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Dexter: The Seventh Season

There's no way to discuss the seventh and penultimate season of Showtime's hit Dexter without acknowledging how the previous year ended. Therefore, if you haven't finished the sixth season, stop reading now. You've got work to do.
05/21/2013 | Comments 0

Nightfall

As Simon Lam gets older, he gets better. The veteran actor has appeared in such in seminal HK action films of the 1990s as Once Upon a Time in China (opposite Jet Li) and Bullet in the Head (directed by John Woo); in the aughts, he graced audience and critical favorites Election and Ip Man.
05/20/2013 | Comments 0

Grand Duel

Lee Van Cleef enjoyed a secondary career in Italy cranking out spaghetti Westerns, with little regard to quality. However, 1972’s Grand Duel — aka The Big Showdown — is deserving of its Grand label. No wonder Quentin Tarantino borrowed its sweeping theme song by Luis Bacalov for Kill Bill; you'll recognize it in two notes.
05/20/2013 | Comments 0

The Last Stand

Early in The Last Stand, the small-town sheriff played by Arnold Schwarzenegger says, "It's my day off. Should be a quiet weekend." That's the new way of saying, "I've got one week to retirement," because it signals — with flashing neon and everything — that life is going to royally upend those plans.
05/17/2013 | Comments 0

Texas Chainsaw

One of the most inconsistent franchises in movie history is the one beget by Tobe Hooper's 1974 classic, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. How does one follow all those less-than-beloved sequels? Lionsgate's latest in the series — the seventh — has a solution: Ignore 'em.
05/17/2013 | Comments 0
Home · Articles · Movies · Documentary · Into Eternity
Documentary

Into Eternity


Timely, visually crisp documentary

Rod Lott May 18th, 2011  

To paraphrase Peter Graves’ pedophile pilot in “Airplane!,” “Joey, do you like movies about nuclear waste facilities?”

If so, the Oklahoma City Museum of Art is running one, “Into Eternity,” Friday through Sunday. And talk about timely; one of its tenets is that the world above ground is too unstable to store nuclear waste, as the recent earthquake — and resulting plant disaster — in Japan proved.

As one of the scientists interviewed in this documentary says, “You can’t make nuclear waste go away. You can’t make nuclear waste harmless.” So the best we can do is seal it up until it no longer is hazardous: 100,000 years.

Director Michael Madsen (not the actor, although he’d do it for a six-pack of PBR), looks at the underground tunnels of Onkalo, a Finnish facility being designed to last at least that long, and won’t even be completed until the 22nd century. His camera snakes and swirls slowly around Onkalo’s insides, with Kubrickian awe and resolve.

Equally purposeful are the film’s crisp graphics, from its title cards to a computer map of the facility, whose twisting tunnels digging deep resemble the Umbrella Corporation in the “Resident Evil” franchise. One sequence eerily depicts the radioactive cloud that grew over Chernobyl after that city’s 1986 nuclear accident.

There’s no real narrative drive to the film, however, although Madsen tries to shoehorn one in. It’s his face that greets the viewer in the opening moments, and his Dieter-esque voice we hear throughout as he tosses about philosophical questions, often ending with the rhetorical but pretentious, “How is it with you?”

Visually, quite fine, thanks for asking.
 
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