Much of the surviving Marley clan is featured here — Ziggy, Rita, Cedelia, Damian and Julian — there’s music and interviews. And more interviews — interviews with lots of people who just happened to show up for Bob’s birthday celebration down in Ethiopia. There’s Danny Glover, Angelique Kidjo, Lauren Hill and others but the participants here seem to be fighting over Marley’s legacy as much as celebrating it.

But the title of the film is ‘Africa Unite’ and NOT ‘A Posthumous Celebration of Bob Marley’s 60th Birthday’. Though the film doesn’t come together as a cohesive narratve or a document of an important event, it does feature a few good, informative moments for people unfamiliar with Marley and/or the Rastafarian movement.

Notably, Haile Selassie’s 1963 address to the U.N. and the pan-African movement are addressed after the 2nd half-hour, the same speech that Marley put to music and recorded as the song “War“.

But the relationship of these celebrities and the search for human rights, cultural development and education get somewhat muddled as the filmmakers wander back and forth from hotel conference-rooms to the streets of Addis Ababa apparently seeking some sort of grilled-cheese manifestation of the departed musician. There’s plenty of archival footage and information about Haile Selassie, but those who are really interested in the subculture and Marley’s impact might do better to see Jeremy Marre’s ‘Rebel Music‘ (2001), Awake Zion (2005), The Promised Ship (2000) or any of the many Wailers concert videos.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

In particular, Jackson tracks the history and growth of Exxon/Mobil, the largest publically-traded oil company, taking account of it’s failures, specifically that of the Exxon Valdez tragedy (1989) and the corporation’s efforts to control and manipulate the social and ecological damage done by that accident.

‘Balance’ is a fine informational documentary replete with many valuable interviews with scientists, researchers and stakeholders, etc. The film’s only shortcoming is filmmaker Tom Jackson’s half-serious ‘confessional’ contributions to his film.

But not everybody can be Michael Moore — Moore’s intimate relationship with his subjects — the Auto Industry, the NRA, even socialized medicine — is unparalleled because Moore takes the time to develop his narratives: As a Flint, Michigan native, he watched as his relatives and neighbors suffered because of GM’s failures; Moore consistently makes an effort to create a personal connection between himself and the institutions that he chooses to roast. In ‘Roger and Me’ it was the economic devastation reaped upon Moore’s hometown as a result of a GM plant closing. In ‘The Big One’, Moore expanded Roger‘s technique to deal with other plant closings throuhout the United States. ‘Bowling for Columbine’ and ‘Fahrenheit 9/11′ were expansions of the same premise, essentially looking at corporate and Executive malfeasance and it’s effect on the common, blue-collar working man. It also doesn’t hurt that Moore is a natural entertainer, who adopts a feckless, Columbo-like persona when he takes to the streets and corporate HQ elevators in search of his interviews.

And that’s the one problem with ‘Out of Balance’ — Tom Jackson is no Michael Moore — his self-deprecating monologue at the beginning of the film falls a little flat and at no point in his documentary does he create a personal connection betweenn himself and the greed-heads of Big Oil, much less the target of his documentary, the Exxon/Mobil Corporation. It has been well established that with Valdez, Exxon/Mobil perpertated one of the worst-ever ecological disasters of any major corporation — why has Exxon earned the rebuke of this film from Jackson — for an accident that occurred back in 1989? Is Exxon more guilty of damaging the environment than any of the other oil companies? More guilty than the car manufacturers for whom this oil is lifeblood?

Now, I don’t mean to diminish Mr. Jackson’s film here – rather, it just seems as though he stopped short of creating a more effective film. Rather than simply manifest a vendetta against Exxon/Mobil, he could have crafted a simple fact-based film that addresses the problems we face as an oil-dependent civilization. Of course, these movies work best when there’s an identifiable villain, but by singling-out Exxon, jackson diminishes his message somewhat.

Mr. Jackson ought to leave the self-deprecating humor to Michael Moore and simply present his interviews as the focus of his films, a technique used to it’s greatest effect in documentaries like Charles Ferguson’s ‘No End in Sight‘.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Six years after 9/11, Osama Bin Laden has been all but forgotten, New Orleans has drowned, people are talking about building a wall on the Mexican border and China owns all of our manufacturing jobs.

As hindsight, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rebecca Chaiklin and Donavan Leitch do a good job of investigating the American political process before everything became political, before Cheney started meeting with Oil companies and before terrorism allowed a then-Majority Government to drop a virtual police-state on our heads, with interminable security checks at the airport and all the rest.

Importantly, Hoffman takes a good look at what was driving the economy back in 2000 and how the economy drove earmarked legislation that drove the construction of prisons and local economies to ‘create’ inmates to ship to far-away prisons and add fuel to those local economies. Manufacturing in the US has emigrated to China, so we are now a service-economy that moves people and paper from place to place.

