Customer Reviews

No Impact Man (2009)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Upon viewing this film, a few things struck me the wrong way about this man. In no particular order, he:

1)Doesn't seem have much respect for his wife.
2)Comes off as a self-indulgent attention whore, who then resents it when attention goes to something he did for no other reason but the attention- ie, not using toilet paper.
3)To segue off of that, he won't use toilet paper, yet his wife works for Business Week, and he takes on this endeavor in order to publish both a paperback and hardback book. Which, you guessed it, consumed significantly more trees than simply using toilet paper in the first place would have.

Also, I'm not quite sure what going vegetarian for a year has to do with eating locally or sustainably, seeing as how locally, humanely raised livestock that fit organic guidelines would've fit their diet just as much as his plan to eat only local, organically grown vegetables.

What saves it from being a one-star film is that, in his own misguided way, he did advocate some things that would legitimately help if people continued to do it, such as supporting your local farmers and producers, riding bikes if one's healthy enough to do so, and limiting our waste; unfortunately, the positives came with a good portion of BS that had to be endured to get there by a man more worried about how many people would think he was awesome than the cause itself, and it's also nothing groundbreaking.

And that little quip about farming not being hard? Charming. That's truly endearing to anyone who's actually done more than twist a garden weasel into the ground to plant parsley where someone else already did the work.

I'm a firm believer in the cause of sustainability, but this tool makes a mockery out of the experiment with haphazard rules he makes up along the way. Where the power came from to make this film in the first place, even in the "no electricity" phase, and how he always gets just enough juice to power his blog on simply completes the charade. He was so insecure that his story would be lost, he couldn't even last the 6 months without updating his blog or filming. In essence, "no impact" doesn't represent his ultimate goal, but his ultimate fear- that his stunt would be forgotten about so quickly if he didn't make himself available during his fasting of consumerism, that the end result would truly have no impact.

To me, that speaks volumes about the level of faith he actually has in the cause.

great little documentary, if you can learn to tolerate beavan early on. it's been said before, he's a lame-o, but it bears repeating. it's unfortunate the filmmakers were saddled with such a huge obstacle (beavan) as this man totally impacts the film like "the annoying guy your best friend is dating". you just have to suffer thru him.

it pays off though! schein manages to salvage the film with interesting, intimate shots. you walk away realizing "nobody's perfect", that we are all struggling with ourselves, our ideals, our way of living.

the film gets blasted for not being THE eco-primer on sustainable living. well, it ain't. and the truth is, it's a better film for it.
you wanna learn how to recycle, be green? there's tons of info out there, find it.

seeing a man, his family struggle with their conscious, that's a way more interesting story.

Very well done film and very eye-opening. I saw the premier in NYC and found it illuminating and inspiring even as someone who already lives "green." It showed not only what the family experienced in terms of reducing their impact but also how it affected their marriage and social life which was interesting and added depth to the story. My only negative was actually that it should have been called "No Impact Family" because his wife and daughter participated too and should be given credit as such.

3.5 stars

It's laughable that this book and project in general got the press they did. While I applaud the basic premise, the selling of it is uber-irony at its saddest. There are only a couple of truly profound moments in this movie, the best of which is Mayer's little comment about Colin's wife: "Michele writes for BusinessWeek; millions of trees are cut down on a regular basis in order to promote their thoroughly fallacious propaganda that American corporate capitalism is good for the people, good for you and me. Now if it's your contention that she makes up for it, that it evens out, because she doesn't take the elevator at your Fifth Avenue co-op, I have to say you're either dishonest or delusional. I mean, if anybody really thought that you were going to have an impact, you wouldn't be getting the attention you're getting."

Now that's the raw, unvarnished truth we hear so little of. If only there'd been more of it in this doc. But then, a film that honest wouldn't be the panacea that we and our McDonald's culture want to believe in. And who wants to see a film with the (more accurate) title of Not Nearly Enough Impact Man?

Two comments at the end, along with Mayer's acute observations, are the best things here: Colin's thought that if we're not part of a community we don't feel accountable for our actions, and Michele's that after turning off their fridge, a/c, etc, they had no reason to be indoors and that the days outside "seemed to last forever". But what really stands out about NIM is both how doomed we are as a nation and planet if a pitifully meager gesture like this project is seen as some sort of ray of light, and what childishly spoiled rotten consumerist brats we Americans truly are.

