United 93

United 93 (Paul Greengrass, 2006) "The War on Terror" turned the tide before it was even declared. The efforts of the crew and passengers of United flight 93 insured that, as they assessed the situation quickly, made decisive plans and executed them unselfishly, in the process saving an unimaginable number of lives. Who knows, besides the dishonored dead, what the target was? We don't know. We can't know. But, after that, every airline passenger became more vigilant, and everybody who didn't put their seats in an upright position (or try to light their shoes) was seen with suspicion. Anyone who attempted anything—short of hogging the overhead compartments, blocking the aisles in conversation, stealing somebody else's honey-nuts, or (god forbid) talking incessantly about themselves THE ENTIRE FLIGHT—against the common good, would be taken down and taken down hard, if not by security officers, then by the passengers themselves (and you had better luck with the security officers). Flight 93 was when the terrorists started losing 55 minutes after the battles had begun.

Greengrass' ingenious attempt to recreate the events on 9-11 leading up to and during that horrific flight (in real time, one might add) crackles and pops with a cinema verité energy that makes the most mundane of the circumstances take on an ironic heft. We all know how the story went—only if merely how it ends—and it makes all the participants victims and their every action and utterance weighted with irony, their moments, being finite, that much more important. The dawning realization that their rudimentary transport had become part of an organized plot to turn their flight into a weapon of targeted destruction is both horrific and inspiring, moving fast through the stages of grief, they decide to make the best of the situation in which they suspected they would not survive, and acted unselfishly to at least stop any further loss of life wherever they were heading, and, maybe, doubtfully, save their own. In an unfolding world of uncertainty, they acted for the greater good.  

It's an amazing story—civilians becoming warriors, victims not settling for that role. And Greengrass' version is done without stars, no grand-standing, just the director's insistence on verisimilitude and energy, not amping the story with false heroics, but only the genuine ones, and enhanced by its own choice not to editorialize.

Little Children

Written around the time of the film's release. Field's most recent film—after an extended hiatus—was Tár, which received lots and lots of attention.

Little Children (Todd Field, 2006) One I've been wanting to see but avoiding. Again, bad decision. 

 

Todd Field has the spirit of Kubrick in him. Field, as an actor, worked on Eyes Wide Shut and Kubrick subjected him to "the drill" about his first film, In the Bedroom—"Why do you want to make that? What can you bring to it? How can you tell your story more compellingly? Is it worth doing, though?" 

 

But Field is a far looser director, and with a much more sure sense of humor, though that was missing in Bedroom. That razor-like humor helps in this story of a neighborhood not coping well with a convicted sex offender in their midst (he's a flasher). Everyone in the Boston suburb is on the critical edge of everyday panic and with an aversion to complacency combined with a complacent lethargy—sure, everyone is a hypocrite about something—so everyone seems determined to see how far they can push the envelope before things come crashing around their ears. 

But the film focuses on a quartet in the neighborhood: retired cop Larry (Noah Emmerich) is a retired cop on disability, who misses the job and finds some solace in harrassing the sex offender Ronnie (Jackie Earle Haley), who wants to live a normal life—like his Mother (Phyllis Somerville) whom he lives with wants for him—but his past is a constant deterrence.

Larry is friends with Brad (Patrick Wilson), who is studying for the Massachusetts bar (at least he should be), but has chosen to be a househusband and raise his son Aaron (Ty Simpkins) while his wife Kathy (Jennifer Connelly) is consumed with her PBS documentary career.

Brad spends many a lazy afternoon taking Aaron to the park, giving the gaggle of stay-at-home Moms there a chance to observe appreciatively and speculate about him. One of those gaggle is Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet), who was working on her doctorate, but gave up on it when she married her now-estranged husband. All of this talk of Brad makes Sarah curious, and—as her husband is more interested in internet porn than her—they gradually "it's-only-platonic" themselves into having an affair. An affair that ultimately leads them to want to leave their respective spouses and run away together.

Every film is a bit of a "bubble-world," limited in scope to the characters featured prominently in the story. And it's the chief complaint by people who don't like particular films that they depend too much on the limited cast-members to sell the coincidences that make up a story. Little Children is one of those films. Pull out any of the plot-threads and it'll tumble like a Jenga tower.

