It Might Get Loud

First Hit: It doesn’t get loud, but for guitar players and fans of guitar players there is enough to be interesting.

This wasn’t a great film about rock guitarist, yet it was occasionally insightful, sometimes interesting, at times engaging, and in moments heartfelt.

Jack White (of The White Stripes and The Raconteurs), The Edge (David Howell Evans of U2), and Jimmy Page (The Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin) are the three guitarist featured in this 97 minute documentary.

The film attempts to bring these three together into a large warehouse, with guitars at close hand, hoping for a possible explosion of loud, amazing, and un-before heard of guitar music. What happens is some laid back conversation, each sharing a few of their famous licks, and a slightly interesting version of The Bands “The Weight” to end the film.

What makes sitting through the stuff in the warehouse is the archival footage and separate interviews with each of these guitarists. I’m sure that my age has something to do with it, but Jack White has a ways to go before he can be acknowledged in the same breath with The Edge let alone Page.

Page’s comfort with his legacy and the ease by which he moves through the film, his engagement with the others, and how he talks about his path through music made it obvious that he is a pretty centered guy these days. White still holds on to the belief that it all must be a struggle for it to be real (he says this multiple times in the interview).

Both Page and The Edge get that what is a struggle for one person is not a struggle for another, and one can only acknowledge what is real for them and they are fortunate enough to be able to express this truth through their gift of playing the guitar.

The Edge was clearly the eye opener for me. I felt his sincerity and gratefulness at being able to expand his understanding of the guitar and electronics (which he really incorporates) to share a voice, his internal voice to all of us. He works very hard at it.

Page on the other hand appeared to let it flow through him, as if he was simply the instrument of a larger calling. When Page plays in this film, I recalled seeing Led Zeppelin at The Fillmore West in SF and then, while the screen showed archival footage of these young lions of the rock scene, it reaffirmed that he was created to bring us these amazing songs and riffs which many of us will never forget.

A touchstone moment in the film was watching him doing air guitar of Link Wray’s “Rumble” because it was like watching everyman air guitar a Led Zeppelin lead guitar riff.

White also had his moments as well and his exploration into ways of making interesting sounds come from these six stringed instruments was revealing. His commitment to the instrument is obvious.

The title of this film comes from a moment when the filmmakers were in The Edge’s waterside studio, while flipping some of his many switches he says, “it might get loud”. I’m not sure what Director Davis Guggenheim had in mind when he came up with this idea to bring these guitarists together. Obviously he reached for three generations White 34, Evans 48, and Page 65 and looked for stylistic differences. Did he have any idea what would happen when he put them in one large room with all the equipment they would ever need to create fireworks, probably not. It reminded me of the numerous times of sitting down with other musicians and trying to find just one song we could all connect to so that we could begin to find a common language to begin exploration. This film was watching them begin a long slow attempt to find that common language.

Overall: If you are a guitar aficionado or like Zeppelin, U2, and/or The White Stripes, then you might enjoy watching this film. But what happens is that each of them shared a small part of their voice but little else happened.

The Cove

First Hit: A very powerful and disturbing film which highlights man’s insensitivity to fellow sentient beings. 

Flipper was a TV program which aired in 1964 – 1967 and was about a bottle nose dolphin which was a companion of a family in Florida. Flipper had a theme song and a signature move which happened to be a tail walk, not unlike Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk.

The trainer for the dolphins which played Flipper was Richard O’Barry who, after witnessing the death of one of the trained dolphins, realized he had created an industry which was cruel for these intelligent creatures.

Since then O’Barry has been on a crusade to stop the training, capture and treatment of these amazing mammals. The focus of this film is one of these crusades.

There is a tiny town in Japan called Taijii which captures thousands of these bottlenose dolphins each year and sells them to marine animal parks around the world. Each dolphin is worth about $150,000.00 which is quite a take for just a few fishermen.

What happens to the dolphins which aren’t chosen? They are herded into a small hidden cove and slaughtered. Each year about 23,000 of these beautiful intelligent creatures are slaughtered and their meat is sold on the open market.

Unfortunately, dolphin meat is full of mercury and when the local town discovers that their kids are being fed this meat for lunch, the practice changes. O’Barry leads a film group and a team of individuals with specific skills to capture this slaughter on film. This endeavor is difficult because this hidden cove is well protected and the fishermen aren't anxious to have their handy work scrutinized. 

With hidden high definition cameras in place they record the bloody gruesome slaughter. Hopefully with some additional public awareness and support this practice will soon stop.

Louie Psihoyos does a good job of creating some drama in this documentary film by creating a story and letting it climax with the filmed slaughter.

Overall: This film is more than about Flipper asking for help, it is how we treat our fellow earthly inhabitants. What goes on to dolphins in The Cove also goes on in the US with the harvesting of pigs, chickens, and cows (See Food Inc.). When are we going to look at alternative ways to feed ourselves?

Unmistaken Child

First Hit: A wonderfully told tale of how a Tibetan master teacher is found and re-identified as embodying the spirit of one who has passed.

Having delved into Buddhism and specifically Tibetan Buddhism I was excited to see this film. Like Kundun by Martin Scorsese, this film follows the path of how a reincarnated master is found. In Kundun it was the 14th Dalai Lama, in Unmistaken Child it was Geshe Lama Konchog.

This film spends little time on explaining this Tibetan tradition, but takes you on a journey to find Geshe Lama's reincarnation with his student and lifelong attendant Tenzin Zopa as your guide. Tenzin Zopa is marvelous in his open honesty and one can see his beautiful spirit when he meets with people along this journey.