We're all so anxious to pat ourselves on the back these days for any perceived bit of "green" activity, because deep down we're all beginning to realize that we've gone too far with our greedy trashing of the Earth, and that hell is about to be paid. Haiti and Katrina-type events are bound to occur much more frequently and much less fixably, and are doing so, and only an idiot thinks they're completely disconnected from our greed-driven consumer cultures. It was painful to watch this movie and realize that this drop in the bucket is seen as progress--and even overkill, incredibly--by our idiot media like Good Morning America, however well-intentioned (though profit-driven) Beaven's motives are.

The opening scenes are telling and depressing; Michele buys a thousand dollar pair of boots then wonders why, is in a different outfit every time we see her (as in the rest of the movie, so non-consumerist chic), and is so thoroughly self-absorbed and spoiled that I kept wondering why Colin was married to her in the first place. Any progress she appears to have made in the movie feels lost as one watches the "Scrabble" dvd extra and listens to her opine about her terrible sacrifices. She claims to have learned from it all but it felt more like she enjoyed the publicity and upcoming money...that's a lot of boots at 975 a pop!

Colin comes off as much more of a rational being, and at least somewhat thoughtful...yet it takes him most of the year to finally put up one tiny solar panel (which was someone else's idea) and to figure out so many other apparently obvious truths that one is left wondering how much thought and research he's really given to it all, short of how he can monetize the situation.

Step one: have a camera person around much of the time! That'll keep it real! Colin laments Michele's love of reality shows...but he then shuts the tv off so she can appear in his reality show. Perfect. As she would say, "Like, I totally, like, think that's totally, like, I'm not sure. I need a quadruple espresso." BusinessWeek must be so proud. (Imagine their faces when they first watched Mayer's dead-on speech about their greed.)

While Colin's little daughter, the future and present consumer, wanders about, Colin sits around making a list of ways to lessen his impact on the planet ("Put the kid back in your crotch," suggested my girlfriend). Then Mommy wants yet another kid, and he relents as a "40th birthday present" to her. Now that's reducing consumption! Make another mouth to feed! This guy is really committed to this "no impact" concept, isn't he? Give me a break. Overpopulation is the number one issue behind all of our woes, yet it's never mentioned here, just another example of how self-serving this project is.

It makes me sad to be cynical about a movie with such seemingly good intentions, but it all felt so fake in a self-consciously pseudo-hip Manhattan way. Mayer's brief speech punctures the thin green balloon so swiftly and devastatingly, a moment far truer than what surrounds it, unfortunately. The whole doc is worth seeing if just for that moment of real insight. At least Colin realizes how right Mayer is, even if neither of them is too happy about it.

Then the project ends and the only difference seems to be that they don't have a tv..."but I'm watching it all day on holidays!" squeals the long-suffering wife. Gosh but it's been hell on her! Their so-called deprivations are a joke. Eating root vegetables! What a noble sacrifice! Sure, billions people a day live on less than that, but hey, they can't buy boots for nine hundred and seventy-five dollars either. They could buy a year's worth of food for their families, though...

These are big steps? Unreal. We need to do a lot more than this, every one of us, and then stop breeding like flies if we can even hope to ameliorate the coming catastrophes. The only intelligent, evolved people I see in this movie are the farmers at the market; the most important part of the whole dvd is on the extra about the bees, when the farmer mentions that GMO plants are quickly killing off the key to all of our farming: bees. Now there's a movie we need to see, and a topic we need to address, like, totally now. But we won't, not until it's too late, as with so many other "green" deck chairs we rearrange on our sinking boat while telling ourselves how we're making such a difference.

I really do applaud the realization that we must all change our way of living in America, but this movie and its partial measures, fitfully adopted and then quickly given up, will never effect that change. The title might be apt, though: this kind of halfway for-a-while project really will have No Impact, compared to how fast our planet is falling apart. There are a thousand Micheles "needing" Starbucks every day and thinking it's "green" to buy things there, to every one of her husband, who's willing to go the real extra steps, if just for a while, and just for his book. That a guy like this gets so much press while almost nobody knows who Rudolf Steiner is says it all.

Steiner and the many other traditional farming/living advocates are the people who deserve movies being made about them, as they've been walking the walk and talking the talk for many decades. 40-year-olds like Colin Beaven, however well-intentioned, who are just now realizing what's up, are waaay behind the curve. That they're presented as ahead of it is merely a harbinger for how bad things are going to get, and how soon.

But then that kind of truth just don't sell...at least not enough to buy a pair of boots for 975 clams.

I watched only a portion of the dvd and confess that despite bringing little expectation, it nevertheless was a slow uncomfortable, albeit sad, erosion for me. I stepped off where the wife gets pregnant. There was far too much marital reality show, just as Colin feared. But what was more frustrating: far too little explanation on how they reach all the terribly strange arbitrary decisions (no to a fridge but yes to ice???) they made to reach what they considered the "no impact zone". In short, too much daydreaming and reacting, not enough solid homework and thinking it through.

