Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (2004, U.S.)

I don't have too much to say about this documentary, but I did want to mark that I have watched it. We're reading A People's History of the United States and Voices of a People's History of the United States for one of my book clubs, discussing a few chapters each month. This month a few of us met to watch this film about Zinn's life and work. Of course, anyone who is interested in the subject matter will like this documentary, and if you're against Zinn's ideas you probably won't like it. For myself, I'm amazed that there was once a person in the world who cared so much and worked so hard to make this country, and this world really, the place it should be. The challenges that Zinn faced just because of his beliefs and his work should be enough to make any mere mortal give up thousands of times, but he never did. He was a truly exceptional person, and I wish I had been able to see him speak while he was alive. This film was an interesting, though too brief, insight into the man and his work.

Rating: 3.5

Babies (2010, France)

This was a very simple, sweet, engaging documentary. It's about four babies in the first year of their very different but very similar lives in San Francisco, Tokyo, Mongolia, and Namibia. The contrast between countries was interesting, to say the least. I do wonder how realistic it was, for two reasons. First, people may act differently in the presence of a camera in their lives. (Perhaps this isn't true of babies, but it would be true of their parents.) Second, editing can make footage a lot different than the reality. However, it seemed pretty real to me.

Inevitably for this type of documentary, the four lives were distilled into fairly one-dimensional portraits. The San Francisco baby's life alternates between having very hands on parenting and being left alone. Both of her parents were present in her life, with lots of reading, music, toys, activities, etc. The Tokyo baby was surprisingly similar to the San Francisco baby. For my taste, there were way too many bright colors in Tokyo, but otherwise it seems to be nice to be a baby in Japan. The Mongolian baby lives in an isolated area. You almost never see the father, and the mother appears only slightly more often. His brother constantly hits him until he cries, and cows, goats, cats, and roosters are running all over him all the time. It's a miracle nothing bad happened to him. The Namibian baby's mothers seems to sit around all day with another woman, mostly doing nothing but occasionally talking or grooming. (They must do more—perhaps new mothers are given "time off.") Of all the babies, the Namibian baby had the most unhygienic upbringing you could imagine, but of the four he almost seemed the happiest, rarely crying.

In all the footage they used, I felt like they could have included a bit on bedtime in addition to the rest of the day (mealtimes, bathtime, playtime, etc.). I did like how they showed the present day "babies" (around age five?) in the credits. Also, the music was a bit weird, oddly chipper, but it was somehow the perfect soundtrack to unify four lives in very different geographies.

This is oddly enthralling considering the lack of dialogue, plot, or even the "message" (or central theme) of most documentaries, but it's really worth watching, no matter your taste.

Rating: 3.5

Food, Inc. (2008, U.S.)

What a great (though disturbing) documentary! I learned a lot. I kept a lot of notes of fascinating things I learned that I could share, but you just can't get the full effect if I rattle them off. Food, Inc. is a great documentary that looks into the world of the corporate controlled food industry

The one positive thing they showed was a farm in the Shenandoah Valley (near where I live). It is a beautiful farm with beautiful, grass-eating cows. The cows eat, fertilize, and harvest the grass. Other cows, which are raised in terrible conditions, are corn-fed, which requires altering diet and shipping in corn, hauling away manure, etc. Anyway the point is that this farm was beautiful and I wish I could get all my food there, because all the corporate meat plants and genetically modified seed businesses just make me sick.

I've never known many documentaries to have stellar scores, but this one was pretty great. The music was ominous in beef plants, slow and peaceful in the Shenandoah Valley (kind of like the Brokeback Mountain score), creepy (creeping music like a bad guy's coming, sort of) when they're talking about a surveillance team from a genetically modified soybean company persecuting farmers who save, clean, and reuse seeds.

As the Virginian farmer said, the food we eat may seem like cheap food, but it's expensive in terms of environmental, societal, and health costs. True and fascinating!

Rating: 4.0