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Alex Gibney’s Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief

If you had a vague but unverified sense that Scientology was a bit odd, unhinged, or unearthly; just wait till you hear about “Operating Thetans” (OTs), the intergalactic dictator Xenu and how the Earth is a slave planet for humans who were brought here billions of years ago while cryogenically frozen, dropped into volcanoes, and blown up with hydrogen bombs. And don’t even ask about O-T-T-R-Zero & “exteriorization” during auditing! I might be getting some of my “ theology ” wrong here but then again, that’s why you’ll want to see Alex Gibney’s newest documentary, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief . Based off Pulitzer Prize winning author Lawrence Wright’s newest non-fiction, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief , Gibney’s adaptation seems determined to include as much of the book’s content as possible, which, makes for a superbly in-depth, re-watchable experience (not unlike his other first-rate documentaries: Enron , Mea Maxima Cul

Jesse Moss's The Overnighters

The Overnighters by Jesse Moss Special Jury Prize --Sundance; 102 minutes Follow Director Jesse Moss with his handheld camera into the provincial town of Williston, North Dakota --population: roughly 20,000; only an hour drive from the Canadian border where winter-nights can drop 20 degrees below freezing. Enter the small, unassuming Concordia Lutheran Church --one of at least five in the state. Meet Pastor Jay Reinke--a plucky middle-aged husband & father with questionable prudence and an undeniable bounty of spiritual generosity toward the downtrodden. Or, at least toward most of them. In broad strokes, The Overnighters tells the story of one religious man’s attempt to serve the housing needs of homeless migrant workers in his small town. In many ways, Moss’s documentary tells a simple story that evenhandedly pits Pastor Reinke and his Overnighters project against the disgruntled congregation, his irritated neighbors, the city council, and at least one intrepid local new

George Saunders's The Braindead Megaphone: Pacifism Playtime

The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders Riverhead Books; 257 pages; $14 Twenty years ago, in that distant past we now call the mid-’90s, the American literati beatified George Saunders as their hallowed saint of short story writing--a torch passed from Cheever to Carver to Saunders. Often associated with the McSweeney’s generation, Saunders solidified his rank among the upper-echelons of literary fame--along with other notables, namely David Foster Wallace, William T. Vollmann, & Junot Diaz--declared by The New Yorker ’s 20 Best Writers Under 40 issue. By the turn of the century, Saunders had published the critically acclaimed CivilWarLand in Bad Decline & snagged a few minor writerly awards along the way. Since then, in the last fifteen years, the New York darling has written at least three novellas, three widely popular short story collections, one book of essays, and a smattering of nonfiction, in addition to garnering, among other prizes, the highly coveted Ma

Jaunting Through the Anthropocene In Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction

The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert Henry Holt; 319 pages; $28 2014 NBCCA nonfiction finalist From colony collapse disorder and the dwindling Monarch butterfly population to the precipitous decline of big trees in California and the “ 13 species we might have to say goodbye to in 2015 ”, the evidence of extinction surrounds & sometimes haunts us. And, yet, so much of daily life seems unremarkable, as we mere Homo sapiens existentially white-knuckle through our waking hours. We might wonder if the pieces fit together or if there's some great meaning behind the apparent rapid rate of global change. Fortunately, as aways, there’s a book to help put some of these questions in perspective. Elizabeth Kolbert, s taff writer for The New Yorker and author of Field Note from a Catastrophe (2006), extends on her previous work in a new monograph cataloguing the inevitable decline of global bio-diversity, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History . When we have fam