Creationism vs. Atheism at the Box Office

Posted on October 16, 2008 at 8:32 pm

As the pro-intelligent design film Expelled comes out in DVD this week, the ads crow that it is the top-grossing documentary of the year. But its record has been eclipsed by the anti-religion film Religulous after only two weeks in fewer than half the theaters “Expelled” was shown in.
According to the LA Times:

“Expelled,” hosted by commentator and character actor Ben Stein, opened April 18 at a whopping 1,052 theaters and grossed a total of $7.7 million at the domestic box office during its full run, according to data tracker Box Office Mojo.

That was nothing like the breakout blockbusters “Fahrenheit 9/11” ($119.2 million), “March of the Penguins” ($77.4 million) or even “An Inconvenient Truth” ($24.1 million), but nothing to sneeze at either: It was the 12th-highest gross ever for a documentary….
“Religulous,” playing at 568 theaters, is benefiting from positive word of mouth. The controversial documentary, hosted by comedian Maher (“Politically Incorrect”) and directed by Charles (“Borat”), dropped only 35% in its second weekend, compared with the industry average of about 51%. By Monday it had topped $7 million, on pace to surpass $7.7 million by Friday and ultimately to a spot in the all-time top 10 for the documentary genre.
Both are unabashed advocacy films starring popular television figures who have appeared both as comics and commentators. “Expelled” urges schools to add the religiously-based intelligent design theory to biology classes and argues that excluding it is a form of harassment. “Religulous” argues that religion is responsible for anti-intellectual, fundamentalist behavior that is a serious threat to human survival.
Imperfect as these films are, the good news is that there is an audience for this kind of provocative material that challenges assumptions on all sides and gets people talking about faith, science, and politics. I look forward to seeing what comes next.

Morning Light

Posted on October 16, 2008 at 5:59 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for some language
Profanity:	Mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Reference to accidental death, some peril
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	October 17, 2008

This sunny documentary about a sailboat race across the Pacific Ocean is a bit of a throwback to the days when a night at the movies included some cartoons, a newsreel, and a travelogue. It has a lot of postcard-pretty pictures of glorious sunsets and fresh-faced kids. But for a movie about a lot of hard work leading up to an attempt to beat the world champs, it is rather laid back.

Roy Disney, nephew of Walt Disney, is the man behind the documentary and its title ship and at times it feels like a reality-show version of “The Mickey Mouse Club Goes to Sea.” Fifteen young sailors are selected from a range of competitors and they are brought to Hawaii for sailing boot camp. Then eleven are selected for the team and they choose a captain and assign positions for the race from California to Hawaii.

The kids, all in late teens or early twenties, are all high-spirited and wholesome. But despite a few “up close and personal” tidbits, it is hard to keep them all straight, in part because while they have a range of accents, they don’t have much variety of vocabulary. If you eat a handful of popcorn every time one of them says “awesome” or “rad,” you’ll be at the bottom of the bucket long before they reach Hawaii. The training scenes do not tell us enough about what skills they will need onboard and the racing scenes lack momentum because we — like the crew — go for days without knowing where they are in relation to the competition. Like the ship, the movie gets becalmed.

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Documentary Movies -- format Sports

What is Obscene? Arthouse Films Documentary About Obscenity Trials

Posted on October 11, 2008 at 8:00 am

Arthouse Films, a terrific new company specializing in documentaries about art, has released an important documentary called Obscene: A Portrait of Barney Rossett and Grove Press. As was once said about another film, this one has “something to offend everyone.” Rossett published allegedly obscene books by everyone from William Burroughs, Allen Ginsburg, and Henry Miller to the “anonymous” works of Victorian pornographers. Many of these works are now considered classic texts, studied by scholars and appreciated by millions of readers. And of course, by today’s standards, they are by no means considered shocking or fringe.
Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in the New York Times:
Appropriately framed by Mr. Rosset’s raucous 1989 interview with Al Goldstein, the colorful publisher of Screw magazine and no stranger to litigation himself, “Obscene” is a warm, entertaining compendium of counterculture voices (including Jim Carroll and Amiri Baraka) and literary landmarks. It’s the story of a man who follows his own drummer — usually with rum and Coke in hand — and believes in “nourishing the accidental.” We should all be grateful that he does.
Rossett’s story is an integral part of the cultural tumult of the era and a precursor of the culture wars of today. He was a pioneer in publishing — and in First Amendment law. His courtroom battles are as important as the works he published. To paraphrase the words attributed to Voltaire, “We may not agree with what he said — we may find it disturbing, disgusting, or offensive — but I would defend to the death his right to say it.”

