18 minutes film 'Plastic Bag' a viral hit on the Web

[Elmore Furth]

So you thought the life a disposable plastic shopping bag couldn't be made in a tragedy. Hah!

Just when YouTube took down the beloved "Downfall" memes featuring Hitler fulminating against everything from "Avatar" to Burning Man, Werner Herzog -- legendary auteur and Teutonic eccentric -- has become a viral hit on the Web.

"Plastic Bag," an 18-minute film directed by Ramin Bahrani and narrated by Herzog, follows the title character, a lowly plastic shopping bag, from "birth" at a supermarket checkout aisle, through a happy life with his "maker" (the woman who took her groceries home in him and used him for random daily chores) to cruel abandonment in a garbage dump. After years searching for his maker, during which the human race disappears, the bag meets its final reward in the Pacific Ocean's notorious "Garbage Vortex," where it finds rueful solace among its dispossessed and stubbornly un-biodegradable tribe.

Playful, poetic, shot through with equal doses of deadpan humor and spiritual longing, "Plastic Bag" has become a hit on the Internet since appearing on YouTube and the Independent Television Service Web site a month ago. The film was commissioned by ITVS as part of its online "Futurestates" project, in which 11 filmmakers were asked to make digital shorts about present-day issues and their implications for the future. It will be shown Sunday at 2:30 p.m. as part of a bonus screening at the Environmental Film Festival.

Though it was created for online viewing, "Plastic Bag" has been shown at renowned film festivals such as Telluride and South by Southwest. And it deserves the play on that circuit, thanks to impeccable cinematic credentials: Filmed with spare elegance by cinematographer Michael Simmonds, "Plastic Bag" elaborates on a visual trope that recurred throughout "American Beauty" and found its first expression in Jem Cohen's 1996 experimental documentary "Lost Book Found."




Web hit 'Plastic Bag' blows into D.C. for Environmental Film Fest

[bif]

1. The movie was very cool!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDBtCb61Sd4

[ellenfl]

2. kick for later. eom

[Statistical]

3. Thanks. I got to check it out later.