"The End of Poverty?" seeks to remind us that the global victory of capitalism over the last 30 years has only brought its flaws into sharper focus. We now live in a world where 20 percent of the population -- that's you and me, bub -- use 80 percent of its resources, where upward of 1 billion people live on $1 a day or less, where 16,000 children die daily from malnutrition and where the people of sub-Saharan Africa, the globe's poorest region, spend $25,000 every minute servicing their massive debt to the rich countries of the North. All those markers of extreme poverty have gotten dramatically worse since the '80s; despite rapid technological and agricultural progress in the developed world, the number of people suffering from chronic malnutrition has roughly doubled in the past 40 years.

Diaz doesn't spend much time addressing the responses of mainstream or neoliberal economists to these phenomena -- essentially: gee, that's too bad! But deregulation, innovation and privatization will fix it all eventually -- and his impressive film would be stronger if he had. Presumably his title is meant to challenge or rebut Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs, the rock-star economist whose book "The End of Poverty" (with no question mark) argues that a program of massive international aid, mixed with marginal, incremental reforms in poor countries -- can curtail extreme poverty within 20 or 30 years.

It's become conventional to blame the culture and climate of poor countries and poor people, at least in part, for their own plight, as if corrupt dictatorships, ethnic warfare and raw-material economies were somehow intrinsic to Africa and Latin America. In depressing but largely convincing fashion, Diaz's film argues that all those things were the result of a lengthy historical process. Africa's dysfunctional and often anti-democratic regimes definitely aren't helping matters, for example, but they themselves -- along with the dire poverty they can't manage -- were produced by the European and North American powers' relationship to the global South, from 16th-century colonization right through 21st-century globalization.

What's most profound, and also most controversial, in this analysis is the question of how much this pattern of exploitation continues today. Between 1503 and 1660, the precious metals looted from the Americas by the Spanish crown increased the European silver reserves fourfold, funding a massive expansion of imperialism. Today, the World Bank estimates that the developing world spends $13 in debt repayment for every $1 it receives in grants. Exactly how different are these scenarios? Is our affluent, consumer-democracy Western lifestyle only possible because we are, in effect, still stealing from the poorest people in the world?

Of course "The End of Poverty?" can't answer these questions in any adequate or complete fashion. Where it intersects with other drumbeat-of-doom documentaries like "Food Inc." or "An Inconvenient Truth" is in arguing that systematic problems require systematic solutions, and that the basic conceptual model of capitalist economics -- endless and unlimited growth -- is a dangerous fantasy that can only end in disaster. Can this one documentary, with its distinct atmosphere of preaching to the choir, cut through the obscurantist haze that still prohibits frank discussion of this question? That's highly doubtful, but every little step helps.

"The End of Poverty?" is now playing at the Village East Cinema in New York. It opens Nov. 25 in Los Angeles; Dec. 4 in Portland, Ore., San Francisco and Seattle; Dec. 18 in Austin, Texas; and Dec. 30 in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Philadelphia and Washington, with more cities and DVD release to follow. 

Of course we all like to pretend that our nice things and our education and our highly professional, dry-cleaned existence means that we're above hope, that we don't have to believe in something like the little guy does, that we don't have to help out or worry or lend our voices to the voiceless. But that's all an elaborate game of make-believe.

You may be able to afford the luxury of cynicism now. But when cynicism becomes a way of life, eventually, you pay the tax with your soul.

Another brick in the wall

Sure, it's tough to fight your own skepticism when you witness how ugly the world can be, day after day. Now imagine growing up in a place that most people see as ugly: Newark, N.J. Its inhabitants are mostly poor and have been plagued by terrible crime rates for decades. But when you watch Sundance's "Brick City," a five-part miniseries that airs every night this week (10 p.m. Monday, Sept. 21, through Friday, Sept. 25) (and you'd better watch it), you get a different view. Once you get past the fact that you're hearing the same old glowing promises out of Mayor Cory Booker that you've heard from every politician under the sun, once you get past the inherent hopelessness of a former Bloods gang member named Jayda trying to kick the gang life, once you look beyond the same old shots of beleaguered cops and overwhelmed high school teachers and tearful community activists, mourning innocent kids gunned down in the streets, there's something beautiful at the core of this series.

It takes a while to let your cynicism slough off, partially because watching a real-life version of HBO's "The Wire" is a little too brutal to take to heart at first, because you've been trained, by that show and by the local news, to avert your eyes from such a gut-wrenchingly dim scenario. Booker, who comes across as charming and slightly nerdy, is still determined to reduce crime in the city of Newark drastically. He wants to make the streets safe for the children of Newark, and keep more of them in school for longer. Can you feel the deep sighs coming already?

While the access that filmmakers Marc Levin and Mark Benjamin, along with producer Forest Whitaker, managed to get to intimate conversations and backroom meetings is truly impressive, it's not always easy to craft a narrative around an endless flow of dismal planning sessions, homicides, press conferences and the latest fight between Jayda and her boyfriend (a member of the Crips). During the first hour or so, it's tough to see how this story will ever take shape.

And that's not to mention the desperation of this picture: Of course the city is broke. Of course Police Director Garry McCarthy is faced with trying to do more with less, but still has to alternately rally and bully his troops in scenes that could've come straight from David Simon's keyboard. Of course Booker is running on fumes and idealism, repeating his own mantras over and over, trying to get all of the beleaguered city officials and community organizers and cops to catch the spirit. Even when the mayor is full of inspiration and a burning desire to fix his city, most of his city officials look like they could use a stiff drink.

But by the third episode -- and I would beg you to stick with this series until then -- something beautiful starts to reveal itself. Suddenly, we stop seeing Jayda as just another former gang member, or Booker as just another politician, or Ras Baraka, the principal of Central High School in Newark, as just another disappointed school administrator. Suddenly we can see straight through to the hearts and souls of these people. Maybe it just takes two and a half hours of this very patient, day-in-the-life documentary to recognize how special the people on-screen are, or maybe it takes that long for its subjects to forget that the cameras are on, or maybe it just takes a while to appreciate how good filmmakers Levin and Benjamin are at ferreting out salient moments so that we really get to know these subjects.

After some dark moments in the first few hours, Jayda starts to really come alive for the camera. She's obviously smart and dynamic from the beginning, but her ability to connect with younger women only becomes clear when she starts a mentoring group for at-risk high-school-age girls called Nine Strong Women. During a sleepover for the girls at her apartment, Jayda warns them against falling in with the wrong crowd, telling them, "Be careful about who you call a friend." One of the girls is annoyed that Jayda is looking straight at her when she says that.

