Garbage Warrior - An Oliver Hodge Film

Variety

In single-minded pursuit of "a method of living that allows people to take care of themselves" comes larger-than-life rebel architect Michael Reynolds, subject of the hagiographic eco-docu "Garbage Warrior." Boiled down from some 350 hours of footage shot by film designer Oliver Hodge, pic takes a little-guy-against-the-system approach that's balanced by Reynold's scruffy charisma. Social-issue fests will saddle up for this, as will green-leaning cablers and niche vid.

A contrarian visionary, Reynolds has been building off-grid sustainable communities in and around Taos, N.M., for 35 years. He uses beer cans, old tires and plastic bottles, organized around construction methods with phrases like "solar gain" and "thermal mass," to build the plug-ugly structures he's dubbed "earthships." Reynolds is seen doing battle with city and state officials over inflexible zoning and housing laws, before he and his small band of merry men find success with their methods at the scene of the 2005 Andaman Islands tsunami. Tech package is handsome, marred by obvious music cues.

World On Screen

A more hopeful film on the same topic, Garbage Warrior, received its world premiere at Hot Docs. It is a profile of renegade architect Michael Reynolds, who for 30 years has led a crew in the New Mexico desert in designing “earthship biotecture”—housing that uses recycled products and is completely self-sufficient. His ingenuity in creating such buildings is as rousing as his failures to persuade the state government to let him continue his experiments are frustrating. British filmmaker Oliver Hodge followed Reynolds over a period of three years, and cannily juxtaposes his bureaucratic battles with successes working with survivors of the Indian Ocean tsunami and hurricane Katrina. It’s a genuinely inspirational film on a subject where we could stand some hope.

Santa Barbara Independent

High in the ranks of the sector of the film festival which could be dubbed “Surprise Hits and Heroes” comes Garbage Warrior, British filmmaker Oliver Hodges’ entertaining documentary on the righteously — and rationally — crazed New Mexican architect Michael Reynolds. As a champion of “radically sustainable” architecture, (i.e. housing designed to work completely off the utility grid, and built from old beer cans, tires, and the like), Reynolds has been a maverick with a cause for decades, and has suffered for his vision. After building “earth ship” houses and communities around Taos, starting in the ‘70s, his architectural license was revoked for years. Reynolds has a powerful story to tell, and a witty/gonzo way of telling it.

But the film is more than just an engaging portrait of a charismatic individualist as he maneuvers through the maze of government bureaucracy. Reynolds’ quest to get a bill passed that encourages experimental architecture leads him to take his case to the field—building “earth ships” in post-catastrophe regions of India and Mexico. As he repeatedly says, what he’s up to is more pressing than ever before, as environmental issues in the wake of global warming move into a state of global emergency. The time to act is yesterday, and Reynolds already has been on the case for much of his life. Like Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, if on a humbler and more personality-specific level, this film demands to be seen by as many humans as possible. Time is of the essence.

DC-IST Washington

“I’m trying to save my ass,” Mike Reynolds says in the opening moments of Garbage Warrior, a superb chronicle of his 30-year quest to bring sustainable housing construction into the mainstream, or at least closer in from the fringes. “That’s a powerful force.” Reynolds, a wunderkind architect and engineer who builds self-reliant “earthships” from the oddly indestructible detritus of an industrial civilization – old tires and plastic bottles are among his most useful materials – believes that life as we know it will disappear within decades as cities (“dangerous areas of chaos that can’t support themselves any longer”) crumble and their former occupants spill outward, either to learn to sustain themselves or to perish. But he’s doing what he can to push us towards the former outcome.

The early sections of Oliver Hodge’s engrossing film – which made its U.S. debut at SILVERDOCS last night -- focus on Reynolds’ remarkable achievements in the Taos, NM community where he has refined, through trial and error, his techniques of building homes (including his own) that offer their inhabitants warmth through winters where the mercury can sink to 30 below zero, relief from the heat in the summer, clean water, and sewage services, all entirely off-grid.

It helps that Reynolds is a charismatic and persuasive subject. Get him going on the subject of global warming, or how insane it is that New Mexico -- the state where we tested the atomic bomb -- doesn’t want to designate land an architectural test site where he can experiment with new techniques without fear of being sued if they don’t work, and his eloquence is almost enough to erase those early shots of him doing leg lifts and pushups in his bathrobe from your memory.

