The Vanguard presentation centers a lot of the documentary around Kink.com, a successful niche operation based in California. The CEO, Peter Acworth, read a news item about the profits involved in peddling porn and left his PhD program to start the company. Twelve years later, the company is thriving, thanks to Acworth's tech savvy. Kink.com was one of the original sites to pilot affiliate marketing programs and has been at the forefront of our changing technological lives ever since.

In another segment of the documentary, Regina Lynn, author of The Sexual Revolution 2.0, provided some insights as to the evolution of sex and technology, tracing it back to the telegraph and the printing press. In general, once we invent something, its only a matter of time before we are trying to enhance our sex lives with it. Even chainsaws aren't immune:



Interestingly, the porn industry is in the same boat as the music industry - the onset of technology has not only created a quicker path for pirates (and made many of us content bandits) but also changed the perception of value. Current TV interviewed various staff members at Wicked Pictures, one of the last plot-driven porn companies, about how their work has been impacted by technology. While there's always been some form of bootlegging, the internet has been able to take what was once a localized network and deliver pirated content to the world. And the industry is feeling the pinch - DVD sales are estimated to be down as much as fifty percent.

Pornographers seem concerned with educating consumers about the economic consequences to downloading free porn, but I'm not sure that will work as well as it assumes that the consumer, regardless of circumstances, will always make the ethical choice when faced with the glut of free content available. In addition, the documentary doesn't explore the other reasons why sales may be slumping - like the recession (which is eating up discretionary income that would go to the companies) or perhaps even the decline of retailers like Tower Records, which offered pornography in an easily accessible venue. In addition, the falling price of technology allows for anyone to become an amateur pornographer (which is explored in the documentary), which means that the market is over saturated will all kinds of free content - the idea of paying for graphic material is starting to seem almost quaint.

As a counter-piracy measure, Wicked pays full time employees to locate poached content and to send cease and desist letters. However, this is hardly effective - even the employees admit that even if they succeed in getting the content removed for one day, it will reappear a few days later. (Someone from this industry needs to talk to Prince. The Purple One hasn't fully scrubbed the internet of his content, but it's the closest I've seen to success.)

A better tactic toward stemming piracy appears toward the end of the film, as industry star Jessica Drake discusses how building relationships with her fan base gives them more of an investment in her personal success. Also, the advent of newer delivery methods like iPorn does appear to be a game changer - the industry is moving toward making porn a full sensory experience through live events, 3-D videos, and content delivery through channels like the iPhone. However, I'm not so sure if the fleshlight 2.0 will catch on:

Ultimately, the brief documentary was interesting, but not satisfying. For technology heads, there wasn't enough discussion of what types of technology porn was ushering in. Quick mentions of HD streaming and affiliate marketing aren't enough to be a prominent part of the story, which focuses on what is currently on the market. Current also appears to be going for maximum sex appeal, trading off the naughty cache of talking to porn stars and industry people in their element. However, HBO consistently does this better with shows like Real Sex and Pornucopia, which leaves the Current TV version too sanitized to be truly salacious.

Porn 2.0 [Current TV]
The Sexual Revolution 2.0 [Amazon]
Pornucopia [Wikipedia]

The confessional-style documentary, which premiered on HBO last night (schedule of upcoming screenings can be found here) follows McCabe (who narrates the film) n her quest to uncover why so many people will subject themselves to injections, surgeries, and peels to regain the appearance of youth. It is a siren song that McCabe is well aware of: At the age of 38, she reveals she has been scrutinizing her body ever since she came across her father's slides from his plastic surgery practice.

Refreshingly free of moralizing, McCabe establishes early on that she, too, struggles with the idea of aging. Setting a precedent for the rest of the film, she begins by analyzing how much money she dedicates to the pursuit of youth:

I found it amazing to watch her dollar costs unfold. McCabe, a smart woman who acknowledges up front that she is not making a wise decision, still cops to being close to $70,000 in debt, makes about $30,000 a year as a temp, yet finds $200 every six weeks to keep her gray hairs at bay.

As the viewer is reeling from the cost, McCabe says, "I may drop my health care coverage, but I'd never stop covering my gray. It may be insane, but it's the truth."

And...it is. Covering gray isn't something I am currently dealing with (and I think a silver afro would be kind of fierce), but I could completely relate to making bad financial decisions in the pursuit of beauty or fashion. How much money have I given to Zappos that could really be earning interest in my Roth IRA? Yet and still, I find myself trading long term financial security for a series of short term beauty boosts.