"You want to know why I look at you? Because you have a beautiful heart and you are gullible as hell. You will believe anything. And that is the worst type of person to be in 2008 living in Newark, New Jersey."

Meanwhile, Jayda's boyfriend Creep, who still hangs out with his fellow Cripps gang members, says he doesn't want to be living in Newark at all. When the two of them go looking for a new apartment to share with their baby, plus Creep's daughter and Jayda's young son, Creep spells it out for Jayda.

Creep: I wanna live ...

Jayda: In a neutral zone.

Creep: ... in the business hood, where I go outside and it's like "How you doing this morning, sir? How you doing?" Fucking suits. That's where I wanna live at.

Jayda: Where in Newark could we find that?

Creep: I ain't say nothin' about Newark.

So why not just move to a prettier place? Sure, some can't afford it. But crucially, a lot of the people we see on-screen aren't merely interested in making their own lives prettier (like so many of us). They're interested in somehow, some way, pulling their community out of a deep, dark pit of despair.

"When you say a kid doesn't want to learn, that's like saying a moth doesn't want to be a butterfly," says Principal Baraka of the challenges of teaching kids with so much turmoil in their lives. "Kids learn every single day. We learn every single day. The question is, what do we learn?"

Baraka and Vice Principal Todd Warren aim to teach their kids lessons that many of them aren't learning at home. In one heartbreaking scene, Warren addresses a group of freshman boys taking part in the Freshman Boys Overnight, a program at Central High that seems to encourage the boys to make the school a sort of second home.

"You're playing around in the classroom, but those kids in [predominantly white] Millburn have their faces in a book," Warren says, but no one looks all that convinced. "But you're too foolish to see that! We're telling you this stuff because we love you, man."

Warren looks around the room and his voice softens. "Some of you don't know anything about real love, though. You've never had any type of interaction with a real man before. Who here is being raised by a woman?" Almost every single kid in the classroom raises his hand.

"Those of you who don't have men in your lives, your fathers, strong male figures, listen. Mr. Baraka and Mr. Warren love you. Mr. Baraka and Mr. Warren are here for you." Even the toughest kids in the room look like they're about to cry when Warren says this.

Boys may always grow up without fathers and Newark may always be a tough place, but this city's heroes give us all something to aspire to. As most of us struggle mightily to improve our own lives, these people fight every day to make the world a safer and better place for their neighbors. In revealing their trials and toils, Sundance's "Brick City" makes our luxuries, from our comforting things to the comfort of our cynicism, look downright foolish by comparison. By resisting the urge to avert our eyes, we can glimpse the blinding beauty that lies in the humblest acts of optimism, generosity and hope.

Across the filmland economy, funding dried up for zombie-stripper flicks and Iraq war docs alike, and this year the eco-doc floodgates opened. Filmgoers in 2009 have been barraged with feel-bad flicks, each of them assuring us that the dire plight of the endangered blue-tailed skink, e.g., is dooming our grandchildren to lives of poisoned, skink-free grimness and slavery, and that it is the Unique Responsibility of Our Generation to Do Something. (Cut to mid-level celebrity, say, Eliza Dushku, without much makeup on: "I always thought that skinks were, like, these pretty lizards who lived in my mom's flower pots. I was like everybody else: I didn't understand the ancient wisdom of a simpler time! When you're on the Hollywood Freeway with a triple latte, you're just not confronting the way skinks are bound with the future of our planet!")

I jest, but only sort of. The post-Gore wave of eco-docs has produced some fascinating, information-rich and occasionally beautiful filmmaking, but it also threatens to cancel itself out in a cacophonous roar of competing voices. Can you tell "Earth" apart from "Earth Days"? Is "Food Inc." a sequel to "War, Inc."? (And when is "Sex Inc." coming out?) Most of these movies bring life to the phrase "labor of love," resulting from years of dedicated work and sacrifice at starvation wages. Their directors and producers have defied the odds in getting them released at all, and most have gone on to defy conventional release patterns: They hopscotch from one film festival to the next, screen in church basements and community centers, self-distribute on DVD or online.

Some of these movies will never "succeed," according to the film industry's standards, and they vary enormously when it comes to coherence and cinematic quality. Some are genuine outsider projects, some are made by prestigious documentarians and some are corporate attempts to cash in on eco-chic. But they all represent the tip of an extremely large iceberg, and reflect the fact that environmentalism has become a mass-scale, grass-roots-based movement that can't be controlled by politicians, policy wonks or talking heads. In that sense, maybe these movies will change the world -- but only if you know which ones to catch and which ones to skip. Herewith, Salon's exclusive user's guide to the eco-docs of 2009.

"Fuel" Activist-cum-filmmaker Josh Tickell spent 11 years of his life on this film, but as he appears to have had a blast driving around the country in his goofball, biodiesel-powered van, I suppose it's all good. Pushing two hours in length and chaotically structured, "Fuel" is a high-spirited, pseudo-encyclopedic tour of everything that's wrong with America's energy policy and how it all could be made right through a combination of biodiesel, wind and solar power. Maybe his arguments aren't all as convincing as they look at first glance, but Tickell gets full marks for making an eco-doc designed to uplift and inspire -- it's the Viagra of green movies!

After taking his film (and his crunchy-power vehicles, including a new one fueled with algae) to innumerable film festivals -- and getting short-listed for the '08 documentary Oscar -- Tickell finally has a theatrical distribution deal. "Fuel" opens this week in New York, San Francisco and Washington; and Sept. 25 in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, with lots more cities to follow.

• Hero: For better or worse this movie is about Tickell himself, and his quixotic, low-rent-Michael Moore quest to tell the world that we've already got all the darned alternative-energy technology we need, and all we lack now is the darned gumption, darn it.
• Villain: All the usual suspects. The oil companies, the auto manufacturers, the government and to some extent the lazy-ass, narcotized American consumer. Hey, I'm not arguing the point.
• Celebrity quotient: Pretty damn high. Woody Harrelson, Sheryl Crow, Willie Nelson and Larry David all appear, more or less gratuitously.
• Film most likely to be confused with: I've already heard it referred to as "Fuel Inc." Any other movie with a short noun for a title.
• Takeaway: I'd heard so many film-industry people moaning about this movie that I was pleasantly surprised. "Fuel" is pure agitprop, but audiences love it, and you come out convinced that our current energy policy is unbelievably dumb (no-brainer, granted) and that we at least ought to try some of Tickell's solutions.
• Mainstream-media snark factor (MSMSF): Pretty minor so far; reviews have been decent. But documentary mavens kind of hate it, and with a New York opening this week, Tickell's about to have a can of gaseous, lethargic big-city ennui opened on his ass.

