Such a frustrating disappointment

Purely Joyful Movie!

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

The movie runs out of plot and jokes well before the end of a two-hour running time, long for a light comedy.

This is part of the money machine of Adam Curtis. Smoke and mirrors carefully built to make up a plausible fairy tale.Back in Soviet Russia nobody knows what is going on. Even the leaders are uninterested. 5000 or 5000000 dead? Who cares? Staying in power is so very important. Illiterate peasants and workers rise up against a Medieval social order that is already killing them by the millions. What next? Nobody knows. Raised with all sorts of holy books they change the holy book of their village with the bible of brother Marx. And like all holy books, few are able to read and even fewer care to read it.So this is where preacher Curtis enters. With the power of hindsight he can take dubious acts and put them on a string to dance for him as a sideshow while he preaches. An engineer can be dead for having sex with the lesser party leader's wife. An engineer can drink as much as he needs to make Stalin jokes. Anything is good enough to make room for the next engineer. And when the said engineer is coming from a bourgeois background, having as much as bourgeois friends, things become easier, so much easier. Yet preacher Curtis can show with archive footage how the engineer was executed for trying to do whatever preacher Curtis needs for the next act of his show.Contact me with Questions, Comments or Suggestions ryitfork @ bitmail.ch

Adam Curtis' first documentary series explores the tragicomic consequences of engineers', mathematicians', scientists', and bureaucrats' attempts to apply their specialized theories to a wide range of phenomenon, creating, each time, more problems than they solve.The Soviet Union, for instance, wanted its socialist economy to provide a better life for its people, and in "The Engineer's Plot," bureaucrats, engineers, and workers describe how their leaders believed that massive industrialization would allow them to do this. But their increasing dependence on engineering and computer-derived targets only hamstrung politicians and bewildered citizens.Meanwhile, their foe, the United States, turned to mathematicians to help them derive a strategy for waging the Cold War. In "To the Brink of Eternity," researchers, mathematicians, politicians, and soldiers relate how game theory and mathematical modeling seemed like useful tools, but only created a world of paranoia and brutality when applied to the arms race and the war in Vietnam.Across the Atlantic, Britain, struggling to keep its head up in a world that seemed to be passing it by, turned to economists to help it become prosperous and powerful again. In "The League of Gentlemen," economists, politicians, and businessmen reveal that their attempts to use Keynesian economics, monetarism, and, finally, laissez-faire capitalism to create wealth failed and that they, actually, have no idea how, or whether, market systems work.Back in the U.S., chemists, entomologists, farmers, and ecologists describe, in "Goodbye, Mrs. Ant," how the chemical industry tried to change agriculture though the use of pesticides and then attempted to justify or hide the unsettling consequences of these poisons on human and environmental health.In Africa, the Gold Coast's reliance on a new hydro-electric power plant to transform it into an industrialized nation backfired. In "Black Power," politicians and businessmen discuss how international markets and Cold-War politics transformed the project from an unlikely panacea into a corrupt poverty trap.And across the industrialized world, physicists who felt guilty for unleashing nuclear fission on the world discussed the feasibility of nuclear power. In "A Is for Atom," they, engineers, politicians, and businessmen recall how dreams of an atomic-powered utopia blinded them to the practical, safety, and economic problems of fission-derived energy, resulting in several major radiation leaks, two core meltdowns, and tons of unstorable waste products.Curtis' juxtaposition of archival footage with historical PR films emphasizes the futile, and frequently absurd, plight of technocrats who attempt to bludgeon the world into a shape that fits technical procedures which read more like science-fiction than science.

Pandora's box is a set of six documentaries concerning the impact of science and technology and society the 20th Century. Each episode is a story of how leaders of different societies strove to create a better, more controllable world based on science and technology but in the end their efforts failed when they came in contact with human desire, emotion and politics. Although the premise sounds deadly dull, Adam Curtis' documentaries are always entertaining. The irreverent use of fifties music and clips from old movies serve to enliven otherwise dry subjects such as Keynesian economics versus Monetarism (Episode 3 "The League of Gentlemen") or the story of DDT (episode 4 "Goodbye, Mrs Ant"). The story behind the story is another constant theme and it is here that the documentaries really shine, there is lots of footage and material and interviews with key people showing that a great deal of work went into the researching of this series. The interviews in particular are of real historic interest and could never be repeated, as many of the individuals and institutions have since passed away. Where he tends to fall down is that he sometimes makes some very tenuous links and comparisons. For instance in comparing the causes Three-Mile-island Disaster with Chernobyl, ("A is for Atom", Episode 6) Curtis seems to ignore the obvious point that in the Soviet Union safety standards were looser and life was cheaper than in the US. In episode 5 ("Black Power"), Curtis relates the story of the Volta Dam in Ghana and how the dreams of its leader Kwame Nkrumah to industrialize fell apart when big business got involved forcing him to accept poor business terms to get the dam built and the country descended into corruption. Curtis seems far too soft on Nkrumah's own responsibility for the mess his country ended up in. Although decidedly left-wing, Curtis is no communist and even if your political views are right wing you will find this series thought provoking. For example Episode 1 ("The Engineer's Plot") on the Soviet Union is the best expose of the failures of state planning that you will see. Curtis has footage from the last days of the Soviet Union's planning system with interviews with the poor benighted Russians actually trying to make it work. Taxi drivers have to drive in circles to meet their mileage quota. Shoe manufacturers discover that their customers want platform shoes but by the time the factory is built, the shoes are out of fashion. The story of DDT (Episode 4 "Goodbye Mrs Ant") showed how the sciences of entomology and ecology were abused for political means by the environmental movement. The lawyer behind the case gleefully showed his strategy of showing that even minuscule amounts of chemical can be harmful. When it was subsequently proved that DDT was detectable in mothers milk, the public outcry was sufficient to get it banned. The fact that DDT itself is actually harmless to people is demonstrated rather shockingly by one advocate actually eating the stuff. Curtis is careful not to say that DDT is good or bad per se, just that when politics and business got involved, genuine science was drowned out. You definitely get the feeling there is a moral to each of these stories but it is hard to say precisely what that message is. Perhaps it is we should be more skeptical about science. Perhaps it is that rationality is impossible outside science. In any case this is not unbiased history, Curtis has very particular and even unique slants on the stories that he tells. Despite this it does not suffer from being opinion. It is both entertaining and informing, whatever side of the argument you prefer.