The film takes on a sense of urgency as it recounts the lawsuits and the bureaucratic hurdles that nearly ruined Reynolds in the late 90s, and his subsequent three-year battle to get his architectural test-site bill through the New Mexico legislature. When Reynolds brings his crew to the Andaman Islands to rebuild after the December 2004 tsunamis that are believed to have killed more than 200,000 people, and then to Matamoros, Mexico after Hurricane Rita, we’re heartened by the sight of him bringing his hard-won skills to a place where they can save lives today. But it isn’t long before you remember that Reynolds believes that much of the first world will look like this in our lifetimes, too. “The American dream now is just, how do we survive?” he asks, and when he expresses his impatience with the legal process, even going so far as to dismiss it as a relic that coming crises will render moot, it’s hard not to think of a certain President with whom Reynolds would seem to have little else in common. But in his unflinching can-doism, his ingenuity, and his generosity, Reynolds embodies all of the best qualities to which the adjective “American” has ever been affixed.

Washington City Paper

By the time Michael Reynolds graduated from architecture school, some 35 years ago, he had already decided that the field “as it stood then, was worthless.” So he moved to New Mexico and began experimenting with houses that exist entirely “off the grid” and are built mostly from recycled materials. He ended up creating several communities, a group of followers, and trouble: Taos County’s planning department cracked down in 1997, and Reynolds’ battle for sustainable architecture shifted to the state legislature. His legal success was limited, but an invitation from the post-tsunami Andaman Islands, located in the Bay of Bengal, was more effective. Reynolds and his crew built houses there out of mud and used plastic bottles, capturing rain for both water and cooling. Director Oliver Hodge deftly shifts from a character study of a neo-Jeffersonian populist—Reynolds thinks cities are “dangerous area[s] of chaos”—to an object lesson in sustainability. But Hodge also recognizes that the embrace of Reynolds’ ideas in a catastrophic Third World landscape doesn’t guarantee they’ll be accepted in a country that can afford resource-burning McMansions. (Reynolds will attend the first showing.)

In These Times

“If you create your own electricity, heating and water systems, you create your own politics. Maybe that’s what they’re afraid of,” says architect Michael Reynolds, hero of Garbage Warrior (Oliver Hodge, United Kingdom, 2007), which had its U.S. premiere at Silverdocs. Reynolds transforms trash into sustainable houses that are as aesthetically captivating as they are utilitarian. These “earthships” collect rainwater with curvaceous roofs and filter it four times for reuse, grow food in lush greenhouses, and harness wind and solar energy to keep inhabitants off the grid. Garbage Warrior presents its visionary protagonist with beautiful cinematography, offbeat humor and a gripping narrative that follows Reynolds as he pursues innovation in sustainable design with an increasing sense of urgency.

New Consumer Magazine

Jen Marsden meets up with Mike Reynolds to find out about true sustainable housing.

Meeting Mike for the first time, he is sitting in the corner of a bar, slowly sipping a beer. You get the sense he is a quiet man, one who doesn’t want to cause trouble. But then he opens his mouth. Here is a man who has for the past 30 years fought hard to get a sustainable housing test site in New Mexico (‘How can they test nuclear bombs but not allow something that will save us?’) and lost his architect license in the process. It then got reinstated when governments and his industry started taking him seriously. This is a man who has latched on to a passion for building houses out of used tyres, plastic bottles and all items usually discarded to landfill.

He says his inspiration comes from his junk-collecting father. ‘I go down to his basement and there is every milk carton and mayonnaise jar that we ever used, but you see he never figured out what to do with them, and that was his problem, but he just thought this jar is too good to throw away, and I’m sure that messed with my head.’

Mike tries to be sustainable through more than just the building materials. His plans are for each home to be off-the-grid, not dependant on on utility companies and the government. ‘People need water, power, sewage disposal, food & comfort. They need those things, and what we have discovered over thirty five years is that those things are available straight away from the sky. The sun is up there, rain falls down, thermal mass is in the earth, garbage is out there with people not knowing what to do with it, we are taking these things that are really easy to get and making homes that provide everything for people.’ He thinks that having a self-sustaining house will bring freedom and is waiting for a leader to really give ‘power to the people’. After visiting the Earthships project in Brighton, film-maker Oliver Hodge decided that he wanted to document Mike’s challenging career. ‘I was inspired by the ideas but also by the characters involved in the whole Earthships concept, an architect working on the frontline, in the trenches, swinging a sledgehammer.’

