An experiment -- and its problems

What if you could enter a spacious, self-sustaining environment, say one with 3.4 acres of floor space? You’d be able to see the outside world, but your immediate environment would include a variety of climates — from rain forests to oceans to a wetland. Your new habitat would generate its own air supply and water. You’d grow and harvest your own food.

Sound appealing at this moment when the world beyond your home feels especially dangerous thanks to Covid19?

After seeing the documentary Spaceship Earth, such sequestered living may lose much of its appeal.

Director Matt Wolf’s documentary tells the story of Biosphere 2, a well-intended experiment that was conducted in the early 1990s in hopes that it would serve as a preview of coming of attractions for colonizing distant planets.
That’s interesting enough, but the movie isn't only about a large-scale experiment; it’s also about the spirit and commitment of a group of people who decided to spend their lives thinking outside whatever boxes they could find.

Wolf introduces us to the team of men and women who initiated many other projects before winding up in the aptly named town of Oracle, Arizona, home of Biosphere 2. Led by John Allen, a kind of modern Renaissance man, this group of adventurers built a ship and sailed it around the world. The people who undertook these projects looked much like other communal adventurers of the 1960s — except for one thing.

As one participant put it: We weren’t a commune. We were a corporation.

The group tried to generate profits from its efforts, which included a traveling theater company and establishment of an art gallery in London.
With Allen at the helm (more or less), the group became innovative capitalists with a consciousness that turned them into early actors when it came to climate change.

By the time, Allen and committed to the Biosphere project, major money was needed, something on the order of $150 million: Ed Bass, a Texas billionaire with a taste for visionary projects, became the project's financier.

But scaling up brought other problems, a need for publicity and the arrival of throngs of tourists, as well as the curse of marketing.
Mistakes were made, one of which included a severe drop in oxygen levels inside Biosphere 2.

But even as things soured (Allen eventually lost control fo the project), some of the group's idealistic spirit remained, particularly among the eight so-called Biosphereans who lived apart from the world for two years.

Biosphere 2 eventually became the property of the University of Arizona.

Oh, and by the way, unless you already know, you won’t believe who shows up at the end when the project needs rescuing — one of the last people I’d expect to have seen in a film such as Spaceship Earth.

Bob's Cinema Diary: 2/14/20 -- A fallen Russian oligarch and a very eccentric woman

Citizen K

Convoluted and full of intrigue, director Alex Gibney’s documentary Citizen K opens a window into post-Soviet Russia. Not surprisingly, the air that blows in is tainted by corruption. Gibney focuses on Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a dethroned oligarch who served 10 years in a Russian prison on charges of tax evasion. Khodorkovsky, who now lives in London, has become a vocal critic of the Putin regime. Khodorkovsky’s fortune was built on oil and, at one point, he was the richest man in Russia. He bought up Siberian oil fields at bargain prices as he built a fortune of $16 billion. The 56-year-old Khodorkovsky serves as our principal guide through a story that Gibney lays out in detail. Khodorkovsky, by the way, is a very rich dissident; he’s supposedly worth about $500-million, a demotion from the upper tiers of super wealth but enough to stave off worries about paying the rent. Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) isn’t about to let the wily Khodorkovsky rule the movie’s roost. The director's voice-over narration, along with additional interviews, gives the film an independent voice. Khodorkovsky now runs an organization called Open Russia, which tries to support opposition to Putin. I don’t know what to make of Khodorkovsky, but if you’re looking for insight into how Russia operates, Citizen K makes for a start, particularly at a time when Putin’s Russia figures so prominently in our news.

Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project

Eccentricity can be irresistible — so long as you don’t have to live with it. I thought about that as I watched Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project. Stokes, who died in 2012 at the age of 83, was the ultimate tape-head. She used VCRs, as many as eight at a time running 24 hours a day, to record every television show that aired in Philadelphia, the city where she lived. She carried out this activity for 30 years as she made the transition from a Communist activist in the 1950s to a reclusive woman who began hoarding newspapers, books and various versions of Apple computers. Stokes needed eight apartments to store all of her stuff. No person is entirely comprehensible, but Stokes seems more inscrutable than most. Her second marriage to John Stokes -- a man with whom she once hosted a public access TV show -- created a cocoon in which she was able to pursue her interests, which had something to do with the way media informs (and perhaps controls) perception. A librarian by trade, Stokes created a catalog of the evolving nature of television news. Director Matt Wolf interviews Michael Metelits, Stokes' son from a first marriage, as well several people who worked for her in her later years. Whatever you make of Stokes, it’s impossible not to get caught up in her story, which means living in her world for the movie’s length. Clips from Stokes’ collection are seen throughout, turning this weird but rewarding movie into a kind of review of 30 years of history. And, yes, you'll learn what happened to all of Stokes' tapes.