By Dave Montalbano
AdventuresOfCinemaDave.com
As Transformers departs the Museum of Discovery to make room for the final installment of Harry Potter, two more independent movies will be opening locally, The Trip, a funny flick, and Into Eternity, a serious documentary.
Into Eternity asks a simple question – how do you remove nuclear waste? Of course, the answers are not easy when one has to factor in that the contamination is poison to humans and that waste must NOT be touched for 100,000 years. Thus is the dilemma that is debated in this documentary from Denmark.
Writer/director Michael Madsen’s 75-minute documentary has visual echoes of 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Andromeda Strain. We witness long, static shots of entering storage caves and machines lowering nuclear container into pools of H2O. Presented in subtitles and dubbed English, we listen to the pessimistic “experts” debate the disposal problem.
Dead pan arguments over the philosophical question “How do we explain this problem to future generations?” No answer is truly obtained, but Madsen provides a pointed commentary. As the debate becomes as absurd as the arguments in the war room reminiscent of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb, the camera cuts to a reindeer pooping in the forest.
The Trip is a quasi documentary that involves a road trip and fine dining in the
English countryside. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon (British Television’s equivalent to Bing Crosby & Bob Hope) portray fictional versions of themselves. Coogan is given an assignment to be a food critic. Unable to take his girlfriend, Coogan takes his married friend and arch rival, Brydon.
As Coogan and Brydon enter each pub, there are multiple montages of gourmet food being prepared. While dining, the two men amuse themselves by doing impressions of celebrities like Michael Caine, Sean Connery and Richard Burton. When the two start getting on each other’s nerves, Brydon breaks into another impression.
This film is a repetitive six- day journey that contains very British references and pithy comments, as one character states, “Behind every joke is a cry for help.”