There are numerous candid spots of George W. Bush speaking without his trademark Texas accent as Hoffman and his crew descend upon both political conventions and the debates which Green Party candidate Ralph Nader was shut-out of. Even as it was noted that the Democratic and Republican candidates were running on identical ‘Children and Education’ platforms, none of them were talking about security, energy, the future of Social Security or the shibboleth of of Universal Health coverage, which now drives a dying auto-industry to Canada where the costs are underwritten by the State.

Looking back at the 2000 election cycle, it is hard to believe that things could get worse, since it becomes plain that many of the candidates in that race weren’t representing their constituents, only themselves.

Admirably, Chaiklin and Leitch carry the 2000 race to its conclusion at the Supreme Court, noting that Gore won the popular vote by 500.000 votes, yet lost the office by judicial fiat. Even there, Hoffman notes the protests at the WTO conferences in Seattle, and Bush’s 2001 inauguration and the failure of civil protest as a means to address social problems. We’ve been living a Constitutional crisis for the past 7 years.

‘The Party’s Over’ is a good film if only for the things it captures – both the ‘Big Lie’ and the ‘Big Absence’ as both the Right and the Left missed the issues that become most important in the seven years that followed.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

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In theaters June 29, 2007.

June 19: Now available via Google Video.

In the first episode, “The Trigger Effect” he examines the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965, which took down the electrical grid of the entire Eastern seaboard, from Maine to Philadelphia. Though I’m sure that the event girded us against future disasters of that sort, a mandatory viewing of the program might have made the Bush Administration better prepared for 9-11, Katrina and put us in a position to deal with the inevitability of Peak Oil. Throughout the series, Burke does the unusual thing of connecting Mankind, Nature and Technology.

Ah, the ’70′s, an age when ‘objectivity’ was a stronger certitude… today, so many of our decisions are mediated by opinion polls and Faith-based nonsense. I encourage everyone to investigate this series. It is available from the usual sources for and arm or a leg, or you can just fire-up Google Video where much of the series is available for free.

Episode #1 – The Trigger Effect

Documentarian Keven McAllester does a satisfying enough job of tracking Erikson’s youth and early music career, before arresting his musical inquiry to dive into a disquisition on the singer’s mental illness and the 17 years he floated in and out of Texas’ Mental Health Care system and the care of friends and family.

Apparently, Erikson discovered LSD in the early ’70′s and it triggered some nascent schizophrenia that Erikson had been walking around with his entire life. At this point – the 20 or 30 minute mark – the film becomes a bit too much like Terry Zwigoff’s ‘Crumb‘ (1994) and the filmmakers take too much of an interest in Erikson’s schizophrenia, twenty years of institutionalization and his eccentric family, specifically his Mother Evelyn and his brother, Sumner. And this is where the documentary seems to go wrong.

If the movie was meant to be a proper portrait, the filmmakers ought to have spent more time on the music that Erikson made and the influence he has had, given that most people have likely never heard of The Elevators or recognize the influence that they had on American music, an influence that trickled into Jefferson Airplane or that of their sometime-collaborator, fellow Texan Janis Joplin.

A case for Erikson and the Elevators’ influence could easily be made, given that they were the first psychedelic rock band. Current scholarship links the Elevators to Michael Stipe and R.E.M., The Jesus and Mary Chain and ZZ Top, while missing the likely influence they had upon acts like The Velvet Underground, Jefferson Airplane, Patti Smith, the Talking Heads and the American ‘Punk’ and ‘Emo’ movements during the ’70′s, ’80′s and ’90′s. Instead, it seems as though director Keven McAlester and his producers, Laura Boyd DeSmeth and Lauren Hollingsworth would rather use Erikson’s story as a springboard to discuss the inequities and difficulties of mental health care here in America, as they go into the homes of Roky, his mother and brother, to reveal some shocking details about the disorders each of them seem to share.

The filmmakers then wrap-up their story create an inaccurate ‘happy’ ending, by depicting a middle-aged Erikson, moving from a State mental facility to the custody and Guardianship roles that have been given to his brother Sumner. What the filmmakers conveniently omit from their coverage is that Erikson has maintained something of a music career since 1995, despite his institutionalization. As part of his role as Roky’s legal guardian, brother Sumner has encouraged his brother to continued playing and organized an annual annual Ice Cream Social in their native Austin and that Roky has largely weaned himself of the many psychiatric medications he was dependent upon while he was a ward of the State.

In this case, I wish the filmmakers had spent more time in the film talking about Erikson and his musical influence, rather than the Jerry Springer-style evocation of American Mental Health care and the traps that it creates. Though Erikson was a victim of that system it is neither the beginning or end of his story.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars