Powerful

Don't listen to the negative reviews

As Good As It Gets

The acting in this movie is really good.

Although made on a lower budget than some of the more popular documentaries of late, "Blue Vinyl" is an excellent film. This investigative work of environmental journalism does a great job of telling the story in an informative, accessible way. It is difficult to appropriately incorporate humor into a documentary about toxic chemicals. It is equally difficult to make a documentary about plastic interesting to watch. But, Helfand and Gold achieve both of these feats. While the story is told from Judith Helfand's perspective, she is not the focus of the film. As a result, the viewer has a character to latch onto without distracting from the story. If you enjoy documentaries, or you're just curious about the topic, this is a great film to watch.

Here be spoilers to some degree. In an informative piece such as this movie I don't think it matters too much, but you've been warned.I know most of you out there don't have PVC on your big list of killers, and that's OK. It's a pretty obscure and boring subject. When I was flipping around and saw this title on HBO the first thing I thought was "ohh... blue vinyl" and thought I might see some skin. Instead, after a few seconds, I realized this was a documentary. Me, being the glutton for boring subject matter, decided to watch it.While it is a little one sided, it gives an overall impression of the positives of convenience and the negatives of PVC and gives both opposing arguments from the industry and activists- ranging from the "end user" (her parents) to the ultra-hippie to the corporate exec. While the narrator does give an impression of her own view, it isn't to the point that disallows the viewer to still disagree easily; and that's a nice thing to have.I loved the shots of people concerned with this issue going out and testing the air themselves, I liked how all involved were calm and overall respectful, and I most liked the opposition between the narrator and her parents. It really brings it down to home- the cost issues and unavailability of other materials was slightly anti-climatic, but gave a good feeling of what really goes on.Good documentary. 7/10- Maybe not ready for mainstream, but demonstrates excellent promise. A more famous "documentary" maker could learn a thing or two from this girl.

Though I did enjoy this movie especially how Judith Helfand went all out to find out information that worried her. However, the only problem I have is that the majority of the people she used for her scientific information were Green Peace scientist.Now, even though these are legitimate researchers, Green Peace has an agenda and they want complete protection of the environment. I feel that this actually hurts her attempt to prove her point. This just makes the movie extremely bias.By talking to these scientist the only thing she does is raise her own anxiety while making her movie a Green Peace Platform thats message will most likely be ignored.My tip, next time stay away from biased scientist all together. Other than that the movie was very good, very well thought out and shot.

This is one of those documentaries where folks have a knee jerk reaction and start thinking how horrible this is and we must save the environment and I'm so glad this was brought to my attention.Problem is what exactly was brought to our attention. This "documentary" had a conclusion first and then set out to prove it. She asks folks what they think, they tell her and she then presents this as fact. When she interviews folks who have an opposite viewpoint she misrepresents what they say and then mocks it. There is a scene in this show where she goes to a convention for the makers of vinyl one of the folks mentions that two of the components in PVC are sodium and chloride which are the components that make table salt, she then says that chemical compounds such as PVC are made up of common elements. Right after this our narrator says that she was just told that PVC is safe as table salt which is absolutely not what she was told. Later on she wants to get an expert opinion on if PVC is dangerous or not, so she has two "scientists" from Greenpeace come. Gee...we know this will be a fair evaluation. Basically the rest of this show is the same way and I think you can get the idea.Stay away from this program as it's more harmful than good.