“DETROPIA” My rating: B (Opens Oct. 26 at the Tivoli)
90 minutes | No MPAA rating
For those who require them, there are plenty of facts and figures on display in “Detropia.”
Try these on for size:
In 1930 Detroit was America’s fastest-growing city; now it is the fastest shrinking.
Detroit now has 100,000 abandoned houses or empty residential lots.
Over the last 50 years, Detroit has lost 50 percent of its population.
But Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s cinema verite documentary is more a mood piece than anything else, a sort of cinematic lament for the death of a once-great city. The effect is impressionistic, with the camera wandering empty streets and shattered neighborhoods, looking for life.
It’s all the result of the shrinking auto industry, which has shipped thousands of jobs overseas to take advantage of cheap Third World labor, with the result that now the United States is beginning to resemble a Third World country.
Blogger Crystal Starr captures images of abandoned buildings and observes community meetings. Former teacher and now nightclub owner Tommy Stevens struggles to make ends meet, noting that auto workers used to show up on a Friday night and order heaping plates of Buffalo wings. Those days are long gone.
The filmmakers follow the struggles of union workers at American Axle to negotiate a contract that will let them survive. They’re told that management doesn’t care if they make a living wage. Result: The company closes down.
Mayor Dave Bing flails about for a solution. Maybe consolidating the remaining population in planned neighborhoods and using the rest of the city for urban farming?
In contrast with all this grimness Ewing and Grady sample vintage TV ads and promotional films from Detroit’s heyday. They tout a bright future for American automobiles and the workers that make them.
Then they take us to a big auto show in which Chevy introduces a new model, complete with artsy modern dancers cavorting in front of a huge multi-media display. Incongruous.
There’s not much of a future to look forward to in this grim effort. The one small ray of hope (if you can call it that) is that property values are so low that dozens of poor artists are moving into Detroit’s downtown and setting up studios.
Better than nothing.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
one of the saddest things that has happened in the history of this nation. And KC is not far behind. In fact, a Star article about the Manheim neighborhood east of Troost displayed the poverty and abandoned houses in that area — a lot like this area. And artists are now moving into the homes there — the ones that won’t be razed by the city, that is.