But, that argument is so much blinkerdly cherry-picking. One of my favorite episodes of the podcast "This American Life" the author Lisa See tells of the Chinese proverb "No coincidence, no story" and the entire show curates stories from listeners with the most amazing coincidences. One is hard-pressed to think of a film...or a book where the confluence of incidences didn't create some narrative thrust. No coincidence, No story...even if it's only that these people are locked under some circumstance...if only by coincidence. 

So it is with Little Children. There is an air of clinical observation to the film that is cruel and humorous, though, for the characters portrayed, everything is of deadly earnest and has complex consequences. And its use of Will Lyman (the voice of "Frontline" as well as "Last Week Tonight") as narrator is brilliant. 

Uniformly the cast is excellent with Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson (he had the least showy role in HBO's "Angels in America" as the closeted conservative), Jennifer Connelly (restrained and never better), and particularly Jackie Earle Haley as the flasher. Absent from movies for years, Haley now has a cadaverous look like he's being consumed from the inside, and his beady-eyed pressurized work keeps you on pins and needles. He and Winslet received the lion's share of accolades at awards-time last year, but the film itself should have received more attention...certainly more than The Departed did. 

 

Todd Field is a guy to watch.

Notes on a Scandal

Written at the time of the film's release...

Notes on a Scandal (Richard Eyre, 2006) There's a sub-category of movies that always sends K. and I into fits of giggles. It started when we saw (take a breath) Kenneth Branagh's film of Francis Ford Coppola's production of Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein.' (whew!) We'd enjoyed Coppola's Bram Stoker's 'Dracula', and liked Branagh's earlier films. But something about this "Frankenstein" went seriously off-the-rails. It seemed like every performance was delivered at fever-pitch (except for John Cleese, who drastically underplayed to avoid Python-esque associations), Branagh's direction was a combination of Brian DePalma swoop-and-carousel moves and Michael Bay "shudder-shots," and Brian Doyle's score was dialed up "to 11." After awhile, she and I turned to each other with our eyes wide, and I said "I think everybody in this movie needs a good night's sleep!" and from then on, we couldn't take the movie seriously anymore.

Everybody in Notes on a Scandal needs a good night's sleep. It's a bit like Snow White done as an urban British drama. Except "Snow" isn't quite as pure. Here's the gist: Judi Dench plays Barbara, an embittered veteran school teacher, who develops a fixation on Bathsheba (Cate Blanchett), a new art-teacher in school. Sheba, as she's know, begins an affair with one of her young students, which becomes known to Barbara quite early on. Barbara then devises a scheme to blackmail a relationship with Sheba and drive a wedge between her and her family, with the aim of having Sheba for herself. 

It's a joy (and a scary thing) to see Judi Dench turn on the after-burners and go into full "battle-axe" mode. Her Barbara is the creepiest creation since Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter, with the added element of a pathetic (calculated?) vulnerability, and she's matched by Blanchett's distracted portrayal of the flibbertigibbet Sheba. There's one scene where both women go into an acting fever-pitch and its a bit like watching the performances fuse into one that's fascinating to watch, but makes you want to pull the "Emergency Stop" cord. And the hysteria is pushed at every hint of motion by Philip Glass' galloping score, even when it seems entirely gratuitous. It makes you want to back away slowly, get behind a locked door...and get a good night's sleep.

The Painted Veil (2006)

The Painted Veil (John Curran, 2006) Maugham's tough. A restrained writer of underlying passions and the complications of class and personality, he has had little luck in adaptations for the screen, which when separated from the civility of his tone, tend to look all the more melodramatic.

Filmmakers have combated this in a number of ways when adapting works by Maugham. They either are as dry as dust, the juice sucked right out of them (The Razor's Edge, 1947), or played to hysterics, overcompensating for the former (The Razor's Edge, 1987...with a "jokey" Bill Murray performance), or just the basic idea used and the rest transmuted to some other end (Hitchcock's Secret Agent).

However, we're gradually catching up to him. With time, his themes have seen better, more fulfilling adaptations, but Maugham needs a director like Elia Kazan, who wasn't afraid to walk the fine line of good/bad taste. "The Painted Veil" has been lensed twice before--once with Garbo in 1937, and, as The Seventh Sin (more box-officey title) with Bill Travers and Elanor Parker in 1957. Both films emphasized the soap-ish, melodramatic aspects of the story, but this one is a huge improvement.*

It's obviously a labor of love, because it cost $17 million to produce and it looks like three times that much, at least. Filmed mostly in China, The Painted Veil tells the story of a spiteful marriage between a cold physician (Norton), and a spoiled society girl (Watts), who must adapt to a life of sacrifice and want in the Far East, and in the process both find their priorities shift and their expectations shattered.

