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
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
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
‘Carlos’ Brilliant Look at Real Terrorist
October 8, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
If further proof were needed that revolutionary terrorists are basically narcissists, it can be found in Carlos, a monumental, and absolutely mesmerizing, film about Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the notorious Venezuelan bomber and radical known as Carlos the Jackal. Director Olivier Assayas' five-and-a-half-hour epic, which will be shown in three parts on the Sundance Channel beginning Oct. 11, followed by a simultaneous theatrical and video-on-demand release starting Oct. 15, is a powerful and complex look into the mind of a terrorist and the entities — governmental and non — that supported ... Read More
‘Howl’: Sex, Poetry and America in the ’50s
September 21, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
October 7, 1955. A 29-year old poet named Allen Ginsberg takes to the stage at San Francisco’s Six Gallery and begins to read: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix…” The poem was “Howl,” now universally regarded as one of the great American literary works of the 20th century and a touchstone of the Beat movement. But Ginsberg’s creation was important for another reason — it spawned The People v. Ferlinghetti, one of the seminal obscenity cases in ... Read More
It’s the End of the World as We Blow It
July 19, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The film Countdown to Zero might be one of the most frightening movies ever made, and it doesn’t feature a single vampire, zombie, biological mutant or alien slime thing. Just a bunch of talking heads discussing the possibility of nuclear terrorism, war or accident. Scary. Very, very scary. The film, which opens July 23 in New York and Washington, followed by a national rollout, is both a condensed history of nuclear weaponry and a sober analysis of contemporary nuclear issues. Produced by Lawrence Bender, the same man behind Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary’s ... Read More
