www.intermod.org

The Holy Modal Rounders: Bound To Lose — two musical soulmates who drive each other up the wall; both get carried off in the drug waves of the 60’s; one cleans himself up in the late 70’s, but the other takes another 20 years to do it — defying the expectations of everyone else waiting for him to die. Great documentary about dysfunctional artists, patient fans and the flipside of charisma and magnetic personalities.

Passion & Poetry – The Ballad of Sam Peckinpah — a sonofabitch to work with but a great director (The Wild Bunch, Cross Of Iron); the documentary itself was actually fairly bad and far too long, what with all the sycophantic Germans and Ernest Borgnine belly laughs.

The Reivers — See, it’s my own fault, really. I saw “William Faulkner” and I thought “seriously f*cked up southern gothic”, but what I got instead was “The Apple Dumpling Gang plus whores and horses”. A sugary coming of age story that I could have gone without.

‘Tis Autumn — The slighty rough filmmaking got on my nerves at first, but the subject at hand (the mystery of Jackie Paris) quickly won me over. A really nice jazz doc and a fascinating story.

Crossing Arizona — standard doc with insight into the lives of the people who are literally at the frontlines of the illegal immigration debate. One on side you’ve got the right-wing blowhards taunting their own right-wing government for not properly securing the border, and the other side you’ve got the humanitarians trying to save the lives of the Mexicans who are taking increasing risks to cross over. In the middle you have the low-wage workers trying to push through it all and get to the jobs. All this on a background of ballot initiatives, posturing for the media, how NAFTA created the problem, etc. Covers many angles, worth seeing.

Sweet Land — A beautiful film and an engaging , sweet story, and that’s coming from someone who usually gags at that kind of stuff (see Things From Trees). It had me in a pleasant fog all the way home. It doesn’t hurt that Elizabeth Reaser is so easy on the eyes …

Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story — basic good documentary, about a kidnapping whose scope and impact gets larger and larger as the years pass.

Puppy — good! Both leads are great, the film is well put-together … the only narrative worth seeing in the festival so far.

Things That Hang From Trees — Oh look, a sleepy southern town with a cast of quirky characters. Easy on the eyes though. That Ray McKinnon, he’s somethin’. But along with Sunday’s No. 2, it’s two hours that I wouldn’t have minded keeping for some other purpose.

Brothers of The Head — seems at a glance to be one those one-joke movies that I’d hate (siamese twin rockers! haha!), but it turned out to be very well done; filmaking, acting, music, it’s all good.

Brother Gordon — it was just a 15 minute short, but a compelling view of a man who speaks eloquently of his conversion from a life of shady civilian/military contract killings to a life of Buddhism and bringing herion addicts back to a healthy life.

Rain on a Dry Land — standard PBS/POV-style doc; illustrative of how immigrants can get chewed up and spit out by America, especially if they don’t know English well enough to converse verbally; particularly illuminating was one scene where you could see how the system essentially encourages them to have more children because it’ll solve their immediate money problems; this also illustrates the language problem because the state support mechanism was trying to communicate more subtle issues, but the “baby=money” message is what made it through the language barriers.

Rural Rock and Roll — careening between insipid interviews and dopey fun, this documented an inbred indie rock scene located in an isolated corner of northern California (pot-growing hippies, contractor rednecks, students of local liberal arts college). Illustrates well one of my rules of life: The Scene Is Now. Don’t wait for someone to tell you that you’re in the midst of a larger movement or scene, because by the time it’s recognized as such and the word gets out, it’s dead and the energy has moved elsewhere. Make your own scene, do it now, and let someone else write about it later. By the epilogue at the end of movie, all of the bands in the doc had broken up.

Edge of Outside: Independent Filmmakers — talking heads documentary about some key filmmakers who invented “independent”: Cassavetes, Fuller, Peckinpah, even Capra. Produced by the staff of Turner Classic Movies, this will air on TCM on July 5th at 8pm and is well worth watching. I’ll be watching it again to catch all the movie references and make my Netflix queue even longer …

No. 2 — writing was too pat, overwrought; but a nice slice of life in suburban (!) Fiji; adapted from the director’s play, and she probably didn’t (yet) have the skills to translate it to screen properly. Looks like I have a new actress to hate to take the place of Keira Knightley. I’m guessing that this got included only as part of the deal that brought Ruby Dee to the gala that preceded the festival.

Note: the film titles below link to the AFF description of the movie; please do read those short descriptions because I don’t recap that material in my comments.

Future By Design — a well-meaning utopian whose grasp of technologies is a mile wide but an inch deep, and none of his ideas would stand up to serious scrutiny. But he keeps his audience of lay dreamers (mostly itinerant retirees, it seems) entertained with lavish drawings and models. Oddly amateurish filmmaking.

Home Front — What strikes me during these scarred-by-Iraq docs is how I know absolutely nobody, even indirectly, who has been sent to Iraq. Middle America has bought into this delusional “freedom isn’t free” “fighting them over there to protect us over here” bullshit that the neocons have cynically fabricated to lure them into voting for their puppet, and Middle America pays for it with their sons and daughters lives and livelihood. But they can’t let themselves come to a conclusion other than “support the troops and the mission” because otherwise they might have to realize that they lost their eyes and limbs and lives for a fraud. These are simple, decent people who have been taken advantage of by a profit-making, body-chewing machine.

