Chasing Ice (now playing in Los Angeles
and New York before a national rollout) reveals the staggering damage done to Earth’s
ice caps as a result of human-caused global warming via stunning time-lapse
photography shot between 2007 to 2010. National Geographic photographer
James Balog and his crew perched cameras on the edge of millennia-old glaciers
in Greenland, Iceland, Canada, Alaska and other historically snow-covered spots. When they retrieved the footage a few years later, they were stunned — as
viewers will be — by the shockingly rapid pace of melt they captured. The
results are not only now-barren wilderness but also rising sea levels with
decreased salinity that is impacting life both in the ocean and on land. The
reduction in ice is also contributing to a global rise in temperature and
increasing ferocity of hurricanes and other “superstorms.”
So long as filmmaker Jeff Orlowski keeps his focus on the findings
from Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey (EIS) and the researcher’s subsequent
efforts to educate the world about global warming, Chasing Ice is gripping. Occasional diversions into
knee surgery that Balog had to undergo and logistical hardships his team endured
seem calculated and excessive. This award-winning testament to disaster need
provide no greater human interest than the obvious natural effects we will all
soon suffer.
Jacques Audiard’s unsparing drama Rust and Bone is also screening now in NY
and will open in LA on December 7th. I first wrote about the
film a few weeks back in my preview of AFI Fest, where it received a special
screening. Marion Cotillard (who won the Best Actress Academy Award for La Vie En Rose and seems a shoo-in for a
nomination this year for her exceptional work here) plays Stephanie, a whale
trainer at Marineland in the south of France who loses both her legs
during a performance gone bad. While I was grateful that Audiard depicts
this accident minimally and tastefully, it also left me wondering exactly what
happened.
Now confined to a wheelchair, Stephanie reaches out to a
club bouncer she had met briefly prior to the accident. Ali (Matthias
Schoenaerts, the terrific, previously unknown star of last year’s Oscar-nominated
Bullhead) is a brutish, washed-up
fighter with a little boy who has had to move in with his sister and her
husband. Although Ali accuses Stephanie of being a whore during their
initial encounter, he’s the one who has sex with women indiscriminately
and farms himself out for small-scale boxing matches to make money.
Stephanie and Ali gradually find wounded common ground, and
more, between them. A subplot about Ali installing surveillance cameras
in unsuspecting workplaces seems extraneous, and Ali’s young son is
forced to undergo a considerable amount of physical and emotional trauma during
the course of the film. Rust and Bone
isn’t a love story for everyone, but many will find it and its two lead
performances undeniably powerful.
Reverend’s Ratings:
Chasing Ice: B+
Rust and Bone: B
Review by Rev. Chris Carpenter, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and Rage Monthly Magazine.
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