Movies -- A Recap -- Part XIV -- The Documentary Edition

I love trains, but not like Darius McCollum does.  Off the Rails is his story.  He has Asperger's Syndrome, and trains are his thing.  So much so, that he has been repeatedly jailed, dozens of times, for impersonating New York City transit workers.  The movie is not only a profile of Mr. McCollum and his legal woes, but also an impugning of the strictures of the legal system and its complete inability to deal with someone like Mr. McCollum.

Most Likely to Succeed was a bit of a roller coaster in terms of my feelings for the characters.  At the start of the film, I liked characters and disliked others.  Later in the movie, my feelings switched.  For some of them, they switched back again.  If you ever wanted a reminder of how circumstances can affect a person's choices in life, this is the movie for you.  They could have done more with this, in my opinion, but the point is there. Overall it was a good watch.

We followed up our viewing of The Safe Side of the Fence with Atomic Homefront.  I wanted to link back to my post about Safe Side, but I couldn't find it.  Did I really not write about it?  Just in case I managed somehow to omit it, here's a quick recap: it's the story of St. Louis's own nuclear disaster.  Okay, it's a bit more nuanced than that - it's in some ways the story of St. Louis's one-time corporate success in partnering with the government on the Manhattan Project, followed by a whole lot of leftover radioactive material which injured and killed a lot of employees and to this day continues to contaminate the city.  It's a pretty sad story.

Back to Atomic Homefront.  It zooms in on one of those leftover contaminated sites in Bridgeton, Missouri called the West Lake Landfill.  The radioactive waste from that site has contaminated the soil and groundwater of nearby neighborhoods, but nobody who is responsible for the dumping seems to care or has ever been truly held accountable and remediation has been minimal, despite it being designated a Superfund site and being on the National Priorities List.  And - even more fun - the Bridgeton Landfill, which is immediately adjacent to the radioactive dump site, has for years had an underground fire smoldering away and getting ever closer to that radioactive waste.  What will happen when it gets there?  I guess we'll find out, since nobody is doing anything to stop it.

In a welcome change of topic from radioactive atomic waste, we stumbled upon a short film called Peter and the Columns.  Two rock climbers - one a local newbie and one an international superstar - decided to race each other up a stretch of rock in Eugene, Oregon.  Before they could race, they both suffered accidents which set them back; the former had a TBI from a bike accident, and the latter broke both legs in a fall.  Not to be deterred, they set about their recovery so they could participate in the long-anticipated race.

Return of the River is another "save nature" documentary, and it is a good one.  It's the story of the destruction and removal of a dam on the Elwha River in the Olympic Peninsula of Washington.  Unlike the next film, this one did a pretty good job of profiling people on different sides of the argument over whether or not dam removal was the right thing to do.  If anything, the Native American voices tended to overpower the others, but that seems right somehow. It was a bit long, though.

In contrast to Return of the River, Artifishal was not interested in all perspectives.  I guess that's okay, not every movie has to be, but for me really unbalanced movies feel less helpful.  Which is not to say tha
t I'm taking a position that fish hatcheries are good for the natural fauna of a river, but this film's weak attempts to include a voice from the "other side" seemed comical in light of how unbalanced it was.  Still has some good stuff in it, though, about the impending destruction of the wild salmon population.  And the full movie is available for free here.