Salon.com > Documentaries http://www.salon.com Sat, 25 May 2013 01:08:20 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 “Jodorowsky’s Dune”: The sci-fi classic that never was http://www.salon.com/2013/05/19/jodorowskys_dune_the_sci_fi_classic_that_never_was/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/19/jodorowskys_dune_the_sci_fi_classic_that_never_was/#comments Sun, 19 May 2013 13:30:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13302687 CANNES, France – According to “Drive” director Nicolas Winding Refn (who’s also here this year with the ultra-violent “Only God Forgives”), the legendary unmade mid-‘70s film version of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” by Chilean-born mad genius Alejandro Jodorowsky actually exists – and he’s seen it. OK, even Refn hasn’t seen a version of it that can be projected on a screen or played on a high-def monitor, the version that was supposed to star David Carradine, Orson Welles, Mick Jagger and Salvador Dalì. That doesn’t exist. But Refn says he spent a long evening in Jodorowsky’s Paris apartment while the latter went through the storyboards for “Dune” with him page by page, talking through every shot and every line of dialogue. “I am the only spectator who has ever seen this movie,” Refn concludes. “And I have to tell you: It was awesome.”

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/19/jodorowskys_dune_the_sci_fi_classic_that_never_was/feed/ 39 Alex Gibney: Julian Assange has become like “those he despises” http://www.salon.com/2013/05/18/alex_gibney_julian_assange_has_become_like_those_he_despises/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/18/alex_gibney_julian_assange_has_become_like_those_he_despises/#comments Sat, 18 May 2013 16:30:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13302064 So Alex Gibney, the Oscar-winning director of “Taxi to the Dark Side,” “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and many other political and social documentaries, has made a fascinating film about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks that has already pissed off a lot of people on the left – and is about to piss off a bunch more. “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks” portrays the Australian hacker-hero Assange as a flawed and complicated figure. As British journalist Nick Davies puts it in the film, the same extraordinary personality who created WikiLeaks is also the one who destroyed it. On one hand, Assange has led the fight for freedom of information in the asymmetrical conflict between the world’s citizens and fearsome Goliaths like the CIA and the Pentagon. On the other, he has allowed his alarming personal failings and his persecution complex to become much too large a part of the story, and has succumbed to what one source in the film calls “noble cause corruption.”

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/18/alex_gibney_julian_assange_has_become_like_those_he_despises/feed/ 71 Pick of the week: Sarah Polley’s family secrets http://www.salon.com/2013/05/09/pick_of_the_week_sarah_polleys_family_secrets/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/09/pick_of_the_week_sarah_polleys_family_secrets/#comments Thu, 09 May 2013 22:55:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13294108 Sarah Polley’s “Stories We Tell” is two or maybe three dangerous kinds of movies all at the same time, and handled so brilliantly that the result is a transformative, unforgettable work of art. This documentary about Polley’s own surprising family secrets -- which includes some sneaky fictional or imaginative elements -- might sound at first like a personal indulgence but becomes something much larger and subtler: A gripping investigation of the ultimately unknowable past, a meditation on how and whether we can actually know anything, and an act of profound love and generosity. That generosity extends not just to the members of Polley’s WASPy Canadian family – although you certainly feel that – but also to the audience. I left the theater thinking not just about Polley’s family secrets but my own, for which of us truly knows where we came from, or what unrecoverable stories of love and heartbreak lie in our prehistory?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/09/pick_of_the_week_sarah_polleys_family_secrets/feed/ 6 “Unclaimed” charts search for forgotten Vietman vet http://www.salon.com/2013/04/29/unclaimed_charts_search_for_forgotten_vietman_vet/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/29/unclaimed_charts_search_for_forgotten_vietman_vet/#comments Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:04:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13284752 UPDATE: The identity of the main claiming to be Robertson has been revealed to be Dang Tan Ngoc, a Vietnamese citizen who has also impersonated other Vietnam vets.

Filmmaker Michael Jorgensen has charted a remarkable journey with Vietnam vet Tom Faunce in the documentary "Unclaimed," which aims to reconnect a U.S. Vietnam war vet, reported dead in 1968, with his American family.

