Saturday, December 5, 2015

Racing Extinction (2015)

Director: Louie Psihoyos                                   Writer: Mark Monroe
Music Score: J. Ralph                                       Cinematography: John Behrens
Starring: Louie Psihoyos, Shawn Heinrichs, Paul Hilton and Ady Gil

Racing Extinction is a remarkable piece of work, not only for its ability to convey the immanent destruction of our planet in an objective, non-sensationalized way, but in the way that it calls upon humanity to do something about it before it’s too late while still being able to celebrate what remains. Director Louie Psihoyos is an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, and co-founder of the Oceanic Preservation Society. He won his Academy Award six years ago for his film, The Cove, which documented the abuse and slaughter of dolphins in one particular Japanese cove. His new film brings together a host of important scientists and researchers, including Jane Goodall, and edits their contributions together in a way that shows a common thread running through all of them: that human life on Earth is actually dependent upon the rest of life on the planet. The main stories in the film are also woven together in a way that moves each of them forward chronologically but uses the ideas in each to reinforce each other as well. The photography is brilliant, especially the underwater sequences, and there are some cutting edge graphics that illuminate the statistics without dominating the narrative. Psihoyos should earn another Oscar nomination, and hopefully a victory, for his dire warning of the consequences of our poor stewardship of the Earth.

The film opens with a photographer taking shots of a bird, an orange Dusky Sparrow, dead in a jar, the last of its kind, extinct as a species from the planet in the summer of 1987. Director Louie Psihoyos then relates the story of reading in the newspaper and seeing in a small article somewhere in the middle, that mankind may be causing a new mass extinction event. That’s the way humans are dealing with their own culpability in destroying other species, he says, by burying the information so that they don’t have to think about it. The beginning of the story starts with Psihoyos and his colleagues doing undercover work to expose the sale of endangered whale meat at a sushi restaurant. Ultimately it was activist Ady Gil, who camped out in front of the restaurant showing images of whales and telling customers that they were contributing to their deaths that finally closed the place down. From there Psihoyos moves backward to his work as a photojournalist for National Geographic, having done a total of four stories on extinction, primarily dinosaurs. Natural extinction occurs at the rate of about one in a million species ever year, but predictions for the next hundred years are as high as fifty percent of all species on earth lost by the next century. Then Psihoyos presents the thesis of his film, that we are living in a new age of extinction and yet we have the power to do something about it.

In discussing the precarious state of the blue whale, the director visits with Chris Clark, head of the bio-acoustic lab at Cornell University. Clark’s lab is the largest repository of animal sounds in the world, and in addition to listening to whale sounds he plays a tape of an extinct bird, the Hawaiian Oʻo. The lab contains many such examples of the only living sounds of such species. From there, Dr. Kirk Johnson calls this new age the Anthropocene, an epoch in which the human imprint upon the planet is so large that is able to actually alter the planet itself. The participation of Ady Gil to shut down the restaurant serving whale meat leads to a discussion of the dedication of thousands of people who have dedicated their lives to saving species--and some who have lost their lives doing this work. Shawn Heinrichs, of Boulder, Colorado, is one of those. Heinrichs helped turn a Mexican island that had hunted whale sharks to elimination in the area into a tourist destination, making the people there far more money than they were making fishing, and saving the sharks. Photojournalist Paul Hilton, from Australia, assists Heinrichs on his mission, and helps him get into black market wholesalers--primarily located in Asia--who are illegally selling endangered creatures in an attempt to shut them down. Sharks, for example, have been fished down to ten percent of their original numbers primarily to satisfy the Chinese desire for shark fin soup.

Dr. Charlie Vernon explains that all of the extinction events on Earth prior to this one, have involved an increase in carbon dioxide but none of them as extreme as what is going on today. Another gas that doesn’t get as much attention is methane, a major waste product of livestock used for food production, as well as its release from melting polar ice, and yet it is twenty-two times more harmful than CO2. The emphasis on the destruction of sea life is actually part of a larger issue of the destruction of the ocean in general, not only in terms of species extinction but the heat of the water due to climate change, and the raising of acidity in the water that is wiping out shellfish and coral reefs. But the most damaging effect of ocean destruction is the way in which it is killing plankton. Dr. Boris Worm has done extensive studies on the effects of absorption of carbon dioxide into the oceans. Plankton account for half of all the oxygen produced on the planet, and yet plankton numbers have been reduced by forty percent in just the last fifty years. The end of oxygen production on Earth would certainly wipe out a majority of land-dwelling species, including most human life. Racing Extinction is a brilliant film. It is not just well filmed, but the message that it sends to us is that life matters, all life, not just human life. And without those other lives on Earth, it may just mean the end of our own.