Al Franken: God Spoke — Eh. An entertaining crowd pleaser. Nice to see it demonstrated once again what a reptile Ann Coulter is. Anyway, nothing in politics really matters ever since the nation failed, on November 3rd 2004, to rise up en masse and correct the mistakes and crimes of the previous four years. Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?

It’s early June and time for the annual Atlanta Film Festival. As I do every year, I’m taking the whole week off of work, I’ve bought an all-access pass, and I’ll be going to every screening that I reasonably can. In the past I’ve usually found a gap here and there in the week’s schedule of movies where I can have a few hours to … run errands and generally relax my mind, but this year seems to be denser than before. I don’t know if it’s the quantity or quality of movies or what, but there’s a lot more that I want to see this year — mostly documentaries as usual.

I’ll be posting here with my thoughts about what I’ve seen, like last year, although unlike last year this time I will post daily to try to capture what I’ve seen as soon as I’ve seen it. We’ll see how that goes .. I don’t know where I’ll find the time.

“Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound.”

— William Goldman, novelist, playwright and screenwriter.

Yeah, I’ve got some things I need to write down, here, and it’ll happen soon …

Three fantastic writers …

Andisheh Nouraee — a columnist for Atlanta’s alternative weekly Creative Loafing (his collected writings for CL here). In one column he’s a man about town reported on the scene (and herd), and in the other column he does a Slate/Explainer take on questions about current events. Recent favorite quote: “… the United States and India also reached an agreement on sharing nuclear technology. The world’s largest democracy and the world’s fattest democracy are now nuclear BFF.”

Matt Taibbi — Politics in the style of Hunter S. Thompson. Take an ex-sportswriter and Russophile, add some tabs of acid and a gorilla suit, and sick him on the campaign trail.

Stephen Colbert — obviously just about everyone’s going to know about him already. His vicious satire is simply the best thing on television right now — I hope it lasts. I have a tedious rule against cable TV at home, but fortunately (!) I work for the beast itself (cable TV) so I actually can tape it at work. So in fact I have a VCR in my office whose sole job is to tape the Colbert Report so I can bring it home and watch it with the sweetie. Colbert recently was interviewed on the public radio show “City Arts & Lectures” and you can hear/download the hilarious hour here. Do it! Now!

Commercial nuclear power has increasingly been in the news lately. Westinghouse has received various approvals from the NRC for its new “advanced” design, Toshiba’s trying to get a small reactor going in Alaska, and general oil supply issues have brought nuclear back to the table again. It’s been nearly 30 years since Three Mile Island, 20 years since Chernobyl, and Americans’ fear of all things nuclear is starting to fade. We’ll probably see new licenses in the next year and construction of new reactors starting before the decade is out.

So I figured I might as well go ahead and get my position down on paper, because people have asked about it in the past.

I spent a few years working in nuclear power plants all over the country. I went into the industry agnostic about nuclear, and came out against it.

The reason I ended up against it is that I found that about 90% of the workers inside really had no idea what they were doing. About 10% of the workers did understand the technology that they were responsible for, and that 10% was feverishly running around trying to correct the mistakes of the 90%.

I felt that I was one of those 10%. Specifically, I would review the results of maintenance work that others had done days earlier and find that it had been done wrong (e.g. “oh crap, his analysis is wrong, that equipment is about to fail”). Faced with a huge number of these situations, I’d have to pick my battles about which equipment to send a crew in again to rework. Or spend even more time and rework it myself. Some problems I just had to let go.

Of course, you see incompetence like this in any industry or workplace, but in nuclear energy, the worst case failure scenario is truly terrible. If you have worker incompetence at a restaurant, or phone company, or auto factory, the worst case failure is far more limited in the damage that it does. And of course these failures happen every day, but hardly ever make the news.

Now, on the other side of the table you’ve got the massive potential of nuclear energy, which of course was originally “clean*, plentiful energy too cheap to meter”. So you’ve got a huge risk and a huge reward, and in the middle you have human beings running the enterprise, and therein is the problem: human nature. It’s human to be incompetent, have nepotism in the workplace, be laggard in firing poor workers, have lapses of memory or judgment, and so forth.

Communism held a lot of promise in its ideals of equity and efficient use of resources, but failed in the face of the inate human qualities of greed and selfishness. Nuclear power promises cheap and clean* energy, but fails in the face of the inate human quality of fallibility.

High risk and high reward, with man in the middle. I don’t trust the private sector to ever get that to work right.

Spring is approaching, and the radio tower at work is still up, so I thought maybe we’d be getting a bonus year of The Hawk Channel. Alas, last weekend The Powers That Be (TPTB) took down the large metal platform (about halfway up the 250-foot tower) that the hawks had been nesting on. I think they were trying to discourage nesting activity so that they don’t run into trouble later this spring when they get around to finally taking down the tower.

Problem is, the hawks really like that tower.

They’ve managed to wedge themselves behind one of the pieces of gear mounted on the tower — hardly as lavish a pad as the old place, but it’s still a great location location location.

Sadly, this will probably only push TPTB to get that tower down pronto. The hawks will probably find a new place to nest in the tall trees nearby, but it’ll take a couple years before the nest successfully produces chicks — first year nests usually fail, from what I’ve read.