Lake of Fire

Director: Tony Kaye
Year Released: 2006
Rating: 3.0

Kaye enters the abortion debate with this obviously personal labor of love, making sure to get both sides' arguments on why or why not the procedure should be legal or illegal. I'm not convinced that his argument makes the Pro-Life side seem sane (aside from Nat Hentoff) - he's obviously fascinated with the likes of Eric Rudolph and Paul Hill, who kill for the cause - and it's more that Kaye's troubled by his own (presumed) Pro-Choice slant, looking for answers in the other side (but finding mostly lunatics). His black and white photography - which at first I thought was too artsy - pays off in the unflinching abortion scenes where the mashed fetuses have to be examined by the clinic staff, although I had the distinct displeasure of seeing many actual abortion videos discussed by the Pro-Life people, having endured four years of Catholic High School and the mandatory religion classes. Leave it to Noam Chomsky and (a surprisingly subdued) Alan Dershowitz to be the bright spots: Chomsky in particular (this guy's a treasure, ain't he?) takes the argument one step further, arguing that you can only discuss abortion when you start addressing the medical and nutritional needs of the already-born and still-starving children of the world. It's upsetting, and it should be.