Looking specifically at the dollars and cents of it all, I am reminded of a series called the Cost of Beauty. PHDork examines the price women pay in pursuit of prettiness, noting:

[W]e can fairly surmise that the majority of harpies–70%–spend between $101 and $1000 per annum on beauty costs. Those numbers fit with both the mean and the median.

As to what sucks up all of those HarpyBuxx (they're not just good for abortions anymore!): our lovely, lovely tresses: 43% of expenditures go towards hair cuts, coloring, or other services. Make-up takes up another 29%. The rest:

Hair removal: 8%
Nails: 7%
Other products: 7%
Spa: 4%
Appliances: 2% [...]

A number of you expressed surprise at your spending, comparing it to X months of rent or groceries. It does add up: what else you might spend $613, or even nearly $800 a year on?

What else indeed? Most of us will never know. We're too hooked on beauty pimps and their products.

One person, who comes to illustrate how far people will go in their quest to find the surgical fountain of youth is Sherry Mecom from Texas.

(Is it just me, or does Sherry sound a lot like Ruby from the Style network?)

Sherry seems determined to use money to correct the past. She was once overweight until she had gastric bypass; she continually works on her body; and she is obsessed with the waterfalls and LG dishwashers she procures for her home. She alludes to a poor upbringing and being unhappy, but it feels like she is unsatisfied. Instead, she plans the next big purchase in her quest for a total life upgrade.

In the course of her travels, McCabe meets another daughter of a plastic surgeon - Erica Rose. However, the things that Erica has internalized about self-improvement differ dramatically from Mitch's low key messages from her father:

The quest for perfection is punishing, and not just for women. Youth Knows No Pain also reaches out to men in pursuit of camouflaging their ages. Men have their own hang ups, that just manifest differently and at an older age. The focus is more on hair transplants, face lifts, and lipo, less about botox and wrinkle creams. In an interview with New York Magazine, McCabe discusses some of the more obvious gender differences:

The women in the film were self-critical, and it was the men who were judgmental of others. What other gender differences did you notice?

We asked women why they were scared of aging, and everyone said, "Being alone. Being alone." You never heard that from men. Society is changing so much, and it's becoming more competitive and we have to stay in the workplace longer. Aging is affecting men in different ways, especially if they're in sales or something. When it comes to aging, men are concerned about being destitute, or in a nursing home. And being alone, but more in the sense of not having someone to take care of them.

However, it is interesting to note that the men seem more invested in critiquing the looks of others. While the women show a lot of competitiveness over beauty and aging (there's a great scene where McCabe asks the doctor if she has less wrinkles than one of his other, slightly obnoxious clients (cough, Mary Rambin, cough), and then cheers when he agrees), the men see no problem with informing women exactly what is wrong with them. Gary Baldassarre, one of the patients profiled, is documenting his own journey to regain his hair through a really graphic hair transplant operation. Yet, he sees no issue armchair analyzing women on television:

Another man, Norman Deesing, is an interview subject because he paid more than $50,000 to essentially look like Jack Nicholson. However, he has no qualms about turning to McCabe at some point during filming and pointing out to her that she's "let herself go [...] from the neck up." Admirably, McCabe brushes off the comment.

After the first hour of the documentary, the focus shifts a little from exploring what is happening to exploring why we seek these remedies. Who wants to go to a Botox party, being injected by a dentist who carries around the toxin in a cooler? Why do we pay so much money to distort our faces? Part of the answer lies in our need to conform to what society says is appropriate:

While most of our issues may stem from low self-esteem, "internet celebrity" Julia Allison's offhanded comment about "having an expiration date" struck hard. While she doesn't seem inclined at all to fight this idea of disposable women, it accurately summarizes the feelings of a lot of women in the documentary. They want to stay young in order to be relevant, to be seen as beautiful, to have access to society. It is this fear of obsolescence that drives the industry, which goes hand in hand with a fear of mortality. Some women, like How Not To Look Old author Charla Krupp, have acknowledged their enemy and have committed to fight literally to the death:

I laughed when I heard Dolly Parton unabashedly admit she was going to "get nipped and tucked until [she] is in a pine box," but for some reason, every time I watch this clip of Krupp, chills run up my spine. Are we really moving toward an era when it will be unacceptable to show any signs of aging?

