Introducing a screening at the Starz! Green Room yesterday of a segment from In Their Boots, a new web-to-PBS series from Brave New Foundation, Jim Miller disclaimed that there were no ideological intentions fueling this new work from the production company that brought you Iraq For Sale and Fox News Porn. Though Miller, Robert Greenwald and their Brave New compatriots are very much in the business of attempting to bring down the modern conservative movement, Miller maintains that this series is “Totally non-partisan…we’re not taking a stance on the war, good or bad or anything.”

On a long enough timeline, this will probably turn out to be an indefensible statement, but as far as the quarter of an hour of reality TV-style footage shown here on Monday, it’s reasonably sound. Each episode of In Their Boots (which you can currently watch online, although Miller says it has screened or will screen on 30 PBS stations across the nation) begins with such footage featuring an Iraq and/or Afghanistan vet adjusting to life back at home, and then cuts to “a live forum [where] Jan Bender, our host, will interview the participants and lead a discussion that includes experts, service-providers and individual viewers in an interactive discussion of the issues raised.”

The footage we saw dealt with an Afghanistan vet, a Green Beret who lost a hand when his weapon backfired, and his journey to a sports camp for disabled vets. it seems like typical Greenwald-factory stuff––sufficiently engaging and sure to infuriate both those prone to anti-war outrage and those who resent the mere existence of propaganda, but graded as cinema, relatively artless. That something like this is pefectly content to be infotainment rather than art is all the more reason to give a closer think to Miller’s pre-screening statement.

More intellectually provocative but also crippled a bit by a lack of distinctive style is David M. Edwards’ Sprawling From Grace; Driven to Madness.  The feature-length doc revolves around the notion that “car culture in the US is a near disaster.” Through a melange of talking head interviews and cleverly used found footage, Edwards traces the roots of our current energy crisis to the development of the suburb, deflates the promise of every conceivable source of alternative energy or the very hope of energy independence.

Not to fall back on the easy pullquote, but Sprawling sprawls a bit too much; its long making of its case seems to go in circles, and the conclusion––more or less, “We better turn into a walking society, like, right now, or we’re fucked”––leaves something to be desired. Still, the film’s very darkness, its unwillingness to offer pat answers, is refreshing, and it impressively hammers home a critique of limousine liberalism by proving that pacifist ideology is fundamentally incompatible with the largeness with which American society has chosen to live.

A side note: I’ve now seen two films in 24 hours featuring ample modern-day footage of Michael Dukakis (the other film is Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, which I’ll cover in my next post), who has aged into a doppelganger of Robert Forster. Anybody want to start fantasy casting the key players in the presidential elections of the past 20 years? No fair to fall back on John Travolta as Clinton or anybody from the cast of W.