When some of Mike’s critics - and followers - alike suggest he is a freak of nature, Oliver is quick to defend him. ‘Evolution wouldn’t happen without freaks of nature, if everything was genetically the same we’d never change’.

‘If people look at Mike and his community as freaks well, they are probably the freaks that are going to evolve and save the planet and save mankind - and that’s evolution I’m afraid.’ It’s a challenge to remain openminded in a structured society and not dismiss ‘freaks of nature’. Mike candidly admits that he would prefer to disappear off to the New Mexican deserts and Andes mountains to build his Earthships there. However he acknowledges in urgent tones that changes in our cities and our current infrastructure need to be made immediately. ‘One thing that I really would like for people to look at is how energy or water is gotten, or how sewage is got rid of.’ His answer is to get an Earthship education. ‘If energy is dealt with in a centralized way then you have to have this serious infrastructure to get the sewage to the treatment plant or get the power and water to the house, and the infra-structure itself is becoming a nightmare. New York’s infra-structure is about to go away, and what the hell are they going to do, nobody knows? So the idea of infrastructure is over.’ By practically demonstrating the possibilities he hopes to inspire others to apply his tried and tested methods to their own home, whether it is tucked in the countryside or in a city. ‘It’s very difficult to change every building into an Earthship. It’s like in the nineteenth century – were they going to change every horse into a car? It’s not smart, it’s not really logical, but cars did take over. But here’s the bigger issue, we don’t have time, we have just years, not decades to get this together.’ An idealist perhaps, yet Mike is pragmatic and takes his global citizenship seriously. He and Oliver, now great friends, most recently helped in the aftermath of the Tsunami in the Andaman Islands and Hurricane Rita in Mexico by re-building houses with the communities. They are due to start work on an orphanage in Sierra Leone, believing that educational demonstrations are what he describes as, ‘the biggest impact in the quickest time’. He thinks this is where there is significant hope for change because, ‘developing countries are not so fenced in by dogma. They have their own traditions and cultures, maybe more than us, but we are literally fenced and walled in by their own legitimacy- they’re more open.’

A believer in making mistakes (which he admits he has – in one case overheating someone’s home and melting their typewriter) in order to make progress, he is not afraid to try new ideas. ‘Basically if you’re screwing up whilst trying something you’re turning over rocks for pearls. If you don’t get into the belief that you are always right, and if you don’t let people set you up for that, then you can’t fail’. Forget Gordon Brown’s Eco towns - he wants us to change the way we think. ‘You don’t need a nuclear power plant to start a new city, you don’t need those millions of dollars to spend on infrastructure and utilities, every home is cellular, it has its own’.

Now Magazine Toronto

Decades before green became fashionable, architect Michael Reynolds was creating self-sufficient homes in New Mexico. Constructed of garbage like plastic bottles and used tires, these homes generate their own power and food and require no outside heat, gas or water. Director Oliver Hodge tracks Reynolds, as grizzled as Nick Nolte on a good day, over the course of a few recent years as he butts up against subdivision regulations and then tries to get the state to change its housing development laws.

Reynolds, messianic and manic, makes a terrific doc subject, and his buildings (he calls them "earth ships") are playful and ingenious. His journey takes lots of unexpected twists and turns, especially when natural disasters hit the world and he and his crew travel to help build smart homes without being burdened by bumbling bureaucrats. Inspiring.

Dazed and Confused Digital

Garbage Warrior, which follows the radical environmental architect Michael Reynolds, was nominated for Best British Documentary at this year’s British Independent Film Awards. We spoke to first-time director Oliver Hodge.

Dazed Digital: How and why did you choose Michael Reynolds as a subject?

Oliver Hodge: I met Michael Reynolds in my home town of Brighton. He and his crew were invited here by a group of British eco-builders in summer 2003, to kick-start the building of the first English Earthship in Stanmer Park on the South Downs.

After watching him work, I was inspired immediately by his high energy and hands-on approach. The inventor of the building was working alongside his crew in the trenches. How many architects do you see swinging a sledge hammer or pick-axing out a sewage ditch?

