Hot Docs - If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front

Rating: ***1/2

The Earth Liberation Front was a proactive organization that cost millions in property damage from several arson incidents across the United States to protest corporate treatment of the environment. In the months before 9/11, calling the ELF a terrorist group, was almost quaint given the fact that in 1,200 incidents there hasn’t been one fatality. Part of that could be luck, but can anyone be that lucky?

That’s one of the many questions asked by co-directors Marshall Curry and Sam Cullman, which follows the government’s prosecution of several members of the ELF, with particular emphasis on the mild-mannered Daniel McGowan. McGowen was a typical middle-class college kid that fell into the environmental movement on a lark. He became disillusioned with the political process and grassroots, non-violent civil action. When his ELF cell set fire to a lumber company under the mistaken belief that they were growing genetically engineered trees, McGowan again reconsidered his involvement with the cause. He moved back to New York from Oregon, but it was too late because the FBI already has his scent.

Curry and Cullman have rare access to both sides: the ELF members and law enforcement. The history of the group and their activism is very well covered, but it’s grounded in the personal story of McGowan and a couple of his fellow activists, and how they’re seemingly stuck in a cycle of disillusionment. There may even be some regret for their actions, although I’m not sure I’d be that presumptuous. There definitely seems to be lamentation about what happened though, and that’s one of the more interesting things about the movie, how this passion, once unrestrained, has turned almost bitter in the long run.

On a political level though, the government and mainstream media bid to label these people “terrorists” is also a bit of a stretch. If any case should help prove how politicized the word “terrorist” has become, it should be the case of the ELF. How can someone be a terrorist is there’s no loss of life? Considering that fine line, the filmmakers ask people on the street their feelings. One woman, after commenting that she was disgusted with the ELF’s actions, admitted that she was an admirer of the Boston Tea Party, an historical, yet still potent form of direct action against a corrupt system.

If a Tree Falls is a fascinating look at one case of whether the definition of terrorist is being stretched beyond its proportions, and whether the government is really the pawn of corporate interests that people like the ELF think it is. At the same time though, the filmmakers seem like they don’t want to take sides. As a result, the film doesn’t have that powerful a voice, and kind of feels like an educational film or news report. The subject matter is very interesting, the film is well made, but I think it could have been more assertive. Still, it can be recommended for tackling subject matter with no easy answers.

Hot Docs - The Parking Lot Movie

Rating: ****

Remember Clerks? It was Kevin Smith’s breakthrough first film about directionless slackers working the cash register at a convenience and video store in the middle of nowhere, New Jersey. One can find an easy allegory on the surface of The Parking Lot Movie, a documentary chronicling the self-styled bohemians that attend a parking lot in Charlottesville, VA. But these are no mere slackers that take your money and watch your car between – how did the synopsis put it – long periods of tedium, punctuated by swearing back at irate customers. But this isn’t a movie about the tedium of doing menial labour, but about fraternity, capitalism, the class struggle and knowing the value of having somewhere to consider the zen in life.

Chris Farina has owned the Corner Parking Lot in Charlottesville for over 10 years. Sandwiched between the vibrant downtown bar scene and the campus of the University of Virginia, business is rarely slow for Farina and his dedicated group of employees. Now, one might think that working at a parking lot would be dull and socially dilapidating, but actually working for the Corner Parking Lot is one of the coolest jobs to have. An assorted bric-a-brac of undergraduate and graduate students man the main gates between classes. They’re philosophers, musicians, artists, and intellectuals Just don’t mess with them or try to do the parking equivalent of the dine and dash, because they will find you.

The Parking Lot Movie is bizarrely captivating; a film that should be as dull as rye bread but is profoundly watchable. The characters you meet are your typical, college-aged hipsters that revel in how much smarter they are then you, but if that sounds like your crew, then you’ve found kindred spirits. But really, these are good-natured guys working a job they like and sometimes, without realizing it, it affects them in profound ways. But it’s a parking lot, you’re saying right now. To which I respond by saying that you kind of have to see it to get it.

