GamerTab That was an excellent one.

Cathardincu Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Glimmerubro It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

Connianatu How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.

Bruce Burns During the early 1990's--my college years--Austin and the rest of Texas were not all that far apart politically. Both were generally moderate and bipartisan. Texas had a governor from the liberal wing of the Democratic party (Ann Richards), and Austin had a moderately conservative mayor (Lee Cooke) and city council. But in 1992, things began to change when developer Gary Bradley with the backing of Freeport-McMoran announced plans to build subdivisions over the Edwards Aquifer, which feeds Barton Springs in South Austin and is the source of most of the potable water for Austin, San Antonio, and their suburbs and exurbs. The citizens of Austin rose up and passed the Save Our Springs (S.O.S.) ordinance, which would have curbed the development of these subdivisions, which caused great controversy statewide. "The Unforeseen" is a documentary showing what led up to the controversy and its aftermath."The Unforeseen" begins and ends with Gary Bradley, the developer at the heart of the controversy. He grew up in West Texas, a land of droughts and tornadoes, where nature is seen not as a treasure to be protected, but as an enemy to be overcome. He mentions that he enrolled at the University of Texas in 1972, and the movie shows archival footage of Austin during that time, when it was still mostly a college town. Back then, Austin was known as a place where you could call yourself a left-wing hippie *AND* a redneck at the same time (of course Willie Nelson is briefly interviewed).By 1980, Bradley was a successful developer with dreams of building a self-sufficient subdivision in Southwest Austin called Circle C Ranch. In 1990, he had just won approval from the city to start building, when the S&L collapse hit, sending the country into recession and putting the brakes on the funding for the project. Eventually, though, he was bailed out by Freeport-McMoran, but by this time, the citizens of Austin were in near-unison in their opposition to the project. Footage is shown of the contentious city council meeting where Freeport CEO (and non-Austinite) Jim Bob Moffett arrogantly declares "I know more about Barton Springs than anyone in this room!" In 1992, Austin overwhelmingly passed the S.O.S. initiative to limit development around Barton Creek and over the Edwards Aquifer. This led to incredible resentment among landowners in the outlying areas because it led to the devaluation of their properties. Eventually they hired a lobbyist (whose name I sadly can't remember from the film) to craft Senate Bill 1704, which said that development only has to follow the rules that were in place at the time it was approved, thus effectively nullifying the S.O.S. ordinance. The bill had strong support from pretty much everywhere in Texas outside the city limits of Austin, but Governor Ann Richards vetoed it anyway. In 1994, she was defeated by George W. Bush, who signed SB 1704 into law. It is not shown in the movie, but ever since, the Republicans in the Texas Legislature have never tired of trying to punish Austin for being unlike the rest of the State, and Austin adopted the unofficial motto "Keep Austin Weird" to show our refusal to be homogenized.I thought the film was fairly good. Director Laura Dunn tries to see all sides of the issue. She makes sure that she gives full voice to the opponents of S.O.S. instead of just a straw-man argument. Gary Bradley is the main interviewee, and he comes off as sympathetic and humble (the fight over Circle C forced him into bankruptcy), but not apologetic. Occasionally, he flashes anger. In one spot, he shouts "What the hell do you know about being a Texan, Berkeley lawyer Bill Bunch?" (Bunch is the guy behind the S.O.S. ordinance, and although he may have gone to school in California, his accent betrays that he grew up here.) However, there is no doubt where her sympathies lie when she interviews the lobbyist behind SB 1704. His face is rarely shown. Instead it shows his hands building model warplanes while he goes on about how backwards Austin is by placing environmental issues ahead of property rights.However, I do think that the movie is quite flawed. Most of the environmentalists interviewed are new-agers who talk about Barton Springs being somehow sacred (it's very special, but ultimately it's still just a swimming pool), or hippies who reject the American work ethic. And entirely too much screen time is given to Robert Redford, a washed-up semi-talented actor-director, who is not as profound as he thinks he is. And the bit at the end where unchecked growth is compared to cancer is a bit much.Ultimately, the films greatest strengths are interviews with the late Gov. Richards and William Greider--who both make strong pro-environmental arguments based on fact rather than sentiment--and a portrait of a family recently arrived in Hutto (an Austin exurb): They are excited to be living in a growing community, yet they hope that it doesn't get crowded and bemoan the shortage of potable water. They are happy to be living in a small town far from the city, yet whine about the long distance to the nearest Wal-Mart. Unfortunately, these two great strengths are given short shrift. I think the film would have been better if it had been more fact-oriented and had talked more about our contradictory desires as humans to be connected to the conveniences of cities, but have the isolation of the countryside. Instead we have a paean to a South Austin swimming pool, and the community that thought it was important enough to protect from suburban sprawl and big money. 7 out of 10.

