Alfred P. Sloan in your FACEEEEEE

What is the Alfred P. Sloan Prize? It's a prize at the Sundance Film Festival that awards a film that focuses on science or technology as a theme or has a scientist as a main character. After seeing good reviews of a few films that happen to be winners of this prize, I decided to review some of them.

1. Primer (2004)
Aaron (Shane Carruth, who also directed the film) and Abe (David Sullivan) are two engineers who work for a large corporation during the day and have an invention workshop during off hours. Inadvertently, they manage to make a time machine while messing around with a device to reduce the mass of objects. At first they use the machine to manipulate the stock market, but soon they start to abuse their new powers, crossing ethical and moral lines to change the course of their lives.
The plot has an experimental structure, given the whole time travel conceit, but is still relatively easy to understand once you get what is going on. It will probably take a viewer a couple of times or more to grasp everything that goes on in the film. What is amazing is that all this is made by a small group of people, but looks so refined and professional. Carruth uses his background in mathematics and engineering to ground the film in reality; documenting the minutiae of tedious scientific research, including the trial and error associated with it. He also uses muted colors and ambience to create an atmosphere of both sterility and dread.

As the film goes on the tension mounts, but at 70-odd minutes does not seem as adequate as it would seem in developing this tension into a climax. Nevertheless, Primer is an accomplished sci-fi film that I think will become a cult classic.


2. Grizzly Man (2005)
For thirteen years Timothy Treadwell lived his summers along with Grizzly Bears in Katmai National Park in Alaska until his life was cut short in 2003, killed by the very bears he swore to 'protect.' This documentary by Werner Herzog is a little portrait into Treadwell's own experiences with the bears, and the events that eventually led to his death. Most of the film is framed within Herzog's own perspective on Treadwell, in his capacity describing Treadwell as both an actor and filmmaker. Thus Herzog himself narrates the entire movie. It takes a bit getting used to as he sounds like a 70 year old Arnold Schwarzenegger (imagine hiring Arnie to narrate your film) but seeing as this is Herzog's message and opinion on the man, it's understandable.

At points the film portrays Treadwell as a kind and gentle man who loves nature and the animals and wildlife he protected and research every year. On the other hand, through his own films we see a Treadwell who was paranoid, interfered with the bears more than he 'helped' them, had this skewed idealization of nature, and openly shunned humanity and civilization while at the same time craving attention, perhaps treating his ventures into Katmai as a sort of self therapy for his own inner demons. Although one could say that he was foolhardy enough to dare to do this with the bears, he did survive 13 years with them with nary an incident. And the circumstances behind his death did push towards a scenario where he would be more likely be attacked than normal. He knew the risks. He knew that he would be killed, either by his own pragmatism or an inner self-destructive urge.

If anything, the film made me want to know more about the real man behind all the hoopla, so in a way, this documentary did its job. Read here for some points about his life and death.

3. Sleep Dealer (2008)
Alex Rivera directs a film that, although being science fiction, deals with problems the world is facing even today.

Memo (Jacob Vargas) lives in Santa Ana Del Rio, a small town in rural Mexico. He dreams of making it big somewhere in the city and uses a homemade transmitter to listen in on conversations of people from far away. Unforunately, this leads to the US government, depicted here as an isolationist and imperial state, attacking his home. Memo now heads to Tijuana where he begins his work as a Sleep Dealer, a sort of virtual laborer, doing the dirty jobs without the problem of immigration.

The commodification of the human soul, cheap outsourcing of labor, water politics (as opposed to energy politics) and increasing corporate and state imperialism are all topics that are valid and as feasible today, but at the same time they are discussed in this movie. Memo and his father Memo goes to a reservoir to get water that should rightfully be theirs; they are asked at gunpoint to pay or face the consequences. Later, Memo delivers money to his family back in Santa Ana del Rio; after taxes and other fees are deducted, only 2/3 of the original amount is given.

The issues raised in the film are quite powerful, but the presentation falls short quite a bit. Some come off as cheap or cartoony; a fight sequence at the end was unnecessary. The characterization was also a bit off the mark, as characters such as Luz and Rudy are given scant screen time, so we don't get to know them as much as we do Memo, making the full product seem incomplete.

Sleep Dealer is a flawed film, but that does not make the issues it raises any less important. In the end, it is worth watching to gain perspectives of things that might be happening to us not in the future, but in the here and now.