Screen Picks

Blue Vinyl (Sun., May 5, 10 p.m.; Thu., May 8, 11 p.m.; Sat., May 11, 11:30 a.m.; Wed., May 16., 7:30 a.m., HBO) Wildly popular at home and abroad, Judith Helfand and Daniel Gold's documentary took the audience award both at Sundance and last month's Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema. It's not hard to see why, since the film, which follows Helfand's quest to investigate the toxic origins of the blue siding installed on her parents' Long Island home, has everything most people want in a muckraking documentary -- a compelling first-person story, an easily identifiable villain, and an upbeat conclusion. The only problem is that a lot of the story seems to have been if not manufactured, at least jury-rigged.

Helfand, who reveals early on that she had a radical hysterectomy in her mid-20s to remove cancer linked to a drug her mother took while pregnant, admits her own sensitivity to issues of chemical toxicity and corporate responsibility right off the bat, but she implausibly stages the film's early scenes as if she's a babe in the woods. Her initial trip to Lake Charles, La., the unofficial manufacturing capital of PVC (polyvinyl chloride, the building block for vinyl products), is played as a lark, when even a cursory examination of the doc reveals that Helfand decided on her agenda before she even started filming. Granted, there's no temptation to side with the chemical industry lobbyists, who at one point cheerily advance a mind-bogglingly inaccurate equation of PVC with table salt (as if all chlorine-containing compounds were essentially the same) -- especially given the data presented, which indicate higher risks of cancer for factory workers and those in nearby communities, as well as an ongoing international conspiracy among manufacturers to hush up the adverse health risks. But when Helfand invites two members of Greenpeace as her first supposedly impartial witnesses, you know you're in for the long haul. Her version of objectivity is observing, "Granted, these guys were biased in favor of saving the planet and its inhabitants-- but I didn't have a problem with that."

Helfand makes an amiable Erin Brockovich, but if you pay close attention, you'll see how Blue Vinyl's activist facade gives way to a more prosaic story of personal empowerment. Helfand may not score any points off the chemical industry expert witness with whom she finally secures a half-hour interview, but we're meant to applaud the effort it's taken her to get that far, and her courage for sticking to it. (Helfand, who won a Peabody for A Healthy Baby Girl in 1997, is not exactly a novice, but it doesn't suit her David and Goliath story to mention her previous experience.) Most conveniently, reducing the story to a personal level means Helfand can pull a small victory out of her unsurprising failure to shake the vinyl industry to its foundations -- she gets her parents to replace the siding on their house. Charming but more than a little disingenuous, Blue Vinyl is journalism for people who hate journalists. That objectivity stuff, that's just boring, right?

Ocean’s Eleven ($26.98 DVD) Boy, even when he’s discussing a dog, it’s fun to hear Steven Soderbergh talk. Though Soderbergh and Ocean’s Eleven writer Ted Griffin’s commentary isn’t as much fun as the notorious bagatelle between the former and The Limey writer Lem Dobbs, it’s still a bunch more enjoyable than the movie itself. Soderbergh admits the movie, his largest-budgeted ever, was “not fun” to shoot, but it’s not bad in bits and pieces -- you can savor the goddamn-we’re-charismatic banter between George Clooney and Brad Pitt, or just skip to every scene with Bernie Mac in it. (His confrontation with a playing-hapless Matt Damon is a classic, about twice as enjoyable as anything else in the movie.) Of course, as all involved admitted then and readily cop to now, Ocean’s Eleven was never supposed to be more than a lark. What it plays like is Soderbergh’s Cape Fear, a talented director deliberately slumming in commercial-ville, with glossy but empty results.

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