The Chances of the World Changing (2006)

Documentary. From the cover art and description, I thought this story would be a green person's paradise. Instead of terrariums, however, we get tubs. Richard Ogust has given up his writing career and turned his Manhattan apartment into a warehouse full of opaque plastic tubs housing 1,600 turtles. While he has altruistically taken it upon himself to preserve numerous endangered turtle species, he is burning out by doing all the work himself -- and as inefficiently as possible, lugging and dumping individual tubs and snipping greens by hand! Much is made of a farm property he intends to take over to found a turtle research institute but these plans fall through as do all of his fundraising efforts. To save the three-hour daily commute, he takes to camping outside temporary storage space in New Jersey. (No mention is made of whether he has electricity and water for self or turtles.) He looks tense and intense and he admits to being depressed on a daily basis. The photography is washed-out and lackluster and the focus of this film is on his personal dilemma rather than the turtles. I gave up after watching one-third of this dull, defeatist treatise on a depressed terrapin collector who seems to have had none of the expected and beneficial qualifications that could have averted the ultimate failure of his self-appointed mission. 2 stars.