Cynical Cinema

Persepolis is the story of a young girl named Marjane growing up in Iran, under the regime of the Shah.  She is precocious, cute, and to a degree bilssfully unaware of the repression that surrounds her.  Her family is a fairly forward-thinking one, with strict ideas of honour and morals, but not one of those crazy-religious repressive families that have become the stereotype.  Her mother is a free-thinker and a stong, independant woman, as is her grandmother.  Her father and his brothers are tough-minded, and willing to take their beliefs to the limit.  When the war with Iraq begins, however, and the Islamic revolution takes over, Marjane’s world view is drastically altered.

 An outspoken girl, there are some scenes which resonate powerfully.  There is one where she speaks out in her university about the new rules that are all of a sudden penetrating into higher education.  If girls can’t wear makeup, because it might arouse the boys, why can’t they wear baggy pants either?  Baggy pants are the fashion right now, and they hide the female form, whereas tight pants show it off.  So is mandating tight pants a decision that was made based on the proper way for girls to behave, or is it because they are against fashion in principle?  A simple, yet powerful scene in a movie that is absolutely crammed with simple and powerful scenes.

The cartoon is almost entirely in black-and-white, which is terrific.  It creates a sort of oppressive atmosphere in a place and time where oppression is the order of the day.  As Marjane grows into womanhood, and starts to question the world around her more and more, she starts to listen to music.  Music that has been banned by the government - it starts with ABBA.  Then ABBA sucks, you gotta hear the Bee Gees.  Eventually this grows into a love for Iron Maiden, perhaps informed more by a form of conscious rebellion at the oppressive society than by an actual love for heavy metal.

Marjane moves to Europe to escape the Iranian craziness, and quickly finds that the nuns she lives with there are, in their own way, as repressive as the Iranians.  A real fish out of water in Europe, she finds that it is tougher to be a stranger in a free land she doesn’t know than it is to live in oppressed land that she does.  Upon her return to Iran, she reconnects with her family, especially her grandmother, who imparts many wise life lessons, and enables Marjane to define herself in terms of her heritage and sociocultural identity. 

Since the whole movie is told through the eyes of this young girl, and then the young woman, hers is the only perspective we see, and it is fairly bleak.  Her perspective, in turn, is informed only by her own personal history, and the cultural and religious background of her upbringing.  Through war, turmoil, executions and horrible oppression, we get two stories, both of them harsh, but both of them fantastic.  The one of the horrors visited upon Iran by the Islamic revolution, and one of a young girl trying desperately to find her place in the world - her world and also a foreign world. 

Something I feel I should add - she has a few experiences with men throughout the film, and I felt, in watching it, that the end could be irritating.  Like, one of those endings where if she just finds the right man, everything will be OK.  And thankfully, the movie does not go down this obnoxious path.  It remains as constant in it’s themes and purpose as Marjane would herself hope to be.  Persepolis is based on the autobiographical graphic novel written by Marjane Satrapi, and she collaborated on the screenplay as well.  She shows herself to be a very courageous woman, laying her sould completely bare, warts and all, up on the screen to tell a story.  A wonderful, smart, funny, poignant and powerful story.  Rent this movie.

Sometimes, it takes star power to get people to watch a movie.  And in this case, the star power comes from George Clooney, the man with about the most star power alive.  Also, of course, Don Cheadle, who actually factors far more into Darfur Now.  Cheadle knows just how powerful a movie can be, having of course starred in Hotel Rwanda.  However, Hotel Rwanda, Shake Hands With The Devil, and dozens of other similar movies share something in common.  They all came to the theatres, to DVD, and to the consciousness of the world AFTER the genocide was over.  In Rwanda, in Cambodia, in Germany and Poland and Yugoslavia and Iraq and elsewhere around the world, the world’s attention was drawn to the horrific events after the fact.  Much of the media tried, in certain circumstances, to tell the story.  But people avoid that until they get it in the more-palatable movie form.

