Richard Nixon said a lot of horrible racist things, and horrible non-racist things, but it seems like people are most fond of digging up this treasure of The Tapes: “I have the greatest affection for them [blacks], but I know they’re not going to make it for 500 years. They aren’t. You know it, too. The Mexicans are a different cup of tea. They have a heritage. At the present time they steal, they’re dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life. They don’t live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like.”

Harsh to be sure, even if he is fond of “them.” But one wonders how far off the mark his prediction really was. You might even argue that the departure of those black people who have overcome stark disadvantage with exceptional talent, intelligence and/or drive to move from the margins and into the mainstream, has pushed the timeline for the rest of them to “make it” back a couple hundred years more, as the most stable members of the community, quite reasonably, launch their escape pods at the first opportunity, leaving the rest of the group structure weakened. Those who have spent a significant amount of time around the poorer black American communities, and who profess to believe that blacks, in general, might obtain a lifestyle on par with whites, in general, within the lifetime of anybody currently drawing breath are either 1) Actually delusional 2) Lying 3) Believe that something really terrible is going to happen to white America or 4) Believe that science will enable us to live to see Nixon’s 500 year forecast come to fruition.

I don’t think this is the message Frederick Wiseman wants us to take away from Public Housing. If you don’t know, he is famously of the old school of non-intrusive documentary filmmaking, so we’re fortunate that no “message” is too obvious. It doesn’t get any more heavy-handed than the recurring footage of a dreary ice cream truck that brings to mind the absence of the joy normally associated with ice cream trucks and the difficult realities of local entrepreneurship, which is touted as the golden path throughout the film. So really, we see nothing more than expertly selected footage from the projects, and the footage is methodically depressing. You can assign any combination of mechanisms to the sad interactions Wiseman captures: poverty traps, cultural breakdown, “black nihilism,” and even some of the tenets of white supremacy, if that’s your bag. The problems and the barriers facing the residents of Chicago public housing in 1997 seem intractable. And while the explanations for the intractability range from the high-minded and compassionate to the vile, they are all posited as explanations of why the problems are intractable, or nearly so. No one even bothers to suggest that a solution is around the corner.

In some ways, the reality faced by poor blacks is even bleaker than the picture Wiseman provides. It isn’t that Wiseman tries to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes. He is focusing on the people working to build up their community in general and a housing project in particular. He is looking at  institutional realities, showing us individuals working hard within institutions and how little fruit their labor produces. We only get a slight glimpse of the depths of the self-destructiveness and ignorance that are commonplace in such communities. The film focuses instead on the disconnect between the programs and systems intended to help and the people they are meant to help. And maybe the unfairness of the expectations placed on those who are in need, or possibly lost.

One scene that stood out as a emblematic comes when the HUD workers hold a meeting with residents to discuss making improvements. Tenants complain that some of the lighting in the projects is frequently out. They seem to initially blame HUD for this. Is it too much to ask that we have some decent lighting at night? The HUD worker agrees that this is a problem, but points out what “we all know.” The reason for the regular loss of lighting is obviously vandalism. The meeting grows silent. The only suggestion is a new system of lights that are essentially unbreakable.  But they are expensive and will take a nice slice out of the budget, which is always shrinking as it is. There isn’t really a good solution to the problem– not to the problem of getting more kids to graduate college– the problem of having reasonable lighting in the projects. Other battles range from the prevalence of vermin to the fact that mere paperwork stands between hundreds of long-vacant government units and members of the growing homeless population, but nothing budges. Well, that’s not entirely true. We do see a confused old man being forced from his old project home. There are no immediate plans on where he is to live now, beyond “a shelter.”  And yes, that is a grape soda he has in the picture.  Don’t pretend that it didn’t occur to you.

At the most basic level, the disconnect seems to be that thoughtful, well-organized people who work for the government establish techniques based on their own M.O.s to aid dysfunctional, unstable people. Lest you conclude that I’m being racist (for the few that haven’t already done so), let me state for the record that I am worthless. I have to ramp up my self-motivation to the maxtreme of self-empowerment to fulfill my will to remember to remind my bride to pay the parking tickets that I accumulate. Had I been born into the projects, I’d never have connected with these programs either.  This is a case of the dictatorship of the responsible in our society: an apartheid privileging those who enjoy having their forms filled out and wiggle their little butts with joy at the chance to present proper insurance and registration. As Travolta in Pulp Fiction thought the chance for retribution would have actually made the vandalism of his car worthwhile, the over-responsible live for the day when their home is broken into or damaged and they can break out their full homeowners insurance with no deductible and their meticulous photographs of everything in the house worth more than $12. But the fact of the matter is that Flanderses cannot just coach Homers into becoming Flanderses.

And in so many cases in Public Housing, it seems like the responsible are setting up systems that make sense to them, meant to guide people like me. But I’d rather die in the gutter than have to attend government meetings and fill out forms just to get decent lighting on my street. Is it reasonable to ask students to take what seem to be extra classes after high school, just so they can graduate with what would be considered a 9th grade education in the middle class? Sure, one in a hundred rises above it all out of exceptional talent and will. But what is to become of the merely average student, crammed into schools that don’t teach because too many students are far below average and despise learning? Then, more extra classes, more programs, more forms… just to find a job. How many of us who coasted through college on suds and wandered into a job at the first place hiring can really say we’d be willing to deal with sign-ups, wait lists, workshops and deadlines based on the hope of scoring a temporary gig at minimum wage plus a buck? Maybe we grow up enough by the time we reach middle age that we can drag the carcasses of our useless kids through the system so that they might one day do the same for theirs (as our parents did for us), but what would most of us have done if we were not part of this middle-class cycle, if we didn’t know our fathers and our mothers were less than 20 years older than us?

The usual threats of murder, prostitution, drugs, gangs, AIDS, teenage pregnancy and prison are present, but are never the centerpiece. Again, Public Housing is more about the institution and the relationship people have with it. Maybe the reality of immobility: that most of us will stay withing throwing distance of the station to which we were born, regardless of if we are Flanderses or Homers. For the thinking viewer, this is even more disheartening than another drive-by. We see people who care begging for simple work orders to be filled out, or explaining sexual responsibility as emphatically as possible to small groups of blank faces. Cops try seemingly random searches and threats. They try reaching out on a personal level. But they always seem resigned. The world of Public Housing is nothing close to hell on earth, like say, City of God, but it certainly doesn’t look like the first world, either. It doesn’t look like anything can really fix it and the only cause for optimism in the film is that some are willing to fight for minor victories. Good luck with that…

The words “Ron Howard Presents” are unlikely to inspire confidence in even the most optimistic of viewers but if there’s one thing this film does prove, almost anything is possible.

In The Shadow of the Moon is a simple and understated documentary that splices rediscovered NASA footage that had been rotting away in the JSC archives with present day talking heads footage of the surviving moonwalkers.

As a historical document alone this film is invaluable. Only 24 people have ever seen the whole circle of the earth from space and it’s quite feasible that as the remaining 18 succumb to old age they will be the last human beings in our lifetime, ever to have done so. It’s left entirely to the Apollo astronauts themselves to narrate the story and for the most part this manages to steer the documentary away from the dreaded Discovery Channel clichés about One Small Step and Mans Greatest Adventure, even if at times it does come across a bit like Abe Simpson yammering earnestly about that time he went to the Moon.

The Krist Novoselic/Dusty Beard of the famous Apollo 11 triumvirate; Michael Collins, in particular proves himself to be exactly the kind of laconic old geezer one could happily listen to recant war stories after a few beers.

The film does not shy away from the politics of the era. The astronauts were well aware that while they were cocooned away in their NASA bubble, America was tearing itself apart over numerous assassinations, the Vietnam War and the fallout of the Civil Rights Movement. As the Apollo 8 and 13 veteran Jim Lovell states, 1968 was a horrible year. In leaving the Earth’s orbit and providing humanity with its first glimpse of how small and insignificant our home planet really is, they managed to salvage some of it. We didn’t so much discover the moon on that day. What we really discovered was the fragility of the Earth.

That famous photo by Bill Anders of Earthrise is still one of the most powerful images ever taken but in a way I am just as amazed by the almost chilling footage taken through the Apollo 8 Command Module window as the three explorers become the first to ever leave the blue planet behind them and head out into the big black.

As would be expected, much of the documentary is taken up with Apollo 11’s first landing on the moon. Far from being a smooth ride to the surface, the mission itself was a near disaster from the moment the lunar module uncoupled itself from Columbia.