John Peters For six months last year I worked in Austin, Texas. There were many things I didn't understand about the place. It has a vibrant live music scene and a semi-official slogan of "Keep Austin Weird" but I found it packed with freeways, office parks, and housing developments with no more than occasional patches of trees and grass. Many of the local people were very nice but, when you got to know them, defensive and depressed. Seeing The Unforeseen helps me to understand why.The first part of the movie shows an initially successful community effort to stop a large upscale housing development that would destroy Barton Springs, an aquifer and natural pool. There are beautiful shots of it from the 1980s and 90s, combined with documentary footage of meetings and hearings about development permits. Unlike the villains in Michael Moore movies, developers and purchasers of the suburban homes are allowed to speak for themselves. They emerge as sympathetic people caught in a trap that makes a fetish of growth and home ownership regardless of their consequences.Things change in Austin when George Bush becomes governor of Texas in 1995. His predecessor, Ann Richards, vetoed a pro-development measure that would have overridden environmental decisions made by the Austin City Council. Bush approves the bill with his now familiar smirk. The state legislature makes community action irrelevant and in a few years Barton Springs becomes a polluted ditch.What's best about the film is its refusal to provide easy answers. Austin, like Dallas and Houston, has become a boom town, especially for makers of computer software. People come to Austin from all over the world and many of them make good money. They want to buy houses. Their employers want office space. It's inevitable that aggressive entrepreneurs will recognize opportunities and do everything they can to promote development. A question that the movie implicitly asks but does not directly answer is exactly what, under these circumstances, should be done.Perhaps the answers remain unstated because they are hard for participants in a consumer society to accept. They may require a standard of living that places fewer conveniences at our fingertips, dwelling in apartment buildings rather than single-family homes, and riding municipal buses rather than cool cars. Most of all, social stability and preservation of the natural environment would need to be given higher priorities than economic opportunity and growth.The biggest problem with The Unforeseen is its multiplicity of themes. First and foremost is the conflict between preservation of the natural environment and economic growth. Pictures of beautiful nature support this theme and are well executed. However, footage of a white-coated physician talking about blood capillaries and cancer cells results more in confusing similes than compelling metaphors. The recitation of a Wendell Berry poem about unforeseen consequences is nicely spoken but hardly relevant – what happened to Barton Springs was foreseen. A shorter, simpler film might have better made its points.

