Daily Archives: April 14, 2009

I.O.U.S.A.

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

A pants-crappingly important documentary about the monstrous problem of the United States’ national debt, director Patrick Creadon’s I.O.U.S.A. takes as its two crusading, point-of-entry subjects Concord Coalition executive director Bob Bixby and former U.S. Comptroller David Walker, both level-headed, entirely cool and collected Poindexter-types who could pass for affable branch managers at your local savings and loan. That’s important, and underscores the rational appeal of this alarm-bell non-fictioner: while it undeniably elicits temple rubbing and teeth gnashing in extra servings, I.O.U.S.A. doesn’t go for cheap partisan provocation.

As superbly elucidated in the bird’s-eye financial history documentary The Ascent of Money, also recently released to DVD, debt in and of itself is not necessarily a problem. But I.O.U.S.A., inspired by William Bonner and Addison Wiggin’s Empire of Debt, tells the story of a country, collectively, living a wildly unsustainable lifestyle. Faced with key deficits in budget, savings, trade and leadership, the federal government is critically overextended in many areas; increased foreign competition in the form of emerging economic markets only deepens our challenges. With the American economy already in shambles, 78 million baby boomers are expecting retirement benefits from their indebted federal government, and it’s these massive liabilities (approximately $7 trillion for social security, and another $34 trillion for combined Medicare commitments, including President Bush‘s prescription drug giveaway) that dwarf the actual debt, and push it to a staggering total of around $54 trillion.

Weaving together archival footage, economic data and candid interviews with Walker, Bixby, Warren Buffett, Alan Greenspan, Paul O’Neill, Robert Rubin, Alice Rivlin, Paul Volcker and other titans of currency, I.O.U.S.A. offers a vivid and alarming profile of America’s financial status, a surefire path toward foreign policy being dictated solely by banking considerations. An effectively stitched together opening montage comprised of various State of the Union speech clips makes sure the audience immediately grasps that this isn’t a partisan hatchet job, despite the indisputable fact that Bush inherited a projection of increasing budget surpluses along with a $5.6 trillion debt in 2000, and took it to around a $10 trillion debt, and growing, at the beginning of this year.

Creaden (Wordplay) is skilled at being able to craft a compelling narrative from and around wonkish details, but he isn’t afraid to interject both real-world irreverence and anxiety into his work– in the form of interview snippets with average retirement-age Americans, heading back to work or fretting about their kids and grandkids — which helps humanize the movie, and make its seemingly too-big-to-tackle problem something relatable, if no less unnerving. Smartly, Creaden also contrasts consumer behaviors (as encouraged by governments); America’s conspicuous consumption is contrasted with a Chinese couple who work together in a factory and earn the collective equivalent of around $20 a day, yet save more than half of that income. As much as the widening manufacturer’s gap, it’s that difference in mindset that helps explain the $260 billion trade deficit with China in 2007.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, I.O.U.S.A. includes a slew of supplemental material, starting with a five-minute, direct-address update from Walker, recorded in early January 2009. An hour-long panel discussion from after the film’s premiere includes Walker, Buffet, Bill Niskanen, Bill Novelli and Peter Peterson, and Buffet and Greenspan also pop up in a separate “economic experts” section explaining why deficits matter. (Here’s a partial hint: the massive debt accrued after World War II, when it swelled to 122 percent of the gross domestic product, was owed to ourselves, courtesy of war bonds.) A special classroom-friendly section provides viewers with Volcker’s reading list. Five minutes of on-the-street interviews with ordinary Americans are counterbalanced by  fiscal update information, a three-minute, data-laden slideshow, and the movie’s trailer. To order any DVD release from PBS Home Video, including this title or The Ascent of Money, call (800) PLAY-PBS or click here; to purchase the I.O.U.S.A. DVD via Amazon, click here. A- (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Bai Ling Talks; Transformers Videogame Site Launches

Ephemera, Interviews

Rotten Tomatoes’ lovely Jen Yamato has up an interesting sit-down interview with Bai Ling, who I have it on good authority will be washing cars tomorrow in the Los Angeles area to help promote the sure-to-be-awesome Crank sequel. (Possibly more on that later.) In characteristically breezy, self-confident and oftentimes free-associating fashion, Ling talks about her hard-charging lifestyle and her own wacky blog, the drubbing she took in China after Red Corner, and Southland Tales‘ infamous Cannes Film Festival premiere, among other topics.

