Beyond the Multiplex

Friday, Nov 13, 2009 7:13 PM UTC

“The End of Poverty?”: How the rich steal from the poor

Does a confrontational new documentary try to resurrect Marx for the 21st century? And is that such a bad idea?

By Andrew O'Hehir

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So here’s the real question about capitalism, the one nobody really wants to face: Does it create gross inequality as an unfortunate byproduct of its energy and dynamism — or is gross inequality itself, between rich and poor, between the industrialized North and the underdeveloped South, the principal product of capitalism over the last five centuries?

Philippe Diaz’s powerful and upsetting documentary “The End of Poverty?,” which weaves together a wide range of talking-head experts and a startling array of ordinary poor people and their advocates from around the globe, casts a strong vote for Option B. Unfortunately, that answer is virtually off-limits in public discussion these days, and is likely to make the film and its French-American director unpalatable to precisely the audiences who should see it and think about it.

It would be easy, and not entirely unfair, to classify Diaz’s film as part of the ongoing effort among certain elements of the global left to rehabilitate Marxism, now that memories of the Soviet nightmare have faded. (In fact, Diaz is planning a film about Marx’s “Capital,” arguably still the most astute study of capitalism ever written.) But that label suggests a dogmatism that is totally absent from “The End of Poverty?” Diaz’s interviewees include the Nobel-winning economists Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, along with such other leading academics as economist William Easterly and political scientists Susan George and Chalmers Johnson. Those people represent a wide range of views (Easterly might even be described as a libertarian conservative), and none of them is likely to start ranting about the abolition of private property or the inevitable triumph of socialism.

“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.

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Wednesday, Nov 11, 2009 8:11 AM UTC

Woody Harrelson on war, death, LBJ and Obama

The one-time "Cheers" star turned eco-radical climbs into bed to talk about his new film, and the new James Dean

By Andrew O'Hehir

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Woody Harrelson in "The Messenger"

Woody Harrelson began our interview by climbing barefoot onto the interior windowsill of his hotel room overlooking New York’s Union Square to point out an apartment across the square where he lived briefly, 15 or 20 years ago. (It’s in the building that houses the Heartland Brewery, if you know the neighborhood. On the second or third floor, he couldn’t remember.) Then he got into bed.

There wasn’t an ounce of pretense about any of this, I swear. He was curious to get a look at that old apartment, and felt like telling me about it. He was tired, so he got into bed. When you meet Harrelson, you get a momentary glimpse of what a strange and exhausting job it must be to be famous. The job involves meeting an endless ocean of people you don’t know and most likely will never see again. The obvious solution would be to retreat behind a well-rehearsed performance of your persona, to recycle a handful of gestures and mannerisms.

Harrelson, on the other hand, seems like a guy totally determined not to let the artificiality of these interactions impinge on his sense of who he is. Perversely, the fact that he is frank and thoughtful, and known to hold unorthodox political opinions he doesn’t keep to himself, has only augmented his fame. You can’t throw an empty Chardonnay bottle out your car window in west L.A. without hitting a Hollywood liberal, but Harrelson is something much rarer: a vegan, raw-foodist, antiwar, anti-capitalist, pro-marijuana, eco-funky, genuine radical who happens to be a beloved character actor with a good-ol’-boy demeanor.

Like the other journalists who showed up to talk to him about his role in “The Messenger,” writer-director Oren Moverman’s film about the United States Army’s Combat Notification Unit (i.e., the dreaded door-knockers who show up with really bad news), I was asked by the publicists to restrict my questions to the film and Harrelson’s acting career. It’s a laughable request anyway, but in fact I would have needed to tie Harrelson up and gag him if I didn’t want to hear his opinions about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the dangers of capitalism and the looming possibility that Barack Obama could become a second LBJ.

For the first half of this decade, Harrelson was mostly absent from the movie screen; he did some theater and TV, a fair amount of environmental and pro-cannabis activism — his illegal banner-drop from the Golden Gate Bridge goes back to 1996 — and a lot of time with his family. (He lives most of the year on Maui with his wife and three daughters.) It seemed entirely plausible that the one-time “Cheers” star and Oscar nominee (for “The People vs. Larry Flynt”) had burned up his 15 minutes, and then some.

It doesn’t look that way now. Harrelson has appeared in more than two dozen films over the past three years, with more in the pipeline, and three of them are piling up on top of each other this fall. He co-stars in the action-comedy “Zombieland” and the apocalypse-thriller “2012,” both of them likely to gross more in a single weekend than “The Messenger” will in its entire history. But Moverman’s low-budget, high-intensity drama about the social and psychological costs of war is clearly “a labor of love” for all concerned, as Harrelson puts it.

