Into Eternity follows the construction of the Onkalo waste repository at the Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant on the island of Olkiluoto, Finland. Nuclear waste takes at least 10,000 years to process itself from being harmful to living organisms. The film explores the question of preparing the site so that it is not disturbed for 100,000 years, even though no structure in human history has stayed standing for such a long period.
The staff of the repository thoroughly cross-sections every logical justification for the repository, trying to ponder on the many possibile hypothetical scenarios thousands of years into the future. I was fascinated by the film’s big questions. Where would human civilization be in 100,000 years? Will the Ice Age complicate things? Will language stay the same? Will people understand the warnings? If so, will they heed the warnings? Is there be a way to profit off the nuclear waste? Can someone try to reuse the plutonium for more power or even weaponize it? What an infinite amount of unanswerable questions, and yet the safety of humanity hangs on the pure faith that man will do good. Like seeing a map of the Milky Way, Into Eternitymade me feel infinitesimal and how ultimately limited we are as humans. We like to think we are in control of things. But as the film suggests, we are our own biggest threat to our future survival.
The film communicates it message heavy-handedly. Every interviewee’s credentials are displayed with the interviewee’s handwritten signature super-imposed over it as if to officially prove to future viewers that this film is no joke. It is approached as if it will be a found footage film warning people not to enter the repository 100,000 years from now. The director Michael Madsen intermittently lights a match in total darkness and recites his monologue quietly to scare the audience and hammer in his point. If he were a young hipster, he would have done these monologues topless. It’s quite silly out of its own context. It is by no means subtle, but it does not need to be. It ultimately offers no answers to it questions but instead it ends on a bittersweet note, totally aware of all the good and ugly things human beings are capable of. I found it both deeply disturbing and deeply poetic.
The topic of nuclear waste storage should be a bigger topic. Everybody should see this film. Highly recommended.
American filmmaker Vikram Gandhi transforms himself into Sri Kumaré, an enlightened guru from a fictional village in India, by adopting a fake Indian accent and growing out his hair and beard. Kumaré travels to Arizona to spread his made-up philosophy and gain sincere followers.
Kumaré documents a social experiment that was not well-planned and goes awry. Vikram Gandhi starts off by pretending to be a false prophet to make fun of religious people. But when he starts to gain sincere followers, he sees that these people have real-life problems and need hope and guidance, he starts to feel guilty. What was he expecting would happen?
The first half of the film is funny and disturbing in the way that it fulfills the entirety of Gandhi’s thesis. We laugh at these followers because we have a social distance from it. For the latter half of the film, it becomes uncomfortable as his followers start to become close with Sri Kumaré, telling him intimate details of their personal lives and asking him for advice. He fights with himself over how he should tell them. This is where the documentary lost me. I did not care one bit for Vikram. I was cringing for his followers and kept watching to see their reaction when the curtain was pulled before them. So in the end, do the ends justify the means? I personally do not think so. Other people may see it differently. To me, Vikram Gandhi becomes the person he set out to mock. The film celebrates its own mean-spiritedness at the end and it just left a bad taste in my mouth. I am not one to make fun of other people’s faith.
If there is anything positive to come out of Gandhi’s experiment, it’s that everybody has the potential to find peace within themselves, whether that’s religion, yoga, golf, knitting or gardening. People should believe in something that they can find happiness in, even if it’s not God.
But I already knew that before watching this film.
On October, 24 2001, Michael Perry and his friend, Jason Burkett, decided steal a Camaro from the the Montgomery home of Sandra Stotler. Perry entered the house through the garage. Perry shot Sandra Stotler with a shotgun and the two men dumped her body in Montgomery County’s Crater Lake.
The duo then returned to the gated community where Sandra Stotler lived and waited outside the locked gate until the dead woman’s son, Adam Stotler, and his friend, 18-year-old Jeremy Richardson arrived. Perry and Burkett lured the teens to a wooded area and killed Adam Stotler and Richardson. Perry and Burkett, driving the Isuzu Rodeo Adam Stotler had been using, went back to Sandra Stotler’s home and finally stole her Camaro. They kept the Camaro for no longer than 72 hours and were finally apprehended after a gun fight with the police. Perry received a death sentence and Burkett received a life sentence.
Into the Abyss is the new documentary film from Werner Herzog, it focuses on the two convicts and various people affected by the crime. In his documentaries, Herzog always seeks what he calls the “ecstatic truth”, his theory that storytellers should never look away from the truth. It’s not enough that we know that murder exists. You have to look at it face-to-face. Once you do this, you will find a whole well of deeper truth.
