11-19-2020, 07:24 PM
Dark Waters (2019)
If you're the type of person who is paranoid and worried about the effect of things like drinking water, air pollution, phone signals, processed foods and additives on your health, then this legal-thriller/horror-movie will probably tip you over the edge. It tells the story of corporate environmental attorney Robert Bilott's battle to expose the DuPont chemical company's (and 3M's) knowledge of the hazardous side-effects of the chemicals used in the manufacture of Teflon (and other products). Something that practically every human on the planet has in their blood now. The passage of time is portrayed particularly well through little details and changes to society around the main characters. This is actually Mark Ruffalo's 2nd DuPont based film after 2014's 'Foxcatcher', where he played wrestler Dave Schultz, who was murdered by DuPont's heir. Ruffalo's understated, internalised acting style is terrific as usual but casting Anne Hathaway as his wife was a mistake because she's very melodramatic, the exact opposite to him. I get that the film is supposed to look dark, sickly and green, as if the medium itself has been poisoned but it was too dark for me, I could barely tell what was happening in some shots. I liked the way some of the supporting characters didn't play up to the conventions of this type of "uncovering the truth" legal genre film, they actually seemed like real people.
The Devil We Know (2018)
This documentary makes a good companion piece to Todd Haynes' 'Dark Waters', filling in a few more details, featuring many of the same real people and largely backing up everything that film portrayed. The most shocking parts are the on-tape depositions with DuPont lawyers and executives. The level of cynicism is extraordinary, at one point they are squeamish about reading out a swear word, even though it's from a sentence they themselves wrote in a DuPont document, along the lines of "F**k the guy who is complaining because we fatally poisoned him". The title is taken from a DuPont internal memo suggesting that although they knew the discussed chemicals were killing people, they're "The Devil We Know" because if they withdrew them, they could end up replacing them with something even more toxic (the title of course has other meanings). Again it's not the kind of film you want to watch if you don't want to start panicking about every product in your house.
If you're the type of person who is paranoid and worried about the effect of things like drinking water, air pollution, phone signals, processed foods and additives on your health, then this legal-thriller/horror-movie will probably tip you over the edge. It tells the story of corporate environmental attorney Robert Bilott's battle to expose the DuPont chemical company's (and 3M's) knowledge of the hazardous side-effects of the chemicals used in the manufacture of Teflon (and other products). Something that practically every human on the planet has in their blood now. The passage of time is portrayed particularly well through little details and changes to society around the main characters. This is actually Mark Ruffalo's 2nd DuPont based film after 2014's 'Foxcatcher', where he played wrestler Dave Schultz, who was murdered by DuPont's heir. Ruffalo's understated, internalised acting style is terrific as usual but casting Anne Hathaway as his wife was a mistake because she's very melodramatic, the exact opposite to him. I get that the film is supposed to look dark, sickly and green, as if the medium itself has been poisoned but it was too dark for me, I could barely tell what was happening in some shots. I liked the way some of the supporting characters didn't play up to the conventions of this type of "uncovering the truth" legal genre film, they actually seemed like real people.
The Devil We Know (2018)
This documentary makes a good companion piece to Todd Haynes' 'Dark Waters', filling in a few more details, featuring many of the same real people and largely backing up everything that film portrayed. The most shocking parts are the on-tape depositions with DuPont lawyers and executives. The level of cynicism is extraordinary, at one point they are squeamish about reading out a swear word, even though it's from a sentence they themselves wrote in a DuPont document, along the lines of "F**k the guy who is complaining because we fatally poisoned him". The title is taken from a DuPont internal memo suggesting that although they knew the discussed chemicals were killing people, they're "The Devil We Know" because if they withdrew them, they could end up replacing them with something even more toxic (the title of course has other meanings). Again it's not the kind of film you want to watch if you don't want to start panicking about every product in your house.
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