In “The Messenger,” Harrelson plays Capt. Tony Stone, a damaged, middle-aged hardass assigned to mentor the younger Sgt. Will Montgomery (Ben Foster), a decorated and wounded Iraq vet, as they take on the uniquely difficult task of informing civilians that their loved ones serving overseas won’t be coming home. If that sounds wrenching, well, it is. But the acting is superlative — Harrelson’s right when he says that Foster’s starring role has echoes of James Dean or the young De Niro — and the half-improvised quality of the filmmaking feels dangerous and intimate but never showoffy.

When Stone and Montgomery are assigned to notify an NOK — that’s “next of kin,” in Army parlance — Foster and Harrelson literally went into the scene not knowing what would happen. They hadn’t even met the actors playing the bereaved-civilian roles, and weren’t sure whether they would break down in tears or respond with physical violence. (Moverman and co-writer Alessandro Camon partly based his screenplay on stories they heard from casualty-notification soldiers.) The story of what Stone and Montgomery have to do, and how it affects them, offers an intimate, human-scale portrait of the real costs of warfare.

Once Harrelson was safely tucked under the covers, wearing an Army T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans, I put my tape recorder on top of the duvet and we got talking. It was a nice big bed, and looked extra-comfy. Woody probably wouldn’t have taken it the wrong way. I can’t say I wasn’t tempted.

This movie isn’t connected to the Fort Hood shooting in any way, but still. It’s kind of intense to be talking about this subject, about death and the military, right after that.

It’s related in the sense that it’s another sad story connected to this war. There’s a lot of those, and that one’s pretty devastating. I feel really terrible for those families.

And then I just happened to notice, on the same page of today’s New York Times as that story, two more of those names in bold-face type. Two more soldiers whose families are going to be getting visits from guys like the one you play in the movie. [Just to put names to them, they were Spc. Tony Carrasco Jr., of Berino, N.M., and Staff Sgt. Amy C. Tirador of Albany, N.Y.]

It really is a devastating thing. I’ve had an evolution of sorts in terms of my attitude toward the war. Not in the sense of the war itself, which I do continue to think is wrong — and I think it’s pretty obvious what the war is about, both of them. During the course of making this, I had the opportunity to spend time with a bunch of soldiers and hear a bunch of stories, and you know, just start to feel a great deal of empathy and compassion toward the men and women who are over there working their asses off every day, not getting paid much and just putting their lives on the line for love of country. I do think that a big part of supporting the troops would be the concept of not sending them into battle in a war for resources.

So you think both Iraq and Afghanistan are wars over resources?

Iraq’s about the oil and Afghanistan’s about a pipeline. It always has been. They started building a pipeline as soon as there was a moment to do so. They started building a pipeline to the Caspian Sea, that’s always been their directive. The guys from Chevron went in and met with the Taliban and realized those guys just weren’t in control enough. That’s why they wanted to oust them. Otherwise it’s an absurd concept: You’re going to war because a guy from some other country, a Saudi, is living somewhere in the mountains? So we’re going to bomb Kabul, bomb the cities? That’s absurd. It’s a foreign policy gone way wrong. But that’s how it always is. American foreign policy has always been, not about spreading democracy, but about spreading capitalism.

It does feel sometimes like our government suffers from some kind of amnesia or OCD. It’s like they keep making the same foreign policy mistakes and just hoping it won’t turn out quite as badly the next time.

I’m hoping that other countries look at us and say, “OK, there’s the government and then there’s the people.” Granted, you’d like the will of the government to be conjoined with the will of the people. But it’s the same way I’ve made the evolutionary step of looking at the war as separate from the soldiers. When I look at Russia, I don’t look at Putin as representing the Russian people. I’m sure they’d love to get him out of there. Regardless, the Bushes and their various oligarchies have gotten us into a situation that’s just very unfortunate.

At least at this point, it appears that Obama is pushing onward with the war in Afghanistan. Is he just constrained by geopolitics? Is he simply not free to say, “Look, we’re not going to do this anymore”?

I think there’s a lot of persuasive and powerful people around Obama. For a president to make his own decisions, I think that’s a rarity. Even someone who we think of as our guy — this is a guy with integrity, a guy who cares, for the first time in a long time — in the Oval Office, even with him we don’t really know who’s pulling the strings. I think of every president as being a marionette. Whether he’s any different, I don’t know. Certainly his military advisors all want him to prosecute this war to the end, just as they did in Vietnam with LBJ.

It’s just too depressing, I think we’re going to have to hit the streets. Obama has the chance of becoming JFK or LBJ. I think JFK was one of our last great presidents, although I thought Carter was pretty great too. LBJ could have been a great president if he hadn’t gotten bogged down in war, but that was quite a war to get bogged down in. Notwithstanding the fact that the war was wrong and they were talking about the Red Scare and the domino effect, if you go and read the Pentagon Papers they were also talking about rubber, tin and oil. They killed 2 and a half million people. What was it all for? In Korea they killed 4 and a half million. Like, we’re liberating these people?

