They were talking about breaking up over “artistic differences.”

—–

The new Showtime documentary ‘From the Sky Down,’ debuting at 8 p.m. EST Oct. 29, recalls how the band’s 1991 album ‘Achtung Baby’ restored their faith in each other while cementing their rock god status.

The film may not convert those immune to the band’s arena rock anthems or those who find their socially conscious pose hypocritical given their affinity for tax shelters.

Frankly, director Davis Guggenheim (‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ ‘Waiting for ‘Superman”) isn’t interested in expanding the band’s fan base nor exploring universal themes. It’s a portrait of a band in crisis, one which focuses like a laser on how the U2 sound came to be.

‘From the Sky Down,’ which opened the Toronto International Film Festival, begins with U2 rehearsing for a Glastonbury concert to feature songs from ‘Achtung Baby.’ It’s the Spring of 2011, and the rockers are in a reflective mood.

“There is a moment when it’s dysfunctional not to look back at the past,” says Bono, a veritable fountain of tasty sound bites.

So Guggenheim flips the calendar back to the band’s earliest days, when a simple pub band from Dublin first hit American shores. We see more than an act conquering a nation. We watch as the quartet embraces America, both its people and musical spirit. The latter, culminating in the disappointing concert film ‘U2: Rattle & Hum,’ shook the band’s confidence.

“You start to believe what people are saying about you,” Bono recalls of the film’s mediocre notices. “Maybe this is the end.’

The band eventually regrouped and, inspired by the collapse of the Berlin Wall, shook up their formula the best way they knew how.

“Making ‘Achtung Baby’ was the reason we’re still here now, the pivot point. Either we’re going forward, or this is the moment when we’re going to implode,” Bono says.

‘From the Sky Down’ may be one of the best X-rays of a band’s musical process. We watch group members noodling over the smallest song details, hear Bono scat singing in rehearsal and watch as musical keys float on the screen.

That minutiae, initially fascinating, starts suffocating the film’s entertainment value. Even diehard fans might beg for another irresistible Bono quote to bring some humanity back into the narrative.

Far better are scenes debunking the band’s oh-so-serious image. We watch Bono and co. strike rock star poses for ‘The Joshua Tree’ album cover against their better judgment, mumbling about how silly the whole process feels. And the film’s detour to Berlin to witness history proves both practical and a singular inspiration.

‘From the Sky Down,’ part of a massive U2 repackaging of ‘Achtung Baby’ coming Nov. 1, is a purist’s delight. With a little tweaking, it might have gone down as one of the more instructive rock documentaries of the modern era.

Guggenheim’s real crime was breaking with liberal dogma. The documentary takes on unions and is supportive of Charter schools. Significant issues with documentaries that were nominated makes it glaringly obvious that propaganda trumps facts and reality, even when it comes to documentaries in Hollywood:

What he found in his two years of researching “Waiting for Superman” (with co-producer Lesley Chilcott) was that a lot of schools aren’t right for any kids — neither the dull ones who need gentle prods to move competently from K to 12, nor the underprivileged bright ones who could be the Geoffrey Canadas of the future, if only a good charter school had enough slots to accept them all.

“Exit Through the Gift Shop” received a nomination despite many published concerns as to whether the film is even based upon reality, or simply a work of art. To invoke Al Gore, there seems to be no real consensus as to whether it even qualifies as a documentary. Clearly the academy was more captivated by the subject matter, street art, than concerns over a film’s reputation for integrity:

Much of the controversy surrounding the street art documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop surrounds whether the movie is real, or a prank. At ZUG, pranks and hoaxes are our business; after careful analysis, here’s our best guess.

IS THE MOVIE A PRANK? Yes and no. We think it starts out as a legitimate documentary, with Guetta intending to create a film about street artists. But it eventually becomes clear that he is a very bad filmmaker, and that is where the story begins to diverge from reality.

SO IF GUETTA IS SINCERE IN THE FIRST PART, AND ACTING IN THE SECOND PART, IS HE JUST A REALLY GOOD ACTOR? That part, admittedly, is a bit of a mystery.

In fact, the skepticism is so widespread the filmmaker was recently compelled to acknowledge it in the media surrounding the Oscars:

Obviously the story is bizarre, that’s why I made a film about it, but I’m still shocked by the level of skepticism. I guess I have to accept that people think I’m full of shit. But I’m not clever enough to have invented Mr. Brainwash, even the most casual on-line research confirms that.

Readers of Right-side new media will instantly recognize Charles Ferguson’s “Inside Job” as another alleged documentary seemingly more interested in propaganda, than an accurate account of the nation’s economic crisis:

“Inside Job,” the acclaimed new documentary by director Charles Ferguson, is a movie that tries to do for the economic crisis what Ferguson’s last film, “No End in Sight,” did for the Iraq War. In many ways, it succeeds.

