News

June 10, 2010 - [ PBS.org ]

POV
Ah, the irony of creating a power list for people in an industry where everyone feels so powerless. And yet, however small the spoils and anemic the troops, there's no denying that within the doc kingdom, there is a hierarchy of power. My previous two posts have led up to this, a ranking of the top ten most powerful people in documentaries. Combine this list with last week's 40 and we've got 50 of the most powerful of the powerless. Enjoy.
 

May 25, 2010 - [ Yahoo! Movies ]

Our short produced piece with Davis Guggenheim talking about WFS now live on Yahoo Movies homepage.

May 20, 2010 - [ Hollywood Reporter ]

In "Fair Game," Doug Liman mostly avoids delivering a political treatise. Instead, he strips the Valerie Plame affair down to its essential elements: the bare facts of the case, the uneasy mix of the public and private lives of a D.C.-area family where Mom is a spy and the life-changing upheaval -- including a marital rift -- caused when her identity is blown for political purposes. This allows a viewer to better understand these two people who were so much the center of attention in the U.S. seven years ago.
 


Whether moviegoers even today can look at this real-life couple, extremely well-played by Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, without the distortion of political beliefs is uncertain. Nonetheless, Liman and his collaborators strive to locate the human element amid the clutter of spin, hypocrisy and partisan rhetoric.

May 20, 2010 - [ Salon.com ]

Travel with me now back to the glorious days of 2002 and 2003. Remember what a great time it was? The Bush administration lied to us over and over again, on a vast scale, about the reasons it was going to war in Iraq, and the media repeated it all with the deep and sincere conviction of robots trained as Method actors. Massive international protests, among the largest in history, accomplished nothing (or so it seemed at the time). When the White House was called on its lies, it set out to bulldoze those who were telling the truth.
 


What's that you say? You don't want to go? Everything about that dismal epoch makes you want to drink absinthe until you vomit? Therein lies the problem for "Fair Game," an engrossing and briskly paced drama that stars Naomi Watts as Valerie Plame, the covert CIA agent outed by the Bush White House, and Sean Penn as her husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson. (The screenplay by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth is based on Plame and Wilson's memoirs.) To care about this unusual and highly sympathetic central couple, one must risk reawakening all the painful emotions surrounding America's ill-fated rush to war in Iraq, very likely a top-10 entry on the list of Things This Country Has Really Fucked Up.
 

May 19, 2010 - [ Time.com ]

Cannes is light on big Hollywood names this year. The absence of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, frequent, luminous presences, or Clint Eastwood or George Clooney, has left the red carpet outside the Palais des Festivals a bit more drab. Sean Penn will be testifying on Haiti before a Congressional committee in Washington, D.C., instead of visiting the Riviera to support his Hollywood docu-drama Fair Game, in which he plays Joseph C. Wilson to Naomi Watts' Valerie Plame. But Plame herself — blonde, radiant and poised — was in town, to promote both Fair Game and Lucy Walker's documentary Countdown to Zero. For much of the liberal U.S. press here, the former covert operative at the center of the Bush Administration CIA leak scandal is the definition of star quality.

May 18, 2010 - [ Entertainment Weekly ]

I’m not sure if this counts as a rush-out-and-see-it recommendation, but the scary, gripping, responsibility-inducing, at times borderline exploitative Countdown to Zero makes old terrors radioactively new again. It’s that rare thing, a piece of responsible fear-mongering. Lucy Walker, the director of this documentary about the still clear-and-present danger of nuclear weapons, has her finger on the ultimate hot-button topic, and she doesn’t let go. The movie features spine-tingling descriptions of the moments we risked toppling into a nuclear conflagration — not just, famously, the Cuban Missile Crisis (Robert McNamara, filmed shortly before his death, is on hand to testify how close we really came there), but lesser-known incidents in 1977 and even 1995, when a wayward American missile resulted in the Russian nuclear football being opened and placed, for the first time, in front of Boris Yeltsin, who had five minutes to decide whether to respond with a full-on counterattack. (The movie says that, fortunately, he wasn’t drunk.)

May 18, 2010 - [ The Wall Street Journal ]

Queen Noor of Jordan and former CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson were among the luminaries who gathered at the Cannes Film Festival on Sunday to support “Countdown to Zero,” a new film about nuclear proliferation. Hoping to follow in the footsteps of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the film was backed by Jeff Skoll’s Participant Media and producer Lawrence Bender, who also came to Cannes in 2006 with the Al Gore environmental documentary.
 


“With ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ we learned firsthand the power of what a movie could do,” said Bender, who told a room of journalists at a press conference that the idea for the project came to him and Skoll when Gore was receiving the Nobel Peace prize in Oslo. “It was here in Cannes that we brought ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ to the world, and it’s our desire and hope that the same thing happens with this movie,” he said.

