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Copyright © 2001–2007
by Daniel
B. Clendenin.
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13 Conversations About One Thing (2001) Set in New York city, this film narrates the every day aspirations and heart aches of four people: a young, brash prosecutor, an aging middle manager at an insurance company, a physics professor at Columbia, and a young cleaning girl. Director Jill Sprecher walks a thin line and teases out the tension between two world views. On the one hand, these characters feel the apparent futility and despair that despite what choices they make, or wish they could make, they really have no control over their lives, and so life feels very random and fickle. Still, as the film has it, the lives of these four characters do in fact intersect, such that a bigger picture of purpose is intimated. Clearly, all the characters in this film long to embrace the notion that there is a larger, benign Purpose directing what appear to be little more than accidental events. In a final scene, even the mere gesture of waving to someone as the subway train pulls away suggests that there is meaning in all we do. Christians will enjoy this film as an excellent commentary on the notion of divine Providence in which a loving God superintends our lives. He is no magician or puppeteer, and all our human choices matter, but we are never beyond the pale of His care or the presence of mystery in all we experience.
How much is a life worth? Modern folklore suggests that at the moment of death, when the soul leaves the body, the body loses 21 grams. Be sure to read a few reviews of this film: the complicated plot is told in a complex, non-linear fashion.
Need to find a support group for your diabetic cat? Searching for limited editions of Dr. Seuss prints? Want to join a "flash mob?" Looking for an apartment, a heavy metal chef, or some football tickets? For all this and much, much more, just go to craigslist.org. What carries this otherwise mediocre documentary film is its fascinating subject matter. The entire film is little more than interviews with people who wax eloquent about how and why they use craigslist. They are not alone. With three billion page views and fifteen million users per month, and fifty million user postings in 100 discussion forums, craigslist is much more than a place to buy and sell; it is a form of entertainment and means for social connections. Many of these people are normal, but many others are just weird, and some of them would appear strange to say the least. The film includes people that should have been omitted, and is needlessly coy about Craig. Nor do you learn much about the basic history of craigslist. For the record, Craig Newmark founded the organization in 1995 in San Francisco. Today craigslist services 450 cities in 50 countries. In 1999 craigslist incorporated as a for-profit (E-Bay owns 25%), but that statement could be very misleading. Their current CEO Jim Buckmaster has been called an anarchist and communist for his steadfast refusal to "monetize" the site. He runs the company with a staff of two dozen people, and their "business model," such that it is, charges $25 for job ads in seven cities, and $10 for brokered apartments in New York City. Otherwise, craigslist revels in its open-source software and philanthropic esprit. For a fascinating article see http://www.forbes.com/technology/2006/12/08/newspaper-classifield-online-tech_cx-lh_1211craigslist.html.
Written, directed, and edited by the Iranian film maker Abbas Kiarostami, this documentary portrays the plight of Uganda's 2 million children who have been orphaned by the ravages of civil war, life under the psychopathic despot Idi Amin, and AIDS. Kiarostami made the film at the request of the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development. If you have been to Africa the sights and sounds are very familiar—piles of smoldering garbage, orange clay landscape, rutted roads, rusted corrugated tin roofs, bicycles, the ubiquitous rubber flip-flop sandals, and a weary yet resilient, elegant, and remarkably joyful people. In the film's most powerful sequence, a nurse wraps a dead child in a dirty blanket, packs him in half of a cardboard box ripped open for the purpose, and then loads the corpse onto the back of a bicycle. In particular, Kiarostami highlights the work of UWESO—Ugandan Women's Efforts To Save Children, an all volunteer organization of women who give themselves to care for the orphans and to train women in small business skills. The film has almost no narrative, and would have been even more powerful if it had. But the images speak for themselves. The title refers to a t-shirt worn by a small child featured in the film who was adopted by a young Austrian couple.
"The truth," recalls Jean Dominique (1930–2000) quoting Shakespeare, "will always make the devil's face blush." For forty years Dominique was Haiti's most eloquent and outspoken political and human rights activist. Whether it was Papa Doc Duvalier, his son Baby Doc, Raoul Cedras, Jean Bertrand Aristide, Preval, the provisional puppet governments supported by America and run by the military, or the hated Macoutes thug-militia, Dominique spoke unvarnished truth and justice to power. He gave voice to the poorest of the poor in general and peasants in particular. When he was assassinated April 3, 2000 at the age of 70, he requested that his wife and the peasants together pour his ashes into the river. By training Dominique was an agronomist, but he became a national hero by force of his unflinching bravery, charming eloquence, and political passion. Late in the documentary he describes himself as always having had "an unquenchable faith as a militant for true change." With his journalist wife Michele Montas, he owned and operated Haiti's oldest and only free radio station, Radio Haiti, despite repeated episodes of harassment, torture, jail, and over six years of exile in Manhattan. Broadcasts were in native Creole rather than colonial French, connecting Dominique viscerally to the millions of powerless peasants. In addition, he produced Haiti's first film in Haiti by a Haitian, sensing that when you watch closely, you understand how a film becomes a political act. In 1965, Papa Doc's authorities permanently closed Haiti's first film club that he had started. Written and directed by Academy Award winner Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs), who interviewed Dominique over a period of ten years, this documentary demonstrates how some times human history is driven from "the bottom up" rather than the "top down." In English and Creole (with English subtitles). Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1992) Nick Broomfield's death row documentary interviews with the serial killer who admitted murdering seven men in Florida. Wuornos grew up in a horribly dysfunctional home, was adopted by a crazy born-again woman, represented by a sleazy attorney, and exploited by the police who were making movie deals during her trial. She was the oppressed victim who became the oppressor, but whom we cannot help but love. Aileen: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003) Wuornos was a life long hooker from an early age, a drug abuser, had a gay lover (probably the only loving relationship in her life), and was mentally sick. Nick Broomfield befriended her, and these documentary interviews chronicle her days right before her execution in 2002. Amadeus (1984) The basic plot revolving around Salieri's jealousy is overdone if not fictitious, but just to enter into Mozart's music and to imagine what it must have been like to know him in his own day and time is fascinating. Amelie (2001)—French Amelie Poulain, a waitress at a Paris cafe, grew up with "a neurotic mother (who committed suicide) and an iceberg father," so she withdrew into her imaginative and shy self. She finds her gift, which is to bestow joy and serendipity upon the least suspecting people through creatively contrived circumstances—her apartment concierge, a blind man, and even her father. At first whimsical, light hearted and winsome, the film takes a final, poignant turn when Amelie must learn to accept love and joy for herself. Amelie earned five Oscar nominations. American Beauty (1999) This film won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, but I thought it was weak. Every character in the film is pathologically dysfunctional, but the bad part is that they are superficial, predictable, and unbelievable stereotypes. Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), age 42, is a loser, and he knows he is a loser. His wife and teenage daughter hate him, for good reasons. Not to worry, he rejuvenates himself by seducing Angela, his daughter's best friend, quitting his job, working out and drinking smoothies, listening to Pink Floyd and Bob Dylan, smoking dope, throwing dishes against the wall, getting a new job at Smiley's Hamburgers, and buying a 1970 Pontiac Firebird. Self destruction as personal makeover? Life is beautiful, as he proclaims at the end of the film? Yeah, right. His wife Carolyn is an obsessive phony who lives only for image and finds her own authenticity by bedding her chief real estate competitor. Daughter Jane runs off with the next door classmate, Ricky, a drug dealing voyeur who spent two years in a mental hospital because of his abusive Marine Colonel dad who wrongly thinks he is gay, even while, apparently, he himself is gay. The real, token gay couple lives a few houses down. Just your average suburban neighborhood. Mid life crises are not funny, and it is too bad that director Sam Mendes did not help Lester deal with his in an interesting or compelling way. American Splendor (2003) Based upon the real life story of Harvey Pekar. Pekar spent most of his life as a file clerk in a VA hospital in Cleveland, then became the most unlikely celebrity when he created the comic series American Splendor. Clearly, this quintessential misanthrope could write about what every day people experience. The film intersperses the drama with real interviews with Pekar, his wife and colleagues, along with animated comics.
Will Ferrell plays Ron Burgundy, the lead news anchor for San Diego's Channel Four network news. Set in the 1970s, this biting satire does for the television news industry what Zoolander did for the fashion industry. Petty personalities, insipid news content about pregnant zoo animals, blow dried hair and toothy smiles, paltry humor, and blatant sexism remind us of the very thin border between film's fiction and whatever constitutes "real" news. Just last night on our "real" news the weatherman reported that San Jose had "four one hundredths of an inch of rain." And he was serious. Watched as parody and farce, this film works. Network news has come a long, long way from the comforting, paternalistic intonations of Walter Cronkite.
"There is a world," remarks the environmental sculptor Andy Goldsworthy of Scotland (born 1956), "beyond which words cannot describe." With that he tosses a mud ball made of dark red crushed iron stone into a river for an explosion of color. What once was solid is now liquid, the immobile stone now part of the flowing river. Ice. Twigs. Thorns. Dandelions. Rocks. Sand. Sheep wool. Snaking ribbons of braided leaves. From the North Pole to Canada, Japan, Australia, and New York, all of his work, most of which is ephemeral because that same nature will destroy it, is made from the elements of nature, sculpted in nature, and is about nature. But words cannot begin to unpack the haunting beauty and evocative power of his creations. This is a remarkable documentary about an extraordinary artist doing brilliant work. Goldsworthy narrates the film and explains how and why he does what he does. Themes of Creation and Creator loom large here. If you cannot watch this wonderful film, simply "google" his name to see some of his hundreds of works.
I watched this film because the DVD case boasts that it won awards at five film festivals, but that only proves that the experts can be badly wrong. Set in 1984 Palermo, Angela is bored at her husband Saro's shoe store, so she takes a more active role in the real family business, which is running drugs by stuffing them into the shoes inside the boxes. Angela is something of a trophy wife for the older mafioso Saro, and you know it's a very bad idea when the younger Masino, a confidant of Saro, starts to hit on her. What was he thinking? In a mafia movie? In prison Saro dumps Angela and promises, "your prince charming is a walking corpse." We never see Masino again, nor does Angela. I tired at watching unshaven men with unbuttoned shirts and pinky rings talk tough in darkened rooms, and failed to find anything very interesting in this movie. In Italian with English subtitles.
Antares is one of the brightest stars in the night sky, but everyone in this film flames out into darkness. As I watched the lives of three dysfunctional couples deconstruct, my mind wandered to the wisdom of the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria: "Be kind to all, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle." All three couples are trapped in the same drab high rise apartments that serve as metaphors for their interior landscapes. The bored nurse Eva has an affair with an out of town doctor, but despite their torrid love affair she does not even remember the man's last name; nor do we ever learn her husband's name. The young and needy checkout clerk Sonja fakes a pregnancy to persuade her cheating boyfriend Marco to marry her. He's an immigrant laborer from Yugoslavia, injecting not only class-consciousness but ethnicity and immigration into the film. Despite her efforts to free herself, domestic violence traps Nicole with the jealous and abusive Alex, the third couple. In twists of fate that are more bizarre than important to the plot, the lives of these six people crash and collide, but only as ships passing in the night. Austrian angst buries everyone. In German with English subtitles. The Apostle (1997) Do you love or hate Sonny (Robert Duvall), the deeply flawed but truly good and human Pentecostal preacher from Texas?
Jerome graduates from high school and enrolls in Strathmore Art School. Picasso is his hero, and he intends to become "the greatest artist of the twenty-first century." Lucky for him, Bardo, who has flunked out and started over three times, takes him under his wing and disabuses him of his innocence. He's pegged every pretension of every classmate, and thus the side-splitting parodies begin. Here is the beautiful beatnik, he tells Jerome, over there is the vegan holy man, then the angry lesbian, the boring blowhard, the brown noser, the fifty-ish mom trying to find herself. "Oh wow!" exclaims Bardo, "another ironic pop culture reference!" The professors with their inflated egos and deep insecurities are even funnier, as are the classroom dramas when students critique each other's work and pontificate about "good art." Unfortunately, into this satire the directors insert a real plot when Jerome falls in love with the nude model Audrey, is upstaged by the hulk Jonah who is at Strathmore for reasons other than art, and then concocts a plan to win her back. He concludes, "I'm a living cliche just like the others." Babette's Feast (1988)—Danish The story is set in the late nineteenth century and takes place in a small fishing village on the dank and dreary Jutland coast of Denmark. A band of dour Christians learn the meaning of God's extravagant grace from a most unlikely source. If ever there was a film as parable, this is it. The Barbarian Invasions (2003)—French The monastics encourage Christians to give some thought to your death every day, not in morbid introspection but in order to live fully today. This film, which won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, does just that. Remy Girard is dying, and now he must come to grips with how he has lived. In a number of significant ways he remains deeply alienated—he started cheating on his wife six months after they married; his chief accomplishment in life upon which he dwells and which forms a major theme of the film is his lifelong sexual escapades; he is estranged from his two children; he describes his work as a professor as total failure; he admits that he is scared of dying; and his son even has to pay some of his students to visit him in the hospital to assure him how sorely he will be missed. But his friends gather around him, they talk and celebrate, and he reconciles at some level with his two children. But is it believable that his son would really bypass bureaucrats and bribe union officials to get an entire unused floor of the hospital so Remy could have peace and quiet, that snorting heroin at his stage of the game is really such a great idea, and that his former wife would so graciously welcome his lovers at Remy's deathbed? Still, this is a powerful film about a date with destiny that, like Remy, we all have. He faced it head on and full throttle. In French with English subtitles.