There are a couple of levels to this movie that make it so immensely enjoyable. First are the personalities. The various attendants profiled are all insightful and interesting young men with good heads on their shoulders. It sounds trite to say (not to mention ridiculous given the job description), but this is more than work for them. Former clerks can appreciate, and perhaps be envious of, the no B.S. way that these attendants handle their business. (No, the customer isn’t always right.) And though it may seem far-fetched to the average viewer to think that one would get so obsessed that you’d run down someone that parks and runs, the primitive mind of a present or former clerk knows too well the impulse of not letting that kind of person get away.

Secondly, there’s the sociological subtext. While not explicit, there is in the film a kind of commentary about cars and the entitlement of the people that own them. As well, this corner parking lot is a front line of the class war, as people look down their nose at these attendants without knowing, or caring, that some these guys are academic superstars in their off hours. The film was shot over three years, and the coda at the end reveals that many of the attendants have gone on to being professors and researchers at various institutions of higher learning. It’s one of those quiet victories that makes the worst times worthwhile. Still, it’s not like the job at the parking lot itself is terrible.

Interestingly, I think Parking Lot Movie would make for a good double bill with another Hot Docs film called A Different Path. The latter is about the positive side of going car-free while the former is about the negative side of drivers and the car culture that people behind the wheel overlook, or simply never see. On its own though, Parking Lot Movie is terribly life-affirming and proves that even the most tedious jobs have in them some pearls of wisdom that can lead you to live a happier, healthier life. But you have to know someone if you want a job there.

Hot Docs - A Different Path

Rating: ****

Oddly timed in an act of universal kismet, A Different Path comes hot on the heels of that incident in the Gulf of Mexico that President Barack Obama called “potentially unprecedented environmental disaster.” With scenes of disgusting oil poisoning the pristine ocean front of the U.S. Gulf coast, we should all be looking to a different path (as if all previous incidents involving oil unleashed on a defenceless and delicate eco-system haven’t already driven that point home). To put it bluntly, A Different Path is one of the most anti-car movies I’ve ever seen. Not that it’s an hour and a half of harping on the evils of the personal automobile, but rather an impressive and positive film experience.

Independent filmmaker and musician Monteith McCollum follows several individuals that are trying to make the world a better place by getting people to think about transportation options beyond the single-occupant automobile. Richard Dyksterhuis and his wife Cleta Hughes are part of a small group seniors in a town in Washington State trying to get a sidewalk laid in their rundown neighbourhood. These seniors, including one in a wheelchair, literally risk life and limb trying to draw attention to the issue as discourteous drivers right them off as “senile old people.” On the other side of the continent in Toronto, Michael Louis Johnson leads a group called “Streets are for People” as members try to reclaim downtown parking spaces through games, art instillations and the like.

The trick of this film is that’s a very preach-to-the-choir movie. That’s through no fault of it’s own, of course, it’s just that’s exceptionally hard to get many people to see things from the movie’s point of view: cars are mostly bad, creating a car-centric society is killing us, and we’re eventually going to pay for it because this life is unsustainable. There are places in the GTA where officials explicitly say publicly that if they implemented a public transit system, then they would attract the “wrong kind” of people to their town (ie: the poor and the newly immigrated). As cities grow, spending on transit remains stagnant while fares rise. And still some people look at you like a leaper when you suggest public transit as a viable alternative to getting around. Either that or they say you’re immature for riding a bike to get from point A to point B being over the age of 18.

