Is this Spinal Tap? Why yes, it is!

This Is Spinal Tap is a ridiculous documentary. Directed by Rob Reiner, it is composed of a multitude of well-cast actors, such as Fran Drescher, Rob Reiner, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer. The film itself was designed to mock rock bands, focused mainly on the 1980's, with some bashing on the rock bands in the 1960s. It took a humerous take on the downsides of band management, miscommunication, and the rise to fame. Nigel, the lead guitarist for the band, is continuously letting the fame get to his head. He bickers about not getting his way, such as eating sandwiches with the bread cut too small or the fact that St. Hubbins's girlfriend, Jeanine, decides to become the new manager when their manager quits. Nigel leaves the band but then appears later on stage because he had to have more of the fame and couldn't leave his friends. This movie is based on a fictional band, but slowly mortalized it into a tangible, "semi-fictional" band, creating two more albums after the release of the movie. To listen to more of their music, here's some from their second album, Break Like the Wind.

One humerous part of the film was when the band members were discussing how their drummers continuously die strange, uncommon deaths.

 

 Eight years after the release of the film, they held auditions for a new drummer. A filming of these auditions was released on MTV in 1992. Some of the criterion for the new drummer were "no living relatives," "no immediate family," and "can count to four" (2:10-15), to name a few. The lightheartedness of the film also left an ominous. dark truth: rock bands are slowly deteriorating due to the harshness of reality. Fame tears a person down, and drugs, spirits, and the pressure of society added on to that can lead to a musician's death.. or in this case, many drummers' deaths.

Our dedicated lifesavers

After watching Restrepo, I was deeply affected by watching these soldiers dedicating their lives to their service in the military.  It's hard to believe how often people take for granted how fortunate they are to live in a free country. The film focuses on the Second Platoon stationed in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. They lose so many men, and even name one of their outposts after a fallen soldier, Restrepo. This documentary, directed by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, provided an apt illustration of the amount of sacrifice made by our soldiers on a regular basis. By providing the live footage of the soldiers returning fire, I was able to see the amount of fear and courage that these men undergo each day to protect us and our country. One instance depicting their strength and dedication is when the Second Platoon found out about the tragedy at one of their sister companies. The other company had lost 9 soldiers, 12 US people were wounded, and 13 aids were wounded. As one of the lieutenants tells his troop about this, he tells them to mourn them and then get over it. They needed to stay level-headed and focused. He then asks if anyone came in not knowing they'd be injured or killed. No one responded. That much dedication from each and every soldier, and then combined into a group, makes me thankful for all their hard work. It's bittersweet hearing about people I know go off to war, but it's their passion and they're going into it so that they can protect us. This film definitely did a fine job in projecting the bitter, but encouraging, viewpoint of our soldiers. The war is gruesome, but our soldiers are fighting to protect our country so that they can come home and we can all live in peace.

Junger and Hetherington braved Afghanistan to gain the incredible footage that they got. After Hetherington was killed by a mortar blast, Junger started the RISC organization (Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues). To learn more about what RISC is and how reporters can be saved, visit here:

http://www.risctraining.org/ or watch this:

Will YOU eat it??

I've watched bits and pieces of Food Inc. before in high school, and after watching it all the way through now, I was still left with that uneasy, queasy feeling. In the back of my mind, I've always known that most foods sold in multinational department stores (such as Walmart) are processed. Many of the lower class, and even now in the middle class, families in the United States, such as the Gonzalez family, are forced to undergo buying the cheapest foods, which just so happen to be the most unhealthy for you. The only option for them seems to be fast food. One of the narrators, Michael Pollan, brings up a good point about how "we've skewed our food system to the bad calories" (11:03). He continues to talk about how the healthy foods are so much more expensive in the grocery stores than the unhealthy, processed food. And why is that? I've often wondered the same thing. Growing up around Chapel Hill, and now living in Asheville, everyone always talks about going green. Eat "organic" foods. Eat healthy. But eating such as that can get pricey, and in this economy, it is difficult to find cheap, nutritious foods.

Watching the animals get slaughtered in the film was slightly unnerving. I grew up on a farm my whole life, raising our animals as pets rather than as food. We had goats, chickens, horses, pigs, ducks, dogs, cats, and many other farm animals. I remember the one time we tried eating one of our chickens. My parents caught it, strung it up on the back porch, and tried plucking out all her feathers. It was a tedious process, and I ended up not being able to eat the chicken when we cooked her up for dinner that night. Although knowing exactly where your food comes from is beneficial (so that you know whether or not it has steroids or pesticides or any other chemicals), I have a more difficult time killing my own food. My roommate is a vegan, but she will cheeses and eggs and dairy products if she knows exactly where it came from (eg. she worked and lived on a goat farm in Italy last summer and ate lots of cheese there). I believe that more people should be more conscientious about where there food is coming from. The director Robert Kenner did a decent job explaining the costs of the food industry and how disconnected humans have become from their food. Be more aware and your body will benefit.

