Trumbo (dir by Peter Askin, Written by Christopher Trumbo, 2007, Samuel Goldwyn/Red Envelope)

Trumbo is the movie which blends interviews, original footage, and beautiful letters written by the eccentric and brilliantly eloquent blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo .. and it beautifully explores this unique personality as seen by his colleagues, friends and family, and conveys the human effects of the Red Scare Mongering that gripped the US Congress and the Entertainment Media in the 1950s and 1960s. Very highly recommended.

Audio Essay: A Kind and Generous Heart (Christine Little, This I Believe, 2008, 4:41)

The NPR Audio Series This I Believe consistency has insightful and honest essays, contributed by both little known and well known individuals. I particular was touched by Christine Little's statement A Kind and Generous Heart.

Film: The Singing Revolution (James and Maureen Tusty, 2007)

The Singing Revolution (made by American filmmakers James and Maureen Tusty with partners from the Estonia film community) documents Estonia's history in the 20th century, through interviews with about 20 participants in the critical period during which the Baltic Nations broke away from the Soviet Union. The question is: How did the people pull off a non-violent overthrow of foreign rulers... and the answer, in large part, is by using music and massive public song festivals as a way to reinforce unity and national identity. This is a most unusual documentary, very touching.

National Geographic's Strange Days on Planet Earth - 2 new episodes

   

National Geographic and Sea Studios Foundation have produced two brilliant episodes of Strange Days on Planet Earth with Edward Norton. The series producer is David Elisco.

I highly recommend these engaging, beautiful, documentaries, which connect everyday small actions taken by millions of people around the world to the significant changes affecting our estuaries, rivers, lakes, oceans and atmosphere which are beginning of have profound and disturbing consequences for fish, bird, animal, plant and human health.

Book: Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace..One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin (Viking, Penguin 2006-2007)

Greg Mortenson had a passion for climbing. Something went wrong at the end of an attempted climb on K2 in 1993 -- or perhaps, something went right -- because while weak and disoriented, he met remote villagers in the Baltistan region of Northern Pakistan who nursed him back to strength, and Greg decided to repay them for their kindness and address a critical needs by raising money and returning to build their first school building, and began a truly heroic cross-cultural adventure spanning California, Montana, Pakistan, Afghanistan. In the course of the last 15 years, he has directly changed the lives on hundreds of young women, and indirectly changed the perception of America in scores of remote villages and towns of Central Asia.

"Three Cups of Tea is one of the most remarkable adventure stories of our time. Greg Mortenson's dangerous and difficult quest to build schools in the wildest parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan is not only a thrilling read, it's proof that one ordinary person, with the right combination of character and determination, really can change the world." - Journalist and Author Tom Brokaw.

Highly recommended.

Film: Taxi to the Dark Side (dir by Alex Gibney, ThinkFilm/Jigsaw Productions, 2007)

Taxi to the Dark Side is Alex Gibney's Critical study of extra-legal expansion of American Power in America's Global War on Terror.

The film focuses around the controversial death in custody of an Afghan Jitney taxi driver named Dilawar. Dilawar was beaten to death by American soldiers while being held in extrajudicial detention at the Bagram Air Base.

Taxi to the Dark Side also goes on to examine America's policy on torture and interrogation in general, specifically the CIA's use of torture and their research into sensory deprivation. There is description of the opposition to the use of torture from its political and military opponents, as well as the defence of such methods; the attempts by Congress to uphold the standards of the Geneva Convention forbidding torture; and the popularisation of the use of torture techniques in shows such as 24.

The film is said to be the first film to contain images taken within Bagram Air Base.

For those of us who feel that part of winning the vast majority of worldwide moderate Muslims over to a situation of tolerance and respect for Western peoples and governments requires that innocent civilians be treated with utmost respect and care, even in areas where terrorist militants have operations, this is one of those films that shows why it is going to take years of work by the next few American government leaders to undo the damage that was done in the Bush Administration.

The Tyranny of America's Great Expectations

On January 8th, the Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens wrote a piece about American politics and how we look at Iraq. He cites cases of "the perfect becoming the enemy of the good", something that also troubles me.

While the op-ed is somewhat oversimplified, I was taken by these two paragraphs towards the end of the piece:

There is great virtue in the American way, which expects CEOs to perform on a quarterly basis, presidents and Congresses to reinvent politics in 100 days, generals to wipe out opponents in 100 hours without taking significant casualties, doctors to save life and limb every time, search engines to yield a million results in less than a second, and so on. There is also great virtue in the belief that what is bad can be made good, and that what is good can be made great, and that what is fractionally less than great is downright awful.

But these virtues can spawn vices. One is impatience. Another is a culture of chronic complaint. A third is the belief that every problem has a solution, that trial is possible without error, that risks must always be zero, that every inconvenience is an outrage, every setback a disaster and every mishap a plausible basis for a lawsuit.

Film: Helvetica: A Documentary Film (Gary Hustwit, Swiss Dots, 2007)

Quite an interesting documentary about visual culture has been made by Gary Hustwit. See Helvetica: A Documentary Film website.

Film: HotHouse by Shimon Doton (86 min, 2006)

  

Media That Matters' David Courier writes:

Nearly 10,000 Palestinians are incarcerated in Israel today. Most Israelis regard these "security prisoners" as murderers and criminals. To the Palestinians, however, they are freedom fighters, heroes, and martyrs in the making. Granted extraordinary access to the highest-security institutions, renowned filmmaker Shimon Dotan uncovers a startling truth: Israeli prisons have become a breeding ground for the next generation of Palestinian leaders and a hotbed for terrorist plots.

Dotan focuses his camera on everyday prison life. What emerges is a surprising glimpse of the prisoners as informed thinkers who are immersed in the details of the centuries-old conflict through newspapers and television. Dotan interviews inmates who are committed to negotiations as well as others who are shockingly unrepentant about their participation in suicide bombings. The cold-blooded testimony of a female Hamas leader, proudly serving 16 life sentences for blowing up a Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem, is perhaps the most chilling.

Israel's prisons have evolved into virtual incubators for Palestinian nationalism, strengthening inmates' ideology and forging a political force that impacts far beyond their walls. Eschewing the simplistic "white hat, black hat" mentality that dominates discussions of terrorism today, Dotan's brilliantly constructed, disturbingly provocative film is both a humanizing force and an alarming wake-up call.

For more information about this amazing documentary, see First Run Icarus Films HotHouse page.

Film: Mapping Stem Cell Research: Terra Incognita (Maria Finitzo, ITVS, 2007)

Maria Finitzo has made, and PBS Independent Lens television series has aired, a beautiful and brilliant story about people involved in fundamental medical research. The film is called Mapping Stem Cell Research: Terra Incognita and the central character is Northwestern University Neurologist Dr. Jack Kessler, but what makes this such a strong film is how the story is told from the point of view of 10 individuals.



Information about this extraordinary film is at Independent Lens' Mapping Stem Cell Research: Terra Ingcognita website.

The Great Rivers Partnership: IBM and the Earth

It is going to take changes in consciousness, changes in legislation, changes in strategy, deeper scientific understanding, deeper communication of scientific understanding to business owners and managers, new production technologies, new philosophies AND MORE to prevent the ever growing negative footprint on the earth by industrial civilization.

But at least IBM is prepared to develop IT technologies that allow us to monitor and understand what is happening. You may find interesting The Great Rivers Partnership.

Column: Et Tu, George by Nicholas Kristof

New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof has done amazing work bringing the situation in Darfur to the attention of the American public. He also has an elegant way of analyzing the failures of leadership of President George W. Bush.

I particularly like his January 23, 2007 column Et Tu, George?.

