Jim Czarnecki

The Big One is an investigative documentary from director Michael Moore who goes around the country asking why big American corporations produce their product abroad where labor is cheaper while so many Americans are unemployed, losing their jobs, and would happily be hired by such companies as Nike.

When your father is a pornographer, what can you do to shock him? If you're Katrina Bartalotti, you announce that you're going to lose your virginity -- live on the Internet, for the whole world to see.

Against the barren wintry backdrop of a psychiatric hospital, inpatients and authority figures drift through turgid psychological states. We meet the artist Jean and his lover Monica, patients of the facility, and several characters circling its periphery: a guard, an Episcopalian priest, and a church organist. Minimalizing dialogue and plot intricacy, Tregenza concedes only kernels of information, demanding that the viewer breathe dimensionality into his archetypes. Acting out primal instincts of lust, envy, fear, and love, subjects teeter vulnerably on the brink of sanity and insanity, freedom and repression in their attempts to navigate their existence.

Neil, a punk rock vegetarian, is being forced to go into the family butcher business. He decides to save the world instead.

The U.S. President, low in the opinion polls, gets talked into raising his popularity by trying to start a cold war with Canada.