“Sonicsgate” is a must see, not only for Seattle Sonics fans who wonder why we no longer have a professional basketball team, but for every Seattleite who gives a damn about what goes on in the boardrooms of this corrupt city. Not since Miami got the once over in “Cocaine Cowboys” has a city been so severely called to task for the villainy of its representatives. Nobody comes out of this story smelling good. Not Howard Schultz, the salesman who could sell a cup of coffee for $35 but had no idea how to run a basketball team. He bought the only Seattle team to win a world championship, watched it go down the drain, then made $150 million and some change by selling it to an Oklahoma City business concern that needed a home team to play in their new supermall of an arena. Not the mayor Greg Nickels, who played a charade of trying to keep the team in Seattle right up to the last minute when he accepted a settlement from team’s hijackers right before the judge was about to hand down a ruling on whether they would be forced to adhere to the terms of their contract. Certainly not the two-faced Clay Bennett, cretinous in appearance but slick as an oil spill in his skill at lying, the buyer who promised to keep the team in Seattle at the same time he was booking dates for them in Oklahoma City. And let’s not forget governor Christine Gregoire, vetoing an offer from Seattle businessmen to contribute millions towards restoring Key Arena, then promising a group of Sonics fans to do everything she can to keep the Sonics in Seattle. Watching this sleazy bunch of double-dealing scoundrels, it is pretty obvious why this is a city that can spend more money talking about a light-rail system than other cities spend to build one.
“Sonicsgate” is not just about the villains, but about heroes as well, and those heroes are the people of Seattle: KIRO sports broadcaster Kevin Calabro, Seattle PI sports columnist Art Thiel, Steve Kelley and Percy Allen from the Seattle Times, Brian Robinson and Steven Pyatt, who founded the Save Our Sonics organization, their attorney Paul Schneiderman, author Sherman Alexie, who brings poetry to the myth and memoir of what a basketball team can mean to a boy and his father, and all the players and fans who are all the casualties of an economic war against something that might be scuffed off as sentimental nostalgia. That something is a stadium where fans come to watch their team play the game, and maybe buy a few beers and some peanuts. As opposed to a stadium that is the cornerstone of a shopping center filled with restaurants and other money-grubbing concessions. Because that is what this whole thing boils down to. Key Arena was not a large enough facility to accommodate all the peripheral businesses that make sporting events such financial drains upon their patrons. In this past decade, Seattle had already built two such stadiums and had blown up another, and it would have been very bad politics to sink $500 million into an arena that would have won the approval of the NBA.
So we have this two hour documentary about a basketball team that could have been a crashing bore. And the title. “Sonicsgate,” might seem a little exaggerated for such a minor scandal. But director Jason Reid has earned the right to such a title. This is unequivocally the most exciting political drama since “All The President’s Men,” another movie with some pretty heroic journalists.
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The beginnings of America’s eco-movement are given a thorough going over in Robert Stone’s documentary, “Earth Days” (Varsity, Dec, 11-17). Beginning with presidential promises from Kennedy to George W. Bush to clean up the pollution of land, air, and water, the film is then turned over to a sampling of experts who guide us through 100 minutes of eco-history.
Their initial reminisces of 1950’s America, accompanied by images of bland suburban purity, might be dismissed as a naïve nostalgia for the clean life. With the rise of automobile culture brought on by the coming of the interstate, however, we see the onset of urban decay. Eventually it becomes clear that we are not simply killing ourselves, but have already done the suicidal deed. It is just taking us a long time to die.
The backlash against the destruction of the planet’s eco-system began with Rachel Carson’s 1962 warning against the deadliness of pesticides such as DDT. Eight years later, on April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day was proclaimed. Since the date coincided with Lenin’s birthdate, right wing whispers spread conspiratorial rumors that the whole thing was a Communist plot.
“Earth Days” is rich with quotes such as “the things we have to do to accumulate more goods deteriorates the quality of our social life,” an idea worth reconsidering in the light of today’s wireless culture. It is invigorating to revisit some of the countercultural experiments in sympathetic living, especially in these times when communities have become statistical units against which we measure our chances of becoming unemployed or catching the swine flu.
But Stone is not just holding up the Whole Earth Catalog as a model for a new society. In fact, he is not reticent about honoring the achievements of the conservative element, giving Richard Nixon full credit for his institution of the Environmental Protection Agency. Ronald Reagan, however, is justly chastised for the part he played in blinding the country to the necessity of cutting back on some of its excesses.
One misstep is the questionable proclamation that humanity only realized that they were on a planet and not in a planet upon viewing the first pictures of Earth from Space. This is rather silly, since our familiarity with such views of the other planets have been part of our lives for as long as most of us can remember. In light of all the other information brought to light in “Earth Days,” this is a light stumble that doesn’t interfere with the great strides made throughout most of its running time.
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