To dos, talk and tools to get America over the hump.
Us in 48 Words
At Progressive Wednesday, we believe that the end of big problems begins with small solutions, and we're striving for a gradual and continuous progressive shift in this country. With your help, PW will create a community of like-minded folks looking to make change through ideas, art, and action.
Disclaimer: This film has many disturbing images. I mean, really horrifying.
Don’t sit back and relax, don’tmake yourself some popcorn, and don’t get ready to enjoy this movie. The Cove is an Academy-Award-winning documentary (best documentary) by Rick O’Barry that exposes a brutal dolphin slaughter in a small cove in the town of Taigi, Japan, where over 23,000 dolphins and porpoises are killed every year. It is an hour and a half that you will not enjoy, but it is one of the most moving and important films I have ever seen.
Rick O’Barry is the former capturer and trainer of the five bottlenose dolphins used in the TV show “Flipper”. Shortly after the show ended, one of them swam into him arms and stopped breathing. Since dolphins are “active breathers” it was clear to O’Barry that this dolphin had committed suicide. The next day he was arrested for freeing a captive dolphin and has been continuing that fight ever since.
The first hour of this film is more like an action-adventure-suspense movie than a documentary. Most of it is spent showing the lengths the crew had to go and the dangers they faced just to get the incriminating footage of the cove. The team of divers, activists, techies, and ex-military men face long imprisonment and even death when they cross the boundary to the cove to place their equipment.
In between action sequences, there is one eye-opening revelation about the dolphin industry after another, from the extremely toxic levels of mercury in the meat (which was put in Japanese school lunches) to the effect closed captivity has on dolphin sonar (like a human living in a house of mirrors) resulting in such extreme ulcers that they are fed a bottle of acid reducers every day. But all of this is just a mild preamble.
They do such an extensive job setting it up that I felt nervous when they finally got the footage of what happens in the cove. Sort of like when your friend tells you over and over how great the pizza is at a particular restaurant, but when you finally eat it, it’s only “OK”. Not the case here. Not even close. Nothing can prepare you for what you see next. Hundreds of dolphins every day, stabbed and then left to bleed to death. The cove in no way even resembles water; it is deep red with blood. It is difficult to watch, which is why it is so important.
I realize that this is less of a movie review and more of a call to action, but please give it a watch. It is available on iTunes, Amazon, and DVD. If you really don’t have the stomach, and I don’t blame you, you can still take action. Visit TheCoveMovie.com, text “dolphin” to 44144 to join a subscriber list and get involved, or just make a simple donation.
It’s a strange feeling to be glad you watched something that you enjoyed so little.
Wal-Mart destroys. That’s the message at the heart of the documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. It’s rather simple. Wal-Mart destroys. That’s what it’s designed to do, and boy, it does it well. Wal-Mart is our Golem. Wal-Mart is the Godzilla of our market-driven creation, eating Tokyo after Tokyo after Tokyo. Only Wal-Mart ain’t no myth, and it ain’t no movie.
But this flick about Wal-Mart makes a new and well-defended argument against the behemoth. What is this larger claim? Wal-Mart is a form of what could be described as, in the film’s words, contemporary “plantation capitalism.” How so? Wal-Mart is all about profit at the expense of all parts of every kind of individual—shoppers, employees, widget-makers alike. Profit at the expense of small, long-lasting, family businesses. Profit at the expense of safety from crime (trust me: it’s in the movie, and it’s peel-your-eyelids-back messed up). Profit at the expense of the environment. Profit at the expense of drinking water. Profit at the expense of public education. For crying out loud, profit at the expense of fire departments. Profit at the expense of health and healthcare. Profit at the expense of various cultures. Profit at the expense of workers’ rights. Profit at the expense of the world economy. Profit at the expense of public funds.
At this point the movie takes a turn, and it shows how the people of Inglewood, California, when told by Wal-Mart that they could go to hell said, “Wait. No. Yougo to hell.” And then a list of city after city scrolls over the screen, each one a place that told Wal-Mart to do the same and won.
This is a movie about activism. This is a movie with a ray of hope. Since many local governments kowtow to Wal-Mart, we can’t trust elected officials to fight for us. We have to do it ourselves. We have almost no other choice. But that choice? It is simple and it is ours: we can choose to shop at Wal-Mart or we can choose not to shop at Wal-Mart. If we can start hacking away at the only thing that Wal-Mart cares about, then we can win. Only then. But then.
We can choose to put a scary parable to rest. We can choose to click off the monster picture before it ends badly for all the characters. Please take a look and choose for yourself:
(Editor’s note: Sorry about the delay. I’ll blame it on the snow. Yeah, that’s it: it was the snow’s fault!)