And what happens when the potions and creams and procedures stop working?

Near the end of the documentary, McCabe sits down with Sherry. It has been three years since they first met, and Sherry went through a rough year. Sherry often uses plastic surgery as a mood boost, and after a bout with depression is actively planning her next procedures. McCabe switches between the first and third meeting to provide some insight into Sherry's development, while Sherry openly discloses her fears about not having the money to keep up the fight against time:

Youth Knows No Pain was engrossing, depressing, and thought-provoking, made even more poignant by the candid self-examination of its creator. After chronicling her memories of her father and her longtime fascination with mortality, she ends the film with an astonishing admission: after all that she's seen during filming the documentary, McCabe decided to take the plunge and start on injectables like Botox herself.

"What about spirituality? Inner peace?...Well, that didn't work." After struggling to make sense of why women subject themselves to beauty treatments instead of aging gracefully, she succumbs to the promises of younger looking skin and a small chance at cheating time.

McCabe's documentary ends with her undergoing different bizarre treatments. Watching her take a needle through the mouth in order to puff up some flesh in her cheek, I kept coming back to her opening admission: It may be insane, but it's the truth.

Youth Knows No Pain [HBO]
Youth Knows No Pain - Full Schedule [HBO]
The Cost Of Beauty, Part 1: The Research [The Pursuit of Harpyness]
The Cost Of Beauty, Part 2: The Numbers [The Pursuit of Harpyness]
The Cost of Beauty, Part 3: The Alternatives [The Pursuit of Harpyness]
Youth Knows No Pain Examines Anti-Aging Industry [New York]

Earlier: NonSociety Nincompoop Mary Rambin: Abortion Is Just Like Botox
How Not To Look Old Author Doesn't Look Old, But She Does Look Stupid

In this sneak peek at Levine's film, self-described "craft mafias" across the country talk about the importance of DIY in their lives - as an outlet for adult creativity, a reclamation of lost arts, a vehicle for radical action - and the dramatic growth of the movement.

Handmade Nation

Handmade Nation Trailer [YouTube]

Handmade Nation: Stop Animated Opening Title Sequence [YouTube]

Film: Handmade Nation [Mother Jones]
Crafty Comeback With Indie Edge [Washington Times]

Related: Slate Ladyblog Slaps The "Feminist Fantasy" Of Etsy

Farming, as we know, is rough. Chris Rohrlach, a New South Wales sheep farmer, had fallen prey to a drought and crop failure, and with a small child, a baby on the way, and a wife whose medical care (she was rendered quadriplegic after a stroke) was more than he could afford, the answer was obvious: a brothel.
As the Independent recounts, Rohrlach and a friend built First Choice Stress Relief from scratch, with his wife's blessing, "with polished timber floors, a solid pine reception desk and four "working rooms", one with a spa, another with mirrored walls and ceiling." While the brothel was legal, the small town of Inverell, conservative and Christian, was appalled and mounted protests. The town's remote location made it hard to "attract staff," especially younger sex workers who were more inclined to go for the opportunities of bright lights, big city. Oh, and Rohrlach was totally unsuited to the pimpin' life. Says the article, "he hated the late hours, and felt uncomfortable around the staff and customers." These, you see, were problems. So, not shockingly, the business closed after less than a year, Rohrlach took a big financial hit, and he's gone back to farming.

The doomed enterprise, the story's tragic undertones - and the conflation of doting father and incompetent brother-owner - proved a compelling subject to filmmaker Safina Uberoi, who chronicles the disconnect in a new documentary A Good Man. We're eager to see it, as it seems to offer a unique perspective on sex work and people's reactions to it. One thing that's immediately striking about the story is that Rohrlach seems to have been totally shocked by people's reactions to, what seemed to him, as straightforward an enterprise as farming. And yet, clearly he was personally uncomfortable with sex work, which mirrors the attitudes of a lot of people. We're thinking the combo of "good guy" and "stern moralists" is going to be a quirk film in 3...2...1, although whether it'll be a Full Monty-style romp or a serious look at the issues involved depends entirely on what Australian actors are available.

The Saga Of The Worst Little Whorehouse In Australia [Independent]

TPATG is the story of the rivalry between makeup mavens Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein, and the birth of the modern cosmetics industry. Whereas before makeup had been the purview of actresses and whores, and a clandestine secret of respectable women, these two dames took it public, made it chic, and brought women into the marketplace, all the while sporting some truly superb millinery. As Rubinstein put it, before them, "All the American women had purple noses and gray lips, and their faces were chalk white from terrible powder. I realized that the United States could be my life's work."