With the radio transmissions flaking out and a guidance computer that had all but shit the bed, Armstrong and Aldrin were miles off target and heading into a boulder field with less than 25 seconds of fuel to save them from becoming permanent residents of the Sea of Tranquillity. The tension of those final moments is not dimmed despite the knowledge of the outcome. That the otherwise unknowable Neil Armstrong had what we came to know as the Right Stuff is not in doubt. On more than one occasion in this movie he is shown seconds, even milliseconds from death and his reaction is always unflappable.

Neil Armstrong has since become a strange old hermit who lives beyond the dune sea (Ohio in other words), and unsurprisingly he declined to be interviewed; yet he still dominates much of the conversation. This is probably for the best as in many ways he is a blank slate of a man who is best left to the imagination. When the archive footage does show him speak, it is in the faltering, hesitant manner of a person completely unused to speaking in public. He has one of the most famous names on the planet yet commendably he keeps to the shadows. What he could do was land that crate. Explaining how it felt is something he can’t or is at best unwilling to do. As an almost apologetic Collins states, the nerveless and logical mindset of the test pilot that allows one to fly and land a tin foil carton a quarter of million miles away from home are diametrically opposed to the artistic skills needed to convey how it feels to take part in such a momentous event.

One moonwalker, Alan Bean became a professional artist, albeit one who paints nothing but the grey dirty landscape of the Ocean of Storms, and a couple of the astronauts featured were affected enough by the experience to become full time Born Again God Botherers. (Mind you, the fact that Apollo 14’s Edgar Mitchell started and was later expelled from his own new age cult is very much glossed over.) As is reflected here, it’s not enough to show the easily bored public an engineering marvel and expect them to retain interest. They want to know how it feels, not how it works. How does it change a person? What’s it like to be able to hide everything you’ve ever known under your thumb? Why did some feel like they had an epiphany up there while others left with the nagging thought “Is that it?” rattling around their heads. The question: How does it feel to stand on the moon is maybe beyond even the sensitive Alan Bean’s reach. Just as Armstrong retreated to a life of quiet anonymity, his partner Aldrin has no qualms in talking about the depression and alcoholism that overtook him once he’d exited stage left. Others too, allude to the boredom they felt once the intense exhilaration of Apollo was behind them.

So what was the point? Apollo cost an annual 5% of the USA’s GDP at its height and apart from proving that man could go to the moon if he wanted to there seemed to be little else in it other than pride and pretty pictures for the public at large. In Apollo’s defense, unlike most of the past centuries’ famous events, Apollo presented a story about hope rather than tragedy or death and even with its steep price tag, it still cost a mere fraction of the disaster in Vietnam, with the added advantage that this was a race that the USA actually could and did win. There is a lovely anecdote by Michael Collins about how in every country he visited after the landings the people he met said, not “you did it” but “we did it”. Not just America, but the entire world felt like it had taken part. Even the French were suitably impressed. However the party line that this was a noble endeavour undertaken for all mankind is shot down by one lunar astronaut. As David Scott explains “it was really about beating the Russians”. Thanks to the rocks brought back we did find out the age and the origin of the moons birth but sadly just as the science was getting interesting, and a geologist had managed to hitch a ride up there, the money ran out and the show was over.

In a way common sense took over but with it came a certain timidity. These aging spacemen reflect an era and a people that to me seem braver and with a brighter vision for the future than the people we are today. As the Apollo 13 Commander, Jim Lovell, puts it:

“It was a bold move and it had some risky aspects to it, but it was a time when we made bold moves”

From what I’ve read, a lot of people seem to think Chris Smith is advocating the ideas put forward by his film’s subject, Michael Ruppert. I’m don’t really think so. Did he also believe the guy from American Movie was going to be the next big horror director? Why is the movie called “Collapse?”

If the film was intended as a mere platform for Ruppert’s views, it would probably be less entertaining and Ruppert would come across less credibly. But Collapse is not a puff piece, it is a portrait of a madman. Maybe. Ruppert, like so many people today, like so many people since antiquity, believes that the end of the world as we know it is at hand. As I pointed out in my otherwise crappy 2012 review, we like to fantasize that the end is near because it means that we are part of the most important generation (especially if we have a chance to stop it). Also, we like to believe that the world couldn’t possibly go on without us, being too small-minded a species to distinguish between our individual mortality and the course of humanity. Back to Ruppert, who makes smoking look like the single most pleasurable activity on earth and who looks to be on the downside of middle age. If we are in the first stages of collapse, didn’t he just happen to come along at the perfect time? He spent the prime of his life at the very height of human civilization. Now, as he winds down his life, he gets to witness the most important and awesome events in human history. Finally, he’ll pass away knowing that, if humans survive at all, they will spend centuries in desperate and primitive squalor, revering the mythical golden age in which he lived.

From here you can plug in the apocalyptic fantasy of your choosing. 2012, Nostradamus, UFOs, Lizard People, global warming. Well, the record does scratch on that last one, doesn’t it? Because global warming seems to be a reality. That is the flip-side of the end-times fantasy: inevitably one generation of doomsayers will be correct and they might come pretty soon. Ruppert makes a pretty good case for his generation and viewpoint, most importantly the “peak oil” scenario, being the ones to finally hit the mark with their revelations.

Part of his appeal, and the appeal of the film, is that Ruppert is on the borderline of credibility and you can’t dismiss him off the bat, but no intelligent person (this seems to exclude other movie reviewers) would accept his claims at face value. The film’s prologue tells us that the filmmakers were making a film about CIA involvement in domestic drug dealing when they met Ruppert and became sidetracked by him and his worldview. His first foray into the fringe came when he was an LAPD officer in the late seventies and early eighties. Ruppert claims he was approached by the CIA to help move drugs on his beat in South Central. While I know fuck all about peak oil, this is an issue I’ve looked at and take it from me, some random guy on the internet, there is a very strong case to be made that the CIA was indeed involved in the cocaine trade in order to finance their wacky adventures in Latin America. If the smuggling did happen, Ruppert would be a prime subject to recruit into the program because both of his parents worked in the intelligence community at fairly high levels. So much so, he says, that while working for the LAPD he discovered that he had a high security clearance, given to him in childhood as a formality because his dad was so frequently involved in secret activity, and never taken back. Ruppert, who had graduated from UCLA with honors and was valedictorian of a police academy class of 1,100, blew the whistle and saw his career crumble and, he says, his life put in jeopardy.

That was the turning point for Ruppert and is the crux of the film. His story holds decent credibility, as he is obviously not insane, he gained nothing and lost everything by his decision to blow the whistle and his story fits in with other accounts of what was happening in LA at the time. If his story is true, it is evidence that he is an honest guy of substantial integrity. Whether it is true or not, this is the point at which Ruppert made the permanent shift from a highly promising young cop, poised to uphold the status quo, to a fringe critic of the same.

Ruppert’s credibility rests largely on that integrity, along with what he describes as a gift for critical thinking. He is not a PhD, but some of his initial, freelance articles were up to the standards of The LA Times. His credentials, though not overwhelming, support the impression he gives of just being a very sharp minded person. His theories and analysis are rarely esoteric, nor totally original, but they are pretty complex and he hits one of the key markers of someone who knows their shit cold, be it Chomsky or Friedman: the ability to explain viewpoints based on complex theories and realities in plain terms. Finally, we see Ruppert break down emotionally at a couple of points, which I think is also critical. No doubt, part of this due to his personal collapse and the long struggle to be heard. But if you listen to the preponderance of nutjobs, and listening to nutjobs is kind of a hobby of mine, you can sense that they don’t really believe what they are saying. They are living fantasies about lizzard people, aliens and Jesus. But their emotional states don’t correspond to their purported beliefs. If you really believe in an impending alien invasion, you don’t spend most of the day watching “Three’s Company” reruns, hit Burger King, then go online and chat about the how the alien invasion has already begun for 45 minutes before a peaceful nights sleep. If you really think your unsaved friends and relatives will literally be tortured forever, why are you less concerned than you would be if you knew one of them was driving drunk? The inconsistencies are due to the fact that all of these people are role playing, but that does not seem to be the case for Ruppert. He believes what he is saying, and has shaped his life around it.

I guess the substance what Ruppert actually believes must be addressed. The essence of the “peak oil” theory is that, given that oil is a finite resource, we will begin to run out of it at some point. Once we pass the peak of oil production, shit will hit the fan. Ruppert points out that we are dependent on oil for far more than fuel. All plastics are made from oil. It takes 7 gallons of oil to make one tire. All industrial fertilizers are derived from fossil fuels. You get the idea. Someday–arguably yesterday–we are going to begin the process of running out of our most important resource (besides precious children, of course). There are strong indications that this is already underway, including the fact that the Saudis, sitting on top of 25% of the world’s oil supply, refuse to make their reserve estimates public, but have begun cost-intensive off-shore drilling. The actions of a nation with a 50-year supply in their cheap, underground wells? Probably not. Logic dictates that if 25% of the world’s oil supply is starting to run out, the world’s oil supply is starting to run out. Solar and wind are the only viable alternatives for energy, according to Ruppert, but even these are not huge net-producers, once you account for all of the energy that goes into getting energy out of them. I looked up “peak oil” on wikipedia, and the counterarguments to the general tenets of the theory seem to amount to “hopefully it’s not as bad as all that.” Or in the words of philosopher king Homer Simpson, “That can’t be true. If it were, I’d be terrified.”