Chris Knipp 'The Unforeseen' considers the issue of land developers as a source of eco-disaster. These are the guys who come in, acquire chunks of property, subdivide them, establish access to services, water, electricity, roads, and so on, and build houses for people to live in. As a documentary this one, for which Robert Redford is an executive producer (with cultish filmmaker Terrence Malick) and also a meandering talking head, provides a worthwhile new angle, with some pungent characters and some interesting personal stories. Unfortunately this lacks some of the scope and perspective of other ecology-related documentaries and seems to get sidetracked more than once. It has a certain built-in balance since one of its main characters is a failed developer whose tears evoke sympathy. But in view of the magnitude of the issues involved, it would seem that those who herald 'The Unforeseen' as superior to a film of the scope and urgency of Davis Guggenheim's 'An Inconvenient Truth' have gone a bit overboard.Are developers bad? Environmentalists seem to think so. Some radicals even just set fire to a row of "green" McMansions under construction in the state of Washington. Frontier-oriented advocates of traditional free capitalism are emphatically in the opposite camp. To them, anything that enables people to exploit and own the land is good. Development is the essence of American free enterprise, a God-given right, what we're here for. Getting rich doing it is the essential American dream.. And so is owning your own little house with its garage and its lawn and its picket fence. Real estate people, and this film, give scant consideration to the issue of indigenous peoples and their relationship to the land.What this film does consider is how developers habitually disregard considerations of proper land use and future degradation, particularly of water resources. Laura Dunn's researches focus on Austin, Texas, a partial childhood home of Robert Redford (he tells us), a college town, a cultural and music center (Willie Nelson speaks for that) and a community whose obvious liberal, preservationist tendencies led its citizens to lock horns with developers in the 1980's, when growth opportunities arose for the appealing, pleasant city and its environs. At the center of the story is a developer named Gary Bradley, whose 4,000-acre Circle C Ranch luxury housing development--conceived as far back as 1980--was set to derail Barton Springs, a large creek near the city linked to the major aquifer of the region. An anti-Bradley Austin website called "Make Gary Pay" calls him "a consummate hustler" and documents how for close to thirty years he has waged war on the city of Austin in cooperation with lobbyists and Good Old Boys of the Texas state legislature.Central to the citizens' and environmentalists' objection to Bradley's project is its indifference to and damage to the regional aquifer. Wikipedia defines an aquifer as "an underground layer of water-bearing permeable rock or unconsolidated materials (gravel, sand, silt, or clay) from which groundwater can be usefully extracted using a water well." Describing residential land development early in the film, Bradley clearly sees big hunks of land simply as a blank canvas on which the creative real estate guy can draw a lovely new picture. He overlooks what's underneath that canvas--such as aquifers. Another factor the film reveals is that development exhausts energy sources and removes land from agricultural use.Bradley's voice, rather surprisingly, tends to dominate the film. We learn how he met with consolidated civic objections to his project when it came up for city approval. But later through the efforts of a lobbyist, whose voice we hear, his face sinisterly hidden as he methodically assembles a model bomber plane, a state law protecting projects like Bradley's--allowing them to override new laws and be subject only to ones in effect when they began (it's called "grandfathering") was vetoed in the early 1990's by the then governor Ann Richards, who had a sympathetic ear for environmental activists. But in 1995 George W. Bush became governor and the law was reinstated. And then around the same time Bradley came a cropper through debts he couldn't pay off and lost everything. He fell afoul of the late 1980's-early1990's loan company collapses. His attempt to file bankruptcy was finally defeated just a couple of years ago--right when his mother died, he tells the camera, tears streaming down his face. In fact, he's still a player and a thorn in the side of Austin.What's the lesson of all this? That real estate developers are foolish? Bradley admits in an audio of the bankruptcy trial that he was miserable at accounting. But not all developers are, though they may be prone to grandiosity--and an excessive sense of entitlement. As we see, they think they should be compensated when new laws lessen the profits they originally expected from a given piece of land. They don't all try to launch a major development right in the midst of a community as liberal and green-activist as Austin, Texas.Okay, if putting a self-serving and rapacious capitalist in charge of land development, though American as apple pie, is not a foresighted approach, what are the alternatives? Unfortunately Dunn's film doesn't provide strong enough voices in this area. We get to see concerted action of citizens both for and against development: the protectionists are impassioned; the free enterprise/property rights advocates are strident flag-wavers. But the voices for an alternative are feeble. Redford talks about how things were nicer in the past, quieter, more wholesome. 'Rolling Stone' essayist William Greider refers to the idea of reworking existing housing to accommodate new populations as a better way, but the idea's too vague. Nor does the Wendell Berry poem, "The Unforeseen" contribute more than a ringing tone of ruefulness. What we need is analysis, scope, and plans.

enviromac I saw this film previewed on PBS' NOW. It is just wonderful that someone has done a film about this issue. I love that the director took the time to learn about alternative views. This type of film making has the possibility of bringing people together to work on consensus.In an interview with the Austinist, Laura Dunn states:Unfortunately, the "American Dream" has become owning a house with a yard and a fence around it. And these days, unfortunately, that house has to be 2300 square feet, and you have to have a green lawn, and there are all these connotations and associations that are built into the American Dream that--given where we are in terms of our environment...are totally at odds with a sustainable future.We desperately need to have this film screened in Sacramento, California. The pressures we face from development are enormous. Does anyone know who I can contact about this?