Well, one of the things this movie engages, in a way, is the fact that the combined U.S. fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan are still below 4,500. Not that that’s not terrible for those families, but it’s not a number that has affected every town and every neighborhood, the way other wars did.

Yeah, but it’s got to be more than 10 times that in terms of people with injuries, people strongly affected by it. I’m not sure what’s going to make people hit the street, and, you know, I’m one of those people who’s not on the street. I recognize that I’m just a guy bitching about it, not a guy who’s doing anything.

The thing I love about this movie is that it really takes into account the consequences of going to war. It’s been gratifying to me to hear from people who say, “Before it was just a thing in the news, a statistic.” You’re not really seeing a blown-up body, or seeing the coffins at Dover. I think it’s a good thing that it puts a human face on it.

On one level I really dreaded those scenes where you and Ben went to knock on people’s doors, do the notifications. They were hard to sit through. But on the other hand, I kind of needed that emotional catharsis. And they’re very intense. In the first scene we see, the woman completely goes nuts and attacks you.

That was cool because of the way Oren shot it. We really didn’t know what was going to happen. I didn’t know she was going to hit me. You don’t know what level the people are going to, the way they’ll manage their grief. I think it made those scenes much more realistic. We never rehearsed, and never even met the people ahead of time. We shot those in one shot. All of that was really good.

They weren’t all done in one shot, were they?

No, there’s only two notification scenes that are actually one shot as you see them in the movie. One is Steve Buscemi’s and then there’s another one. But they were all shot as a one-camera, single-shot thing, with one camera following the action. Later on, if Oren did three takes or whatever, he’d join the different takes together, find whatever worked better. But they were designed to be one-shot takes, and it felt very real. It kept us right on our toes, and on edge.

That guy that you’re playing felt very real to me. He’s this hardass military lifer, an Army guy, and he’s really messed up in ways he doesn’t even recognize. I mean, this guy badly needs a hug.

[Laughter.] That’s the best description yet. He badly needs a hug. That’s true.

I thought there was terrific chemistry between you and Ben Foster, who plays your younger tag-team partner. Obviously you guys are pros so it can be hard to tell, but it felt like there was something real happening there.

Oh, it was incredible. I feel like he’s my brother, I really love him. And as an actor, he’s one of the best I’ve ever worked with, if not the best. Total immersion in the mind-set of the character, and constantly reminding himself of the significance of what we’re doing. Just before a scene, maybe I’m not completely grounded, and he hands me these pictures of soldiers smiling or hanging with their kids, and they’re marked with the dates they died, 2003, 2004, whatever. You can’t help but be full of the emotion, with what this movie’s connected to. It’s one of the few times that I’ve felt emotional pretense really skirting on emotional reality. I don’t think I said that right. It’s just, you know, we’re pretending, but the reality of it is big.

I’ve seen him in other movies, but people are really going to notice him this time, if they haven’t already.

I think he’s one of the most amazing actors. It’s like I’m working with James Dean before people know that he’s James Dean. I feel like I just did “East of Eden” with James Dean. His talent is so expansive, he’s got a huge career ahead of him.

You took several years off, and for a while there it didn’t seem clear whether you wanted to make Hollywood movies anymore. I guess you’re at peace with them now! I’m not ranking on you for making movies. You’re an actor. But does it help you somehow to do a smaller project like this one alongside a big movie like “2012,” which can pay a lot of bills?

You know, I don’t feel like a movie has to have a message, necessarily. If a movie’s fun and funny and just great entertainment, that’s enough. But it’s nice to do a movie like “The Messenger” where you feel like people watch it and it’s initiating conversations that are important. What more could you hope for?

I did take a long time off. I wasn’t planning on taking that long, it just kind of happened. Five years. I did keep my hand in, in terms of doing some plays. I wasn’t entirely out of the loop. But it was a good thing. I needed to spend some time with my kids. I needed to get away from it. I wasn’t liking the whole, I guess you would say, business-y side of it. I came into acting initially because I loved theater, I wanted to be on Broadway. You know, I would have been on Broadway, but I ended up doing this show.

I’ve heard about that! Apparently you were on TV for a few years.

Yeah. Otherwise I just would have been here in New York. I love theater, that is where my passion is. There was a lot about “The Messenger” that felt very theatrical. Just really being in a scene with a fucking serious actor, like a young De Niro type of actor. It was just a great experience all the way around. I feel super lucky to be a part of this movie.

“The Messenger” opens Nov. 13 at the Angelika Film Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York, with wider release to follow.

