Review of “The Unforeseen” by IndieWIRE’s Michael Tully
Michael’s really helped create awareness for the movie in prior posts to IndieWIRE’s Blogs. Now he’s written a formal writeup for Muze, Inc. which is very kind…
Must-See Cinema: THE UNFORESEENLaura Dunn’s The Unforeseen opens at Cinema Village tomorrow. I give it Boredom at its Boredest’s highest recommendation. I’ve spoken to people who find the film heavy-handed and flowery and whatever else, but for me, The Unforeseen is one of the most resonant films that I’ve ever seen. I watched the trailer the other day before The Counterfeiters (though well executed, it felt like much of that movie was taken from Holocaust Drama 101, making it a perfectly worthy Oscar winner), and even the trailer of Dunn’s majestic elegy to nature and hope had me on the verge of tears. Here’s the review I wrote for Muze, Inc.:
Laura Dunn’s feature-length directorial debut is a profoundly stirring, visually stunning, and emotionally overpowering work of epic beauty. Sharing a kinship with the film’s executive producer, Terrence Malick, Dunn’s lyrical non-fiction poem reaches levels of transcendence not often encountered in cinema. THE UNFORESEEN recounts the embittered battle that emerged in the latter half of the 20th Century between real estate developer Gary Bradley and the residents of Austin, Texas. Bradley’s plan to develop yet another subdivision that would disturb the beautiful natural swimming hole, Barton Springs, created a swell of communal emotion that challenged big business and development in a manner heretofore unseen. As Dunn tells her personal tale, using archival footage, gorgeous graphic effects, incredibly lush photography (courtesy of Lee Daniel), and present-day interviews with the formative players (Bradley, former governor Ann Richards, and many others), THE UNFORESEEN begins to speak on a much grander scale, challenging viewers to confront similar situations that continue to plague their own cities and neighborhoods. But where Dunn succeeds and exposes her true humanity is in her portrait of Bradley, a reviled figure whom most opponents wouldn’t take the time to try to understand. It is this dismissal of anger and bitterness in favor of understanding and hope that makes THE UNFORESEEN such a transformative viewing experience and elevates it to greatness.
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Film Journal International calls it “A rapturous nightmare.”
Maybe it’s the despairer in me, but that contends for favorite three-word review. Here are excerpts from Chris Barsanti’s review…
A documentary that looks like an art-house film, The Unforeseen wields its impressive cinematography and poetic narrative form (Wendell Berry provides appropriately ruminative narration) to make a strong case that the country as a whole is cutting itself off from the natural world with frightening speed. The camera glides through endless construction sites and hovers over the octopus-armed suburban developments with a cool dread. All the while, these montages of a deadening, choking future are contrasted with crystalline underwater images. The spirit of Terrence Malick—who serves as executive producer here—is everywhere in the film, from its dreamy evocation of nature’s small miracles to the humane treatment of those who in normal circumstances would be viewed as villains.
One of the great documentaries of our time, The Unforeseen is a rapturous nightmare.
Read the full review here.
IndieWIRE reviews “The Unforeseen”
Some highlights from the new Indiewire review.
Due to the onslaught of environmental documentaries that prioritize urgency over intelligence, Laura Dunn’s “The Unforeseen,” an inquisitive, elegant rendering of the battle between land development and dwindling natural resources in Austin, might get lost in the shuffle. And what a shame that would be, for Dunn’s refreshingly thorough look at the encroachment of capital on untouched land is smart enough not to treat its subject as a horror show. The film is more sobered than alarming, yet it’s hardly defeatist. An impressionist’s portrait of contemporary American economic life, “The Unforeseen” is for nature both a paean and an elegy, and for contemporary American nonfiction a challenge, in both scope and aesthetic…
…Indeed there are occasional shots of glistening cobwebs, slow-motion underwater swimmers, and sunlight streaming through fog-shrouded trees that will inevitably recall Malick’s work, yet Dunn’s film isn’t a simple retreat into nature, nor is it a reducible portrait of greed (an emotional outburst from Bradley at the end is captured with true sympathy, even awe). Instead it’s a document for posterity, diagnosing our moment with refreshing pragmatism. As merciless and propulsive as rushing water, Dunn’s film is constantly moving forward, all the way into its stunning final images, which map out our country’s soul with mournful deliberation.
Full review here.
NY’s Time Out Reviews The Unforeseen
Time Out NY’s brief and positive review is included in its entirety here.
Visually rich, narratively ambitious social-problem docs are as uncommon as point-and-shoot nonfiction harangues (and the ills they chronicle) are abundant, so Laura Dunn’s The Unforeseen is a rare gift. Plainspoken yet urgent, it makes the wrist-slashingly depressing topic of real-estate development somehow transcendent.This is partly the influence of executive producers Terrence Malick and Robert Redford (the latter of whom appears a little too extensively on camera), which in one sense makes the film a fascinating, unexpected collaboration between two Indiewood warhorses. But it’s Dunn who finds languid lyricism in the central theme of humanity’s (or Texans’, anyway) exploitation of nature. She does so largely by approaching the issue at hand—the parceling of an Austin suburban enclave and its potential for wholesale land-rape—obliquely and with an eye toward the cosmic. One memorable scene, in which a surly, development-friendly legislator assembles a model bomber plane as he’s being interviewed, tells us more about “the deserted prospect of the modern mind” (to quote the Wendell Berry poem that gives the film its title) than a thousand well-meaning lectures from Al Gore. Committed and life-affirming without being naive or strident, The Unforeseen is the movie An Inconvenient Truth wanted to be.