Here is yet another time where we, the people of the world, can actually make a difference before it’s all over and a race of people are wiped out.  In Darfur, a small part of Sudan, there is a genocide taking place.  Right now.  It was the subject of a documentary last year called The Devil Came on Horseback, which was a fine look at the problems actually happening in the region.  Darfur Now focusses more on what real people are doing to prevent the extermination of these innocent people.  Cheadle and Clooney do what they can, using their star power, to convince China to stop trading with Sudan, or at least to acknowledge the genocide taking place.  The fact that they are the highest-level delegation to approach Chinese officials on the subject is, as they say themselves in the film, deeply sad.

There is another young man, a college student at UCLA, who with no political experience whatsoever, who manages to pass a state bill in California to prevent any money going to Sudan.  A Darfurian woman who has joined the rebel forces fighting the Janjaweed, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, a United Nations humanitarian who actually takes the film makers through his attempts to deliver aid and food to the refugees, and a community leader in a Darfur refugee camp.  These six people are all trying to do what they can in a cause that is lost unless they can make the people at the top of the governments of the world respond in some way. 

And therein lies the problem.  Not only are governments notoriously slow to respond to things like “genocide” - after all, how long did it take the U.S. to go after Saddam Hussein for gassing the Kurds after it happened?  Fifteen years?  And even then, how much did they really care about the genocide?   Darfur Now, in addition to being compelling viewing, is an attempt to mobilize people, create awareness and call attention to one of these situations that is taking place right now.

The opening scene to For The Bible Tells Me So is great.  It’s a little scary at first.  I was watching, thinking “what have I got myself into?”  It appeared as though the film was going to be a bunch of anti-gay Christian propaganda.  It was an old news clip of a woman talking on television about how homosexuality was a terrible thing, and that she and her associates were not there to condemn the gay folk, but rather to help them by changing their lifestyle and “curing” them.  Then, out of nowhere, a guy shows up and slams her in the face with a pie.  Hilarious!  As it turns out, the film is not anti-gay propaganda, but rather anti-anti-gay propaganda.  It examines the way fundamentalist, right-wing Christians have distorted the meaning of the words in the Bible to further a bizarrely conceived anti-homosexual agenda.

People are quoted everywhere in this movie saying that the bible says homosexuality is “an abomination”.  And many of them can, indeed, quote chapter and verse.  However, the gay-bashers and anti-homosexual preachers and pastors and rabbis are using a very convenient interpretation of the bible.  Of course, we all know that the bible is interpreted very differently by many people.  Which is why some Christians are catholics and others knock on my door to give me pamphlets about doomsday that feature creepy pictures of children feeding goats.  But everyone who has chosen to engage in this crusade against homosexuality is doing more than interpreting the bible differently than sane people.  They are purposely ignoring large portions of the book.

You see, if you took the one passage from Leviticus that homophobes have used as their shining example of God’s hatred of homosexuality, and you took it at face value, you would be entirely missing the point.  This is the passage:  “You shall not lie with a male as those who lie with a female; it is an abomination.”  If that was the only passage you read, and you were a bible-thumping nutjob, you might think God was anti-gay.  But if you read the rest of Leviticus, you would realize that the word “abomination” is not nearly as harsh as it seems.  In fact, anything the least bit out of the ordinary is, in this chapter, an “abomination”.  Like eating shrimp.  Abomination.  Eating rabbit.  Abomination.  Eating bacon, oysters, ham, pork chops, lobster and crab.  Abominations.  But you are allowed to eat locusts.  Huzzah for the bible!  I don’t see Fred Phelps holding rallies outside seafood restaurants or pig farms.  Or eating locusts.  Although I would very much like to see Fred Phelps eat locusts.

Actually, Phelps is not in this movie, amazingly.  Which is kind of great, because he represents the extreme.  The really out-to-lunch lunatic fringe of the church and Christianity in general.  And that isn’t what the movie is about.  It’s about the opinions of regular, ordinary Christians, and how they are affected by those around them.  We meet many devoted religious believers who have had to deal with gay children.  Some are more tolerant than others, some actually became estranged from their children while others became activists for gay rights themselves.  The film also deals with the idea of ordaining gay ministers.  The backlash against those who have become ordained, and the support they received from other parts of the Christian community. 

