Cultural Mining

Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

It’s the closing weekend of Hotdocs, but there’s still a lot left to see. So this week I’m looking at two documentaries and one disaster thriller. There’s a tower casting radio waves across Toronto, an institution disseminating news across North America, and a plane crash in a vast unexplored region of the Western Pacific.

The Tower that Built a City

Dir: Mark Myers

It’s the 1970s in Toronto, eternally stuck in second place behind the richer, more glamorous  city of Montreal. Expo 67, The Stanley Cup, the Montreal Olympics they all left staid conservative Toronto in their dust. But wait! Something new is happening in Toronto: they’re building a new tower in the railway lands to broadcast TV and radio signals across a sprawling city and beyond. The CN Tower, the tallest free-standing structure in the world is gradually coming up, level after level as a city watches. And at the same time, Toronto is growing like mad: War resisters driving north from the US to avoid the Vietnam war; anglophones driving west fleeing the Parti Quebecois separatists;  and an amazingly diverse group of people from Asia, the Caribbean and Europe, making Toronto their new home. And the tower has a snowball effect. Sktscrapers springing up right and left; Toronto has a baseball team, an international film festival, a Caribbean carnival. Suddenly Toronto is cool, desirable, and “world class”. And all because of a tower. 

The Tower that Built a City is a documentary about the defining icon of Toronto’s skyline and what has happened to the city since the CN Tower opened 50 years ago. The director argues that Toronto is the city it is because of that tower. It takes the form of an oral history, with a parade of voices recalling who did what and how the city reacted using literally hundreds of period photos, headlines, and clips skillfully edited together into a seamless story. This doc is fantastically well-made. Most cuts are 1-2 seconds long, including even the speakers, but every image is appropriate to the narrative. Some minor criticism: out of the dozens and dozens of talking heads, over 50 years of Toronto history, you’d think they could have found some women to tell us interesting things about about Toronto, but the interviews are a virtual sausage fest of engineers, architects, art critics, hockey players, sports writers, politicians, and broadcasters… with scarcely any women to be seen.

That said,  The Tower that Built a City is funny, informative and totally engrossing, a much-needed dose of nostalgia, and a pleasure to watch.

Steal This Story, Please!

Dir: Carl Deal and Tia Lessin

It’s the 1990s. Amy Goodman is a young journalist who wants to make a difference. Shortly after traveling to East Timor in Indonesia to join Allan Nairn in covering the political violence and turmoil, they are caught in a massacre. Indonesian forces fired on hundreds of peaceful protesters, killing at least 250. They broke a major story that had been completely ignored in mainstream media up until then. Years later, she flies to West Africa, and somehow manages to record on tape the CEO of Chevron Nigeria admitting that they were behind transporting soldiers of the military dictatorship to gun down villagers protesting an oil spill. In Minneapolis-St Paul at the Republican convention, and again at Hanging Rock at indigenous protests against the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline,  she is arrested and accused of fomenting riots. Apparently, a valid press pass is not enough to stop police from arresting and handcuffing her. These are all stories that first broke on Democracy Now!, the independent, hour-long daily radio news broadcast heard across North America (including on this station) she started 30 years ago. This documentary follows her — and her fellow reporters and co-hosts — Juan Gonzales, Nermeen Shaikh, Jeremy Scahill, and Sharif Abdel Kouddous — at work in the studio and on location over a thirty year period. And it pulls back the curtain to show us a little bit of Amy Goodman’s personal life: childhood photos and videos, a newspaper she wrote with her big brother, and her adorable dog Zazou. The title — Steal this Story, Please! — is a reference to Abbie Hoffman’s revolutionary Steal This Book from 1970. What it’s saying is, they want legacy media to pay attention and air the crucial news stories that  Democracy Now! has broken. Please rebroadcast them. It’s not a corporate news site looking for advertising dollars; it’s there to get these stories — the ones that no one else will cover — out to the public where they can do some good.

Democracy Now is highly-respected news site that deals with heavy stuff, and is not known for its fluff, gags or filler. But Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, the filmmakers of this doc, know how to make movies watchable. They produced many of Michael Moore’s docs like Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11, and like those films, this one never drags or bores you. It’s exciting, even thrilling, as the journalists race to make their deadline. The Canadian premiere I saw at Hotdocs had lineups around the block and ended with a 5-minute standing ovation. And I’m happy to say Amy Goodman mentioned this radio station, CIUT, three times in the Q&A.

Steal this Story, Please! is a fantastic doc.

Go watch it…please!

Deep Water 

Dir: Renny Harlin

It’s the night before a big flight to Shanghai on Northeast Airlines. While the Captain (Ben Kingsley) is whooping it up in the karaoke room of the airport hotel, his co-pilot (Aaron Eckhart) is swimming laps to calm his nerves. He wishes he could be with his family — his young son is in hospital for chemo — but he really needs the income. They both show up on time the next morning to chat with some of the passengers… but the atmosphere is tense. Little Cora, a know-it-all, doesn’t get along with her stepbrother in their newly blended family. A douchey guy (Angus Sampson) never stops smoking cigarettes  or aggressively complaining about the flight. A conflict is brewing between two amateur sports teams, one from the US the other from China, which comes very close to an actual fistfight. The flight is largely uneventful — just a married couple attempting to join the Mile High Club in a washroom — until a fire breaks out in the luggage deck, which rapidly spreads to the wings and engines. It’s a crisis; they are hundreds of miles from  the nearest airport in Guam. It’s up to the captain to save his passengers. They eject the fuel and crash-land on the surface of the sea, just above a coral reef. The plane is torn apart on impact, but remarkably dozens of passengers survive. Some are trapped underwater in a captured air bubble; others floating on debris or lifeboats, and still others in large chunks of the plane still floating on the waves. But their trauma is not over. When the survivors see the fins they realize their terror is just beginning. And with no way to communicate with the outside world, can the survivors hang on till rescuers arrive? Or will they all end up as dinner for sharks?

Deep Water is a combination disaster movie and shark movie. We follow the plight of 20+ characters, some who live and some who die, and manages to keep the sprawling, multiple plot lines together. It’s full of would-be heroes and stoic grannies, budding friendships and nascent romances, just trying to survive amidst mechanical sharks, jump scares and foreboding music.

The movie abounds with classic film references, from Lifeboat to the Poseidon Adventure, from Airport to Jaws. Very little original here, but I do enjoy watching schlocky disaster movies like this one, no matter how cornball it is.

Deepwater is trash, but I liked it.

Deep Water opens this weekend in Toronto; check your local listings. Steal This Story Please and The Tower that Built a City are both at Hotdocs, which continues till Sunday.

This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Saturday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website culturalmining.com