It's one of Maugham's "too little, too late" stories, but I've rarely seen one better acted (the cast includes Naomi Watts, Edward Norton--sacrificing salaries as producers--Liev Schrieber, Toby Jones, and Dame Diana Rigg) or realized so well. This may be the best movie deal in years from a production and audience stand-point.

Babel

Babel

or

"The Crash Heard 'Round the World"

A nice little movie that no one has ever heard of is John Sayles' City of Hope made in 1991—it presents a limited space in time in the life of Philadelphia where the decisions of every character over the disposition of a single city block affects every other character in a way that negates any sense that lives can escape the self-imposed limits inflicted by others (and placed on themselves). Everyone is trapped and without any hope. 

 

Paul Haggis, when he copied the form in Crash offered the same bleakness but leavened it with individual rays of hope. One can look at these movies and quibble about coincidences and manipulation, but speaking as someone who's lived in one city and worked, basically, in one field for most of his life, those aspects of rubbing too many shoulders has never seemed like much of a stretch. It's pretty amazing how a large city can become a "small town" fairly quickly and without irony.

Babel, though (named after the tower in the bible-story that created so many ESL programs), takes it one planet further. From its opening image of a Moroccan hunter trudging the desert to its last shot of a man holding a naked woman on a Japanese balcony, every single life is intertwined in a way that makes one wince, and actually creates dread over the next revelation of inter-connectedness (there's one character, whose absence sets in motion an unfortunate series of events, that we never see—supposedly she'll be in Babel II). It's a bit of a stretch, lessened somewhat by the global investigation of a mistaken act of terrorism. Nothing brings the world together like Homeland Security.

Still, if one can overlook The Big Skein that hangs over the movie like a shroud, the individual segments are involving, dramatically impeccable and present worlds that are never less than intriguingly realized. One wonders throughout where the stories will lead, even if the answer on an occasion or two is nowhere.

To reveal too much would be robbing the movie of any freshness it possesses, but suffice it to say that lack of communication is a key in all of them and that they are resolved (when they're resolved) by a recommitment to family (except when they're not). It's a bit messy in that regard. But, then, what world isn't?

Superman Returns

While doing work on The B/C-L Index—you are using it, aren't you?—I come across reviews that haven't been thrown on here. This one is an oddity. It's the first movie review I wrote after a long time of just letting movies rattle around in my head. It's rough with way Too Much Information about my personal life for me to be comfortable with it, and too much "What I Had for Dinner"-type information that just seems irrelevant to the subject at hand (that being the movie). Still, it was an interesting read (for me, at least). If I haven't improved since then, I've at least learned to stay more on track...which for a blog about movies is important.

You'll Believe a Man Can Float

Driving home from Superman Returns in 4-story IMAX and 3-freepin'-D on Wednesday night, I was listening to KIRO Newsradio. Thousands were evacuating, fearing the cresting of the Delaware River. Andrea Yates was convicted (again) of killing her kids. A public official was lost in the Olympic Forest.

"Man!" I thought. "We could really use Superman."

I knew I needed him. It had been a rough week of moving furniture and hauling myself from The Island to The Redmond. I was swamped at work and I had to take Tuesday off for the transfer of our big stuff from The Place What We're Selling to the current domicile, so my Wednesday started at 4 am (just in time for the sunrise) to get started early on due assignments. After all this, I was looking forward to seeing friends I hadn't seen...in ages, and seeing the new "Superman movie". I was really looking forward to that. I've been pretty discouraged lately, and a new Superman movie...well, that seemed just the ticket. The previews for it were great.

So, how is it?

Good! Not as good as Superman: The Movie. Better than Superman II (which I've never liked) and it's Shakespeare compared to the moronic Superman III: Wasting Richard Pryor and the incompetent Superman IV: The Quest for Peace ("You'll Believe a Movie Can Stink to Highest Heaven!").

But everyone will be comparing it to the first one. As well they should. Superman Returns should be called "Son of Superman" (*ahem* cough!) as it's so closely tied to the first film. It recycles Marlon Brando as Father Jor-El, and recycles whole sections of the first film's Mario Puzo/Robert Benton/David Newman/Tom Mankiewicz script, including my favorite Lex Luthor line: "My father always told me..." "Get out!"