Column: China's Sunshine Boys by Thomas Friedman

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has argued in many of his pieces that we America must consider energy policy as critical to the future of our security, economy and environment.

I particularly liked his December 6, 2006 article China's Sunshine Boys.

Column: Who Will Succeed Al Gore? Our Crucible Moment by Thomas Friedman

A lot deservedly has been said about the Nobel Committee's decision to award the 2007 Peace Prize to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and to Al Gore. But I thought an interesting perspective on Mr. Gore and on American Politics is Thomas L. Friedman's October 14, 2007 column Who Will Succeed Al Gore?.
 

The War: Directed/Produced by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick (Florentine Films, PBS-WETA)

Six years in the making, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's The War is a magnificent documentary of World War II, and its affects on the Americans who served in the military, and those who lived through it at home. Focusing primarily on about a score of families from 4 smaller cities of the United States, and including many hours of actual combat footage, this is an amazingly comprehensive view of the War. The coverage of the social environment just before and during and after the War is elegant. Very highly recommended.

Financial Costs of Iraq War could be $2 Trillion

While the deepest loses from the chaos in Iraq in which American troops participate are of course the deaths of Americans, non-combatant Iraqis, and other internationals, following by the severe life-altering injuries that Americans, non-combatant Iraqis and other internationals sustain, followed by the fact of how many Iraqis have been forced to flee the country or endure years of chaos... even the pure financial cost to the United States is already staggering. Based on recent work by well-regarded economists, using information from the Congressional Budget Office, the likely cost of this war is $2 Trillion. The amount of positive benefit this money could have provided to the people of the world, and to the non-military aspects of the struggle against terrorism, is almost beyond contemplation. (Low estimates are $1.2 Trillion BTW).

For an interesting summary, see this article from the May-June 2007 issue of Harvard Magazine: The $2-Trillion War.

Persistence of Myths - Recent Research Results

On September 4, 2007, the Washington Post ran an article entitled Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach by Shankar Vedantam. Very interesting reports of research on how many people's minds work in terms of associating "truth" with messages they have heard many times, even when many of those times were statements saying the statement itself was incorrect.

Film: No End In Sight (2007, Charles Ferguson, Representational Films/Magnolia, 102 min)

No End In Sight, directed by Charles Ferguson, reconstructs the period from 3 months before the US attacked Iraq through the period of the first Iraqi parliamentary elections using interviews with journalists, diplomats, military personnel, and intelligence officials. It argues that a series of willfully foolish decisions in Washington made civil war and insurgency in Iraqi extremely likely. Meanwhile, it explains the human, cultural and financial cost of this historic blunder. This is a film that you simply must see.

Film: The Ground Truth (Patricia Foulkrod, 2006, 80 min)

Patricia Foulkrod's film
The Ground Truth is a series of interviews with US veterans of the Iraq War. This is a truly unique and important film.

Film: SiCKO by Michael Moore (Dog Eat Dog/Lionsgate/Weinstein, 2007, 116min)

            


Michael Moore has blended several amazing tales in his new film about the American Healthcare System. One tale is about individual Americans who were covered by health insurance, but whose insurance companies, in an attempt to control costs, denied them coverage leading to human suffering.

Another tale is about how health care is delivered in 4 foreign countries, each of which developed its own version of universal no-cost or ultra-low-cost medical care, and each of which, while spending less than the US does, produces dramatically better health outcomes and seems to have much more satisfied health care providers.

A third tale is about Moore's hypothesis that making health coverage connected to employment is just one of several systematic tactics to keep citizens fearful, stressed, and passive.

Amazingly, using a wide-range of archival footage, interviews he did in 2004 through 2006, and a sense of irony and humor, this dense material, and often tragically sad material, comes across elegantly and enjoyably. In the end, Moore believes that foundational social values in a country end up determining how much the voices of citizens can influence how systems, like the health care system, are operated. A terrific and timely film.

View the trailer, or see the movie website.