As an armchair economist I can point out something right away. Even if we are ultimately unable to replace oil in our civilization, the breadth of its use should mean a slower decline than Ruppert figures. There is a ton of shit made out of plastic, for example, that doesn’t really have to be. We should see glass coke bottles and metal laundry hampers long before we see food shortages in Los Angeles. As the price of oil based fertilizer goes up it seems likely that some kind of alternatives will emerge. Given that beef production is hugely inefficient in terms of produce in and produce out, for example, as fertilizer prices multiply, beef could become a luxury item and most of us will have to learn to like tofu.

Not that I really know what I’m talking about. More importantly, the film does not succeed or fail with the details of Ruppert’s ideas, though it must be pointed out that there is film of him discussing the impending collapse of the derivatives markets about a year before it happened. But his most interesting points are the generalities. Why should the sudden explosion in human population, which correlates perfectly with our figuring out how to use oil, end any differently than the explosions animals experience when they discover a massive new food source, devour it and then see a population crash? His economic criticisms are essentially Marxist: capitalism is predicated on infinite growth, but nothing grows infinitely. Certainly the hubris of capitalism’s advocates is unjustified. Assuming you actually read and stuff, how many times have you seen someone write off the Marxist prediction because we survived the depression. Well, shit, anything that lasts 150 years and only comes to the brink of total collapse a couple of times is certain to last forever, right? I’d boil down Ruppert’s general point to the observation that a our population is expanding, and our energy use is expanding even per capita, and our economy is becoming evermore about infinite expansion, largely on paper; while our growth and consumption cannot go on forever and contraction will be jarring at best, and more likely catastrophic.

Equally interesting to me, is the general profile of Ruppert I’ve tried to convey. As I said, I love nutjobs, be they authentic wackos like Holocaust-deniers and UFO people or radical philosophers who I might wind up agreeing with. Mostly, this is because it’s much more fun to read a tenured professor seriously proposing a shift to capitalistic, syndo-anarchism, than to read some shills quibble about the public option. Ruppert is so interesting because he seems to cover all of the bases. Bright, articulate and not crazy, but overly invested in his conclusions. He has unusual ideas, but his fundamental world view is not totally divorced from convention. He seems a bit damaged, but not unhinged. The bottom line is that you can watch him talk for about 90 minutes straight without a moment of boredom.

Planet Earth – Nature filmmaking was redefined by this blockbuster, the result of naturalists and zoologists being given unprecedented funding and time to capture film of the world’s last remaining wild places. As a supreme ode to the beauty of this lonely planet, it is unparalleled. As a vehicle for dramatic stories about what animals must do to survive in the unforgiving natural world, it is genuinely moving. And as the largest canvas for the most beautiful cinematography ever filmed, it is flawless. Though the hype surrounding the project was deafening, and the merchandising inescapable, it pays to return to Planet Earth with fresh eyes to consider just how much work went into the shots that made it onscreen. David Attenborough performs the narration and unifies the work with the larger view that our planet is very much taken for granted. A much-overused phrase to be sure, but at a time when human capacity to change the world is unsurpassed, we scarcely understand the long-term effects of our current policies and activities. That industry places all of the visually stunning vistas on display here in jeopardy is beyond question. What the series forces the viewer to ask is, what else is placed at risk? Society has difficulty weathering a relatively small stock market crash; what would occur if the natural resources we depend upon are pushed beyond their ability to withstand us? There has been no better series for considering our place in the world, and the crossroads that we have reached.

Atom - Another bit of brilliant storytelling as Professor Jim Al Khalili approaches the baffling subject of the atomic and subatomic world from a historical perspective. As he reviews the development of atomic theory from traditionalists like Einstein to the mind-boggling theories of Heisenberg and Bohr, the documentary is peppered with choice anecdotes. For example, Boltzman conceived of atoms to develop equations to explain the behavior of steam, an experimental afterthought resulted in the proof that atoms are almost entirely empty space, and that Erwin Schroedinger was inspired to theorize that a particle was a wave after he spent a week wearing out some Austrian whore. Khalili has a gift for expressing atomic and subatomic theory in a way that is accessible to those unused to thinking in terms of mathematical equations. This task is nothing to sniff at since Heisenberg noted that it is impossible and intellectually dishonest to even attempt to form a visual picture of an atom or its fundamental particles. In fact, it was Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle that conceptualized the view that pure math is the only way to understand the subatomic world. And so this would hold true for the intergalactic world as well. Sit back and enjoy as you learn about how solid objects do not actually exist as we think of them, and that we are a cloud of particles defined not by position or speed, but by probability and equations.

Blue Planet: Seas of Life – There will be a lot of David Attenborough on this list, it would seem. For good reason, since his efforts have yielded the best shot and most thoughtful considerations of the natural world. In Blue Planet, the vast ecosystems of the ocean are examined by system; the sterile open ocean, the largely unknown deep, the rich coral seas, the variable and adaptive tidal seas. Though individual species take center stage, the systematic approach avoids the pitfall so common to nature films: having too narrow a view. All exist within a system, and one that is carefully balanced. The Deep chapter in particular is edifying in its look at a habitat that has been explored less than the moon, with new species discovered on each dive. Deep ocean vents shooting water as hot as molten lead (but still liquid due to the pressure) are encrusted by a riot of organisms, all living in total independence of the energy of the sun. A glimpse of early Earth, perhaps. There is so much content in this series that its rewatchability is absurdly high.

Earth: The Biography – Watching Professor Iain Stewart wax poetic about the forces that shaped the Earth is akin to a Euro discussing the greatest sport in the world – you would have to lack a pulse to avoid being caught up in his joy for the subject. Covering topics as vast and complex as air (atmosphere), water (oceans), fire (volcanism), and ice is no mean feat, but Dr. Stewart burns through these with great speed in a way that ties the systems together. The visuals are remarkable, and more than justify investing in a hi-definition player. Most of all, this is a pure educational experience, and one that bears rewatching. The deft explanation for how the ocean currents and the deep ocean conveyor work together to cycle oxygen to the deep and nutrients to the surface to make those oceans highly productive is not to be missed. Indeed, the chapter on water connects solidly with climate change literature to suggest that the deep ocean conveyor can be shut off rather easily, and once this happens the oceans will become incapable of sustaining life in large amounts. Considering this is where the human species gets much of its food and half of its oxygen, that is an arresting conclusion.

Ocean Odyssey – Using both actual footage and computer animation, the life cycle of the elusive Sperm Whale is examined in this well-executed work by the team from Walking With Dinosaurs. The incorporation of CGI is seamless, and essential for never-photographed details like a battle with a giant squid, or the whale’s use of a sonar unit powerful enough to knock a diver unconscious. The documentary covers the birth and development of the young whale, how it learns to hunt, the way they breed and communicate, their transglobal migration, and eventual death. There are details provided about how humans have impacted their habitat with overfishing and whaling, but fortunately these are not terminal tangents that would rob the feature of its focus. It suggests an optimistic future for this and the other great whales for their adaptability, perhaps in a way that will take advantage of global warming in ways other animals cannot.

Life in Cold Blood – Unlike his series about the oceans or Mammals, Attenborough’s Life in Cold Blood has a difficult task to be accomplished without the help of photogenic animals. The cold-blooded animal groups of amphibians, snakes, toads, and crocodiles are viewed with a distinct lack of romance by our species. That we reserve the term ‘reptilian’ for the most detestable among us says it all. Nonetheless, the film crew manages to capture moments that are nothing less than spectacular, and dispels the many general myths people hold about cold-blooded animals. Mammals and birds consume more than 90% of their intake to maintain their body temperature, so reptiles and amphibians are far more efficient. Their behavior is complex, their adaptability surprising, and their ability to survive may be far greater than their warm-blooded cousins.  Snakes that fly, crocodiles that carefully nurture their young, and a lizard that mourns its fallen mate will change the way you think about these animal groups. They are in no way primitive; indeed their very existence suggests their equality with us on the evolutionary scale.