Fortunately, the movie itself is not as angry as the last paragraph. As well, these are not your typical activists profiled. Take the case of David Hughes, a former New Yorker that lived in Manhattan, but had to commute to an office in New Jersey everyday. Literally being able to see his office building across the river from his apartment window, Hughes did something unusual: he decided to kayak across the Hudson to work everyday. The result was that he cut his commute to a third; 30 minutes by kayak as opposed to an hour and half with the bridge and tunnel crowd. That kind of blew my mind a little, but it also punctuated the film’s real point. This is a movie about thinking outside the box. This is a movie about finding original solutions. This is a movie meant to get one thinking about one’s own space and what they can do to improve. It’s transportation policy D-I-Y.

But I don’t think A Different Path would be half as inspiring without its artistic flourish. Certain scenes and stories are punctuated with stop-motion slides and illustrations, which combined the phone interview soundbites and the POV shots of Johnson riding his bike around Toronto, give the film an ethereal, dream-like quality. It’s like John Lennon’s “Imagine” re-imagined as being about a world where car culture no longer holds its sway. This is daring work. As in it dares you to be as forward, and as imaginative, and as positive thinking as its protagonist. If you don’t walk away with from this film smiling, then you’ve got no soul.

Avatar

Rating: ****

For the longest time I was an Avatar denier. As good as writer/director James Cameron is there was just no way possible for his $400 million sci-fi opus to carrier the weight of all expectations behind it. Between the fact that it was the filmmaker’s first narrative movie in a dozen years, to all the talk about ushering in a new era in both motion capture performance and 3-D cinema, it’s enough to give even the most egocentric filmmaker nervous collapse. But this is Cameron we’re talking about, and anyone bold enough to call himself King of the World in front of a roomful of Hollywood’s elitist of the elite at the Oscars is bound to be predisposed to not just trying to meet expectations, but exceed them with extreme gusto.

So it is with Avatar, which doesn’t just fulfill the promise of what’s possible from James Cameron, but takes it those expectations and gives them the maximum dosage of steroids medical science can allow. Hyperbole? Perhaps. On a story level, the film is not without its flaws and is, actually, rather derivative of other movies, including one or two of Cameron’s own. On a visual and technical level though, Avatar is out of this world to use just the right term. Brilliantly realized with the same kind of obsessive detail that drove Cameron to hire the same china makers that made the plates on the original Titanic for his movie of the same name, Avatar is the most engrossing epic put to film since the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

The film takes place on Pandora, a life-filled moon orbiting a gas giant planet several light years away from Earth. A nameless corporation is trying extract a mineral called Unobtanium (an inspired bit of word play) but are running into problems due to the indigenous population’s refusal to be re-educated and re-located. A group of scientists led by Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) are trying to study the planet and learn about its people called the Na’vi. One of the new members of the team is Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic Marine who’s subbing for his dead twin brother by getting behind the proverbial wheel of an Avatar. The avatars, cloned from a combination of Na’vi DNA and the DNA of its eventual driver, are very expensive to make, which is why Sully’s brought in unprepared for the rigours of Pandora, or for interaction with the Na’vi.

One can gleam from the mere pretext that Sully will end up “going native” in a predictable fashion. He’s taught by Na’vi princess Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) the ways of her people and their deep connection to the planet and all its life forms. One can see that the Na’vi and their culture isn’t something that Cameron cooked up over a weekend with such great detail given to everything that has to do with Pandora. Though it’s mostly a computer cooked up imaginative realm, Pandora is so vivid you can almost reach out and touch it, and with Cameron’s improvements to the 3-D process you really feel like you can. Avatar is an immersive experience tailor made for the big screen, a larger than life adventure that dares to be duplicated even though it probably never will.

But there’s no denying that Cameron put more energy into visualizing his world than writing an original story around it. Avatar plays like Last of the Mohicans meets The Happening with a dash of the Endor scenes in Return of the Jedi. Cameron borrows characterization from Aliens with the uncaring corporate administrator played by Giovanni Ribisi and a feisty Latina ally in Michelle Rodriguez’s Trudy. Worthington again confounds, leaving us wondering how this unknown beguiled so many into thinking he was such substantial leading man material. There’s something that seems terribly bland about the man, which may be the point in the case of Sully but I sense another Jim Caviezel in the offing, an actor of supposed great wells of talent that burns bright and then disappears.