Elizabeth Arden (real name, awesomely, Florence Nightingale Graham) hailed from rural Ontario, was a suffragette and a self-made woman. Helena (Chaya) Rubinstein was Polish-born, and established her business in Europe before taking the rivalry to Fifth Avenue, only blocks from Arden's salon. Over the course of a fifty-year rivalry of products and image, the two doyennes avoided each other - and never met. Rubinstein famously said, "With her packaging and my product, we could have ruled the world."

While it's always fun to see imperious dames of a certain era sweeping around, making pronouncements, and generally ruling their respective roosts with stylish elan, it's also worth considering that this was the only way a woman could get ahead: by being larger-than-life, and to a degree probably sacrificing some of the personal for the image. It must have been a tricky balancing act: being grandes dames without threatening the men; being always "women" before "executives" yet careful not to expose any femininity that could be perceived as weakness. (See also "Chanel, Coco" and "Draper, Dorothy.") The film touches on prejudice they dealt with (although we don't hear much about the anti-semitism Rubinstein must surely have faced as a woman working in this era), but it's a side note...probably because they chose not to expose these things themselves in a time when a woman couldn't afford even perceived chinks in her armor. Could such characters exist today? Probably not - not least because they wouldn't need to.

The film's clumsy at points, and not always satisfying about the cultural implications of the evolving makeup industry, but as biography of amazing women - and a really good rivalry story - it's a very good watch. Then too, it's fascinating to consider the implications of cosmetics as early liberator - and to consider that in an era when female entrepreneurship was difficult enough, this was a particularly outre line of work. That said, the timing was right - and the doc does a lot with exploring the synergy of the development of makeup and film...and by extension, the deification of Hollywood as role model.

I can pay this film no higher compliment than to reprint Star magazine's disappointed pan:

But it gets a stuffy, academic treatment in this boring film. It should be fun but, instead of gossip by insiders, it's mostly a bunch of professors talking about it in dull, scholarly terms. The subject is fascinating - particularly the way the arrival of movies changed people's attitudes toward make-up (before movies, the only women who painted their faces were actresses - and prostitutes!). But this film finds ways to drain the juice out of every aspect of this subject that it looks at.

The Powder and the Glory [powderandglory.com]
The Powder and the Glory [Star]

Eleven Minutes, which opens today in limited release, is a documentary by Michael Selditch and Rob Tate, who met Jay McCarroll when they made the Bravo special Project Jay. The two filmmakers follow Jay's creative process as he takes his designs from sketches to his first show during New York Fashion Week. Jay is in almost every frame of the film, and while some critics find his flamboyant personality "insufferable," others feel the directors still didn't get to the heart of what makes the designer tick. Several critics predict the film will bore Project Runway fans who are not truly devoted to learning about the minutiae of the fashion industry. (Apparently the months of preparation that go into the "eleven minutes" a designer gets to show his collection on the runway aren't quite as exciting as stitching together a red carpet look from corn husks and Twizzlers in under 24 hours!) Below, the critics weigh in on whether Eleven Minutes can, as Tim would say, "make it work."

The Wall Street Journal

For a while Jay McCarroll's flamboyant self-involvement is fairly insufferable. (As I heard him wonder, in the opening sequence, if he's incapable of being loved, I wondered how much, if at all, the documentarians loved him.) Before long, though, his courage and exemplary toughness shine through. Maybe he was having nervous breakdowns off-camera, but the man on screen grows into the role of hero as the preshow frenzy reaches fever pitch. Project Runway isn't the only thing that got him here, he tells an interviewer who keeps strumming the same frayed string: "It's my passion and my humor and my talent." By the end you're rooting for his talent to prevail.

NPR

Funny, fragile, acerbic and irreverent, McCarroll is acutely aware of his outsider status and prone to trip over his own insecurities. Post-Runway, he rejected both the prize money and a deal with Banana Republic, apparently from lack of confidence. The tension of his relationship to the fashion world - and specifically how he earned his place in it - permeates Eleven Minutes, a movie whose title refers to the length of a runway show but also suggests a truncated allotment of Warhol's 15 minutes of fame.