And this is what makes this movie wonderful.  It is certainly a movie that takes sides - It has chosen to take the side of common sense over the side of rabid homphobic insanity.  But the fact that it stays right in the middle, with average Christians of all denominations - catholic, baptist, lutheran, you name it - and examine their beliefs and the origin of those beliefs.  And for the most part, these beliefs originate with the ignorance of others.  If your priest is constantly telling you that homosexuality is unnatural and evil, and you have built your life on following the bible and the teachings of your church, then it only stands to reason that you will have a difficult time reconciling those deeply-held beliefs with the truth when you are presented with the real facts.

After watching the film, I wanted to read more about the church and the crazy divide that has been caused by support for, and opposition to, the gay and lesbian community.  In fact, I have done considerable research just for this review.  Here is a great website that examines all six bible chapters that homophobes cite when condemning the gay lifestyle, and explanations for why it’s a little nuts.

http://www.otkenyer.hu/truluck/six_bible_passages.html

And that’s the last thing that makes this movie great.  It knows exactly where it’s going.  It doesn’t talk at all about non-religious people.  And I am most assuredly a non-religious person.  But I found it fascinating nonetheless.  It never makes the easy point that blindly following the bible is a poor way to make any decision.  It never takes the easy road that is constantly presented by fervent religious believers with their crazy behaviour and antics.  It takes on those beliefs at the very root, and presents the facts in such a way that almost any religious person, with the possible exception of the most rabid homophobic ones, would have to really think about their views in the context of this film.  A powerful statement on an important subject.

“Recount” is an HBO movie that premiered on May 25th on HBO in the states and The Movie Network here in Canada.  Originally, Sydney Pollack was slated to direct the film, but pulled out at the last moment due to an undisclosed illness, which of course was cancer, the same cancer that caught up to him yesterday.  A sad coincidence as this fantastic movie premieres.  This is one of those major TV drama events where a made-for-TV movie actually gets hype and buzz and deserves it.  Well worth checking out.

HBO has just put the movie on TV, a dramatized version of the real events that led up to George Bush being fictitiously elected over Al Gore in 2000.  I recently saw Antonin Scalia, one of the American Supreme Court justices directly responsible for the handing of the election to Bush, saying in an interview “it was eight years ago.  Get over it.”  But America can’t get over it.  They still have that falsely-elected president, who is still screwing things up on a daily basis.  And not in a fun, keystone-cops kind of way.  Screwing things up in a malicious, Mr. Burns sort of way.  Scalia, by the way, is also the Supreme Court justice who believes torture is not an act in violation of the Eighth Amendment, the one dealing with “cruel and unusual punishment”.  His reasoning - although torture, such as waterboarding, IS cruel and unusual, it does not qualify as “punishment”.  You see, people who get tortured are not being punished for anything, since they have not been convicted of anything.  They may well be innocent.  And if they are innocent, then they are not being punished.  A prince of a man, Mr. Scalia.  But I digress.

Anyway, although the politics and questionable behaviour of Antonin Scalia are something about which I could rant for aeons, the man does not figure prominently in Recount.  Rather, the movie is about several other people.  Ron Klain (Kevin Spacey), Al Gore’s fired-then-rehired campaign advisor.  Warren Christopher (John Hurt), the secretary of state under Bill Clinton, who was sent by Gore to supervise the recount.  (Sidebar - Christopher, so far, is the only person portrayed in this film that has objected to his protrayal.  He has not seen it, but he read the transcripts and felt they made him sound way too naive.)  Katherine Harris (Laura Dern), the Florida Republican Secretary of State who exhibited terribly partisan and unethical behaviour during the 2000 election, doing everything she could to hand victory to Bush.  And James Baker (Tom Wilkinson), the Secretary of State under George Bush Sr., who was the chief legal advisor to Bush Jr. in 2000.

