Exploring what will happen to ordinary people as the river rises

The Three Gorges Dam spanning China’s Yangtze River is the largest hydroelectric project in the world.  When finished, it will provide mammoth amounts of hydroelectric power to the country and its people—but it will also cause the waters of the Yangtze to rise, obliterating many homes.  Thousands will have to relocate to the highland and start anew.  Yung Chang’s new documentary Up the Yangtze, opening at the Bijou this weekend, explores the different worlds created by the dam and illuminates a darkened corner that may soon disappear under the waters of the Yangtze. 

The resulting film is far from academic.  Up The Yangtze is not a National Geographic special report on a nation’s economic climate, but a film focusing on two young people from different parts of China.  

Herzog’s Encounters at the Edge of the World explores Antarctica

Enigmatic director Werner Herzog has, during nearly 50 years of making films, been drawn to the outskirts of man’s inhabitation of the planet. In Aguirre, the Wrath of God, he envisioned conquistadores making their way along the Amazon, and in Fitzcarraldo, an obsessed opera-lover tries to build an opera house in the middle of the Peruvian jungle.

Herzog portrays not only the outside of civilization, but its outsiders, people who cannot bear to lead ordinary lives, and who will go literally to the ends of the Earth to escape them.
The director himself has remained an outsider, refusing to work in traditional ways, refusing to be pigeonholed as a documentary or narrative filmmaker.

Which is why it will surprise no one who’s followed his career that he allowed this instinct to lead him to Antarctica in the documentary Encounters at the Edge of the World, the third offering of the AEC’s fall Independent Film Series.

American musical icon Blake lauded in world-premiere documentary

Besides his guitar mastery, Blake also plays the mandolin, six-string banjo, fiddle, and dobro. He transcribes classic fiddle tunes for guitar, and is also a singer-songwriter, composing tunes such as “Ginseng Sullivan” and “Slow Train Through Georgia.”

After 32 albums and multiple Grammy nominations, some with his wife Nancy, Blake’s work has been celebrated on film.

WALL-E is, yes, a masterpiece

For someone who will blissfully sit through the most out-there theatre in the world, I am a plebian when it comes to film. I hate David Lynch films (except for The Elephant Man and The Straight Story; I have one word for David Cronenberg films (bletch); and admittedly I have seen far more animated films than most small children
But that’s exactly why I’m qualified to tell you that Disney/Pixar’s WALL-E is in fact the masterpiece it’s being touted as. Though it can be happily enjoyed by the smallest viewers for its amazing Pixar visuals alone, older kids and adults will appreciate the bigger meanings, references and yes, messages.
By now, you’ve probably heard that the title character is a little, very lowly robot, possibly the only one left on a completely trash-covered Earth, which humans have abandoned for 700 years. He wanders about trying to fulfill his original “directive” (to compact trash), accompanied only by his friend/pet, a cockroach. He has filled his “house” with collections of things, including rubber ducks, kitchen utensils and light bulbs, and is forever charmed by replays of certain songs from the movie of Hello, Dolly!

Somewhere in the depths of all the sludge remains the memory of what is really precious.