Director Eric Khoo mixes fact with three fictional relationships in this remarkable exploration of the human longing to love and be loved. An elderly shopkeeper tenderly cares for his wife in the hospital, then struggles with deep loneliness after she dies. Two teenage girls communicate by email and text-messaging, but their gay relationship ends in tragedy. A middle-age, lecherous security guard stalks a gorgeous woman at a distance and, pathetically, finally writes her a love letter. Parallel to all of this is the real-life story of the deaf and blind Theresa Chan, a 61-year-old teacher of disabled children. Throughout the film she types her life story with deep reflections about love and longing. Fate brings these four stories together in a powerful conclusion. Be with Me won awards at five film festivals. Mainly in English, but some Chinese with English subtitles. A Beautiful Mind (2001) John Nash won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1994 for work he had done as a Princeton grad student in the 1940s. In between, schizophrenia hounded him. His wife is the real hero. The film glosses over the seamier aspects of Nash's real life (see the biography by Sylvia Nasar), and gives the impression that lots of love will cure mental illness (wrong), but this is still a moving film that explores the borders between genius and madness.
In 2003 six American hairdressers opened a beauty school in the bombed out ruins of post-Taliban Kabul. Director Liz Mermin follows this venture from the grand opening and selection of the first class to the graduation dinner three months later. Two of the volunteers, Sima and Shaima, had emigrated from Afghanistan to the United States more than twenty years earlier, and their cultural reconnection is emotionally powerful. "It's been twenty years since I was here," observes Sima, "but the country has regressed a hundred years." Two other volunteers are positively obnoxious; they cannot understand why these Afghan women would not wear makeup, drive, or anger their husbands. One of them begins classes with yoga meditation as the Afghan women giggle. Another gushes that their project is not just about hair and makeup but about "healing the country." The real heroes that make this film worth watching, though, are the Afghan women. "Our men have backwards mentalities," one of them laments. I found the symbolism of a beauty parlor run by culturally insensitive American do-gooders in a conservative Muslim country rich with paradox. Was this project one of genuine feminist liberation or self-congratulatory cultural imperialism? A little of both, I thought. In English and Afghan. Being There (1979) In this clever satire Peter Sellers plays Chauncey, a mindless gardener who finds himself a presidential advisor. But who's the real fool? Chauncey's last words in the film are ‘life is a state of mind.’
Edward Bloom is dying, and his son Will, whose wife is pregnant with their first child, dearly wants to know just who his enigmatic father really is. The problem is that Dad was a blowhard storyteller who talked about things he did not do and did not talk about things he did do ("we never talked about not talking"). He was a combination of the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, very charming and very fake, and so Will laments, "I have no idea who you are." But maybe Will has misread his dad, and all the stories are true in some sense. The overall theme of Big Fish is thus entirely poignant, but the metaphors mix rather badly with humor, surreal scenes of giants, witches, crows in dreams who prophesy death, etc., and an extended love story about Mom and Dad. This good film could have been better if the visual medium had not overwhelmed the otherwise rich plot potential. Billy Elliot (2000)—British In this British film a hard-scrabble, coal-miner father comes to grips with his son's aspirations to be a ballet dancer. Bring the kleenex.
When Traudl Junge was twenty-two she was chosen, she recalls, "by complete coincidence and chance" from a typing competition to become Hitler's secretary from 1942-1945. Later in life, she became deeply disturbed about how she could have participated in the Nazi horror at such close quarters and remained so apolitical. In a brutal catharsis of self-analysis, she describes her "blind spot" as remaining so oblivious to the obvious. Clearly wanting to unburden herself and to speak publically for the first time, she gave ten hours of interviews at the age of 81, just months before she died. This film has almost no cinematic style or technique. Junge sits in her modest Munich apartment, a camera is put on her, and she delivers a ninety-minute, somewhat rambling soliloquy on what it was like to be Hitler's secretary. There is little ethical or war time insight; the fascinating part, in fact, is how banal she describes Hitler —his dog, his diet, his kindly paternalism, daily lunches and dinners with him, etc. More than half of her remarks cover Hitler's last few days in his Berlin bunker, where he eventually committed suicide and his body was burned. This fascinating film could have been so much better if a savvy interviewer had plied her with questions. In German with English subtitles.
In 1998 photojournalist Zana Briski moved to a red light district in Calcutta to document the lives of prostitutes. After three years she discovered that the children born into these brothels were fascinated by her camera. Knowing that these kids were destined to a life of sex slavery, drugs and violence, one day she brought the kids ten point-n-shoot cameras and formed a workshop to help them discover the beauty of their own lives through the liberating power of art. This film won the 2005 Academy Award for best documentary, and follows the "class" of nine kids she gathered. Through dogged perseverance Briski was able to get several of the kids into private boarding schools, and even one of them to a major American university. Later she started a foundation called Kids With Cameras that now works in Calcutta, Haiti, Cairo and Jerusalem. There is also a book of the children's photography called Born Into Brothels: Photographs By the Children of Calcutta. Much like the films City of God shot in the slums of Rio de Janeiro and Promises about Palestinian and Israeli kids, Born into Brothels reminds us how much adults have to learn from children. Bowling for Columbine (2002) Film maker Michael Moore is unapologetic about his extremely liberal politics. So what? The question is not whether he is liberal but whether his documentaries and ambush interviews about important social questions—corporate greed in Roger and Me, and truth telling in government in Fahrenheit 911—are true.
Baby boomers like myself will enjoy this documentary, a sort of period piece, about a group of buddies who were close friends growing up in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in the late 1950s. The epicenter of their childhood memories of stick ball and basketball was 2nd Street Park. Through interviews, original home movies, and still photos we follow their life stories through nostalgic recollections of childhood, teenage angst, and emergent adulthood with all of its attendant poignancy and pain—the volatile fifteen years between 1960-1975 when romantic descriptions of rampant drug use gave way to nightmarish reality, the Vietnam War, broken marriages, sick kids, professional challenges, and the like. All of this is utterly normal, and happens to very normal people, which is to say that it is a universal story that makes this a meaningful retrospective on life, love, loss, regret, and hope.
Every year the Baraka School selects twenty seventh-grade boys from the most violent ghettos of Baltimore, where 76% of male students do not graduate from high school, to spend two years at their all male boarding school in rural Kenya. This documentary movie won awards at six film festivals for its portrayal of one such class, with a special focus on four of them—Richard and his brother Romesh, Montrey, and the budding preacher Devon. The first twenty minutes of the film takes place in Baltimore, where we experience the horribly dysfunctional context in which the boys live, meet their families, learn of their selection to Baraka, and watch as their mothers bid them tearful good-byes at the airport. The next forty minutes documents their lives in Kenya, culminating their first school year by climbing Mount Kenya, then the last twenty minutes follows them back home to Baltimore for eight weeks of summer vacation. An unexpected plot turn at the end of the film ratchets the emotional quotient of this fantastic film even higher than you could have imagined. This is one of the finest films I have watched in a long while. Bread and Tulips (2000)—Italian Rosalba, a slightly overweight woman in her forties, is left behind on a family vacation. Rather than return to her family, she finds her way to Venice and a romantic encounter with a waiter named Fernando. Will she find the romance she longs for, or return to her family and the hum drum of whatever it is we call normal life?
Does Don Johnston (Bill Murray) really have a 19-year-old son from his philandering past? Does it matter? An anonymous letter he received insists that he does, and that his enterprising son is on a journey to find his father. Don's not so sure; perhaps it's a hoax. Next door neighbor Winston, a wannabe detective writer, cannot resist the intrigue, and sends Don packing to visit four girl friends from his past, all the while looking for important "clues" to discover who sent the letter and bore his son. We know that Don will visit four former lovers, and that they will now live in extraordinarily different settings. "It sure is crazy how people change," exclaims the husband of a former lover. Laura (Sharon Stone) is a "closet organizer," Dora (Frances Conroy) was a former hippie who lives in a wealthy but sterile suburb and sells "high quality pre-fab homes," Carmen (Jessica Lange) is a former lawyer turned "pet communicator," and Penny (Tilda Swinton) lives in rural isolation among angry grease ball bikers. Winston identified a fifth candidate who died, so Don visits her grave too. But this simple road trip develops more subtleties than we might imagine. The journey transforms Don. At first he professed wholesale disinterest, then he agreed to go, he eventually becomes interested in these former lovers and how their lives had intersected, and by the end he himself is haunted with finding his son. Also, violent dreams about any number of other women agitate him with unpleasant memories. A second letter from his most recent former girl friend Sherry on similar stationery bookends the end of the film. But to the last of the film you do not know if Don succeeds in his quest, and neither does he. Then you realize that this film is not about Don's girlfriends or his phantom son but about himself, an aging Don Juan who made money "in computers" but who awakens to move beyond his laconic, couch-potato existence. He is not trying to find former lovers, or even his son; he's trying to find himself.
Barely forty years old and with films like Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Ocean's Eleven, Traffic, and Erin Brockovich to his credit, anything director Steven Soderbergh does is worth a look. In this innovative film he moves from directing mega-stars like George Clooney and Julia Roberts to using non-professional, local people as "actors," who participated in the script, to tell a simple, powerful story. The film was set in their homes and made for a measley $1.6 million. In real life Debbie Doebereiner worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken for twenty four years. In the film she stars as Martha, an overweight woman with orange hair whose life consists of working in a doll factory in Parkersburg, West Virginia, and taking care of her invalid father. Her younger co-worker Kyle does not own a car (he lives in a mobile home with his mother), so she taxis him every day, and generally mothers him. The two are joined in the doll factory by Rose (in real life Misty Dawn Wilkins, a hair dresser), a single mom who like Kyle did not finish high school and who works two jobs struggling to get ahead. The night that Martha babysits Rose's daughter so she and Kyle can go on a date ends in tragedy. These extremely ordinary people are trapped in the banalities of life as grey as the Ohio Valley landscape, living on the "bubble" that in their case bursts. Bubble also makes history as the first film released simultaneously in theaters, on pay-for-view cable television, and on DVD. I loved this deeply human film. The Buena Vista Social Club (1999)—Cuban A documentary by Wim Wenders in which Ry Cooder reassembles the Cuban jazz group Buena Vista Social Club. Fascinating scenes from Cuba with a stirring reunion-finale in Carnegie Hall.
When Annie Clark's husband dies of leukemia, her best friend Chris Harper happens upon an idea to honor his memory after finding a pornography magazine belonging to her son. A group of women friends in their fifties from Yorkshire's normally staid Women's Institute pose in the nude ("not naked!" we are reminded in the film) to produce and market a pin-up calendar, the proceeds of which would benefit the hospital where John was treated and died. Starting with an initial print run of 500 calendars, the women meet international acclaim, including an appearance on the Jay Leno Show, and raise $1 million for the hospital. There is nothing erotic or even sensual in this lighthearted British comedy (rated PG-13). All the women's poses are strategically obscured by potted plants and the like. Instead, in addition to the mischief-making comedy, there are surprisingly powerful sub-themes of body image, aging, grief and loss, community, and memory. The film is based upon a true story from 1999. I was prepared to dismiss this film but instead enjoyed it for the lighthearted fun that it is.
Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as the (in)famous writer Truman Capote (1924–1984) in one of the best films of the year, despite the problems of viewer identification that it might provoke. In researching his "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood Capote befriended a young man who was convicted and eventually executed for the brutal murder of a Kansas family of four. The portrait of Capote that emerges is of a flamboyant artistic genius whose deeply complex personality reveals itself in decidedly mixed motives. He attracts, repels and fascinates us, all at the same time. In the film Capote befriends the young prisoner Perry Smith for at least four conflicting reasons. Capote was egotistical, vain, narcissistic, condescending and ambitious. Several times he lied to Smith in order to exploit him for selfish, professional purposes in writing his book. When asked if he "esteemed" Smith, Capote replies, "he's a gold mine." Second, Capote's gay lover Jack jealously accused him of falling in love with Smith, which also seems to be true. Third, interviewing Smith evoked powerful memories of his own childhood that resulted in an obsessive act of self-identification and emotional attachment with him: "it's as if we grew up in the same house, but he went out the front door and I went out the back." These memories include exclusion as an outsider, family suicide, alcoholism, and parental abandonment. Finally, Capote genuinely empathized for the young death row inmate, and the film provokes themes of social justice revolving around our penal system and pity for a criminal with a horrible childhood. Smith is not a monster, he insists, and Capote intends his book to "return him to the realm of humanity." Still, Capote chose not to do all that he might have to save Smith; he even wanted Smith to die to supply an ending for his book. When the film ends we learn that In Cold Blood remained an unfinished novel, and that it was the last book that Capote ever wrote, even though he lived another eighteen years. Badly missing in this remarkable film—the slightest mention of the murdered victims and their families. Capote won five Academy Award nominations.
Built in 1928 to hold 4,000 prisoners, the Carandiru House of Detention in Sao Paulo housed 7,500 violent criminals and was the largest prison in Latin America. That was before it was closed and then demolished in late 2002, ten years after government troops stormed the prison in October 1992 and killed 111 inmates after a riot had broken out. Not a single police died, and as the film portrays it the prisoners had thrown their weapons out the barred windows and waved white flags. Based on these real life events, the film traces the violent prison subculture, the stories of several inmates (through extensive use of flashbacks), and especially the role played by the humanitarian prison doctor, Drauzio Varella, who volunteered his services for fourteen years after visiting the prison for AIDS research. He later wrote a memoir about his experiences, Carandiru Station, which forms the basis of the film. The film culminates in the riot, features the actual footage when it was demolished by dynamite in December 2002, and incorporates interviews with prisoners who survived the massacre. This film is not for weak stomachs; it is an unsettling commentary on the Darwinian subculture and institutionalized inhumanity inside our worst prisons. In Portuguese with subtitles. Chocolat (2000)—French I viewed this film as a sort of modern day parable of the Good Samaritan: the most unlikely and even pagan person, Vianne, opens a chocolate shop during Lent (!) on the square of an uptight, moralistically Catholic town in 1950s France. But she brings the town together after the Christians had split them apart.