Each of those actors gives an examplary performance, especially Spacey, as an idealist who will fight to the end, and Dern as a woman in way over her head with a self-esteem problem and a taste for the spotlight.  Also terrific are Dennis Leary as Michael Whouley, and Ed Begley Jr. as David Boies.  Although we already know the end result of this film, (and for many of us politically interested folk, the entire process), this film still plays like a thriller.  Each moment is more and more tense, as you really get a sense of the machinations behind the scenes.  You get righteously indignant at the Republican troublemakers who tried to delay the re-counting of the votes.  You get furious at the groups who intentionally excluded more than 20,000 voters, most of them African-American, under the false pretext that they had been convicted of a felony.  You pull for the supreme court to render the right decision, and you can get right into it when something goes the right way for a change.  Even though you know for a fact that at the end of the movie the bad guys win and we get eight years of Chaney and Rumsfeld and Rove and Rice and that president guy.

 The only really irritating thing about the movie is the appearance of Bush and Gore themselves.  The two of them appear courtesy of archival footage, which is fine, but then they are shown, always from behind, and played by some stand-in actor.  That gives Recount, if only for those few brief moments, the feel of one of those lame, cheap, re-enactment scenes from a When Animals Attack show, or Unsolved Mysteries.  Aside from that, however, Recount is incredibly brisk, moves along very quickly, and is an absolutely thrilling political true story.  Tour-de-force performances all the way through, and a script that I’m sure just wrote itself.  Catch this one while you can, playing on The Movie Network right now.

My biggest complaint about Grace Is Gone is the very first scene. John Cusack is obviously some manager at some company, and he is leading his co-workers in one of those office cheers. You know - “who comes first?” “The customers!” “Who comes first?” “The customers!” “Who comes first?” “THE CUSTOMERS!” And then everyone runs off to begin their day. I once worked at a place like this. Every morning, before they began, they would put their arms around each other in a circle, close their eyes, and listen to Eye Of The Tiger all the way through. I’m not even joking. They really did this. I’ll tell you, my time at that job before I quit was the longest eleven hours of my life! Well, watching The Postman, twice, on the same overseas plane ride, with Mission To Mars sandwiched in between the two showings, was the longest eleven hours of my life. But this job was a close second.

Thank God the movie is actually decent, because it sure left a bad taste in my mouth when it began. When Cusack gets home from work, we find out that he has two charming little girls, one twelve-year-old and one eight-year-old. The older one seems wise and mature beyond her years, and a little too serious for a normal little girl. The younger one is innocent and vivacious, and seems maybe a little too young for her age. We learn quickly that their mother (and Cusack’s wife) is a soldier in Iraq. The little girl sets her watch to go off at the same time every day, which is when her mom’s watch will go off in Iraq, and they’ll think of each other. And blah blah sentinemtality…blah blah. The older daughter is an insomniac. She falls asleep in school because she can’t sleep at night, because she is thinking about mom fighting a war.

Then two military men show up at the door. Mom (Grace) is dead. And this is where the movie really starts. Cusack, losing his mind just a little, scares the hell out of his older daughter and thrills his youngest when he decides that rather than tell them about their mom, he will spontaneously put them in the car and take them on a road trip across the country to some kind of Dinseyland-type amusement park, the name of which escapes me just now. The whole movie is this road trip, and although that seems boring, enough happens that we are reasonably entertained. Cusack and his daughters, with their support-our-troops ribbon on their car, meet up with his brother, an anti-war jobless bum. I don’t think the movie as a whole is trying to say that those who question the war are shiftless losers, but it sure feels that way during the scenes with the brother, ably played by Alessandro Nivola.

And it really is the performances that hold what could be an awfully thin movie together. Most notably Cusack himself, who appears to have put on a few pounds, and forgoes his usual stutter-bitter-confused delivery for something more sympathetic and damaged. His relationship with the girls, while it starts off as sort of arm’s-length and cautious, improves throughout the trip until, at the end, he tells them their mom is dead. (I’m not ruining anything here - you had to know this movie was going to end that way, right?) It’s a pretty good scene, in the sense that the entire movie has been leading up to that moment, and it would have been very easy to make it maudlin, to contrive a tear-jerking moment, but director James C. Strouse doesn’t do that. Instead the revelatory moment is nicely understated and subtle.

The older daughter Heidi (played very well by Shelan O’Keefe), throughout the movie, knows something is amiss. She puts a lot of clues together, but can’t quite figure out what’s really going on. It seems simple enough to us watching that she should understand completely, but she is unable to conceive something of the magnitude of the death of her mother. After all, she’s just 12 years old. So that option doesn’t really occur to her, or if it does she chooses not to explore the possibility any further. And although Cusack is considerably older than Heidi, he too can’t conceive of this happening either. And the two of them are the glue that holds Grace Is Gone together. Two terrific performances that raise the level of this movie from maudlin to moving. It comes out tomorrow, May 27th, from Alliance Films.

Holocaust is a now-legendary miniseries that ran on NBC’s Big Event series in the late 70s. Starring Meryl Streep, James Woods, and a ton of other stars, this is a seven-and-a-half hour marathon of remarkable brilliance. Streep and Woods are terrific as a German woman and her Jewish husband. They get married at the beginning of the film, just before the Nazis start rounding up Jews for the ghettos and for executions. The series follows their story, as well as many others. Woods’ family plays a big part too. His father, a doctor, is played by Fritz Weaver, and his mother is Rosemary Harris. We follow them all the way to the Polish ghetto, and then to Auschwitz. Woods’ brother, Joseph Bottoms, witnesses and then escapes from the 1941 Baba Yar massacre, and with his girlfriend joins up with the Russian partisans in their battle against the Nazis.

Also a big story in Holocaust, Michael Moriarty is absolutely great as Erik Dorf, a German lawyer pressured by his ambitious wife to join the Nazi party. Although he is initially conflicted about the inhuman treatment of the Jews, he quickly loses his humanity and rises through the ranks of the SS to become a key architect of Auschwitz and the gas chambers. His story, while initially sympathetic, becomes more and more unpalatable as the film moves on, and eventually Dorf becomes the face of the evil that was the Nazis. He manages to justify his ideas and his involvement in the slaughter of so many innocents by thinking of it as just a job. He’s just following orders. His position is just a job. And his job is to find more efficient ways to slaughter Jews and better methods to explain it to the rest of the world. The Dorf we meet at the beginning of Holocaust would have recoiled in horror at the things done by the Dorf we see at the end.

Throughout, Holocaust is (of course) devastating and horrific. While we can celebrate the love between Bottoms and his girlfriend as they get married, and we can feel a certain amount of satisfaction and inspiration from the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, the story is so well-known and so bleak that it’s tough to lose oneself in the nice moments. But that is as it should be. You don’t watch a series like Holocaust expecting comedy and love stories. But it needs some (relatively) light-hearted moments to alleviate that crushing sense of dread and depression one will feel while watching. Of course, the people who really went through this have no respite, but that’s no reason not to give us one as we watch. After all, you want people to actually watch this, if for no other reason than it’s an event we, as people, should never forget.

Holocaust won several Emmy awards, being ineligible for Oscars. One of the most decorated TV miniseries of all time, it won for Outstanding Limited Series, whatever that meant in 1978. Streep, Woods and Moriarty all won acting Emmys, as did Blanche Baker. Five other actors were nominated, without winning. The direction, by Marvin J. Chomsky, won, as did the script by Gerald Green. Morton Gould’s musical score was nominated for an Emmy AND a Grammy, and Moriarty and Rosemary Harris both won acting Golden Globe awards. In short, Holocaust won every award that was available to it at the time, everything short of the Oscars. Which makes it TV’s equivalent of Schindler’s List, an apt comparison in that it stands right up there with that film as the two greatest documents of the most horrific events in modern history. It comes out on DVD for the first time tomorrow, May 27th, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