Kenner has also recently started a new organization called FixFood which plans on educating the public and bringing change to the food system by using videos and social media. Here's one example of what FixFood is.

dolphins are whales too!

After watching The Cove, I was astounded and appalled by the vast number of dolphin slaughters going on around the world (23000 a year!), especially in Japan. Growing up, I had always heard about how intelligent dolphins were. It's one of the main reasons why they're so enjoyable to be around. I used to always want to swim with the dolphins or go see them at the aquariums. Now, all anyone should want is to set them free. Viewing them in those tight compounds makes me claustrophobic. I wouldn't want to be confined, so why should they? In the television series The Simpsons, one episode depicts humans as the cruel oppressors and the dolphins end up retaliating against them and taking back "their" land, while dumping the humans in the ocean. Even in a humorous light, the dark reality can hit and prove that dolphins are being harshly misinterpreted and misused.

When the director Louie Psihoyos interviewed people off the streets in Tokyo, I found it very surprising that many people did not know that dolphin meat was being sold in the marketplace. Especially hearing that much of it is labled as a much more prestigious whale meat... And to hear that it was offered to be sold in schools is sickening. Since mercury accumulates the higher up in the food chain, humans *allowing* other humans to consume an animal with 2000 ppm is murderous. These people should be imprisoned due to the fact that they're knowingly poisoning human beings. But with Japan's intense, and quite insane, laws, where they can jail anyone for anything, no questions asked, they pretty much have free reign to do whatever they want and can get away with it. If enough people stand up against dolphin slaughtering, then maybe one day it can stop. Organizations such as Greenpeace and people like Ric O'Barry hope so. And Ric used to support capturing dolphins until he knew what was really going on...

To learn more about how YOU can Save the Whales (and dolphins and such), click here.

Capt Paul Watson: "All social change comes from the passion of individuals." (23:00)

The Inside Job of Corruption

The film Inside Job was a little confusing due to the fact that I knew very little about politics or really anything about the economical crisis that the nation was in. The recession that had swept this nation had affected nearly every home, including mine. Being kept in the dark about the seriousness of the situation, my parents had done their best with what they had been given, only cutting back on what was not needed, such as eating out or buying new clothes. The horror of the hand-me-down phase in my angst teen years appeared to rock my world, until I realized that many of my friends were in the same situation. I learned back in high school that the US has been in a recession for quite some time, and that we have over a 16 trillion dollar debt, something that won't be paid back in our lifetime, if ever. The Inside Job provided an outlook that still shocked me: we're in far deeper than I had thought. The lying scoundrels sitting in the White House were ready to take all that was "theirs," or so Charles Ferguson claimed, the film's director. Whether or not that this is true, or if they want to actually try to help get the nation out of its debt, is not the way that Ferguson wanted viewers to see it as. Ferguson clearly made the goverment as the evil devil that is controlling our lives. We, as middle to lower class citizens, have no say as to what is going on, other than the fact that we vote for these monsters into office. They are the ones profitting off of our misfortunes. We give more and more money in the form of taxes, trying to survive in this cruel world, and these government officials plunder it. They then take it all and do whatever they want with it, becoming some of the richest men alive. It makes me sick to think that our federal government is so corrupted.

This movie is claimed to be used to educate us, if not also infuriating us into action.

Naqoyqatsi: Life as War

Before watching this film, I had heard rumors that it was a non-speaking, music-oriented film about the destruction of humanity by technology. After watching it,  I had discovered so much more than that. It was hard to focus all my attention on the film, for an hour and half of straight listening to music while strange, sometimes distorted or ominous pictures flash across the screen can be tedious, I was able to grasp a little about what I thought the director was trying to produce. It's not so much about the downfall of humans by technology, but about how humans have evolved over time, and how they've learned how to destroy themselves. It's a part of life, though. We use our resources to live and to die. Wars happen, births happen, it's all part of the circle of life.

