“Green Mountain GlobaLocal:” Spinning the very best tunes from Vermont musicians and the world, every Monday night on WMRW 95.1 fm - low power community radio for the Mad River Valley.

Monday, August 27, 2007 - Full moon fever; clear, cool, and quiet outside the studio.

Featured artist: All-Vermont “Local-Ear” Show

Anais Mitchell: Come Out
Bluegrass Gospel Project: Blue Train
Aaron Flinn’s Salad Days: Where I’m At
Allison Mann: Straighten Up and Fly Right
Stupid Club: Candy Music
Grace Potter: Lady Madeline
Lindy Pear: The Trade Off In Vermont
Wagtail: House Carpenter
Chad: Jerry’s Gone
Ekis: Let It Out
Adele Nicols: Fly Me To The Moon
Don Sheldon/Mitch Barron: Set It Up
James Kinne: Sleeping In On Saturday

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The Bourne Ultimatum: This Summer’s Best Action Flick

Missed surfing the summer movie blockbuster wave these past three months? You are in luck – the best action film of the season just hit the multiplex. Based on the trials of CIA rogue threat Jason Bourne, spy novelist Robert Ludlum’s most memorable character, The Bourne Ultimatum packs enough excitement to make up for a relatively disappointing summer of trilogy enders: Spidey, Shrek, and Pirates of the Caribbean among them.

Here are ten reasons to check out Bourne:

10. Not convinced that Hollywood is working overtime to glorify our culture of state-sponsored violence? Just sit through Bourne’s previews for the fall action movie line-up: The Kingdom (FBI crack team targeted by elite Arab network in unnamed Middle Eastern country), Beowulf (The West’s most celebrated monster-slayer fable, animated with Angelina “Council on Foreign Relations” Jolie and Russell ‘Gladiator” Crowe), Shoot ‘Em Up (Clive Owen and Paul Giamatti in a hit man movie), American Gangster (Denzel Washington playing a black mobster). Guns, guts, grandeur, gore – bring it on. Who funds this stuff?

9. Matt Damon: At last, after two attempts, the actor has grown into the role of Bourne: world weary, tough, clever – it’s all in his eyes. Amazing what a few years will do to a young actor’s chops.

8. Camera tricks: Especially the mid-scene sudden half zoom, which is used over and over again and just doesn’t get old here. Watch the film with your director’s hat on, and marvel at some of the shots they’ve constructed here. And bring some Dramamine, as you may feel seasick watching this story unfold.

7. David Strathairn: The Good Night and Good Luck actor is a treat to watch – graying, tight lipped, intense – as Bourne’s rival. After his tremendous performance as Edward R. Murrow, it is good to see him receiving more mainstream movie roles like this one (even if his character is a bit insidious).

6. The film’s editing: Shaky, edgy, almost manic. I sat at the very back of the theater, and high up – and I still got dizzy. See #8, above. Important safety tip.

5. Killer sound byte: “This isn’t some story in a newspaper – this is real,” says Bourne to a Guardian journalist right before the bullets start flying in a crowded train terminal. Best action movie line of the summer.

4. Product placement: Did 3M, Google, Motorola, and Blackberry throw down some cash for mentions in this film? If not, they sure should have. Bourne even gets to Google some research in the film’s first fifteen minutes. Good to know that even super-secret spies rely on the big G for intelligence gathering.

3. 24/7 Surveillance: Like Fox’s 24 or Will Smith/Gene Hackman’s Enemy of the State, Bourne reminds us how much of a surveillance society we now live in. Our Blackberries, mobile phones, computer connections – all are conduits carrying not only our personal information, but our real time location whenever we are dialed in. Welcome to the Panopticon.

2. Julia Stiles: I’ve always liked her acting – nice to see her stretch again in a serious role.

1. Chase scenes: The number one reason why us celluloid thrill seekers go to summer action movies. This movie delivers ‘em, in spades. The Tangiers, Morocco rumble is particularly memorable, coming as it does at the film’s strategic point, once character and dramatic tension have been well established.

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What a Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire
Read more at www.whatawaytogomovie.com

Review by Rob Williams / www.robwilliamsmedia.com

“I didn’t say it would be easy; I just said it would be the truth.”
Morpheus, The Matrix (1999)

The 21st century world faces a number of problems that, in combination, provide all of us with unique challenges in a new century that will end up looking little like the 20th. If you are awake and paying attention, you can probably tick off a short list of concerns all of us confront moving forward.

Climate change.

Overpopulation.

Mass species extinction.

Global Peak Oil.

Environmental overshoot.

The culture of Empire.

Now, a brand-new documentary film written by Tim Bennett and produced by Sally Erickson – “What A Way To Go – Life at the End of Empire” – considers the interconnections between these emerging “big picture” problems. The film functions as a two hour “cat scan of the planet,” according to historian Carolyn Baker, and provides an eye-opening look at our civilization’s future.

What makes this film engaging is the use of a number of techniques seen in other films – The End of Suburbia, for example - of the same genre, with the addition of a first person narrator (Bennett himself), who provides an intimate connection to the stories told in this sprawling and dense celluloid experience.

Bennett’s personal take, combined with a four-part approach that structures the film – The Train, the Train and the Tracks, Locomotive Power, and Walkabout – helps frame the wide-ranging story Bennett and Erickson tell.

“What a Way to Go” is helped along by the clever editing together of old video clips from the fifties and sixties with a number of talking heads, that, in combination, keeps the viewer awake and immersed in the flow to the story. A wide variety of thinkers and cultural critics – Chellis “Off The Map” Glendinning, Daniel “Ishmael” Quinn, William “Overshoot” Catton, Richard “The Oil Depletion Protocol” Heinberg, Paul “The End of Oil” Roberts, Jerry “In The Absence of the Sacred” Mander among them – provide specific insights into the nature and scope of our global dilemmas. And a provocative pastiche of images – many arresting, some disturbing– stitched together above a Philip Glass-like soundtrack help anchor the film sonically.

The film suggests that all of us, collectively, have gotten lost in a “hall of mirrors.” Our mediated culture (built on what Quinn calls “totalitarian agriculture”) amplifies our own importance as humans, which is further exacerbated by our slavish and narcissistic devotion to technology, machines, and mediated (and often addicting) experiences. This situation, in turn, leads to serious repercussions for every other species in the world, and the health of the planet itself, as we human beings who live and work within the ever-expanding world of the Empire conquer the rest of the planet (including human cultures unlike our own) in the name of satisfying our needs, wants, and desires.

And denial is not just a river in Egypt, according to our talking heads. It is difficult for most of us to “see the prison bars,” Bennett observes, mixing metaphors, as the train the world is on speeds by, because we are addicted to the current culture, and change or resistance seems so often futile, at best, or impossible, at worst. Worse, perhaps, is the “infantilization” of our culture, which, as Heinberg notes, makes us more susceptible to herd mentality and dependence on the very forces that are threatening to take apart the planet, and us with it.

Now, the film suggests, the bill is coming due, in the form of climate change, peak oil, and a whole host of related problems for which there are no easy solutions.

Or indeed, no solutions at all.

“I don’t like happy chapters,” Bennett says towards film’s end, because there is “no list of quick and painless fixes. If there is going to be a happy chapter, we will have to write it together with the rest of the community of life.”

Or, as the Chinese proverb explains, “If we don’t change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed.”

My biggest criticism of this film – and it is a big one – is it’s failure to name names – how did the world get to this point? What about the global role of the World Bank, or GATT, or the IMF, or the WTO, or the military-industrial-media-energy (MIME) complex, or any one of a number of other structures or organizations that contribute to pushing the “train” Bennett speaks of forward?

No mention of them here.

Despite this shortcoming, though, Bennett and Erickson have provided us with a two-hour look at a very real future most of us would rather not contemplate, and offered us, if not solutions, than ways forward.

“Gather yourselves,” say the Hopi elders. “We are the leaders we’ve been looking for.”

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