He is chosen to find the reincarnation of his master, a job he deems overwhelming and unprepared for, however, because he is asked by the highest Lamas, therefore he does this job with all his spirit. He seeks the guidance of an astrologer living in Taiwan who tells him the direction he must travel and also that the child’s father’s name begins with an A.

With this information, the audience watches as he spends years meeting children until he finds the Unmistaken Child. He’s nervous when he takes the child to other master lamas for testing, but his pick is true and in the end the Dalai Lama confers his blessing on the child.

The most touching part of the film is when Tenzin Zopa has to tell the child’s parents that their child will be taken away from them and put in a monastery.

Tenzin Zopa is wonderful, open, expressive and unmistakably beautiful. The child is the reincarnation of this revered teacher and the quickness in which he learns to confer blessings on the people who visit him is amazing.

Overall: An incredibly beautiful film about how a spiritual leader in the Tibetan tradition of Buddhism is chosen.

Food Inc.

First Hit: Everyone needs to see this film. It may change your mind about what you eat and will certainly educate you on how creating food has become more about the production line and how fast and cheap we produce it than nutrition and how it helps our bodies.

The two main narrators of this film are Eric Schlosser who wrote “Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the all American Meal” and Michael Pollan who wrote “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”.

The film begins with shots of grocery packed aisles in a grocery store. We see thousands upon thousands of products on the shelves, and as Eric states, where did all this food come from. The first startling statistic revolves around how the producers of meat products are being consolidated into just a few.

Example: 50 years ago, the top dozen major beef producers controlled less than 30% of the market. Today 4 companies produce more than 80% of the beef on the market. The how and why this happened and the dangers of what we are now facing, as the production of food becomes an exercise in least cost efficiency, is what this film is about.

This film documents the incredible and powerful impact of fast food chains on all our markets. It shows how corn is produced by huge farms and sold at a loss, but these farms make money because they are government subsidized.

Why is corn important? It is in everything and is used to fatten up our animals for slaughter. You see how the chicken industry has created a full grown chicken in less than 50 days when it used to take 70 days. One of the worst parts is, these chickens can barely stand or walk and on most chicken farms, the chickens never see the light of day. You see a hog processing plant that kills more than 32,000 pigs a day. You see miles and miles of cows being fed corn, which their bodies cannot handle, to fatten them up.

Corn fed cattle is a danger because their stomachs can produce E. coli 015:H7 which would normally be non-existent when they feed on grass. We hear the story of a woman losing her 2 year old son from E. coli contaminated hamburger. The film also shows you farmers who care and are attempting to do something about it. We are also shown a story about how Monsanto, in their quest to make germ resistant seeds, has capitalized on their invention to the tune of ruining farmers.

Finally, the film gives you very clear instruction of what you can do to change what is going on and the reason is: If we don’t make these changes, we are headed for a nutritional and health disaster.

This film was expertly directed by Robert Kenner and does not rely on histrionics, over dramatizations or a bending of the truth. However, there are some images of food processing that had me momentarily turning away from the screen because they were just simply too hard to watch.

Overall: We are heading towards a health crisis through our food. The images, explanations and information will stay with me long after this film leaves the theaters.

Enlighten Up!

First Hit: Interesting idea and the execution, although uneven, was thoughtful and engaging.

The idea was to take a person; in this case Nick Rosen skeptical journalist and the director’s friend, and let him spend 6 months trying different yoga techniques to see if the there is, or if there can be, some form of spiritual enlightenment at the end by becoming involved in yoga.

Kate Churchill, who directed and produced this film, was curious about her own yoga practice and felt that maybe she could begin to uncover some of her own questions about her own practice by following and filming someone who had no experience at all. She chose Nick because of his practical and journalistic background and after telling him the story about what she wanted to do, he wholeheartedly joined the adventure, besides he had just left his most recent job.

The film begins in New York where they both live. Nick attends numerous classes with different teachers all claiming to have the best type of yoga. Soon after attending some of these classes the film audience and Nick see the fallacy and ego of the teachers which gets in the way of “the practice”. There is quite a bit of posturing by teachers as to who has the best technique and who has the best classes, like it is a popularity contest.

Nick and Kate head off to Hawaii to meet up with Norman Allen a revered teacher who keeps a low profile and he begins to create questions in Nick’s mind about his perception of yoga and the idea of self. It is at this part of the film that it starts to really delve into some of the spiritual aspects of having a yoga practice, or any practice.

Then it was off to India where Nick met up with various teachers including B.K.S. Iyengar and Sri K. Pattabhi Jois who have their particular view regarding the power of yoga, self-inquiry, and practice. Slowly and subtly Nick and the audience begin to see that it isn’t really about the asana positions (postures) of yoga just like it isn’t about one’s sitting position in meditation, it is how one approaches everything with a level of openness, compassion, and equanimity.

A number of the teachers touch on this in their own way and as the audience watches Nick, and despite Kate’s irritation with Nick, you sense that something has shifted in his life and yet he won’t be able to put hard journalistic facts around it.

I think Nick was typical in his behavior as a good looking, semi avant-garde, late 20’s New Yorker. He likes to party and likes to think of himself as a ladies’ man. As a subject he’s good because he is curious enough to ask questions and bright enough to know something is going on within him as this journey unfolds. He’s real. Kate’s direction was a bit uneven and I found myself wondering why there were scenes of her voice telling Nick to ask a teacher a question. Her irritation with Nick grew during the filming and I liked that it felt real in that way.

Overall: An interesting and amusing film which carries some insight as to where one finds their spiritual path. Listen closely and some of the truth does reveal itself along the way.