Neither the clothes nor the quotidian drama of their making are especially interesting. The true subject of Eleven Minutes, an inadvertently poignant cautionary tale, is the toll reality TV stardom can take on the psyche and ego.

The New York Observer

The amount of work that goes into making those 11 minutes run smoothly is truly mind-boggling. Directors Michael Selditch and Rob Tate do a good job of hanging back and letting the inherent drama of the loony-toon world of fashion unfold. It's not always pretty, and more often than not it's completely unglamorous. But compelling it is, even when it is downright depressing (watching a sales meeting with reps from Urban Outfitters should be enough to dissuade plenty of wannabe designers).

The Village Voice

What truly elevates it all is how the directors (deliberately appearing on-screen at times) subtly address our perceptions of filmed "reality," from their even-handed vérité here to the more grossly manufactured confines of reality TV, a medium McCarroll is quick to call "vulgar." Like Soderbergh's two-part Che-yes, I'm making this comparison-Eleven Minutes is less about its subject and more about formalist processes (both McCarroll and the filmmakers'), and shouldn't exist as a stand-alone without viewers having experienced its other half, Project Runway.

Yahoo

Considering that McCarroll is in pretty much every frame of the movie, though, we never really get to know what moves and drives him as a person. We see the ugly parts of his personality but they never make him human; they feel more like quirks... In the very beginning, he laments feeling lonely when he sees other people in love, and he wonders whether he'll ever be deserving of such love himself - but Selditch and Tate never come back to that. At one point McCarroll describes himself as "the poster boy for angry insecurity," something else they should have explored.

The San Francisco Chronicle

If you're a fashion insider, you may find the entire film fascinating. If you're not, you may find it way too long, even at 103 minutes. For general audiences, it could use a bit of, ahem, tailoring - taking in here and there. It can be argued that the unrelenting immersion in McCarroll's fits of panic and pique mirrors the intensity of preparing for a major fashion show for an entire year. It can also be argued that, at the end of the day, it's a movie and one that would have been even more effective with a tighter edit.

USA Today

While it's intriguing to learn about all the players involved in creating a fashion line, there's too much minutiae to keep the attention of those who are not obsessed with design trends. What works in snippets on a reality show would seem to work blown out to a full-length documentary. Only it doesn't. Perhaps this is partly because the film lacks the suspense of the show's competition. Additionally, the documentary's scope feels hampered by too tight a focus... What is meant to be a no-holds-barred exploration of the creative process often comes across more like the tiresome Confessions of a Reality TV Darling.

The New York Times

Eleven Minutes, directed by Michael Selditch and Rob Tate, might be described as a low-rent answer to Douglas Keeve's documentary about Isaac Mizrahi, Unzipped (1995), a movie that also revealed the fundamental silliness of fashion, though it had some glamour attached. Here Mr. McCarroll, a self-deprecating show-off with a whiny voice, and his unpaid assistants scuffle over eight months to come up with the cheap materials and outsourced labor to turn his sketches into items that in the end nobody buys. Famemongers are advised to heed the film's cautionary message: Fleeting celebrity on reality television comes with no guarantee of an afterlife.

"Eleven Minutes" opens today in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Phoenix and San Francisco.

• Iranian officials are now claiming that Esha Momeni, an Iranian American, acted against national security when they arrested her last month in Iran while she was making a documentary of women's activists in the country. • Meanwhile, the Nobel peace laureate Shrin Ebadi says that the Iranian penal code turned women into second-class citizens and uses an "incorrect" interpretation of Islam. • The rise of the internet has stopped many parents from paying taxes on their nannies, which may prove to be more difficult as the economy goes south and nannies require health insurance or get fired and file for unemployment. • Another pregnant woman was rejected from several hospitals in Tokyo, just 11 days before a similar series of rejections caused a pregnant woman to die after giving birth. • The Ministry of Defense is "looking into" allowing women to serve on submarines for the first time in the Royal Navy's history. • Ghada El-Tawli just recently returned to television after she was pulled from her job as an Egyptian anchorwoman after she decided to start wearing a hijab. • Although the risk is low, a new study has found that women with silicone breast implants increase their risk of developing a rare form of lymphoma. •

The film also highlights a program that gets it right, the New York City Gynecological Teach Associates, in which specially trained women talk medical students through a pelvic exam on their own bodies. The independent film still needs to raise money for the editing and distribution process; you can learn more here.