An unlikely teacher, the failed musician Clément Mathieu, radically transforms the lives of incorrigible delinquents who are imprisoned in the decrepit Fond de l'étang boarding school with peeling paint, rusted gates, and no coal for the furnace. Yes, a sadomasochist headmaster who beats and screams at the kids, Mr. Rachin, runs the school. The film opens with two old men, Pierre and Pepinot, who meet for the first time since they were both—surprise—classmates at Fond de l'étang. Pierre, now a world famous conductor, asks whatever happened to Mathieu, and as luck would have it Pepinot just happens to have the old man's diary. The film backtracks to their school days and the story of Mathieu's remarkable influence. The Chorus is formulaic, sentimental, improbable and predictable, but I liked it. Perhaps that is because I recently visited my ninth grade English teacher, Mrs. Tilley, now 90 years old, or because my wife teaches second graders. Still, this film is good if not great, and earned two Academy Award nominations, including Best Foreign Film. In French with English subtitles.
Rich people who travel to Rio de Janeiro think of it as paradise. Poor people who actually live there in its worst slum called the "City of God," built by the government to isolate them from the rich tourists in the city center, can tell you it is more like a precinct of hell. Shot on location in a nearby neighborhood (the actual slum was deemed too dangerous), and incorporating characters who actually live in the "City of God," this film chronicles daily life in one of the world's worst slums. It is a world of pitiless violence, grinding poverty, remorseless revenge, and a complex hierarchy of drug lords. The film is narrated by one of the few people to escape this vortex of anarchy, one "Rocket" who aspires to be a photographer, and is based upon Paulo Lins's novel of the same name (Ciudad De Dios). At 135 minutes, I found the film a little long, but I also hasten to add that I think it deserves the uniformly superlative reviews that it has received. In Portuguese with English subtitles.
Writer and director Jim Jarmusch gathers ostensibly random combinations of conversation partners in coffee shops for smoke, drink, and impromptu talk. There is no introduction or conclusion, no soundtrack except for the ambient, background noise of the various coffee shops, no narration or explanation, and filmed in black and white. But only two of the eleven vignettes worked for me; the others felt and sounded very much like playing for the camera. The effect was artificial rather than authentic human conversations about important matters.
A fascinating documentary about how US networks and especially Al Jazeera, the satellite cable channel watched by 40 million people in the Middle East (it started only in 1996), have covered the current Iraq war. In the first few moments of the film Samir Khader, a producer for Al Jazeera, observes, "there is no war without propaganda." This film gives the lie to the common idea, constantly repeated by Rumsfeld, that Al Jazeera lies and distorts the truth whereas US media are fair and objective.
This tense urban drama set in Los Angeles opens with a car wreck that serves as a metaphor for the collisions between ordinary people because of the racist rage that underlies their particular English vernaculars, work, dress, music, marriage and family. A Persian shop keeper ("They think we're Arabs!"), a Hispanic locksmith, two black hoodlums, a wealthy black film director, redneck white trash, a despicable suburban white couple, a naive white rookie cop, and other ethnic typecasts are all trapped in stereotypes that they project on to others, paranoia (not all of which is unjustified), bigotry, and mutual misunderstanding. In this film good people are bad and bad people are good, and most everyone is a mixture of the two. A corrupt cop who molested a woman he apprehended later rescues her from a burning vehicle with professionalism, bravery and genuine compassion: "You think you know who you are," he tells a younger cop, "but just wait a few years." He rages at a black HMO clerk but at home tenderly cares for his dying father. Accidental encounters and random events "crash" these fallible human beings into one another in a world void of all political correctness. Director Paul Haggis does an excellent job of showing the corrosive power of racism not only between people but even among people who are otherwise from the same "group." Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) Judah Rosenthal boasts all the accomplishments of a successful ophthalmologist, but is wracked by the guilt and angst of having entangled himself in adultery, lies and murder. He realizes, as the film says toward the very end, that we "define ourselves by our moral choices." Meanwhile, Cliff Stern (Woody Allen) loses the love of his life, Halley (Mia Farrow), who falls for his wife's boorish brother, Lester (Alan Alda). Along the way, Allen's characters discourse on nearly all the important themes of life—love and sex, God and religion, marriage and family, work and calling. Some have hailed this as Woody Allen's best film.
The case of this DVD boasts five festival awards and the promise of "redemption" for its characters, but I was left wondering why on both counts. There are at least nine suicide scenes in this film, mainly imagined, but one of which is very real. Teenager Mason grows up in a horribly dysfunctional family where dinners are characterized by a raging father (Luke), a people-pleasing, pill-popping, and alcoholic mother (Leila), and a crazy uncle (Bobby) who thinks that World War II is raging and who dies in an asylum. A tragic accident strikes that feeds on their dysfunction. Enter a young girl (Danny) whose mom is a passive-aggressive, drifter single parent. Danny enjoys drugs, alcohol, and admits that she has "a thing for things that aren't good for me." But put Danny and Mason in a lush meadow with a brilliant blue sky, undulating grass, and an idyllic pond, and what do you get? Redemption? No. On an improbable fishing trip with his son Mason, father Luke described every character in this film: "You wake up one day and nothin's the way it's supposed to be. So you try to keep goin', takin' down the people you love the most right with ya. And for some reason you can't admit that until you've already lost them." Despite global hand-wringing, accords, agreements, and peace-keeping forces, the Darfur genocide that began in July 2003 continues. Directors Aisha Bain and Jen Marlowe take the viewer on-site to Darfur, and through on-camera interviews with dozens of locals they let the people describe the tragedy in their own words. Their personal anecdotes are heart-breaking and appalling. The desert landscape, wind-swept and littered with bomb fragments, is stark. Despite its denials, the Sudanese government under president Omar al-Bashir has backed the Janjaweed militias to plunder, pillage, rape women of every age, and liquidate entire villages. According to the United Nations, 400,000 people have died, and over 2 million have been displaced (many refugees pouring into Chad). This documentary is only 55 minutes long, but it's a graphic, powerful and informative reminder of how much of the world can ignore the most unimaginable horrors when countries have no self-interest at stake. Das Boot (1981)—German What war is really like from the perspective of young German soldiers on a German submarine in World War II.
A friend of mine once observed, partly from personal experience, that behind every great person there often lay a trail of human wreckage. In this energetic documentary about two 1960s-revivalist rock music groups—the Brian Jonestown Massacre led by Anton Newcombe, and the Dandy Warhols led by Courtney Taylor—that dictum proves true. Taken from over 2,000 hours of original footage, the resulting 107 minutes take you on the scene and behind the scenes of the bands, record executives, fans, roadies, drug binges, police arrests, and concerts across the United States, Europe and Japan. Newcombe in particular is a tragic mix of manic energy, musical genius, and abusive dysfunction. I could hardly believe it when the end of the film indicated he was still alive and had independently produced twelve CDs (no one would work with him). "Linkouts" on the main DVD allow you to view extended deleted scenes. This is a great film to view if you feel, like I sometimes do, that you are "out of it" when it comes to the contemporary rock music scene. Dinner with Friends (2001) Two couples, best friends, explore the problems and possibilities of marriage and go their separate ways. Which couple chose the better path? Dirty Pretty Things (2002) A Nigerian doctor turned taxi driver and hotel clerk, a Turkish factory worker, a Chinese worker in a morgue, a Russian doorman, and a hooker paint a grim but all too realistic portrait of what life is like for the invisible, illegal and undocumented immigrants in modern London.
Mahmut is a man in mid-life who has lost all joy and passion for life. He is a professional photographer who insists to his friends that "photography is dead." He watches television for endless hours in his dark apartment, frequents bars and restaurants alone, worries about his mother who is hospitalized, chain smokes, and badly misses his former wife Nazan who is emigrating to Canada with her new husband. Then his relative Yusuf shows up on his doorstep in Istanbul, unemployed and unemployable. Yusuf upsets all of Mahmut's petty habits and routines, leaving lights on, smoking in the wrong rooms, not flushing, littering beer cans, and the like. The film explores the palpable loneliness and lostness of these two men, and how they interact. Truly, they are "distant" from any meaningful friendship with each other, the world, or even their own selves. In Turkish with English subtitles. Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood (2002) Roger Ebert hated this movie, but I liked it as a story of the young woman Sidda (Sandra Bullock) who comes to grips with her strained relationship with her mother through the help of her mother's three lifelong friends. Do the Right Thing (1989) Spike Lee's study of urban racial tensions stirred controversy when it was first released. Did he intend to advocate violence or merely record it as so many have experienced it? At the end of this film powerful quotations from Martin Luther King and Malcolm X support either view. Set in the sultry summer of inner city Brooklyn, nearly every scene in this film crackles with tension. The black neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyevesant is patrolled by white cops, and commercialized by an Italian family pizzeria that has been a mainstay for twenty-five years, and an upstart Korean grocery store. The racial tensions simmer just as much within the black community; there is only derision for a plan to boycott the pizzeria, Da Mayor is part village idiot and part wise elder, and even Mookie (Spike Lee) is caught betweeen allegiance to his black community and his Italian employer. Doing the right thing is sometimes hard not only to do but even to know.
In this much-maligned film, the Danish writer and director Lars von Trier paints a dark portrait of the human spirit in both its communal and individual dimensions. He suggests that lurking beneath our veneer of social respectability, and even our best of intentions, there is something wild and dangerous deep in the human heart. Grace (Nicole Kidman) is a fugitive on the run from gangsters who seeks refuge in Dogville, a tiny town of fifteen people set in the Colorado Rockies at the turn of the century. At first petty, suspicious, and insular, after a two-week trial the citizens loosen up and provide Grace the haven she seeks. But eventually the town turns on her, viciously, despite the many ways she has served them. Grace forgives them, the victim blaming herself, and then later undergoes her own moral transformation and exacts vicious retribution. The victim becomes the new oppressor. This film watches more like a movie of a play. The entire production takes place on one, large sound stage. The town streets, bushes, etc., are mere chalk lines. The houses are sparse frames without doors. John Hurt narrates the successive "chapters." At 177 minutes, the film is long. Critics tended either to love or hate this film, but either way, von Trier is far and away one of the most important film makers today, so it is always interesting to see his latest creation.
Matsumoto left his job on his wedding day to return to his true love Sawako, who in despair at his decision to marry another girl (the daughter of his boss) for parental approval tried to kill herself. She failed, and her attempt left her speechless, emotionally vacant, and prone to bizarre behavior like shoplifting. But he devotes himself fully to her, and throughout the film the two lovers reconnect not only literally but also metaphorically when, bound by a red cord around their waists, they wander together as "bound beggars" throughout the four seasons of the year. In a parallel love story, the old man Hiro reflects on how he left his girl for a job when he was as young (the opposite of Matsumoto's choice). He too reconnects since when he left decades earlier his lover promised to wait for him every Saturday with a box lunch. True to her word, Hiro finds her waiting, in the same dress and in the exact same place. In a third story, a famous pop icon Haruna is disfigured in a car accident, and agrees to meet an infatuated groupie, Nukui, who blinded himself out of devotion to her. Tragedy, tenderness, devotion, and brutal murders characterize all three stories. Dolls was an official selection at film festivals in Toronto, London, New York, and Cannes. The visuals in this film are stunning, but I am sure that the cultural subtleties and symbolism are lost on viewers like me who do not understand Japanese culture well enough. In Japanese with English subtitles.
Vera Farmiga won a Sundance award for her portrayal of Irene, a blue collar checkout clerk, mom of two boys, and compulsive cokehead. Irene is a survivor of sorts who is easy to admire. She clearly loves her boys Ben and Jason, finds another job cleaning houses when the grocery store fires her ("I was fast because I was high, but when I came clean I slowed down."), and even checks herself into rehab. But she leaves rehab early, spends her kid's birthday check on crack, and leaves her dead beat husband for a recovering addict named Bob. Their emerging love devolves into relapse, co-dependence, and new spasms of self-destructive choices. Writer-director Debra Granik also won a Sundance Director's Award for this film. Befitting the despair and depth of Irene's problems, the entire film takes place in the dead of winter, and at the film's end the plot remains open and unresolved. Rated R for drug use and some nudity.
Nominated for best foreign film in 2004, Downfall recreates Hitler's final days in his underground Berlin bunker. The film opens with a real life clip from Traudl Junge, age 81, whom Hitler hired as his secretary when she was only 22. Junge wrote a memoir about her experiences, and sat for a lengthy interview-turned-movie called Blindspot (2002), both of which served as material for Downfall. Struggling to forgive herself, Junge remarks, "I never thought that fate would take me somewhere I'd never really wanted to be." But contrary to Hitler's insistence that she and others flee Berlin as the Russians invaded, Junge stayed to the bitter end. Delusional, paranoid, and mercilessly disdainful of the German citizenry who suffered the carnage of his megalomania, it is chilling to watch Hitler and his volcanic rage as the end approaches. He screams about betrayal, and strategizes with battalions that no longer exist. At 155 minutes, this is a long film, but even though we know the outcome before we begin, the film maintains its dramatic tension. Strong portrayals of Eva Braun, who married Hitler in the bunker a few days before they both committed suicide, Himmler and Goebbels enrich the plot. Magda Goebbels murdered her six kids with cyanide pills rather than have them live in a world without Nazi Socialism. Downfall reminded me of the idiocy and horror of war, its catastrophic human toll, and the consequences of leaders who are blinded by ideology, surrounded by sycophants, and deaf to genuine criticism. In German with English subtitles.