But, Superman: The Movie was really three films: The deadly earnest Krypton section ("This is no fantasy" intoned Brando at the beginning); the equally serious Smallville/Fortress of Solitude section (with Glenn Ford's last great performance, and a farewell to Ma Kent scene in a seemingly endless epic wheat field); and finally, the Metropolis movie, with its antic screwball comedy pace (brilliantly achieved, by the way), it's cartoonish villains ("Otis-burg? O-TIS-BURG???!!!") with their absurdly successful attempts at stealing nuclear missiles, and at its soul the "Superman Meets Girl" romantic comedy story-line. I've always felt that lurching shift in tone was a bit out of step with the rest of the film (though you could make a case for showing that stalwart Superman is needed in such a crazy, zany world). Now, I'm not so sure. Because Superman Returns keeps the earnest tone of the first couple sections of the original throughout its considerable length. More cohesive it may be, but it's not more entertaining. In fact, it tends to bog down the proceedings, which consists of "regrets and things unsaid" which would have made Richard Donner's His Girl Friday pacing inappropriate. Which only points out how large the gulf is between that first film and this one.

Donner's Superman was a frothy entertainment, that, in the days of disco, long sideburns, and flaired pants, winked at the concept of heroics. This one is heavier, darker, meaner and less entertaining. There's less joy to it. And it takes its heroes deadly seriously. You think a guy like Spider-man has great power, thus great responsibility? Hell! Try being "Superman!"

Donner's flying scenes in the first (with a lot of credit going to licensed pilot Christopher Reeve) showed the joy of flight--the freedom of it--the grace. Who wouldn't want to fly after "Superman?" "SR's" flights are rarely graceful, and powered by stress. This Superman is always in a hurry. He doesn't stop to smell the up-drafts or do a lazy roll through the clouds. He's making a bee-line from one emergency to another. There's another quality to the SR aerial scenes--isolation. Superman is often seen as a small speck in a big, empty sky with life going on far below him. He's not a part of this Earth, and Singer drives the point home again and again. It's no fun being Superman.

I'll bet audiences have a problem with that: if they were Superman, of course, they'd enjoy it. It brings to mind the Superman scene I'd like to see. Howard Chaykin, of "American Flagg!" comics fame said in an interview how he'd like to start off a Superman comic. Lots of panels of ordinary Metropolitans going about their day only to have them interrupted by a blue-red streak going by their window. BOOM! Another about to sip his coffee. BOOM! A couple more of those until you get to the "splash" page: Superman, over the ocean, wearing a pair of shades, and popping his fingers, listening to "I Believe in You" (from "How to Succeed in Business (Without Really Trying)) on his Walkman. "You have the cool, clear eyes /of a seeker of wisdom and truth."

Yeah. I'd love to see that Superman.

But despite Returns' seriousness, there are joys. Brandon Routh looks and sounds so much like Christopher Reeve that it doesn't take a big leap (or a single bound) to accept him in the role. He exhibits a bit more life as Clark Kent than the more stalwart Superman, breaking into a goofy grin at the slightest provocation, and restraining the klutz routine (he doesn't constantly punch up his glasses the way Reeves' CK did). I also like the fact that his performance doesn't have the same "I'm sharing a joke with the audience" quality that Reeve brought to the role. Kate Bosworth is damned cute as Lois Lane** (as a blonde, she barely registers on the screen, but here, her hair darkened brown, she seems to have a bit more depth) and has little of the Margot Kidder neuroticism and (here's a plus!) I don't remember hearing her scream once. I do miss Kidder's whiskey baritone cracking on "Clark!," however.

There could be a bit more life to Frank Langella's Perry White and Kevin Spacey's Lex Luthor. Spacey's Luthor is self-contained malice and only sparks to life during a confrontation scene with Lois. Gene Hackman expertly tred the mine-field of jokes in the first film, but it was tough to buy him as a real threat to anybody but his cronies. Spacey's Luthor is a villain who does bad things...and enjoys doing bad things. Unfortunately, here, you mostly see him prepare to do bad things, and so there's no real pay-off for the character until 2/3 of the way through the film.