Margot at the Wedding is a film written and directed by, go figure, writer/director Noah Baumbach, and this is his follow-up after his Oscar-nominated flick The Squid and the Whale. Like the aforementioned flick “about” a cephalopod and a cetacean, this movie centers around families gone just a wee-bit haywire, marriages on the rocks, affairs, kids caught in the middle, and the forces driving people together and apart.
The film stars Nicole Kidman (equal parts biting, subtle, and heart-breaking) as Margot Zeller, a fiction writer, who takes her son in tow by train, boat, and car to her sister’s pad (Pauline, played by the beguiling Jennifer Jason Leigh) for a weekend. Pauline is set to marry Malcolm (Jack Black), an unemployed artist/writer/rocker, and the Zeller clan is getting together for the first time in a long time for the event. Secrets get shared and hidden, Black pulls off some laugh-out-loud hilarity in the midst of a relatively serious flick, and the tenderness that can be shared between those who love one another gets shot all to hell.
While I didn’t go all “Rah! Rah!” for The Squid and the Whale, I dug this flick because there’s hope hidden beneath the surface callousness of the players. Baumbach creates more believable characters by way of a looser script, which allows the actors to move organically through scenes. In much of his previous work (particularly the Wes Anderson directed flick, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), the characters are so affected you feel like you’ve been left out of a story told by old Ivy-League roommates. Here, though, I buy the conflicts, I buy the back-stories, I buy the surprises, I buy the love that nearly gets expressed. (And maybe that’s the up-shot of the flick: love, at best and at worst, can only be nearly expressed).
But you don’t need to buy it. Just rent this sucker.
It’s not that I kowtow to David Fincher, but I do tend to dig his flicks: Fight Club, Panic Room and The Game, which includes my favorite not-safe-for-work piece of dialog ever (just click here… it’s the third section of quotations down). Zodiac is Fincher’s latest piece of cinematic brilliance, and this one stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., and Chloë Sevigny. The film loosely tells the story of the Zodiac killer, a serial murderer who terrified San Francisco residents during the late ’60s and early ’70s, and who mystified the authorities, intensionally and successfully.
But the movie isn’t really about the brutality of the murders (and they are brutal) or the murders themselves. And the film’s not really about who actually committed the murders (though we’re led to believe who it likely is/was). This film is really about Robert Graysmith (played with an unaffected texture by Jake Gyllenhaal), a cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle when the Zodiac killer began sending cryptic letters to the area’s newspapers. These hand-written letters include admissions to certain killings, matter-of-fact explanations of why he enjoyed killing people, demands that newspapers print some of his letters (which they do), and coded messages, most of which were never cracked.
But here’s a sampling of one of the few ciphers figured out: “I like killing people because it is so much fun. It is more fun than killing wild game in the forest, because man is the most dangerous animal of all … I will not give you my name because you will try to slow down or stop my collecting of slaves.” You get the rated-R idea.
After several years of letters received, unsolved murders, and unsuccessful leads, the police and reporters essentially give up trying to crack the case. But Graysmith can’t let go. He obsesses, quits his job, and starts tracking down leads let go years and years ago, crossing over several different police jurisdictions, interviewing cops, neighbors, surviving victims, and reporters. In the end, he writes two true-crime books, Zodiac and Zodiac Unmasked: the Identity of America’s Most Elusive Serial Killer. But this all comes with heavy prices.
And so this is a film about secrets kept and secrets we reveal, about safe and unsafe obsessions, about deaths and the ways we lead our little lives. Zodiac is a piece of gripping film-making that leaves your mouth agape and your mind wanting more.
As I mentioned this past Monday, I adore the film Into the Wild, the inspired-by-a-true-story flick Sean Penn directed and scribed based on the book by the same name. It’s a must-read, a book written with a deft hand and kind heart by Jon Krakauer. More importantly, as far as this Friday is concerned, Into the Wild is must-see. For the first time in Progressive Wednesday history (yes, we’re history makers here), I’m reviewing a piece of cinema still in the cinemas. Why? Because this is a beautiful work of art, a combination of powerful acting, an original soundtrack written and performed by Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam fame, and visuals that will leave your mouth agape.
So, Matt, what’s the story? Oh, the story. The story is about Christopher McCandless. In 1992, after graduating with honors from Emory University, Chris dropped off the face of the earth to those who knew him. He donated his savings to Oxfam, burned his cash on-hand, cut up his driver’s license, and abandoned his car. He hoofed, hiked, kayaked, and hopped trains all over the country for two solid years. He worked when he needed some money for equipment or meager amounts of food and drink, but he led a tramping life, one of solitude and revelation ending in Alaska. I’m going to give something away: Chris dies. The end isn’t what matters: the why and how of the way he viewed life matter.