He told us he had had his architect's license revoked, and his radical communities were shut down by planners in the late nineties. It was pretty clear that we had a story - Mike was a battle-scarred front-line eco-fighter who wanted fast change. He told me he wouldn't give up until he was six feet under!

DD: Was it a tough experience over three years?

OH: In the early days it was tough to get funding from broadcasters. I had to shoot nearly a third of the story before we were funded. That was a huge financial risk. I have worked on many stressful movies, but it is a different kind of stress when you are gambling that much of your own time and money.

It was a difficult narrative too, because so much had already happened. Often it was a case of waiting, back in the UK, until something was about to kick off. As soon as we got the call I was there with a camera, whether it was in court or in the post-tsunami or -hurricane Rita disaster zones.

DD: What's your personal view on the prospects for progressive architecture like Michael Reynolds'?

OH: It is frightening that houses are now responsible for nearly 50% of our CO2 emissions in many countries.

Mike's approach to architecture has the potential to achieve the radical social change we need to combat global warning. Everything you need in one of these housescomes from harnessing simple natural phenomena (gravity, radiation, convection) in simple ways, and it forces you to adopt a much more tuned-in way of thinking.If these ideas really took off imagine the freedom and political control we would have over our own lives, if we were no longer at the mercy of politics, oil prices or corporations.

DD: How did you find being BIFA nominated? Has this affected the film’s UK distribution at all?

OH: Being BIFA nominated was a great boost , it put the film in a different league and gained us some high profile press. We are in talks with some UKdistributors at present, and the nominations have undoubtedly helped that.

DD: You were on a panel recently called "Can Documentaries Change The World?" What did you conclude?

OH: I’m often asked "are you primarily an activist or a film maker?" The answer is both. I wanted to make a film but was driven to make this one because of by my beliefs. Garbage Warrior has not even been released yet, but already it has inspired projects in Sierra Leone, Mexico and Norway just from its festival screenings. When it's screened on TV and in the cinema around the world. I am confident many more projects will happen.

Metro Toronto

Imagine, if you will, that Mad Max wasn’t a sci-fi B flick but a documentary; Garbage Warrior isn’t that movie. Imagine, however, that there was a prequel to this theoretical Mad Max documentary, and you’ll have a better idea of the mood and ambition of Olive Hodge’s portrait of eco-architect Michael Reynolds, a film that — hardly unique among the current slate of documentaries — wears its agenda proudly on its sleeve.

When we first meet Reynolds, he’s standing under the desert sun, pounding dirt into an old tire with a sledgehammer. These dirt-packed tires are the principal building blocks of the unique houses, or “earthships” Reynolds has been building, mostly in the American southwest, for three decades — low, solid dwellings that are part hovel, part hobbit’s cottage, and part greenhouse; off-the-grid, self-sustaining shelters inspired by Reynolds’ vision of a nightmare future in store for all of us.

Built literally out of garbage — beer cans, plastic bottles and the tires described above — and designed to recycle waste water and sewage and retain heat (too successfully, sometimes, we learn), Reynolds’ earthships are like high-tech shanties for survivalists, and at one point the architect describes scavenging parties to the abandoned cities to collect material for the earthship settlements he imagines are waiting in mankind’s future.

We’re doomed to this humble fate thanks to the usual apocalyptic litany — pollution, resource depletion, and global warming, the Big One that Reynolds and his occasionally cult-like supporters and crew see just around the corner, especially when the 2004 tsunami and hurricanes Katrina and Rita happen while the architect fights to save his work and his reputation against the bureaucracy that strips him of his licence to practice due to the resolutely non-code building standards of his earthships.

While there’s probably merit in the work that Reynolds is doing — work that even he calls experimental — his credibility is torpedoed by the hyperbole and alarmism with which he tries to sell it. There’s no credible link between hurricanes and tsunamis and the catch-all scenarios imagined by “climate change,” but it does at least give Hodge’s film a third act, as Reynolds and his crew head off to the Andaman Islands to help with the rebuilding efforts there.

As a profession, architecture is a unique magnet for egotists, and it’s a shame that Reynolds’ film can’t get past its agenda and worshipful attitude to see the far more compelling story of a man trying to shape the world to match his vision of it; without that critical distance, Garbage Warrior plays as little more than shambling propaganda.