May 18, 2010 - [ IndieWire ]

More than twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the threat of nuclear annihilation remains a grave concern. Today, however, the focus is not an identifiable nuclear superpower as foe, but rogue groups, extremists or anyone with enough money, engineering capability and access to enriched uranium be it by theft or paying off corrupt officials. Lucy Walker’s disturbing Cannes doc, “Countdown to Zero,” produced with Participant Media, explores the all too real threat of a nuclear event that could easily destroy a major city, and with that plunging the world into a crisis that could not only kill millions and topple the economy, but also devestate age-old social mores as civilizations panic and demand an end to the sort of rights considered the norm in the world’s democracies.

May 17, 2010 - [ Salon.com ]

Like a lot of people, I've been living under the blithe impression that the end of the Cold War had ended the threat of nuclear annihilation, and that the possibility of al-Qaida or some similarly nihilistic group acquiring a weapon was remote. At a screening and press conference here for "Countdown to Zero," the enraging and terrifying documentary from British director Lucy Walker, Participant Media and producer Lawrence Bender (best known as the man who makes Quentin Tarantino's movies happen), I learned how wrong all that was.

May 17, 2010 - [ AFP ]

A terrifying study of the nuclear threat was launched at the Cannes film festival on Sunday, in a heavyweight campaign documentary showing how terrorists can get hold of atomic weapons.
 


The Cold War may be long over but "Countdown to Zero" -- from the producers behind Nobel Prize winner Al Gore's climate change polemic "An Inconvenient Truth" -- warns that nuclear bombs are easier to come by than ever.
 


Through interviews with former world leaders, spies, smugglers and scientists, British film-maker Lucy Walker's work shows how unsecured lumps of uranium in Russia could end up being used by terrorists to destroy cities.
 


Interviewees include ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Britain's former prime minister Tony Blair and Pervez Musharraf, the former president of Pakistan. Their conclusion: the world must push for "zero" nuclear weapons.

May 17, 2010 - [ The Washington Post ]

It should come as no surprise that weird moments abound during the Festival de Cannes, given the number of renowned filmmakers, rabid movie fans and frolicking stars gathered here from around the world. 
 


On a given afternoon, you might see a gaggle of men in tuxedoes and their be-gowned dates swigging from a bottle of champagne while walking down the Croisette, or come nearly to blows in a movie line. (A little advice: Never get between a Frenchwoman and the new Woody Allen movie.) 
 


But Valerie Plame Wilson may be having the strangest Cannes experience yet. The former CIA covert operations officer came here on behalf of not one but two films. She appears in the documentary "Countdown to Zero," in which she serves as a nuclear counterproliferation expert; and later this week she will attend the world premiere of "Fair Game," a dramatization of her memoir in which she's being played by Naomi Watts.

May 13, 2010 - [ Huffington Post ]

"Fair Game," the film about former CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson and the Bush administration's leaks about her identity, is set to premiere May 20 at the Cannes Film Festival.
 


Naomi Watts and Sean Penn play Plame Wilson and her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson. Doug Liman, the producer behind the Bourne franchise, directed "Fair Game."
 


Based on Plame's 2007 memoirs "Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House," "Fair Game" is the only U.S. film in the running for the Palme d'Or, the festival's top prize.
 


The film's trailer hasn't made it online, but the clip below was posted to the festival's web site.
 


Plame's identity as a CIA operative was leaked to the media after her husband, a former ambassador, cast doubt on the Bush administration's claims that Saddam Hussein sought uranium in Africa.
 

May 12, 2010 - [ Entertainment Weekly ]

Maybe once a year, a documentary will somehow break through the mass of superhero sequel remakes, prestige Oscar bait, and movies that star Meryl Streep to become a genuine popular success. These films tend to run in two directions: Political-flavored provocations (Bowling for Columbine, An Inconvenient Truth, and Super Size Me), or triumph-of-the-human-spirit cute-porn (Spellbound, Young@Heart, and March of the Penguins). But how about a documentary that combines the two approaches: A film that makes an important societal point, while also making you cry happy inspirational tears? How about a film like Waiting for Superman?

May 6, 2010 - [ TakePart.com ]

On Day 3 of the nuclear non-proliferation talks at the U.N., the talking stopped. For a few hours at least, delegates and participants in the three-week summit just watched. 



They'd been invited by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to a sneak preview of a film central to their discussions: Countdown to Zero. Produced by Lawrence Bender and Jeff Skoll, who joined Ban to introduce the screening, Countdown to Zero traces the history of the atomic bomb and makes an emotional appeal for a world without nukes.



That's a world most people in the room had spent a lot of time thinking about.

May 6, 2010 - [ MTV Newsroom ]

It has been a terrible year for natural disasters. The devastation in Haiti, the earthquakes in Chile and the current flooding in Nashville have all threatened infrastructure, destroyed livelyhoods and taken lives. Last week, we were beset with another mess: A blown out oil well in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana that has been spewing hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude into the sea. 