At Your Cervix [Official Site]

Entertainment Weekly:

What divine inspiration moved Kimberly Rivers Roberts, an aspiring rap artist and toweringly self-possessed woman from New Orleans' Ninth Ward, to grab her Hi8 camcorder and document the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina as it smashed up her neighborhood? And what grace brought Roberts to the attention of Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, filmmakers who, like so many others, went to Louisiana after the levees broke? Whatever the cosmic luck, the result, Trouble the Water, is essential, unique viewing: a stunning experience of the hurricane and its aftermath, rooted in immediate personal response and emotions that encapsulate the full national catastrophe.

Newsday:

Shot predominantly from the attic of their rapidly submerging house during the worst of the storm, Roberts' visual record gives us a palpable sense of impending doom. But it's only after the Robertses - in the company of filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal - return to their battered city their crime-ridden neighborhood that the true, sustained and still-unresolved damage of Katrina becomes so terribly clear.

Salon:

If possible, Roberts' movie-within-a-movie is even more amazing than it sounds. She captures a tale of courage, heroism and tragedy more thrilling than any Hollywood spectacle; one neighbor, a man Roberts and her husband, Scott, hadn't even liked before the hurricane, risks his life to save them, swimming back and forth across the street using a punching bag as a flotation device. Roberts barely knew how to turn the camera on when the storm started, and her footage is highly uneven. But you can feel her taking ownership of the situation as the catastrophe worsens, doing her own TV-news-style voice- over and alternating between establishing shots and close-ups.

The Los Angeles Times:

Kim Roberts' footage, shot with a video camera she'd bought on the street for $20 only the week before, gives a rare from-the-ground-up look at what it's like to be flooded out of your house. We watch in hypnotized horror as the waters rise so high they almost obliterate the corner stop sign, forcing the Roberts and their extended family to take precarious refuge in their attic.

Startling as that footage is, however, it takes up only about 15 minutes of "Trouble the Water." The documentary's best asset is not what Kim shot, but the woman herself.

With her buoyant, naturally dramatic personality (she ended up giving birth to a daughter in Utah just days before the Sundance award ceremony), bold, nervy Kim has the kind of intensely charismatic spirit documentary directors dream about. With her as our guide, "Trouble the Water" looks at the reality of New Orleans from the inside.

New York Daily News:

Using mostly amateur video shot by an aspiring rap artist and her husband in the lead-up to Hurricane Katrina and in the weeks after, this gripping, sometimes unstructured doc shows the devastation New Orleans residents suffered in the swirl of the storm.

Filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal utilize the footage Kim and Scott Roberts had taken throughout the disaster, showing how residents suffered, survived and came together to help when official assistance let them down. Kim especially emerges as a real voice of America, one that refuses to keep quiet about the horrors she saw.

New York Post:

As "Trouble the Water" points out, most of New Orleans' black residents have yet to return to a city that turned its back on them. When Kimberly sings, she gives voice to their pain.

The A.V. Club:

Trouble The Water is infuriating in its depiction of helpless Americans getting left behind, and uplifting in the way it shows the Roberts putting their lives together, but it's also frustrating, because it lacks some focus. It starts off being about the footage Kim shot, but she didn't shoot a lot, and anyone coming to Trouble The Water looking for an insider's take on the storm and its immediate aftermath will be disappointed to find that the bulk of the film takes place post-emergency. Even more bothersome is how Lessin and Deal keep steering away from the most persistently unsettling part of the Hurricane Katrina story, having to do with the multiple ways the rights of American citizens were taken away, by the suspicious and the well-meaning alike. Given that the filmmakers' original idea for their project stalled out due to lack of access, it's disappointing that they didn't explore that angle more. Even the generally upbeat Roberts and their friends note the promises and lies that have been exposed by their predicament. "Freedom exists," one of their neighbors says. "There's just… limitations on the freedom."

Village Voice:

The first and most gripping half of Trouble the Water, directed by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, is essentially a first-person disaster movie—history captured in the visual grammar of Cloverfield. Driven just to get it down ("I'll be able to tell the story"), Kimberly aims her palm-sized camera at her backyard, at the neighbor passed out on his porch, at the kids laughing off the storm warnings in the street. A dog whimpers, an Army truck creeps by, the sky fades to gray, a drizzle begins. Those cunning directors who've turned shaky-cam mock-vérité into a horror-movie cliché waste a lot of effort planting such "stray" details; they don't have the thing that gives Kimberly's footage its eerie force—genuine uncertainty about what's going to happen.