The Story of Maths – Though a ponderous subject, if you are not of a mathematical bent, the theory behind maths can be fascinating when explained by a master of the form. This series looks at the history of mathematical systems and how they evolved through history, driven by practical need and intellectual curiosity. Professor Marcus du Sautoy covers the history of how systems of math are developed, and his passion for the subject is infectious. The ancient Egyptians needed to come up with a way to predict the Nile floods for farming purposes, as well as to measure land and calculate taxation. The number system borne of this need was used to create fractions, a binary system that predated computers by 3000 years, geometric series, and the use of pi. The Babylonians developed a number system based on 60, as it was easy to divide, and recognized the use of place values. Pythagoras developed a theorem (the name of which escapes me) and was a part of developing the system of mathematical and geometric proofs that is still used today. Most importantly, he proposed (inspired by the work of blacksmiths striking anvils) the harmonic series to understand music, and that the universe itself was subject to mathematical laws. This was a stepping stone to theoretical physics whereby math has been used to predict the existence of exoplanets, the existence of certain fundamental particles, and the presence of supermassive black holes. And so forth. Never has math been presented in such a clear and relevant way.

Nature’s Most Amazing Events – The focus here is not on a particular animal or ecosystem, but on a remarkable event that occurs at the intersection between opportune weather, available resources, and the massive migrations of animals that move to take advantage of same. Though there is some educational value in how these tremendous events occur, really this is an excuse to show off your hi-definition player. The sound is powerful, the visuals are unmatched by anything outside of the Planet Earth documentary, and the drama is worthy of a master storyteller. The two most impressive chapters focus upon the unique world where the desert becomes a swamp teeming with life in the Okavango Delta, and the rare but intense Sardine Run off the coast of South Africa. The Okavango Delta becomes a haven for animals that will cross miles of inhospitable desert to take advantage of the brief bonanza that gathers; for a herd of elephants, their survival depends upon it during this dramatic passage. The Sardine Run culminates in a cloud of sardines visible from a mile in the air, attacked from every quarter by the largest army of predators on the planet. More accomplished visual poetry that this does not exist.

Besieged Fortress – Disaster movies get this resounding answer from the nature film genre as a seemingly unstoppable phalanx of driver ants descend upon a termite mound in Burkina Faso. Though the termite mound has a defense, they are hopelessly outmatched and their queen is helplessly immobile. Though one is not predisposed to caring about the survival of an insect, the drama that is set up by this efficiently paced and cleverly plotted tour de force will grab hold of you nonetheless. It is possible that some of the shots were tampered with by the filmmaker, but considering how well this story is told, who gives a shit?

Life After People – One of the more engaging thought experiments of the decade; if people disappeared, what would happen to the Earth and to the things we have left behind? How quickly would entropy claim our tremendous successes? Quite quickly, as it turns out. This well done and exhaustively researched work (based in part on Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us) speaks volumes toward our species-centric view of our world, and our relative insignificance. Though humankind wreaks havoc upon the biosphere and the future of virtually any species living in the wild, the Earth itself and any flora or fauna that manage to survive our last throes would get along swimmingly without our presence, and scrupulously remove any trace of our existence within 100,000 years. A cough in the history of our planet. Try to guess what actually might survive. This was presented both as a single film and a series.

Meerkat Manor – This became a cultural phenomenon in 2005, much to everyone’s surprise. It turns out that suricates have a family dynamic as involving as a soap opera, and for the Whiskers clan, the danger afforded by the Kalahari provided a tense atmosphere in which the tale unfolded. Unlike in fiction, none of these characters are protected by an author, and the predators that watch carefully from the scrub are indifferent to the narrative. This brought an unnerving unpredictability to what would otherwise be saturated by anthropomorphizing bullshit. There is some educational value to this, but its strongest asset is its ability to suck you in to the daily bustle of a group of animals with remarkably complex behavior. What is most shocking is how emotionally involving it can be – and if you watched this all the way through and did not shed a tear or two along the way, you are made of stone.

The Universe – There is no larger subject that could be tackled, but the impressive array of planetary scientists, astronomers, and physicists are game enough. The Universe makes it cool to be a geek again with an overpowering series that injects immense amounts of Whoa into every single episode. Detailed and intricate, yet accessible to a layman, this series addresses subjects of more than a purely intellectual interest. The first season dealt largely with the solar system, bristling with fun facts like how Earth’s magnetic field is the only reason we still have an atmosphere (unlike Mars), Jupiter has a core of solid Hydrogen metal, and that Neptune’s distance from the sun is what allows it to have 1,000 mph winds. The subsequent seasons leapt even further off the map, considering Dark Energy, the ways in which the Earth can be destroyed, the life cycle of a star and the odd phenomenon of the neutron star. Even if you feel the subject matter is alien to you, the elation of the scientists who provide intuitive models for understanding rather strange concepts will rub off on you. Another fun fact: if you fell on a neutron star, you would be converted to a pure lump of neutrons. Awesome.

Winged Migration – One of the most visually arresting films ever made, Winged Migration departs from the standard model of nature films by having relatively little narration, and providing information with images when possible. This is to its credit, as this is a feature to be appreciated in silence. The vast clouds of birds swooping with the wind currents, the storm of gannets dive bombing into the water, and the impossibly distant migrations of geese create unforgettable images. Another fascinating aspect that made Winged Migration unique was the filmmaker’s direct involvement in the film and resulting manipulation of the action. In order to capture some of the images, the crew filmed a group of geese that were being trained to locate their nesting grounds with an ultralight aircraft. The birds were shot from a distance of mere feet, allowing shots that will likely never be made again. This has been a source of criticism, but again the goal was not perfect realism, but achievement of ideal cinema. Once a subject is photographed, one cannot claim it was untouched in the process.

Charles Darwin and The Tree of Life – In a way, this is reflective of not only the life and impact of Charles Darwin and his unifying theories of biology and evolution, but also reflective of the presenter, whose name is synonymous with the nature film. David Attenborough reviews the history of how Darwin came to realize the connection between all living things going back to one remote ancestor. Visuals are interspersed with footage of Attenborough discussing some zoological item of interest from thirty years prior. Subtly, this gives shading to the importance of the theory over the last 200 years. After all, without this quantum leap, there would have been no understanding of the relationship between animals, plants, bacteria, and whatever the current planetary population may yet evolve into. Nature films tend to be static despite themselves, as a snapshot in time. The Tree of Life makes clear that we are on a continuously moving arrow through time, and our actions have powerful impacts upon this tree’s branches. It is a fitting tribute to one of the most extraordinary minds in science, and the difficulty he faced amidst ignorance and superstition in bringing this knowledge to humankind.

March of the Penguins – Its popularity resulted in some backlash, thanks in no small part to a contempt for the opinions of the herd, for Oscar, and for that stupid anthropomorphizing voice over by Morgan Freeman. Like any nature film or documentary not presented by someone who is an expert in the field, it is best to turn the volume off and play something else in the background. For the visuals alone this film deserves to be considered with the best of the decade. The extraordinary difficulty of shooting footage during winter in Antarctica (where gasoline itself becomes a jelly and exposed human flesh freezes in seconds) by itself brushes aside any objections to this masterful examination of the survival instinct. Luc Jacquet edits the footage to create a story about what a species must do to simply exist from one year to the next, the meager rewards, and the impossible risks that are taken. Anyone who felt this movie was about cute penguins and their cuddly offspring read way too much Nietzsche.

If We Had No Moon – An intriguing intellectual exercise whereby eminent astronomers consider what would happen if Earth had no moon; indeed, the foremost question is why such an unusual event occurred. It is suspected that Earth evolved simple life even before the Cambrian period, with a deep global ocean that drowned the land as the early solar system began to settle. Earth’s smaller cousin Orpheus also evolved life, but their orbits were too close, and they smashed into one another, eradicating life and creating a molten ball of fractured mantle and gas. The Earth settled, and the debris around it coalesced into the Moon, and so the only planet in the solar system with a relatively large moon came to be. As it turns out humans owe their existence to the moon. If not for Orpheus, the Earth would still be a vast ocean devoid of terrestrial life. The Moon itself stabilizes Earth’s orbit, seasons, and temperature. The chaotic orbit and tilt that Earth would have without its moon would make the development of intelligent life difficult to impossible as we imagine it. Overall an engaging documentary that brings into sharp relief just how precarious our existence truly is.

Hate nature?  Check out Matt’s best docs of the decade.

Hate everything?  Check out Matt’s worst docs of the decade.