"Crude" Not an eco-doc in the classic sense, Joe Berlinger's fascinating cinéma-vérité exploration of the $27 billion pollution lawsuit filed against Chevron by indigenous groups in Ecuador shares the same consciousness-raising goals and aims at the same audience. Berlinger's fly-on-the-wall methodology ensures that there's plenty of ambiguity here, and he goes to great lengths to include Chevron's point of view (legalistic and inane as it may be). A meaty process film that captures the intersection of global petro-politics, law, inequality and celebrity, "Crude" is thought-provoking and profoundly unsettling. It most definitely does not leave you thinking that everything will be OK if you make your own diesel fuel out of corn husks scavenged from Dumpsters.

• Hero: Up-by-the-bootstraps Ecuadoran lawyer Pablo Fajardo, a one-time oil-field worker turned indigenous-rights crusader. Secondarily and more ambiguously, Steven Donziger, the alternately appealing and offputting New York lawyer who is Fajardo's main advisor.
• Villain: I can appreciate that Chevron is in a no-win position here. It inherited the toxic nightmare in Ecuador when it bought Texaco in 2001, and now must battle an enormous potential judgment in a country that has swung sharply toward the anti-American left. Well, cry me a river. And don't their corporate communications people understand that the more they attack Berlinger's film, the more people will want to see it?
• Celebrity quotient: London socialite Trudie Styler swans through the poisoned indigenous communities in one awkward sequence. In fairness, Styler and her husband, Sting, have done a great deal to help the afflicted villages, and have put the Chevron case on the international cause-of-the-month calendar.
• Film most likely to be confused with: "Fuel"
• Takeaway: It's a grim and engaging yarn leavened by flashes of possibility, something like the legal case from Dickens' "Bleak House" transplanted into "Heart of Darkness." Opening-week audiences at New York's IFC Center have been tremendous.
• MSMSF: None. Even the members of the entertainment media, who bow to no one in their jadedness, aren't going to side with Chevron against a well-respected documentary filmmaker and a bunch of dirt-poor Amazonian Indians living in a poisonous cancer cluster.

"No Impact Man" New York couple Colin Beavan and Michelle Conlin, both writers, decide almost on impulse to transform their lifestyle such that they have near-zero environmental impact, meaning no TV, no air conditioning, no product packaging, no food grown outside their home region, etc. (Yeah, yeah -- no toilet paper either.) The result was Beavan's fascinating blog and just-published book, along with this highly entertaining documentary by Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein, which captures both the problems attendant on worm-composting and lack of refrigeration in the Manhattan summer (more maggots than a Dario Argento movie!) and also the reality-TV-style psychodrama of the Beavan-Conlin marriage. Beavan tends to drive people nuts, while the self-effacing shopaholic Conlin is irresistible.

• Hero: Husband and wife both have their followers -- Beavan has become a highly in-demand environmental speaker and fundraiser -- but Conlin is the undisputed movie star. She's the one who buys a $975 pair of boots just before the project starts, and then must walk up and down nine flights of stairs in them. She's the one whose conversion experience is both dramatically and personally effective.
• Villain: For perhaps a third of the audience, that's going to be Beavan, who can come off as a cloaked, judgmental persona. The intended villain, of course, is the mixture of apathy, complacency and conventional wisdom that makes most of us feel completely powerless in the face of impending global doom.
• Celebrity quotient: Well, much of the problem with "No Impact Man" comes from its resemblance to reality TV, and from the fact that Beavan and Conlin have now reinvented themselves as ambiguous public figures. I like their irascible friend Mayer, who teaches Beavan how to grow vegetables and strives to indoctrinate him with leftover '60s anarchism at the same time.
• Film most likely to be confused with: No problem here! Comparisons to "Super Size Me" aside, this movie is instantly identifiable as itself.
• Takeaway: This couple's naive struggle to save the planet single-handed will either suck you in or drive you batshit. There's not a lot of middle ground here. But love 'em or hate 'em, it's a damned entertaining spectacle.
• MSMSF: Over the moon. The Beavan-Conlin household has been the target of an extended takedown by the New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert, and reviews have tended to dismiss the environmental message and describe the film as if it were a Henry James novel: It "unsparingly exposes the confused power dynamics of a certain kind of modern middle-class marriage," wrote A.O. Scott of the New York Times. That's not entirely off base, but it also speaks to how uncomfortable most lardass journalists are when confronted with anything that might require them to reflect on the world of power and privilege they inhabit and their own ideological preconceptions about it. (Allow me to clarify that I don't mean that Tony Scott is a lardass, specifically -- he looks pretty good on TV!)

"The End of the Line" Traveling from the tuna markets of Tokyo -- where some wholesalers reportedly have tons of that delicious red meat frozen against future shortages -- to the streets of London, the straits of Gibraltar and the coast of Senegal, British director Rupert Murray paints a dire but colorful portrait of the global overfishing crisis. A thoroughly depressing catalog of how completely we have devastated the world's oceans, "The End of the Line" argues that many factors have combined to cause a near-catastrophe: rising populations and widespread poverty in the developing world, coupled with the rising popularity of seafood in the metropolitan West and the explosion of high-tech methods for finding and catching ever more fish. Late in the film, some hope is offered: If we can limit our appetite for seafood, especially the large and delicious ocean fish, most species can still recover.

• Hero: Charming, laconic English reporter and author Charles Clover, who delights in tormenting high-end chefs, dysfunctional Euro-bureaucrats and trawler operators who flout the rules.
• Villain: Well, the global fishing industry has operated with no rules -- or broken them, where they existed -- for generations. But the real culprits, I am afraid, are you and me. Sushi, anyone?
• Celebrity quotient: None, unless you take sides in the intra-professional warfare between fisheries biologists.
• Film most likely to be confused with: There are at least four other movies with this title, two of them made in this decade. Also sounds like "At the Edge of the World" and "Encounters at the End of the World." Enough with the bland and generic phrase-titles, people!
• Takeaway: The mixture of rage and hope in this one is tough to take, frankly. Fixing the overfishing problem would be relatively easy, compared to, say, global warming. No new technology is required and the solution is well understood. But political will, changes in the global marketplace and adjustment of human appetites would all be required, and I'm not too sanguine about those.
• MSMSF: Not much, except for the fact that the film went almost unnoticed. This is an urbane, professional, impressively constructed documentary, although its subject strikes people as a little abstract and unsexy.

"Food Inc." This eye-opening agitprop doc about the true costs of cheap, corporate food, a collaboration between director Robert Kenner and writers Eric Schlosser ("Fast Food Nation") and Michael Pollan ("In Defense of Food"), is one of the signal cinematic moments of 2009. Although compared often to "Inconvenient Truth," "Food Inc." represents a much earlier phase of activism. As Pollan said when I interviewed him, the local and organic food movement is about where environmentalism was 40 years ago, just before the first Earth Day. A complex and layered attack on agribusiness and its transformation of America's food economy, Kenner's film both recognizes that corporate food production has had obvious benefits for consumers and argues that in the long run it's unhealthy for everybody. Alternately horrific, humorous and inspiring, "Food Inc." continues to play around the country as an organizing tool for locavores and organic-food mavens.

• Hero: Of course Michael Pollan is an eloquent speaker with a huge following, but it's Joel Salatin, a western Virginia farmer and rancher who raises organic livestock, who steals the show with his Will Rogers-flavored folk philosophy.
• Villain: Nobody from Smithfield, Perdue, Tyson or Monsanto would comment on camera for the film. Suffice it to say their hard work on behalf of the American consumer is depicted harshly herein.
• Celebrity quotient: Near-zero, although in some overeducated quadrants Pollan may qualify.
• Film most likely to be confused with: Is it a sequel to "War, Inc." or a companion piece to "Fuel"?
• Takeaway: Unabashedly partial but thoroughly nonpartisan, this is terrific muckraking journalism.
• MSMSF: Absolutely none. Reviews have been universally glowing.

"At the Edge of the World" This odd, breathtaking high-seas adventure follows the eco-pirates of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (originally a Greenpeace splinter group) as they pursue the Japanese whaling fleet in the ocean off Antarctica. Deliberately controversial, and likely to alienate at least as many viewers as it delights, Dan Stone's doc makes an intriguing companion piece to Louie Psihoyos' vastly more respectable dolphin doc, "The Cove" (see below).

• Hero: Very much depends on your perspective, but Alex Cornelissen, the laconic young Dutchman who captains one Sea Shepherd vessel, comes off as a high-integrity action-movie protagonist who steers by his own compass but is no zealot. Vin Diesel could play him in the fictional version -- for that matter, so could Adrien Brody.
• Villain: You can debate the semantics, but the Japanese have found a loophole in the international whaling moratorium that permits them to flout the law's spirit, if not its letter, and stock the sushi bars of Tokyo with whale meat.
• Celebrity quotient: Nah. Greenpeace renegade Paul Watson, who founded Sea Shepherd, is as close as we get.
• Film most likely to be confused with: Werner Herzog's "Encounters at the End of the World." That's a terrible title too (although a terrific movie).
• Takeaway: Watson is a divisive figure, seen as an ineffective bombast even by many people within the environmental movement. As to the bigger picture, you're free to debate the morality of Sea Shepherd's tactics, call them terrorists, etc. They're fearless, they believe in what they're doing, they have indeed saved some whales, and it looks like they're having a blast.
• MSMSF: Surprisingly, not that high. One prominent critic, says Rotten Tomatoes, actually called this "the summer season's most surprising and thought-provoking documentary." Oh, wait -- that was me. Seriously, though, there's been considerable Internet chatter directed against Watson and the Sea Shepherds, but critics have been gentle.

"The Cove" This blend of James Bond-style adventure and Jacques Cousteau-style underwater discovery is beautifully photographed, thematically explosive and often surprisingly funny. It's a smashing filmmaking debut from longtime nature photographer Louie Psihoyos, so why has it underperformed at the box office? Could be that scene where we watch hundreds of dolphins slaughtered in a secret Japanese cove, but I'm just guessing. Still, Psihoyos and his collaborator and star, longtime dolphin activist and former "Flipper" trainer Ric O'Barry, have accomplished at least some of their goals -- this year there was no dolphin massacre in Taiji, Japan, and dolphin meat is off the local school-lunch menu. Definitely a contender in this year's docu-Oscar race.

• Hero: O'Barry has spent most of his life campaigning to free dolphins from captivity, using legal and extra-legal means. This stems from an electrifying story he tells in the film, about watching one of the "Flipper" stars, in his words, commit suicide as a result of life in captivity.
• Villain: As with the whaling issue, it's easy to blame the Japanese. But there wouldn't be a dolphin roundup at Taiji if there weren't an international dolphinarium trade, eager to pay prices as high as $250,000 for the most desirable young-adult dolphins. (It's the rejects who get turned into meat, which is often mislabeled and contains near-toxic levels of mercury and other heavy metals.)
• Celebrity quotient: Well, O'Barry might have turned himself into a celebrity in this movie. He's great on talk shows!
• Film most likely to be confused with: Actually, none. A title that's simple, that works and that everybody can remember -- what a concept!
• Takeaway: A tough sell to audiences, apparently, but a movie you'll never forget and also one that's likely to create widespread enforced changes in the dolphin trade.
• MSMSF: Some of the usual comments about how a movie can't possibly change anything. But the response has been glowing overall.

"Earth Days" A fascinating film with a concept that's difficult to summarize, ace documentarian Robert Stone's latest offering feels like a voyage into a Thomas Pynchon-style alternate reality: One-tenth of the American population demonstrated against pollution and environmental destruction; a 36-year-old ex-Jesuit seminarian whose platform included "exploring the universe" was elected governor of California and appointed an astronaut-turned-hippie as his science advisor; a female college student became an overnight celebrity with an anti-childbirth commencement address titled "The Future Is a Cruel Hoax"; a Republican congressman became the leading environmental exponent in Washington; and the president ordered solar panels installed on the White House roof. Of course it all actually happened, during the now-forgotten historical period before and after the first Earth Day, in 1970. In telling the stories of those people and their era, Stone simultaneously laments the road not taken and suggests we can still learn from it.

• Hero: This movie's awash with 'em, from Whole Earth impresario Stewart Brand to one-time Interior Secretary Stewart Udall to longtime GOP congressman Pete McCloskey to "hippie astronaut" Rusty Schweickart to Stephanie Mills, the aforementioned anti-breeding coed. (Who was actually a student of my mom's!)
• Villain: Once again, friends, that would be all of us. We don't really have someone else to blame for allowing the historical moment, pregnant with exciting changes, to slip away amid the Reagan revolution and the flow of cheap Saudi oil.
• Celebrity quotient: It's loaded -- if you're a longtime Sierra Club member who's followed the history of American environmentalism closely. Otherwise, there's Jerry Brown and Jimmy Carter.
• Film most likely to be confused with: "Earth," an assemblage of pretty nature footage released by Disney at almost the same time. "Earth Days" was never such a great title, but that unhappy coincidence killed any chance this picture had at the box office.
• Takeaway: Kind of a downer, and isn't it always like that with American history? Sometimes I feel like the entire story of this country goes from periods of overweening arrogance to a series of heartbreaking missed opportunities, and then back again.
• MSMSF: Kind of a problem. Reviews were OK, but you can't expect people who write about movies to think about historical issues, or to understand social and political questions in anything beyond the most canned, received-wisdom terms.

Well, what if it did? What if we could reorder our priorities such that we had dramatically less impact on the environment -- and led happier, less stressful lives at the same time? That was the question that led New York writer Colin Beavan to propose a quixotic, charming, maddeningly naive and borderline-nuts project to his wife, Business Week reporter Michelle Conlin. It's the project that came to be called "No Impact Man," which is the title of Beavan's long-running blog as well as his just-published book and the documentary film about his family's adventures made by Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein.

In 2006, Beavan suggested that he, the reality-TV-addicted, espresso-guzzling Conlin and their daughter, Isabella, not yet 2 at the time, should interrupt their relatively normal Manhattan creative-class existence in order to live for an entire year while making no net impact on the environment. None, as in zero. No air conditioning, no TV, no electricity, no gas or oil heat. No takeout containers, no plastic bags, no recycled paper cups from Starbucks. No food grown more than a day's drive from New York City, which meant hardly any winter vegetables beyond cabbage and potatoes. (And no coffee whatsoever, a stark change for Conlin, who sometimes imbibed three or four iced quad-espressos a day.) No commercial soaps, shampoos or cleaning products, "natural" or otherwise. No journeys on planes, trains or automobiles (including the New York subway). Infamously, no toilet paper.

Beavan's book -- its full subtitle is "The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process" -- and Gabbert and Schein's "No Impact Man" documentary are remarkably different experiences. I recommend them both, but where Beavan offers an earnest, searching account of the project's religious-cum-philosophical roots and logistical difficulties, the movie is a hilarious, riveting must-see about a family as it breaks down almost all the way and then reinvents itself.

As Beavan presents her in print, his wife is almost a stock-comedy figure, a shopping-obsessed "Sex and the City" gal who can't tear herself away from the plasma screen and has never so much as cooked a pot of pasta in her life. (Actually, that last part appears to be true.) On screen, though, the quick-witted, winsome, self-effacing Conlin is most definitely the star of the show. Where Beavan is a cloaked persona who can come across as diffident and judgmental, Conlin is completely relatable, as they say in TV, and also follows a far more dramatic and emotional trajectory than he does.

Before the No Impact project begins, Conlin buys a pair of boots for a sum so obscene I won't print it -- and before it ends, she has not merely adjusted to but embraced a lifestyle free of TV shows or new clothes, where instead of eating takeout in front of "American Idol" she eats her husband's cabbage-and-eggplant frittata (again) after walking up nine flights of stairs to their candlelit, unheated apartment.

After a March 2007 New York Times Home Section profile bearing the unfortunate but irresistible headline "A Year Without Toilet Paper," which painted a medium-snarky portrait of the couple's low-wattage existence, Beavan and Conlin first became the center of a media feeding frenzy. Of course their household did not literally reduce its carbon footprint to zero, and of course their year of self-enforced asceticism did not affect global climate change in any meaningful way. But it's unfair to argue that they haven't made a difference.

Beavan's blog and the media coverage have inspired many people to emulate their example, and have provoked disproportionately angry responses from many others. A lot of  environmentalists who were initially suspicious of the publicity-stunt aspect of "No Impact Man" have warmed to its effects, and Beavan is highly in demand as nonprofit fundraiser and speaker. That doesn't mean that the rancor has abated from other people who feel criticized, lectured or insulted by Beavan, his worldview and his project. One poster on Gawker suggested that mowing down the Beavan-Conlin family with an Uzi would benefit the environment, and I imagine commenters on this article will come up with colorful images of their own.

If the No Impact Man project was partly a marketing opportunity from its inception -- Beavan intended to write a book all along -- that doesn't make it less sincere, or less of a threat to the dominant ideology of American consumerism. In their foolhardy plunge into uncharted terrain, Beavan and Conlin pose a fundamental challenge to a central tenet of American life: the idea that the "pursuit of happiness" is permanently and necessarily attached to economic growth, to the manufacture and consumption of ever larger quantities of stuff.

If any significant number of Americans downscale their consumption to any significant degree (setting aside the Beavan model) we would see a widespread economic collapse that would make the current downturn look like a glamorous European vacation. If some of those people actually decided, as the Conlin-Beavan household genuinely seems to do, that they were happier with a low-stress, low-consumption existence -- that working all the time and buying more junk did not correlate with happiness -- well, then we'd be forced to deal with a massive restructuring of our social and economic lives. But isn't that day of reckoning coming, one way or another?

Beavan and Conlin called me from their Manhattan apartment, where they were nursing Isabella, now 4, who was home with a bad cold. She broke in occasionally with requests for a drink of water or a bathroom visit, but didn't seem interested in answering my questions. Conlin says that Isabella adjusted seamlessly to the No Impact project, and then to the electricity being switched back on: "She was very Zen or gnostic about it. She just grooved with the moment."

Colin, having read the book and seen the movie, I think they paint really different portraits of the same experience. How do you evaluate the differences and similarities?

Colin Beavan: You know, the book is me telling what I consider to be important about the story. The movie is basically Laura and Justin telling what they consider to be important about the story, and they don't entirely overlap. There's places where I watch the film and go, "Geez, I wish we could have emphasized that more." But given the ideas we're trying to promote, there's tremendous value in having both. The book is in the world for audiences who are likely to be interested in the book, and the movie provides an entry for a completely different audience.

In the book, for example, you gradually out yourself as a Zen Buddhist, and it gradually becomes clear how much that informs your thinking and your decisions. Now, the viewer of the film can watch whole thing and have no idea that that's part of who you are and the choices you've made.

Honestly, the film is 90 minutes long, so it can't accomplish as much. It does provide a certain sense of intimacy that the book cannot, and the book can provide a certain depth that the film cannot. In truth, there were many, many conversations about the values that went into No Impact and they didn't make the cut of the film, and I miss those sometimes. Not necessarily my involvement with Zen Buddhism per se, but the thematic commonalities between religions that "No Impact Man" is based on -- I would have liked to see more of that in the film.

You write a lot about the fact that you see No Impact as rooted in various religious traditions.

There are many commonalities between the religious traditions. They're the ancient roots of wisdom. They're all struggling to tell us how to deal with human existence, and that's what we're struggling with now. All the great religions tell us, at root, to do less harm and more good. Probably the biggest consolation that all the religions give me is the understanding that we're all intimately connected, and not only are we intimately connected, but at a very real level we can't always see, we're actually one. The only thing that really makes any sense is trying to figure out how to get through this together. That is very much at the root of "No Impact Man."

You've had a lot of time to think about why this project pushes so many people's buttons. I mean, a lot of people have been inspired by you. But there are also these violent, negative reactions, and I wonder what you think about those.

There's at least two elements. One is that so many people are just working so hard, trying to do the best by themselves and their families, the people that they love. They don't have any time to themselves, and this so-called American dream is not turning out to be everything it's cracked up to be. So they're not as happy as they thought they would be. And then somebody comes along and says, "Hey, I'm living as environmentally as possible!"And there's an inference that you're not.

So basically, people are like, "I'm working my rear end off, I'm doing my best, and now you're telling me that the way I'm living my life is destroying the planet. Leave me alone!" People are overwhelmed, and I totally get that. We live in overwhelming times. Sometimes the natural reaction is to push the problem, and anybody that's discussing the problem, away from us.

On another level, there are people in the environmental movement who sincerely believe that absolutely the only way forward is through collective action leading to regulatory change, and they consider any emphasis on individual action to be a distraction. My belief is that collective action has not yet reached the head of steam that we need, and therefore that regulatory change is not as strong as we need it to be. We need to find ways of rallying people who are outside the choir and getting them involved. That means cross-aisle support, and part of the way to get that is to examine the intersection between the personal and the political, to say, "How is your life contributing to the problems our culture has?" Once people have skin in the game by examining that level of detail, then you can get them involved in the politics too.

Michelle, both the book and the film present you as going into this almost unintentionally, as if you were barely aware of how big an undertaking this was. Is there a degree of shtick to that, or was it really that way?

Michelle Conlin: Basically, Colin had been writing books and they were historical nonfiction. He told me, "I don't want to do that anymore. I want to write about global warming," and then he figured out a way to write about it. He was so excited about this idea, and I was so excited for him and wanted to be supportive and wifely and all that. So I just said yes, and I didn't fully think through what it would mean. I also didn't really have any idea what I was getting myself into. I just impulsively said yes.

C.B.: To be fair, at that stage of the game neither of us knew what we were getting ourselves into. We didn't understand just how unsustainable our systems were, and how much you have to withdraw yourself to make anything approximating no impact.

In some ways, you seemed to discover and bring together all these themes or trends that already existed, whether it was the local-food movement, the voluntary simplicity movement, the DIY crafting movement. Not to mention cooking at home and growing your own vegetables, which hardly qualify as new inventions or rediscoveries. To what extent were you genuinely naive about that stuff?

As far as the local food movement goes, I was absolutely and completely unaware of it. Of course I knew that the farmer's market existed, but I had always been flummoxed by the farmer's market. You know, a rutabaga. What does one do with a rutabaga? [Laughter.] I was genuinely flummoxed by that. When I say that neither of us knew what we were getting ourselves into, I think that in some ways I believed we'd just buy organic food. And then when I started to research the impacts of our food system, I realized that organic food was an insufficient standard, and we had to move to local food.

I mean, the conceit of the book is that I'm an armchair liberal who spouts off about everything but doesn't do much about it. Of course I had been involved in some political actions but I really didn't know what to do about it. So this really was a journey of enlightenment, in the sense of learning the details.

I get the sense that there are some people in the environmental movement who view you with some bad blood. They see you standing on the shore like Christopher Columbus, saying, "I've discovered a new world!" And they're like, wait a minute. There's already people living here.

M.C.: Honey, let me jump in here, OK? Andrew, I think Colin makes it really super-clear in the book that, like, we really didn't know anything, and there are people who've been working on this stuff for decades, who have dedicated their lives to it. We in no way consider ourselves to have discovered any of this. We're very aware that there's a huge legacy of people who've worked on these issues forever, and we stumbled into all of this in 2006.

C.B.: Basically I'm a communications professional. I'm in the lucky position of taking the work of people who've come before us and to communicate what they've learned. As far as I'm concerned, I'm largely popularizing other people's work.

In terms of that ability to communicate, I wonder if it's actually helpful that before you started this you guys were much closer to the lifestyle of your average urban professional couple. You weren't environmental activists or super-educated organic consumers or whatever.

M.C. I think it is. I don't think we were environmentally awake. I mean, intellectually we knew what was going on, but I don't consider that we were active in the movement or super-conscious in our own life. I think that made the whole thing more interesting.

C.B.: You know what it's like when you're going to write a piece. You start to get obsessed and you want to research it. There was a time period between when we decided we were going to do it and when we actually started, and I deliberately didn't start doing research ahead of time. I thought that story about a naive person who cares but has no idea what to do was really important. I wanted to be like everybody else. I am like everybody else.

M.C.: That was a story I was looking for and wanted to read about, because that was a story I could relate to.

Now, how does your family live today, with the official No Impact project in the past? Have you made permanent logistical and physical changes, or are the effects found somewhere else, in spiritual or psychological ground?

M.C.: I'll answer first just because my answer will probably be shorter. Yes, there are specific physical manifestations to it; we bike and eat local food and all of that. But for me, the spiritual and psychological benefits and dividends were just as deep, if not deeper.

C.B.: There are so many adaptations we made that we kept, but one of the big spiritual or psychological changes for me was the understanding that all of our voices count. All our voices count, and we have a right and a responsibility to talk about how we want to live together. Actually, if we start doing that then change will happen.

M.C.: Can I add one more thing, Colin? I realized early on that we were redesigning our whole lifestyle. That's pretty exciting, and now that we've had that experience, it makes for a very intoxicating adventure, to approach life that way.

