An Inconvenient Truth

Director: Davis Guggenheim
(2006)

Lauded by critics, widely viewed internationally (grossing nearly $50 million worldwide), and honored with a panoply of accolades, An Inconvenient Truth is perhaps the most important film of the last decade. It effectively increased worldwide awareness about the perils of global warming in an entertaining and straightforward manner that could not have been achieved by scientific journals alone.



The film’s protagonist is one of the reasons the film was such a success, as he offers the audience an emotional connection to the film. Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, Jr. is viewed by many as a cult hero following his ill-fated 2000 presidential election bid (in which he f*ing won the “popular vote” by half a million ballots). An Inconvenient Truth is just as much an overview of his career as it is about environmental calamity. It’s a moving scrapbook, in which Guggenheim strings together formats ranging from 35mm film and HD to JPEGs and even VHS tape. In an interview with StudioDaily, he noted, “the only thing we didn’t use was charcoal drawings.”

The former Vice President thrives as an ambassador for the environment. Gore makes the claim that he delivered his now infamous presentation on global warming over a thousand times. By featuring that lecture in the film, he ensured that his audience would grow exponentially.

Gorian Graph (via NOAA)

What constitutes a great film is obviously a subjective criterion. An Inconvenient Truth was bestowed the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature on February 25, 2007. While it may not be the most innovative documentary of 2006, nor that with the highest superior aesthetic, the statue was likely bestowed on the film because of its consummate use of documentary film as a method of broadcasting global issues.

Gore concludes the film by saying:

Each one of us is a cause of global warming, but each one of us can make choices to change that with the things we buy, the electricity we use, the cars we drive; we can make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero. The solutions are in our hands, we just have to have the determination to make it happen. We have everything that we need to reduce carbon emissions, everything but political will. But in America, the will to act is a renewable resource.

official film site * trailer * buy it here

Trivial Tidbits:

• First documentary to win two Oscars: 2007 Academy Awards for Best Documentary Feature and Best Original Song for Melissa Etheridge's "I Need to Wake Up"

Trivial Epilogue:

• Gore interview with grist.org: http://www.grist.org/article/roberts2/
• "Long ago I decided that global warming must be real, because Al Gore's movie made money...the market has spoken." - Stephen Colbert on The Report

The $20,000,000 Club

Only 6 documentary films have cracked the $20 million mark at the box office. Data retrieved from BoxOfficeMojo.com;

1. Fahrenheit 9/11: $119,194,771 (2004)
2. March of the Penguins: $77,437,223 (2005)
3. Earth: $32,011,576 (2009)
4. Sicko: $24,540,079 (2007)
5. An Inconvenient Truth: $24,146,161 (2006)
6. Bowling for Columbine: $21,576,018 (2002)

A look at the top twenty:

(click to enlarge)

For some perspective, Fahrenheit 9/11 (as of the moment I type this) is the 332th highest grossing film of all time in the domestic box office with $119,194,771. This is eight spots below I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry at #324, which cracked the $120,000,000 mark.

Hoop Dreams

Director: Steve James
(1994)

Generally viewed as the greatest documentary of the 1990s (if not all time), Hoop Dreams is an epic look at two basketball wonders from inner-city Chicago; William Gates and Arthur Agee. The film tracks the most formidable years of their lives, from the time they are literally scouted by high school teams in middle school through their first year in college. In the end the film transcends the sport of basketball. It is an epic narrative of their lives, their families, and their communities.



Both boys are recruited by St. Joseph High School, a Catholic, predominantly white high school in an affluent neighborhood. The school is both culturally and physically far from their own neighborhoods. They have a three hour commute everyday. Before their sophomore year, tuition issues arise. While William finds fortune in the form of a sponsor (who oddly happens to be the President of the Encyclopedia Britannica Corporation), Arthur is forced to drop out of school because his parents can’t keep up with the expenses. He ends up attending Marshall Public High School. This offers an affecting contrast between the two protagonists.

Gene Pingatore, the well-intentioned drillmaster coach from St. Joseph, barks at his team to “think about the game on the way to the game” before sitting in the front seat of the bus in front of his stoic student-athletes. Cut to: loud mayhem on the Marshall High School bus, including kids playing cards in the back. It feels like a romanticized account of contrasted bus rides, but it’s all real. In fact, if this film were fiction, much of it would be dismissed as too unbelievable.


There are certain moments that were serendipitously caught on film. For instance, when Arthur’s vacant father unexpectedly shows up at the courts, he briefly plays with his son before walking off to the far side. The camera then captures him brazenly making a crack deal in plain view of his son. Other moments seem to magically fall into place, like when William’s mother is solemnly sitting in the O.R. waiting room as a melancholic Phil Collins track plays diagetically on the radio.

Time has aged this film beautifully. Some of the characters in the film, who often seem to be caricatures of themselves, have become even more exaggerated over time.

William with his math teacher at St. Joseph High School

*SPOILER ALERT* The filmmakers chose the perfect two kids for their project. Both found some success on the court. Amazingly, Arthur and the Marshall Commandos actually make it all the way to the state championships, but come up short in the final game. It was cathartic to watch the Commandos lose. Not out of some kind of sadistic joy, but seeing them lose was reality. In real life, making it to the state championship game is a victory in and of itself. Rather than a Hollywood tale, in which the protagonist’s team would have undoubtedly, unquestionably, positively won the state championships (and the national title in the sequel, etc.).

