Politics

Who Killed the Electric Car?

In 1996 electric cars began to appear on roads all over California. They were quiet and fast produced no exhaust and ran without gasoline. Ten years later these futuristic cars were almost entirely gone. What happened? Why should we be haunted by the ghost of the electric car?SPECIAL FEATURES:12 Deleted ScenesDocumentary: "Jump-Starting the Future"Music Video: Meeky Rosie's "Forever"System Requirements:Run Time: 91 minsFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DOCUMENTARIES/MISC. Rating: PG UPC: 043396152861 Manufacturer No: 15286

It begins with a solemn funeral…for a car. By the end of Chris Paine's lively and informative documentary, the idea doesn't seem quite so strange. As narrator Martin Sheen notes, "They were quiet and fast, produced no exhaust and ran without gasoline." Paine proceeds to show how this unique vehicle came into being and why General Motors ended up reclaiming its once-prized creation less than a decade later. He begins 100 years ago with the original electric car. By the 1920s, the internal-combustion engine had rendered it obsolete. By the 1980s, however, car companies started exploring alternative energy sources, like solar power. This, in turn, led to the late, great battery-powered EV1. Throughout, Paine deftly translates hard science and complex politics, such as California's Zero-Emission Vehicle Mandate, into lay person's terms (director Alex Gibney, Oscar-nominated for Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, served as consulting producer). And everyone gets the chance to have their say: engineers, politicians, protesters, and petroleum spokespeople--even celebrity drivers, like Peter Horton, Alexandra Paul, and a wild man beard-sporting Mel Gibson. But the most persuasive participant is former Saturn employee Chelsea Sexton. Promoting the benefits of the EV1 was more than a job to her, and she continues to lobby for more environmentally friendly options. Sexton provides the small ray of hope Paine's film so desperately needs. Who Killed the Electric Car? is, otherwise, a tremendously sobering experience. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

Stills from Who Killed the Electric Car? (click for larger image)

Writer/Director Chris Paine Blogs About Who Killed the Electric Car

When Who Killed the Electric Car premiered at the Sundance Film Festival (on the same weekend as An Inconvenient Truth), we wondered whether movie goers were ready for a new kind of 'action film'. Fortunately people jumped onboard and this seems even more true today.

We put this DVD together after the release of the film to include a dozen short scenes we couldn't quite fit into our story. My favorite is one with Stan and Iris Ovshinsky who developed the revolutionary battery technology that powered GM's electric car (and today's Prius). These two brilliant octogenarians took our small camera crew on a Willy Wonka style tour of their inventions including the world's largest thin film solar cell factory. As we stood under a football field size machine in Troy Michigan, I blustered "Is solar power back?" Stan exclaimed " What?! Solar never went away... What was back was backward thinking!" And as his machine cranked out miles of solar cells above us, we knew he was right.

I'm especially glad that the optimistic last scene of Who Killed the Electric Car has proven that we weren't just wishful thinkers when we finished our edit. The clips feature the first glimpse of the ultra fast Tesla electric sports prototype as well the Zenn neighborhood electric vehicle. Both cars are starting to roll off production lines today. And while the State of California (and some car companies) are still gambling on hydrogen fuel cells, plug-in cars are proving to be more environmentally efficient and popular. Early adopters deserve a lot of the credit. Oil companies and the internal combustion engine monopoly may have "killed" thousands of electric cars (EVs) in the 1990s, but EVs are coming back. (Stay tuned for next film...)

I hope you'll find our documentary takes you on a wild ride out of the 20th century and into the 21st. --Chris Paine, Writer/Director

Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement

Alex Jones's new documentary, Endgame, posits several theories relating to "the dawn of a new dark age" in which a few elite businessmen are planning to erase global boundaries in order to conglomerate the governance of three disempowered populations: the E.U., the North American Union, and the Asian Union modeled after Communist China. This plan allegedly involves depopulating countries around the world, constructing superhighways that connect otherwise unreachable regions throughout America, and forming paramilitary groups to infringe on personal freedoms and privacies. Interview footage of journalist Jim Tucker among many dubious others is spliced amongst myriad historical footage of the past two World Wars, right wing political speeches, eugenics charts, and shots of woodcuts depicting Napoleanic conquests and the Roman empire, impling that our society's political conservatism bears resemblance. But in tracing the formations of the League of Nations, the U.N., and finally Bilderberg Group in 1954, Endgame accuses these groups of trying to merge countries and eliminate international borders, without really assessing the fact that this has never been a secret. It will also seem obvious to many viewers that private parties "bankroll" wars for economic gain, not always philanthropic. Toward the film's end, an extended segment about Planned Parenthood's ties to early eugenics groups, which accuses Ted Turner and Bill Gates of buying into depopulation plans because both have donated funding to promote birth control in third world countries, reveals a pro-life agenda. In addition, after watching multiple clips of Jones himself yelling into people's car windows, wondering why the airport security are detaining him for following businessmen with a camera, stalking visitors at a Canadian hotel, and making other various rash gestures, it is difficult not to see Endgame as one man's elaborately considered conspiracy theory. —Trinie Dalton

Alex Jones is a true patriot, a genuine hero. - Actor/Director Charlie Sheen



For the New World Order, a world government is just the beginning. Once in place they can exact their plan to end 80% of the population and help the select, chosen few of the planet live forever with the aid of advanced technology.