Do you honestly wish, in retrospect, that you had never 'fessed up on the whole toilet-paper question?

C.B.: Yeesh, that's a good question. If I have any regrets, it's that at the time of that early publicity blast I was a little bit apologetic about the idea that we need to change our lifestyles as Americans. I didn't say as forcefully as I do now that we need to change substantially -- we emit five times the carbon of the average Chinese person -- and not all of that's going to be achieved by regulation. We have to live more environmentally, and we also have to address our quality-of-life crisis. We need to figure out how to be happier and more environmental at the same time.

As for the T.P. thing, I do prefer that we talk about the kinds of issues that are brought up by the No Impact Man project: individual action or collective action, quality of life vs. standard of living. All sorts of things that have nothing to do with bathroom hygiene.

"No Impact Man" is now playing at the Angelika Film Center in New York and the Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles. It opens Sept. 18 in Chicago, San Francisco and San Jose, Calif.; Sept. 25 in Denver, Philadelphia, Sacramento, Calif., Seattle and Washington; Oct. 2 in Boston, Charlotte, N.C., Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, San Diego and St. Louis; Oct. 9 in Cleveland; Oct. 16 in Kansas City; Oct. 23 in Dallas and Houston; and Oct. 30 in Atlanta, with more cities to follow.

"Crude" sometimes seems like improbable fiction, a story co-authored by Charles Dickens and Che Guevara in which a former oilfield worker named Pablo Fajardo, who still lives in the two-room house where he grew up, is now the plaintiffs' lead attorney, threatening to bring the world's fifth-largest corporation to its knees. One of the story's many oddities is that Chevron was never involved in Ecuadoran oil exploration, or in the alleged systematic and deliberate discharge of oil sludge and contaminated water that has sometimes been called the "Amazon Chernobyl." But when Chevron acquired Texaco in 2001, it also took on that company's assets and liabilities, and now must defend itself in a case that has had many unexpected twists and turns.

After lawyers for the 30,000 or so Ecuadoran plaintiffs filed suit in the United States, Chevron fought for years to have jurisdiction returned to Ecuador, probably assuming that that country's traditional pro-business oligarchy would make the whole thing go away. Sometimes you need to be careful what you wish for: Now Ecuador has a left-leaning president, Rafael Correa, who is allied with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and openly sympathetic to the anti-Chevron case. As Berlinger's camera captures, the trial was largely conducted outdoors, on the site of the alleged contamination, with soil samples taken in public with the cameras rolling. Chevron's attorneys respond with various contradictory claims: That sludge in the ground isn't dangerous; it isn't ours; it wasn't taken from the right place; people shouldn't be living here anyway.

Over the course of four years in diverse and difficult conditions, Berlinger captures Fajardo and his American consultant, Steven Donziger, as they travel from Ecuador to New York to Houston and back. He meets residents and nurses in the Cofán indigenous community who discuss the cancer clusters and epidemic skin diseases found in the area around the contaminated waterways. He follows Trudie Styler, the jet-set fashion-plate spouse of Sting, as she tours the region and renders it an international cause célèbre. At the last minute, just as Berlinger was preparing the film for Sundance this year, he was granted interviews with a senior Chevron scientist and a corporate counsel, who assured him that A) everything is fine in the affected region, and B) we're off the hook, legally speaking, even if it isn't.

Berlinger is a leading practitioner of the cinéma-vérité method, which avoids voice-over narration or other devices aimed at directing the reader toward a specific conclusion. This is somewhat unusual in a film that seems so clearly a work of advocacy, but as he explained during a phone call that was scheduled for 15 minutes and stretched to 45, his job is to convince the uncommitted viewer that what Texaco did in the Amazon was an immense moral crime -- not to create agitprop on behalf of the plaintiffs in a specific lawsuit. First, here's the official trailer for "Crude":

Joe, I was thinking that the vérité method must have posed a special challenge in this case. You're not in the business of telling the audience who is right and who is wrong, and that comes with certain advantages and certain disadvantages for a storyteller.

Definitely. I don't believe in voice-over narration, but voice-over narration helps you speed the story along and gets you through difficult moments you may not have coverage on. This film was one of the hardest editing challenges I've ever faced, because there's a complicated 13-year history behind this lawsuit, which you have to dole out to the audience so they understand the context. Then you can get to the present-tense story.

I think my point of view is all over this film. This film has been criticized at film festivals by more activist-oriented folks, who think I've given Chevron too much screen time and think that I need to have a clearer point of view. But I have a certain view of how to engage an audience. I'm a pretty active television producer and executive producer, and I see a lot of environmental and human-rights films that have this style of banging a singular message over somebody's head. That's a very different theatrical experience from engaging the audience to be a judge or a juror, to weigh the pros and cons of all the issues.

I think it makes a more persuasive film, and, ironically, a more effective advocacy film, if you allow people to arrive at a point of view on their own. When you whitewash certain troubling aspects of a situation because you think, oh, it takes away from the main point of view that Chevron is evil -- that makes the film less honest and less interesting and less real. You end up just preaching to the converted, when the mission ought to be to bring people who aren't sure about what they think into your camp. A non-narrated approach, a warts-and-all portrait of all sides, is to my mind a more persuasive moviegoing experience.

Right. I mean, just in terms of the lawsuit, I didn't come out of this film absolutely sure who was going to win, or who should win. The issue of liability seems immensely complicated, and I'm not sure if anybody really understands it.

People have said to me, "You give Chevron too much airtime. You don't seem utterly convinced that they should lose the lawsuit." Well, I'm not utterly convinced that they should lose the lawsuit, because I'm coming at it from a different perspective. Specifically, I'm not smart enough or well enough equipped -- I'm not a judge or a scientist, and I haven't read the 100,000 pages in binders in that judge's office. I can't tell you whether Chevron has wrapped itself up in enough legalese to prevail in that lawsuit. But I can tell you that some things are larger than the lawsuit, and that the moral responsibility lies at their door. You don't go into somebody's backyard and treat it the way they treated it. I don't care about the legality. Manifest destiny was a legal philosophy that justified all sorts of terrible acts in this country. The Nuremberg racial laws made discrimination against Jews legal in Germany. So I can't tell you whether Chevron should win or lose in this lawsuit, but I don't think they have morality on their side.

