Steady Diet of Film

Review: Countdown to Zero

Countdown to Zero is an impassioned, exhaustively researched reminder of the lingering dangers of nuclear weapons. Using a quote from a speech President Kennedy delivered in 1961 before the United Nations to provide the film’s framework for why (accident, miscalculation or madness) how (build, buy, or steal) nuclear weapons could be obtained and used. Combining the efforts of producer Lawrence Bender (An Inconvenient Truth) and director Lucy Walker  (whose previous films Blindsight, Waste Land and Devil’s Playground have garnered no fewer than six Audience awards on the film festival circuit) their motives and personal politics are clear. They go about exploring this thorny geopolitical issue with the aid of a lot of top shelf speakers (former Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev, former UK prime minister Tony Blair, current Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf, former Secretary of State James Baker and Valerie Plame to name a few) who provide clear insights and thoughtful introspection.

But the specter of being tagged “a talking head film” looms large in Countdown to Zero and the methods the filmmaker team employs to make the film ‘more human’ run the gamut from colorful (if not somewhat predictable) to so monumentally offensive and stupid that they strip away much of the film‘s credibility and craft. Demonstrations of animated detonation zones on city maps, archive footage of plane crashes edited together for comedic effect and well bankrolled news footage serve their purpose but are used as the repeated go-tos for jokes that didn’t feel all that funny to begin with.

The overly chatty “man on the street” interviews wherein people -- conspicuously reflecting every ethnicity, age, gender and geographic location -- enthusiastically cite the same opinions, ‘nuclear bombs are like.. totally bad!’ also start to grate pretty quickly. It’s understandable that a filmmaker would want to introduce some levity into the subject of global nuclear annihilation but it greatly undermines the evidence presented by scientists, former heads of states and trained spies to treat their expertise as though it needs to be backed up by a pep squad.

But the moment Countdown veers into reprehensible territory begins with its opening sequence of surveillance footage from no fewer than four subway station terrorist bombings. The message that these attacks could have been far more damaging had they been padded with nuclear material is a fairly obvious and unnecessary one to make. Nor is it appropriate to show what amounts to snuff footage for a film with such a pronounced political agenda. Countdown then continues the meme, sprinkling mock surveillance footage of a baseball game throughout the rest of the film. Matched for framing and timing to the subway footage, the viewer sits ready to flinch at an explosion we know will never come. It’s a galling manipulation that is both unethical documentary storytelling as well as profoundly shitty filmmaking.

There’s also a niggling feeling that one of the scientists appears to be coached into making his message into a better pullquote. When mentioning that the technology needed to make nuclear devices is well-established and readily available he quips, “this equipment is from the 1950s.. this is 2010!” Countdown to Zero premiered at the Sundance film festival in late January 2010, it seems very unlikely his interview was conducted in the year 2010. But priming its subjects for maximum trailer-osity is really the least of the film’s offenses.

All of this begs the question, what happened here? Walker’s previous works have all been genuine crowd-pleasers but never through a process of dumbing down their material or creating a false sense of suspense. Quite the opposite, in the past she’s gone into isolated and stigmatized communities, gained the trust of people either doing extremely difficult work (a woman trying to convince Tibetan monks that blind children aren’t cursed in Blindsight) or at particularly unflattering point in their lives (the Amish teens smoking meth during their “rumspringa” in Devil’s Playground), then burrowing into their stories so thoroughly it was impossible to not be moved by the experience of really spending time with and understanding these individuals.

The film’s failures don’t derive from a lack of caring or craft. Remnants of a smarter film can be seen in the construction and editing of a lot of complicated material into a thoughtful, accessible film. In one scene, the film imagines what actually happens after a nuclear explosion. Walker (providing the film’s voice-over) explains the immediate medical and structural damage, then goes on to posit what the culture and political ramifications would be in the weeks, months and years for people outside the blast radius. It’s an exceptionally thoughtful grace note to a film that is so callous towards actual suffering.



Countdown to Zero opens in New York in Los Angeles today. It opens in Portland at Cinema 21 July 30th.