A group of Iraqi filmmakers directed by Hayder Mousa Daffar document life in Iraq since the fall of Saddam and the entrenchment of the American occupation. I could not detect the slightest ideological slant in this film, the gist of which is captured in the words of one person who said that he had one sentence for Americans: "Baghdad is hell, really is hell." Based upon this film, you can be sure of two truths, that Iraqis hated Saddam and are glad he is gone, and that they detest the American occupation and will be glad when we are gone. After all, observes one man, "why would America be here if they did not expect to benefit?" International diplomacy is not rooted in altruism. In a tragic metaphor of the situation in Iraq now, associate producer Sa'ad Fakher was killed when he fled Iraqis who shot at his car, only to be massacred in a hail of bullets after he turned around and drove straight into an American ambush. His friends counted 122 bullet holes in his car. In Arabic with English subtitles. Writer-director David Lynch has earned a well-deserved reputation for portraying a very dark and even surreal world with films like Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001). He moved on to television with the series Twin Peaks. His latest foray finds him experimenting with animated "film" on the internet. The first few seconds of Dumbland advises viewers that "Dumbland is a crude, stupid, violent and absurd series. If it is funny it is funny because we see the absurdity of it all. For mature audiences only." If anything, that is an understated warning about the vulgarity and violence that follows in the eight three to four minute "episodes." The darkness is not new for viewers familiar with Lynch, nor is the creativity or quality that great; a talented high-schooler could have made these shorts. Dumbland is important because it shows the experimental direction of a major film maker. Lynch sat down at his iMac by himself, and with a software program called Flash used his mouse to draw the simple black line drawings on a white background. He then added animation, voices and music. Go to www.davidlynch.com and, for a price, you can purchase his "film" made for the internet. It will be interesting to see how efforts like this will impact major film production and distribution, television, and even DVD rentals.
I watched this film because the DVD blurb by Oprah Winfrey (who narrates a good portion of the film) encourages "every parent to take their children to see this movie." And how many films have you watched that are set in Ghana?! Emmanuel Ofosu Yeboah was born with a deformed leg and suffered all the disadvantages and humiliations you would expect in a third world country. His father deserted the family, then his mother died, but through perseverance of body, mind, and spirit, Emmanuel became a national hero as a champion of the disabled in Ghana. His initial feat was to ride a bike across Ghana on one leg to draw attention to the plight of the disabled; the rest of the documentary follows how this snowballed onto an international stage including visits with Kofi Annan (a Ghanaian), Robin Williams, and to even more remarkable athletic accomplishments. Emmanuel's "gift" involves a double entendre; he had his leg amputated and replaced by a prosthesis at Loma Linda Hospital in California, and of course his incredible story is a gift to all of us. Oprah was right; see this wonderful documentary about an incredible human being.
In August 1914 Sir Ernest Shackleton and a crew of 27 men and 69 sled dogs sailed from South Georgia Island headed for the Antarctic continent; they intended to become the first to traverse its 1500 miles. They never got started. Six weeks later and only 100 miles from their starting point their ship ground to a halt in the endless pack ice. Eventually the ice crushed, splintered and sank The Endurance. Their saga over the next two years has proved to be one of the most remarkable and best documented stories of human survival, bravery, and leadership ever. After drifting clockwise for 10 months and 1300 miles on the massive, melting ice sheet towards open sea, the crew abandoned their doomed vessel, boarded their life boats, then took six months to find its way to Elephant Island. Shackleton and six of his crew then navigated a 22-foot lifeboat 800 miles in 17 days back to South Georgia Island. After several failed attempts, he finally returned to Elephant Island and rescued his stranded crew. Not one crew member was lost. Using ship logs, crew diaries, original photography (including stills and motion pictures by the ship photographer), interviews with descendants of the crew, and assorted historical archives, this film documents "the most successful failure" ever. There are many books on this drama; Alfred Lansing's The Endurance is one of our family's all-time favorite books, bar none. So is this incredible film.
At five and a half miles high (29,028 feet), mighty Mount Everest is the holy grail of climbers. Since Edmund Hillary first summited Everest in 1953, over 150 people have died trying to scale its heights (about a third of them by avalanche). This interesting if short (45 minutes) film documents a successful 1996 IMAX expedition by three climbers—Jamling Tenzin Norgay, whose father accompanied Hillary; Araceli Segarra, the first Spanish woman to ever reach the top; and Ed Viesturs, a professional climber who also happens to use this trip as his honeymoon. As fate would have it, their climb occured at the same time as the disaster documented in Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air when New Zealander Rob Hall and seven others were caught in a storm and killed. Spectacular scenery takes you to the crevasses and cols, the gale winds, snug tents, base camps, and minus-100 temperatures. But the successful climb that the film documents is overshadowed by our knowledge that the "real story" at that time was about Hall and his ill-fated companions. A powerfully emotional interview with Beck Weathers, a survivor of the Hall expedition who lost both hands and part of his face to frostbite, is a "special feature" of the DVD that makes watching this otherwise interesting film all the more worthwhile. At 35 minutes this special feature is almost as long as the film itself. The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2000) Tammy Faye Bakker Messner would appear to be crazy. But millions of people love her, and you have to wonder why. Clearly, there is something deeply human and moving about this woman so many people love to trash. This documentary, directed by her openly gay friends Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey, shows why. Fahrenheit 911 Michael Moore’s latest film won a standing ovation and top prize at the Cannes Film Festival (May 2004), then in its first week in American theaters became the highest grossing documentary of all time. It’s hard to tell who was more worried about this rabidly anti-Bush film—conservatives who fear Moore’s mudslinging will stick to the President, or liberals who fear that mainstream America will label his views as way out of bounds and associate them with Kerry. Time magazine rightly observed that Moore’s method incorporates equal parts comedy, tragedy, infiltration, confrontation, and speculation. The Family Man (2000) The workaholic Jack Campbell (Nicolas Cage) must decide whether his career is more important than his family. Not a serious movie, but one that reminds us of what counts in life.
I watched this Russian father-son film in conjunction with the dark, Russian film of a similar theme entitled The Return. Both explore the father-son relationship, the latter one through the lens of patricide, this one through the tender but painful bonds of a very deep love. The two live together in an apartment after the death of the mother, and the film tracks how they both grow into their separate identities while maintaining an intense bond. Should the father leave his son, move to another city for a job, and take a new wife? Should the son follow his father's career path in the military? Does not the son's girlfriend take him away from the father? On two separate occasions in this film we hear the ambiguous and distinctly Christian notion, “A father who loves his son crucifies him. A son who loves his father sacrifices himself for him.” This is the second film in a trilogy by director Alexander Sokurov that began with Mother and Son (1997). Sokurov attributed any homoerotic interpretations of this film to "sick European minds." In Russian with English subtitles.
In 1967 the Danish director Jorgen Leth made a 12-minute film called The Perfect Human (be sure to get the DVD that includes this as an extra, and watch it first). In this documentary the controversial director Lars von Trier challenges his mentor to remake the film, which captivated him so much that he viewed it twenty times, but to do so following five different "obstructions" that he stipulates. First, he must film in Cuba with no set and no shot longer than 12 frames (about half a second). Next, he must go to wherever Leth feels is "the most miserable place on earth" and remake the film with himself playing the lead role, and so that it does not reveal the location. Third, Leth is given complete freedom to do as he pleases. Next, he must remake the film as an animated cartoon, since that is a medium both of them despise. Finally, in the most poignant part of the film, Leth must simply narrate a script written by von Trier, that is, the master must relinquish all control to his imperious student. At one level this film is a fascinating look inside the aesthetic process, and how ostensible limitations can provoke rather than diminish creativity, for Leth does not, in fact, produce what von Trier predicts will be "a piece of crap" that "ruins a little gem." I was reminded, for example, of the strictures imposed by, say, eighteenth century musical style, which music is immediately recognizable because of that style, and yet on the other hand the limitless creativity that Mozart used to explore and expand the genre. At a second level, the film explores the ethics of the relationship between the subjective film maker and both his local context and the "objects" he films (often people, of course). Can Leth really make a film in the red light district of Bombay without being impacted by that context, or by ignoring it altogether? Would it be false to try such? Does he not have any personal qualms about filming a sumptuous dinner amidst starving masses? Third, we have here a contest between two different film styles, in which the iconoclastic von Trier tries to demolish the classical style of his teacher. Finally, von Trier admits that he is trying to "banalize" Leth, to force him to make a film that "marks" him or gets under his skin so that he cannot hide his true self behind the safety of the camera. He wants Leth to squirm like a turtle wriggling on its back. That is, he wants to prove that his mentor and idol is not "the perfect human." Leth intimates that von Trier fails, because he does in fact realize that he is merely an "abject, human human." Rather than reveal something about Leth, von Trier reveals that it is he who is the ultimate "obstruction" when he projects onto Leth something that is not there. In Danish with English subtitles. The Fog of War (2003) After Robert McNamara headed Ford Motor Company he became president of the World Bank. In between he was Secretary of Defense and the chief architect of the Vietnam war. Now in his eighties, he gave twenty hours of interviews to filmmaker Errol Morris, who condenses them into these 106 minutes.
After her husband and child died, the peasant Meili Zhang founded a school for the children in her isolated, parched village in northwest China. She was not a teacher, but she did her best and she loved her kids. She founded the school, she says, "so that the kids may have hope." Xia Yu, a gorgeous young woman from Beijing a thousand miles away, and a "real" teacher, comes to help at the school. She corrects their pronunciation, teaches them some English, and encourages Meili to obtain a computer. Of course, mutual culture shock sets in. Xia stares in disbelief as the same pail of water is used to wash clothes, rinse your face, make tea with orange rinds, and water the donkey. Meili can only respond to her guest's strange ways with "Teacher Xia, you city people are strange." What transpires is an unfolding friendship of two women from radically different socio-economic and cultural contexts. Two sub-plots revolve around the men in their lives—Meili's love for the local "film projectionist" Wang Shu, and Xia's estrangement from her husband because of her growing affection for Meili and her school. Late in the film turn about is fair play when Xia takes the entire class of peasant kids to Beijing. In Mandarin with English subtitles. Full Metal Jacket (1987) In 2003 the US military budget exceeded the military spending of all other countries combined. For some this is a cause to glorify war, so a film that reminds us of the obscenity, vulgarity and human carnage of battle is a good bet. Writer and producer Stanley Kubrick follows a group of Marines from basic training on Paris Island to bombed out buildings with snipers in Vietnam (filmed on sets in England). The sadistic drill sergeant has an amazing gift for obscenity as he trains these his “ministers of death.”
If you like Jim Carrey's style of humor, then you will probably enjoy his antics with Téa Leoni (who starred as a similarly harried housewife with Nicholas Cage in Family Man). They play a suburban couple, Dick and Jane Harper, who fall from the penthouse to the outhouse. Dick is promoted to vice president for communications at Globodyne, a promotion so big that Jane quits her job. That same afternoon he realizes that he is merely a talking head for corporate sleaze bags. When Globodyne craters, they lose everything, as do all the employees. They resort to criminal capers to survive, and in the end exact recompense from the corrupt executives and restore the lost fortunes of the former Globodyne employees. In a delicious dig, when the credits roll you read a list of people honored for "Special Thanks," then realize that the names are real life corporate criminals—Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, Dennis Kozlowski, and so on. But there's the rub. It is somehow sad to see Carrey stuck in sophomoric slapstick, and real-life people who really lost their life savings at Enron or WorldComm probably won't find the movie very funny. This film got uniformly poor reviews, but it still might be worth an evening of light laughs; just don't expect too much.
George Clooney wrote, directed, and starred in this historical docudrama about the 1953 hostilities between television commentator Edward Murrow of CBS and "the junior senator from Wisconsin," Joseph McCarthy. The latter, of course, accused Murrow and many others of communism. Murrow, for his part, stood up to McCarthy's muckraking. More broadly, even at its dawn Murrow openly worried that television would become a medium that would "distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us," rather than teach, illuminate or inspire. He also decried the conflicts of interest between television's corporate advertisers, the government's efforts to spin propaganda, the military, journalistic independence, and the viewing public. We must never "confuse dissent with disloyalty," Murrow insisted. Can news ever be neutral? Should it even try to be? Does not most every perspective "censor" the news with its own commitments and predispositions? Given the radical polarizations of our contemporary political context, due in part to the role of media, this is a film that deserves viewing and discussion of the many questions it raises. At several junctures in the film Murrow insists that television viewers and the body politic get what they deserve: "our history will be what we make it." Good Night, and Good Luck was filmed in black and white, includes original footage of the McCarthy hearings, and won six Academy Award nominations.
About the nicest thing you can say about Timothy Treadwell is that he was a controversial person who along with his girl friend Amie Huguenard died a senseless, tragic death when they were mauled by grizzly bears in Alaska's Katmai National Park in October 2003. Even more gruesome, his camera recorded the audio but not the video of the mauling. You will be disappointed if you watch this documentary to learn something about grizzlies, but if you view it as a commentary about human nature, both your own and the film's subject, it's fascinating. Timothy Dexter (he later changed his last name and cultivated an Australian accent) spoke about the "work" he did on his summer "expeditions" among grizzlies, but he was anything but a scientist, nor did he leave any papers or field diaries that advanced knowledge. He boasted about "protecting" the bears from humans, and styled himself an environmentalist or preservationist, but many argued that he harmed the grizzly population by habituating them to humans with his over familiarity with them. Treadwell spent thirteen summers from 1991–2003 with the grizzlies (nowhere do we learn what he did during the other nine months of the year), the last five of which he or Huguenard shot over 100 hours of amateur video. Some of the film's scenery, then, is spectacular. But 100 hours of video shot over roughly 500 days is not much, and at least 50% of this film comes from director Werner Herzog, not Treadwell. So Treadwell can hardly be thought of as a naturalist photographer despite his claim to that too. Still, he had his fifteen minutes of fame as an eccentric "grizzly man" on David Letterman's show. In fact, Treadwell was a college drop out who moved from New York to California, where he failed as an actor. By his own description in the film he descended into alcohol and drugs, and then as a deeply troubled loner he found solace by living in the Alaskan wilderness all by himself, except for his beloved bears. Treadwell treated these wild animals as his best friends, and some have even speculated that he understood himself as more of a bear than a human being. He speaks tenderly to them, pets them, thanks them for being his friend, calls them each by names he gave to them, and in one scene he even lovingly fondles the fresh excrement of a bear and describes how wonderful it is that just a few minutes earlier it had been inside of "Wendy." In another scene he cries when he discovers a dead bumble bee. To his credit Herzog does not romanticize Treadwell, and very early on we learn about his horrible death (he was decapitated, dismembered and digested by the bear, as the stomach contents that were retrieved a day later showed). Herzog interviews a number of people who knew Treadwell, including a former girl friend, park officials, and bush pilots who helped retrieve the remains. Grizzly Man evoked in me a sort of Freudian voyeurism about the worst sort of death imaginable, but in the end I was filled with sadness about a misfit who was so clearly alienated from all things human.