The film to me is not about the lawsuit. After having spent almost four years on this situation, I see a certain inadequacy to the legal structures in place to deal with these human rights and environmental crises. It has taken 17 years to get to this point, and it will probably take another 10 or 15 years for the whole thing to be appealed and counter-appealed and worked out, and then God knows how long before payment is made. That's just too long. Generation after generation are suffering. While this legal proceeding goes on, people are dying and generations are being affected.

So I'm comfortable showing both sides of the lawsuit, to show how messy it is and how long it takes. Also, I think truth rises to the top. No matter how much corporate-speak legalese they wrap themselves up in, the ultimate message of the film is that for 600 years white people have treated indigenous people abysmally. It's a part of our history we really don't grapple with. I mean, at some level we know, in the back of our heads, that that Jack in the Box over there used to be a Cherokee village, and we moved these people out of sight.

Here was the big epiphany for me in making this movie -- it seemed like that was something that happened in the distant past, but the reality is that multinational corporations of the late 20th century, particularly in the extractive industries, are just the modern-day continuation of this shameful treatment of indigenous people. The Chevron lawyer in the film says, "People shouldn't be living here. This is an industrial zone." No, sorry. People have been living here for millennia. So I think this is an advocacy film. It's an advocacy film on behalf of indigenous people who were fucked over by Catholic missionaries, and then by their own governments, and then by the oil companies.

On one side you have this enormous oil company, and on the other side you have this former oilfield worker just out of law school, and they're fighting it out in the legal system of a country that, let's face it, has a long record of cronyism and corruption. It doesn't seem like a fair fight.

Chevron fought for years to get the case moved to Ecuador, and I don't think they ever imagined it would go to trial. At the time Ecuador was run by a military junta that was very pro-business, run by the Spanish-descended oligarchy. It was a very comfortable and cozy relationship: extracting minerals and fucking over the indigenous population. I don't think they counted on a couple of things that have taken place that happened that, luckily for me, were very cinematic. One of them was the emergence of this local populist hero, Pablo Fajardo. A local oilfield worker, impoverished but horrified by the humiliation of the workers and the environmental degradation, pulls himself up by the bootstraps and gets educated, gets a law degree, and his very first legal case -- which gains traction and results in at least a moral victory -- is against the fifth-largest company in the world. You simply couldn't make that up.

Chevron also didn't count on the emergence of a global environmental movement and the rise of mistrust of large corporations and their way of doing business, of pursuing profit at all costs. Then there was the change of regime in Ecuador, the election of Rafael Correa, who gets a bad rap in this country as a left-wing, anti-corporate protégé of Hugo Chávez. And a lot of that is accurate, to be fair. But he's the first president to visit the region, the first one to have some sympathy for the indigenous people and the first one to eschew cozy relationships with the extractive industries. Ecuador actually passed certain constitutional rights for flora and fauna last year, as a demonstration of their new commitment to the environment. Correa is having mixed results, but instead of extracting the oil, he wants to sell the oil rights to people who will keep it in the ground.

There are a lot of fascinating characters in the film, but I was really interested in Sara McMillan, the environmental scientist Chevron supplied to you at the last minute. She says everything is fine in Ecuador, there's no problem, if people are getting sick it's not our fault. She's very reassuring and comes off as really sincere. If she's lying, she's doing an extraordinarily good job of it.

She does come across as sincere, and I think she is. That's one of the deeper and more troubling aspects of those interviews. I think she believes every word coming out of her mouth. She's been down there, but she's drunk the Kool-Aid.

It reminds me of our earlier film, "Paradise Lost" [about the dubious conviction of the "West Memphis 3" on murder charges], when co-director Bruce Sinofsky and I were so flabbergasted at what was going down that we'd pull the judge aside, or the prosecutor, and ask them, "Are you guys kidding?" It became very clear that the judge, the prosecutor and the chief inspector had utterly convinced themselves of the righteousness of their mission and the evilness of Damien Echols [accused of masterminding the killings]. It's not that they were covering something up. It's more difficult to change that mind-set than it is to expose a coverup.

It's the same thing with this woman from Chevron. I believe she believes every word that comes out of her mouth. That to me is scary, and it's a signal of institutional denial. We're not talking about bad individuals, we're talking about an institution with no regard for indigenous people.

Another ambiguous area in "Crude" is the presence of Trudie Styler, Sting's wife. On one hand, she's clearly done a lot for the Amazonian people, and has raised the international profile of the case tremendously. On the other hand, you've got the bogus architecture of celebrity, and this beautiful, well-mannered English lady showing up in an outfit that cost more than every physical object in the Cofán village, all put together.

Absolutely. I have tremendous regard for Trudie and Sting. The only tangible benefit these people have received in 17 years of outside involvement are the water-filtration systems Trudie brought to the region. She and Sting have been talking about the rain forest and the rights of indigenous people for many years, long before celebrity drive-by cause-embracing had become favorable.

But the film is observing and commenting upon that uncomfortable intersection between celebrity culture and social activism. It is a shame that only when the wife of a rich and famous rock star comes to town, this case gets kicked up a notch. There are many places around the world that don't have a film and don't have a rock star or a celebrity to help them.

To go back to "Paradise Lost," Damien Echols is alive today -- and I don't say this arrogantly -- because the film produced a great outpouring of support from people like Eddie Vedder, Johnny Depp and Norman Lear. There were a tremendous amount of people who saw that movie and joined an international movement. The film came out at just the right time, just when the Internet was becoming a communication device in a big way. Lots of money has been raised, and if it hadn't been for that outpouring of support, Damien might not be alive today. I don't think the state of Arkansas has the balls to inject the guy, because of all the international attention and celebrity involvement.

I bring that up because that's an example of a guy being lucky, because a film was made. I can't tell you how many letters I've gotten over the years from wives or mothers or girlfriends of people on death row who claim they're innocent. Of course, not everybody is innocent, I'm not that naive. But those people don't have a film or a celebrity, and it's the same thing with these human-rights cases and pollution cases. This is just one part of the world that's been ravaged by the oil industry. They happen to have a celebrity involved and a film being made. The film is definitely a comment on that -- not just on Trudie's involvement but the film's involvement. It's a shame that that's what it takes to move the needle.

"Crude" is now playing at the IFC Center in New York. It opens Sept. 18 in Los Angeles; Sept. 25 in New Orleans, San Diego and San Francisco; Oct. 1 in Toronto; Oct. 2 in Chicago; Oct. 9 in Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., and Austin, Texas; Oct. 16 in Coral Gables, Fla., Denver and Santa Fe, N.M.; and Oct. 23 in Seattle and Washington, with more cities to follow.