Arthur cleaning his kicks. You should see this kid's Trapper Keeper.

High Praise from Roger Ebert:

Many filmgoers are reluctant to see documentaries, for reasons I've never understood; the good ones are frequently more absorbing and entertaining than fiction. "Hoop Dreams," however, is not only a documentary. It is also poetry and prose, muckraking and expose, journalism and polemic. It is one of the great moviegoing experiences of my lifetime.

Trivial Tidbits:

• Hoop Dreams was not nominated for the best feature documentary at the Academy Awards. This caused such an uproar that the selection process was modified thereafter. (source)
• However, it was nominated for best editing (lost to Forrest Gump)
• In 2007, the International Documentary Association (IDA) named Hoop Dreams the No. 1 documentary in film history

Epilogue:

• Vintage Siskel and Ebert on Hoop Dreams

Berlinger Must Hand Over Some Footage

In May, we here at DocZine reported on the lawsuit of multinational energy corporation vs. filmmaker. Chevron had brought suit against director Joe Berlinger in an effort to subpoena over 600 hours of unused footage from his 2009 film Crude, which itself was a film about a court case in which the Ecuadorian people sued Chevron (then Texaco) over the pollution of the Amazon Rain Forest. Chevron believed the outtakes from the film would expose corruption on behalf of the Ecuadorian legal team.

Chevron had won the case for the footage, but Berlinger was granted his request for an appeal in June.

Joe Berlinger (via filmmakermagazine.com)

Yesterday an appeals court ruled that Berlinger had to turn over some, but not all, of the footage. According to the LA times, “While the judges said a full opinion would follow, they did order that Berlinger give Chevron footage not appearing in ‘Crude’ showing counsel for the plaintiffs in the environmental lawsuit (who discuss trial strategy in the film); experts in the proceeding (some of whom Chevron has accused of partiality); and current or former Ecuadorean government officials (which the oil company says colluded with the plaintiffs' lawyers).”

Evidently this was a fair decision, as both sides seemed pleased with the compromise. Chevron got the footage they were looking for. Berlinger remarked, "We are extremely pleased with today's results."

For those that may be interested in yesterday's appeal proceedings, courthousenews.com has a detailed account.

We Live In Public

Director: Ondi Timoner
(2008)

The internet boom of the late 1990s saw many young entrepreneurs quickly amass staggering wealth. Josh Harris was at the forefront of that rush, eventually netting more than $80 million with his company JupiterResearch and later the internet television network Pseudo.com. We Live in Public portrays the peaks and valleys in the career of Harris, "the greatest Internet pioneer you've never heard of."

Josh Harris (image via boingboing)

Harris was an eccentric visionary who used his fortune to fund human experiments. Just before the turn of the millennium, he invited 100 artists to live in an underground bunker in New York City outfitted with webcams to document their every move in a project called "Quiet: We Live in Public." This compound featured Japanese-style sleeping pods as well as a shooting range and an interrogation room in which the occupants were asked deeply personal, probing questions by a highly aggressive interviewer. Harris sought to foreshadow the fact that one day, the internet would put increased pressure on our lives by completely eradicating our privacy. Fortunately, the fire department shut down the project before anyone lost it.

He imagined a kind of Orwellian dystopia in which every second of our lives would be captured on video and put in the public domain for the world to examine. Today, many facets of our lives are on display on various websites. But the future has brought a different kind of transmission than Harris had imagined. By and large, we have control over what is published for the world to see. We are the publishing supervisors of our Facebook pages and the editors-in-chief of our YouTube channels. Perhaps Harris’ vision of an totalitarian future simply hasn’t yet materialized.



After the collapse of "Quiet: We Live in Public," Harris was clearly not satisfied with the results of his experiment. He immediately put his hypothesis to the test once again, this time putting himself under the microscope. He outfitted a New York loft with 30 motion-controlled cameras (including one in the fridge, litter box and toilet bowl) and 66 microphones and moved in with his new girlfriend, Tanya Corrin. After a “giddy” first month, the honeymoon quickly faded. Harris and Corrin became so distant to the point where they would sit in different rooms and talk to their viewers in chat rooms more than each other. Eventually this pressure cooker exploded in a very ugly way, for all the world to see. Timoner postulates:

I think that's an important lesson; the internet, as wonderful as it is, is not an intimate medium. It's just not. If you want to keep something intimate and if you want to keep something sacred, you probably shouldn't post it.

The film opens with an uninviting video of Harris saying goodbye to his dying mother. It then jumps to a history of the internet before moving on to focus on Harris and his endeavors. Some may see the film as off balance, but the documentary is successful for its perseverance if nothing else. Timoner captured footage from every unique venture of Harris’ life over the past 15 years, including his escape as an apple orchard farmer in Columbia County, NY. With 15 years worth of footage on any oddball such as Harris, one could make a compelling film. Each one of his undertakings could be the subject of an entertaining film in and of themselves, but Harris’ eccentric persona brings it all together.

official film site

Trivial Tidbits:

• We Live in Public won the Grand Jury Prize award in the U.S. documentary category at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival
• In the early days of the internet, videos streamed at 1 frame/second

Epilogue:

• If you have seen the film, you might be interested in this video: Crazed fan of pseudo.com attacks founder Josh Harris after screening of We Live in Public. Though, seeing as he has recently said that Pseudo itself was a fake company, I wouldn't be surprised if that attack was staged as well.