The Village Voice reviews The Unforeseen
The Village Voice has mentioned The Unforeseen twice before, once for Human Rights Watch Festival and then for Sundance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. But with the film’s true NY release happening in a few days, it has just written its first true review. Here are a few highlights from it…
True, The Unforeseen—a haunting meditation on hubris and the folly of claiming rights over something as elemental (and temperamental) as the environment—can be seen as part of a small but growing canon of ecological-alarm documentaries, a genre broad and urgent enough to encompass the PowerPoint apocalypse of An Inconvenient Truth, the countdown-to-Armageddon jeremiad of The 11th Hour, and the mountaintop-removal broadside of Black Diamonds. But the qualities that make The Unforeseen ineffective as a shrieking call to arms—among them a tone that’s less hectoring than contemplative, and an unusual sympathy for the opposition—make it vastly more absorbing as a movie…
…the movie’s glacial pace and willingness to let its mind and eye wander that produces its spiritual and intellectual heft—not to mention its atypical visual splendor. The idea for the film came from executive producer Terrence Malick, himself a longtime Austinite, and cinematographer Lee Daniel’s texture-besotted HD/Super 16 imagery evokes the rapturous transcendentalist quality that surfaces in Malick’s own films: the weight of rain on grass, the play of magic-hour light on a creek. Through its transfixing glimpses of the natural world and an agrarian lifestyle at risk, The Unforeseen ponders nothing less than what happens when we turn our backs on the divine.
This well-written review emphasizes aspects no other reviewer has. Read the entire review here.
Laura Dunn receives Independent Spirit Award for “The Unforeseen” (Videos)
[youtube bkb0VeoylhU View video on YouTube]
You can also see about Laura’s Press Room interview at Film Independent’s 2008 Spirit Awards Coverage page. Click the image below.
(clicking about image will open a new window)
Tales from the Indie Spirit Awards….
(Laura and fellow nominees Gary and John, photo from AJ Schnack’s blog)
So our award was, honestly, totally unexpected. Having rapped with one of the jurors - the venerable AJ Schnack - at the nominee reception a couple nights before, I was completely convinced that we hadn’t won. He positively raved about the film “Running Stumbled” as a powerful and most amazing film and deserving of the highest praise. In fact, I had heard rave reviews about both Helvetica and Running Stumbled and simply felt honored to be in their company. Even when the nominees were read it seemed clear from the audiences applause when both of their names were read that they had genuinely enthusiast fans while our film simply seemed unknown.
So my husband Jef and I approached the afternoon with a kind of carefree enjoy-the-spectacle attitude, sneaking by the hordes of press and photographers on the blue carpet and scoping out whatever non-alcoholic beverages we could find. Having a 2-year old at home, we don’t get out much and aren’t exactly the “socializing” types, but we loved running into several dear friends who have championed our film such as Christian Vesper and Laura Michalchyshyn from the Sundance Channel and our superhuman sales rep Josh Braun wearing an awesome orange shirt. So yes, the win was unexpected and I had nothing prepared to say — not sure how it all came off — but we are very grateful for the opportunity to further the film’s message about protecting the natural world in the face of unrelenting development, and to spotlight our beloved Austin and her treasures still at stake. Congrats to Gary and Brigid on their engagement — we thoroughly enjoyed meeting the lovely couple. And I can’t wait to see both Helvetica and Running Stumbled — how inspiring to meet a community of filmmakers doing what they love despite the challenges along the way.
Who says there aren’t New Jobs Being Created?
From today’s Wall Street Journal…
FDIC to Add Staff as Bank Failures Loom
By Damian Paletta
WASHINGTON — The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is taking steps to brace for an increase in failed financial institutions as the nation’s housing and credit markets continue to worsen.The FDIC is looking to bring back 25 retirees from its division of resolutions and receiverships. Many of these agency veterans likely worked for the FDIC during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when more than 1,000 financial institutions failed amid the savings-and-loan crisis.
FDIC spokesman Andrew Gray said the agency was looking to bulk up “for preparedness purposes.” The division now has 223 employees, mostly based in Dallas.
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Music from the motion picture soundtrack “The Unforeseen”
I’ve noticed the soundtrack gets asked about on a regular basis. In both YouTube and IMDB, people want to know the songs used throughout the film. So I put together an iTunes iMix with virtually all of the songs from the film. If you have iTunes, you can get the entire soundtrack in roughly the same playing order as the film.
To sample or buy, just click here.
[kml_flashembed movie=”http://ax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net/flash/feedreader.swf” fvars=”feed=WebObjects/MZStoreServices.woa/ws/RSS/imix/html=false/imixid=275109108/sf=143441/xml?v0=575″ quality=”high” salign=”lt” wmode=”transparent” width=”435″ height=”330″ name=”feedreader” /]Laura wins the Independent Spirit Award “Truer than Fiction”
Laura received the Independent Spirit ‘Truer than Fiction‘ award. This was beyond a shock to both of us. From advanced word we were under the impression that she didn’t win so Laura was completely surprised by this. It will hopefully help create more awareness for the forthcoming theatrical release…