The music by Philip Glass provided an emotional scene to the film. It enabled the viewer to feel the hardships, highlights, and/or importance of each major event. Many times the music, and the computer generated images, reminded me of the flight scenes in the 2002 movie Catch Me If You Can. In that film, every time Leonardo DiCaprio fled from the FBI, jumping from one job to the next, leading a huge trail of check fraud, John Williams had a fantastic arrangement of music, such as this. He managed to keep the viewer feeling the tension of how something was about to happen, whether good or bad. Glass did the same. His music tied together the pictures of how people brought about their own downfall, while keeping the emotional sense of excitement for what was to come. I kind of enjoyed the film, even though it was a little too long for my taste.

Here's more music from Philip Glass, from the film The Hours:

Death By Plastic

 

After watching Werner Boote's documentary, Plastic Planet, I was a little confused about how Boote wanted to retaliate against the plastic companies. Boote travels around the world to discover and spread the word about the inevitable side effects that plastic has on people's health, such as cancer, enlarged breasts, sterility, allergies, or even death. Most people have many plastic belongings in their homes, even lower class people in third world countries. Gaining the adverse health effects is scarily common in the world. The release of harmful materials into the food chain can also affect the surrounding ecosystem. Boote discusses how plastic is filling up the oceans and fish are consuming it more, thinking it's kale. One strange point in the film is that the adverse effects on the sexual organs in fish are showing up in humans. The toxins from the plastic are getting into the bloodstream of humans and making people sterile, changing our futures. I knew in the past that the fumes of plastics were harmful, but I never realized that its not just decomposing plastic that releases these fumes. Just by drinking out of a plastic bottle, you can inhale the harmful toxins. It takes 200 years for plastic to decompose. So with this in mind, and Boote's constant harranguing consumers about the side effects of plastic, what does he expect us to do? He goes straight to the source many times and finds out about bioplastics, which are not as harmful to the environment, but costs a lot more to make. I just don't understand what he wants from us, because there is no way that a whole world will stop buying plastics or producing it. There are sometimes substitutes, but there's never clear answers. Boote's retaliation seems like a losing battle to me.

Jesus Camp

 

After watching the documentary film "Jesus Camp," I was overcome by so many mixed feelings. I was shocked by how straightforward Pastor Becky Fischer and her church were about spreading evangelism. It wasn't just about scaring these children into being saved, but more about completely knocking them off their pedestal. They were no longer allowed to be children (having fun, telling ghost stories, playing pretend, having their world filled with fantasy-such as Harry Potter stories). These kids were forced to grow up and become, in a way, better than the "fat lazy adults" that now incorporates our society. The children that are focused on in the film were shown as being manipulated, by their parents, into their faith. They were forced to scream into the microphone and speak in tongues. They were transfigured into warriors, brainwashed by their own parents and other adult authority. It's not a choice for these small soldiers, but instead, an obligation.

This reminded me of the harsh battles going on in Africa with Joseph Kony, the LRA (the Lord's Resistance Army) and the Invisible Children. The LRA is a group of Africans lead by Kony who have been travelling around East and Central Africa abducting, killing and displacing civilians, especially young children. These children are abducted to join Kony's army and are taught that the only way to survive in this cruel world is to join the army. Although to stay in the group is to kill or be killed, the main idea isn't that much different than Becky's Jesus Camp. She convinces her children that they are filled with sin, and will continue to fill with sin for the rest of their lives, unless if they repent now and praise the Lord. They must join her army to be saved. To her, it's the only way to survive in this cruel world filled with sinners. Becky claims that the Devil is everywhere and he will try to make you sin, and if you do, you'll die. Similar to the LRA, these kids are scared into their faith, believing that they must be good and join, or they'll die. The thing is, we're all going to die. We're all sinners. Our faith mainly changes our mindset of how we should live and where we believe we'll end up after we die. Believing is not going to make a person immortal. We're human. Whether we want to or not, we will probably end up sinning. The Jesus Camp is created for these children to be trained to fight in the war against the sinners. Outsiders debate on whether it's war or worship. The evangelists in the film just see it as a challenge.

Grizzly Man

After watching the Grizzly Man, I was astounded at the extreme measures Timothy Treadwell was willing take in his excursions through Alaska. Although the footing was very impressive, it seemed to be a foolish idea to interact in close proximity with the bears. As mentioned by one of the interviewees, I too felt that it was wrong of Timothy to endanger his girlfriend's life. However, I also understand that his girlfriend was choosing to be supportive of him. But the fact that she was blatantly afraid of bears, and that she would not go to close to the bears made it more crazy that she actually went on these adventures with him. Two months living with bears? Every summer? She only made it to the second summer though... Timothy Treadwell was a brave soul. He really wanted to become one of the bears. He was there to protect them and to become one. Unfortunately, he couldn't come to terms with the fact that he was still a man. And therefore, that is what got him and his girlfriend killed. What a tragedy.