The man, whom Faunce believes to be Special Forces Green Beret Master Sgt. John Hartley Robertson, remembers only that his helicopter was shot down in Laos in 1968 and that he had a wife and children in Alabama. Though presumed dead by Americans, the man says that he survived a year of torture in Vietnam and then married the nurse who cared for him.

From the Toronto Star:

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/29/unclaimed_charts_search_for_forgotten_vietman_vet/feed/ 4 Tribeca Film Festival: The 10 hottest movies http://www.salon.com/2013/04/17/tribeca_film_festival_the_10_hottest_movies/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/17/tribeca_film_festival_the_10_hottest_movies/#comments Wed, 17 Apr 2013 21:15:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13274179 Born a dozen years ago in the wake of a major tragedy, the Tribeca Film Festival finds its opening week this year tinged with trauma as well. Yes, the show will go on, with the glitz and the headlines more than a little subdued by the painful news from Boston – but what kind of show is it? Tribeca is now established as a cornerstone event of New York’s spring cultural season, but still lacks a clear role in the movie world’s ecology. It’s not a major market festival where films are bought and sold, in the vein of Cannes or Sundance, it’s not a Hollywood/Indiewood showcase, like Toronto, and it’s not a celebration of DIY or low-budget ingenuity, like South by Southwest. In part, Tribeca has always been a hometown festival for the Manhattan-centric indie film world, but that’s no longer the same hot concept it was in 2001, when Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff announced a new film festival aimed at getting downtown Manhattan back on its feet in the wake of 9/11.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/17/tribeca_film_festival_the_10_hottest_movies/feed/ 1 Pick of the week: Lost in Stanley Kubrick’s labyrinth http://www.salon.com/2013/03/29/pick_of_the_week_lost_in_stanley_kubricks_labyrinth/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/29/pick_of_the_week_lost_in_stanley_kubricks_labyrinth/#comments Fri, 29 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13253996 It’s entirely possible that no movie in the history of the medium has attracted the same combination of film-school erudition, amateur scholarship and fanboy and/or fangirl intensity as Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.” At first glance that might seem baffling: Although Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s bestselling horror novel was an eagerly anticipated film starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall, with a big-name director attached, it got middling reviews (or worse) on its 1980 release, and wasn’t a major hit. But give the Kubrick cultists and conspiracy-theory decoders full credit; over the years they have transformed “The Shining” from flop to classic, and it’s now widely understood as an enigmatic and literally labyrinthine masterwork that contains multitudes.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/03/29/pick_of_the_week_lost_in_stanley_kubricks_labyrinth/feed/ 51 Pick of the week: Dick Cheney has no regrets http://www.salon.com/2013/03/15/pick_of_the_week_dick_cheney_has_no_regrets/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/15/pick_of_the_week_dick_cheney_has_no_regrets/#comments Fri, 15 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13229670 There are so many jaw-dropping moments in “The World According to Dick Cheney” that I’m sure to forget several of them. One comes right at the beginning, when interviewer and co-director R.J. Cutler asks the most “consequential” vice president in American history – that’s Cheney’s word – a series of softball questions to get him warmed up. Cheney looks undeniably older and thinner after his recent heart transplant (talk about jokes that write themselves!), and he does deliver a few minuscule nuggets of warm-and-fuzzy: Happiness is fly-fishing on the Snake River, and misery is the loss of a family member. In case you’ve been wondering, his favorite food is spaghetti. Then Cutler asks Cheney about his biggest flaw. It’s a standard Barbara Walters-style question, for which every skilled politician has a faux-humble answer at the ready.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/03/15/pick_of_the_week_dick_cheney_has_no_regrets/feed/ 43 Read our salon on fracking http://www.salon.com/2013/03/04/a_salon_we_drill_into_fracking/ http://www.salon.com/2013/03/04/a_salon_we_drill_into_fracking/#comments Mon, 04 Mar 2013 14:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13216894 The growing tension between environmental concerns and business interests intensified this weekend amid reports that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was ready to approve a plan to allow hydraulic fracturing (aka "hydrofracking" or "fracking") in parts of his state, until a last-minute intervention from Robert Kennedy Jr. put the plan on delay as it undergoes further study. As politicians at all levels (including the president) will be deciding whether to embrace the controversial method of shale gas drilling in coming months, we asked two experts with divergent views to discuss the issue with us -- and you.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/03/04/a_salon_we_drill_into_fracking/feed/ 29 “The Jeffrey Dahmer Files”: That nice young man in Apt. 213 http://www.salon.com/2013/02/12/the_jeffrey_dahmer_files_that_nice_young_man_in_apt_213/ http://www.salon.com/2013/02/12/the_jeffrey_dahmer_files_that_nice_young_man_in_apt_213/#comments Tue, 12 Feb 2013 21:55:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13199085 Milwaukee in the early 1990s was a fairly typical middle-size, Middle American city, which is to say it was struggling with relatively high rates of crime, widespread urban blight and all the effects of the collapsing industrial economy, including crack and unemployment. When burly, mustachioed homicide detective Pat Kennedy showed up at the Oxford Apartments on North 25th Street – in a working-class, largely African-American neighborhood -- on the night of July 22, 1991, he felt pretty sure he was a tough cop ready for whatever he might find: a drug deal gone wrong, a domestic dispute turned deadly or some other variation on the familiar themes of urban violence.

