Softwing Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Lucia Ayala It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Kamila Bell This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

karlcchen What's the movie trying to say, what's the issue it trying g to raise? If you know nothing about the subject/place and just watch this movie, you will never know. Just like another engineer finish another Operational Manual - only good for people only know how to operate the machine. The movie should be clear and self-sufficient for people know nothing about the current issue(s) so people know what it is trying to say. This movie is only good for people already know about the issue and want to get more information. Karl

Robert J. Maxwell This documentary centers around the commercial development of the land around Austin, Texas, particularly Barton Springs, a natural spring that locals have used for recreation for years. The future of the aquifer beneath, which waters cities like San Antonio as well as Austin, is also problematic. Whence the water for the sprinklers on the golf course? Where does the weed killer from all those lawns settle? We hear the guy, Gary Bradley, who sounds reasonable enough, nobody's notion of a greedy, reckless money monger, who bought up the land and intended to put a planned housing development on it -- almost identical new houses, golf course, a green belt right out of Lewis Mumford, and the rest. It was opposed by Austin's considerable community of activists and was stymied -- after Bradley had put money "up front" for sewers and some infrastructure -- stymied by limitations on the number of houses he could build on the land. He then teamed up with a notorious mining outfit that hired a lobbyist. The result, however one wants to twist it, was a victory for the developers. There is a Wal-Mart Supercenter in their future."Land developer." That's an interesting concept. A land developer is someone like Bradley who buys a great area of land then chops it up into smaller parcels and sells them at a profit. In that sense, a butcher is a "cow developer." Robert Redford reminisces about the summers he spent at Barton Springs as a boy. Willie Nelson is around to make a few comments. Bradley is articulate and intelligent and frustrated. The lobbyist is smooth and patient, musing on his work as he paints and builds model warplanes. But the most articulate commentator is a redneck farmer whose corn field are disappearing, engulfed by urban sprawl. "All houses," he says. "Ain't no more farms. Farmin' is out. . . . What they gonna eat when there's no more farms? That's what I want to know." He echoes the Reverend Thomas Malthus who saw this dilemma coming two hundred years ago.Malthus is thought of as discredited because his predictions didn't materialize as soon as expected. (The industrial revolution came as a surprise.) But the proposition remains the same. "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man" The environmentalists we see, some of whom sound a little kooky, have a point when they argue that developers think in terms of "cost" and others think of "value." We can measure and, to some extent, like Bradley, predict how many dollars we may make in profit or lose by taking the wrong chance. But one of the environmentalists states that she is turned off by golf courses because they are too perfect, too manicured, an artifact, but not God's artifact. What is the dollar value of, say, the Grand Canyon? Why not build forests of motels, souvenir shops, and fast food places along both its rims? And lush gated communities at the Sonoran bottom? The value may be completely lost, sold down the river, but think of the profit.The environmentalists will lose in the long run if things don't change dramatically -- and soon. In the last forty years the population of the United States has grown from 200M to more than 320M. The earth's population in 1950 was about 2B. Today it's more than 6B. By 2050 it will approach 12B. It's a familiar trajectory to anyone who's studied population irruptions and the crashes that follow, yet the Chinese seem to be the only nation on earth that recognizes the problem, let alone tries to do anything about it. I said "soon" before because there is a lag time of about two generations between doing something about the problem and realizing the effect. In other words, if you wait until the dimensions of the problem are self evident, it may be too late.The film is slanted towards this point of view without attacking the explosion of human beings directly. I'm not sure the producers themselves, including Robert Redford, understand where the root of the problem lies. Making money the way Gary Bradley has is, as Redford points out more than once, making short-term profits at the expense of long-term values. But he also notes that the problem goes beyond Barton Springs. The point is not merely to save the springs and the Austin countryside from developers. It's that we must save the earth from ourselves.There's a challenge for environmentalists and developers both, and neither seems ready to meet it. It's not always easy to interpret Malthus. ("Improper arts to prevent the consequences of irregular connections" may be a reference to abortion.) He suggested that if we didn't check our appetites for reproduction, nature would, in the form of "vice" and "misery." Vice, left undefined, probably means crime. Misery I think most ethologists would define as stress-related disorders like ulcers or the complete breakdown of social organization, like that found in Calhoun's "behavioral sinks." Judging from this movie, the way it circumscribes itself, our capacity for over-reproduction is only exceeded by our capacity for denial. Pretty gloomy stuff. I guess that's why Malthus's notion is called the dismal theorem.

imxo Whether you support unfettered property rights on the one hand or a government's exercise of power to defend the common good on the other hand, this film will let you down. On the left, it's often unenlightening clap trap, especially when you notice the horribly sentimental background music. On the right, it points out the selfishness of those claiming to be the real Americans when they are mostly just "real loud" Americans. Someone should tell those folks that common sense says you don't shite where you eat, but as long as they're taking cash to the bank they'll apparently just do their business wherever they please. These people probably know that everything has consequences, but they plan for the other guy to bear those consequences, a guaranteed formula for social meltdown.The only admirable figures in the film were a wizened old farmer and a young boy in a new suburb. Those two seemed to possess a clarity of thought singularly missing from the property developers on one side and the ecological "Nimbys" on the other. It was nice, though, to see the late Texas governor Ann Richards again, certainly a far more lucid politician than the person who replaced her.I think neither side was well depicted in this film of the ongoing battle between personal vs. social, private vs. public. Ultimately, The Unforeseen is, unfortunately, a lightweight film on a very serious subject.