There are many, many movies just like The Great Debaters, which comes out May 13th from Alliance Films. Movies that deal with race relations in the Jim Crow south. Movies that show kids in college achieving a greater understanding of the world through a special teacher and through competition. Many of which have starred Denzel Washington. All of which means The Great Debaters is nothing new. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t excellent. What sets this film apart is the crafting of the movie, courtesy of Washington, who directs, and the performances that hold it together, also courtesy of Washington. He is terrific as the college professor who molds a team of Africa-American debaters into the most potent orators in the college world.

Also terrific is Forrest Whitaker, who now has to merit some consideration as one of the finest actors of our time. He plays a preacher at the same college as Washington, a fine orator himself and a renowned scholar. He doesn’t quite understand, the way Washington does, how best to harness his intellectual powers to effect true change, but he grows over the course of the film. But the character who does the most growing is his son, who is played by the aptly-named Denzel Whitaker. As the youngest member of the Wiley College debate team, Whitaker is both the emotional centre of the movie and the one character whose growth most mirrors the story arc. His performance as 14-year-old James Farmer Jr. May well be the best in the film.

Rounding out the terrific cast are Jurnee Smollett and Nate Parker, as the eventual other two members of the debate team. Parker plays a rebellious student, who is brilliant but tortured. Smollett is a driven, intelligent woman, who aspires to become only the third black female lawyer in the United States. Their story, (and romance) is incidental to the film, but it works. Denzel Washington’s story seems incidental as well, at first. When he isn’t working at the college, he is dressing up as a farmer and holding clandestine meetings in barns, attempting to organize the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. This leads to him being branded a communist, and there is a backlash against him that comes from both the white establishment and his African-American colleagues. In the end, this is not simply an incidental story line, it is essential to the full fleshing out of the story.

The fact that this film is based on a true story might be the most remarkable thing about it. These people did exist, they did do this remarkable thing, and who knows - had we been there at that time, in 1936, it may well have been as powerful and inspirational as the movie itself. Now, I do have a quibble or two. If this were 1936, using a reference to Hitler to win a debate wouldn’t exactly have the gravity that it does now. In fact, it might have been a rather weak argument in 1936. Like making a Gearge-Bush-is-awful argument in August of 2001. Maybe you can see something terrible coming, but it sure isn’t there yet. And also, the top-ranked Harvard debate team seems to have had their lines dumbed down a little. They don’t make enough sense and they aren’t good enough points for such a highly-touted debating team. That being said, however, I would have really liked to see a little more of the debates themselves. They are all so compelling and so interesting that I could have handled another hour of movie if it was all debating.

As Wiley College mows down their opponents in Texas, and takes on the best Negro colleges in the States, a final showdown is set when Harvard agrees to meet the team and debate against them. Harvard is, of course, the perennial powerhouse team, the best in the country, and they are willing to meet this remarkable Negro team in an historic debate. Of course, this is the big, climactic, and inspirational finale of the film, and it’s fairly routine in the way it ties everything together, but it is set up and delivered so well that it doesn’t feel like a cliche or like the obvious ending, it just feels great. And so does the rest of The Great Debaters.

I hate to call something a must-watch, because people send me emails, angry that I said Hot Fuzz is a must-watch, and they hate British people. Or that A History of Violence is a must-watch, but they hate violence! (I really did get both of these emails. I liked the violence one best.) But this is one. The Hunting Party is a movie that asks the question - how hard are the agencies of the world really looking for the Osama Bin Ladens of the world? Specifically, this movie deals with the CIA and their “efforts” to track down the war criminals of the conflict in Bosnia and Serbia. As it stands right now, most of the war criminals - murderers, genocidaires, rapists and worse - from the former Yugoslavia are still on the loose, (many believe some are sheltered in Russia) despite agencies like the CIA having vowed to track them down and find them half a decade ago.