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Thursday, Nov 5, 2009 1:05 AM UTC

The undignified near-death of Miramax

Why Disney turned Harvey Weinstein's legendary indie empire into a zombie slave -- and why it doesn't much matter

By Andrew O'Hehir

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Stills from "The Queen," "No Country for Old Men," "Chicago," and "Pulp Fiction"

It seems to me that if I were the owner of the only independent-film distributor the general public has ever noticed or cared about, the company that brought the world “Pulp Fiction,” “The Crying Game,” “sex, lies, and videotape,” “The English Patient,” “Shakespeare in Love,” “Chicago,” “The Queen” and “No Country for Old Men,” I might try to cash in on that brand name in perpetuity by making or selling some really good movies. Fortunately for all concerned, I am not the owner of Miramax Films, and in recent days the once-mighty indie empire founded by Bob and Harvey Weinstein in 1979 has reached the end of the road, or pretty nearly so.

Actually, what’s happening to Miramax isn’t even as dignified as a public execution. Instead, now that its corporate overlords at Disney (owner of Miramax since 1993) have drained the company of its vital essence, it will be kept alive in shrunken, zombie-slave form. Reportedly, Miramax will be reduced to around 20 employees — definitely not including current head Daniel Battsek — and relocated from its longtime home in New York to the Disney lot in Burbank, Calif., where it will release something like three boutique-film titles a year.

I say again: Harvey’s old company, the one that launched, catalyzed and perpetuated the indie revolution of the ’80s and ’90s. Three movies a year. In Burbank. That’s not a studio or a distributor or even a “specialty division.” It’s a hobby, or an off-brand. It’s like that weird brand of Pepsi they sold in the ’80s that was neither regular Pepsi nor Diet Pepsi, the one that came in a sky-blue can and was flavored with lemon, and inexplicably had one calorie instead of none at all. That’s Miramax.

It might seem utterly baffling, at least at first: Sure, the economy stinks, but Miramax’s collapse comes less than two years after the company collected a big pile of Oscars and other awards for “No Country for Old Men” and “There Will Be Blood.” Not only had Miramax fully recovered from the 2005 split with the Weinstein brothers (it seemed), but post-Weinstein head honcho Battsek was riding high, pushing forward with an aggressive list of productions and acquisitions. “When you think about how glowing it looked for Battsek just two years ago,” says longtime indie guru John Pierson, who partnered with Miramax on various projects in the Weinstein era and now teaches film at the University of Texas, “it’s amazing that it could all fall apart so fast.” (CORRECTION: In the first published version of this post, I described Pierson as a former Miramax executive, which is not accurate.)

As Pierson also notes, Miramax almost certainly didn’t fall apart that fast. While no one inside Disney is talking (at least not to me), veterans of the indie industry almost unanimously suggest that the Miramax collapse was a long time coming. As filmmaker and distribution veteran Jeff Lipsky puts it, there was always “a lack of transparency” in the relationship between Miramax and Disney, meaning that we never knew for sure whether Miramax’s supposed hits were adding anything to the corporate bottom line. “Since the day Disney bought Miramax, who knows whether they were bleeding red ink left and right?” Lipsky asks. “I would speculate that this might be a case of pure financial practicality, and Disney finally needed to stop the bleeding.”

Pierson observes that when we saw Joel and Ethan Coen picking up their statuettes for “No Country for Old Men,” or Daniel Day-Lewis winning the best-actor prize for “There Will Be Blood,” we didn’t see how much money was spent on publicity and advertising before those guys reached the stage of the Kodak Theatre. “You can easily get into a situation where you’re spending money hand over fist in search of that glory,” he says, “and along the way you’re eroding whatever profitable bottom line you might once have had.” Indeed, although those two films grossed more than $110 million between them, well-placed industry sources suggest, amazingly enough, that neither one managed to turn a profit.

Magnolia Pictures president Eamonn Bowles, who worked at Miramax in the ’90s, sees the company’s near-total desiccation as just another chapter in a lengthy and necessary restructuring of the film marketplace. Over the course of the last two years, numerous other studio specialty divisions and small indie distributors have disappeared, including Picturehouse, Warner Independent, Paramount Vantage, THINKfilm and New Yorker Films.

“The landscape has changed a lot since last summer, when all those companies closed down,” Bowles says. “The market has gotten back to a more sustainable level. Those companies whose basic M.O. was to chase the Oscar at any cost created an absolutely false marketplace.” He suggests that surviving companies like Magnolia, Sony Pictures Classics, IFC and Zeitgeist, who focus on marketing quality films to niche audiences, are now in a stronger position. “Producers are the ones who may be hurt by this, because there are fewer players with fewer resources, and it’s a buyer’s market. But we’ve done very well since last summer. It’s inherently a more reasonable situation.”