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Documentary

Interview: Irena Salina of ‘FLOW’

Posted on September 18, 2008 at 4:00 pm

Director Irena Salina talked to me about her new documentary, “FLOW: For Love of Water,” about the problems of contamination and scarcity in water systems throughout the world.
What kind of water do you drink?
Tap water! We need to get back to fall in love with tap water. If you’re concerned about chemicals, until we put state of the art filtration in place, look at the “get the tap back” information at Food and Water Watch.
What led you to this project?
My first film was “Ghost Bird: The Life and Art of Judith Deim.” She was a painter who lived in a remote village in Mexico and had known John Steinbeck when he was young and lived with gypsies in Spain. She was an inspiration to her daughters and granddaughters. I had been collecting articles about this issue. I heard Robert Kennedy, Jr. speak with Riverkeepers about fighting companies dumping chemicals in the Hudson. I responded to this like a mother, the idea of those chemicals coming into our bodies.
Then I saw an article in The Nation: “Who Owns Water?” by Tony Clarke and Maude Barlow. They asked, “Is water going to be the oil of the 21st century — could it become a monopoly?” Within the article was a small story about New Orleans, the biggest privatization project in the US and I decided to cover it. US Filter and United Water, Mayor Nagan, ACORN, a labor guy — every civil society representative was there. I brought a good friend with a camera. I covered the whole story interviewed everyone — it will be on the DVD extras. I contacted Steven Starr in LA and said, “I want to make a documentary about water.” He immediately believed in it. Then off I was going to Japan and the World Water Council, meeting all the players and the people, doing the sound, camera, everything. Next, Steven was giving me his mileage to go to Bolivia. Five years, on and off, and now it is here.
How do you convey the seriousness of the issue without leaving people in despair?
What was really, really important was to have some characters who really moved me. I thought, “Wow, this man has such an effect on me, what he is doing for the poorest of the poor, maybe there’s a chance he will go through the guts of people.” Scientists talking, I was yawning! If “An Inconvenient Truth” didn’t have Al Gore but some professor, it would not have worked. I tried to find people to be inspired by. Not just boring talking heads, yes this is a serious subject, there are young activists who scream but what I loved about Maude Barlow was she could be your aunt, a middle class grandmother could relate to her. She was very passionate about what she does. We had tears in our eyes listening to Ashok Gadgil.
What resources are you making available to people who want to know/do more?
We are working on our website. We will have maps of the US. And people can also go to Food and Water Watch for more information.
What do you most want people to get from this film?
I love what Peter Gleick from the Pacific Institute says about how the World Bank knows how to spend $100 million but it does not know how to spend $1000 a million times. For me, that is the essence of the problem. That could not describe better what I’ve seen around the world.
What is the best advice you ever got?
Plant the seed little by little, one step at a time, with simplicity but at the same time reaching slowly from one place to another.
What inspires you?
Anything that gets me, deep, on a heart level, on a gut level, whether it’s a little woman who inspired me in Mexico, the story of water, equality, people, justice. My grandfather was in the resistance from Nice. He has an avenue under his name. He was always for the people. He view was: You had to be there, to do it, you did not even ask.
My next project is something that sort of grew on me over the last two years, planted its roots and not letting me cut it, the story of the farmers in India who are in desperate circumstances due to pesticides. I will treat it as a fiction film but explore as a documentary. I don’t know if I was Indian in a past life but there is a connection with the earth. It is not an expose but a love story. It is not “we hate Monsanto” but the story of a grandmother conserving the seeds for the next year and the next generation.

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Documentary Interview

FLOW: For Love of Water

Posted on September 11, 2008 at 6:00 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	NR
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Disturbing material about water contamination and shortages, brief footage of riots
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	September 19, 2008

Americans take for granted our most precious and vital resource. We assume that when we turn on the tap, the water that comes out will be perfectly safe and more than plentiful, endless. And then there are those rows and rows of pristine water in bottles on our grocery store shelves.

But it isn’t safe and it isn’t endless. If global warming creates floods, many of us can move to higher ground. If we run out of oil, many of us can walk. But if we run out of water, it is all over for everyone just about immediately.

This documentary finds a good balance between terrifying statistics, depressing images, talking heads, and hopeful suggestions. The bad guys, according to the film, are the corporations who sell bottled water, removing it from communities by diminishing their sources for water so they can sell it back to them. And in a telling segment, we learn that the World Bank is better at giving away a billion dollars to build an ineffective water treatment facility that disrupts the local economy and ecology than they are at working toward lower-tech, lower-impact, lower-cost solutions. No one who sees this movie will think the same way again about reaching for that line of clear bottles at the grocery store or letting the shower run while you take a phone call. Ideally, no one who sees this movie will ever vote for a candidate again without finding out what he or she will do to keep our water safe and plentiful.

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Documentary Movies -- format