Documentaries

When Havana Marking was growing up in England, her hippie father regaled her with stories of the epic landscape and stunning people he encountered while visiting Afghanistan in the 1960s. Young Havana was hooked. "I wanted to go there for years and years," Marking said. "I have done a lot of traveling in Asia and Islamic countries and lived and worked in various Islamic countries. But Afghanistan was this forbidden jewel. I could never go there." When U.S.

"Revolution" is not a word you hear used seriously in America nowadays, possibly because of all the promised revolutions that failed or possibly because it has become co-opted, commercialized and devalued ("a revolution in hair care," that sort of thing). It was not so long ago, however, by geological time, that it evoked something more tangible: a real and imminent change in the way the world was run and who ran it in a time when the country seemed poised on the edge of several sorts of civil war and the culture was perpetually convulsive.

Interest in the environment is heating up as fast as global warming. Contributions to the Sierra Club soared 33% last year, homeowners are installing solar panels, and even preschool children are recycling. At the same time, nonfiction filmmakers are trying to shape the ecological conversation, turning out an abundance of critically acclaimed, Earth-friendly documentaries. But three years after "An Inconvenient Truth" won over moviegoers and Oscar voters, many new works are suffering the same fate plaguing other intellectually engaging films: moviegoers would rather hug Transformers than trees.

There's a moment in the documentary "It Might Get Loud" when Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, while sitting with fellow guitarists Jack White and the Edge, reaches for his Gibson Les Paul to play a thundering "Whole Lotta Love." The solid-body guitar remains the model of choice for Page and many of rock's leading players, and is the enduring legacy of the late guitarist and inventor Les Paul. "It was like a throwdown," director Davis Guggenheim said of that moment in his film. "It was like, 'I'm done talking.

When documentary filmmaker Dori Berinstein arrived to shoot the auditions for the New Jersey Nets' first over-60 dance team, she could hardly believe her luck. Not only would these amateur dancers -- some of them in their 80s -- perform for tens of thousands of rowdy NBA fans, but the NETSationals were to be a hip-hop dance team. This geriatric squad would be rump-shaking to the music of Jay-Z, Fat Joe and Ludacris. "I couldn't have been more thrilled about that," Berinstein said, chuckling.

In 2002, LeBron James first appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated, which dubbed him "The Chosen One." He was compared to Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson. Talk about hype: James was all of 17 and a junior in high school. Now 24, James is the NBA's reigning MVP and the best hoops player on the planet not named Kobe Bryant. Today, he views that SI cover as a symbol of the outsized celebrity he attained at a young age. "Now that I look back on it, I'm like, 'wow, that was huge,' " he says.

Nearly half a century after its debut, Jack Kerouac's "Big Sur" is getting its due. By the time he published the book in 1962, Kerouac was already lost in the alcoholism that killed him seven years later at age 47. Wednesday marked the 40th anniversary of his death. The reviews of Kerouac's last major novel -- a wrenching, thinly veiled account of his failed efforts to stop drinking -- certainly didn't help his crumbling state of mind. "What can a beat do when he is too old to go on the road?

America has a bad case of the doomsday jitters. You don't have to be a Glenn Beck follower to know that whenever things go wrong in this country, you can always find all the anger, bitterness and fear-mongering bubbling up and over into our popular culture. With Wall Street fat cats still cashing in while the rest of the country suffers from double-digit unemployment, with partisan bickering at an all-time high and a war in Afghanistan threatening to suck up 40,000 more troops, the country is in a sour mood, full of nasty, dark suspicions about the future.

"CSI: NY" star Gary Sinise can be seen in a new time slot this weekend. The actor will be featured in "On the Road in Iraq With Our Troops and Gary Sinise," a documentary airing on Fox News on Saturday at 6 p.m. Culled from 26 hours of footage taken of a trip Sinise made to Iraq last July, the hourlong special follows the actor as he visits with American troops across the country. It was the fourth trip to the war zone for Sinise, who started traveling to U.S. bases with the USO after the Sept.