation of Carl Hiassen’s 2002 tale is welcome. Roy Eberhardt, the hero of the tale, is the new kid in the town of Coconut Cove, Florida. In short order he’s become the target of the school bully, pissed off a girl called Beatrice the Bear, and gotten hit on the head by a golf ball after chasing a barefoot kid. In another subplot, a local cop (Luke Wilson) is trying to figure out the source of some petty vandalism at a construction site. Turns out it all has to do with a pancake house and some owls competing for the same slice of real estate. The Florida in this movie isn’t the one of Disney World or CSI: Miami, but the quainter version found in Hiassen’s novels and the songs of Jimmy Buffet. Not surprisingly, Buffet, one of the film’s producers, provides much of the soundtrack and plays a science teacher. I wouldn’t have minded a little more of the whimsy of Hiassen’s adult novels; unlike those, Hoot gets less quirky as things progress, settling eventually into a straight pro-environment, teen-empowerment mode. Adults may find the corporate villain one-dimensional as well. Almost all of it is straight out of the book. Perhaps dismayed by the reception afforded the only other film made from one of his novels (Striptease), Hiassen wrote the script himself. There are more original films, but by virtue of likable characters and having no competition at all, Hoot is the junior-high semi-comedy of 2006 (so far).

IMDb link

posted 8/20/13