New York Magazine:

As someone of bounteous hope but little (formal) faith, I found Kimberly’s religious ejaculations a bit trying. She and her husband trek north to a relative’s house in which there’s no water, and when a man shows up to turn it on, she exclaims, “When you trust in God, he sends miracles your way!” Five minutes later, the man returns, now ordered to shut the water off, and this time God goes pointedly unmentioned. But I admit that my perspective is that of a privileged New Yorker who has never had to summon comparable spiritual resources. Whatever sparked and has sustained Kimberly’s resolve is indeed a kind of miracle. The rap that she performs for the camera, “Amazing,” is just that, an explicit (and profane) account of her sordid past capped with an irresistibly upbeat refrain—a potential smash. That faith brings her and her husband back to New Orleans despite continued government neglect—even as New Orleans pours its resources into luring tourists back to the French Quarter. In one scene, Kimberly and fellow refugees line up for FEMA assistance at some kind of ranch, where a sign overhead points to Gate B—CATTLE ENTRANCE. You can’t make this stuff up. You can, however, capture it on film for all time. Trouble the Water is ineradicably moving.

Rolling Stone:

Kimberly's star power comes from the music she writes and sings, music that was almost lost in the storm. The moment in the aftermath when she finds it and raps about her feelings will knock you off your feet. At the Sundance Film Festival in January, when the film premiered, that moment got audiences standing and cheering. Never mind Katrina, Kimberly Roberts is the real force of nature. Despite the political incompetence that continues to devastate New Orleans, Kimberly and Scott went home with only positive vibes. The repair needed in their city has gotten Scott a job in construction. And Kimberly's music has attracted producers. No wonder, a glory abides in this woman's voice. "Inspiring" is an overused word in the movie business. But it fits here. Lessin and Deal have made Trouble the Water a spellbinder you do not want to miss.

'Trouble The Water' opened on August 22nd in selected theaters in Los Angeles and New York.

Earlier: Hurrican Katrina, Three Years Later: A New Memoir And An Approaching Storm [Jezebel]

Because let's face it: The younger generation is fucked. Eight-year-old girls are getting pedicures and bikini waxes — won't these become life-long habits? Next come the boob job at 16 and lipo in the early 20s. Some people make fun of rappers for spending their money on cars and bling but at least you can try and pawn your diamonds, sell your Benz. What kind of investment is Botox? What kind of lessons are young girls learning when our culture focuses so much on looks? One can only imagine the psychological ramifications on today's young girls who are faced with padded bras, thongs and looking up to whitewashed or size 00 celebrities. And what of the young women who can't afford $100 a month in beauty products? Are they actually better off, in a way? (What are the chances they'll see it that way?)

This study was done in conjunction with the documentary America The Beautiful. It's so frustrating that this film is rated R when The Dark Knight is PG-13; meaning that millions of kids saw the Batman film when they really need to examine their priorities.

Don't get it twisted: It's fun to play with makeup and haircolor. For plenty of girls, it's not even about attracting the opposite sex. But the overwhelming focus this culture has been placing on looks has got to be damaging to the younger generation. (Don't forget: Girls today think being called sexy is the ultimate compliment.) It's clear that we need to make a change: How do we even begin?

Botox And Blush Obsession Seen As Cause For Alarm [Reuters]

Earlier: Waxing
Teen Girl Gets Lipo To "Prevent" Eating Disorder
How Many 8-Year-Olds Have To Get Bikini Waxes Before We All Agree The Terrorists Have Won?
Young Girls Today: Tramps In Training?
America The Beautiful Reveals Ugly Truths
Today's Teens Believe It's Better To Be Sexy Than Clever

[Photo via Megan* on Flickr.]

Village Voice:

If Patti Smith's narration to Dream of Life was simplified into a stanza, it might go something like this: As long as I can remember I sought to be free/Bob Dylan once tuned this guitar for me/My mission is to give people my energy/Fred, Jesse, and Jackson are my family tree/New generations, rise up, rise up, take to the streets/Me and Flea talking about pee. Her much more long-winded monologues are just as randomly assembled in the actual documentary, 109 mostly black-and-white minutes of punk's wet nurse floating through the modern world while endlessly ruminating on mortality, art, and the occasional bodily function. Problem is, there's nary a hint of context, even with biographic essentials: When Patti sprinkles the ashes of "Robert" onto her palm, we're momentarily left to guess that's Mapplethorpe; when she and erstwhile paramour Sam Shepard are acoustically jamming and their respective tattoos come up, the playwright muses, "That was a weird night at the Chelsea." More, please?