This is a story about new friendships, enthusiasm for solitude, male identity, and a consumer culture gone haywire. This is about a world that drives some to drink, others to hit the open road. This is a film about the only two things meaningful: how we live and how we die. This movie makes you want to get off your ass and do something, anything, before the final period is typed and our stories come to close.
So do something for me: watch this film. And then? And then do something you’ve always wanted to do: if only for a few moments, be free.
Before I really begin this review, a big, big, oh-so-big slab of thanks to the woman working at Blockbuster who, while helping me find this flick, told me to look under “M” for “Matador” and not “T” for “The.” What ever would I have done without her?
So, now, the review. The Matador is easily one of the funniest flicks to come out of 2005; there were moments where it was hard to catch my breath I was laughing so hard. This film stars Pierce Brosnan as Julian Noble, an assassin-for-hire, who runs into Danny Wright, played by Greg Kinnear, a down-on-his-luck salesman. By random chance, they bumped into one another in a Mexican hotel bar, and they subsequently begin an odd, but useful, friendship. Julian takes Danny to a bullfight, shows him how to kill a man, helps him through a bind, and then, six months later, shows up at Danny’s doorstep in need of a big favor. Danny, reluctant but indebted, obliges.
While The Matador is definitely a dark comedy, there’s an underlying tension: righteousness versus ruthlessness. The two, the film seems to argue, are closer than we care to imagine, blurring together when we think they’re separate. Danny’s a businessman and Julian sees himself as the same, creating another theme: Machiavellianism as a way to make gains.
But while the story is fresh and fun with its serious undertones, it’s Kinnear’s pitch-perfect squirming, and Brosnan’s killer delivery of hilarious dialog that make this an absolute must-see. So, here’s just a sampling of some of Brosnan’s lines (these ain’t safe for the kiddies):
“I’m as serious as an erection problem.”
“I look like a Bangkok hooker on a Sunday morning, after the navy’s left town.”
“I need a break. There’s no retirement home for assassins is there? Archery at four. Riflery at five.”
“An assassin without confidence is a horrible thing to behold. It’s like a relief pitcher who fumbles the ball.”
“My handler, Mr. Randy, contacted me the way he always does, through an ad in the International Tribune looking for cat sitters in Bali.”
“I didn’t mean to weird you out. I was wrong, please. I just get paranoid sometimes. I’m drunk. I’m tired, and I’ve just been fornicating for the past two hours.”
A Life Less Ordinary, as its title seems to suggest, evades the typical niching done by movie reviewers. This flick is a drama, a black comedy, a crime caper, a romance, and a fantasy. I’m betting I’m leaving a category or two out. It’s all those meshed, molded and morphed into one of my favorite films of the past decade or so. I’ll say from the outset that this movie has its narrative flaws (and maybe a little unnecessary hyperbole), but I’m willing to overlook those for the sake of engaging adventure.
The story goes a little like this…. Robert Lewis — played brilliantly by Ewan McGregor — is a janitor under the employ of Mr. Naville, a stinking rich businessman, who cans Robert and replaces him with a floor-cleaning robot. After getting dumped by his girlfriend shortly thereafter, Robert goes, well, he goes ballistic, grabs a gun, busts into his former boss’s office, and kidnaps his daughter, Celine (played by Cameron Diaz). Meanwhile, God sends two angels, O’Reilly (Holly Hunter) and Jackson (Delroy Lindo), to help Robert and Celine realize that, while chaos has pushed them together, they might actually be a good fit. Hunter and Lindo are fantastic in this flick, serving as hilarious comic foils. Let’s just say the story goes equal parts weird and wonderful from there….
Thankfully, A Life Less Ordinary was written and directed by the dudes who brought us Trainspotting (so just imagine that bizarre and frenetic movie with a bit of hope and zero heroin). In the wrong hands, this could have become sentimental doggerel. Instead, we see, as the plot unfolds, that by bucking conventions A Life Less Ordinary manages to blend the true elements, good and bad, faced by any pairing of two people.
And if all that weren’t enough, this flick offers up a variegated soundtrack that helps put the pieces together. It includes: Beck, The Prodigy, The Cardigans, Bobby Darin, Elvis Presley, Squirrel Nut Zippers, Oasis, and Luscious Jackson, one of my favorite bands from the ’90s. The scene that uses R.E.M.’s “Leave” is worth the price of, well, there’s no admission really since you’re gonna rent this sucker, so it’s worth the price of Blockbuster, maybe some homemade popcorn if you’re so inclined, and a couple Diet Cokes.
Wal-Mart destroys. That’s the message at the heart of the documentary 
Make this your homepage 
Add this to your favorites