Shared Darkness

A coolheaded yet still quite frightening nonfiction exploration of the inherent dangers of nuclear weapons and proliferation, Lucy Walker’s sobering Countdown to Zero makes a strong case, in non-polemical fashion, that political myopia is perhaps helping ink humankind’s eventual obituary.

The details make the thing. Much talking-head discussion centers around so-called loose nukes, but it’s also fascinating to hear former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (above) reflect regretfully on the 1986 Reykjavik summit breakdown, which could have possibly eliminated all nuclear weapons, or at least ballistic missiles (something many saber-rattling Reaganites are now too confused with anti-Obama rage to remember).

And there are, of course, many horror stories of nuclear disaster barely averted, plenty not widely known. One that was reported on was a 1995 American missile test over Norway that tripped all the signal wires of a preemptive attack. The Russians were informed of it in advance, but somehow failed to pass the message along up the chain of command, resulting in Boris Yeltsin (thankfully not intoxicated… or perhaps thankfully so?) being awoken in the middle of the night and given only a couple minutes to decide how to respond. If he’d followed established governmental protocol, he would have launched nuclear missiles at a dozen American cities. With so many threats in the world, it seems insane to continue to exist in a state of alert so open to malfunction, corruption and error. And yet if there’s anything that human history has taught us, it’s that we typically don’t truly learn a lesson until it’s we’ve paid disastrous consequences. (Magnolia, PG, 90 minutes)

Cult infamy and accidental celebrity take a turn under the microscope in Winnebago Man, an intriguing documentary from Ben Steinbauer that takes a look at Jack Rebney, the foulmouthed “star” of a viral sensation. Hired in the late 1980s to host a series of industrial videos for Winnebago’s RV campers, Rebney repeatedly lost his temper in the sweltering Iowa summer heat, and his crew — half out of irritation at his antics, half out of bemusement — left the camera rolling.

The outtakes became an underground sensation, traded around on VHS tapes, and, starting around 1995, became a huge hit on YouTube, generating millions of views worldwide. For his movie, Steinbauer tracks down the heretofore unexamined Rebney living in semi-seclusion in northern California, where he initially claims to know nothing of his strange demi-celebrity. Again given a stage, though, Rebney soon roars to life.

The original clips are funny because in them the savvy viewer recognizes, perhaps on a subliminal level, the public presentation of a very private anger (“Why don’t I say it fucking right? My mind is just a piece of shit!”). Steinbauer, though, never really seems to work up either a cogent thesis statement or tack of inquiry — his work bears the marks of a serial noodler. Early, promising strands seeming to offer some greater contextualization give way to little more than a travelogue, in which Steinbauer and a longtime friend of Rebney’s coax and cajole him into attending a special San Francisco festival screening of other video curios.

Even as Steinbauer becomes closer to his subject, and tries to inject biographical details of Rebney, the essence of the man remains curiously distant. Still, the emergent portrait is at least entertaining, offering a glimpse forward at the next generation of Andy Warhol’s famous assertion regarding fame, when one person’s 15 minutes can now become a frozen-in-time, perpetual humiliation — either good-naturedly owned, or forever an irritant. For more information, click here. (Kino, R, 85 minutes)