If Dickens were a film critic, then late December every year would have seen his editor coming around saying words to the effect of "Charles, 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,' sure, but can you split that up, pad it out, give me some space-filler for the week after Christmas?" After the usual end-of-year list-making, I found myself, as ever, just a little bit taken aback by the force and fervor of countering salvos from people out there in the ether who disagree with your subjective opinions. I know my friends who write for newspapers get their share of bizarre letters; I know that being on TV statistically increases your chances of being murdered. But I found myself asking, as I often do when my opinions garner the kind of spittle-flecked crazy talk that my end-of-year 'Worst' list did, what is it specifically about the internet that makes people jerks? And couldn't Al Gore have foreseen that when he first invented it?
I was also thinking about this outside of my job duties as professional movie watcher because I had one of those birthdays over the holidays -- one of the tipping point birthdays, the arrival of an age where you're not old, but you can sure as hell see it coming, even though you have to squint. And it occurred to me that there were plenty of things I grew up with that the subsequent generations did not have the chance to experience (8-tracks, Manimal, Ronald Reagan) and that there were many things the subsequent generations grew up with that I did not have the chance to experience as part of my youth -- most notably, the internet. And when you think about it, what the internet really offers at the worst is a heady cocktail of instant gratification (Google searches, bit torrent, VOD, etc.) and absolute anonymity (blog commenting, p2p networks, cryptography, etc.) You can say anything you like, instantly see it out in the world, and it probably won't come back to you. In other words, the internet offers everything that a grown-up person should not, or would not, want. Future generations will spend their entire lives swaddled and coddled in the clawing arms of those two horrible forces, and that makes me a little sad. And then I realized I had found myself worrying about the kids, which of course means that I am, in fact, old.
The cure? I went and saw a movie. Many people ask what the point of Top Ten and Bottom Ten lists is, but for me, I read them to track down stuff I missed -- films that may not have played here in San Francisco, that I may have missed at one of the film festivals I was lucky enough to cover this year, or that may have just passed me by, or slipped my mind. This year, I found myself reading other people's 'Top Ten' lists in one browser window and adding films to my Netflix queue in the other. (Up next: Day Night Day Night and Tears of the Black Tiger. No, not as a double bill.) And early in the year, the Red Vic, San Francisco's plucky worker-owned rep theater was showing one of the films I missed from 2007, Manufactured Landscapes, on the big screen.
I'm not going to go on at great length about Manufactured Landscapes, but I will note in a sidebar that you should get a sense of the gloom inherent to San Francisco's turn-of-the-year rainy season when I tell you that sneaking in a matinee of a documentary about a photographer devoted to large-scale photographs of massive modern construction projects, electronics and scrap recycling work camps, mining sites and industrial fabrication areas -- in China -- made a break from the damp and dark. Documentarian Jennifer Baichwal followed photographer Edward Burtynsky for the film, and if the movie isn't as impressive as Burtynsky's actual photos are, it's close -- a great, gripping look at the realities of global commerce and the scale of progress. And not to be overly simplistic, but watching Chinese workers reclaiming valuable materials from circuit boards that had been shipped over from North America to be recycled, melting high-tech down over open fires, simultaneously made me think that if rudeness on the internet is my biggest problem, my life is pretty much a cakewalk, and also that I never want to buy anything, ever again. Once you watch where things come from, and where they wind up -- and think about the oil required to get them across the ocean twice -- it's a bit harder to get excited about that 150-inch TV everybody loved at CES.
It's striking when a movie says more, even indirectly, about the nature of modern commerce in 90 minutes of near-silent footage than you've heard from the clichés and homilies and pre-spun phrases of all the presidential debates so far. Manufactured Landscapes starts with a simple shot that becomes astonishing, as the camera slowly moves right-to-left across the production floor of a factory in China. It keeps going. And keeps going. And keeps going. The shot goes on so long that your mind starts to wander: What are they making? And what are they making per hour? Why aren't Americans making what they're making? Would what they're making -- oh, I think it's steam irons -- really cost that much more if they were made in America? But your mind isn't wandering at all, really; in fact, just the opposite happens. And as the camera moves right to left, you take in the epic majesty and life-sized drudgery of the iron-makers, and marvel at all this effort and industry marshaled so that you and I can save a few bucks when we go to Wal-Mart to buy something. Joe Wright's five-and-a-half minute-long Dunkirk retreat tracking shot in Atonement is one of the more talked-about scenes of the year; it certainly demonstrated that Mr. Wright had the vision and the resources to craft a genteel spectacle that evokes the all-encompassing terror and surreal beauty of a past war. But Ms. Baichwal does something more impressive just by finding the right real place at the right pace, and captures the all-encompassing terror and surreal beauty of right now. Mr. Wright takes five-and-a-half minutes and gives you something to wonder at in Atonement, but Ms. Baichwal uses her steady, unblinking eight minutes at the start of Manufactured Landscapes to do something even more impressive; she gives you something to atone for.