I was suckered into watching this horrible film because on the DVD cover Roger Ebert described it as "one of the best films of the year." I could not disagree more; after watching it I was still searching for "a plot at the end of the film." What plot there is I found entirely unbelievable. Bobby Powell grew up smoking pot, which he introduces to his high school friend Jonathan, and to Jonathan's mother Alice. He also shared sex with Jonathan and an erotic flirtation with Alice. When Jonathan and Bobby meet years later as adults, Bobby fathers a child with Clare, Jonathan's live-in friend with purple hair. Bobby claims, "I just want everyone to be happy." The "family" of four moves to Woodstock where they open a cafe. But did we not learn from that generation, if not from our HIV generation, that so-called free love, sex and drugs are very expensive? Only in a Hollywood movie could such a bizarre picture be portrayed as idyllic.
About half way through this film hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina (a Hutu) and his family are hiding on the roof of the hotel, and his wife Tatiana (a Tutsi) turns to him and says, "Paul, you are a good man." That, and not so much the genocide of nearly a million Rwandans, is the theme of this award-winning film—how one person's bravery, cunning, diplomacy, deceit, bribery and wits saved over a thousand people, many of them Tutsi refugees that the Hutu extremists sought to exterminate. For a longer look at the actual genocide read We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch. For provocation and inspiration based upon a true story, watch this film. The Hours (2002) Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway becomes the common thread that knits together the stories of three women (Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep) from three different times and places, all of whom attempt suicide.
Pop artist, prankster, and provocateur extraordinaire, Ray Johnson (1928–1995) had many acquaintances, but to a person no one claimed to know who he really was. His life, his death from suicide, and his prolific work were a single, seamless performance act. This documentary interviews curators, his agent, collectors, the police that investigated his death, his first cousin, fellow artists like Christo, and even, appropriately, his mail carrier (Johnson mailed thousands of pieces of his "mail art" to people around the world). The same semantic range of words emerges from them all — enigmatic, elusive, isolated, underground, and mysterious. In one "work" he dropped sixty foot long hot dogs from a helicopter. In another, we see him hopping around on one foot as he beats a cardboard box with a belt. "He kept so much of himself to himself," remarked one person. "No one ever seemed to know what he did, or what he thought he was doing," observed another. But upon his death a veritable treasure trove of Johnson's work surfaced—paintings, drawings and especially mixed media collages pasted on the cardboard inserts of laundried shirts (he once told a friend he did "chop art" and not "pop art"). The film, much of which is shot in black and white, begins and ends with consideration of his theatrical death on Friday, January 13th, 1995. His body was found floating under a bridge in Sag Harbor, New York, by buoy number 13. The night before Johnson had stayed in room #247 (= 13) of a motel. He was 67 (= 13). A few days later people discovered his house meticulously staged with transparent clues. Johnson was clearly an extraordinary and eccentric genius, once referred to in the The New York Times as the "most famous unknown artist." His works which spanned nearly 50 years are now exhibited in museums around the world. In America (2002) Sarah and Johnny move with their two young girls from Ireland to tenement housing in New York City. A few floors below them Mateo of Nigeria has scrawled "Keep Away" on his door in bright orange letters, and screams in rage. Why he does so, and what happens when Johnny's family discovers why, form the crux of this film. In America is only partly a story about immigration, and more about grief, loss and friendship among these five people. This was a good but not great film, even though it earned three Academy Award nominations. In the Bedroom (2001) At first it seems this film is about a summer romance between Frank Fowler and an older woman Natalie, but in a plot twist we discover that the film is about the parents, Matt and Ruth Fowler, whose outer world and inner emotions are ripped apart by events beyond their control. They are stuck inside themselves, ‘in the bedroom’, and struggle to emerge.
First there was his book (Earth in the Balance, 1992), then his road show about the book, and now a documentary film about Al Gore's road show to push the crisis—and it is a crisis—of global warming to the forefront of American public discourse. Regardless of your opinion about Gore's political history, here he combines the consensus of mainstream science with admirable passion to explain in lay terms a crucial issue of our day. This film lacks almost any creativity in that it simply shows Gore giving his Power Point presentation to a live audience. But it is a Power Point well worth considering. Gore includes charts, graphs, statistics, personal anecdotes and before-and-after pictures of the effects of global warming. In conjunction with the film's release Gore has published a book version of An Inconvenient Truth (2006). This would be a fine film to watch with older kids.
I was so disheartened at the end of this film that I just sat in my seat. A woman exiting down the aisle stopped at my chair and asked, "Was that a true story?" When I told her that it was a documentary she exclaimed, "that's unbelievable!" Jesus Camp features the Pentecostal children's minister Becky Fischer of Missouri, and the summer camp that she runs in North Dakota. But by including footage of Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, the film directors clearly intend to include the 30 million believers of the Christian right. I physically squirmed in my seat watching these anti-intellectual, self-righteous, judgmental, and bigoted people (re)define the Gospel in endless ways—young earth, intelligent design, abortion, global warming, Harry Potter, home schooling, and fidelity to George Bush. You might say that it's a cheap shot for the film makers to exploit such an easy target as Fischer; she is obese, emotional, and authoritarian. But at a minimum the film reminds us of how prevalent and extremist the Christian right is, and how, understandably, many unchurched people view Christianity because of them.
Gorgeous scenery in Afghanistan is the backdrop about the ugly plight of women in the grip of the misogynist Taliban rule. See this film in conjunction with Osama. The Killing Fields (1984)—British Sydney Schanberg received the Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his reporting as the NY Times correspondent in Cambodia (1972-1975). This story dramatizes his relationship with his Cambodian guide and interpreter Dith Pran. Schanberg left Pran when journalists fled the country during that genocide that killed about 1.7 million people when the Communist Khmer Rouge overtook the country after American forces left neighboring Vietnam.
Like its off-beat predecessor Calendar Girls, this comedy will not appeal to everyone, but I thought it was one of those rare films that was both hilarious and poignant. When his father dies, much to his chagrin Charlie Price inherits the family's 100-year old shoe factory. Foreign imports and changing styles have pushed the Price factory to the brink of insolvency, until Charlie's chance encounter with the drag queen "Lola." Whereas over the previous hundred years they had made "a range of shoes for men," they switch to making "shoes for a range of men," more specifically, shoes "for women that are men." An unlikely friendship develops between Charlie and Lola, each of whom struggles with their own unique loneliness. With Lola consulting, the blue collar factory workers of Northampton learn about London fashion, and to their credit retool their factory with gusto to storm the Milan shoe show with their sturdy stilettos. The DVD blurb advises that the film is "inspired by a true story." Rated PG-13.
In 1938 Alfred Kinsey, a young Harvard-trained zoologist whose speciality was the gall wasp, took over a course on "marriage" at Indiana University and, based upon his relentless curiosity and unapologetically scientific treatment of the subject, turned the class into something akin to sexology. He subsequently published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), based upon 18,000 sexual histories he and his staff collected. For the first time ever, sex was scientifically-situated. This biographical dramatization reminded me of Ray, in the sense of an overwhelming human force who grappled with a perennial subject and in the process shaped American culture. The main message of the film, if it has one, seems to be that repression and taboo melt in the light of frankness and tolerance of difference, no matter how quirky: "We are the recorders and reporters of facts—not the judges of the behaviors we describe," insisted Kinsey. But the film is careful to show in some deeply painful moments like pedophilia, sex encouraged among staff members, Kinsey's bi-sexual experimentation, and broken marriages that human sexuality is far more, and more complex, than the mere scientific documentation of its parts. Fidelity, intimacy, integrity and love define sexuality as much as our habits. Kinsey died in 1956 at the age of 62, although the Kinsey Institute continues today.
Kenji is a quiet, reclusive librarian working in Bangkok who is an obsessive-compulsive, fastidious neat-freak. He is also suicidal. By my count he tries to commit suicide at least eight times in this film, although he is never successful because fate intervenes—the door bell rings, his alarm clock goes off, a coconut falls from a tree, and, most importantly and improbably, he meets the sister of a girl he fancies. Fate is a key theme in this film, as we learn from several intersecting subplots. Kenji is also unsuccessful in his suicide attempts because of friendship with the Thai extrovert call-girl Noi, who is in every sense his opposite. She lives in a rural Thai village in a house that is a pig sty of dirty dishes, trash, and stray dogs. Director Pen-ek Ratanaruang thus fashions their akward, endearing love into a study of the powerful influences of friendship and fortune. This film won awards at festivals in Sundance, Toronto, and Venice, although reviewers have been sharply divided. I liked it and recommend it. In Thai and Japanese, with English subtitles. The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) Most Christians dismissed this film as heresy (which it was), but I liked it because it made Jesus very human to me and reminded me that “we do not have a high priest who cannot empathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). Life is Beautiful (1997)—Italian The Italian director Roberto Benigni stars in his own film as Guido, a Jewish hotel waiter who with his son Joshua are loaded on to trains and taken to the death camps. It is all a humorous game, he insists to Joshua. Controversy swirled around this film with its use of humor to survive the Holocaust. Life is beautiful because the worse human evil cannot crush the human spirit.
On February 7, 2003 about fifty famous blues musicians gave a benefit concert at Radio City Music Hall to celebrate 100 years of the blues. Starting with an African piece from Togo, and moving through slave and turn of the century black music, the concert functions as a sort of history of the movement. Except for a few back stage interviews, marvelous black and white archival material, and short interviews, this unadorned documentary lets the concert speak for itself. Listening to ninety minutes of the blues, I was struck by the powerful simplicity of the words, and how merely knowing the words and the music by no means adds up to the blues. Except for John Fogerty, Bonnie Raitt, Aerosmith and a couple others, all the musicians are black, which makes for a strange setting when you realize that most all the people in the audience are wealthy whites (similar to an NBA basketball game in this regard). Yes, BB King gave the final two songs. This film is a music lover's delight.
"Life is nothing but a beauty pageant with everyone judging you all the time." So complains Dwayne, a sullen teenager who reads Nietzsche and scribbles notes to his dysfunctional family because he's taken a vow of silence. Not a bad move, either. His father Richard spouts cliches about his motivational series called "Refuse to Lose" that is an abysmal failure. Wife and mom Shery is the peace-maker-enabler. Her brother Frank is a Proust scholar who tried to commit suicide, and her foul-mouthed father who lives with the family kills himself snorting heroin. "Welcome to hell," Dwayne scribbles to Frank. Little Olive, the darling of the family, won a trip to the "Little Miss Sunshine" beauty pageant, so the entire family piles into their dilapidated VW van for the 800-mile trip from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach. They endure the calamities and indignities you would expect, then find redemption of sorts that bespeaks a larger and more serious lesson to us all when they deconstruct the pageant in unlikely ways. Thank God for the Harris family!
"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/ And then is heard no more: it is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing." So wrote Shakespeare in Macbeth. Whether he was right is the question that every character in this film struggles to answer. The plot revolves around a train wreck, and how the various people related to that wreck and to the newspaper that reported the story (the editor, a reporter, the wife, the train worker), interpret the event. Was it suicide? Negligence? Fate? Murder? The artist Meryl hallucinates about this and many other Freudian fears (cleverly represented by animation). She meets the photo-journalist Nick who has his own existential fears, not the least of which is his cancer diagnosis. In the end their love moves beyond the many limits that life and death impose upon our fragile existence.
This retrospective docu-drama ("inspired by a true story") was written by Stacy Peralta, one of the central characters in the film who also wrote the earlier genuine documentary called Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001). Set in Venice Beach in 1975, it follows the fortunes of three teenage surfers-turned-skateboarders who discovered the magic of attaching polyurethane wheels to the bottom of mini-surfboards: "They come from oil, and they grip. You can ride on walls." The film has very little plot or character development, a lot of drugs and alcohol, and the dialogue seldom moves beyond verbal towel-snapping, but there is enjoyable footage of these "wood-pushers" careening on car tops, weaving between traffic, carving empty swimming pools, hitching on the rear bumpers of buses, and competing in the first national skateboard competitions. This film hardly rises to the quality of what Riding Giants did for surfing, but it still provokes some interesting questions about how a small group of stoned beach bums who were greatly disenfranchised from mainstream society jump-started what is now a billion dollar industry complete with X-Games on ESPN. Lost in Translation (2003) Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is lost in Tokyo, lonely, and more emotionally distant than geographically distant from his wife back home. He meets Charlotte in the hotel where they both live, but it is a romance that can never work. Somehow we wish it would. Luther (2003) This film, directed by Eric Till, should not be confused with the 1973 film of the same title and starring Stacy Keach as Luther. Both are based upon the play by John Osborne. Like its predecessor, the 2003 film received modest reviews, but given Martin Luther’s (1483–1546) importance as the father of the Protestant Reformation, perhaps historical importance rather than cinematic success will earn this film some kudos at least among believers.