While the Miramax of the ’80s and ’90s was a legendary institution whose movies and mystique will linger for years to come, no one I spoke to this week expressed much nostalgia about the current edition, which has flailed around since its 2007 Oscar run, without finding an identity or any notably successful films. “Whatever the name brand was worth, once upon a time, it doesn’t mean much today,” says Pierson. “I think anybody who was smart enough to know about Miramax knew that the company meant Bob and Harvey, and unless they go out of business, you can’t really say that Miramax is dead.” (The brothers’ struggling new entity, the Weinstein Co., was buoyed somewhat this year by the success of “Inglourious Basterds.”)

During the Weinstein glory days, when the company made money, won awards and produced or distributed important films by everyone from Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith to Pedro Almodóvar and Krzysztof Kieslowski, Pierson adds, “Miramax changed the world, totally and completely. The closest analogy I can draw in film history would be United Artists, from about 1960 to 1972, where you’re talking about winning Oscars, about bringing European films to America, about working with important auteurs and also making films for large audiences. Does that mean people will forget about Miramax in 40 or 50 years, the way they’ve mostly forgotten about U.A.? I don’t know. Probably.”

To a fan (and creator) of challenging art-house fare like Jeff Lipsky, the Miramax story is more about extraordinary marketing than extraordinary movies. “Harvey Weinstein has proven himself to be a marketing genius,” he says, “and that’s what the success of Miramax, and all the dollars it generated, were built on. He could take a movie that was savaged by the critics, like ‘The English Patient,’ attract huge audiences to it and then win best picture. As for ‘Pulp Fiction,’ I’m not sure that any other company could have done what Harvey did with that film. And, listen, it’s an overrated film, in my opinion. But the marketing campaign they built around it — that wasn’t overrated at all.”

Some Internet commentators have pronounced the Miramax collapse to be a symbolic death knell for independent film. On one hand, that’s lazy, short-term meme-think from people who know little about business and even less about art. On the other hand, they might be right, in that a certain era of independent film — the one in which it appeared as a hip, hot but fatally nebulous commodity — is coming to an end.

“If you’re in the arts there’s always going to be independent work, and an audience that wants it,” says Eamonn Bowles. “It’s going to be more complex, it’s not easy to synopsize and it’s not easy to market. We’re always going to have independent film, but is it going to be independent film as played out in the pages of Us Weekly? This isn’t the end of independent film, but it might be the end of the large-scale tarting-up of independent film.”

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Tuesday, Nov 3, 2009 9:03 AM UTC

Lightning survivors tell (almost) all!

A spectacular new film explores the physics and metaphysics of nature's most terrifying elemental force

By Andrew O'Hehir

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A still from "Act of God"

You probably don’t need a movie to tell you that lightning can evoke something approaching religious terror in the most atheistic people, and can be seen as the direct work of God by the faithful. Maybe your own body told you that, the last time the hair on your neck and arms stood rigid while a bolt took down a neighbor’s tree. (At our family’s getaway house in central New York state, summer lightning strikes have more than once caused the phone to ring. As my wife once observed, if it’s actually God on the line, what do you say?) Or maybe the fact that virtually every religious and spiritual tradition views lightning as a death-dealing instrument of divine power clued you in.

Nonetheless, that movie is here, and Canadian documentarian Jennifer Baichwal’s “Act of God” is an undeniably provocative head-trip, laced with the most spectacular lightning-storm footage I’ve ever seen. (Baichwal got jobbed out of an Oscar nomination, in my view, for “Manufactured Landscapes,” her film about photographer Edward Burtynsky and his remarkable work in China.) All those divided forks and curlicues and bizarre non-geometrical shapes are dreadful and gorgeous on their own terms, but you can’t avoid the sense that there’s something fundamental about them, and that they seem momentarily to open a window onto an understanding of reality you’re not equipped to grasp.

That alone might be worth making a special trip to see this film on a big screen, or an expedition to the house of that friend with the really humongous plasma screen, once the DVD gets here. Beyond the amazing light show, don’t expect Baichwal to take on lightning in direct or linear fashion; many viewers will be enthralled by “Act of God,” while others may well be irritated. If you pay attention, you will learn a little about the basic physics of lightning in this movie. You’ll also learn a little about how it mimics (on a macro scale) the transmission of electrical information within the human brain, and even how many scientists point to lightning storms in the primeval ocean as the source of the first chemical reactions — and thereby the first life. But this isn’t a science film, and the elliptical story Baichwal wants to tell is far more about our reactions to lightning — the way we fear it and wonder at it, the way it appears to us as both random and divine — than about lightning itself.

Her human subjects range from novelist Paul Auster, who has written about his near-miss with lightning as a teenager at camp (the boy directly in front of him was killed), to a Las Vegas death-and-dying guru who says his spiritual practice was activated by a near-fatal lightning strike, to practitioners of the Afro-Cuban Santeria religion, who view lightning as an attribute of the god Shango; and to a group of Mexican villagers struggling to understand an especially cruel act of the deity, when several of their children were killed by lightning at a hilltop shrine.