National Post Canada

Trash of civilizations

Chris Knight, National Post  Published: Thursday, February 14, 2008

Review: The Garbage Warrior (3 stars)

The man at the centre of Garbage Warrior - the refuse rebel, if you will - is Mike Reynolds, a sixtyish '60s radical with a nest of grey hair, an earnest demeanour and a house made of old beer cans, discarded bottles and used rubber tires. In the first 20 minutes of so of Oliver Hodge's documentary, these hippie trappings don't do him any favours. Reynolds calls his self-sufficient abodes "earthships" and his hand-built neighbourhood in New Mexico "the Greater World Community." Residents are apt to wear hemp and strum guitars. By the third mention of "off-the-grid living," you might be ready to dismiss the lot of them as New Age cranks.

That would be a mistake. Reynolds' construction methods might sound like something out of a pot-fuelled brainstorming session - "Hey, man, why don't we just collect beer cans and make houses out of them?" - but the resulting creations are elegant, sturdy and remarkably self-sufficient. Trapping heat to use on cold winter nights, collecting rainwater for bathing, watering plants and toilet-flushing, running on solar-powered batteries, the so-called earthships are an ecologist's green dream.

If all Hodge did was document the history of these houses (Reynolds built his first in 1972, and refines his design ideas with each new generation of building), he'd have a handy documentary. But he also follows the man's run-ins with The Man. Reynolds ran afoul of local and state governments in the 1990s, and was stripped of his architectural licence and forced to shut down his unorthodox off-the-grid community. (Among the problems was that earthships do not have sewage and power hook-ups; never mind that they don't need them.)

"I was breaking rules and laws, right and left, there's no question about it!" he says cheerfully, but adds that to try and try again is the only way to improve his creations, which he sees as a necessary component in the fight against global climate change.

The film then follows his foray into state politics, as he drafts and tries to have passed a bill to allow "housing test sites," much as New Mexico has already been home to nuclear bomb test sites. Legislators stall him with unanswerable questions: "How independent is the word independent?" "Is there a term for ‘real people' other than ‘real people?' " Reynolds doggedly, dutifully dons a suit and tie to argue his case in the legislature, gleefully offering to the camera the visceral metaphor of himself as a virus invading the, er, guts of the government.

Coincidentally, Nature herself provides Reynolds an opportunity to prove himself. The Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 left hundreds of thousands homeless and without water, and Reynolds headed to India's Andaman Islands to help rebuild. Like a low-budget Jimmy Carter with his earth-filled tires and empty-bottle houses, he was greeted as a saviour. Eight months later, Hurricane Katrina showed how even the United States could be humbled by nature's fury.

Garbage Warrior thus manages to start on a sanctimonious note and end on a practical one. Even if total off-the-grid living remains a dream for all but a few hardy pioneers, surely Reynolds' trial-and-error techniques of sustainable design deserve closer attention. He's willing to share his ideas, and admits a selfish motivation: "If humanity takes the planet down the tube, I'm dead. I'm trying to save my ass, and that is a powerful force."

Toronto Sun

Michael Reynolds is a long-haired, wild-eyed maverick architect, and Garbage Warrior presents him in a warts-and-all fashion.

Reynolds, who designs sustainable housing, initially comes across as just another aging hippie, and when he shows off the houses he builds out of old beer cans and rubber tires, it's easy to dismiss him -- been there, smoked that -- as a passe boomer.

One of the great delights of Garbage Warrior is the way it lets Reynolds' genius sneak up on you, allowing him to win you over the way he eventually wins over everyone he encounters.

This documentary, which concerns Reynolds' vision for sustainable housing and his efforts to spread the good word about it, begins in a laid-back community in New Mexico. Here, Reynolds talks about his theories and shows some of the dwellings he's built out of throw-away items.

These houses really are completely self-sufficient, with power, water and sewage all taken care of under one roof, via sun, rain and wind.

The buildings near Taos are all built by Reynolds and his gang of builders, and the dwellings vary in looks between whimsical and wacky. Since Reynolds has been at this for about 35 years, an entire community has sprung up around him.

Reynolds is genuinely concerned about the future of the planet, and he long ago set out to build a house where people could thrive off the grid. No mortgage, no utility bills, no food shopping.
 
For a decade, he and his cronies built dwellings near Taos, learning from their mistakes and improving as they built. Sometimes roofs leaked. One house had too much sun and too much heat ("I'm just glad I didn't fry a baby or something.") Another was plagued by sewage disposal problems.