In 1994 ball room dance classes were introduced for fifth graders at two New York City schools. The pilot program was so successful that today 6,000 children in 60 NYC schools are required to take a ten-week class in ball room dancing, with teachers provided by the American Ballroom Theater. The documentary Mad Hot Ballroom gives you a front row seat and behind the scenes preview of what has now become an annual citywide competition. This is a wonderful film that would make for great family viewing and later discussion. The film follows Public Schools 112 (Bensonhurst, an Italian neighborhood turned heavily Asian), 115 (a Dominican Republic neighborhood with a poverty rate of 97%), and 150 (Tribeca) as they practice for the competition. The kids learn merengue, foxtrot, swing, tango, and rumba with the dedicated instruction of their teachers who are likely some of the few positive adults in their lives. One teacher interviewed even bursts into tears thinking of her kids: "I see them turning into little ladies and gentlemen." Of course, many of these kids have so much going against them, and it is painful to listen to them talk so nonchalantly about poverty, domestic violence, absentee fathers, gangs, and drugs. In this respect the film reminded me of Born Into Brothels and how the art of photography captured the imaginations of small children and even transformed their lives. Others compare the film to Spellbound. The real success of this film is apparent when you consider that there is no narrator; the children speak for themselves, as only awkward fifth graders can, and they have a deeply human story to tell about growing up.
Margaret was raped by her cousin, Bernadette flirted with boys during recess at her orphanage, while Rose had a baby out of wedlock. All three girls were forcibly removed to the Magdalene Laundry as "penitents" to save their souls. But this Irish convent is really a slave labor camp run by a sadomasochistic nun named Bridget. The film, set in the late 1960s, follows the stories of these three girls, and the institutionalized brutality they experienced. Physical torture, sexual exploitation, and psychological humiliation were their lot, and the lot, we learn from a film trailer, of some 30,000 women detained at similar laundries throughout Ireland from the 1880s until the closure of the last one in 1996. Some of these women spent a lifetime in these prisons. It goes without saying that this film is not representative of the church or its clergy; many people had wonderfully loving experiences growing up Catholic (or Protestant). Others have objected that the film trades in shallow stereotypes. But this is part of our Christian history; the film is based on survivor accounts, and some of the survivors have said reality was worse than the film's version. No amount of pious platitudes can cover it up. This is a powerful and deeply disturbing film about how some Christians have committed and then justified horrendous evil, all in the name of God. The Man Who Knew Too Little (1997) Wallace Richie (Bill Murray) works at Blockbuster in Des Moines, and to celebrate his birthday he visits his bigshot brother and banker in London. But brother James must host important German clients to seal a deal, so he enrolls Wallace in a reality television show called "The Theater of Life" where contestants play scripted roles. Wallace mistakenly answers a phone call from a real hit man, remains oblivious throughout the film of the mistaken identity, and the rest of the film is about reality mistaken as fiction and vice versa. This film got horrible reviews, but I thought it was hilarious.
In this National Geographic documentary the filmmakers take your through a year in the life of Antarctica's Emperor Penguins. The director Luc Jacquet pitches this as a romantic story of migration and mating in which thousands of penguins waddle and glide 70 miles across an icy wasteland to the same place year after year, often in single file, to bear their young. The foreboding geography is fascinating and the cinematography remarkable, as they only could be. The technical challenges of making a movie like this where temperatures plunge to -70 degrees boggles the imagination. But I thought the film had trouble finding its exact voice. The music track suggests certain viewpoints, and the narrator's script equivocated between the purely scientific and the crassly cute ("This is a love story."). We can easily imagine learning much more about these fascinating creatures who thrive in such a harsh environment. March of the Penguins will take its rightful place alongside other family-friendly animal-lover films like Winged Migration, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, and The Story of the Weeping Camel.
When Maya Lin was just a twenty-one year old architecture student at Yale, the committee for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial chose her proposal (a class assignment, it turns out) from a national competition of 1,441 submissions as the winning design. Then the battle began. Congress people and even Vietnam veterans opposed it, the latter caricaturing it as a "big, black scar in the earth." Others compared it to a boomerang. Lin was vilified as a communist. And a memorial designed by an Asian, woman, college student? In the end, after congressional hearings at which the young Lin testified, her design was built and then dedicated in 1982. I have taken my family to the memorial when we visited Washington and, along with virtually everyone who has visited, can attest to the incredibly evocative power of this public monument. The first half of this documentary covers the VVM; the last half reviews her other prominent works, namely, the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, the Museum of African Art, the Wexner Center at Ohio State University, a fountain commemorating the contributions of women at Yale, an open air Peace Chapel, and her work with the Presidio project in San Francisco. I am always inspired and encouraged to follow the story of a person whose sense of vocation is so strong and crystal clear. This film won an Academy Award as Best Documentary in 1994.
I watched this film because it earned awards at five film festivals, including Cannes and Sundance, but save your time and money—it's horrible. The dialogue is dreadful, the plot unbelievable, the multiple sub-plots distracting, and the teenage sex ridiculous if not perverse. So, the experts are wrong, including Roger Ebert who gave this film 4 of 4 stars. Richard is separating from his wife Pam and works at a shoe store. He meets Christine, a starving artist who drives a taxi for the elderly, as if we should care. I guess the film revolves around the single line of a senior citizen to the effect, "Your whole life could be better, starting right now." Yes, especially if you avoid this film.
Which is more important, the journey or the destination? Romao is an illiterate and unemployed man with a wife and five kids, but he believes in destiny. "My true destiny is on the road," he tells anyone who would stop him from taking his family of seven on a six-month, two thousand mile bicycle journey across the heart of Brazil to Rio de Janeiro. There, he believes, he will find work so that he can feed his family. People think he's crazy, of course, including his family. They panhandle, do odd jobs, sing songs at restaurants, meet people both evil and good, and sleep in abandoned buildings and rusted out buses. But they love each other deeply and experience many life lessons, especially the adolescent Antonio who is turning into a young man. This film, "based upon a true story," won at least five festival awards, all of them deserved in my opinion. In Portuguese with English subtitles.
In this British Christmas family film two brothers face an ethical dilemma when a sack containing 229,000 British pounds falls off a train and into their lives. Their problem is urgent, too, because within a week the British pound will convert to Euros and their windfall will turn worthless. Of course, there are also dark characters with designs on the money. The older Anthony (age 9) prefers investing, or maybe currency speculation, while his younger brother Damian (age 7) believes that the money is a gift from God and so he wants to help the poor. Damian has memorized the dates and lives of many Christian saints, and even speaks with them, and as the film unfolds we begin to realize that he is a saint himself. But money is only one of their problems. Their lonely, widower father has moved the family to a sterile suburb and a new school, and Damian especially misses his deceased mother. Perhaps she too is a saint he can contact? Is she OK beyond the grave? Don't be fooled; this is a sophisticated film with special effects that you could view several times to understand and contemplate.
Jane Fonda's son Troy Garity stars as Albert Burroughs, a poor imitation of Forrest Gump. He is developmentally disabled, and all the more so because of his overbearing mother who goes to excessive lengths to protect him from the real world. When she is killed in a suspicious hit-n-run accident, Albert is easy prey for two characters who try to con his considerable money which he won as an expert ice fisherman. His employer rounds out the cast as a good guy who has Albert's best interests in mind and tries to shield him from the con artists. This film was an "official selection" at festivals in Palm Springs, Slamdance, and Seattle, but you should skip it. Monsieur Ibrahim (2003)—French Shot in 1960s Paris, Omar Sharif, now in his seventies, plays an elderly Muslim shopkeeper who befriends the teenage Jewish boy Momo who has been bereft of any meaningful relationship with his father. Monsoon Wedding (2001)—Indian An arranged wedding is the occasion for exploring the clash of generations and cultures. The bride and groom are both Indian, sure enough, but Hemant is a computer programmer from Houston and Aditi is from Delhi. Monster (2003) The dramatized version of the real life story of serial killer Aileen Wuornos, who was executed after about ten years on death row. Roger Ebert hailed Charlize Theron's performance as one of the best ever in the history of cinema.
In 1952, twenty-three year old Ernesto Guevara de la Serna and his best friend Alberto Granado left school and their wealthy families on an 8,000 mile trek from Argentina to the northern tip of Peru. Their initial purpose was nothing more than fun and games, and to celebrate Alberto's thirtieth birthday. Along the way they encounter exploited miners, indigenous Indians, and disenfranchised lepers, and the geographical pilgrimmage turns into a political awakening. As Ernesto remarks at the end of the film, "I'm no longer me, at least the me I used to be." You can enjoy this film as a coming-of-age travel narrative with spectacular scenery of Incan ruins and the Andes mountains. As a political documentary of its main subject, the revolutionary Che Guevara, it is at best romantic and incomplete. The founder with Fidel Castro of the 1956 Cuban Revolution, with later exploits in Congo and Bolivia, Guevara was murdered in Bolivia in 1967 at the age of 39. Still, there is something deeply powerful about the "pedagogy of the poor" learned from real life experiences of injustice and oppression such as are recounted here, and which are the lot of a disproportionate number of people in our world. The film, in Spanish with English subtitles, is based upon Guevara's diaries of the trip. Granado, now in his eighties, still lives in Havana. Mulholland Drive (2001) Viewers have had strong opinions pro and con about writer-director David Lynch's film, but everyone agrees that it is futile to search for a linear, comprehensible narrative. To say that the perky Betty helps the amnesiac Rita find her true identity does not begin to communicate the complexity, or absurdity, of this film. Admirers argue that Lynch has given us a brilliant study in the surreal; detractors claim it is all incomprehensible style over meaningful substance and that he is only messing with our minds. Like a dream, this film is at once unreal and incoherent, but nevertheless very powerful. In what sense are your own, human dreams "real?" If you appreciate thinking about the complexity of that question you will like Mulholland Drive; if not, skip this movie.
Talk about parallel universes. When Louis Kahn dropped dead of a heart attack in the men's room of New York City's Penn Station, he was one of the world's foremost and most famous architects. He was also one of the most secretive. His body lay in the city morgue for three days because he had scratched out his name on his passport, he was bankrupt, and he left behind not one but three families. The front-page obituary in the New York Times read that Kahn had one daughter, Sue Ann, by his legal wife Ester. Left unmentioned were a daughter Alexandra by Anne Tyng, and a son Nathaniel by Harriet Pattison. Nathaniel was only eleven years old when his father died, and twenty-five years later he sets out to try to find out just who his father was. This documentary follows him as he interviews architects, professors, taxi drivers, his two half-sisters, a rabbi, and even his own mother. The film is too long, and wavers between a consideration of Kahn himself, both his mysterious life and his architectural legacy, and also the emotional confusion and pain that Nathaniel tries to address. A genuine sadness hangs over this film that reminded me of something a Stanford professor and friend once said: behind every great man there is often a trail of human wreckage. My Dinner with Andre (1981) The plot of this movie, such that it is, would seem to be a recipe for disaster, but I am one of the many fans of this movie which in its entirety is about....a two-hour dinner conversation.
Susan Tom is a divorced, single mother in California who after having two biological children adopted eleven handicapped children. This emotionally intense documentary film is not about a smiley Brady Bunch, but about a raucous household of children with serious and severe problems—mental, physical, emotional and medical. Faith was horribly disfigured in a fire as an infant. Xenia was born with no legs. Teenager Joe is a deeply angry and explosive child who threatens to kill Xenia; he eventually dies from Cystic Fibrosis. Others are mentally retarded. Susan describes herself as "fat but interesting." Both adjectives understate the case. She does not work outside the home, but instead supports everyone, and her $600 a week grocery bill, from SSI income. Margaret, age 18, is unwillingly conscripted to help make it all work, and breaks down in screams to get her mother's attention. Perhaps the mark of a fine film is that in watching it you think far more about its subjects than about how they are portrayed. My Flesh and Blood won the Audience Documentary Award at the 2003 Sundance festival.
I watched this film twice and loved it even more the second time around. As a light-hearted comedy it follows the travails of the frustrated, gangly, unseemly, and misanthropic high schooler, Napoleon, along with his circle of similarly weirdo and disenfranchised characters that surround him—his brother Kip who specializes in chat rooms, Pedro the improbable class president, Uncle Rio a door-to-door salesman, and his heart throb Deb. Napoleon is hazed at school, envies Pedro's mustache, lies about having a gorgeous girl friend, and musters his best compliment to Deb at the dance: "I like your sleeves; they're big." These central characters are all decidedly uncool. But everyone needs a friend, and at times watching this film makes you squirm when you appreciate the very real social realities that it parodies. Best of all is the film's sugary ending.
I was eager to like this experimental film written and directed by Rodrigo Garcia (son of the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez), but in the end was disappointed. Garcia tells the stories of nine women, each one as a separate and independent 10–12 minute snap shot. Except for pain and dysfunctions of all sorts that relate directly to the men in their lives, the nine stories are unrelated. We encounter teenage and elderly women, blue collar and professionals, black, Hispanic and white. Diana is divorced from her husband but they should have stayed together. Sonia is badly married and should divorce. Holly confronts her abusive step-father and maybe commits suicide. Samantha referees between her distant parents. Ruth considers an affair, Camillie confronts breast cancer surgery, and as an inmate Sandra is separated from her daughter. The artistic signature of this film is that Garcia shoots each of the nine vignettes in a single, uninterrupted 10–12 minute shot with a hand-held camera, and that the crises these women face remain unresolved.
