This blog will present news items about the motion picture business, with emphasis on lower budget, independent film in most cases. Some reviews or commentaries on specific films, with emphasis on significance (artistic or political) or comparison, are presented. Note: No one pays me for these reviews; they are not "endorsements"! Starting in May 2016, many of the reviews for new feature films have been done on a hosted Wordpress site, and this blog now mostly does shorts and older films.
Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!
"Population Bomb" turns the argument about overpopulation on its head
“Population Bomb”, by Austrian documentarian Werner Boote,
lays out the modern understanding of population demographics. That is, richer populations have fewer kids
in order to have better lives for ”grownups”.
The poorer populations accept a kind of moral aesthetic realism and have
large families. It's common for immigrants from poorer countries to send money back to relatives (and not just their own kids), something that people from richer countries don't experience much. I made that point in conversation outside the embassy before we went in, and I ruffled some sails.
The world’s population recently topped 7 billion, doubling
since the mid 1960s. I can remember cute
statements back then, that homosexuals would answer the “world’s population problem”.
Boote starts out driving in Vienna, and then travels the
world in a film that is visually impressive.
As a kind of Gulliver, he visits Mexico City, China, India (Mumbai),
Kenya (Nairobi and the Serengeti), Japan, Finland, two locations in the US
(Georgia and a university in Massachusetts, and a pedal boat conversation on a
lake that I think I recognize as in northern New Jersey), and a finale in
Dhaka, Bangladesh, with the film ending with a spectacle of a kind of hajj,
followed by millions leaving on trains.
Gradually, the case builds that even in countries with
teeming cities, there is ample countryside that could support billions more if
people lived simply and consumed fewer resources. So the richer people become the “guilty
remnant”. The boat conversation has
another professor saying that it used to be common for “capitalists” to aspire
to eugenics, until Hitler made the concept unacceptable. So we have euphemisms like “family planning”. Indeed, the film covers the aftermath of
China’s one-child policy (lots of only children who behave like “little
emperors” ruling the country now), and looks at family size in some other
cultures (like Japan). He also hits hard the problem of the aging populations
in richer countries which could, as I have pointed out on other blogs, lead to
the enforcement of filial responsibility laws (China and other Asian societies
already have a tradition of “filial piety”.
The footage in Finland, where he talks to another prof from
Germany after showing Finland’s own demographic research, was interesting to
me, because some critical scenes in my own novel happen there, and my own
impressions of the area are accurate (looks like northern Minnesota, but even
rockier).
The film was shown at the Austrian Embassy by the DC
Environmental Film Festival. The screen
could have been bigger. This film really
would benefit from very professional showmanship, because of the spectacular
urban and countryside photography. The
absolutely most graphic slums were in India, but the most primitive living
conditions were in Kenya. Somehow, the
film also recalled Paramount’s “Babel”. The title also reminds me of Elinor Burkett’s
2000 book “The Baby Boon”. Note: “boon”
and “boom” don’t mean quite the same things.
The official site is here. I’m told that the distributor is Icarus for
the US. The company mentioned in the
credits is ThimFilm and NGF. (Any
relation to ThinkFilm, now in bankruptcy in the US? This would seem to fit Radius TWC pretty
well.)
Outdoor embassies shown here are Austria and China, near UDC in Washington.
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