Sunday, October 18, 2015

Her Life as a Man (1984)

Director: Robert Ellis Miller                                Writer: Joanna Crawford & Diane English
Music Score: John Cacavas                              Cinematography: Kees Van Oostrum
Starring: Robyn Douglass, Marc Singer, Robert Culp and Laraine Newman

With the huge success of Dustin Hoffman’s gender-switching film Tootsie, producers began casting about for a suitable project that could copy the same formula and ride on the financial coattails of that film. They found it in writer Carol Lynn Mithers’ story of becoming a man after dark in Greenwich Village in order to experience what it would be like. Screenwriters Joanna Crawford and Diane English moved the story to Los Angeles, in order to facilitate the production, and had their protagonist donning the disguise in order to get a job at a magazine that didn’t want to hire women. The subsequent TV movie was called Her Life as a Man, and is a criminally neglected entry in a genre that, because it has so few films, should be celebrating this well-acted and well-produced story. At a press conference prior to the film’s telecast Robyn Douglass attended wearing her male costume and fooled most of the reporters in attendance. The film was given decidedly mixed reviews when it was broadcast, with some reviewers feeling that it trivialized the feminist movement, especially after Douglass had appeared in Hustler and Playboy. But there were a few positive reviews that understood the intent of the picture and focused on the things that make it so charming.

The film opens on a cover version of the Four Seasons’ “Walk Like a Man,” and shows Robyn Douglass besting her boyfriend, Marc Singer, on the racquetball court. When her car won’t start he fixes it, then she goes to work at a small Los Angeles newspaper, The Southland Weekly, and discovers that she has been laid off because of declining circulation. The friends at her farewell get-together at a bar include David Paymer, Liz Torres, Carol Potter, and Douglass’s best friend, Miriam Flynn. She doesn’t tell Singer until they get home from dinner with one of his clients, and to end her miserable day she also gets a rejection letter from The Village Voice. Her job search during the next few weeks is as fruitless as it is disappointing. Then she applies for an opening at Sports Life, and is interviewed by the editor, Robert Culp. But when she’s turned down this time she knows that it’s because she’s a woman and he’s simply not giving her a chance. So Douglass decides to get a fake beard and wig and tries it out on Flynn by meeting her at a bar, similar to the scene in Tootsie when Dustin Hoffman meets Sidney Pollack in the Russian Tea Room. But it’s Singer’s help she really needs, to get the mannerisms and the attitude right to be a convincing man. After his initial shock, he agrees, and the montage, again set to the Four Seasons’ music, makes for a terrific segue to the second act.

Armed with a new identity, Douglass goes in to see Culp with a newfound confidence and this time lands the job. She’s so excited, though, that she meets Singer and his parents, Patricia Barry and Paul Napier, at the country club without changing first. Of course Singer thinks that’s the end of it, and he’s quite taken aback when he finds out Douglass plans to work at her new job as a man. She doesn’t think it’s enough just to get the job, now she wants to prove she can do the job. At the magazine she meets another writer, Laraine Newman, the token female who is forced into writing about gymnastics and women’s tennis. The two of them form a friendship and help each other with their writing. But the job has long hours and before long it’s interfering with Singer’s life, when Douglass goes away for the weekend for an interview--a very clever segment with Joan Collins pretending to seduce him/her--missing dinner engagements with clients, and in another parallel with Tootsie, missing a dinner he’s prepared. After Singer storms out in anger, he comes back a few days later to make up only to discover Douglass with Newman and again, like Tootsie, Newman thinks Douglass is gay. The ending, while pure Hollywood, is still incredibly uplifting and despite the negative criticism bespeaks a positive change for nearly all of the characters, not just the protagonist.