In Endgame, documentary filmmaker Alex Jones chronicles the history of the global elite s bloody rise to power and reveals how they have funded dictators and financed the bloodiest wars using order out of chaos to pave the way for the first true world empire.

Watch as Jones and his team track the elusive, secretive Bilderberg Group to Ottawa and Istanbul to uncover their secret summits, allowing you to witness global kingpins setting the world s agenda and instigating World War III.

Learn about the formation of the North American transportation control grid, which will end U.S. sovereignty forever.

Discover how the practitioners of the pseudo-science Eugenics have taken control of governments worldwide as a means to carry out depopulation.

View the progress of the coming collapse of the United States and the formation of the North American Union.

Never before has a documentary assembled all the pieces of the globalists' dark agenda. Endgame's compelling look at past atrocities committed by those attempting to steer the future delivers information that the controlling media has meticulously censored for over 60 years, fully revealing the elite s agenda to dominate the earth and carry out the most wicked plan in all of human history.

Extras and features:

Bilderberg 2007 Report - Extended footage of the annual secretive conference

The Battle for the Republic featurette with extended interviews and footage

Special performance of Shackles on Me by Blues legend Jimmie Vaughan

The Fog of War - Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara

The Fog of War, the movie that finally won Errol Morris the best documentary Oscar, is a spellbinder. Morris interviews Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and finds a uniquely unsettling viewpoint on much of 20th-century American history. Employing a ton of archival material, including LBJ's fascinating taped conversations from the Oval Office, Morris probes the reasons behind the U.S. commitment to the Vietnam War--and finds a depressingly inconsistent policy. McNamara himself emerges as--well, not exactly apologetic, but clearly haunted by the what-ifs of Vietnam. He also mulls the bombing of Japan in World War II and the Cuban Missile Crisis, raising more questions than he answers. The Fog of War has the usual inexorable Morris momentum, aided by an uneasy Philip Glass score. This movie provides a glimpse inside government. It also encourages skepticism about same. --Robert Horton

Bowling for Columbine

Explores people's facination with the handgun and the possible reasons for the increase in gun violence in the United States.
Genre: Documentary
Rating: R
Release Date: 13-FEB-2007
Media Type: DVD

Michael Moore's superb documentary (following in the footsteps of Roger & Me and The Big One) tackles a meaty subject: gun control. Moore skillfully lays out arguments surrounding the issue and short-circuits them all, leaving one impossible question: why do Americans kill each other more often than people in any other democratic nation? Moore focuses his quest around the shootings at Columbine High School and the shooting of one 6-year-old by another near his own hometown of Flint, Michigan. By approaching the headquarters of K-Mart (where the Columbine shooters bought their ammo) and going to Charlton Heston's own home, Moore demands accountability from the forces that support unrestricted gun sales in the U.S. His arguments are conducted with the humor and empathy that have made Moore more than just a gadfly; he's become a genuine voice of reason in a world driven by fear and greed. --Bret Fetzer

FRONTLINE: Bush's War

9/11 and Al Qaeda, Afghanistan and Iraq, WMD and the Insurgency, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Fallujah and the Surge. For six years, FRONTLINE has been revealing those stories in meticulous detail, and the political dramas played out at the highest levels. Now, on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, the full saga will unfold in this special definitive documentary analysis of one of the most challenging periods in the nation's history.

Islam: What the West Needs to Know

An examination of Islam, violence, and the fate of the non-Muslim world.

Virtually every major Western leader has over the past several years expressed the view that Islam is a peaceful religion and that those who commit violence in its name are fanatics who misinterpret its tenets. This claim, while widely circulated, rarely attracts serious public examination. Now, the question is finally being asked, "Is Islam itself violent?"

Through an examination of the Koran, other Islamic texts, and the example of the prophet Muhammad, this documentary establishes, through a sober and methodical presentation, that violence against non-Muslims is and has always been an integral aspect of Islam. "Jihad," while best translated as "struggle," as represented in the Koran and the life of Muhammad, means nothing less than organized warfare against unbelievers. Relying primarily on Islam's own sources, this documentary demonstrates that Islam is a violent, expansionary ideology that seeks the destruction or subjugation of other faiths, cultures, and systems of government.

The documentary consists of original interviews, citations from Islamic texts, Islamic artwork, computer-animated maps, footage of Western leaders, and Islamic television broadcasts. Its tone is sober, methodical, and compelling.

Features interviews with noted experts on Islam including Robert Spencer, Serge Trifkovic, Bat Ye'or, Abdullah Al-Araby, and former terrorist Walid Shoebat.

Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy

The history and impact of the new global economy are made clear--and compelling--in Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy. This three-part, six-hour documentary does an astonishingly thorough job of dissecting and explaining macroeconomics and their current political and social importance without ever causing a loss of consciousness for the viewer. Part 1, The Battle of Ideas, chronicles the history of economic thought from the start of the 20th century and its socialist reforms right through the deregulation of the 1980s. Part 2, The Agony of Reform, explores the upheavals that such deregulation caused, focusing primarily on economic growth and gains and touching briefly on the wrenching consequences for the poor. Part 3, The New Rules of the Game, explores the consequences of globalization, including terrorism and the contagion of market collapse. The series makes good use of both large- and small-scale examples, and features interviews with several major world leaders. There is a slight teenybopper feel to The Battle for the World's Economy's admiration for today's celebrity economists, but the contagious enthusiasm is part of what makes the series so interesting. Big ideas are made extremely accessible to the average viewer (without condescension). Well worth watching. --Ali Davis

Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy confronts head-on Americans' critical concerns about the new interconnected world. Based on the best-selling book by Pulitzer Prize-winner Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, this groundbreaking series explores our changing world—the great debate over globalization and the future of our society.

Commanding Heights reunites the team that created The Prize— award-winning producer William Cran (From Jesus to Christ) and Daniel Yergin—and is the first in-depth documentary to tell the inside story of our new global economy and what it means for individuals around the world. Filmed on five continents, the powerful narrative combines stunning film footage with dramatic stories and extraordinary interviews with world leaders and thinkers from twenty different countries, including: Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, former USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev, Mexican President Vicente Fox, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, former Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, Rep. Richard Gephardt, and President George W. Bush's Economic Advisor Lawrence Lindsey.

Commanding Heights dramatically captures the issues that have defined the wealth and fate of nations and shows how the battle over the world economy will shape our lives in the twenty-first century.

Special DVD Features Include: ? Access to the Commanding Heights Web site, including: ? An exclusive time map, which provides an interactive atlas of economic history ? Comprehensive transcripts from on-camera interviews, and biographies of the people who played significant roles in the development of the modern global market ? An online teacher's guide that provides suggestions for applications of the Web site in classroom instruction ? An excerpt from the companion book to the series ? A complete list of interview subjects included in the series ? Chapter breaks ? English audiotrack and subtitles ? On three DVD5 discs.

Night and Fog - Criterion Collection

Though only a short subject, this groundbreaking documentary remains one of the most influential and powerful explorations of the Holocaust ever made. Director Alain Resnais bluntly presents an indictment not only of the Nazis but of the world community, and the film is all the more remarkable for its harsh judgment considering the time in which it was made, less than a decade after the end of the war, when questions of responsibility were not yet being addressed. Juxtaposing archival clips from the concentration camps across Germany and Poland with the present-day denials of the camps' existence, the film seeks to once and for all expose the horrifying truth of the Final Solution, as well as to address the continuing anti-Semitism and bigotry that existed long after the war's end. An invaluable resource and testament to history, this film was a profound influence on all films to address issues of the Holocaust, from Judgment at Nuremberg and Shoah to Schindler's List. Night and Fog remains an essential and indispensable document of the 20th century. --Robert Lane

Ten years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, filmmaker Alain Resnais documented the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz. One of the first cinematic reflections on the horrors of the Holocaust, Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) contrasts the stillness of the abandoned camps' quiet, empty buildings with haunting wartime footage. With Night and Fog, Resnais investigates the cyclical nature of man's violence toward man and presents the unsettling suggestion that such horrors could come again.

The War Room

Documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker (Don't Look Back) and Chris Hegedus shot behind-the-scenes at command central for Bill Clinton's 1992 election campaign and came up with this film. You won't find the kind of daily damage-control and skirt-chasing indirectly alleged in Primary Colors, but the filmmakers do give us a strong sense of the uphill battle of a presidential campaign. The center of the film is really James Carville, who steered the machine for Clinton's '92 run and who comes across in this film as a deeply passionate, complex, and somehow timeless man who could have fit into any chapter of American history. --Tom Keogh

Thomas Jefferson - A Film by Ken Burns

The complicated life of Thomas Jefferson is the subject of this excellent documentary by noted filmmaker Ken Burns. Using techniques that will seem comfortably familiar to viewers of other films by Burns, historians and writers (including Joseph Ellis, Daniel Boorstin, Garry Wills, and Gore Vidal) appear on camera to speak about Jefferson, a cast of actors read the words of Jefferson and others. The visuals include beautifully photographed shots of Jefferson's famed estate, Monticello, other locations where Jefferson lived and worked, and a vast number of period drawings and paintings. Jefferson, who was born into a prosperous Virginia family but lost his father when he was young, became a skilled lawyer despite his natural shyness. And the story of how he became a public figure and rose to prominence during the American Revolution is told intelligently. Commentators, including the noted African American historian John Hope Franklin, grapple with the peculiar inconsistencies of Jefferson's life. The man who wrote the Declaration of Independence owned slaves, and some of what he wrote about race is both troubling and puzzling. This film (which covers Jefferson's entire life, including his two terms as the young country's president and his later years in Virginia) doesn't sidestep controversy but provides a balanced account of one of the most fascinating of all Americans. --Robert J. McNamara