Movie Details
| Title: | Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea | |
| Director: | Chris Metzler, Jeff Springer | |
| Year: | 2004 | |
| Genre: | Documentary | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 12.14.05 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 12.14.05 | Alamo Downtown | A documentary about California's Salton Sea: a large saltwater lake just south of Palm Springs that was created from an engineering mishap and became a vacation hotspot for a few years until a few minor ecological disasters rendered the area smelly and full of dead fish and birds. Now it's home to weirdos, eccentrics, poor folk and old people. The doc kind of covers all of the little communities around the sea and gives a nice history to the spot and educates toward how it's drying up and without some major financial help the sea will eventually evaporate and ruin Palm Springs with huge dust storms which suck. It also lets us meet lots of people from the area and shows us how weird, eccentric, poor and old they are. One of the directors was in the house and gave a pretty complete Q&A afterward. Then the band which supplied most of the music for the movie did a 20-minute set with some footage sort of synching on screen. The movie was interesting and made me think about how weird the whole situation is down there. It's this sea that was basically a mistake to start with but had maybe 10 or 20 years of prosperity before nature kind of reminded everyone why it wasn't there in the first place and now it's dying one long slow 30-year death with these people trying to hold onto it for some reason or another. There's really no easy answer to the question of how to deal with the sea, just that it's there out in the desert and may one day be gone. The band is called Friends of Dean Martinex and they're local. It's two guys, a keyboardist and a drummer, and they played with a laptop so about half the song would be loops and samples then they'd play on top of them. The songs were really nice. Sort of like AIR's instrumental stuff... the only problem I felt while listening to them was that their songs sounded like the build-ups to crazy grooves that never really break out. They'd all make great intros or first tracks of albums but if they really opened them up and laid down a solid drum track they could become right up my alley. I still really enjoyed them though so I might try to track down some of their stuff. I think they have a few albums out or something. |
