Trouble the Water

Tia Lessin and Carl Deal thought they were making a documentary about National Guard soldiers from Louisiana who were in Baghdad when Hurricane Katrina struck dry land. "The high water vehicles the National Guard would need for the disaster were in Iraq," Lessing told Free Press Houston in an interview conducted on the patio outside the Angelika Film Center. Trouble the Water, the resulting film, is currently playing in an exclusive engagement at the Angelika.
Literally out of the blue walked Kim and Scott Roberts into their lives and the documentary. Kim and Scott were leading a caravan of New Orleans survivors, saw the camera crew at a convention center in the middle of Louisiana, and walked up saying they had shot video of the real thing, Fifteen minutes of dramatic hurricane footage in addition to the aftermath filmed by Lessin and Deal as they try to make sense of the disaster, make Trouble the Water compelling viewing.
Kim knew the hurricane was coming, she and Scott couldn't afford to leave town so she started video taping her neighborhood, New Orlean's 9th Ward that was ground zero when the levees broke. What she captured shows the human tragedy at the heart of the disaster. An uncle passed out on front porch from booze steps will be dead in hours, dry streets swept with wind will turn into raging rivers. When Kim's video reveals the family huddling in the attic because the water has risen so high the resulting claustrophobia is like a scene out of a George Romero film. Only in Trouble the Water, it's real. A 911 emergency call comes over the soundtrack. A woman says she's trapped in the attic and is going to drown. The operator can only inform the caller that the police are not responding at this point in the storm. "I'm going to die?" the caller asks. "Yes," comes the automatic reply.
"There were a lot more call like that," Lessin mentions, "You wouldn't believe how many."
The footage Kim shot forms the basis of the film but substantial info is gleamed by Lessin and Deal as they follow-up on the people we meet at the beginning. Kim also has a hip hop project called Black Kold Madina that comes to fore in the latter part of Trouble the Water. Kim has some moves and knows how to use the camera. All the while you're flashing back to the footage of the storm. Moments like Larry, a neighbor who swims back and forth rescuing people from Kim's attic to higher ground. "There were about a dozen people in the attic," Lessin reminds.
Trouble the Water shows more than the 9th Ward, during and after Katrina. Segments set at a Naval Base that turned survivors of the flood away at gunpoint and the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce with their feel-good hometown promotion bring home the fact that some people perceive the whole affair in a totally different light.

Filth and Wisdom

Eugene Hutz appeared in a movie a few years back called Everything is Illuminated. Playing a snide Eastern European with a thick garbled English vocabulary his character preceded Borat by a year, although the latter has actually been seen by millions whereas Hutz may only be known inside the circle of musical admirers of his gypsy rock genre band Gogol Bordello. Nonetheless Hutz cuts a confident path across Filth and Wisdom sporting a handlebar moustache and spouting Malapropisms like "Florence Nightingbird" in his comic Ukrainian accent.
Thing is apart from the spine of the film, that if you dwell in the gutter long enough you start to seek knowledge and wisdom out of the natural circular cycle of life, there's very little going on. Hutz as A.K. lives with two hot femmes and they all need more money. It's a bizarre twist on a type of Three's Company relation where A.K., who runs a B&D service out of the apartment, talks Juliette and Holly (Vicky McClure and Holly Weston) into stripping and helping out with things like spanking the customers. Filth and Wisdom presents a lascivious environment that's pure sit-com fantasy. You wouldn't know it to look at it but Filth and Wisdom was directed and co-written by Madonna. For instance, you know that Guy Richie directed RocknRolla because of the way he explores fringe characters in the London underground. Madonna keeps the camera steady and stays away from too obvious choices.
Sure the strip club scenes occasionally give the film momentum, but most of Filth and Wisdom just sort of happens without rhyme or reason, just kind of lies there. Still there's no denying Hutz as a screen stealer, and Gogol Bordello live will pop open your eyes. Filth and Wisdom offers a heightened look at the kind of working class lives that come off with greater truth in Michael Winterbottom or Mike Leigh films.

Happy-Go-Lucky

There's a song off the Pecker soundtrack called "Happy-Go-Lucky-Me" by Paul Evans, a 50s rock and roll ditty that Evans laugh-sings his way through. The song makes you infectiously happy just by listening.
Similarly the English import Happy-Go-Lucky contaminates viewers with giddy pleasure. Were the film  helmed by anyone but cinema stalwart Mike Leigh, Happy-Go-Lucky might have obstacles to overcome what is basically a small character study. But with Leigh's vision that makes one person's attitude a microcosm of our daily reality, and Sally Hawkins giving the most effervescent performance you can imagine, Happy-Go-Lucky just keeps getting better as it progresses, even as its characters become more charming and like personal friends.
Hawkins plays Pauline Poppy Cross, and with a nickname like Poppy it's no surprise that her demeanor bounces up and down the screen. Hawkins' smile is mile wide, flush with teeth and good will. In the late 50s and early 60s there was the British cinema movement recognized by its kitchen sink realism and angry young man characters. Happy-Go-Lucky inhabits those environs only Poppy leans more to the happy young lass school of thought. We first meet Poppy getting drunk with some mates and then partying all night when the pub closes. But then there's a serious side as you follow her to her job, grade school teacher.
Everything in the movie supports Poppy on her way to even greater happiness. And all these less developed characters are templates from other Mike Leigh films. Whether it's one of Poppy's daft friends, or a fellow educator investigating one student's family background, or a driving instructor (Eddie Marsan, on the rise as the bad guy in Hancock and playing John Houseman in the upcoming Me and Orson Welles) who has lost his grip on the steering wheel of life. Marsan goes off on a Biblical rant that reminded me of the David Thewlis character from Leigh's breakthrough domestic release Naked.
Leigh comes on light and frothy in films like Happy-Go-Lucky, and Career Girls, or Life is Sweet with the same intensity that he channels tragic karma in films like Naked or Secrets & Lies and Vera Drake. Either way he makes films with characters that fascinate you from the get-go.