Hubert Selby Jr: It’ll be Better Tomorrow, is a solid film about a writer I’ve never read but would probably like.  He dropped out of school after the 8th grade and became a merchant marine during WWII and therefore a drunk.  We’re told that he only turned to writing after narrowly escaping death and being debilitated by TB.  Selby’s most famous book was Last Exit to Brooklyn which sold a bunch of copies, largely because of two idiotic obscenity trials.  He made a bunch of money and squandered it on drugs before rebuilding his life, continuing to write and becoming a popular teacher at USC.  The part of the film that actually sets out to tell his story does so quite well.

However,  about a third of the film irritated the fuck out of me, not because of unusual sins, but because of typical ones found in the biographical doc.  If you’ve watched any number of “Real Men of Genius” documentaries such as Sketches of Frank Gehry, or Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes; Crazy Sexy Cool you’ve seen the breathless fawning and hyperbole and, depending on the time in which the person lived, the celebrity hob-knobbing and circle-jerks.  Look, Henry Rollins has injected himself into the situation in act of self-promotion number 10,000.  Here’s Anthony Kiedis for no reason.  Selby overcame a drug addiction, so let’s get Robert Downy Jr. to narrate.  That’s how good a writer Selby was.  Huh?

The truth about greatness is that it’s a matter of increment, rather than orders of magnitude.  This is most clear in more objective endeavors like sports.  The most commonly cited example is golf, where one stroke separates Tiger from the field and the field from the club pros.  I like the example of football though–bear with me you unclean foreigners.  Football is a multi-billion dollar industry and meticulously scouted athletes conform to a narrow range of physical attributes.  You can rule out 99.99% of the population from a given position just by watching them run ten feet.   Yet the differences between the greatest of all time and the home town heroes are so subtle that you could build a team almost exclusively of first tier, all-time greats who weren’t even noticed by college scouts and wound up at barely-known programs.  Build an offense around Walter Payton, Jerry Rice, Randy Moss, Jackie Slater, Larry Allen, Gene Upshaw and a properly sedated Terrell Owens and you’re in pretty good shape.  Steve McNair is probably your quarterback and though, he’s “only” a borderline hall of famer, he wasn’t even a Dvision I player and your team would still score 80 points per game.  Yet nobody could tell that any of these guys were good enough to play for Iowa.

Within the arts and academics, where success is more subjective, greatness is just as hard to spot and narrowly achieved.  You probably know that Confederacy of Dunces was only published under improbable circumstances after the author committed suicide as a failure.  There must be hundreds of such books that were never discovered. Marconi and Tesla tied on inventing the radio.  Leibniz and Newton tied on inventing calculus.  A bunch of other people would have also tied with them, except they died at age seven because they crapped in their drinking water.  Only a handful of living filmmakers will be remembered through the centuries, but nobody really has a clue which ones.  Will future generations believe that Sokurov is ten times better than Scorsese?  Will there be hundreds of professors specializing in “The Simpsons” or “The Wire” who look down their nose at film from this era?  Will Hubert Selby Jr. be completely forgotten? It all seems possible.

Again I don’t have a huge problem with the strictly biographical elements of this film and the footage chosen of Selby.  Nor is my argument that the great people who are separated by timing, chance and marginally better ability are any less great or interesting because of it.  In fact, the things that make up those little differences are far more interesting than the scenario of the typical hagiography, wherein the genius is a comic book hero.  If some people just popped out of the womb with IQs of 300 and the ability to throw a 180 MPH fastball, their stories would quickly become boring.  Warranted hagiography is fine, but what are the nuances and idiosyncrasies that allowed the subject to shine?  Selby talks about his style, but only briefly.  There has to be more to say about the man and his work that could be included at the expense of cameos testifying to his freakish genius.

In fact, with rare exceptions, other celebrities should usually be excluded from these films.  Anyone who’s ever listened to a DVD commentary knows the mechanism at work here.  Celebrities, though usually talented and deserving, have still just scraped past other talented and deserving and people to achieve their status.  Insecure and unwilling to face this fact, they establish a tacit contract whereby all parties wildly exaggerate each others ability.   Maybe the producers casting the voice of ALF thought it was a coin toss between the guy who got it and the next guy at the time.  But now, we can see that he was unbelievably fucking brilliant!  I’m not saying that Selby is the same as the ALF guy, but I did want to throw up when an actress from the film of his Requiem For A Dream declared that the chance to give voice to his words was “one of the great gifts of my life.”

The best part of the contract is that even those giving out the blowjobs benefit.  Not only is there the understanding that they too will be blown down the line (the guy who did the voice of ALF will talk about the stunning vision of the producers of ALF),  there is the implication that they have earned the right to understand and opine on the genius by being brilliant themselves.  Why is Richard Price in a film about Selby for like fifteen minutes?  So he can say, “Hubert Selby is a Genius.  I ought to know… I’m Richard Price.”  And Michael Jordan loves Ball Park Franks.  They plump when you cook ‘em!  Obviously Rollins, who is a genius at tricking people into believing he’s not an idiot, is the more gratuitous example.  But it’s specifically because I’m fine with Price that I mention him.  I know Price deserves a spot on the totem pole that is invisible from my own.  But, apart from perhaps a few words on Selby’s influence, that has absolutely nothing to do with Selby the man. Long after it’s explained to we uninitiated why Selby was great and what he did, we still hear from Price and the like.  Give me more from his students at USC.  His mailman.  Hell, maybe the guy himself.  There’s a decent amount of footage with Selby, but seeing as he is the subject of the film, maybe he should be in it more than Darren Aronofsky.

Apart from just being fed up with this hagiography approach in general, I think it irked me so much in this particular film because Selby comes across as unbelievably modest and unconcerned with stratification of status.  He wasn’t a monk, but it seems like if he knew a film was being made about Robert Downy Jr, it would never even occur to him to involve himself.  When he called for a job at USC he wasn’t sure they’d have one for him because he never seemed to realize that, according to one testimony, there should be a wing of the Harvard library named in his honor.   So I doubt he’d believe that his legacy is best conveyed via celebrity endorsements.

The basic facts of what happened are clear enough.  Five boys in their late teens went to a backyard “fort” where two other boys hung out and stored, maybe sold, pot.  One boy waited in the car while the others went to the fort.  A fight broke out and one or more of the boys from the larger group stabbed the two friends, killing one and hospitalizing the other.

The film takes a strong editorial stance that the boys who were charged were treated unfairly, and that the police officer who was father to the murdered boy, manipulated the criminal justice system to that end.  Also, it’s a piece of shit.  The distortions begin almost immediately with the caption “Agoura Hills, California: 50 Miles North of Los Angeles.”  This is true, in the sense that Agoura Hills is ten miles North of Los Angeles, thirty miles North of downtown.  The film further distorts matters with tactics like emphasizing unsubstantiated statements by defendants.  One kid, Brandon Hein, didn’t even know that the actual murderer or murderers had knives with them.  He didn’t even know anybody had been stabbed until well after the fact. How do we know this and why is it repeated several times?  Because he said so.

Most of the facts of the case and the perspectives of prosecutors are presented, though reluctantly.  Initially we get Alan Dershowitz’s characterization–that a fight broke out between teenagers and somebody wound up getting stabbed.  This is the impression we are left to hold.  Now, this is bad enough.  I mean, teenagers fight all of the time without anybody getting stabbed.  The reason that there is usually not a stabbing, is that no one pulls out a knife and sticks it into the person they are fighting.  Let’s take a step back, as the film never does, and consider that the kids who were stabbed were outnumbered four to two by the kids who were attacking them.  You can make whatever “heat of the moment” arguments you like, but it is critical–and never discussed, that 1) The perpetrators initiated the conflict and 2) They did so with a two to one numbers advantage.  Yet, 3) they still wound up stabbing not one, but both of the boys they were attacking.

While these facts are evident in the film, they are never presented in an organized way because that is a pretty tough scenario to finesse.  Rather, the film tries to convince us that the stabbings were borderline self-defense, focusing on a smaller version of events within the larger scenario.  The chief aggressors were brothers, Micah and Jason Holland.  Micah was being punched out within the conflict, so Jason stabbed Mike McLoren, the boy who was beating up his brother.  Then Jimmy Farris attacked Jason , who  stabbed Farris fatally.  The details of the stabbings are withheld until more than an hour into the film, when it is finally revealed that Jason stabbed Mike three times (lacerating his liver, as you can find out from wikipedia), and Jimmy twice, puncturing is heart, though he would claim the stabbings were an accident.  The fact that it was only a two inch blade is mentioned far more often than the five, separate stab wounds to two different boys who never presented lethal force when attempting to defend themselves.  This is because we are meant to believe that a two inch blade is about equivalent to a bee-bee gun.  Maybe not even that.  Hey, these kids were practically throwing water balloons.  Should you go to jail for throwing a water balloon?