From the beginning, the project comes off as ill conceived, grossly lacking in research on the general topic and disorganized as to how to solve even simple situations like hygiene. Case in point -- Colin's pot-in-pot cooler was a failure for Colin's assumption that the very arid climate where they are successfully used wasn't a factor. Not enough thinking. Another even more egregious case in point -- there is no greater impact on Earth to be found than in its overpopulation yet there appears zero consciousness about that displayed in the discussions by either husband or wife prior to their second conception. How does one overlook that?

At some point, it became too difficult to watch the kind of ignorance that doesn't know it is. It brings to mind how one must first understand the entirety of the problem to make successful course changes. Flying by one's pants seat can be humorous but this was merely a sad self indulgent cousin to "Into The Wild", which drew a hugely sympathetic reaction from me. It was just as admirable of a goal but with quite the opposite of an admirable application. Fortunately for the Beavans, nothing as essential as survival was ever at stake so all their angst, in contrast to McCandless's dangerous heroics mixed with understandable naivete, comes off as average every day dumbo. If you last the whole dvd, I say bully for you. I couldn't.

No-Impact Man is supposed to be a documentary about 1 year in the life of a man named Beavan and his family during which they use only sustainable, non-polluting products. It was not supposed to be a movie about WHY you should be a no-impact environmentalist, nor a movie about HOW to go no-impact, so I wasn't disappointed that this DVD didn't show either of these things. Also, Beavan never said that his experiment was in living the only acceptable lifestyle, so I don't fault him for getting solar panels to power his laptop or selling his books. However, what I did expect was a movie about his experience of living without disposable things, and No-Impact Man didn't deliver. Instead it is a movie about Beavan and his wife, and some discombobulated moments in their lives.

Example one: The family tries to use a double-bucket system to cool food rather than having a fridge. But we get from the movie a scene where Beavan's wife is telling him that he doesn't support her because she is willing to use the buckets but he is not willing to have a second child with her. That's basically a movie about them as a couple, and we don't learn anything like... is the food going bad? Are the buckets hard to use? etc.

Example two: The family stops using toilet paper, using washable pieces of clothe instead. We get to hear from the wife stories about how some of her co-workers won't shake her hand anymore, etc. But what was the experience of using the clothe like? Did they feel clean? Was it gross to wash the clothes? No questions like that are ever answered.

I don't know who put this movie together, but they did a very poor job of making the No-Impact Man experiment either interesting or educational. Hopefully the book will be better.

This film was interesting and overall worth watching; but I was disappointed there wasn't any supporting information on their chosen methods or how-to. It was basically a reality show about a family simplifying their lifestyle, repetitive justification for doing so, and their increasing popularity along the ride.

I would have liked to see:
- Background on his project plan and how he drafted it
- How he researched and why he chose the methods he chose
- Real answers behind addressing toilet paper, dirty diapers, etc. and I'm not asking this out of perverse fascination. I'm asking it out of sincere interest on how to live without these things.

Highlights:
- I loved Mayer, the gardener's, humor and wisdom
- I enjoyed seeing their solution to laundry
- I liked the information around cleaning products but wanted more info on how to do this myself
- It was nice to see a child be part of this project. I have one and a little one on the way; so it's nice to know it's "doable" with babies

Lowest points:
- Didn't care about his numerous talks with national tv shows or his soapbox moments; the point seemed to be overblown
- Because there was so much lack of information and supporting facts he came off as extremely amateur and somewhat ignorant. I can see why some reviewers were annoyed
- His defensiveness around people wanting to know HOW he got by without toilet paper, etc.

My comments about other reviews:
- I feel the criticism behind the question," was he really low impact?" to be essentially irrelevant. That title, "Low impact man" is for publicity. This film is really about simplifying a lifestyle and doing what you can to reduce eco impact.
- Some people were confused by his choice to go vegetarian. Apparently, they didn't hear the fact that meat-eating, whether grown locally or not, contributes to green house gases.

Because of these omissions, I feel this film was 3 stars at best and would not recommend the book as from its reviews it doesn't cover these areas either. Despite this, I do feel it was worthwile just to see a glimpse of the lifestyle, from a perspective of wanting to become more self-sufficient and prepared in case the grid went down.

The goal of this documentary is to inspire people to reduce their impact on the environment by reducing their carbon footprint. Therefore, technically this should be called Reduced Impact Man. The fact that Colin Beavan is alive him treading on the earth and using it's resources means he's making some impact on the environment.