The Hunting Party stars Richard Gere and Terrence Howard as a reporter and a cameraman who have been through many wars together. The film is inspired by the true story of a disgraced reporter, played by Gere, and his cameraman (Howard) and a wet-behind-the-ears young journalist who has to prove his merit because he is the big boss’s son. The three of them take off into the former Yugoslavia, searching for the region’s most notorious and dangerous war criminal, the butcher known as “The Fox”. How much of what transpires after that is true and how much is fiction, I don’t know. But I do know that the movie is enthralling. Three things make The Hunting Party tremendous. First, the social conscience and the real-world political questions raised by the film. Secondly, it’s pacing. The first time you see Richard Gere’s live, on-air meltdown on national TV, it’s almost comical, in a way. Later, you learn the circumstances behind that meltdown, and when you look back on it, you can no longer remember why you found anything funny in it at all, it just looks tragic. There is enough subtle humour throughout the film, at just the right places, to break up what would otherwise be overwhelmingly tragic and bleak subject matter. And third, the realism. These characters behave the way three real people, in the real world, would behave. Yes, they are foolhardy, yes, they are reckless, and yes, they are probably very lucky to be alive at certain points in the movie, but they never seem anything less than human at any point.

The Hunting Party is both a fascinating character study of a man who does not know how to stop being a reporter, and an eye-opening look at the way the CIA, the UN and other world agencies pay lip service to war criminals and the architects of genocide without ever really doing anything about them. It is, indeed, a must-watch. So watch it!

The Real Dirt on Farmer John is a documentary that has appeared in video stores recently, and it’s pretty good. Not great, but good. You see, it’s about fifty different things, and any one of those things would be interesting, but none of them are delved into with any huge depth. Farmer John Peterson is a real farmer, raised on a farm in small-town-USA, who turned out a bit different from his neighbours. A man who took over the family farm in the 60s, and invited his new friends to stay there and help him work the land. This turned into sort of a hippy commune at the time, while still working as a fully functioning farm, the hippies were actually pitching in as farm hands, lifting the hay bales and turning the soil and doing the grunt work. Peterson was able to embrace the cultural climate of the 70s, which meant he had a lot of friends, but none among his conservative, old-school farming neighbours. Peterson became a pariah in the community. Rumours of murder and Satan worship…why did I capitalize Satan as I would God, I wonder…hedging my bets, I guess. Anyway, these rumours abounded.

Peterson went on to become a playwright, an actor, a painter, an artist in all types of materials, an ecologist and an pioneer in both organic foods and farming co-ops. But through it all, he remains, at heart, a farmer first. All these things are dealt with in a tight 82 minutes, which is why I say I would have liked to see more on each of these topics. The film also touches on the demise of the family farm, the urban sprawl that has taken the place of the food we eat, the tough times for American small business and farm industry, and the problems inherent in the American economic system, as they relate to farming. Not only that, but the film has time to fit in a few rays of hope and a few potential solutions to these problems, many of them possibly coming courtesy of Peterson himself. An eccentric man, a fascinating story, but one that I would have been happy to watch for two hours, rather than just over one.

Everything is not cool. By everything, I of course mean the world. But we know that. We ALL know that. Sure there are the climate chage “deniers” out there, the poor misguided future architects of their own demise. The fact that climate change and global warming is even a political issue, or a controversy at all, is due in large part to the Bush administration in the U.S. and the media. I mean, seriously, if the U.S. and Bush and the rest of the Republican party elite took global warming seriously, and put policies into effect to reduce emissions and save civilization, do you really think the Conservative government in Canada would be resisting science as much as they do? That they would be ignoring the environment the way they are? I’m going to say no. If the Americans took it seriously, and had signed on to Kyoto or put strict regulations in place, we (and Harper’s Conservatives) would be right there one step behind them, doing the same things. I think we can safely say there is no doubt about this.