But what does work for Avatar is the motion-capture. On many occasions one can sense the actor behind the performance and feel that you’re actually watching someone act like a character rather than a special effect. This is no minor trifle either because if the Na’vi didn’t work this whole movie would have fallen apart like a cheap car. The execution matches the grand vision even in spite of all the hiccups in the script. Avatar is an absolute bombastic thrill ride that has to be seen to be believed, and seen in 3-D in order to be full appreciated. James Cameron is back in fine form, ladies and gentlemen. Here’s hoping he doesn’t have to wait another 12 years for technology to catch up so he can execute his next bold vision.

The Cove

Rating: ****

This movie is a must see for animal lovers, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to like it, or that you’re even going to be able to sit through it. The Cove is a staggering work not necessarily for how its made, but for what its about. Additionally, one admires the people involved as they risk their very freedom as they work diligently and decisively to expose one of the most terrible animal rights abuses currently perpetrated on Earth, and that’s no idle hyperbole. What gets exposed in The Cove makes the Canadian seal hunt look like Sunday night vespers, and seriously calls into question reach and effectiveness of world wide organizations tasked with the protection of water-born mammals and the prosecution of those that hunt them.

The Cove refers to an inlet in ***, Japan, a hidden alcove that hundreds of dolphins and porpoises are shepherded into at a time where they’re effectively slaughtered. Between September and March, every year, Japanese fisherman organize what could be described as an old fashioned stampede where dolphins are rounded close to shore and cordoned off by nets to prevent them from escaping back into the open ocean. The dolphins that aren’t selected for display in aquariums all over the world, end up rallied to the Cove where they meet their maker, and end up carved up and shipped to serve as lunch meat for the *** school lunch program, or falsely labelled as more high-end whale meat to stores in Kyoto and Tokyo.

It would take a certain kind of cold-hearted bastard to read that and not at least be given pause about the fate of these perfectly harmless and indeed loveable creatures. If you’re a dolphin unlucky enough to be swimming off the coast of Japan your fate may very well come down to either circus or tuna. If that doesn’t sit well with you, you can imagine how Ric O’Barry feels about it. Much like Peter Benchly, author of the novel Jaws was based who later in life became advocate against the hunting of sharks, O’Barry, once the dolphin trainer on Flipper, now dedicates his life to protecting them from the same kind of exploitation he committed. He’s more or less public enemy number one to a world full of people accepting the exploitation of the animals he loves.

Fearlessly tackling the dolphin trade in ***, director *** follows an all star team of advocates that decide to expose the slaughter to the world be capturing it live and in living colour on camera. Considering the lengths the industry has gone to in order to protect themselves (the film crew is followed by no less than the chief of police at one point), it’s a mission of stealth and guile. And it truly is a mission, no question, a meticulously planned Ocean’s 11-style heist, or a Mission: Impossible spy game. Experts from numerous disciplines are called in for the job, including movie magicians from Industrial Light & Magic whose mould-makers develop the camouflage for the team’s cameras.

The harrowing quest of the team trying to capture these villains in the act is as taunt as any Hollywood thriller, not the least of which because of the very real consequences of what might happen to them if they’re caught. You end up admiring these people because of their commitment, and I’m sure many audience members wish they could have been there to share the risk. But the excitement of watching the mission come together abates when you see the results in the footage they capture. Watching the sea literally go read with dolphin blood is perhaps one of the most emotionally effective images I’ve ever seen in a documentary. If The Cove isn’t one the year’s best films, it’s darn close. This deserves to be seen far and wide; in fact it must be seen far and wide.

