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    Deepwater Horizon Examined

    Documenting the Invisible: Filmmaker tries to make sense out of Deepwater Horizon disaster

    Tarra Gaines
    Dec 13, 2014 | 6:29 pm

    On April 20, 2010 what began with an explosion on the offshore oil rig Deepwater Horizon that killed 11 members of the crew became one of the largest environmental disasters in U.S history. The oil continued to flow into the Gulf of Mexico for months after the initial explosion, yet the story continues today, with just last week the Supreme Court refusing to review the BP settlement.

    The Great Invisible, a new documentary film by Peabody Award-winning director Margaret Brown, attempts to chronicle the events and Gulf Coast lives forever altered by the disaster. This weekend Brown brings the film, which won the SXSW Grand Jury Prize for Documentary, to town for its Houston debut. I recently had a chance to speak with her about the project and how Houston fits into this ongoing saga.

    CultureMap: How soon after the Deepwater Horizon explosion did you decide you wanted to document what was happening?

    Margaret Brown: It was about three weeks afterwards. I grew up in Alabama, and my father, who has a house on the water, kept sending me pictures of the clean up. They were shocking photographs. I am used to seeing the house as a pretty pristine place in Alabama and it was over run with workers and boom. It was very upsetting. I started talking to people and kept hearing the hopelessness in their voices. At the time, I was making a whole different movie, but I decided to drop that film and make this one.

    CM: When did you complete the film?

    MB: I finished right before SXSW this year, March of 2014.

    CM: So at what point in the project did you realize it was going to take years to fully chronicle this story?

    MB: It’s funny that you ask that because I didn’t realize right away the emotional toll that it would be making a project for so long.

    What I thought the project was changed as I was making it. I thought I was just going to make it about where I grew up in Alabama, and I would go back every few months and document what was going on. But about a year and a half in, I got interested in how globally we’re all connected to oil. I wanted to make the film bigger and have it also relate to the oil industry and people who were on the rig that day, not just be about the people in Alabama. It became something I was making all the time.

    CM: So with your Gulf Coast roots, this started as a personal story for you, but it became much more?

    MB: I feel like it stayed personal, but it got to be where I wasn’t interested in just that story. I wanted it to be character driven, but I realized it was a bigger story about how we’re all connected to oil and what happens when you fill up your car and that risk that we’re connected to.

    CM: I would imagine for a story this vast, with all these lives affected, and then getting into the nature of oil in all our lives, that one of the biggest challenges would be to find some coherent narrative for a film audience.

    MB: Yes, absolutely.

    CM: Were there ways that you decided to do that so it would be comprehensible to the viewer.

    MB: The film is one connection that leads to another connection. It’s a web of a film. It’s an ensemble piece, and it does have a three act structure, but it doesn’t follow one character on a journey. It’s a web of how we’re all connected to oil.

    There are three or four mains characters that take us through the story. There’s a narrative progression, but it’s not one character’s story.

    CM: Tell me about a few of those voices that help to carry the audience through the film.

    MB: We meet Doug Brown who is the head engineer on the Deepwater Horizon. He was there when it was being built in Korea and he was there when it sunk. He also gave me never-before-seen footage on Deepwater Horizon that he made for his family about two years before the explosion. Through the footage you get the feel of what life on a rig is like. He leads us through that world. It’s pretty powerful stuff because you can feel the danger.

    There’s another character named Roosevelt Harris from Bayou La Batre, Alabama, who volunteers for a soup kitchen. He brings food to all these oyster workers who are out of work. He leads us through the world of seafood workers along the Alabama Coast and how they’re being impacted and coming together as a community, or not as the case may be.

    Then there’s Bob Cavnar, who’s going to be at one of the Q&As. He’s worked in the oil industry for about 30 years. He owns different oil companies and wrote a book on the Deepwater Horizon.

    CM: How does Houston fit into the overall story and the film?

    MB: We follow three cities in the movie, Houston, Bayou La Batre, and Morgan City, Louisiana. We are in Houston because that’s where the oil industry is headquartered for the world. Houston plays a huge part, about a third of film.

    CM: The impact of Deepwater is still being felt, so was there a moment when you just had to tell yourself: This is it. I have to stop filming, I’ve got to end it at some point.

    MB: Actually, it was a Houston thing that ended it. There’s an oil executive named Steve Wyatt, who I filmed in the beginning of the movie and I’ve stayed friends with him and we’ve talked over the years.

    Less than a year ago, I had a rough screening in New York, where I talked to one of my producer about what might be missing from the film. We realized what was missing was another scene with these oil executives.

    I called up Steve and I said “Americans don’t really understand what oil is and what you guys understand about it.” He knew my film was also about the United States relationship to energy. And I asked, “Can we do a scene where you guys talk about that from your perspective?” We filmed this scene with Steve and his friends and it was an amazing scene. Then I knew I was done, that all the pieces of the film were there.

    ----------------------

    Margaret Brown will discuss the movie after the 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. screenings on Sunday (Dec. 14) at the River Oaks Theatre and conduct a question and answer with several subjects from the film, including oil executives Bob Cavnar and Steve Wyatt; Keith Jones, whose father died on the rig; and Stephen Stone, a roustabout on the rig and his wife, Sara.

    The Great Invisible movie poster.

    The Great Invisible SXSW movie poster March 2014
      
    The Great Invisible Facebook
    The Great Invisible movie poster.
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    Movie Review

    Live action Lilo & Stitch remake offers up frenzied fun and nostalgia

    Alex Bentley
    May 23, 2025 | 2:30 pm
    Lilo & Stitch
    Courtesy of Disney
    Lilo & Stitch returns to theaters this weekend.

    The project to turn every single Disney animated movie into a “live action” film has rarely seemed like anything but a money grab by the movie studio. Most of the films have failed to update the original in any meaningful way, and in many of the cases, they’re almost shot-for-shot remakes, making the reason for the new film’s existence even more confusing.

    Having almost exhausted the supply of their 20th century movies, Disney has now remade 2002’s Lilo & Stitch. The film follows an alien experiment, originally known as 626 (voiced by Chris Sanders), created by Jumba ( Zach Galifianakis) for the benefit of an alien race led by the Grand Councilwoman (Hannah Waddingham). Unfortunately, 626 is too uncontrollable for them, and is banished to the faraway planet known as Earth.

    Landing in Hawaii, the creature soon to be known as Stitch gloms on to a young girl named Lilo (Maia Kealoha), who mistakes it for a dog while looking for companionship following the death of her parents. Tracked by Jumba and fellow alien Pleakley (Billy Magnussen), now in human form, Stitch leaves a trail of destruction wherever he goes, much to the chagrin of Lilo’s older sister, Nani (Sydney Agudong).

    Directed by Dean Fleischer Camp and written by Chris Kekaniokalani Bright and Mike Van Waes, the film will surely be a blast of nostalgia for anyone who was a kid when the original came out. The now-3D Stitch is just as chaotic as ever, and they even included cast members from the first film like Tia Carrere (now playing a social worker for the orphaned sisters) and Amy Hill as a kindly neighbor.

    But for all of the frenzied fun that Stitch offers, there’s very little else that holds the story together. For one, the Lilo character as a real person doesn’t work as well as she does in animated form, as there’s something fluid that happens in animation that feels stilted when it’s an actual little girl. Perhaps sensing this fault, the film is loaded to the hilt with bite-sized moments that try to make the audience laugh, but do little to give the story any meaning.

    The difference between animation and live action is never more evident than with Jumba, Pleakley, and CIA agent Cobra Bubbles (Courtney B. Vance). Characters that are goofy and enjoyable in animated form come off as weird and off-putting in human form. They’re supposed to bring a sense of fun and even suspense to the film, but instead they feel like characters who are getting in the way of a better story.

    Kealoha, making her professional debut, is definitely cute and offers up some interesting moments opposite Stitch and Nani, but her lack of experience shows. Agudong turns in the best performance, giving a bit of emotional weight to a film that needed more. Galifianakis and Magnussen would have been better served as voice-only roles; neither comes off well when their characters turn into humans. Hill is like a warm hug every time she comes on screen, and the story could have used more of her.

    The new Lilo & Stitch is not an abomination, but like most of the Disney live action remakes before it, it fails to stand on its own merits. Never given a chance to be its own thing and featuring storytelling too disjointed to be effective, the film is another so-so effort from a studio that knows how to make much better movies.

    ---

    Lilo & Stitch is now playing in theaters.

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