There’s no doubt that this is a TV movie, but while the weakest aspect of the film is the screenplay it’s not all bad. The humor misses at times, but when it hits it’s very good. The parallels with Tootsie are unavoidable, mostly because they were by design. But it works. The story is light and fun, a commentary on society without being preachy. What really lifts the production to another level is the acting by all involved. Robyn Douglass is perfect for the role, though she was a relative newcomer at the time, appearing in a half a dozen films after her debut in Breaking Away with Dennis Christopher. Marc Singer, is a great foil for her, surprised and disappointed in her at times, but never completely unsupportive in the way that a lot of similar characters are written. And though Laraine Newman isn’t quite believable as a writer, Robert Culp is given some incredibly bad stage directions, one of which is loading a shotgun during his interview with Douglass to show how macho his is. Finally, composer John Cacavas, who began his career at Hammer Studios in the early seventies, provides a catchy theme, which winds up becoming an integral part of the film. Her Life as a Man, while not quite up to the standards of Tootsie, is nevertheless a charming comedy that deserves a lot wider recognition.

Sunday, January 4, 2015

Life Itself (2014)

Director: Steve James                                         Producer: Martin Scorsese
Music Score: Joshua Abrams                             Cinematography: Dana Kupper
Starring: Roger Ebert, Chaz Ebert, Gene Siskel and Marlene Siskel

While I’ve said before that Roger Ebert was not my favorite film reviewer, there is no arguing with his profound influence, not only within the profession but on the public consciousness of film reviewing as a profession. Who really knew about film criticism as a popular art form in and of itself before Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert came on the scene? And as corny as the format seems today, it really was revolutionary to bring these two critics to television. But beyond that, Roger Ebert had a long-lasting impact on the film community simply in terms of his personality, going up against video games as art and his embracing of atheism that not only sparked a lot of controversy, but expanded even more his sphere of influence. But it was his final battle with cancer, a long and hard fought battle, that really showed the kind of heart that makes a film like Life Itself possible. The film begins with a quote by Ebert to the effect that for all of his life he was the star of his own movie. And that’s even how some of his friends describe him, not only as the star but as the director.

The actual director of the film, Steve James, takes that as his conceit and uses footage from the last six months of Ebert’s life in the hospital and combines it with readings from his autobiography of the same name, Life Itself, to quickly move from his childhood to his job working for the Chicago Sun Times. But what really stands out is that, even at that point in his career, he was a really good writer. Six months after getting the job, the film critic retired and the job was Ebert’s. At the time he slipped easily into life of a reporter, including the drinking, and as he describes it he was lucky that the drinking played so much hell on him in the form of hangovers or it would have killed him. From there the film naturally moves on to the teaming of Ebert with Gene Siskel, but still keeping bits and pieces of his earlier life to interject onto the narrative. The two could not have been more different and yet, that’s what made the show so great. Roger, the fun-loving English major and one of the guys, while Gene was the serious philosophy major and a loner. Roger, who could pound out a fully-formed review in twenty minutes, and Gene, who agonized over every word.

Then James moves on to talk to other film critics, who had both positive and negative things to say about the way that the show so severely limited real discourse about film, but at the same time popularized the notion of personal analysis as a way into the individualized understanding of a film. He also interviews filmmakers of small films that both Roger and Gene felt deserved the publicity that their unique platform in entertainment gave them to promote works that would otherwise have been ignored. But through it all, the love-hate relationship that made the show so successful was also a part of their personal relationship as well, one that they could never really overcome. They were such very different people that they were never going to be friends in the conventional sense, and yet as time went on they needed each other all the more. In many ways, Gene’s death in 1999 was a wake up call for Roger and much of what happened in the rest of his life was informed by the death of his friend.

The last part of his story is meeting his wife, Chaz, and getting married, spending time with his new extended family and continuing his work without Gene. It was a transformative experience and, ironically, much like Gene’s death, his marriage to Chaz also made his ultimate death much more peaceful for him. By far the most hear-rending part of the story is Roger’s final stay in the rehabilitation center before his death. Watching him force himself through physical therapy or having his throat suctioned out is tough to watch, but it’s real, and it is one of the defining features of Ebert’s life, that he wanted to be real, one of the guys, one of the everyday people and contribute what he could to their lives. There’s nothing exceptionally artistic about Steve James film, but that’s really a tribute to his subject. Life Itself is simply the story of a remarkable man, Roger Ebert, someone who shared his love of art with all of us and made all of us the better for it.