If the stabbings were part of a robbery, the killing, of course, becomes first degree murder and all participants are guilty of it via the felony murder rule.  Certainly, a contributing factor to the judgment that this was a robbery, was the fact that the boys committed another robbery, literally on the way to the “fort.”  They stole a woman’s pocket book from her car, though it turned out not to have money. The woman followed and confronted the boys but was scared off, as the boys threatened her and fled again, allegedly hitting her car in the process (the final detail comes from wikipedia, not the film, again).  The film even goes so far as to include implications that the woman is at fault here, initiating a dangerous, “high speed chase” of the boys who robbed her.  Within half an hour, the boys approached the fort to acquire pot–either by stealing it or having acquired a sudden aversion to robbery.  If it was not a robbery, how did the fight break out? The Hollands and their friends had come to give Jimmy and Mike money, but Jimmy and Mike decided they would rather be on the wrong end of a two-on four fight than make some easy cash?  Though the film repeatedly presents an the assertion that this was somehow not a robbery, it never gives an alternate theory.  It also seems unlikely that any of the boys went to the fort not knowing why they were going there, which is the assertion given most often in the film.

I have only a bit to contribute as an “insider” to the case.  I didn’t know any of the people involved well and, at the time of the murder, had no clue who the dead boy, Jimmy Farris was.  I can say, with certainty, that the Holland brothers were no strangers to fighting.  Jason was in my fourth grade class and threw a chair at our teacher.  This was not an isolated incident.  So I’m sure that the film is correct in asserting a rough upbringing for the Holland boys.  In any case, the pattern of violence and fighting was established early on and nobody mistook them for cream puffs later.  The filmmakers talked to one student–a half witted blond chosen at random–and one teacher to paint the Hollands and the others as good boys.  The prosecutor’s allegation that they were a neighborhood menace is never investigated beyond that.  I can’t say if these kids were a general menace or not–other than that they never bothered me.  But I do think it is relevant that they were experienced fighters.  They had to know what they were doing.  The stabbings were not the result of a sheltered child or a nerd flying into a panic in his first taste of physical conflict.

There is no doubt that the prosecution went overboard in the case.  They sought fist degree murder charges for all of the boys including Tony Miliotti who, by all accounts, never threw a punch. The prosecution successfully portrayed the boys as belonging to a gang, though the judge ruled that they could not do so.  They seem to have coaxed testimony from the boy who survived the stabbing and withheld the fact that he was given immunity from drug charges.  In fact, they told the jury that he was risking those charges by testifying, knowing that they had already given him immunity from them.  Despite protests to the contrary, the LAPD father of the victim was a factor in pursuing, and getting, life without parole for three of the boys and 29 years for Micah Holland, who was fifteen at the time of the killing.   Brandon Hein–who was a marginal figure in the actual fighting was among those to get life, certainly an unfair sentence.   Mike Valardo, the boy who waited in the car while the attack took place, wound up serving about five years.

But it seems to me that the law allowing for such things–which it clearly does–is the greatest instance of immorality.  As severe as the crimes are, does a teen guilty of a fatal stabbing in a small time robbery deserve life without parole?  Does the teen standing behind him?  Is it worth paying $50,000 a year to keep them locked up?  The scattered and biased approach of the film doesn’t really do favors to anyone.  If you are familiar with the case, or take a minute to consider the information objectively, it comes off as prejudiced and unreliable.  With so much time wasted quibbling over details and obfuscating facts, there was plenty of room for a compelling, fair-minded film.  Rather than diminishing the magnitude of this particular crime, the film could have included three or four similar cases, asking that we reevaluate harsh sentencing in general and the felony murder law in particular, and reign in overzealous prosecutors.  Instead, it’s just a waste of time. About which I wrote a 1500-word review.

The illusion of the traditional farmer has been very useful from a marketing perspective, as every imaginable food product will have a picture of happy animals and good, honest, hard-working farmers bringing sustenance to the world while handling the family business. Thanks to the great distance between the consumer and how their food is produced, this remains a quaint and accepted illusion. Upton Sinclair noted that he was aiming for America’s heart when he wrote The Jungle, and ended up hitting it in the stomach. His disgusting depiction of hog killing floors as dangerous places where the sausage was more likely to contain nutritionally blank potato flour, rats, and the occasional injured worker than any actual pork became a clarion call that resulted in legislation to ensure safe food and safer working conditions. Large businesses have been fighting such measures ever since, finding ways to increase efficiency and maximize profit, even if laws must be bent beyond the breaking point and traditional farmers must be squeezed out of their land and livelihood in order to do so. As the brilliant and entertaining new documentary Food, Inc. makes clear, the most important weapon that such corporations employ is the ignorance of the consumer. This is not necessarily the fault of the consumer, who enjoys deceptively low prices and must see through a fraudulent cloud of bullshit to figure out just where their food is coming from, who makes it, and what those business practices involve.

The film expertly redefines the new American farmer as “factory farming“, and that the independent traditional farmer is not only increasingly rare, but is being actively chased out of the business. Using genetically modified seeds, massive irrigation schemes, greenhouses (for plants out of season), vast shipping routes, industrial processing techniques, and psychological warfare in the form of marketing, incredible amounts of food can be processed annually in a fairly cheap fashion. Though this is touted as a success, there are many problems with the factory model. The food is cheap, but the giant farms receive subsidies ($25 billion annually), so in effect the food is already paid for. This functions to keep out food imports, but also serve to skew production toward the factory model. Apart from the unnecessary subsidies, the system is wasteful, with each food item traveling an average of 1500 miles before consumption. Food produced out of season requires enormous investment and resources, such as greenhouses and ethylene gas to ripen vegetables. Lastly, the system is a setup for epidemics as the food is handled in standardized fashion with contaminated machines, product being sent hundreds of miles away for more efficient spread. At the grocery checkout, the prices are affordable since those tax-funded subsidies have already been applied, so we are none the wiser. Organic farming does not benefit to the same degree, as these are usually smaller farms which receive the minority of subsides.

Vegetable farming has been unkind to traditional farmers, who have found their land becoming too expensive to lease, and the large companies to which they are contracted will demand constant upgrades that keep small farmers in debt (average debt of $500,000) and unable to negotiate or unionize. If a farmer does not wish to use genetically modified seeds, they may be in for a world of hurt. Monsanto, for example, has patented genetically modified soybeans that resist herbicides; thanks to a conservative Supreme Court ruling, if you attempt to clean the seeds for planting next year, you will be fined into bankruptcy. And if you do not use genetically modified seeds, Monsanto places you on a blacklist banning your ability to use their other products, harassing you with investigators (there is a team of 75 who prowl the fields across the United States), and if genetically modified plants spread to your field, then you just made Monsanto thousands of dollars richer. Not all of this is legal, but if you start or receive a legal suit, then the corporations simply outspend you. When the money is big enough, the law no longer matters.

Animal farming is even more ridiculous. Now that meat is a meal and a condiment, demand has skyrocketed, and companies like Tyson and Perdue occupy 80% of the meat market. They control the supply and set the rules for smaller meat farmers. The animals are genetically modified, live in tightly packed sheds in complete darkness, standing in a community pool of stool, and ingest antibiotics constantly. Chickens produce twice the meat they once did, and are killed twice as fast; with such a demand for breast meat, the chickens have breasts so big that the bones cannot hold them up, and they are unable to walk. The largest killing floor in the world is in Tar Heel, North Carolina, slaughtering 32,000 hogs per day. The amount of shit produced exceeds New York City’s output. Most of the labor is with illegal immigrants, with occasional raids on their company-sponsored sheds to give the appearance of adherence to labor laws. The meat is often contaminated despite the antibiotics, so a filler material has been designed that is made with ammonia that will make ground meat safe to eat despite the presence of E Coli 0157. Yes, they are adding ammonia to meat to make it edible.

Once the factory system showed the enormous profit margin of food production, there has been no looking back. Each problem with the model has inspired increasingly bizarre responses, such as use of antibiotics, ammonia, radiation, genetic modification, and bizarre feeding practices, but never a reevaluation of whether the system itself is a good idea in the larger picture. The system is expensive and wasteful to begin with, but there are additional hidden costs. For example, food is modified to maximize taste of salt, fat, and sugar; consequently diabetes and cardiovascular disease along with the attendant obesity have become epidemic, and the medications needed to treat these diseases are not considered part of the cheap grocery bill. They should be, since efficiency is useless if the costs are outsourced to taxpayers and pharmaceutical companies. Also, the cost of raising meat is cheap partly because the major food for livestock is corn. Cows, pigs, and chickens did not evolve to eat a corn-only diet, and so the animals become quite sick before they are killed. If a corn-fed cow is not slaughtered, they will actually die anyway within a few months of abscesses and other systemic infections. Also of note, corn-fed cows have overwhelming carriage of dysentery-causing organisms like hemorrhagic E Coli. If the cows start eating grass, the dysentery issues disappear.