But these are the people who have the most power to effect change. Every administration in every government in every country in the world is concerned about their legacy. And think about the legacy of some of our recent leaders. At the moment, Jean Chretien is best remembered for the sponsorship scandal, but fifty years from now, what will be his legacy? I think it will be NOT sending Canadians to Iraq. Saying “no” to the Bush government. That is what he will be most remembered for fifty years down the road. And Bush? What will be his legacy? At the moment it looks like the complete screw-up that is Iraq will be the lasting memory of Bush. But, again, fifty years from now, when people look back on it, that may not be his legacy at all. The destruction of a country, it’s people, the creation of enormous amounts of terrorists all over the world, disastrous foreign policy and heavy-handed top-down control of the government, the downward spiral and possible future crash of the American economy, and the invasion of American freedom with the Patriot Act and other measures. Legacy? Maybe. But all of those things, fifty years from now, may pale in comparison to one thing. Inaction on the environment. If, fifty years from now, the United States are largely uninhabitable, the number one scapegoat will be Bush and his cronies.

“Everything’s Cool” takes a look at the “backlash” against global warming. It examines the American attitude toward the crisis, which largely has been “what crisis? Really?” Hundreds, maybe thousands, of scientists have presented reports to the American government saying global warming is happening. Now. It is helping to create all the crazy weather and bizarre climate happenings of the last few years. It is here, it is now, it is incontrovertable. There is no doubt. The government takes these reports and edits them. In editing them, they remove words like “is” and replace them with words like “may be”. Well, “the world IS in crisis” and “the world MAY BE in crisis” are two very different statements. What big oil and the Bush government want to create is controversy. They don’t want to win - they can’t possibly win, they are arguing against facts and science. So what they want to do is muddy the issue as much as possible. As long as people continue thinking there is a “controversy” about global warming, they have succeeded, and they can say things like “it needs more research”. Balls!

But what “Everything’s Cool” is saying is that the main reason the environmentallists have failed in persuading governments that we are running out of time is that they are going about it the wrong way. When you show people melting ice, and a lonely polar bear on an ice floe, and pictures of Hurricane Katrina, it is effective for some people. But not for most. Most people will say “oh, that’s too bad. Someone should do something.” But then they have more important concerns. They are out of a job because the economy is crumbling. They can’t afford to pay their property taxes, they need to find health care or a family doctor…these things are far more important to the average person than a polar bear on an ice floe. Therefore, no one is really seeing the big picture, mostly because they don’t want to. If people are given two options to believe, they will more often than not choose to believe the one that is more convenient for them. So…the solution the Bushies have is - give them two options! Even if one does not exist.

But global warming is not Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or Sasquatch or UFOs. It is not something you can either “believe in” or not. They call it “theory” because that makes it easier to ignore. Well, evolution is called a “theory”. Why? Because then hardcore right-wing extremist religious fanatics can ignore it. After all, it’s just a theory. For them, it’s inconvenient for them to believe in evolution. If it were inconvenient for people to believe in the “theory” of gravity, there would be newspaper columns and millions of websites and right-wing radio host nutjobs doing their very best to “disprove” gravity. And “Everything’s Cool” offers (somewhat) a solution. Don’t tell people all this negative stuff, like “you’re about to die”. A person will understand that. People will tune it out. It’s too upsetting. So, here’s what you do. You prove to people what these same scientists have been saying for years. Ending our dependence on foreign oil, converting to clean alternative energy sources, and cutting emissions drastically can be good. Not just for the environment, but for the economy! For YOUR wallet! Environmentallists have not gone this route up until now, because they figured the polar bear on the ice floe would move people more. And yes, it certainly should. But it doesn’t. Giving them the positive news will actually spur people into action.

This is certainly possible, and I think it’s high time we try. After all, the old methods are clearly not working. We need to start fixing this yesterday, and it’s already tomorrow, and we have page upon page upon volumes of reports, and a lot of gum flapping and talk in the very places where action needs to begin. For more information about this excellent movie and about global warming and about what you can do, go to: