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Friday, June 03, 2011

'The Last Mountain' premieres tonight in D.C., N.Y.

UPDATE, June 10: The journalist who knows this issue best, Ken Ward Jr. of The Charleston Gazette, has a review of the film.

Coal River Mountain in West Virginia is not the last mountain in Central Appalachia, or even "one of the last," as the trailer below says, but it is the subject of the mountaintop-removal documentary by that name, featuring environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., that premieres in Washington, D.C., tonight and will have a free showing in Charleston, W.Va., in a week. Here's the schedule.



The movie is "unabashedly polemical," reviewer Mark Jenkins writes in The Washington Post. "The film provides evidence of catastrophic health problems, resulting from high levels of lead, mercury and other metals in drinking water, and flood hazards, from earth dams that hold (or fail to hold) water contaminated by toxic sludge. The movie’s credibility is boosted by the weakness of its opposition: Massey Energy," which wants to mine Coal River Mountain but "has been on the retreat" because of safety isuses at its underground mines. This week Massey passed into history, merging into Alpha Natural Resources. (Read more)

The Atlantic's story has a silly headline, "Will 'The Last Mountain' Stop Coal Mining?", and ignores the fact that mountaintop mines do not remain "pockmarked moonscapes." Still, writer David Thier asks a pertinent question, one that he says applies to all "films that double as activism: Do they translate outrage into action?" Kennedy "says that the movie is meant to make viewers understand the economic, environmental and moral costs wrapped up in coal."

For many Americans, especially those working blue-collar jobs in Central Appalachia, such problems and questions are outweighed by shorter-term economic concerns. Thier says director Bill Haney (also the /co-screenwriter and co-producer) focuses "on working-class West Virginians and paint[s] the coal company execs as fat cats. But the ultimate focus on Kennedy, a man whose family is a stand-in for northeastern privilege, may undercut that message. ... It's a well-told story, but its conclusion is unwritten. It succeeds in producing that raised eyebrow and sense of guilt about the power coursing into the TV, but it's hard to tell if it will do much more. The real test of its quality won't be told in box-office receipts, but on the top of Coal River Mountain." (Read more)

The New York Times review displays a disappointing lack of familiarity with the region's landscape. And much of the coverage casts mountaintop removal as an issue only for West Virginia. We hope the film does not; one of the producers, Clara Bingham, has Kentucky roots. Kennedy told The Hill that the most surprising thing he learned during the production was "How much democracy had been subverted in this state" of West Virginia. (Read more)

UPDATE, June 24: Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe writes, "It’s sincere. It’s misguided. It feels like a stunt." Morris also calls it "a righteous embarrassment" and says Kennedy's "outrage just doesn't really connect with anyone else's," and calls the movie "an infomercial for wind farms." (Read more)

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