Baichwal’s title, while it’s meant to be suggestive, does not signify a religious interpretation: The term, after all, is used by insurance companies to describe lightning strikes, as well as by believers. To the devout Catholics in that Mexican town, “God doesn’t make mistakes,” and the incomprehensible deaths of their “angelitos” can only mean they were called away to some higher purpose. For Paul Auster, being struck by lightning is just one of the many chance events that we vainly struggle to fit into a pattern. Yet for all his talk about facing life as it is, and avoiding “fairy tales,” he admits that the lightning incident has informed his writing career ever since. As Baichwal sees it, I think, this most elemental of elemental forces challenges whatever we do or do not believe about the universe. If it doesn’t kill us first.

“Act of God” opens Nov. 4 at the IFC Center in New York, with wider national release to follow.

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Friday, Oct 30, 2009 2:28 AM UTC

Have an alt-horror Halloween!

Forget the sequels, formulas and pointless gore -- at the low-rent, freaky fringes, horror movies are still alive

By Andrew O'Hehir

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Christine Brown (Alison Lohman)

Alison Lohman in “Drag Me to Hell”

Maybe filmmakers have actually started to run out of ways to tell stories about the fact that we’re all scared of dying (although we know it’s likely to happen) and that we feel confused about sex. Maybe it’s Hollywood’s addiction to formula and nostalgia, and its corresponding aversion to artistic innovation. Maybe it’s one of those cyclical, cultural things, that scholars a generation from now will start to figure out, like the disappearance of the western.

Whatever the reasons are, the mainstream American-made horror movie has been in dire condition for at least the last decade. A shambling corpse with rotting ligaments and lolling eyeballs, it just can’t keep up with us. We want it to chase us away from the campfire and into the dark, deep woods, but it just shuffles around doing third-rate showbiz impersonations — a little Jerry Lewis, a little George Romero — and sinks back into its TV coma.

It was bad enough when horror movies just became unimaginative gore ‘n’ grossout spectacles, as in the “Hostel” period. It was worse when they became warmed-over formula remakes and celebrity rehab vehicles, as in the Paris Hilton/”House of Wax” period. Worst of all, most horror movies these days are both boring and careless, put together as cynical business deals aimed at separating young viewers from a few dollars and made by people with no feeling for the traditions, demands and highly discerning audiences of the genre.

With the release this week of Ti West’s neo-retro, early-’80s-style “The House of the Devil,” it appears that all is not lost. (A hell of a lot is lost, but not quite all.) Rather than assemble another one of those haunted-pumpkin lists of the scariest movies ever, which always tend to reshuffle the same 15 or 20 films, I thought I’d pick out a few recent horror highlights, and along the way argue for an enduring if unofficial alt-horror tradition. I’m not necessarily talking about ultra-low-budget indie films, although there are a few of those on this list. Mainly, I’m saying that horror movies based more in storytelling, character and psychological creepiness than in shock value and formula have never died, and you can find them in all kinds of places at all levels of production.

I’m not discussing here the enormous Japanese and Korean horror wave of the ’90s and 2000s, which has been highly influential in Western horror but is really its own phenomenon. (And as eventually became clear, a lot of those movies were just as formulaic in their own way.) I am including a couple of Euro-horror films made in this decade because you should know about them if you don’t already, and because the European take on classic American horror has helped bring the genre back to basics.

I am not writing about Rob Zombie (director of “House of 1000 Corpses,” “The Devil’s Rejects” and two “Halloween” remakes) because I don’t like his movies that much and I’m not sure what to say about him. Make your own damn list, Zombie acolytes. As will be obvious, I’m giving a fair bit of credit for reviving 21st-century horror some of the credit for keeping horror viable to the New York indie scene around West and his producer Larry Fessenden, also a director, writer, actor and all-around genre-film Svengali. (West is also behind the IFC.com vampire-dating series “Dead & Lonely,” and has made a still-unreleased sequel to Eli Roth’s “Cabin Fever.”)

Some of the movies on this list are more like instructive examples than shining moments in cinema history: I watched “Dark Mirror” because it was getting lots of eyeballs on IFC Festival Direct, and found that it was exactly the kind of mid-level, TV-grade, reasonably competent horror flick the cable networks used to make but don’t bother with anymore. Let’s begin, though, with the stuff that’s absolutely terrific.

“I Can See You” This tremendous debut from writer-director-editor-composer Graham Reznick begins with the most familiar horror-movie plot device you can imagine — a group of ill-prepared urbanites head out for a camping trip — and ends up as full-on, post-Kubrick, experimental-film freakout. Produced by the ubiquitous Fessenden, who also appears as an increasingly sinister corporate pitchman from the distant TV past. What is that character doing at the rural retreat of a hipsterized Brooklyn, N.Y., ad agency, whose star designer (Ben Dickinson) is having some weird problems getting a painting of his father finished? There’s no way to explain that until you see the movie, which goes from comic-realistic mode into full-on psycho meltdown with more terrifying adroitness than any other movie of this decade. Just out on DVD. See. It. Now.

