A cautionary tale about scientific hubris and overreaching that plays like a Planet of the Apes prequel, Oscar-winning (for Man On Wire) director James Marsh’s latest film, Project Nim, is about a chimp who learned to sign. A major media story back in the late ‘70s, the story of Nim Chimpsky began when he was taken from his mother at a primate research center in Oklahoma and given to a New York family to be raised as a human. The experiment was the brainchild of Herb Terrace, a Columbia University psychology professor, who felt if the simian could be taught sign language, he might be ... Read More
The Last Mountain: A Scary Movie About … Coal
June 2, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The Last Mountain is scarier than any Saw, Alien or Friday the 13th film ever made. It's a documentary about mountaintop coal removal in West Virginia, starring a group of locals whose environment is slowly turning into toxic sludge and an energy company whose methods are so predatory, they make Wall Street bankers look like acolytes of Mother Teresa. "If someone tried to blow up a mountain in Utah or Colorado, they'd be put in jail. Why is that allowed in West Virginia?" asks environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who figures prominently in the film. "It's because the public does ... Read More
Lessons Learned From School and War
May 10, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The First Grader initially looks like a classic three-hanky weepie. An illiterate 84-year old Kenyan decides he wants to learn to read before he dies, and tries to enroll in an elementary school class. He’s turned away and told to go to an adult education center, but there’s none in his area, so he’s eventually allowed to study with the kiddies. This creates all sorts of media attention and controversy — news outlets from around the world cover his story, local bureaucrats fume at the attention he’s getting, and some people believe he’s only doing it for money. Eventually, ... Read More
Documentary Tells Story of Art Saved from Stalin’s Fury
April 4, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
One of the most astonishing art collections on the planet is housed inside an obscure museum in the dusty Central Asian town of Nukus, Uzbekistan. The Igor Savitsky Museum is home to thousands of paintings and sculptures made by artists the Soviet government had banned, all collected by a former artist and archeologist who traveled throughout the Soviet republics in a desperate search to uncover these hidden treasures. "I found these paintings rolled up under the beds of old widows, buried in family trash, in dark corners of artists' studios, sometimes even patching a hole in the roof," ... Read More
‘Making the Boys’ Examines Controversial Gay Play
March 10, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Mart Crowley was in a desperate situation. The screenplay he had written for 20th Century Fox was never produced, a TV pilot he scripted for a major star wasn't picked up by the network, and his agent had dropped him. Crowley needed something to write about that would get him back in the game. Then Crowley read a New York Times article in which theater critic Stanley Kauffmann complained that three of America's most famous playwrights — Edward Albee, William Inge and Tennessee Williams — were gay, but refused to write about homosexuality. Crowley, gay himself, thought this was a good ... Read More
A Hiding Place for Nuclear Waste
February 4, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The first documentary that Netflix might slot into their science fiction category, director Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity is an eerily fascinating look at the planet’s most unique construction project. Known as Onkalo — “hiding place” in Finnish — this massive work in the north of Finland, which began construction in the last century and won’t be completed until the next one, is a series of concrete-reinforced underground tunnels meant to store the country’s nuclear waste. And it’s designed to last until the waste is harmless — a full 100,000 years. Say it again — ... Read More
Robert E. Lee Without the Halo
January 3, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The thing about Robert E. Lee is that he’s practically the poster child for what a general is supposed to look like. The trim white beard, the noble brow and piercing gaze, the way he sat erect upon his famous horse, Traveller. The aura the man projected was noble, upright, almost saintly. But as Robert E. Lee, a documentary being broadcast Jan. 3 on PBS’ American Experience suggests, he was something else entirely: a reactionary slave owner whose overweening ambition helped destroy his homeland and kill a generation of young men in the process. Guaranteed not to warm the cockles of ... Read More
Bhutto Soap Opera Makes for a Compelling Film
December 2, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The events surrounding Benazir Bhutto's life play out like some particularly lurid, R-rated action flick. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the charismatic father and Pakistani prime minister, is overthrown by a rival, jailed and executed (the rival, Gen. Zia Ul Haq, later dies in a mysterious plane explosion). One of Benazir's brothers is poisoned, killer unknown. Another brother is murdered in a confrontation with police, allegedly without provocation. Bhutto's husband is accused of corruption, jailed for years, but never convicted of any crime. Bhutto herself is in and out of jail, in and out of exile, ... Read More
Eliot Spitzer’s Rise and Fall, and Potential Return
November 4, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
It's hard to imagine a fall from grace that happened faster, and with more finality, than Eliot Spitzer's. Once nicknamed "The Sheriff of Wall Street" because, as New York state attorney general, he prosecuted some of America's biggest financial criminals, Spitzer was elected governor with a whopping 69 percent of the vote and seemed a contender for the nation's first Jewish president. Then it was revealed that he had been patronizing expensive call girls, and Spitzer's public career was over almost overnight. But were the revelations of sexual misconduct the result of leaks to the press ... Read More
Mixed Report Card for ‘Waiting for Superman’
October 9, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Some of the best bits in Waiting for Superman, the new documentary by Davis Guggenheim on the failures of American education, especially for the poor, are the shots of presidents promising to do something about it. “Now let us praise famous men,” the film as much as says, as it rolls out sequences of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush signing legislation and pontificating. There’s George W. Bush, too, with the slogan, “No Child Left Behind” in large letters on a banner behind him, rolling out the latest ... Read More