Yagira Yuya won best actor at the 2004 Cannes festival for his role as Akira, a 12 year-old boy who cares for his three younger siblings when the four of them are abandoned by their mother. Paternity in this film simply does not exist, and in fact we might believe that the children had four different fathers. The few minutes we meet the mom, Keiko, early in the film would not discourage that idea. After Keiko moves her family into a new apartment she gives them several rules: only Akira can go outside, none of them will go to school, and no loud noises, lest they be evicted. Then she leaves, and but for Akira's savvy they are on their own. How could she possibly leave? Will she return? Where did she go? Nobody knows. Akira shops, cooks, banks at the ATM, tracks down his dad to beg for money, and cares for his siblings, as we watch the sad and inevitable meltdown of the four children. The film was inspired by a true story that was reported in Tokyo not too long ago. In Japanese with English subtitles.
Nói is a deeply estranged teenager who lives with his grandmother in an isolated and impoverished fishing village in remote Iceland. The icy landscape and winter darkness are foreboding, but beautifully mysterious in their own way. His father is an alcoholic taxi driver who rages at the piano with an ax. His grandmother wakes him in the morning by blasting a shotgun out the window. Nói is smart enough, perhaps too smart for such a community— he solves a Rubic's Cube during an interview with the school psychologist. When he sends a tape recorder to take his place in class because he can't be bothered with school, he is expelled. An albino misfit and outcast who shaves his head, Nói finds some solace in his basement crawlspace (although it is never clear just what he does there), with a View Master with slides of Hawaii, and with a soul mate Iris who works at the local gas station-cafe. In a surprise ending, tragedy destroys his only glimmer of hope and Nói finally imagines an alternative future. This is the debut film by writer and director Dagur Kari, and it won numerous awards at international film festivals. In Icelandic with English subtitles.
"Inspired by a true story," North Country tells the story of Josey Aimes (Charlize Theron) who works in the mines of the Mesabi Iron Range in northern Minnesota, and who initiated the first class action sexual harassment lawsuit in America. The first woman was hired in the mines in 1975, but this story begins in 1989 when men still outnumbered women 30 to 1. In the understatement of the film, a patronizing supervisor tells his new women employees, "the mines are a shit pit." The images we see make it hard to believe any human being would work there—filthy, deafening noise, dangerous, difficult and toxic, this is a Dickensian world, but a socio-economic world where people need their jobs. And for Josey, a single mom with two kids by two fathers who lives with her parents, the union job pays six times her job washing hair in a salon. It also brings vulgar sexual harassment of every sort, which she stands up to despite objections from every quarter— not only from the neanderthal men, but also from the isolated community, the union, her parents, and even her women colleagues. Despite the "nuts-n-sluts" accusations that she was either imagining things or brought them on herself, Josey challenges the system. Whereas in the film Monster where she played the repulsive murderer and psychopath Eileen Wuernos, in this film Theron is undoubtedly the best-looking bedraggled miner and single mom you'll likely see. A bit of a distraction in an otherwise powerful film about bravery in the face of injustice. Most disturbing of all, the lawsuit with the real-life Lois Jenson was only settled in 1991; the plaintiffs won a modest settlement, but more importantly a sexual harassment policy at the mines. Directed by Niki Caro, who also made Whale Rider.
If you can suspend almost all critical judgment and subscribe to a Hollywood tear jerk formula, then this film might work for you. About 80% of The Notebook is a flashback to the 1940s and the improbable summer romance between Allie Nelson and Noah Calhoun that led to their marriage. She is from fabulous wealth; he works at the lumberyard for pennies. Surprise—her mother objects! But they canoe in sunsets, splash in the rain, separate for years, coincidentally find each other many years later, leave the respective people they love, and all through the power of a house Noah restored. In the present day, an elderly Noah reads this story aloud to his now demented Allie from a notebook she had written. The mere reading cures her of Alzheimer's, at least long enough for them to die in each other's arms. Sorry, it does not work for me. Much more interesting would have been an exploration of an aging couple still in love, or about that long interlude between a summer fling and death's doorstep; how does a couple keep the flame alive? This film cheats both ends with sugary sentimentality and leaves the middle passage unexplored. Nowhere in Africa (2003)—German/Kenyan A German family flees the Holocaust by going to a farm in rural Kenya.
This sad and gritty film has earned a half dozen festival awards and nominations. It follows the tragic fates of three young women from Jersey City's ghetto—Suzette (a pregnant runaway teenager), Marisol (a crack addict and young mother), and Oz (a drug dealer), whose lives intersect after their separate paths to prison. Nearly every influence in their lives, whether personal or social, is harmful to them, including school, music, home, friends, drug and alcohol abuse, and, most of all, their trash-talking, gangsta boys. The girls live in a malevolent universe that is parallel to anything you would consider normal. Whether they got there by bad luck, bad choices, or by a heartless society that has victimized them is debatable. The director shows his hand, though, with several shots of the Statue of Liberty.
In 1998 principal Linda Hooper and two teachers at the middle school in Whitwell, Tennessee (a former mining town with a population of 1,600) cast about for a school project that would teach their eight graders about prejudices, stereotypes, diversity, and tolerance. Their little town, they knew, was entirely white, and the middle school enrolled no Jews, no Catholics, only five African Americans, and one Hispanic. They settled on the theme of the Holocaust. But how to teach it? They would collect one paper clip for each person killed by Hitler—six million in all, inspired by Norwegians who had worn a paper clip on their lapel during the war to protest the Holocaust. The project stalled after an initial burst of energy and enthusiasm, then a reporter for the Washington Post and the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw ran pieces about the project. In the end they collected 27 million paper clips from around the world, 11 million of which they displayed in a rail car that had transported Jews to the death camps. Walls fall, and hearts open. The teachers tell how they stereotype northerners, and even their own students. The town meets Holocaust survivors who speak in the local Methodist church. This might not be a great documentary film. I thought it dragged a little, plus I think it is hard to say much new about the Holocaust. But the simple narration of how real people were genuinely transformed in an otherwise insignificant middle school was remarkable. I only wish I had watched Paper Clips with my ninth grade daughter. Don't miss this film.
We first meet the childhood friends Said and Khaled as ordinary garage mechanics, but not too far into this movie their spiritual adviser Jamal informs them that they have been appointed for a suicide bombing mission in Tel Aviv. As young Palestinians doomed to a future of oppression and poverty, we sense their humiliation and hopelessness. We watch as they are promised glory as martyred heroes and transport to heaven by angels. If it is possible, we can almost "understand" how and why someone would volunteer for such a mission. Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad explores the religious, the socio-economic, the deeply personal, and the violently political in these two characters. But to his credit, Abu-Assad does not take this film in a linear direction. Said's girlfriend Suha, who was born in France and raised in Morocco, objects to their plan for reasons of both principle and prudence. Technical glitches complicate the mission, family matters enter, and at one point Said and Khaled get separated. Only in the last two minutes of this nail biter do you learn the outcome. In Arabic with English subtitles.
A scruffy Philip Seymour Hoffman takes to the road with a camera crew in the six months before the 2000 presidential election to document the dysfunctions of our political system. There's nothing new, ambitious, or very challenging about that goal, and Hoffman does nothing to deepen or clarify the film's subject, which by its end is entirely predictable—more disgruntled citizens (mainly from the left), some of them famous, others obscure, like homeless activists and sloganeering protesters. The film also loses focus by a staccato presentation of endless hot button issues, including farm aid, the WTO, the Million Mom March, legalization of drugs, capital punishment, welfare, corporate influence, voter apathy, etc. Much of the film focuses on the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions. Just how much can you learn from thirty-second sound bites from Willie Nelson, Charlton Heston, Ralph Reed, Noam Chomsky, Susan Sarandon, Rosie O'Donnell, Bianca Jagger, Pat Robertson, Barney Frank, and Newt Gingerich? Of course, at this point the film is also badly dated.
The British film maker Jeremy Gilley documents his personal campaign to establish a single day of global peace and non-violence. In fact, he discovered that Costa Rica had won approval for an original international day of peace back in 1981, so Gilley's quest was to reinvigorate the day with a new and fixed date, September 21 of every year at the United Nations. It took five years of meetings with school children, Nobel Peace laureates, heads of states, NGO bureaucrats, media moguls and even the Dalai Lama, but on September 7, 2001 the United Nations voted unanimously to approve a resolution to designate every September 21 as the new International Day of Peace. In the bitterest of ironies, Kofi Annan was scheduled to ring the peace bell and proclaim the change on September 11, the last day of peace before the new, fixed date on September 21 took effect the following year. Yes, the documentary includes Gilley's naysayers who derided his quest as a hapless and romantic gesture, but I for one join those who saluted him for doing anything and everything to encourage humanity to forsake violence and war.
Is there any cinematic icon more recognizable than the Phantom's mask? Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera opened in London on October 9,1986, and since then there have been more than twenty productions world-wide. In London there has never been a seat unsold. Over 50 million people have seen the show, and the box office gross world-wide stands at nearly $2 billion. So, why not a movie version to capture this wild success, even though a film can never compete with the live show? I love the story line, even though my wife and I differ in our responses to the Phantom, and I like the music. So, even though this film dragged along, and a friend of mine echoed the belief of many when he described the show as "cheesy," I still enjoyed it. With Roger Ebert, I recommend this film even though I really did not think it was a very good film. The Pianist (2002)—French/German/Polish/British Directed by Roman Polanski, this film recounts the true life story of the Polish Jew and classical pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, and how through sheer luck and gritty determination he survived the Holocaust.
The key to enjoying this film is to remember that it is not a documentary but a rendering of a fictional last performance of the radio program, but that's hard to remember when Garrison Keillor plays himself—singing, telling stories, and peddling make believe commercials with dead pan seriousness. The live radio variety show that many people enjoyed is one thing; this film loosely based upon it is another. Without that connection this film would never stand on its own. After thirty years the Soderbergs sold the building to wealthy Texans, and thus the show's final act. The two Johnson sisters, Yolanda and Rhonda (played by Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin), reminisce backstage while the show plays live in the background. Country cowboys Dusty and Lefty yuck it up. A woman who is really an angel, a death backstage during the broadcast, and a visit by one of the new investors disrupt the story line. But watching "GK," as he is called in this film, is always a treat.
Set in the post-war 1950s, director Jane Anderson portrays the life of Evelyn Ryan (Julianne Moore), a mother of ten who supported her family as a "contester" by winning an astounding number of prizes for her hundreds if not thousands of entries. Evelyn is an irrepressible mother, cheerful, dutiful, brilliant, and probably an enabler to her husband Kelly. Kelly (Woody Harrelson) is an insecure, self-loathing under-achiever whose alcoholism explodes into fits of rage and violence. But as was true for that era, he was the man of the house who called all the shots. When the cops arrive to quell their domestic violence, they chat with Kelly about baseball; when the priest comes over he advises Evelyn to be a better wife. If not for Evelyn's soothing, confident oil upon these troubled waters, the Ryan family and marriage would have both disintegrated. In an interesting technical twist Anderson has a double of Evelyn narrate parts of the film. Anderson based the film on the family memoir The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less by Terry Ryan (one of the ten children). As someone who was raised in a family of eight in the age of Father Knows Best, I loved this emotionally rich film about a mom who had no power but all the influence.
If you have ever wondered how to gain at least some understanding of the convoluted, protracted and intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict, watch this documentary film. You will learn its basic history, but perhaps more importantly you will learn about the deeply human impulses that drive that history, human impulses as they are experienced and narrated by seven children interviewed for this film project—Israeli and Palestinian, extremist and conciliatory, passive observers and political militants, boys and girls. A child's perspective, it turns out, touches the viewer very deeply, for these kids have siblings who have been killed and parents jailed without formal charges. In an especially moving sequence, the children meet together in an exchange of food, games, friendship, opinions, tears, and feelings of both hope and futility. The final frames show an Arab mother and a Jewish father in a maternity ward standing next to each other, each embracing their newborn baby. The producers edited over 170 hours of original interviews down to 107 minutes for this incredible film. In Arabic, Hebrew, and English, with English subtitles. Pulp Fiction (1994) Most critics hailed this foreboding film a watershed, even "the first masterwork of the post modern pop culture generation" (Brian Laidman). Three separate and non linear plot lines intersect in an orgy of violence, racism, sadism, black humor, and stream of consciouness vulgarity. Old school movie released the same year: Forest Gump. New school enfant terrible: writer-director Quentin Tarantino.
Critics have generally raved about this film, and why not? Jamie Foxx's portrayal of one of the world's greatest singers is marvelous (the soundtracks are Charles's originals). Born into grinding, rural poverty in Albany, Georgia, Charles's mother Aretha moved her family to Florida when he was an infant. By age 7 Charles was completely blind from glaucoma. This film tracks his life from then until 1966 or so when he finally beat a twenty-year heroin addiction. But I had several disappointments. By ending when Charles was only 36, this film neglects the entire last half of his life. His addiction to drugs and women (he fathered 12 children and was divorced twice), the powerful influence of his mother who taught him to avoid self-pity and to be his own person, and his guilt over his failure to save his little brother from a drowning accident when he was five, all figure more prominently than his musical genius. In his fifty-year career Charles performed 10,000 concerts, won 12 Grammys, and charted 85 singles. I wanted to learn more about how this genius fused Gospel, blues, country, jazz, and big band music into a raucous style all his own. Perhaps it is impossible for any film to capture a figure so much larger than life. Charles himself was involved in the making of this film, and at the end of the day, despite the feel of an unoriginal soap opera script (music, drugs, philandering, and racism), it is well worth seeing. Stranded in a New Orleans hotel with a group of five adults and four children, film maker James Bills put his camera to good use in his native city. In this one-hour documentary, with no stock footage at all, he records the city before, during, and mainly after Hurricane Katrina hit on August 29, 2005. Even today, seeing his film, it is hard to comprehend the terrifying power, destructive force, and catastrophic flooding of the storm. Bills interviews a handful of citizens and with understated narration lets them tell their stories. The bald lies and gross incompetence of local, state, and especially the federal government loom large. "It has changed me forever," reminisced one woman. "I will never depend upon the government for anything. You're on your own." A recent article in the New York Times suggested that 18 months later, New Orleans's population has probably topped out at less than half of its pre-hurricane size. Riding Giants (2004) This spectacular documentary tells the story of surfing, from its nascent beginnings in the 1950s as a counter cultural way of life, and even statement about life, to its current status as a multi-billion dollar industry complete with its own superstars with super contracts. It follows the surfing greats like Greg Noll, Laird Hamilton and other big wave riders who tempt fate by careening down 60-foot moving mountains of water. The personal stories, the spectacular photography, the soundtrack, and athleticism and obesssions of the world's best big wave surfers all combine to make a wonderful film. One warning: after viewing this film your life will feel very dull.