“Drag Me to Hell” Nowhere near as obscure as the other movies on this list, but it’s noteworthy that Sam Raimi’s return to low-budget, ’80s-style horror — after much, much too long spent in the mind-deadening Peter Parker universe — was met with widespread delight by both critics and paying customers. And can we just say that Sam and his brother, Ivan Raimi, were smoking some genius herb when they made their doomed main character (Alison Lohman) a loan officer forced to evict an elderly Gypsy woman and then face her mystical wrath? I hope Lohman’s character is enjoying having her eyeballs boiled in Satan’s cauldron, that’s all I have to say. (Just out on DVD.)

“Trigger Man” This is the feature West made before “The House of the Devil,” and although it has a fraction of the budget it may be even more effective. Yet another Fessenden production (and he appears in a brief, villainous cameo). Nearly wordless and plotless, “Trigger Man” follows two guys into the wilderness, where their manly getaway is interrupted by a mysterious sniper attack. Beautiful and genuinely frightening, this plays like an attempt to strip the rural-assault movie down to its basic ingredients. Oddly similar to both “I Can See You” (above) and to Kelly Reichardt’s über-indie anti-bromance, “Old Joy.”

“Murder Party” I’m actually surprised to realize that writer-director Jeremy Saulnier’s urban-hipster horror-comedy doesn’t have anything to do with Larry Fessenden. Ultra-cheap, loaded with gore and very funny throughout, “Murder Party” follows an ordinary schmo to a Halloween party held by a group of self-involved Brooklyn “artists,” who’ve invited him there to kill him — as, you know, a “project.” Watching it, I kept thinking the broad satire was about to get unbelievably stupid, but Saulnier is spoofing the art world from the inside, and the relentlessly raunchy good nature of “Murder Party” is impossible to resist.

“The Last Winter” One last big dose of love for Fessenden, who directed this atmospheric Alaska-set eco-catastrophe thriller that channels, or so he claims, both John Carpenter’s “The Thing” and Kurosawa’s “Dersu Uzala.” Frankly, Larry, the big spectral secret revealed at the end of the movie is pretty goofy, but that’s made up for by the tense, near-future setting in which an isolated oil-field crew is drilling through the melting Alaska permafrost — and things are starting to go very wrong. And that last shot, the one where this movie collides head-on with “An Inconvenient Truth”? Devastating.

“Calvaire (The Ordeal)” European horror directors offered all sorts of odd formula tweaks in the 2000s, but none weirder than Fabrice du Welz’s psychotronic journey into “the Siberia of Belgium,” where a low-rent, Tom Jones-style lounge singer is imprisoned by the way-too-friendly proprietor of a country inn. I really can’t explain anything that happens in the movie after that; don’t miss the homoerotic barroom-dance scene, set to quasi-avant-garde piano music. Continuing a venerable European tradition, du Welz followed this memorable and profoundly demented debut by making an execrable English-language film (“Vinyan”) that went thankfully ignored. Back to the Walloon Siberia with you!

“Hardware” A minor cult classic made almost 20 years ago and only now appearing in a definitive double-disc DVD edition, Richard Stanley’s post-apocalyptic “Hardware” may have struck early-’90s viewers (those few who caught it) as a low-budget blend of “Terminator” and “Blade Runner.” Well, what’s so wrong with that? Nasty, gory and tense, “Hardware” features future TV stud Dylan McDermott as the rakish scavenger who brings a disassembled android home to his metal-sculptor girlfriend (Stacey Travis). Of course the damn thing knows how to rebuild itself, and is trained to kill anything that’s warm and moving. Hilarious hairdos aside, this is a dirty, atmospheric and nearly lost fragment of movie history. Cameos by Iggy Pop and Lemmy of Motörhead!

“High Tension” Speaking of foreshortened Eurohorror careers, French director Alexandre Aja made an international film-fest splash with this twisty, unusual take on the Yank psycho-killer genre. A pair of attractive college pals (Gallic starlets Cécile de France and Maïwenn), with some unresolved Sapphic business between them, are pursued by a slasher (in a vintage Dodge Charger with Confederate flag plates, of all things). Aja builds suspense briskly and effectively, and “High Tension” offers a narrative switchback I’ve never exactly seen before. Let’s just say that the hulking, blood-spattered killer isn’t quite who he appears to be. Aja then went on to make some dreadful-sounding Kiefer Sutherland vehicle that I haven’t seen.

“The Descent” Although set in Appalachia and starring (mostly) American actors, Neil Marshall’s all-female, ultra-claustrophobic spelunking adventure was actually made in England. “The Descent” begins with one of the most horrifying shocks I’ve ever seen in a movie, and the general mood is one of deep, dark unsettling dream. Protagonist Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) is taking the spelunking trip largely to forget a haunting tragedy, but her team of macho chicks will find that somebody, or something, in this unexplored cave really, really wants to meet them. Eventually becomes a standard chase-nightmare, but a highly effective one throughout.

“Dark Mirror” A minor film-fest and video-on-demand hit, director Pablo Proenza’s nifty little L.A. gothic features a couple of attractive TV actors (Lisa Vidal of “E.R.” and David Chisum of “One Life to Live”) who find out that their lovely new Arts & Crafts cottage holds some strange secrets. I’ve never seen a horror film based on the principles of feng shui before, but I guess it was inevitable. Proenza handles the contrast between the sunny setting and the creepy occurrences ably, and although the script is indifferent I genuinely didn’t see the big switcheroo coming.

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Friday, Oct 23, 2009 6:35 PM UTC

“Star Trek”: Coming to a theme park near you!

Is the interactive kiddie spinoff "Star Trek Live" the final, gruesome nail in Gene Roddenberry's space-coffin?

By Andrew O'Hehir

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A still from "Star Trek: The Animated Series"

A still from “Star Trek: The Animated Series”

Gene Roddenberry must be spinning in his grave. Or he would be if he had one; his ashes were shot into space in 1997. (Wait, I’m confused. Does that mean he’s always spinning in his grave?) With Roddenberry and his wife, Majel Barrett Roddenberry (Nurse Chapel in the original “Star Trek”), now both dead, control over the “Star Trek” franchise has devolved onto a slithery nest of interlocking corporate interests. Which accounts for a troubling press release I received on Friday, announcing the creation of something called “Star Trek Live.”

Although the “Trek” franchise presumably has renewed Hollywood viability after this summer’s lively and successful J.J. Abrams prequel — the 11th “Star Trek” movie overall — it long ago entered a decadent phase of creative and marketing metastasis: Spinoffs producing spinoffs, actors becoming directors becoming authors. (I’m still waiting for a film version of “Star Trek: The Animated Series,” or a Web-only series based on William Shatner’s co-authored “Trek” novels. Somebody’s probably working on them.)

That provides some context for the genesis of “Star Trek Live.” But what the hell is it, exactly? My first guess, while cagily inspecting a press release that’s crammed with merchandising buzzwords and light on specifics, was that somebody who hadn’t been reading the paper lately was following through on some three-year-old scheme to launch a “Star Trek” Broadway musical. Now, that sounds like a pop-culture disaster of heroic and delicious proportions, so I’m sorry to report it isn’t happening. With discretionary spending in free fall and the recent closure of “Shrek: The Musical,” Hollywood studios are backing away from the Great White Way as an ancillary revenue stream.

No, “Star Trek Live” is something else, “an interactive stage show” that’s “targeted for a run in theme parks and performing arts centers across the country.” The show “combines cutting-edge special effects, unmatched audience interaction and an exploration of real space-age technology,” taking “audiences of all ages on an exhilarating journey with Captain James T. Kirk and Vulcan science officer Spock.”

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: ZOMG! This is what Roddenberry’s atheist-Apollonian vision of the future has come to! Unemployed dinner-theater actors in Kirk and Spock drag and plastic tricorders, doing a laser show for the kiddies! At Waldameer WaterWorld in Erie, Pa.! It will bear the same relationship to any actual “Star Trek” incarnation as that teeny-tiny Stonehenge in “Spinal Tap” bears to seeing Led Zeppelin play live in 1973! And you’re absolutely right.

OK, OK, let me pay some lip service to journalistic fairness by reporting that “Star Trek Live,” while a property of CBS Consumer Products, will actually be created by the Mad Science Group, a “science enrichment provider” that creates shows for schools, camps and other youth venues. It’ll be some kind of hybridized edutainment product, in which Kirk and Spock train a fresh group of “Starfleet cadets” on their first day at the Academy. Learn, learn, learn; science, science, science. But wait, enough of that, shorty — the Earth is under attack from unknown aliens! Put down those curly fries and shoot those bastards!

I’m not backing off my initial, bigoted assumption that this latest bastardized effort to grub a few more dollars off a canceled 1960s TV series is an idiotic debasement of the already-flaccid “Star Trek” legacy. But, hell, that’s nothing new. And let’s face it, fellow parents: If these people can bottle even 0.5 percent of the Trekker spirit, in a package that appeals to the science-nerd kids who are too chicken for the vomitous coaster rides, we’ll all be grateful. If they can end it with a group line-dance number — hopefully led by “Kirk” and “Spock” doing the Robot — I take back everything I just said.

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