There is one cracker-jack sequence involving a doomed airliner that shows that it's pretty darned hard task to stop a plane in free-fall. It's note-perfect, right down to showing the skin of the craft buckling from a lurching halt. The movie has a good bead on the concept of heroism, too. There are a lot of heroics in this film (not just from der Ubermensch) where people who could take the easy way out, go against their better judgement and do What Must Be Done, despite the jeopardy it may put them in. It makes a statement that heroism doesn't come from powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. It comes from the heart, the conscience and the will.

Good movie/bad movie? Thumbs up/Thumbs down? Hard to say at this point. There are some movies that are merely okay while you suffer through them, but are better in memory (Napoleon Dynamite is one of those films: I can laugh at parts of it in retrospect, but I'd have to be kidnapped and a gun placed to my skull to watch it again***). Superman Returns was just the opposite: enjoyable while sitting through it (though I was aware of just how long it was, I didn't quite get to the point of checking the time), but the farther I get from it, I remember what's wrong with it more than what was right. If I had my "druthers," Superman Returns would be lighter than the Batman Begins, the "X-men" films, Spider-man, certainly lighter than Ang Lee's Hulk. At least it wasn't as frivolous as the Fantastic Four. My opinion of it is evolving, and that brings up another issue.

I've noticed an interesting trend in on-line reviews over the weekend. Initially, they're scathing, criticizing every aspect of the film..and harshly, to a ridiculous , often hysterical level. Second viewings produce a more favorable response, even admiration. I suspect that folks go, expecting to see the first film or worse yet, their idealized memory of the first...or second film. In that regards, this one will fail, but it can't help but fail. You can't fight a cherished favorite, or the memory of a cherished favorite. My advice: Go, expecting Superman IV. I know I'm going to see it again. Through the double exposure of the 3-D glasses, I couldn't tell whether the cribbed...sorry, the "homage"...final shot of Superman flying up, up and away past the audience had its Superman smile benignly at the audience. Like the George Reeves wink at the end of some of the TV shows, and Christopher Reeve's shared smile, it would have been nice to see it in this one. The fact that I didn't disappoints me, and makes me wonder why a decision not to include it, was made. Don't we want Superman on our side? I'll have to see it again. *

My favorite sum-up is by The Stranger's Andrew Wright who grumped: "For a movie featuring a hero who can conceivably give God a wedgie, there's precious little zowie to be found." "Zowie!" as in Adam West clobbering Ceasar Romero "Zowie?"

 

* And, sad to say, there is no smile on the final fly-by of 2006 Superman. He merely scans the audience with his eyes on the way past, ever vigilant. He probably isn't smiling because of the relatively few bodies he sees in the seats. And the ones that were there are already heading for the Exits. Not exactly what a super-hero expects when he sets out to "watch your back." 

 

** Hey, c'mon, younger me: Lois Lane shouldn't be "cute".  Lois Lane would curl her lip if you called her that.

 

*** Yeah, I don't know what my problem was here. I watched it a few years later and fell in love with it and regard it fondly.

A bit of hind-sight from here in 2024: James Gunn is making a new Superman movie with a new "from-scratch" cast and I just read the Internet News says that the "CW" is making a Superman series with Brandon Routh playing the role again—although as it's from the Internet, I'll believe it when I see it on my TV screen. I like Routh. He's gotten looser and more charismatic with age and I bet he could do a fine performance as "Supes" these days (as he did on those recent CW shows).

But, my long-distance memory of Superman Returns tilts it to a "bit of a drag" movie. There WAS no "ZOWIE!" to it. It was dark, dispiriting, mean and vengeful. It lingered on the negative and dismissed the positive. It should be bright, three-colored and direct. It should take pride in the right and look down on the wrong, not dwell on it. Bad guys shouldn't be taken so seriously; they should be ridiculed...but not by Superman. That would be mean. But, they should be dispatched so that life can go on positively.

And no brooding. Zack Snyder spent so much time having Henry Cavill doubting himself and "his way" that he never got around to showing a good portrait of Superman. And I, for one, am glad he got stopped before he could carry out his "Superman-as-villain" scenario for his planned Justice League series. That would have been just a dreary exercise. As dreary as making Superman a "fair-weather father" as he is in Superman Returns. Not to mention a serial-peeper. The crux of Superman is he's a good guy. Just because he CAN do something, doesn't mean he does. There's a thinking, moral filter there...that the recent incarnations have forgotten about.