Work is underway to cap the well using a 100-ton concrete and steel construction, but the damage has been done. Though we won't know the extent of the impact the oil will have on the delicate ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico until they can cap the well and assess the damage, it's safe to say that it will be near-catastrophic. The concern over the future of the world's oceans is currently at its peak, which is why Participant Media (the company behind environmentally concerned projects like the Al Gore-fueled documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," the currently-in-theaters kid-friendly nature movie "Oceans" and the Oscar-winning film "The Cove") has set up the Save My Oceans Pledge. It's a social media-based project that asks participants to do one of three things to help ensure the ongoing health of the planet's seas: Using reusable bottles and bags, eating non-endangered seafood or reducing one's carbon footprint in order to prevent ocean temperatures from rising. All you have to do is head over to the official Save My Oceans site, take the pledge and then post it to Facebook or Twitter to get the word out.

May 5, 2010 - [ EW.com ]

I don't know about you, but the moment I hear the word lobbyist, my brain glazes over. Casino Jack and the United States of Money woke my brain, and my outrage, right up. The latest documentary from Alex Gibney, who has set the gold standard for muckraking nonfiction in films like Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, the movie explores how Jack Abramoff, king of the Washington, D.C., lobbyists, built a system of cash for favors into a new-style government machine.



Casino Jack starts off as a fascinating portrait of the college-campus Republicans who came up in the 1980s — men like Abramoff and the clean-cut, fire-breathing Ralph Reed, who saw themselves as radicals out to remake America. And here's the thing: They did. It was the glad-handing, backroom-savvy Abramoff, however, who crossed the line into illegality, inviting a series of eager dupes — Malaysian dictators, Native American casino operators — to funnel millions of dollars to him and his cronies in what was, in effect, a protection racket. In the end, Abramoff went to prison, but the ethos he created didn't go away. Casino Jack is really a look at how the culture of Washington was rebuilt to sell itself to the highest bidder.
 

May 6, 2010 - [ Boing Boing ]

Readers who survived the eighties will remember how deeply the fear of nuclear destruction was embedded in popular culture of the time. We danced to hit songs about atomic ennui, we poked fun at "duck and cover" and bomb shelter blueprints, we believed ourselves less naïve than our parents' generation. But we knew we were no less safe from The Bomb. When the Cold War ended, a new era of nuclear threat emerged.
 
"Countdown to Zero", a documentary from the team behind "The Cove" and "An Inconvenient Truth,"  speaks to that threat, and to a younger generation largely unaware of its existence.  After viewing the film in Los Angeles, I caught up with producer Lawrence Bender and executive producer Jeff Skoll.

April 30, 2010 - [ The Huffington Post ]

Oscar winning director Alex Gibney's latest film, Casino Jack, is premiering in Washington, DC next week, New York last, and San Francisco the week after. The film tells the story of Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff. It is an extraordinary story that most only vaguely understand. Casino Jack is beautiful and compelling, hilarious in parts, yet deeply depressing. If you need a bit of shock therapy to convince you of just how extreme things had become, there is no better source.
 


But as I watched the film, I wondered who it was really going to hurt. The plain target of the story as it ties to Abramoff is of course the Republicans. Abramoff (with Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist) was a College Republican revivalist. He came to power as that movement, born in the wake of Reagan, was launched into orbit with the ascendency of the Republicans in 1995. He consolidated and extended his power as the Republicans consolidated and extended theirs. He was the righthand lobbyist to the exterminator-turned-congressman Tom Delay. He brought Delay down, and had John McCain really allowed the investigation that he had started to work its course, he would have brought down many more in the Republican Party as well.
 

April 29, 2010 - [ Broadway World ]

National Wildlife Federation has teamed up with Participant Media and other non-profits on the Social Action Campaign for the family comedy 'Furry Vengeance,' educating children and families about the importance of getting outdoors and protecting wildlife.
 


'Furry Vengeance,' opening nationwide April 30, is brought to you by Summit Entertainment, Participant Media, and Imagenation Abu Dhabi. This new feature film for the entire family stars Brendan Fraser as a real estate developer whose latest project threatens the habitats of local forest creatures. Brooke Shields plays the wife and voice of reason throughout the film. The woodland critters, who don't want their homes disturbed, seek comical revenge by turning a peaceful neighborhood into a battlefield of epic proportions.

April 29, 2010 - [ Los Angeles Times ]

Jordan Howard is one of the girls featured in Girls Gone Green.  She’s a senior at ECHS— the Environmental Charter High School in Lawndale.  Jordan submitted her school to Obama’s Race to the Top Commencement Challenge and now ECHS is in the top 6 finalists.  They are the only green school, the only school in California and the smallest school in the competition.  Also, despite the economic disadvantage that kids at ECHS experience in contrast to the other 5 finalists, they are getting 97% of their students through 4 year colleges and creating an effective generation of green ambassadors.  It’s a real success story.
  


They just need enough votes to make it into the top three and then the President will choose the winner. Anyone can vote by going to http://www.whitehouse.gov/commencement and giving ECHS a 5. Please help ECHS by voting today. You can vote multiple times. Voting ends tonight!