In time, they created houses where people could use sun and rain for power and water and grow their own food.

The results for Reynolds' hard work? Lawsuits, getting his architect's licence revoked, plenty of government red tape.

Nonetheless, the man's enthusiasm and his energy are daunting, and it's only too bad it took global catastrophe to bring suitable attention to his work.

After the 2004 tsunami, he was invited by Indian authorities to build some of his sustainable dwellings for survivors on the Andaman Islands.

With their wells full of salt water, the locals learned from Reynolds a simple solution: How to build a roof that collects rain water. (Reynolds calls his creations "earth ships" and he built more in 2006 after Hurricane Rita hit Mexico.)

Garbage Warrior starts off like a feel-good Beach Boys song, but it ends up as a symphony.

Reynolds is a genius whose enthusiasm has influenced a lot of people for positive change -- even politicians.

Garbage Warrior was filmed over three years in the U.S., India and Mexico, and it's a terrific introduction not only to Reynolds' work, but to the extraordinary political and economic hurdles facing anyone who hopes to make positive change.

An Inconvenient Truth outlines the problem; Garbage Warrior offers some solutions. You should probably see them both. Soon.

Toronto Star

Garbage Warrior may be a documentary but it follows a narrative arc perfected by Hollywood. In this movie we are immediately introduced to the hero, an American architect, Mike Reynolds, and given a reason to pay attention to him. In his early 60s, he is certainly a striking figure with his tousled, shoulder-length grey hair, and his obvious vigour – we see him doing push-ups and sit-ups and jogging with his dog, in a fruitless attempt to trim his ample stomach.

But that's not the reason for our interest. The reason is he is going to save the world.
Reynolds' chosen means is architecture – environmentally sustainable houses built with walls of beer cans and tires, of which there is no shortage on this planet. In the hills of Taos, N.M., he creates communities of like-minded supporters who have built, under his tutelage, homes called "earthships." The owners of these off-the-grid dwellings follow Reynolds with religious devotion.

"I always tell Mike that he's like a freak magnet," his wife says. "He attracts the weirdest people."

At least they don't have to pay utility bills, thanks to natural ventilation of their homes and the heat-storing properties of tires.

But, as in the classic Hollywood formula, establishment forces pounce on this convention-defying hero. They spot his vulnerability. His earthships, it turns out, have sometimes been disasters.

"When you're doing something like running sewage through living rooms and building a building out of garbage, if you really do seriously f--- up, it's 10 times as bad," Reynolds says. "If I had a roof that leaked, it was lawsuit. If I had a smell in the bathroom, it was lawsuit."

Joining irate clients are the town planners of Taos, outraged because the earthship communities have no roads, no utilities, no services as understood by town planners. They issue an injunction to stop Reynolds from building homes. Reynolds, understandably, is in the depths of despair – but true to Hollywood form, he pulls himself together, buys a suit and tie, and fights back, lobbying the state legislature of New Mexico for a bill that would allow him to build his experimental houses. It's a good story, although a Hollywood script doctor would call for more development of the main character. "Mike's biggest obsession is his work," Reynolds' wife says, and all that Reynolds talks about is his houses. We get the feeling it would be a hard slog conversing with Reynolds on a long trip.

First-time director Oliver Hodge also has to make the dramatic centre of his story – Reynolds' attempt to lobby the state legislature – exciting. This is not easy. Committee rooms are meant to be boring places, and Hodge has to resort to some fancy tricks to keep our attention.

Garbage Warrior is, in the end, a fitting tribute to a free spirit and a valuable citizen. But Reynolds' architecture is more interesting than his conflicts with authority, and the documentary suffers from trying to pump that conflict for all it's worth.

Globe and Mail

Green doc leaves its brain in the trash
LIAM LACEY
From Friday's Globe and Mail
February 14, 2008 at 11:58 PM EST

Garbage Warrior
Directed by Oliver Hodge
Featuring Michael Reynolds
Classification: NA

First, Garbage Warrior isn't really about garbage and secondly, it's not about a warrior. This piece of green advocacy is, essentially, a celebration of Michael Reynolds, an architect living near Taos, N.M., who has spent 35 years experimenting with and creating self-sustaining houses, often out of recycled materials.

The green movement is eager for such heroes, but Garbage Warrior falls into the trap of so many documentaries that are more from the heart than the head: It's a timely subject, devoid of the rigour that might make it actually important. Shot over three years by first-time filmmaker (and professional Hollywood props creator) Oliver Hodge, the film chases one narrative thread and then another. There are least three potential films here, each perhaps worthy of a television newsmagazine segment.

The first section of the film portrays Reynolds's life outside Taos in an off-the-grid desert home, without utility bills or dependence on any central authority. The grey-haired hippie-libertarian and trained architect is the author of a half-dozen how-to books on eco-building. His eccentric-looking self-sustaining houses, called “earth ships,” are built using abandoned bottles and tires and have a wide following.

A community of like-minded “freaks” has grown up around him. His life is good (cue several scenes of him jogging with his dog) except that Reynolds lies awake at night preoccupied by the apocalyptic effects of global warming and urban collapse. He says his personal hero is Noah.

When one of the residents of Reynolds's experimental community explains that he lived the first 11 years in the community without a flush toilet, you begin to see where there might be trouble ahead. Sure enough, there's a change in administration at the local planning committee, and the new regime has safety and health concerns about Reynolds's community. Reynolds is penalized for his code-breaking housing and he loses his architect's licence.

After a period of despair, he decides to adapt. He begins building sustainable houses that meet the zoning standards of a subdivision, but he gets bored with “generic” housing. He is determined to continue to experiment with housing ideas, which means taking risks with people living in his houses. His mission sets up the film's Mr. Deeds sequence, after the Jimmy Stewart film about one dogged idealist against the system. Reynolds buys a suit (his wife amusingly says he looks like a “homeless car salesman”) and heads off to the New Mexico Legislature to introduce a bill allowing him to provide experimental housing.

Reynolds's struggle to sell his ideas is portrayed as a confrontation between an idealist and myopic bureaucrats. There are endless committees, nitpickers who criticize Reynolds's bill as too vague and without controls. With just four days to go before the end of the legislative session, Reynolds finds a champion. A beautiful and idealistic young lawyer, Renni Zifferblatt, a bill analyst for the judicial committee, believes in his cause, helps him redraft his bill and starts lobbying for him. Her presence leads to the film's most egregiously stupid moment. Zifferblatt is shown, in slow motion, sashaying across the legislature floor, long fringed dress and long dark hair swaying. Cut to Reynolds, waiting for the vote results: “Hubba, hubba,” he says. So much for women earning respect in the professions.

It takes a natural disaster in India to finally bring Reynolds some personal vindication. He and a crew head off to India for three weeks to help tsunami survivors. His efficient, self-sustaining model home, built out of recycled materials (with built-in wells that fill with rainwater from the roof) is just the ticket. Grateful locals sing his praises, though we do not have the benefit of seeing what long-term impact his building provided.

One of Reynolds's workers marvels: “We got to like beg on our hands and knees to build these in America, but here they're loving us and wantin' us to do it.”

Perhaps it shouldn't have been a surprise to learn that people in the midst of catastrophe aren't as picky about their housing requirements as American suburban planners. But there's another catastrophe-opportunity waiting back at home, as Hurricane Katrina destroys a substantial part of New Orleans and leaves hundreds of thousands of people homeless. Reynolds makes a second pitch to the New Mexico legislators to have his experimental-housing project approved. There are dark murmurings about vested oil interests and Reynolds is portrayed as a prophet without honour in his own land. Stupid democracy, with its demands for consensus, trumps individual vision once again.

“It's almost like disaster has to happen for the rest of the world to start preparing,” mourns Reynolds, to which you're tempted to reply: And just what part of human nature don't you understand?

Now Magaizine Toronto

MOVIE REVIEWS
GARBAGE WARRIOR
GLENN SUMI

GARBAGE WARRIOR (Oliver Hodge). 87 minutes. Opens Friday (February 15) at the Bloor.
Rating: NNNN

Decades before green became fashionable, architect Michael Reynolds was creating self-sufficient homes in New Mexico. Constructed of garbage like plastic bottles and used tires, these homes generate their own power and food and require no outside heat, gas or water.

Director Oliver Hodge tracks Reynolds, who looks as grizzled as Nick Nolte on a good day, over the course of a few recent years as he butts up against subdivision regulations and then tries to get the state to change its housing development laws.

Reynolds, messianic and manic, makes a terrific doc subject, and his buildings (he calls them "earth ships") are playful and ingenious.