What Kennedy walked into was a case that no one, anywhere, would have expected. Hardened police officers, as Kennedy and building resident Pamela Bass remember it, were disheveled and vomiting; the handcuffed suspect – a white man, unexpectedly – was howling like an animal. A foul stench filled the air, a combination of putrefying flesh and industrial chemicals. One of the ashen-faced uniformed cops inside Apartment 213 told Kennedy to look in the refrigerator. As everyone who’s ever read the gruesome details of the Jeffrey Dahmer case knows, there was a severed human head in a cardboard container inside that fridge, along with a few other dismembered body parts – and those were only the first of many gruesome discoveries in that apartment. Kennedy also noticed an open box of Arm & Hammer baking soda in the back of the fridge, and remembered that his own mother used to do the same thing. On the inside of the door, he recalls, “There were condiments: mustard, ketchup, A-1 Sauce, that kind of thing.”

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/02/12/the_jeffrey_dahmer_files_that_nice_young_man_in_apt_213/feed/ 0 Pick of the week: Is the golden age of short films upon us? http://www.salon.com/2013/02/01/pick_of_the_week_is_the_golden_age_of_short_films_upon_us/ http://www.salon.com/2013/02/01/pick_of_the_week_is_the_golden_age_of_short_films_upon_us/#comments Fri, 01 Feb 2013 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13187558 We’re living in a golden age of short films – or at least we should be. Whatever device you’re using to read this article constitutes a node in the greatest distribution network for electronic media ever imagined or devised, one that theoretically reaches most people on the planet. As anybody who’s ever filled an idle minute with a YouTube video of someone else’s cat knows, a widely shared clip can pile up hundreds of thousands of views literally overnight. But unlimited access to an overwhelming torrent of unedited and unfiltered images is one thing, and careful, artful curation is quite another.

There’s a reason why short-film programs at film festivals are usually packed, and the annual showcase for Oscar-nominated shorts has become ever more popular, even in a world where all of us could spend our remaining lifetimes, several times over, watching allegedly entertaining Internet videos at no cost. (At no financial cost, that is; I do not speak of the cost to your soul or your sanity.) As unreliable as the Academy Awards may be at every possible level, it’s a relief to encounter the 2013 Oscar-nominated shorts and reflect that a group of people who know quite a bit about the art and craft of filmmaking has decided that these are good examples.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/02/01/pick_of_the_week_is_the_golden_age_of_short_films_upon_us/feed/ 0 Is a two-state solution still possible — or is Israel toast? http://www.salon.com/2013/01/31/is_a_two_state_solution_still_possible_%e2%80%94_or_is_israel_toast/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/31/is_a_two_state_solution_still_possible_%e2%80%94_or_is_israel_toast/#comments Thu, 31 Jan 2013 12:45:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13186518 Israeli filmmaker Dror Moreh got his start making TV commercials for Ariel Sharon, the war hero who served as Israel’s prime minister from 2001 to 2006, when he suffered a devastating stroke that has left him in a “persistent vegetative state” ever since. (Just last week, however, Sharon underwent a high-tech FMRI exam that revealed “significant” brain activity, suggesting that he may be aware of his surroundings.) That’s important background for Moreh’s Oscar-nominated documentary “The Gatekeepers” in various ways.