Flow

You may not want to drink water after seeing this film. The tap water we utilize in our kitchens contains trace amounts of jet fuel and Prozac according to the documentary Flow. Bottled water may not be much better. Nestle corporation was depleting water supplies in Michigan to provide bottled water sold around the country. The corp was sued but appealed more than one decision and over time won.
At least in American the water only contains a few harmful elements because in third world countries the hydro supply is decidedly worse. Villages have witnessed World Bank sanctioned water engineering projects turning their once free flowing supplies into pay as you pump alternatives. As a result they just go down to the river but the water there contains waste. In another turnaround created by greed the substance atrazine is allowed in the U.S. while in Europe, home to its manufacture, it's banned because it contaminates groundwater.
Flow dwells on some not so pleasant facts, even while presenting said facts in the prosaic manner of a public television documentary. Let's face it, in our present era of denial such truths as the sad state of our water supply will not mean much until the water literally evaporates and people have to wait for rain water. After all, consider the dire docus that warn about the fragile state of the economy and how we basically ignore those even while banks and insurance and mortgages companies are falling apart before our eyes.
On an up note Flow examines a project funded out of the University of Texas where houses are designed with special gutters that collect rain into cisterns for future use. Unfortunately for every progressive idea Flow springs forth it seems corporate malfeasance takes society two steps back.
Companies like Thames Water, Vivendi and Suez are changing the way people consume water all over the world. We can survive without electricity for a spell, we know that. Gas and oil are necessary to thrive but not absolutely needed for life, as is water. Flow makes its case loud and clear although to be really eloquent it would've offered fewer talking heads and suggested realistic alternatives for the day the faucets flow empty.

I.O.U.S.A.

A documentary that lays bare the federal deficit, the ironic thing about I.O.U.S.A. is how everything the movie warns about has now come to fruition. Directed by Wordplay helmer Patrick Creadon, I.O.U.S.A. explains in a very academic yet accessible manner the four components of the federal deficit; budget, savings, trade and leadership. Brings a pad and pen because you'll want to take notes. It's interesting how an element of chaos dominates economics in addition to other factors. Chaos rules the I.O.U.S.A. website that displays Creadon's name spelled wrong on the press page.
I.O.U.S.A. starts out with an exhilarating montage of the last ten presidents, captured in media and news footage, haranguing about the economy. Eisenhower urged us to break "the calamitous style," while Nixon advised to "keep producing." Ford warned us about being "self indulgent" and Reagan showed he could "act forcefully." Clinton balanced the budget and proclaimed "budget surpluses for the next 25 years." Bush senior called Reagan's supply side economics "voodoo economics." Among the clips Creadon has one moment with Obama and Hillary in a two-shot, listening to Bush 43. That is back to back with a two-shot of Ted and Robert Kennedy but at what cut-off age do people not recognize the latter pair?
While the film was released earlier this year as a one-night theatrical event that included a satellite town-hall type discussion with economic experts, I.O.U.S.A. will roll out in limited engagements starting next week. I am not an economics expert and even after watching this film twice and writing down names I have no idea of how the whole thing works. But is goes something like this, according to 2007 figures our national debt is 8.7-trillion while the gross domestic product is 13.5-trillion thus our debt is 64-percent of our GDP. To coin the words of other talking heads in I.O.U.S.A. "that's pretty crazy."
A historical timeline illustrates that the American Revolution put this country in debt to the tune of $75-million, which is where the graph starts on March 4, 1789 the first day of our fiscal government. By 1835 the USA had paid off that amount and for the first and only time we had no national debt. There are landmarks like 1913 and the start of the Federal Reserve and modern income tax, and the end of WWII where the graph goes into the red, where our national debt was more than 120-percent of the GDP. The percentage during the early years of the Depression was in the 40s, yet now the same percentage hovers in the 60s.
I.O.U.S.A. centers on two men conducting a lecture tour where they express these and other financial talking points. David Walker who resigned as U.S. Comptroller General for the Bush Administration in March of this year and Robert Bixby executive director of the Concorde Coalition, a grassroots org that promotes fiscal responsibility. Through them the story unfolds with additional clips of movers like Ron Paul taking on Alan Greenspan in a 2000 C-SPAN seg, or one of the Concorde Coalition founders Senator Paul Tsongas, a popular Democrat from the 90s who was an economic moderate, and of course Warren Buffett who has so much money that he's got to have something interesting to toss into the brew.
We leave with a sense of conviction about things that should be common sense: don't spend more than you can afford, export more than we import, choose our leaders wisely. One sequence near the end recalls the 1956 Suez Canal conflict where Britain and France took on Egypt. Our country owned a significant amount of the UK national debt and we threatened to sell it off, thus creating havoc with the British economy, if they didn't pull out. They pulled out and a war was averted. Now the shoe is on the other foot. Our national debt is practically in the pockets of Japan, China and oil producing countries. Let's just say you need to be nice to everyone you meet.

Queen of remakes

Have you noticed how many remakes Naomi Watts has starred in?
First there was The Ring, a remake of a Japanese horror flick, then Ned Kelly, which perhaps wasn't so much a remake as a retelling of the legend of Australia's 19th century outlaw hero. King Kong was twice as long as the original, while Funny Games was a shot per shot remake by the same director of his French original. Now Watts is attached to a remake of The Birds. We all know how that ended: The birds won.