Once again, Ferguson stands back, and also leans in close, to give you the big picture – in this case, how the unchecked growth of investment banking, the mania for deregulation, and the new-fangled application of principles of physics to the stock market all merged to create a high-finance runaway train that was destined to crash.

Ferguson does a ruthless job of revealing one aspect of the crisis that few have talked about: the selling out of prestigious economists who work in academia. Some of the most respected economic thinkers in the country made, and still make, huge amounts of money from consulting fees, and they were instrumental in lending credibility to corrupt policies.

I wouldn’t look for many, if any, mentions of the Community Investment Act, or the role of Fannie Mae, or Freddie Mac, from Ferguson. It’s all the fault of Wall Street, despite multiple well documented reports of how government regulation and interference -and the push to expand home ownership across populations that couldn’t afford it, set the stage for the collapse. Without those policies, there wouldn’t have been all those high-risk financial instruments which Wall Street traded to prop up tragically flawed government policies:

Two narratives seem to be forming to describe the underlying causes of the financial crisis. One, as outlined in a New York Times front-page story on Sunday, December 21, is that President Bush excessively promoted growth in home ownership without sufficiently regulating the banks and other mortgage lenders that made the bad loans. The result was a banking system suffused with junk mortgages, the continuing losses on which are dragging down the banks and the economy. The other narrative is that government policy over many years–particularly the use of the Community Reinvestment Act and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to distort the housing credit system– underlies the current crisis. The stakes in the competing narratives are high. The diagnosis determines the prescription. If the Times diagnosis prevails, the prescription is more regulation of the financial system; if instead government policy is to blame, the prescription is to terminate those government policies that distort mortgage lending.

There really isn’t any question of which approach is factually correct: right on the front page of the Times edition of December 21 is a chart that shows the growth of home ownership in the United States since 1990. In 1993 it was 63 percent; by the end of the Clinton administration it was 68 percent. The growth in the Bush administration was about 1 percent. The Times itself reported in 1999 that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were under pressure from the Clinton administration to increase lending to minorities and low-income home buyers–a policy that necessarily entailed higher risks. Can there really be a question, other than in the fevered imagination of the Times, where the push to reduce lending standards and boost home ownership came from?

The fact is that neither political party, and no administration, is blameless; the honest answer, as outlined below, is that government policy over many years caused this problem.

Still, another alleged documentary may well be the worst when it comes to spinning fiction into reality for a so-called documentary worthy of an Oscar nomination. “Gasland” by Josh Fox and Trish Adlesic has so much controversy swirling around it that seriously questions the film’s honesty, it’s led to a fledgling cottage industry debunking it and several states have gone on record (a document from Colorado’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission) challenging the honesty of the pseudo-documentary. But that didn’t slow down Hollywood or the Academy from embracing a bit of environmentalist propaganda disguised as fact:

On Feb. 1, industry group Energy In Depth (EID) sent a letter to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences arguing that Best Documentary Feature nominee Gasland is ineligible for a nod as the group maintains it’s a factually inaccurate work of “stylized fiction”.

“We’d like to take this opportunity to highlight the Academy’s posted criteria for entries nominated in the documentary feature category, and identify for you why we believe the work of one such nominee may fail to meet this standard,” EID’s executive director Lee Fuller writes in the letter.

Hollywood, through the Academy, has gone so far out on a limb peddling fiction as fact with its documentary nominees this year, one has to wonder if they aren’t panicking due to widespread rejection of Obama’s Leftist policies. It would be shameful if much of middle-America hadn’t already given up on Hollywood as much more than a Leftist propaganda mill.

One can only hope that as many people as possible become aware of what a farce the documentary category is this year. The message to future documentarians interested in getting any Oscar play seems clear. It’s fine to leave objectivity and facts on the cutting room floor; produce the best bit of Leftist propaganda you can and, who knows, it may rate as best documentary of the year. Who cares if it doesn’t document anything accurately? Not Oscar, it seems.

For those who’ve seen it, one of the most striking things about the film is that it comes from the man behind “An Inconvenient Truth.” So how did the guy who is known for making a film championed by liberals just make a film that trashes one of the biggest supporters of liberal candidates? That’s what I wanted to find out. 

“I grew up in northwest,” Guggenheim began, speaking of his home in North West D.C. “When I was just a kindergartner, I remember asking my mom, ‘Why do I take a bus across the Potomac into Virginia’” to go to school. His mother’s response: “Because the schools in D.C. are broken.” 

And they still are, 40 years later, he pointed out. And not just in D.C., but across the nation. “40 years later I’m driving my kids past two public schools to a private school,” he said. As a supporter of public education, he won’t send his own kids to a public school because he fears they won’t receive a good education. It’s these facts that drove him to make this film. 

I asked him about the political differences in the two films, “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Waiting for ‘Superman.’” Both stories focus on an issue bogged down by legislation and talking points. But both focus on something else: people. 