His journey takes lots of unexpected twists and turns, especially when natural disasters hit the world and he and his crew travel to help build smart homes without being burdened by bumbling bureaucrats.

Here's hoping his innovative ideas about sustainable living eventually find homes with politicians and other decision-makers.

EYE WEEKLY CANADA

BY ADAM NAYMAN   February 13, 2008 15:02
EDITORIAL RATING: (2 STARS OUT OF 5)
Directed by Oliver Hodge. (STC) 86 min. Opens Feb 15 at the Bloor Cinema (506 Bloor W).

Mike Reynolds, the New Mexico–based architect at the centre of Oliver Hodge’s documentary Garbage Warrior believes that people should be able to take care of themselves. To that end, he’s a portrait of shaggy self-sufficiency; over 35 years, he’s literally carved out his own niche in the desert landscape, constructing and maintaining environmentally-friendly living spaces out of refuse and plaster.

The structures, at once lo-fi (the walls are made out of beer cans) and vaguely futuristic (a pan across one compound looks like an establishing shot from a sci-fi film), are organized around Reynolds’ notion of sustainable living in the face of dwindling global resources. When he’s inevitably brought up on zoning violations — a crisis that gives the film its dramatic shape — he transforms into a courtroom crusader. While there’s no denying that he’s had a successful run doing things his own way, Reynolds is more fascinating as an iconoclast than he is persuasive that his rugged blueprint constitutes a plausible design for life. Director Hodge simply doesn’t prod him hard enough, and the deferential tone is disappointing; so is the conventional Doc 101 construction, which feels at odds with Reynold’s unique, individualistic aesthetics.

BBC.co.uk Film Network

Garbage Warrior

Some of the most cinematic British movies on display in this year's festival are in the documentaries section (see also Nick Higgins' A Massacre Foretold). Oliver Hodge's Garbage Warrior is a revealing insight into the revolutionary mind of architect Michael Reynolds, a pioneer who's been building eco-friendly homes in New Mexico for decades. Hodge's film chronicles Reynolds' battles with the New Mexico authorities and his success in the Andaman Islands following the 2004 Tsunami disaster. A truly inspiring movie.
19th and 20th August, Cineworld

IO Film

Maverick architect Michael Reynolds, having decided early on that his training was "worthless," has devoted his career to experimenting and developing totally self-sufficient eco-buildings.

Reynolds' message is that houses are one of the biggest contributors to energy waste in our society and fixing them can help reduce environmental hardship for future generations, while also freeing us from unnecessary financial burdens. "We need to be doing something now. Tomorrow morning," he drawls, with a characteristic sense of urgency.

Reynolds has been creating earthships out of materials that would end up in a landfill - tires, cans, glass and plastic bottles - in New Mexico since the '70s. These fantastical-looking buildings are completely off-the-grid. No incoming sewage pipes. No water pipes. No electricity lines. He designs his buildings to make the greatest use of available energy from light, wind and rainwater. They are free-formed shapes, using curved earth walls and multicoloured bottle domes, and they have weird stuff like propellers pointing out of them

The grizzled Reynolds, with his shaggy, grey hair, is great company as he articulates his passion for sustainable living with a mischievous sense of humour. Oliver Hodge's judiciously edited point-of-view piece grows in strength as it follows Reynolds' protracted struggle with local and state authorities who shut down his community of "earthships" in 1997 for building code contraventions.

Reynolds' response, after having been robbed of his livelihood, credentials and self-respect, is to suit up and take his battle to the state senate, with a mixture of bloody-minded determination and zealous conviction. Although the film only touches on the official issues with Reynolds' architectural inventions, it is a story well told and the good-humoured warrior at the centre is an inspiration.

Suite 101

Garbage Warrior (UK)
If the thought of building a house with trash piques your curiosity, so too will this outstanding documentary. Oliver Hodge tracks Michael Reynolds, an architect in New Mexico, on his quest to use garbage to build self-sustainable housing. Watch the charismatic go-getter as he gets his bill into the House of Commons (to hilarious effect), his team’s journey to after Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami in South East Asia, and the communes in New Mexico. Riveting, solid work.

Fri Oct 5 @ 7:00pm, Sun Oct 7 @ 11:30am, ADDED SCREENING Fri Oct 12 @ 7:00pm