The game is stacked heavily against not only the family farmer, but the consumer. Awareness of a company’s business practices is difficult, and so people have little understanding of how their food is made, and what the true cost is. They have no awareness of the cost of farm subsidies. The oversight has been gutted, with the FDA experiencing such staff and budget cuts that they have gone from 50,000 annual inspections in 1974 to 9,000 in 2006. The head of the FDA in the past decade has generally been a meatpacking CEO or some other goon who is the very picture of a conflict of interests. The USDA does not have the authority to shut down plants that repeatedly fail inspections, and apart from the occasional public outcry during an epidemic, there is little that can be done to companies that flout the laws.

Fortunately, Food, Inc. does have a glimmer of hope in how to approach the corporations that have achieved a stranglehold on the industry. To demonstrate the utility of knowledgeable buying power, Wal-Mart is presented as being part of the solution. I know, it confused the hell out of me too. Basically, the position of Wal-Mart is that only the money matters, and if the shoppers demonstrate that they want organic food produced in a sustainable fashion, then they will respond accordingly and stock their shelves with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of organic and sustainably grown food. This is in sharp contrast to the food producers who work to intimidate farmers and bribe legislators. Organic companies such as Stonyfield have become highly profitable. Small farmers such as the ones who have appeared in this documentary despite the likelihood that they will be sued and bankrupted for their efforts reveal what a true American hero is. Though venal politicians have been lobbied to emasculate regulatory agencies and appoint judges who side with Big Food on nearly every issue, they remain venal, and vulnerable to efforts to unseat them for their stupidity. Threatening your congressman and senator can be surprisingly helpful if you are persistent in your letters. The alternative is apathy, and that is why Big Food was able to successfully sue Oprah Winfrey for publicly insulting a food company. The work to fundamentally change the way food is made is considerable, but as long as one remembers that all of the power rests with the people who buy the food, everything else falls into place.

So, Food, Inc. is not only winning entertainment, but it will boil your blood from the first to last frame. Throughout, the director is careful to avoid giving the impression that we are completely fucked, and for once I share their hope. The green revolution, though not without its inconsistencies, has fundamentally changed how companies do business. Some companies are obstinate to these changes, but if Wal-Mart becomes a champion of organic foods, then just about anything is possible.

Steve Kudlow, known affectionately as “Lips” to the faithful, has reached the half-century mark of his otherwise unremarkable life, spending most of his time working for a catering company in the suburbs of Toronto. Despite his age, he maintains the defiantly unkempt hairstyle of youth, and during every waking moment, he is a slave to neither despair nor quiet resignation, but rather a near mystical level of vigor and optimism. Clinging to the sounds of a parade that has long since passed by (and never was that big to begin with), Lips has not yet put to bed the belief that his band, Anvil, a project he started at age 14 with lifelong friend (and drummer) Robb Reiner, will once again reach the pinnacle of the heavy metal world. Back in the heyday of the early 1980’s, Anvil toured the globe with the likes of the Scorpions, Whitesnake, and Bon Jovi, only to disappear without a trace for no conceivable reason. Other, less talented bands continued to curry favor with America’s youth, so why did Anvil die an all-too-typical musical death? How, then, did the teeming stadiums of yore become the sad, lonely bars of today? That is, when the bars are even returning phone calls.

Perhaps the world didn’t really need yet another documentary about pathetic dreams, dying hopes, and deluded rock stars who can’t give up the ghost, but in the case of Anvil! The Story of Anvil, the expected laughs and eye-rolls yield to genuine empathy, as we quickly dismiss all forced connections to Spinal Tap and the like (an actual “11” in a recording studio, as well as a trip to the real Stonehenge) and focus instead on the nature of true friendship. What other link, after all, should two people have than the fulfillment of a dream? So many flirtations of youth, bound by the trivia of shared loneliness, die violently upon reaching adulthood, as the light of new responsibilities diminishes the carefree contentment of having nowhere in particular to go. For Lips and Robb, the bonds of affection are maintained with almost effortless abandon, as neither one has ever really grown up. Sure, there are homes, wives, children, and yes, even jobs, but all appear to be mere distractions; roadblocks and irritants to be dispatched at a moment’s notice whenever the allure of the road beckons from afar. We never see a lick of evidence to suggest that these two men are anything but committed husbands and fathers (even if they could be better providers), but the moment they get that call, it’s a glow that not even badminton with the kids can replicate.

The central thrust of Anvil! is the resurrection of the band as they begin what amounts to a world tour, though these guys are traveling decidedly second class. They miss trains, get lost, and by all accounts, the tour “manager” (some odd chick they appeared to find in a chat room or something) is cutting her teeth on Anvil’s time. There’s a decent rock show here and there (Sweden is usually kind to heavy metal), but the standard gathering of fewer than a hundred all but defines this journey abroad. And when the band reaches Prague, the crowd is practically non-existent, an insult compounded by the fact that the club owner refuses to cough up payment. Not a dime, he says, citing their lateness as an explanation, even though he made no effort to keep them from hitting the stage. Lips’ confrontation with the visibly terrified deadbeat is tense and fascinating, until of course we understand that this is more the rule than the exception. As Lips kindly informs us upon reaching the States, the band mates are as broke now as they were before embarking on this trip, making it little more than a vacation from their actual jobs back home.

Still, did they really expect the red carpet treatment? Anvil, while pioneers in their own way (we hear from Lemmy, Slash, and Lars Ulrich testifying to their early influence), never resonated beyond a select few (“Metal on Metal” is damn catchy, but it ain’t “Peace Sells”). In fact, they just might own the distinction of having released the most albums without a single breakthrough. Still, someone was listening. I never cared for their music myself (I bought a single album, Pound for Pound, and quickly sold it to a used music store), and even here, they sound more like a ludicrous marriage of Savatage and Manowar, but as always, that’s not the point. We marvel at the grizzly, sagging visages that pepper the ever-dwindling crowds, but they’re true believers nonetheless; human beings who are moved, never mind the source. If it gets us through the day, should it matter? Men approaching Social Security still retaining their jean jackets, faded leather, and fist-pumping ways can invite ridicule, but when so many move through life with bitter, glassy-eyed indifference, it’s damn near inspiring to witness the power of music. Yes, even bad music.

Much of the real drama concerns the release of Anvil’s “long-awaited” album This is Thirteen. Unlike most recordings, though, the band has to front a UK rep 15,000 pounds to see it through, and not even then will a single sale appear on the horizon. Lips tries his hand at telemarketing to raise the cash, though he lasts but eight painful hours at the sort of place even Ricky Roma would dismiss as too depressing. Additionally, they must press the album themselves, bringing forth a shipment of boxes that, one expects, will be thrown into a crawl space at some point in the near future. Copies are mailed to various record companies, but only EMI Canada shows any real interest, and even then it’s likely a ploy just to get their logo in a film. The A&R man is polite to a fault, but no one in the room expects the conversation to go anywhere. The second the music starts, we all but hear the withering balloon sag in the corner. Lips and Robb might wish it were 1983, but tastes have moved on. It’s arguable whether or not they’ve progressed, but these are businesses in search of profit, not arbiters of artistic worth. At least the band has the internet to reach the previously unreachable fan base. Those boxes had better empty fast, however, given the money floated by Lips’ sister, as well as the tensions that resulted from the stressful recording sessions. Tears, outbursts, and threats emerged, but they never outshined the music.

At last, when Lips plays at a music festival and is more excited to meet his fellow metalheads-in-arms than anything he does on stage, we don’t mock his child-like enthusiasm; instead, we ask if we ourselves have ever expressed so basic an emotional release. Far from the sick fantasies of a lonely autograph hound, this is a man still pushed to the brink by the only thing he’s ever given two shits about. And if they are still playing at their age, why fade away into that good night? In the past, I’ve been the first to criticize the jock who won’t hang up the strap, or the rock god who insists on that one, final tour, but here, more than ever, I’ve come to realize that I’m in no position to judge. Simply put, I’ve never been so good at anything — so dedicated and immersed in a craft — that I’d ever have the opportunity to “move on.” Whatever it is I’d stop doing would hardly cause a disturbance, even in my own small world. Anvil! is that kind of movie: the half-cocked, demented old farts you thought you despised are actually the dudes you wished you could be. What Lips and Robb settle for — the average life — is the best most of us will ever attain, and we don’t even have the luxury of needing a reason to go shirtless at middle age while screeching drunks ask for more.