That was my experience watching Into the Abyss, on the surface it covers a very depressing subject. At the helm of any lesser director it would probably be depressing. Instead, it cuts right through and takes you to different places emotionally beyond “hey dude, murder is depressing, so be depressed while you watch this”. It’s emotionally raw, the parts about the victim’s families dealing with the victim’s deaths are powerful stories. We see that it so much more harder to grieve when one’s death was over something so meaningless. Mostly we can say that these deaths are all made from wrong choices. Did these people have a choice? Some seemingly did and some claimed they did not. It would be so much easier to judge and encapsulate how we feel about a person’s actions if we did not look at the whole truth of his predicament.
There is humor at times, but it’s not there to break tension. It comes as part of the ecstatic truth. Herzog greets the father of Jason Burkett, Delbert Burkett, who is also in prison, “How are you?” The sits down and casually snaps a “I’m fine.” Herzog half-scoffs, “How fine (are you really)?” Delbert recounts how he testified for his son in court and pleaded to the judge not to execute Jason. He blames himself for not being there as a father and never gave his son a chance for a good life.
It’s even romantic at times, the wife of Jason Burkett speaks about how she fell in love with her husband and desires to bear his child, despite that they will not be together for 40 years until he makes parole. She holds a sonogram picture of the baby and that was an unnerving moment. As she held up the picture, I wondered if the child is another seed of criminality. That’s what I saw. I think other people will have different interpretations. The film is dense enough for it.
One of the most chilling moments for me was the interview with Fred Allen, the Captain of the Death House Team in Texas, where the prisoners are brought to be executed. He describes the procedure of taking the patient to be lethally injected and his struggle with keeping the job after lethally injecting 125 convicts. A notepad is shown noting the times of the procedure of Michael Perry’s execution: when he arrived, when he was strapped to the bed, when he was injected and when he passed. That struck me still. I did not have an emotion for that.
Herzog does not narrate as he usually does and I think that was a good aesthetic choice. He only conducts the interviews. Herzog’s own views are implied in the film (he is against the idea of capital punishment), but it’s not as loud of a statement as one would experience in a Michael Moore film. It is unlike Cave of Forgotten Dreams where he needed to answer, “Why the hell are we looking at these caves for 2 hours?” There is no question of why we need to watch this and Werner Herzog takes a step back from telling us his personal views. The viewer is left to decide how they want to judge the actions Michael Perry and Jason Burkett. Herzog provides no answers, but asks all the right questions.
Why did these three people die for a car? Why did these two kids kill for a joyride? How does death affect a family? How do you live your life knowing that you will be executed next week? Is there any real purpose to executing Michael Perry? After all, it won’t bring them back. Does anyone, including the state, have any right to take a life? Just because the law says so, does that make it right?
At the end, It left me raised the hairs on the back of my neck. I thought about the absurdity and ironies of life. Into the Abyss reflected the human predicament and how as human beings we think we know everything, but we are not even close to understanding ourselves.
Senna is a documentary film that depicts the life of Brazilian motor-racing champion, Ayrton Senna.
You do not need to know anything about Formula One racing or even have to be remotely interested in it to enjoy this film. The story provides you with the technical knowledge that you need to know. The most noteworthy thing is, Senna works on primal storytelling instincts. There’s a guy, he loves racing and is pretty talented at it. He wants to race with the best team. The best racer on the best team (Alain Prost AKA “The Professor”) does not want to be second. They are on the same team but they race for themselves. Tensions arise.
Senna and Prost’s rivalry seemed too dramatic to be real. The rivalry was akin to Maverick and Ice Man in Top Gun. It is unbelievable this all really happened. There is a writing credit in the film’s credits (by Manish Pandey) though I imagine that is more compiling the facts to tell the most dramatic order possible than rewriting facts.
Film is an amalgamation of all the arts (photography, music, theater, storytelling etc.), the only new art form to arise out of film is editing. The idea that putting two separate images next to each other can evoke a whole new independent meaning. Senna is a film composed mostly of archive footage and interviews and it is truly impressive the amount of emotion and drama that was conveyed through archive footage. The story was told with great flow. It’s great to know that the editing by Greger Salls and Chris King has been recognized at this year’s BAFTA awards.
Ayrton Senna himself is a fascinating subject. We see the passion and determination in his eyes and you cannot help but root for him. It was not about being the best. Senna speaks of racing as his way of spiritually connecting to God. Racing was simply his purpose.
The musical score by Antonio Pinto brings out Senna’s spirituality and subtly sets the story from Senna’s perspective. Essentially you are either hearing Senna’s feelings or “how we should feel about the situation”. The music at the finale was particularly impactful.
I do not know thing one about Formula One racing and honestly I still do not know very much having seen the film. But Senna took me into another world and it gripped me all the way through. By the end, it struck me still and raised all the hairs on my back ( even though I am Asian).
I could not recommend this more, do not let the fact that this is about racing stop you from seeing it. Give it a chance!
