p]:text-cms-story-body-color-text clearfix”> <\/p>\n
\u201cForever chemicals\u201d don\u2019t die \u2014 they just regroup. Only instead of regrouping in hell, as that old Marines saying goes, it\u2019s in the oceans, where such compounds were dumped for decades.<\/p>\n
For years, Times environmental reporter and Pulitzer finalist Rosanna Xia has been covering the legacy of forever chemical DDT, a pesticide once applied to humans as innocuously as hairspray and yardhose water. In 2020 she broke the story that barrels of DDT\u2019s toxic waste, last sent to the ocean floor decades ago by its biggest manufacturer, Montrose, were closer to Southern California\u2019s shores than previously thought. Her ongoing investigative work is now the subject of a documentary, \u201cOut of Plain Sight,\u201d which Xia co-directed with Daniel Straub. (Full disclosure: It was produced by L.A. Times Studios, an affiliate company.)<\/p>\n
The film is a fleet, urgent-sounding dispatch, centering on Xia herself as an intrepid factfinder roving the affected coastline, dropping in on scientists, oceanographers, biologists and wildlife experts as she tries to piece together the effects of half a million barrels of forgotten DDT, banned in 1972 but still having an impact on an already fragile ecosystem and the descendants of those exposed to it. Her inspiration, quoted up top and glimpsed in archival footage, is Rachel Carson, whose seminal 1962 book, \u201cSilent Spring,\u201d spurred enough public outcry against chemical pesticides to lead to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.<\/p>\n
Carson\u2019s galvanizing alarm was, paradoxically, an absence, seen in declining bird populations (hence the \u201csilent\u201d of her title). Xia\u2019s clarion call, meanwhile, starts with robot-captured images of leaking barrels on the ocean floor. That\u2019s the beginning of the sea-to-land food chain that starts with DDT-ridden marine life. Microplastics are the current bete noire and rightly so, but we\u2019re still in the dark about the causal calamity of a past era\u2019s chemical polluting. It\u2019s one thing if a company like Montrose, now defunct, once believed no one would notice their massive DDT-waste-dumping operation. It\u2019s another, the movie argues, if we choose not to wrestle with the environmental ramifications being felt today.<\/p>\n
\u201cOut of Plain Sight\u201d strives to be more cinematically alive than the standard talking-head-laden documentary. A brief history of DDT, from the corporate excitement over its invention to protesting, is given a snazzy split-screen archival montage treatment, sourced from educational films, newsreels and interviews but scored to the Zombies\u2019 \u201cI Don\u2019t Want to Know\u201d as a cheeky touch. And all of Xia\u2019s interviews are filmed in the field in a v\u00e9rit\u00e9 style, a nod to journalism in action, from UC San Diego labs and mammal rescue operations treating cancer-riven sea lions to microbiologist David Valentine\u2019s attempts to collect samples from those time-bomb-like barrels of sludge.<\/p>\n
Though we need movies that demystify journalism (and Xia is an appealing on-camera correspondent), that aspect is less interesting than the propulsive portrait of a dedicated, multi-pronged effort to expose, understand and hopefully clean up a still-viable threat. \u201cOut of Plain Sight\u201d doesn\u2019t need to be earthshaking filmmaking to relay a valuable ongoing story about a hidden nightmare for all of us. It brings to mind another famous saying, just as applicable to DDT\u2019s longevity as the one about the Marines, from William Faulkner: \u201cThe past is never dead \u2014 it\u2019s not even past.\u201d<\/p>\n
‘Out of Plain Sight’<\/p>\n
Not rated<\/p>\n
Running time: 1 hour, 34 minutes<\/p>\n
Playing: Opens Friday, Nov. 21 at Laemmle NoHo 7<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"p]:text-cms-story-body-color-text clearfix”> \u201cForever chemicals\u201d don\u2019t die \u2014 they just regroup. Only instead of regrouping in hell, as that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":146145,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[89381,89378,4670,7357,89379,146,878,85,1037,46,12275,89382,8403,31005,89380,8728,1529,89377],"class_list":["post-146144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-affiliate-company","tag-barrel","tag-california","tag-chemical","tag-ddt","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-il","tag-interview","tag-israel","tag-journalism","tag-montrose","tag-ocean-floor","tag-pesticide","tag-plain-sight","tag-rachel-carson","tag-review","tag-xia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146144\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/146145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}