For one thing, Moreh gained access to six former heads of the Shin Bet, Israel’s secretive internal security service – who had never before given public interviews – largely because of his political connections. Those men had all worked with Sharon and respected him. For another, understanding the political evolution of Ariel Sharon sheds some light on Moreh, whom I met a few days ago in New York, and also on the surprising pragmatism and moral complexity reflected in his interviews with the Shin Bet leaders.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/01/31/is_a_two_state_solution_still_possible_%e2%80%94_or_is_israel_toast/feed/ 27 Is Werner Herzog a libertarian? http://www.salon.com/2013/01/25/is_werner_herzog_a_libertarian/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/25/is_werner_herzog_a_libertarian/#comments Fri, 25 Jan 2013 19:15:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13182027 Even by the standards of Werner Herzog’s peculiar and peripatetic career — which stretches from the adventurous works of New German Cinema in the 1970s through a remarkable series of documentaries to acting roles in “The Simpsons” and “Jack Reacher” — “Happy People: A Year in the Taiga” is an odd production. For one thing, Herzog didn’t “make” the film, in the normal sense of that word, although what you’ll see on the screen is very much infused with his sensibility. A contradiction? You bet.

None of the remarkable footage of an isolated Siberian village or the hunters who make their living in the almost impenetrable wilderness that surrounds it was actually shot or directed by Herzog, who has likely never been within several thousand miles of the place. Through a friend in Los Angeles, he came upon four hour-long movies about a group of men who keep the Siberian traditions of hunting and trapping alive in one of the remotest regions of the planet, almost completely cut off from modern society and technology. He contacted Dmitry Vasyukov, the Russian filmmaker who had indeed spent a year in the Taiga – the dense and literally trackless forest of the Siberian interior – and convinced him to allow Herzog to construct a 90-minute “international version,” with a new musical score and English voiceover narration in Herzog’s inimitable Teutonic-philosopher mode.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/01/25/is_werner_herzog_a_libertarian/feed/ 13 Alexandra Pelosi: “If it’s guilt or shame — Jim McGreevey’s actually doing some good in the world” http://www.salon.com/2013/01/18/alexandra_pelosi_if_it%e2%80%99s_guilt_or_shame_%e2%80%94_jim_mcgreevey%e2%80%99s_actually_doing_some_good_in_the_world/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/18/alexandra_pelosi_if_it%e2%80%99s_guilt_or_shame_%e2%80%94_jim_mcgreevey%e2%80%99s_actually_doing_some_good_in_the_world/#comments Fri, 18 Jan 2013 21:08:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13174337 Alexandra Pelosi doesn't come to a film festival struggling to woo backers or hoping to attract distributors. For the past 13 years, the youngest child of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has been employed by HBO, which has enabled her to make the documentaries that have compelled her most and cover the kinds of political topics that keep America up late at night: homelessness, immigration and naturalization, the evangelical community and, with her latest film, women’s jails, recidivism, homosexuality in the Catholic and Episcopal churches and, in no small measure, redemption. Best known for getting on the campaign bus with then-presidential candidate George W. Bush for her Emmy-winning “Journeys with George” to her doc about the closeted evangelical, "The Trials of Ted Haggard," she has just arrived at Sundance to present her latest documentary, “Fall to Grace,” an 18-month study of former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/01/18/alexandra_pelosi_if_it%e2%80%99s_guilt_or_shame_%e2%80%94_jim_mcgreevey%e2%80%99s_actually_doing_some_good_in_the_world/feed/ 7 Birding: The latest angsty Manhattan craze! http://www.salon.com/2013/01/15/birding_the_latest_angsty_manhattan_craze/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/15/birding_the_latest_angsty_manhattan_craze/#comments Tue, 15 Jan 2013 22:48:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13172315 My Central Park bird species was Nycticorax nycticorax, or the Black-crowned Night Heron. It’s not an unusual or endangered bird or anything, and can be found in most parts of the world. It's just that I wasn't expecting to encounter one in the middle of Manhattan. A slightly squat, gray-and-white predatory water bird about 2 feet tall, it hunts by night (as the name suggests) and spends its days hunkered down in trees by the water’s edge, which is where my wife and I met one in the spring of 2005, by the pond in the southwestern corner of the park. We weren’t birding or anything. We were the underslept parents of 1-year-old twins, relishing a brief springtime escape in a city park whose wildlife population seemed dominated by rats, pigeons, pond turtles and other invasive scavenger species. The heron was not interested in our amazement. He opened one eye, shifted slightly on his branch, and went back to sleep.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/01/15/birding_the_latest_angsty_manhattan_craze/feed/ 12 Is documentary-style photography dead? http://www.salon.com/2013/01/02/is_documentary_style_photography_dead/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/02/is_documentary_style_photography_dead/#comments Wed, 02 Jan 2013 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13157750 Los Angeles Review of Books IN THE NEW afterword to Aperture’s recent rerelease of her classic, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Nan Goldin writes:

I am terrified that everything I believe about photography, about this work, is over because of the computer and easy manipulation of images it facilitates. This work was always about reality, the hard truth, and there was never any artifice. I have always believed that my photographs capture a moment that is real, without setting anything up.

Later, she continues:

Now, it is so distressing: no one any longer believes that a photograph is real. Almost every time I give a talk or teach, I ask this question about truth and photography. If all but four or five in an audience of two hundred artistic people don’t believe that photographs are true, then what does that say about the rest of the world? So this eliminates the larger reason for having done this book — not for me, but if nobody believes it as having happened …what is the point? The belief that a photograph can be True has become obsolete.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/01/02/is_documentary_style_photography_dead/feed/ 1 Oscars Documentary short list announced http://www.salon.com/2012/12/04/oscars_documentary_short_list_announced/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/04/oscars_documentary_short_list_announced/#comments Tue, 04 Dec 2012 17:51:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13114465 "Bully," the Weinstein Company's anti-bullying film, controversially rated R by the MPAA, has made the short-list for the Oscar's Documentary category. It joins 14 others films, narrowed down from 126 that qualified, including the documentary about the world's most influential dissident artist, "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry."

Conspicuously absent from the list, however, was the riveting Ken Burns documentary,"The Central Park Five," which yesterday won the New York Film Critics Circle's Best Non-fiction film category.

Only five of the films on the shortlist below will be considered for the Oscar nomination:

"Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry," Never Sorry LLC

"Bully," The Bully Project LLC

"Chasing Ice," Exposure

"Detropia," Loki Films

"Ethel," Moxie Firecracker Films

"5 Broken Cameras," Guy DVD Films

"The Gatekeepers," Les Films du Poisson, Dror Moreh Productions, Cinephil

"The House I Live In," Charlotte Street Films, LLC

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/04/oscars_documentary_short_list_announced/feed/ 0 Is feminism worth defending with torture? http://www.salon.com/2012/12/01/is_feminism_worth_defending_with_torture/ http://www.salon.com/2012/12/01/is_feminism_worth_defending_with_torture/#comments Sat, 01 Dec 2012 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13112161 None of us living today can know how historians of the future will judge the whole “war on terror” phase of American history. Will it remain a contentious point of ideological division, like McCarthyism or the 1960s, or will it become a national embarrassment to be swept under the carpet, like the Salem witch trials or the fulsome speeches in defense of slavery delivered on the floor of Congress? And then there’s the possibility that the terrorist-hunting mania of the years since 9/11 has driven us so completely nuts, and bankrupted us so thoroughly, that a balanced view of this age will only become possible after the whole edifice comes crashing down. To quote the most intelligent, most farsighted and most deeply hypocritical of our slave-owning Founding Fathers, I tremble for my country when I consider those future conversations.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/12/01/is_feminism_worth_defending_with_torture/feed/ 79 “The Central Park Five”: New York’s darkest hour http://www.salon.com/2012/11/30/the_central_park_five_new_yorks_darkest_hour/ http://www.salon.com/2012/11/30/the_central_park_five_new_yorks_darkest_hour/#comments Fri, 30 Nov 2012 22:07:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13111701 If you lived in New York in 1989 – hell, if you lived in America in 1989 and were over 12 years old – then you remember the story of the Central Park jogger. It was a terrible case that seemed to epitomize everything that had gone wrong in America’s greatest city during the reigns of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush -- the toxic combination of exploding Wall Street wealth, skyrocketing crime, the crack epidemic and worsening racial tension. This was the “Bonfire of the Vanities” New York, the “American Psycho” New York, in which newly created or reinforced classes, the super-rich and the alienated poor, faced off in nearly open warfare. The legendary power of that failing city is such that many contemporary visitors to New York still expect the Bronx to be on fire and Central Park to be an uninhabited zone of “muggers and trash,” in the words of my mother-in-law, and are startled by the affluent chain-store bustle of 21st century Manhattan.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/11/30/the_central_park_five_new_yorks_darkest_hour/feed/ 12 Pick of the week: The case that unlocked the Catholic scandal http://www.salon.com/2012/11/16/pick_of_the_week_the_case_that_unlocked_the_catholic_scandal/ http://www.salon.com/2012/11/16/pick_of_the_week_the_case_that_unlocked_the_catholic_scandal/#comments Fri, 16 Nov 2012 00:59:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13099945 You can’t argue that Alex Gibney’s “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God” is the definitive treatment of the Roman Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal. This problem goes so deep into church history, and its implications are so broad, that no single book or film or series of newspaper articles can encompass it all. But by beginning with one of the earliest and most infamous of documented cases in the United States — the abuse of perhaps 200 deaf boys at a Wisconsin boarding school by a priest named Lawrence Murphy — the Oscar-winning Gibney (director of “Taxi to the Dark Side,” “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and several other films) is able to suggest answers to certain very big questions.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/11/16/pick_of_the_week_the_case_that_unlocked_the_catholic_scandal/feed/ 44 “The Revisionaries”: Texas schoolbook battle — crazier than you thought! http://www.salon.com/2012/10/24/the_revisionaries_texas_schoolbook_battle_%e2%80%94_crazier_than_you_thought/ http://www.salon.com/2012/10/24/the_revisionaries_texas_schoolbook_battle_%e2%80%94_crazier_than_you_thought/#comments Wed, 24 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13050111 Don McLeroy is a dentist in suburban Texas with the geeky, earnest manner of an American guy who has educated himself, however imperfectly, on a wide variety of topics. With his balding pate and high-waisted, pleated slacks, he makes Ned Flanders from “The Simpsons” look like Mick Jagger, circa 1969. I found myself utterly unable to resist McLeroy, who is likable and 100 percent sincere. He’d be a great neighbor, in large ways and small; the kind of guy who’d pull over on a busy highway to help a stranded motorist, while everybody else zoomed past. But as we see in the documentary “The Revisionaries,” it’d be a mistake to consider him harmless just because he’s a nice fellow.

As a Tea Party zealot, fundamentalist Christian, young-Earth Creationist and, for a while, chairman of the Texas State Board of Education, McLeroy became nationally notorious for his efforts to undermine scientific education and sneak covert religion into textbooks. One of the great things about Scott Thurman’s film — a low-budget but thoroughly watchable documentary, largely funded on Kickstarter – is that it helped me see the world from McLeroy’s point of view, which I might previously have considered impossible. He feels almost painfully oppressed by arrogant experts with fancy university degrees who insist on a difference between scientific evidence and faith-based personal opinion, and he genuinely believes that the half-baked, cherry-picked “weaknesses” in evolutionary theory expose the ideological underpinnings of modern science.

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