Review: The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers

Rating (out of 5): ****

A fascinating theme emerges early on in Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith's Oscar-nominated documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers: that the same circular thinking and one-upsmanship games inevitably will overtake hyper-insulated circles once their belief system come under fire. Whether they be grassroots activist groups, major media companies, the Department of Defense or the White House -- the wheels come off with striking similarity and lead to fantastic collapses.

Daniel Ellsberg began as a researcher in the State department for the Johnson administration on the day of Gulf of Tonkin incident. A true Cold War believer, his department was tasked with compiling evidence of violence against Americans in the region that would enable White House policy advisers to construct an explanation for why the war on Communism was about to be expanded. But after years of amping up reports of petty criminal acts and masking false alarms with his credibility, Ellsberg enlisted in the Marines to gain a perspective on Vietnam he felt he wasn't getting it through high-level security intelligence briefings. He was shocked to learn that military strategists had invented investigative ground campaigns out of whole cloth and the sum of the war consisted of dropping millions of pounds of bombs on an underdeveloped nation. Upon his return he came to realize that the combination of Congress' deference to the Executive branch and battling egos within by then-President Nixon's team meant the war could conceivably go on until the United States ran out of bombs or the American people chose to stop it.

Read the rest of my review at Greencine.

Review: Lucky

A lot of thought has been put into exploring the possible science of what makes us happy. A spate of pop psychology pieces have explored the matrix of whether our romantic relationships are equitable enough, how we should feel about children, did we ever develop coping mechanisms for life’s setbacks, do we find our work meaningful -- much of their findings go against the grain of conventional (read: capitalist) wisdom. But all of these theorists agree on one point, as long as our basic needs our being met, money changes nothing when it comes to being happy. In fact, all of these pieces cite the same study my Economics professor (and also Notorious B.I.G.) was touting 10 years ago, once you make $40,000 a year, more money will only bring you more problems. A figure that seems oddly impervious to inflation or cost of living increases.

Jeffrey Blitz’s (Spellbound, Rocket Science) breezy documentary Lucky looks at a handful of lottery winners to see how a sudden influx of hyper-wealth changed their lives. Blitz opens by interviewing people in a convenience store buying lottery tickets for a jackpot that’s reached over $250 million. Blitz has selected a store near a homeless mission for maximum poetry, and their lotto aspirations cuts a seemingly wide swath of the human condition from “I just want to help people” to “America owes me one”.

In Lucky, the lottery winners who started out with structured, middle class lives all attempt to maintain normalcy, they each put enough money into a trust to ensure a lifelong safety net for their children, they might buy a nicer car -- but they typically go about their lives as much as possible -- one woman even vows to keep her job at a meat-processing plant. But a later check-in shows that their one lucky break has earned the contempt of their friends and extended family, worsened fissures in marriages and made the gig at the meat-processing plant seem a lot less desirable.

The people who struck it rich at a point when they were barely scraping by fare even more poorly. Having no framework to manage money or gauge the caliber of the people around them, they were each left vulnerable to manipulative bottom-feeders and easily seduced by ostentatious spending that eventually collapsed in on itself. Six jet planes, seven wives (fourteen breasts enhanced), five hundred pairs of pants and a life-sized Nativity scene flown in from Spain (never opened) reads like a Craig’s List ad that doubles as a cautionary tale.

Blitz appears to believe the one true “winner” of the bunch is Quang Dao, a  Vietnamese immigrant who experienced grinding poverty and strife as a child and as a young adult settled in Lincoln, Nebraska. Dao now has a massive family (totaling 30 in the States and 80+ back in Vietnam) that he is able to make comfortable with massive homes and set up with their own businesses. It’s telling that this distinctly American enterprise is only able to create lasting enrichment for the people with none of the expectations or interest in the mythology Americans have created around the lottery.  

After experiencing such meteoric rises and falls each person grows reflective about why they won so much money and what life lesson can be taken away from it. Even the tuxedo’d host of a Powerball show waxes  philosophical as he applies pancake makeup, believing he has been given an important post in the world and must act accordingly.

Even if you can’t buy into the notion that people win the lottery For A Reason, Lucky dismantles the idea that sudden wealth merely emboldens the greater or weaker elements of a person’s character -- it throws people into a hyper-privileged chaos that most are ill-equipped to handle. It’s a nice problem to have but beware the warning of Biggie Smalls.


Lucky airs on HBO July 19th.