**** The Wire, Season 3
*** Zero Effect
* Bottle Shock
*** Up the Yangtze

The Wire is still great. Season 3 brings in politics more, but also explores Bunny Colvin’s radical solution to the drug problem in the western and features his awesome paper bag speech. As a sometime libertarian, I really got into that storyline, and thought they worked out the implications, good and bad, in a meaningful way.

Zero effect was pretty good. I had no expectations (can’t remember how it got on my queue), and it turned out to be some good entertainment.

We were so thoroughly uninterested in the people we met in the first 20-30 minutes of Bottle Shock that we just ejected it and sent it back to Netflix. Sorry, Alan Rickman, I promise to watch you in something better soon.

We missed Up the Yangtze, a documentary about the effects of China’s three gorges dam on people living in the area, at SIFF last year and were looking forward to renting it. It starts off slowly but gradually picks up and becomes a fascinating and understated story. It follows a girl whose family’s house will be covered (like many’s) by the new lake created by the dam. Her family sends her to do menial work on a riverboat to support herself and her family, instead of going to school as she wants. The contrast between her rural family’s life and that onboard the riverboat (both among the more modernized young people working there and the rich tourists coming through) is staggering, and underlined by the images of the new lake slowly consuming the family house.