Appropriately, the whole thing ends up in Japan, where a capacity crowd welcomes the band back from an inappropriate oblivion. You can always count on the unhinged youth of Japan to set your career back on track, though this frenzied group could easily be the last for our metal gods. There’s talk of yet another album, Juggernauts of Justice, but I doubt sis will contribute a crumb until she sees her first nickel from the previous installment. No matter, as Anvil plays on. Just another band, roaming from job to job, without a single guarantee of another day to come. Here’s hoping they die at their post, hair flying about, with that ever-present vibrator sliding down that well-traveled guitar. Though only the cruelest universe would take them both at once. Leave one man standing, comes our plea, if only to allow the funeral to serve as that much-needed gig; that expected springboard to the bigger and the better just around the corner.

Jonathon Sharkey has a dream. It’s a typically American dream, and because it involves long odds, hard roads, and swimming against the proverbial tide, the first few moments of W. Tray White’s documentary could very well inspire even the most hardened political observer. Sharkey, you see, wants to be the Governor of Minnesota. It’s 2006, the war in Iraq is less popular than ever, change is in the air, and maybe, just maybe, in the same state that once sent Jesse Ventura to power, those quirky voters could once again buck tradition and sprinkle a little independence in the garden of predictability. It’s a script that practically cries out for Jimmy Stewart. Unfortunately, at least from the perspective of anyone who believed the man actually had a chance to win, Mr. Sharkey just happens to be a Satanic vampire. Who is sexually involved with his half-sister. And whose entire platform consists of believing he has the Constitutional right to execute anyone he wishes, especially those who have personally wronged him. And, as the title of the film so conveniently informs us, he’s known as “The Impaler.” What could go wrong? Ain’t this America?

Predictably, the film is less a journey through the gauntlet of political warfare than the onscreen unraveling of a genuine psychopath, the sort of man who, from the very first interview (and there were many after his bizarre announcement), appears on the verge of a very messy suicide. It’s not just that he’s fond of discussing his blood-filled diet, or even demonstrating how he rips at his own arm like a starving pit bull and offers it to his hungry female companion as if passing the stuffing at Thanksgiving; it’s his glassy-eyed, incoherent rambling that betrays the tortured madman within. As such, I waited patiently for the revelations to fall like bitter rain. After all, whenever we catch a snippet of a seemingly “private” phone call where the subject roars at his family with Jake LaMotta-like rage, or listen to a monologue about his otherwise unmotivated hatred of everything in, around, and throughout the state of Indiana (he calls it Iraqiana), we know we’re about to see a title card announcing a buried molestation charge. Indeed, Sharkey was raped by his father. As if that wasn’t enough to begin the tailspin, his mother threw him down a flight of stairs, a process that ended with a full body cast and years of pain. So what if Sharkey first told us he simply “fell.” Despite the favorable press, few come to Satan through good times and well-adjusted upbringings.

So while at first we might have been impatient with the smirking commentators (Tucker Carlson among them) who used their camera time to mock the poor man for his religious beliefs rather than actually find out what he stood for, it’s only a brief interlude until the rubber hits the room. From the wife (technically an “ex-”, though he won’t grant a divorce) who says he’s better known as “Rocky Adonis Flash” to the right-field lightning strike that he has a background in wrestling, the hits pile up so quickly that we half expect his kids to come forward with tales of humiliation and despair. Which they do. It seems dear old dad once choked his daughter and held a knife to her throat, which might have been excusable if he didn’t also dress like a woman, complete with a bra stuffed to the gills not with tissue, but honest-to-goodness man-boobs. Jonathon’s also wanted in Indiana on numerous charges including stalking, and it seems fitting that he’s arrested mere minutes after completing one of his typically surreal interviews. And, as if on cue, we learn that he once faked his own death, using his female “character” to send out emails to stunned friends and relatives. I’d like to think the whole ruse was simply to get out of paying taxes or something, but it appears he genuinely loves being a chick.

Down we go, further and further into this tale of garden variety insanity, when we are hit with the fact that the woman we think is a half-sister is nothing of the sort, and this “Kat” chick is actually Jonathon himself, so named because he wanted to resurrect the memory of his long dead sister. And through it all — the restraining orders, neck biting, and humorless rants about using the term “cloak” instead of the more pedestrian “cape” — we are left wondering why this creep fest was even made, as the tone never decides whether or not it is pro-exploitation or simply a commentary on our national obsession with fame. The latter is too obvious to warrant yet another self-righteous narrative, but at no point was a perspective given. Neither was a literal point of view, as half the film occurs in the sort of shadow that might be mistaken for a dark closet. We hear Mr. Sharkey, but where the hell is he? Fine, you can certainly use a cheap camcorder for a film few will see outside of the festival circuit, but whatever happened to the light of day? Add to that the frequent (and annoying) subtitle misspellings that ranged from the pathetic to the embarrassing, and you have an amateur hour that doesn’t even have the decency to be consistently hilarious. Sure, I chuckled a bit when the director interviewed a Sharkey son in front of a yard overrun with toilets, but the titters quickly vanished in favor of the discomfort one usually finds in a rambling essay about nothing in particular.

Maybe all we’re meant to be left with is the notion that naked ambition is quite frequently a mask for volcanic self-loathing, but even that’s too easy. Sure, politics is in fact show business for ugly people, but is the lust for power so inextricably tied to a deep-seated desire for personal revenge? Is it as much about “showing them” as craving a privileged perch by which to enact unimpeded justice? After all, Sharkey seems unconcerned about the possible resistance to his illegal executions, or even his rewards for those who committed crimes in our country’s name while serving in combat. But at the moment we think he’s Stalin in a Meatloaf wig, he’s browsing Home Depot for an impaling post. Even his expected training in the black arts is so inept that he’s utterly baffled by the task at hand. What’s left is less an instrument of torture than the beginnings of that long delayed fence repair. And, as if in need of a dash of credibility, the movie spends a good five minutes with old wrestling friends, now broken and battered mountain men, who love to show off the moves, though they’re not about to vote for a guy who doesn’t love Jesus. Maybe that will come when Jonathon runs for president, which the film announces did in fact occur in 2008. We’re even treated to a campaign commercial of sorts. I’m still waiting for the concession.

Not long ago I developed a fascination with the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), Pride Fighting and all other forms of the human cock fight. Until recently, I’ve held the Gracie family in a certain level of contempt. It is because of the Gracies that I initially became disillusioned with the UFC upon ordering an early pay per view event, back in the nineties. These fuckers were so good at submissions that they reduced every UFC fight to several minutes of almost gay porn, culminating in an arm bar and one dude, who looked like he was the result of genetic experiments involving silverback gorillas, tapping out to a Gracie, who looked like a place kicker. Although I admired the scrawny Gracies for effortlessly besting ogres, watching them in action was a bore. It was years before I checked back in with the UFC and learned that ultra-violence had been restored.

It was at this point that I began downloading Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fights wholesale. What joy I felt watching my favorite, Mirko “Cro Cop” reduce 900 pound, former NFLer Bob “the Beast” Sapp to a quivering pile of chocolate pudding with one devastating kick to the abdomen and nearly decapitating the mammoth, Alexander Emelianko. How I laughed with glee when Vitor Belfort dropped the ridiculously confident, gelatinous mollusk, Scott Ferrozzo. At some point I developed more of an appreciation for the submission style and began searching for Gracie clips. I discovered that the previously maligned by me Gracies had a video, available for download on limewire, called Street Fighting.

This video rocks for the simple reason that it does away with the usual pretenses behind “self defense” instructional. The notions that these techniques are meant for spiritual fulfillment or only as defensive measures are completely dispensed with. The instructor introduces the first technique by saying, “Now let’s suppose that you decide that this guy needs to get hit.” Should you apply these tactics judiciously, at risk of being sucked into the dark side? No, you merely need decide that someone “needs to get hit.” Brilliant!

The techniques themselves are gold. If you do in fact decide that someone needs to get hit, the instructor recommends a looping open palm strike to the ear. I actually practiced the technique as recommended and was astonished at the force you can generate. He said your hand should tingle from the rush of blood, mine hurt. If you actually hit someone on the ear using this technique, he said they would cry. My girlfriend sure did.

The second technique is also gold. The instructor actually suggests how to set up a close-standing adversary for a sucker punch. Assuming your enemy is bumping chests with you, put your hands up to your chest and say something like “what did I do?” This puts you in perfect position to throw an elbow right into some douchebag’s chin. Again, I practiced and feel pretty confident that even my flabby ass could send someone into slumber country with this move.

Several more techniques were discussed in the video, but before they were covered, I had already run off to practice the first two. I suppose you could buy this video. RDRR. Or search limewire for “Gracie” and get some entertaining education for free.