“I had a lot of great teachers when I was going up,” he said. “My best teacher was my father, who made documentaries. And he always taught me … ‘When people see a movie they invest in people. … They’re not here to hear about an issue. They’re here to invest in people.’” … He passed away just before I did ‘Inconvenient Truth.’ … I had Al Gore’s slide show which was all just charts and graphs and I remember him saying ‘people,’ so [I insisted] that it was about one man’s personal journey.” 

Personally, that was the first thing I thought of when I saw “An Inconvenient Truth.” It wasn’t about environmentalism. It was about Al Gore. 

Back to Guggenheim: With “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” the motivation was “to remind people what’s at stake” in the education debate – the kids. “These kids and these families have to play bingo. They have to win at a game of bingo to have a good education,” Guggenheim said of the lottery system used to select which applicants will attend charter schools. “It just seems wrong.” 

As to the film itself, it really chronicles two stories: the children affected and the system as a whole.

“I made … two films separately and made them work on their own,” he said. “And I didn’t cut them together until the end, until like three weeks before I showed it at Sundance. So the idea is you can watch them separately but they would be more powerful inter-cut together.” And together, they are definitely powerful. 

This isn’t the first film on education that Guggenheim has done. His first film, “First Year,” followed teachers during their first year. “All I wanted to do was see what it was like to follow five teachers,” Guggenheim said. “And there was this feeling like they were performing miracles each day, they would reach these kids … [but] I always felt like outside their doors there was this looming monster, there was this system that was working against everybody.” 

“I had this amazing experience where I’d be packing up my equipment … and a principle would come and lean against the door and say, ‘I love that you’re making this movie, but you know we’ll never fix our schools until we deal with some of these other things.’ Things like the bureaucracy and the unions and these very, very onerous contracts. But they would only sort of whisper them to me after the cameras were off – no one wanted to talk about it.” 

So Guggenheim did. It’s a powerful film, and I highly recommend it. But in the end, the film’s message is very simple: 

“As complicated as we have made [the debate], it boils down to what parents already know: It’s all about great teachers, it’s all about who’s standing in front of the kids every morning. … If you reemphasized everything and really focus on recruiting great teachers, developing great teachers, rewarding great teachers, you know, that would go a very long way to fixing our schools.”

NOTE: This is the better part of this interview, which I shared with Craigh Barboza from MyDVDInsider.com (just so you know the questions aren’t coming from me alone).

Davis Guggenheim

It is refreshing that the film’s director, Davis Guggenheim (who directed An Inconvenient Truth), is able to put politics aside to see the destructive nature of teachers unions. Guggenheim put his own kids through private school but realizes that not everyone can afford such a luxury. Here, he sets out to tackle the real problems that have long plagued public school systems: teachers unions. Though, he is careful to say that he isn’t bashing unions in general.

Guggenheim sees that not everything has to be a political football, which is why we should applaud him for taking a bipartisan approach. However, some feel that the response to the film shows the true, negative colors of conservatives. Liberal Patrick Goldstein comments in the Los Angeles Times:

If you’re a documentary filmmaker, you’re happy to get rave reviews from any source, since you need all the good PR you can get. But I find it revealing, when it comes to the liberal vs. conservative partisan divide, that whenever Michael Moore releases a new documentary promoting a liberal cause, conservatives are quick to bash him for being a left-wing propagandist. But when Guggenheim makes a film offering wholehearted support for a conservative cause, liberal critics have written just as many glowing reviews as conservative ones. (The film has a sky-high 93 fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes.) What does that tell you about who’s got the most open mind here?

First of all, only looking at Michael Moore and Davis Guggenheim as leftists is a bit single minded (even though they are). Sure, they both have done their partisan films, but one is far worse than the other. Big Hollywood’s editor-in-chief John Nolte has even gone as far as to defend Moore when he was appointed to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Board of Governors:

Yes, Michael Moore is a liar, a shameless propagandist and an anti-American leftist of the highest order. But he’s also one helluva talented filmmaker and it would be wildly hypocritical for me to believe or argue that anyone should be blacklisted from AMPAS due to their political beliefs. And that’s the only reason I could possibly use to argue against this appointment.

It doesn’t get any fairer than a conservative defending Moore because not doing so would support a blacklist mindset. Even still, Moore has dedicated his career to leftist causes.  Look at his films: Bowling for Columbine (a good film that ends up ruining itself with a weak plea for gun control), Fahrenheit 9/11 (a horribly partisan and dishonest portrayal of Bush enabling conspiracy theorists), and Sicko (a disgusting defense of socialism). Everything Moore directs (and writes and says) is to further a far Left agenda. Therefore, he is so painfully predictable, which is why it is so easy for the Right to go after him.

On the other hand, Guggenheim has directed the paranoid global warming holy film An Inconvenient Truth as well as a short for the 2008 Obama campaign. Yet Guggenheim differs from Moore in that he has also done a lot more work outside of political documentaries. If you look at his profile from imdb.com you will see he has directed episodes of Deadwood, Numbers, Alias, and even the conservative loved 24, a show Moore wouldn’t touch in fear of losing his leftist cred. Sure, An Inconvenient Truth is praised by leftists and hated by conservatives (generally speaking), but by creating a wide variety of content, Guggenheim gives an opportunity for both conservatives and liberals to appreciate his work.

So it isn’t fair to assert that liberals are better than conservatives because critics on the Left show balls by embracing a leftist filmmaker who makes a conservative argument (when the Right won’t respect Moore). The day that Moore steps outside of his self-loathing, socialist-loving fog bubble is when conservatives can respect him. Anyone who is honest about their politics will find good and bad on both sides. Guggenheim has apparently done this with Waiting for Superman. Until Moore decides to transform some of his propaganda films into useful documentaries, we will continue to wait, but I wouldn’t recommend holding your breath.

—–

Whatever his personal beliefs were as he began the process of documenting the fate of five children whose very futures rest on the less-than 10% chance of being accepted into a charter school, in the end Guggenheim risks the grave sin of apostasy as he courageously bucks the left-wing narrative to present a heartbreaking and damning exposé of the American public school system.

Had the exact same film been brought forth by a right-winger it would have had zero chance of creating any kind of national debate, much less change. But coming with Guggenheim’s clout and left-wing bona fides, there’s a chance his noble effort could spread a Road to Damascus virus among those who have for too long turned a blind eye towards an indefensibly immoral system propped up at the expense of children. Armed with facts and actual inconvenient truths, “Superman” deconstructs every lie told by politicians, union officials and bad teachers in defense of a status quo that destroys as many, if not more lives than drugs or gangs.

Anthony, a 5th grader from DC who lost his father to drugs; Francisco, a 2nd grader from the Bronx; Bianca, a kindergartner from Harlem whose working single mother can no longer afford Catholic school; Daisy, a Los Angeles fifth grader; and Emily a middle-class 8th grader from Silicon Valley, are all on the bubble – especially the first four who are minority children living in rundown inner-city neighborhoods and in families dealing with unemployment, under-employment and in all but one case, a single parent household. To say these kids are at risk is an understatement, and Guggenheim introduces us to them at what might be the most important crossroad of their lives. The parents know it, and because they’re incredibly intuitive, so do the kids. One path leads to what is most likely to be a hopeless future thanks to a failing public school with a horrific drop-out rate. The other path leads to a dynamic charter school (that receives both private and public money) freed from the shackles of an unreasonable, unethical and entitled teachers union where graduation rates can exceed 90%.

Geoffrey Canada

Incredibly, although it does appear to be the fairest method, the fate of American children desperate for a chance at a real education depends on a lottery system. Whether it’s bouncing bingo balls, a computer, or pulling names from a bucket — at schools across the country, every year hundreds of families gather in the hopes that Lady Luck won’t condemn their child to a “Failure Factory.”

To Guggenheim’s credit, a large part of his documentary focuses on what can and does work. If the film has a real-life Superman it’s Geoffrey Canada, a Harvard-educated reformer who intentionally chose the worst school district in the country to start a charter school in order to prove his belief that regardless of socio-economic background, with attentive teachers doing what it takes to make sure no child falls behind, these kids can be ready for college. Currently his Harlem-based charter school is producing much better graduation rates and a much higher percentage of students ready for college than the average suburban school.

If there’s a Superwoman, Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee is it. Her tireless fight against an intractable union culminates in the ridiculous and the tragic when the union refuses to even allow for a vote a proposal that could potentially double teacher salaries if in exchange they agree to accountability by giving up the tenure (earned after only three years) that makes it virtually impossible to fire them for anything. In one incredible aside, we learn that the State of New York spends $100 million a year on teachers who have been removed from the classroom for a potential fire-able offense and, while being paid full salary and benefits, hang out all day in what’s called the “Rubber Room” playing cards and reading newspapers as they’re put through a termination process that rarely results in termination.

Guggenheim doesn’t slam teachers, though. In fact, he has an enormous amount of respect for what they do and believes the good ones need to be paid better. But as one person informs us, the problem is that the unions see it as “a teacher, is a teacher, is a teacher,” and they fight tooth-and-nail against any proposal involving pay based on merit and make it impossible to get rid of the 6-10% of bad teachers who are shuffled from school to school and literally destroy lives by allowing their students to fall so far behind they eventually lose hope and drop out. If you’re looking for context, the national average of doctors and lawyers who lose their license is somewhere around 1 in 75, for teachers it’s a jaw-dropping 1 in 2500.

And a lack of funding is most certainly not the problem. As the film informs us, prior to the 1970s the American public education system was the envy of the world. But over the past 40 years as per student spending has risen (allowing for inflation) from $4,000 to $9,000, student performance rates have hit bottom when compared to other industrial nations.

If anything, Guggenheim sees money as the problem and doesn’t shy away from the fact that it’s Democrats in bed with the teachers unions – who just so happen to be the most powerful lobbying force in the country (oil companies are a distant second). The director even gives George W. Bush credit for reaching across the aisle to Senator Kennedy and at least trying accountability with No Child Left Behind. But as the film’s informative and creative animation (think Schoolhouse Rock) informs us, NCLB just isn’t the solution.

Schools are failing due to lack of funding? That’s a lie.

Kids from troubled homes and poor socio-economic backgrounds can’t learn? Another provable lie. And what proves it best is the devastated look on the faces of those parents who don’t win the lottery – who believe their child might now be, as one parent so memorably puts it, “doomed.”

“Waiting for Superman” is nothing less than God’s work and is as deserving of as much support as we can possibly give it. Furthermore — and who ever thought I’d write these words — the director of, yes, “An Inconvenient Truth” deserves our respect  Predictably, he’s already under fire from protesting teachers unions. But in the end Guggenheim might prove to be the real Superman to these kids. After all, the old Vulcan proverb says that only Nixon can go to China. Well, maybe only a progressive can finally and forever make this righteous case to the well-intentioned but misinformed liberals standing in the way of much needed reform. Let’s just hope there are enough of them out there.

UPDATE: Davis Guggenheim’s name was corrected.

This isn’t true for all of them. Ed Begley Jr. walks the walk, and there are everyday tree-huggers scattered throughout America quietly attempting to make work a sustainable lifestyle. You can smell them from here. But most environmentalists are lying liars who know they’re lying. Because if you honestly believe man is destroying the planet, that the apocalypse is nigh, you prepare for it. Most coastal elites are Global Warming believers and yet Global Warming, we’re told, will make the oceans rise to the point that will someday put much of the coast, especially Manhattan underwater. So why aren’t coastal elites moving inland? Why aren’t they pulling a Lex Luthor and buying up all that cheap property that will someday be the new coast? And why do they continue to burn fossil fuels, enjoy air conditioning, and otherwise consume? Because deep down inside they know what we know: it’s all bull shit Socialism disguised as nonsense.

People who believe, truly believe that an environmental apocalypse – be it through increased temperatures, a rise in sea levels, or super-hurricanes — is imminent, act as though it’s imminent. They don’t live in big, fancy, air-conditioned homes propped precariously on the side of the Hollywood Hills and purchased through the dividends of an unnecessary energy-burning, landfill-filling industry. They don’t run up incredible electric bills. They don’t purchase second homes large enough to house Michelle Obama’s entourage.

However, after an “awakening,” courtesy of former Vice President Al Gore’s wildly inaccurate propaganda-horror film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” James J. Lee believed.

Let’s keep in mind that “An Inconvenient Truth” is not a work of fiction. Well, at least it’s not presented as such. Al Gore’s Academy Award-winning documentary is not  “The Day After Tomorrow.” Hollywoodists, using the mighty propaganda power found in the sound and fury of the modern day motion picture, brought a Vice President of the United States before the world to inform us that man was killing the planet.

And yesterday, someone who took that film at its word, who took Al Gore at his word, acted on it.

James J. Lee might have been crazy as Ed Schultz at a Glenn Beck rally … but he believed. And if you believe, truly believe in Al Gore’s doomsday scenario, it’s not hard to convince yourself that going Jack Bauer — employing extra-legal and violent methods — for the greater good of Gaia is a moral and even a heroic choice. A better example might be John Brown, the fanatical abolitionist who committed horrible crimes in the noble cause of freeing the slaves. But at the time, slavery was a very real evil. Al Gore’s doomsday scenario is not.

Not for a second do I believe that Al Gore or anyone involved in the creation of “An Inconvenient Truth” wanted or even imagined that someday someone would strap on explosives, walk into a building with a daycare center, and take hostages in the hopes of terrorizing a cable outlet into creating more programming similar to “An Inconvenient Truth.” Nor do I believe that they — or anyone — is responsible for lunatics who take political messaging to a violent extreme.

But Gore and Co. are consciously and purposefully using the most powerful propaganda device ever created to spread self-serving lies in the hopes of scaring us into voting for the kind of government that will give the elite more control over our lives. And so there’s simply no getting around the fact that had these people (and their media minions) inspired with the truth instead of a lie, yesterday’s tragedy might not have happened.

Not Evil Just Wrong examines the true cost of expensive energy for those who already live in poverty or fixed incomes.

One of the highlights of the Alaska tour was a visit to Colony High School in Wasilla where we screened an excerpt of the documentary and took questions from students.

Sarah Palin, Wasilla’s most famous resident, did not attend but a large number of children were there and seemed interested and asked interesting questions.

Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth has been shown many times, in many classes at the school and the students seemed to appreciate an alternative.

However it seems that the school authorities were not so keen on the alternative.

In an unprecedented move they insisted that any student who wanted to see an excerpt of Not Evil Just Wrong must have a permission slip from their parents.

The school authorities put no such condition in place before screening An Inconvenient Truth even though both documentaries have the same MPAA rating.

Perhaps even more significantly, Alaska is a state where the state can arrange an abortion for a student without notifying their parents. Regardless of your opinions on abortion (or the issue of parental notification) the Alaskan authorities seem intent on sending out a clear message.

If you want to watch a documentary that challenges the liberal environmental consensus we will introduce barriers to access. If you want to have an abortion parents don’t need to know and we can probably fit it in after gym class.

It Might Get Loud’s central conceit is simple and elegant in principle, but surprisingly messy and complex on screen: Take three eminent guitarists of differing styles and generations, interview them individually, get them to open up about their relationship with their instrument and then, for the film’s climax, throw them together on a sound-stage surrounded by guitars and see what happens.

Guggenheim’s choice of guitarists is a surprising one that somehow makes sense; Jack White of The White Stripes and The Raconteurs (in his 30’s), The Edge of U2 (in his 40’s), and Jimmy Page of The Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin (in his 60’s).

The three musicians’ contrasting philosophies make for a fascinating musical study, as well as some unintentionally amusing moments: Page in one scene is shown lovingly caressing his Les Paul, comparing it to a woman, deserving of reverence and respect; White, meanwhile, sees his guitar as essentially an antagonist, a thing to be fought and conquered, and is shown repeatedly doing just that, bloodying his hands in nightly battle with his red and white axes. In another scene, Edge is shown talking about the impetus for both the formation of U2 and his own notoriously minimalist playing style – in the 70’s, he says, rock got too big and self-indulgent, with the kind of endless guitar and drum solos parodied to such great effect in This Is Spinal Tap. Of course Edge knows, but is too polite to mention, that Led Zeppelin was both prime instigator and practitioner of the grandiosity he laments.

Another fascinating juxtaposition: Edge makes a fetish of technology, explaining in great detail the many and varied pedals, amps, dials, and diodes required to transform his limited number of plucked notes into the soaring U2 anthems we know and love. Meanwhile, White is sneeringly suspicious of digital technology, and carefully guards his soul and music from its polluting effects by choosing for his instruments old, cheap, barely tunable creatures of wood and plastic.

The personalities of the three men are likewise contrapuntal: White practically stoops under the weight of the chip on his shoulder; Edge is calm, almost serene, even as he discusses the frustration of the compositional process. And Page…Page seems unsettled, even haunted. But more on that in a moment.

The highlight of the film, of course, is the much heralded “summit,” when the three men come together on a Los Angeles sound stage. The meeting is initially awkward, but soon they are loosening up, showing one another their songs, talking about the music they made and which made them. At one point, Page stands and starts playing the riff to “Whole Lotta Love,” to White and Edge’s giddy delight. Edge tries, with limited success, to teach Page to play “I Will Follow” (“Are you sure about that chord?” Page asks). White plays “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground” for his elders, whose faces betray admiration and affection for their younger colleague. And when the three of them jam on “In My Time of Dying”…well, magic as only music can make.

It Might Get Loud is filled with such lovely moments. Guggenheim’s triumph is finding ways to illuminate not only the minds of these men, but the music which animates them: White surrounded by misty mountains builds a guitar out of a board, nails, wire, and a coke bottle; Edge travels to the school where he first met his band-mates some 30 years ago, pointing out the billboard where the notice for musicians was first posted; Page explains his “light and shade” compositional philosophy at home by picking up his guitar and playing a lilting and lonely “Ramble On.”

For those who know “Ramble On,” propelled on record byJohn Paul Jones’ slippery bass line and John Bonham’s ticking percussion, Page’s ad hoc rendition here is shocking – indeed, at first it is barely recognizable. But there it is, stripped down to the bare chords, revealing itself to be that rarest of God’s creatures – more beautiful naked than ornamented.

And here the comparison between Page on the one hand and Jack White and The Edge on the other falls away – the two younger guitarists, as accomplished and skilled as they are, are not, in fact, Jimmy Page’s peers; their music when stripped down seems less, not more.

Edge and White have something else in common: They both have ongoing musical concerns. White has at least three bands he heads, The White Stripes, The Dead Weather, and The Raconteurs, as well as a flourishing producing career (check out his exquisite production on Loretta Lynn’s fantastic Van Lear Rose). Edge and U2, meanwhile, have just released their most creatively, if not commercially, successful album in a decade, and are currently selling out stadiums across North America and Europe.

Page has not been so lucky. Since Led Zeppelin collapsed in the aftermath of John Bonham’s death in 1980, what little music Page has made has been the palest shadow of Zeppelin’s greatness, sub-par albums made with sub-par collaborators like The Firm and David Coverdale. These efforts seem to confirm his fans’ (and perhaps his own) worst fears – that Page cannot function musically outside the Zeppelin framework, a framework which he created, led, and nurtured.

In December 2007, a one-off reunion show at London’s ’02 Arena led to hopes and plans of a full-scale Zeppelin reunion, a new album and tour with Jason Bonham taking his father’s place on the skins. Alas, it was not to be: Zep vocalist Robert Plant is enjoying some of the best commercial and critical success of his career with his collaboration with bluegrass crooner Alison Krauss, and apparently and understandably wants no part of Jimmy Page’s nostalgia trip.

Where does that leave Page? He has written two new songs for It Might Get Loud, titled “Embryo No. 1″ and “Embryo No. 2,” so called because they are sketches of ideas that may or may not evolve into full song-hood. One of the songs makes a brief appearance in the film, but so far there are no plans for either of them to appear in finished form, nor does there seem to be any other Jimmy Page solo work on the horizon: When asked what Page would be doing in the coming year, his manager Peter Mensch recently told MusicRadar: “Fuck if I know.”

As the film closes, Page speaks candidly about his fears of the day when the creative coals are at last still and cold. That day comes to all artists, he notes; all you can do is try and make sure that it remains as far away as possible.

The painful evidence suggests that, for the architect of “Stairway to Heaven” and “Kashmir,” that day has already come. But maybe it doesn’t have to be that way. Maybe Page’s creative straight jacket is self-sutured. Maybe he just needs someone to believe in him.

I do.

Then they answered their own question when they decided it was their role to protect Al Gore from An Inconvenient Question.

Phelim McAleer, the director of Not Evil Just Wrong, asked Al Gore about the British Court Case which found his documentary An Inconvenient Truth had nine significant errors.

McAleer said that given his documentary is being shown in schools – does he accept the errors and has he done anything to correct them?

However, Mr. Gore declined to address the issue and when asked for a straight answer from McAleer – the response of the Society of Enironmental Journalists was not to applaud one of their own for bringing truth to power but instead they cut the mic of a journalist.

Continue reading at noteviljustwrong.com.

]]> http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/annmcelhinney/2009/10/11/al-gore-the-death-of-journalism/feed/ 646 http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/mrulle/2009/07/01/hollywoods-silent-spring/ http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/mrulle/2009/07/01/hollywoods-silent-spring/#comments Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:44:21 +0000 Michael S. Rulle Jr. http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/?p=173354 The sweet pretty things are in bed now of course. The city fathers, they’re trying to endorse, the reincarnation of Paul Revere’s horse. But the town has no need to be nervous. The ghost of Belle Starr, she hands down her wits, to Jezebel the nun, she violently knits. A bald wig for Jack the Ripper who sits, at the head of the Chamber of Commerce.

Mama’s in the factory, she ain’t got no shoes. Daddy’s in the alley, he’s lookin’ for food; I’m in the kitchen with the tombstone blues. “Tombstone Blues” – Bob Dylan

Perhaps the sudden death of pop icon Michael Jackson had many Hollywood stars contemplating their own future obituaries. But the industry, which has been strongly committed to promoting the dangers of man-made global warming, was strangely silent on the Waxman-Markey bill which squeaked though the House last week. The United States economy, i.e., actual real human beings who live in America, continues to suffer from the enormous Obama-lead government’s allocation of resources by massive deficit spending and taxes. The axis of deception changes with each specific fiscal proposal.

The latest comedy of abominations, named–with its usual Orwellian precision–The American Clean Energy and Security Act, was passed Friday by the House of Representatives. The Pelosi/Waxman/Markey trio lead this charge. The winners, in this latest travesty, are that new breed of Obama entrepreneur, the mega wealthy looking for Government handouts. But the Country “has no need to be nervous.” After all, they are simply fixing the “failed policies of the Bush Administration.” But as legislation goes, this Energy Act really takes the cake. As Arnold Kling so succinctly put it, “The cap and trade legislation maximizes rent-seeking (favoritism toward particular businesses) and minimizes carbon reduction.”

This bill was resisted both by Greenpeace and those growing numbers who realize the whole premise of this Act of Congress, “man-made global warming,” is a farce. I have written about global warming before: James Hansen: Man of Science » , Al Gore’s Animal Farm and “Red Flags,” and Short Update on Squealer Al and a Compliant Brokaw. The Global Warming Petition Project has 31,000 signatories from scientists in the US who oppose the so-called climate crisis “consensus.” Their work is summarized in this this paper. The EPA’s own suppressed report skeptical of global warming can be read here CEI Releases Global Warming Study Censored by EPA . And the Senate Minority Report, with 650 signatories, can be read here US Senate Minority Report on Global Warming.

There is no consensus on “man-made” global warming. There are no demonstrated falsifiable theories that support this concept. It started out as an ideological movement and has gradually morphed into a game of crony-capitalism. Much of the world has already moved on. The two fastest growing economies, India and China, don’t even pretend they will participate. This bill will only add further costs to our already over burdened economy. I clearly don’t expect any reasoned argument to persuade those who have chosen to believe in “man-made” global warming. That would be too much to wish for. But what one should expect proponents of that view to be true to their principles. Greenpeace Opposes Waxman-Markey because, in their view, it “sets emission reduction targets far lower than science demands, then undermines even those targets with massive offsets. The giveaways and preferences in the bill will actually spur a new generation of nuclear and coal-fired power plants to the detriment of real energy solutions. To support such a bill is to abandon the real leadership that is called for at this pivotal moment in history.  We simply no longer have the time for legislation this weak.” While I obviously disagree, at least they know a pig when they see one. They know this bill does little to eliminate greenhouse gasses.

Where do those Hollywood promoters of the catastrophic dangers of global warming stand on this bill? Are they on the same side as Greenpeace? Not from what I can tell. The Hollywood eco-establishment are those guys who made hundreds of millions trying to terrify the public into action. Given this bill will reduce global warming by “seven percent in 40 years,” according to those who believe in this “science,” one would think these highly visible committed Hollywood activists would be in a state of outrage. But then one would be wrong. Let’s start with “An Inconvenient Truth” Academy Award winning Director Davis Guggenheim and his star Nobel Prize winning docu-hero, Al Gore.

Guggenheim, who said upon first meeting with Al Gore, “I left after an hour and a half thinking that global warming is the most important issue, and if I do one thing in my life it’s to help more people see Al Gore do this. I had no idea how you’d make a film out of it, but I wanted to try.” Al Gore gave a speech in DC on July 17, 2008 and called on Americans to completely abandon electricity generated by fossil fuels within 10 years, and replace them with carbon-free renewables like solar, wind and geothermal. He said “the survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk….{and} the future of human civilization is at stake.”

What does this bill propose? That in ten years, 15%, not the 100% Gore says is needed, of the United States energy (not global energy) needs must come from “renewable” sources. By 2020, “greenhouse gas emissions” must be reduced by 17%.  However, “offsets” can be purchased that permits no reduction at all in CO2 emissions. These offsets include “activities such as protecting rain forests in Brazil — that are deemed climate-friendly.” Who will decide when an “offset” is appropriate? How much do you think those offset decisions will be worth? These are mere details that no one knows the answer to–but we can easily guess. This bill will also tax imports from countries that do not have the same standards as the US, which is a direct sales tax on the US consumer. This is absurd beyond belief. It is no wonder people who care strongly about this issue oppose it, regardless of which side they are on.

The entire premise of “An Inconvenient Truth” is the need for radical action now. So Al Gore must oppose this bill, correct? No. Instead Al Gore is the leading “rent seeker,” heavily lobbying Congress to pass this bill calling it “as important to our time as the Civil Rights legislation was to the minorities of the 1960’s and the Marshall Plan of was to America during the 1940’s.” Coincidentally, his venture capital firm is heavily invested in…….Global warming money making schemes. Guggenheim is onto other projects and has been silent on this bill. Davis Guggenheim documents Jimmy Page. But Guggenheim and Gore do not stand alone.

Leonardo DiCaprio has also been a very visible proponent of the dangers of global warming.  He was honored by Mikhael Gorbachev earlier this year when he received the International Green Film Award in Berlin. His website is dedicated to various “green” causes and has even written columns in Time Magazine in support of Van Jones, Obama’s advisor on “green jobs.” Congress is debating the most important pieces of legislation on global warming to date, yet he is silent on his website about its passage. Keanu Reeves and Alanis Morrisette narrated The Great Warming, an absurd ideological screed based on the book by Lydia Dotto. Where do they stand and Waxman-Markey? They, too, are silent. How about Oprah Winfrey, Laurie David , and Bill Maher? The list is endless. If they have spoken out, I have not seen it. These people are always at the forefront of appearing morally superior. So why aren’t they publicly involved in arguably the most important political Energy debate this country has had? Why aren’t they on their megaphones urging true reform?

But this is not really surprising. Being green in Hollywood has usually been about moral preening and self-aggrandizement, not actual legislative change. They are no different than Al Gore. This is a promotional device designed to advance their careers by being both visible on these causes yet indifferent to actual legislation. In fact, they may even have a direct interest in no serious legislation passing. This way, they can keep themselves relevant. Eventually, I hope and believe, this issue will die a deserving death.

Like modern day Leni Riefenstahls, Hollywood has been at the ideological forefront in support of the dangers of man-made global warming. But few change their lifestyles. Oprah bragged openly about her private jet at a graduation speech at Duke University. Like Al Gore, they give every indication of being in on the con. It does not really affect them. Paying a few thousand more a year in fuel costs is irrelevant. So what if we have another tax on the rest of the country?

The good news, if one can possibly call it that, is this bill has smoked out the fakes, who many of us have known were there all along. Plus the Senate may finally put the final stake in this vampire’s heart. If so, perhaps the Obama honeymoon can be declared officially over.