Maybe it's because all I see these days (because they're the loudest) are politicians as "anti"-Supermen who don't believe in "Truth" (that's for damn sure!), "Justice" ("Delay, Delay, Delay") and I don't know what the Hell their idea of "The American Way" is (but it probably involves a lead pipe). It would be nice to have that...as an alternative for what America supposedly stands for now.

Dr. Bronner's Magic Soapbox

Dr. Bronner's Magic Soapbox (Sara Lamm, 2006) I've used Dr. Bronner's pure castile peppermint soap for more than twenty years. It's cleansing, it tingles, and it smells nice. It helps wake one up in the morning, along with the five cups of coffee, the energy drink, and the oatmeal with fruit (and the viewing of errors once your daily review is posted).

But, you can't use it without a more-than-casual look at the label. Where most soap companies might have directions, or ingredients, or, even warnings—such as, "don't drink this stuff, you idiot"—Dr. Bronner's soap bottle is surrounded by a daunting label of small type that contains a rambling, repetitive, almost encyclopedic treatise espousing a unified God theory, and "the Moral A-B-C's." Every inch of the label is utilized, even the margins, completely ignoring the "white space" rule or easy scanning strategies, and invoking Jesus, Mohammad, Buddha, Thomas Paine, Rudyard Kipling, Albert Einstein, Rabbi Hillel, even Carl Sagan in its scatter-shot "All-One" philosophy.

Two things come to mind: his heart's in the right place, though his mind, not so sure; and...should I be using this stuff?

Hey, the soap's great. It's completely natural, organic, non-synthetic, "vegan," and "Fair-Trade." I use it every day, and I've stopped reading the label—there's no warning for eye-strain, only from squirting it into your orbs, even by accident.  Plus, it's in most health-food stores...most stores, in fact, and these things get tested. 

 

Plus, I like it.

But, the label had me curious. I'd done some research, which was inconclusive, but the news that a documentary, Dr. Bronner's Magic Soapbox, was circulating around the movie-drain allowed me to pop two soap bubbles with one poke. I put in a request at Netflix...they'd never heard of it. That's okay. They'd never heard of Chaplin, either. A year later, it was available, and when it came in the queue, I snapped it up.

And what a tale it is: Bronner, a German Jew and fifth generation soap-maker whose family died in the Nazi concentration camps, emigrated, made it over to the U.S. and established the first of four soap-making companies, and began developing his personal philosophy. Married four times, institutionalized for a time (in the 50's, he got very loud, ranting at a lecture, and when you hear it in a German accent...well, people get nervous...especially during the 50's), escaping and hiding out in California, where another soap-making venture (out of his apartment!) caught on, and became huge with the counter-culture in the 1960's, who were rather accepting of things "out-there" (as long as you listened to their crazy ideas, too, man).

He had three kids, two of whom died before him, the youngest tours the country delivering lectures about his father,* and promoting the soap, doing out-reach, and checking outlets. Nice guy, living what he learned from his father about "never judging people," but, in marked contrast, he actually listens as much as he talks (there's an interesting interview with the doctor's last wife, where Bronner is in the background, still babbling away—blind as a bat—and unaware that the camera is no longer on him). 

Bronner's other son built up the soap business, standardized the processing, bottling and distribution, doing it cheaply and in a non-polluting way—no pumps, just gravity—and was utterly disdainful of his dad's "All-One" jazz: for one, it scared off customers, and for two, Bronner would leave the kids for months at a time on his "lecture circuit," the kids often becoming subject to orphanages and foster-homes. Now, the grandsons run the business efficiently, and with even more focus on making the company as green and fair as possible (their salaries are capped, so no one makes more than five times what the lowliest worker makes, and donating a whopping 70% of their net profits to charity).  And they make a LOT of money, bemused by the reputation of their grandfather/creator, who had lots of crazy ideas, one of which worked like gang-busters.

Not unlike Henry Ford.

Lamm's documentary is quirky, gossipy, empathetic, but not afraid to exploit the "woo-woo" side of the story. She also has access to a lot of previously filmed material that gives context to the overall story, that is just weird enough to be an American success story.

Dr. Emmanual Bronner, his soap, and the Universe

 

* He has a great line in his lectures: "Eccentric geniuses cannot be good fathers...At dinner, he'd be (doing his work), and we'd say, "Dad, we're waiting," and he'd say, "What's more important: eating or uniting Spaceship Earth?"...and, well, he's got you there...."

The reply, of course, is: "Hey, Mr. 'Health,' starving your kids is gonna look GREAT in the papers..."