B&B Presents: Ecological Apocalypse II: Nature’s Revenge

I had so much fun the last time around, I have decided to do a second round of Man Vs. Ecology Pictures.
Again, it is going to be a documentary saddled up next to a Cheesy B-movie.

7:00 pm

Manufactured Landscapes (2006) Canada

I usually do not do this, but I will use the text out of the studio’s promotion to give you an Idea. It is just that eloquent.
“Manufactured Landscapes is a feature length documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Burtynsky makes large-scale photographs of ‘manufactured landscapes’ – quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines, dams. He photographs civilization’s materials and debris, but in a way people describe as stunning or beautiful, and so raises all kinds of questions about ethics and aesthetics without trying to easily answer them.
The film follows Burtynsky to China as he travels the country photographing the evidence and effects of that country’s massive industrial revolution. Sites such as the Three Gorges Dam, which is bigger by 50% than any other dam in the world and displaced over a million people, factory floors over a kilometre long, and the breathtaking scale of Shanghai’s urban renewal are subjects for his lens and our motion picture camera.
Shot in Super-16mm film, Manufactured Landscapes extends the narrative streams of Burtynsky’s photographs, allowing us to meditate on our profound impact on the planet and witness both the epicentres of industrial endeavour and the dumping grounds of its waste. What makes the photographs so powerful is his refusal in them to be didactic. We are all implicated here, they tell us: there are no easy answers. The film continues this approach of presenting complexity, without trying to reach simplistic judgements or reductive resolutions. In the process, it tries to shift our consciousness about the world and the way we live in it.”

To give you a further idea of the quality of this Doc., when I was in T.O. during the Toronto International Film Festival in September I was in an elevator with a bunch of film makers who were raving about how visually astounding this film was. When I checked it had been sold out almost right away.

9:00 pm

Gojira tai Hedorah AKA Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster (1971) Japan
For a bit of fun at the end of the evening I want to show this classic and campy Kaiju monster battle. It had not been released yet during the last Ecological Apocalypse night.
The Gojira series, especially the original, is one of the best for popularizing concern over threats to the Earths Balance. Lost in the 1950s American Version is that Godzilla started out as an anti nuclear testing statement, especially due to the activity in the pacific during the Cold War. This 1971 version directed by Yoshimitsu Banno was more intended for children and the ecological statement is fairly weak. Keep in mind that weak usually lends to more laughter. In this version: Gojira, defender of the Earth, has become a national phenomenon, akin to the Loch Ness Monster, especially for children. The monster has been ingrained into the Japanese consciousness. However, the Japanese citizens and industrialists still do not realize that destroying the balance of the Earth will summon the millennia-old protector. The story follows a young boy who finds a creature, which thrives on toxic waste, naming it Hedorah, a pun on the Japanese word for sludge, hedoro. This monster sucks on smokestacks, oozes at the screaming populace, and belches poisonous fumes. In his dreams, the boy wishes for Gojira to defeat Hedorah and for people be persuaded to stop polluting the earth. Gojira, as the great protector of the planet’s balance, fights the monster in a rage against humanity’s destruction of his ecology.

If Manufactured Landscapes is unavailable, I will alternate with:
The Day After Tomorrow (2004) USA a blockbuster disaster flick about climate change.