Also, in unrelated news, Activision has launched its official web site for the videogame companion for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, tagged as a place where fans can log on and “join a global Transformers community to get the latest news, images, videos and developer insight about the highly anticipated videogame set to hit shelves later this summer.”

Lymelife

Film Reviews

“Culkins are kind of like Bebe’s Kids… they don’t die, they multiply.” Sorry… but this was the thought that surged through my mind as I settled into Lymelife, another self-satisfied, allegorical tale of the gritty dark side of Northeastern suburban paradise and its attendant loss of innocence, all as peddled by Derick Martini, making his directorial debut. A sort of facile, surface-polished lesser entry in the canon of movies like The Ice Storm, The Chumscrubber and American Beauty, in which sensible and in some regards overly mature kids grapple with philandering and emotionally stunted adults, Lymelife is a bunch of discrete, thematically similar scenes in search of a cogent narrative punch.

Centering on two deeply troubled, dysfunctional families during the dog days of the 1970s, the film revolves around an awkward, sensitive 15-year-old boy, Scott Bartlett (Rory Culkin), whose family life is ostensibly turned upside down after an outbreak of Lyme disease hits his community, spreading illness and paranoia. Scott’s parents — workaholic father Mickey (Alec Baldwin) and overprotective mother Brenda (Jill Hennessy) — are unhappy in swallowed ways bubbling just underneath the surface, and his older brother Jim (Kieran Culkin) is back on brief loan from the Army, and about to ship off for war. Complicating matters, Scott has fallen in love with his neighbor and longtime friend, Adrianna Bragg (Emma Roberts). Troubled in different ways, Adrianna’s less affluent family consists of her uptight mother, Melissa (Cynthia Nixon), who’s carrying on a not-so-clandestine love affair, and her father, Charlie (Timothy Hutton), who’s slowly slipping away from the effects of Lyme disease.

Derick Martini and his brother Steven, the writer-actors behind the winning, low-budget 1999 indie Smiling Fish & Goat on Fire, collaborated on Lymelife‘s script based on their own experiences growing up on suburban Long Island, but the movie feels too cute by about half, groomed for indie flick preciousness in certain scenes. Lymelife premiered, I gather, at the Toronto Film Festival, and truth be told it’s the warm bosom of a welcoming throng of international filmgoers that’s the best home for this decently acted but otherwise marginally disappointing domestic ensemble.

There’s something of a charismatic star spark from the young Roberts, particularly in the manner in which she captures how teenage females drive the bus of sexual experience, and set the tone for the vast majority of adolescent amorous encounters. But overall her performance is a hot-and-cold thing, a lot of which is admittedly dictated from a scattershot characterization that finds Adrianna admonishing and/or patronizing Scott one moment (“I can call your mom, she can bring you an icepack or a Yoo Hoo or something,” she says in an awkward, meant-to-be-serious moment, after a bully thumps Scott), and then flashing him her red bra in confessional booth the next.

The Martinis have a nice touch with some end-around, unexpected moments of interpersonal friction or personal introspection — there’s a great bar scene between Mickey and Charlie that ranks among the best scenes of passive-aggressiveness I can recall — but the Lyme disease-as-metaphor stuff doesn’t play, and they absolutely overreach when they aim for more overt emotional manipulation. These hamfisted instincts most reveal themselves in thunderously stupid and unrealistic behavior by cheating adults — bits crammed in to advance scenes, and feed revelation amongst minors — and reach their apex in a woefully misguided finale that feels like a straight-up gangsta rip-off of American Beauty, only without the balls of actual catharsis through bloodletting. (Screen Media, R, 95 minutes)