Beavan wants to make changes that are big, so he goes big by making some drastic cuts. Some of those cuts include no shopping for anything new, no takeout, no flying, no t.v., no plastics, no air conditioning, no elevators and even no using toilet paper. Instead, he either wants to reuse what he already has or borrow what he doesn't. However, something struck me about him borrowing ice. If everyone were to make the same drastic cuts as him, then who would he borrow ice from?

He's passionate about this cause, but not everyone is on board with it...not even environmentalists who think he gives environmentalists a bad name. His neighbor calls him delusional and tells him he's making the solution seem too simple so the government doesn't have to extend effort to change (why make the effort if the problem is simple?). And the media criticizes his efforts, too.

There's a clip of Beavan on the Colbert Report where Stephen Colbert tells Beavan that although he's having Beavan on his show, he doesn't support what Beavan is doing and even says it's dangerous. Now normally Colbert is a jokester who says the opposite of what he really means, but from the look on Colbert's face, it looked like he was dead serious. The clip is so quick, though, I couldn't tell for sure.

His wife is also hesitant about this change. Beavan wants to dive right in and experiment, but his wife is more comfortable dipping her toe in first. She admits to being addicted to shopping and watching reality t.v., so this change is a little scary for her.

Beavan wasn't very sensitive to his wife's concerns, which bothered me. For instance, when his wife had a hard time giving up coffee, Beavan didn't make any adjustments in the plan to accomodate her. But when HE had a hard time giving up his laptop, he did make adjustments for himself by switching from not using electricity to using solar.

When his wife shared her concerns about not being able to conceive a child at 40, he dismisses her concerns by telling her if she's not going to talk about the cause he's working on, he doesn't want to hear it. He softens his dismissal by using the phrase "I hear you" (probably a phrase he read in a self-help book or heard about in therapy), but it's clear from his demeanor he wasn't hearing her. He seemed oblivious to the panic in her eyes and his insensitive treatment towards his wife made him a hard person to like.

I do applaud him for making an effort to change, but when the experiment ends, it turns out all the changes he made aren't even sustainable for him. Perhaps had he been more prepared, he could've gotten his message across more successfully.

I saw this documentary some months back on Netflix, and I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed the story of Colin and his family experimenting with less impact. It's not perfect. They live in 5th Avenue (really?), they're feeling their way along in this experiment without really knowing what to do to make less impact and Colin's wife tries but she's really not on board. It's an intellectual pursuit that breaks down in real life, but they keep trying.

But you know, I admire someone _trying_ to do what they can. And following through publicly when you know darn well their friends, family and colleagues think they're nuts. Colin took alot of flack, much like some reviewers are giving about this DVD, that he's only out for publicity. His wife works for Business Week and he's a published author already, so who knows?

But he kept going despite the strong critics and he's still behind his idea today. No one can maintain promoting an idea for publicity over the long haul. It's too hard. Colin not only maintains it, he's more passionate than ever. In the end, he's spearheaded a movement.

The most interesting part of this film is the way we see Colin and his wife, Michelle, interacting. It's a real inside look at a marriage relationship where an outside idea totally throws your life in chaos. What would you do if your spouse came home and says we're going to do this (fill in outlandish idea)? Seeing how they work through the changes and the attention was fascinating. I enjoyed seeing them converse and negotiate a pretty tricky situation that would've put a big rift in another relationship.

I love--much like I love a homemade rustic apple pie--that it's not a perfect set-up and they aren't perfect people. It's encouraging to those of us firmly entrenched in "normal" American consumption to see that maybe there's an alternative, if we tried.

This documentary truly did change the way I live my life, I watched it one day on Netflix because I saw some articles written about it and people's review just like this saying how much they enjoyed it. I recycled regularly before, and I'm cheap so I don't have a whole lot of crap and have bought a number of things from goodwill in my lifetime... but this movie really made me stop and think. I think part of it is a ploy to make a lot of money, but I think a large part of it is a crusade to try and get people to stop and think about the ways that they're living and have them ponder about what they would be willing to change or not change. No one in this world is perfect and it would be easy to find somewhere to point fingers at the author/maker. The movie let's the viewer make their own opinions about what "No impact man" is doing, it doesn't judge anyone for not living the way he does- it just opens people up to the idea that maybe they could change something they are doing. Watching the movie did get me into learning about a lot environmental factors 1. because it's green and 2. because it's generally cheaper. I've also gotten sick of the materialistic attitudes of America, and the movie was refreshing to show someone who thinks in this way. There is a little crazy behind this documentary, but I believe that there is also a lot of genius behind it as well... and it has made a change because it changed me.