Bruce Burns During the early 1990's--my college years--Austin and the rest of Texas were not all that far apart politically. Both were generally moderate and bipartisan. Texas had a governor from the liberal wing of the Democratic party (Ann Richards), and Austin had a moderately conservative mayor (Lee Cooke) and city council. But in 1992, things began to change when developer Gary Bradley with the backing of Freeport-McMoran announced plans to build subdivisions over the Edwards Aquifer, which feeds Barton Springs in South Austin and is the source of most of the potable water for Austin, San Antonio, and their suburbs and exurbs. The citizens of Austin rose up and passed the Save Our Springs (S.O.S.) ordinance, which would have curbed the development of these subdivisions, which caused great controversy statewide. "The Unforeseen" is a documentary showing what led up to the controversy and its aftermath."The Unforeseen" begins and ends with Gary Bradley, the developer at the heart of the controversy. He grew up in West Texas, a land of droughts and tornadoes, where nature is seen not as a treasure to be protected, but as an enemy to be overcome. He mentions that he enrolled at the University of Texas in 1972, and the movie shows archival footage of Austin during that time, when it was still mostly a college town. Back then, Austin was known as a place where you could call yourself a left-wing hippie *AND* a redneck at the same time (of course Willie Nelson is briefly interviewed).By 1980, Bradley was a successful developer with dreams of building a self-sufficient subdivision in Southwest Austin called Circle C Ranch. In 1990, he had just won approval from the city to start building, when the S&L collapse hit, sending the country into recession and putting the brakes on the funding for the project. Eventually, though, he was bailed out by Freeport-McMoran, but by this time, the citizens of Austin were in near-unison in their opposition to the project. Footage is shown of the contentious city council meeting where Freeport CEO (and non-Austinite) Jim Bob Moffett arrogantly declares "I know more about Barton Springs than anyone in this room!" In 1992, Austin overwhelmingly passed the S.O.S. initiative to limit development around Barton Creek and over the Edwards Aquifer. This led to incredible resentment among landowners in the outlying areas because it led to the devaluation of their properties. Eventually they hired a lobbyist (whose name I sadly can't remember from the film) to craft Senate Bill 1704, which said that development only has to follow the rules that were in place at the time it was approved, thus effectively nullifying the S.O.S. ordinance. The bill had strong support from pretty much everywhere in Texas outside the city limits of Austin, but Governor Ann Richards vetoed it anyway. In 1994, she was defeated by George W. Bush, who signed SB 1704 into law. It is not shown in the movie, but ever since, the Republicans in the Texas Legislature have never tired of trying to punish Austin for being unlike the rest of the State, and Austin adopted the unofficial motto "Keep Austin Weird" to show our refusal to be homogenized.I thought the film was fairly good. Director Laura Dunn tries to see all sides of the issue. She makes sure that she gives full voice to the opponents of S.O.S. instead of just a straw-man argument. Gary Bradley is the main interviewee, and he comes off as sympathetic and humble (the fight over Circle C forced him into bankruptcy), but not apologetic. Occasionally, he flashes anger. In one spot, he shouts "What the hell do you know about being a Texan, Berkeley lawyer Bill Bunch?" (Bunch is the guy behind the S.O.S. ordinance, and although he may have gone to school in California, his accent betrays that he grew up here.) However, there is no doubt where her sympathies lie when she interviews the lobbyist behind SB 1704. His face is rarely shown. Instead it shows his hands building model warplanes while he goes on about how backwards Austin is by placing environmental issues ahead of property rights.However, I do think that the movie is quite flawed. Most of the environmentalists interviewed are new-agers who talk about Barton Springs being somehow sacred (it's very special, but ultimately it's still just a swimming pool), or hippies who reject the American work ethic. And entirely too much screen time is given to Robert Redford, a washed-up semi-talented actor-director, who is not as profound as he thinks he is. And the bit at the end where unchecked growth is compared to cancer is a bit much.Ultimately, the films greatest strengths are interviews with the late Gov. Richards and William Greider--who both make strong pro-environmental arguments based on fact rather than sentiment--and a portrait of a family recently arrived in Hutto (an Austin exurb): They are excited to be living in a growing community, yet they hope that it doesn't get crowded and bemoan the shortage of potable water. They are happy to be living in a small town far from the city, yet whine about the long distance to the nearest Wal-Mart. Unfortunately, these two great strengths are given short shrift. I think the film would have been better if it had been more fact-oriented and had talked more about our contradictory desires as humans to be connected to the conveniences of cities, but have the isolation of the countryside. Instead we have a paean to a South Austin swimming pool, and the community that thought it was important enough to protect from suburban sprawl and big money. 7 out of 10.