TIFF Review-Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands

Rating: ****

The tar sands in Alberta are the focus of enormous ongoing controversy from environmental damage and the contribution to global climate change to the debate over boom or bubble economics and sustainability. What is incontrovertible is that the tar sands project in northern Alberta will take a section of the province the size of England and make it an industrial zone, as three barrels of water are used to extract precious crude from the dirt for every single barrel of oil made. This kind of short-sightedness seems obvious to some, and it begs the question what wouldn’t we do to get every drop of oil out of the Earth? Perhaps what we need is a new perspective.

Director Peter Mettler gives us just that with his documentary Petropolis, a 45-minute long aerial tour of the tar sands and their surrounding area. Naturally, one might think that watching nearly an hour of film shot from a helicopter over one large area, with only the musical score for accompaniment, sounds rather dull, but of course it isn’t. From the still untouched boreal forest to the very heart of the tar sands extract through opening mining or refinement, these collected images strike you in several different ways.

The enormity of the project hits you hard, the massive machines, the desolate landscapes that were once fertile vegetation and the trees in the distance waiting their turn. And then there’s the disgust factor. Rivers of putrid runoff that looks like someone hadn’t properly mixed their Nestle’s Quick, and the huge smoke stacks pumping out more CO2 than every car in Canada does in a day, and the almost frozen way the smoke from these columns appear as seen from above.

Of course though, one has to point out that this is a propaganda piece. Greenpeace was a financier and co-producer on the project, which isn’t to say that the images are doctored or that any of the stats presented are wrong, but there’s definitely an agenda afoot here. Separate from the political though, Petropolis makes a very powerful statement, or at least it should. Anyone that complains about gas prices should see this and recognize the true cost of what comes out of the pump. Light on narration and colour commentary, the film lets the images speak for themselves and they say a lot. It may be activism filmmaking, but there’s nothing subversive here. Just the facts ma’am has never looked so terrible, but been so refreshing.

Earth

Rating: ***

There was just something about this whole “Disney Nature” and “Earth” thing that kind of irked me. Here, we have one of the largest corporations in the world, promoting the Discovery Channel’s whole “our planet is awesome” schtick, and sorry, but I wasn’t biting. Having said that though, I will now redact some of my cynicism. On the one hand, Earth has some amazing photography and gets some gorgeous shots of various vistas and lifeforms on our planet. On the other hand though, it really doesn’t add anything new and it doesn’t say or doing anything that I could have gotten out of any one of a hundred previous nature documentaries.

It was Earth Day and the theatre was fairly full; I guess seeing a movie with a kind of environmental message on the day set aside to recognize such a message is literally the least you could do. And that’s the main problem, this movie literally feels like the least that could be done. Again, let’s be straight, what’s been done is amazing, but there really is no context beyond the pageantry and drama of the animals’ struggle in the small stretch of wilderness left on this world. And frankly, I’m not sure whether I should be relieved or perturbed by the fact that the filmmakers offered what is basically a pro-environmental film without context on the issue.

Constructed simply enough, Earth follows three families during a year in the life: polar bears struggling to find food while racing the rapidly vanishing ice, a mother and son elephant travelling miles across the Africa desert to topical abode and a pair of humpback whales that leave the safety of tropical waters to reach the food rich Antarctic. Along the way, other animals in other regions are photographed as they go about their lives hunting, feeding and mating. It’s hard not to appreciate the diversity of life on this planet as it plays out on film and it’s hard not to appreciate the richness of the images collected by the filmmakers or doubt the ingenuity needed to capture them.

The film kind of touches on the issues of global warming and climate change in the polar bear sequences, but with the narration of James Earl Jones of all people it almost sounds like more of a nuscence than anything. It sure doesn’t sound like a kind of serious problem. Sure there’s less ice now in the summer, but scientists are warning that in a few years, maybe even next year, there’ll probably be no ice, and that’s going to affect a lot of polar bears. Similarly, issues of human encroachment and natural resource abuse kind of get a shout out, but it seemed kind of noncommittal; a kind of disclaimer for public notice, like the warnings on boxes of cigarettes.

But I did admire how the film didn’t shy away from the brutality of nature, or at least acceptable, G-rated brutality. It did strike me though that while the camera had no trouble watching a Great White Shark chomping on a seal, it cuts away pretty quick when an arctic wolf catches up to an infant caribou. But even given the flaws, Earth is still great eye candy, and it’s one of those movies that everyone can enjoy. It’s beautifully shot and marvellously composed and it flows easily enough to encompass a decent portion of life on Earth, though I’m sure the deleted scenes will be killer. Aesthetically pleasing, but at its heart rather empty, Earth is a pretty okay first film from Disney Nature, even if it is just a corporate sham.

The Happening

Rating: ***

There’s not that much left to say about the meteoric rise and thunderous crash of the career of M. Night Shyamalan, but one thing is more certain: Hollywood always loves a comeback story. So the question is: does The Happening constitute a comeback? Well, I don’t think I’d go that far, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction. Shyamalan manages to construct, for the most part, an effective paranoid thriller although it does delve into some inappropriate bouts of comedy and melodrama. On the bright side though, it’s infinitely more cohesive than Lady in the Water and not as insulting as The Village.

It starts in Central Park where people out minding their own business mysteriously become inflicted with a condition that makes them disorientated, lose their motor functions and eventually kill themselves. Science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) and his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) flee Philadelphia with Elliot’s friend Julian (John Leguizamo) and his daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez). However, it soon becomes apparent that the phenomenon isn’t limited to either Central Park or New York City and the “attack” is spreading from the largest population centres to the smaller ones. It’s a desperate quest for survival as Elliot and Alma try and stay one step ahead of the happening.

Like all of Shyamalan’s films, The Happening takes place in hyper-realistic and visceral reality, like an extended episode of The Twilight Zone, which either works or it doesn’t. In this movie we see both sides, but what works best is when Shyamalan ratchets up the tension and then the movie rightful begins to feel like a worthy successor to Hitchcock’s The Birds, which was clearly the primary influence for Happening.

The underline fear generated in the film comes from the characters feeling that they have no idea what’s going on, and thus they are clueless as to how to do anything to save themselves. One of the best constructed scenes in the film is when Wahlberg’s Elliot uses the scientific method to get some handle on the situation as the sounds of people killing themselves occur all around them.

And yes, that means that Shyamalan’s first R-rating is justly deserved, although he exercises a lot of restraint in relation to say Eli Roth, director of the Hostel films. The director uses gore to accentuate the fear and the violence of the situation and more often than not comes out of nowhere as a surprise, since he more often cuts from the violent act.

Not that you need really bloody scenes, for me, a car cruising down a suburban street where there’s a person hanging by the neck from every other tree is more than creepy enough. Shyamalan also effective turns foliage into a truly frightening adversary; every flick of a branch is cause for alarm.

The performances though were kind of problematic. I found Wahlberg kind of stagnate in many scenes and the shame of it is that he shows some real life in others; it’s quite a range to cover throughout an hour and a half film. As Alma I though Deschanel was under utilized and not given much to do outside the typical fretting wife stuff. There was a whole subplot where she was being cell phone stalked by a creep from work named Joey that just left me scratching my heading thinking, why is this important?

By far though, the most bizarre character was Betty Buckley’s Mrs. Jones, who the Moores seek refuge from as they try to outrun the plague. She was crazy in a way that reminded me of Tim Robbins in Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, and I don’t mean that in a good way. The Happening proves once again that while lunatics have the best shelters in a world ending catastrophe, they may not necessarily make the best survival partners.

The other thing about the Mrs Jones scenes is that they highlight the primary flaw of the film: a hodge podge of styles being silly on minute and serious the other, makes for a woefully inconsistent film. Still, there are a lot of interesting ideas in the mix of The Happening so I am recommending it, if only for the sake that raking out Shyamalan seems to be the new hip pastime. For me, I continue to await the return of the Unbreakable Shyamalan.