New York:

Eleven years in the making, fashion photographer and artist Steven Sebring’s gorgeous, up-close-and-personal doc about the legendary rocker is both a journey into Smith’s storied past and a portrait of her life today—less a movie about a musician than a transfixing meditation on her own iconography.

Salon:

"Patti Smith: Dream of Life" is frequently beautiful and intermittently haunting and could be called a meditation on aging and mortality, an intimate study of a peculiar variety of fame and a portrait of a genuinely remarkable person. It has played at Sundance and Berlin and all over the film festival world, at least in part because everyone's so amazed it actually got finished. Still, while "Dream of Life" succeeds on its own terms, I can't help feeling there's a missed opportunity here, an opportunity to make clear to younger women and men just how amazing Patti Smith's journey has been. (Maybe, like Julien Temple's wonderful "Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten," that kind of film can't be made while the subject is alive — but I'm not quite sure why that would be so.)

The New York Times:

You may not learn everything you want to know in “Patti Smith: Dream of Life,” an impressionistic portrait of that punk godhead, but you learn just about everything you need. Created over a heroic 11 years, it was directed and mostly shot by Steven Sebring, a high-end commercial photographer whose perseverance and conspicuous unfamiliarity with, or disregard for, the conventions of nonfiction cinema (not to mention the apparently deep-enough pockets that freed him to follow his own muse) have inspired a lovely, drifty first feature that feels less like a documentary and more like an act of rapturous devotion.

Variety:

The titular rocker-poet gets a suitable portrait in Steven Sebring's "Patti Smith: Dream of Life," which runs radically against the grain of American-made pop music docs. The result of 11 years of filming (much of it in wonderfully grainy black-and-white 16mm), pic is designed as a stream-of-consciousness experience, following Smith as she revives her music career and considers every aspect of her life. Death, too, plays a stark role, and the textured, thoughtful results may prove too cerebral and abstract for auds beyond Smith's hardcore followers, but long-term, this will be a loss-leader that gains much respect.

What Sebring — a fashion and pop photographer, painter and commercials maker — doesn't know about doc filmmaking never hurts the film. Starting in 1995, when Smith recorded her comeback album "Gone Again" and toured with her idol, Bob Dylan, after having not performed live for 16 years, Sebring's project clearly developed as it went along, and the effect of watching the film is seeing something in the making — like rummaging through Smith's closet, and stumbling across interesting stuff.

The Hollywood Reporter:

A knowledge of Smith's landmark contribution as a rock 'n' roll pioneer is not essential, and the film should be a joy for anyone interested in pop culture of the past 40 years.

Sebring does not take a conventional route here, which is fitting for his subject. The long gestation period for the film has afforded an intimacy and ease that allows him to penetrate Smith's inner and outer worlds, weaving back and forth in time from her arrival in New York in the late 1960s to raising her two children in Detroit with husband Fred "Sonic" Smith to her triumphant return to performing in the mid-'90s. Structure is anchored in the bedroom of Smith's cluttered New York apartment and jumps around from there as she reflects on her life and art.

Time Out New York:

But having privileged access and elucidating a mysterious figure are two different things. Sebring makes the crucial mistake of assuming his viewers are all Smithologists. (Even for them, the film might be too vague to become a holy object.) Amazingly, there is no testimony to contextualize her impact on the punk world, nothing at all about the horrendous 1977 onstage injury—she broke several neck vertebrae—that almost cost Smith her career. The live footage is choppy and interrupted; almost perversely, we never hear Smith’s gorgeous hit “Because the Night.” And the great question mark over Smith’s life—why she retreated from the spotlight along with her husband, White Panther and former MC5er Fred “Sonic” Smith—is not probed.

Instead, we get a lot of the singer’s poetry and recent political activism, and many sweet moments with her children and doting parents. Sebring is a sentimentalist, and his film comes alive when Smith melts into warm memories of going to Coney Island with Robert Mapplethorpe and getting hot dogs. But the opportunity to introduce newbies to a serious music-world icon—and her significance—feels squandered.

'Patti Smith: Dream of Life' opens today in limited release