Recorded live at the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles's Ambassador Hotel (1987), this documentary celebrates the music of the inimitable Roy Orbison (1936–1988). Filmed in black and white, Orbison is joined by an all-star back up band (and admiring colleagues), including Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, T-Bone Burnett, k.d. lang, and others. Orbison had an amazing vocal range in addition to his signature falsetto, an understated and unadorned style that I find refreshing in our in-your-face age, and a knack for writing songs that other people made famous—"Pretty Woman," "Blue Bayou" (Linda Rondstadt's version sold 7-8 million copies), "Only the Lonely," and "Crying." I watched this wonderful performance two different times on public television, and highly recommend it for any baby boomer who ever piled a stack of 45s or 33s on your first record player.
This film won several festival awards, and is fine as some Friday night fluff, but it did not work for me. Saint Ralph wavers between the inspirational, the cute, and some serious coming of age issues; trying to do all three fails. Ralph Walker is a likeable trouble maker in the ninth grade at an oppressive Catholic boarding school. He cheats, lies, smokes, curses, underachieves, and enjoys his raging hormones. His father died in the war (the film is set in 1953), his mother lies deathly sick in a coma (although you would never know it because she looks quite beautiful), and if he is expelled from the school he is orphaned. He learns in his religion class that performing a miracle requires faith, prayer, and purity, and so he sets out to run the Boston Marathon in order to effect a miracle for his dying mother. Sub plots with a girl friend and a teacher-priest who just happens to have been a marathoner as a young man add little. I did not find Saint Ralph even remotely believable, nor did I appreciate that Catholicism was presented in the worst possible light. The headmaster is a cardboard character who, yes, is a sick tyrant. Ralph has several visitations from God who appears to him in the form of Santa Claus. You can watch to see if Ralph gets the miracle of a marathon victory, and whether this redounds to his mother's healing; just don't set your expectations too high.
Is it my imagination or do most war films feature a character named "Sarge?" The characters always talk tough to one another, ask where their buddy is from, play cards, smoke precious cigarettes, and beat the odds. One hails from Brooklyn, another from the Louisiana bayou. One is a pacifist with moral qualms, another a hardened atheist. Despite the many awards this film won, I found it predictable and mediocre. Four American soldiers are trapped behind enemy lines, and when they are joined by a stranded British paratrooper they realize that they have vital information that they must smuggle back to the Americans. So they trudge through bitter snow and accomplish the task. No, that was never in doubt. Along the way they encounter a Belgian housewife in an abandoned farmhouse who feeds them. Nice. One of the soldiers, Deacon, a former missionary, speaks German so fluently and without an accent that he gets them past Nazi soldiers. Hmmm. The film does humanize the soldiers, though, including a sympathetic Nazi, so they are thus not only warriors but also saints.
This film begins in a mine shaft in Saxon Germany and ends in the honky tonks on the Louisiana bayou. How the protagonist Schultze got from one place to the other, barely speaking any lines at all in almost two hours, and just what his journey symbolizes beyond mere geography, constitute the plot of this film. Schultze and two of his buddies retire from the local salt mine, but after puttering in the garden and pestering their families, life as pensioners settles into the predictable monotony that we might expect in an insular subculture characterized by traditional polka music. Later he even stops forlornly in front of the mine on his bike. One kid sneers at the three old codgers, "I'll never be like that." The bachelor Schultze lives alone, but we learn from family photos that his father was a noted accordion player. Schultze is too, and one night on his little radio he hears some zydeco music, an accordion-based genre from Louisiana. He turns off the radio after a minute, then turns it back on, then pulls our his battered accordion and reproduces the tune. He can't sleep but stares at the ceiling because he can't get the music out of his head. He's hooked. This new musical passion gives Schultze a new lease on life, but dare he play such newfangled music in the land of polka? His friends urge him on despite petty detractors, and even send him to their sister city in Texas for their annual German music festival. There Schultze experiences a new joie de vivre, a new style of music, a new geography, and new friends—all without knowing any English. Some people found this film plodding, but I loved its minimalist, slow-moving style through which we watch the endearing Schultze discover himself. The DVD case advertises that Schultze Gets The Blues has won awards at ten international film festivals, a remarkable feat considering that it is the first film by writer-director Michael Schorr. In German with English subtitles.
I don't think this film adds anything new to the debate about so-called "death with dignity" or the right to end your own life. But it is a tender and nuanced treatment of the subject that raises the major questions and includes the major stakeholders—the legal system, a religious priest who is caricatured as moralistic and uncaring, friends, and a three-generation family that lives with and cares for the quadriplegic Ramon, who after a diving accident 26 years ago wants to end his life since, he insists, it is a life with no dignity. Ramon's brother adamantly objects: "nobody kills anyone in my house." Others are not so sure. Four women in particular loom large in the film's plot. I will not spoil Ramon's final choice, which to the film's credit is not clear until the very end. The Sea Inside is based upon a true story in Spain, and was voted Best Foreign Film for 2004. In Spanish with English subtitles. Shawshank Redemption (1994) Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) is a banker who is wrongly accused of murdering his wife and is given a life sentence at the Shawshank Prison. Similarly, longtime inmate "Red" Redding (Morgan Freeman) has wrongly been denied parole two times, and no wonder, for everything about this prison is evil. Warden Norton is cast as a fundamentalist Christian who issues Bibles to every incoming prisoner, quotes Scripture, whistles "A Mighty Fortress is Our God," and who otherwise is a sadist. So, we root for the criminal inmates against the "good" government prison that tries, unsuccessfully, to dehumanize them. Three plot twists in the last half hour make this a fantastic film.
Miles Raymond and his friend Jack are both losers in their own, very different ways. But they were roommates as college freshmen, and so Miles takes Jack on a tour of California's wine country a week before his wedding in a sort of two-person, weeklong bachelor party of wine-tasting and golf. Miles is a clinically depressed, misanthropic, divorced, alcoholic middle school teacher whose novel has been rejected. He oozes self-hatred and is utterly endearing. Jack is a back-slapping, good looking hunk of a bit-actor who wants to bed a few women before he settles down to marriage. The plot revolves around the two women they meet on their trip, Stephanie and Maya, and the consequences for all involved. Side-splitting humor and deeply human poignancy combine in this travel narrative. I loved Paul Giamatti (Miles) in American Splendor, and he is every bit as good in this film. His character is developed more than Jack's, but perhaps Jack has little character to develop? This movie has received uniformly great reviews (a notable exception being one in the New York Times).
Talk about brave soldiers. This documentary film tells the stories of the thousands of active duty GIs and retired veterans, both at home and in Vietnam, who agitated to end the war in Southeast Asia. Their means were many—a network of coffee houses, a full-page ad in the NY Times signed by 1400 active duty soldiers, 300 underground newspapers, sits-ins, public marches, pirate radio, petitions, refusal to go on patrols, and even "fragging" (killing their superior officers with fragment grenades). Many of these people of conscience spent considerable time in prison. The original film footage of the Vietnam war and personal interviews with veterans who explain why they did what they did are deeply moving. These firsthand witnesses knew the truth of war—the degradation, propaganda, government lies, cynicism, torture, and how war might turn some boys into men but it turns far more people into animals. I watched this film with a deep sense of gratitude. Popular history makes fun of Jane Fonda but consider this—in this film you'll see that her audiences included not just leftie hippies but 60,000 active duty soldiers who agreed with her. According to this film the Pentagon documented 503,926 "incidents of desertion." After watching this film read the book by Chris Hedges, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.
In this documentary by his friend Sydney Pollack we meet Frank Gehry (b. 1929), winner of the Pritzker Prize (1989) and controversial rebel rule-breaker in the world of architecture. We also meet colleagues in his firm who contribute to his deconstructionist designs, clients, business executives Mike Eisner and Barry Diller, artists, musicians, a dissenting critic from Princeton, and even Gehry's therapist of thirty years, all of whom comment on Gehry's life and work. I especially enjoyed the considerable time spent in Gehry's studio watching the artistic process unfold with paper models, computer simulations, pen sketches, and so forth. A beautiful sound track accompanies a cinematic tour of his notorious creations around the world, including his signature piece, the titanium-covered Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. Critics complain that his work is perverse, tortured, ugly, and dissonant, but most people acknowledge the remarkable genius of a man from a poor Jewish family who early in his life drove a truck for two years. The Son (2002)—French/Belgian The Belgian carpenter Olivier runs a vocational ed shop for teenagers. When he befriends yet another apprentice, Francais, he could never imagine the consequences of his decision.
Adam Sandler in a serious role? Yes, after a fashion. As the most famous chef in America, husband, and father, he plays John Clasky, and is married to Deborah, a suburban housewife who raises the bar for what it means to be a type-A control freak. When we meet her mother Evelyn we understand why.This Los Angeles family is very wealthy and profoundly dysfunctional. Enter Flor, a Mexican housekeeper who has a teenage daughter Cristina who is the same age as the Clasky's daughter Bernice. Since her mom does not speak English, Cristina narrates the film for us. You can imagine the sub-plots of this "blended" family, but in the end Flor is a source of humanity, warmth, and normalcy for everyone.
A movie about a spelling bee?! Yes, and it is good if not great, which is why Spellbound was nominated for an Academy Award in 2002. Every year over 9 million kids compete in local spelling bees. I can remember mine forty years ago, can you? The winnowing process brings 249 regional winners to the National Spelling Bee finals for two days of competition at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, DC. that are televised live by ESPN. This documentary follows the family stories of eight children from drastically different backgrounds who made it to the 1999 finals. My favorite was Angela who came from a rural farm in Texas where her father is a laborer who entered the country as an illegal alien and who still does not speak English. Then there are the blue bloods with driven parents who hire private tutors for their kids in between horseback lessons, an introverted wunderkind Ted from Rolla, Missouri who does not study at all, and April whose father owned a run-down bar for forty-five years and whose mother is a ringer for Archie Bunker's wife Edith. Watch the film to see which one of these likable kids takes home the first prize of $10,000.
A tiny Buddhist "monastery," big enough for an elder monk and his ten-year old disciple, floats moored in a remote, isolated lake, surrounded by spectacular forested mountains shrouded in mists and a whole lot of silence. The dialogue in this film is minimalist. We do not even learn the names of the monk and his disciple. But the themes that it engages, such as desire as the cause of suffering, possessiveness, anger, sin, redemption, loss of innocence, wisdom, and the like are universal experiences. The film passes through the four seasons of the year, an obvious metaphor for the developmental stages of the two characters. In each successive season the characters are about a decade older, so that in circular fashion the ten-year old apprentice at the beginning of the film is the new elder at the end, complete with his own young apprentice. In fact, this rather captivating, meditative and philosophic narrative takes several unexpected plot turns. The gorgeous scenery in this film would alone make it worth watching. In Korean with English subtitles.
The title of this film refers to the single positive memory that the teenager Walt could convey to his school psychologist, about a time when he and his mother visited New York's Natural History Museum. Walt's parents, Bernard and Joan, are both writer-snobs, a trait that does not serve their family well after they separate, especially because Joan's career is flourishing and Bernard's is tanking. After a family meeting when they tell Walt and his younger brother Frank that they are separating, the film tracks how everyone takes sides, plays favorites, blames, and manipulates. Fear and insecurity stalk everyone. Whose night is it to take the cat? Joint custody is hell. It's her obligation to pay the tennis instructor. Walt and Frank do poorly in school, drink too much, run away, and experiment sexually as ways to act out. Bernard, an insufferable and self-absorbed egotist, has a fling with one of his college students, while Joan sleeps with the tennis instructor. This film won numerous awards, but I thought it had an ambiguous and unsatisfying ending. . . like those of many families deconconstructed by failed marriages. Standing in the Shadows of Motown (2002) Everyone knows what Motown music is, but almost no one knows the Funk Brothers. They were the behind the scenes studio band of that powerful music movement, and played on more number one hits than the Beatles, Rolling Stones or Elvis Presley combined. This documentary tells their story and ends with a reunion concert of the aging veterans in Detroit.
Shot on location in the Gobi desert of Mongolia, this unlikely but fascinating film documents the lives of a four-generation family of herders who live together but all alone in tents. If we did not know this was planet earth, the landscape might lead us to believe it was the moon. Wind, sand, rocks, sun, and the distant horizon of mountains are about all the eye can see. Tragedy strikes when an albino camel is born and the mother refuses to have anything to do with it. She spits at her baby, kicks it, flees from it, and refuses to let it nurse. This is a heart-rending natural tragedy, but for the desert dwellers it is a looming economic disaster. After trying every trick of the trade to reconcile mother and baby, the great-grand-father advises that they must call for a musician to perform an ancient, traditional ritual to heal the camel. They do so by dispatching the two very young brothers Dude and Ugna, who ride their camels alone across the desert wastelands some 30 miles to the nearest town. There they encounter the distractions of television and computers in a sub-plot of culture clash. But they succeed in their mission, and the rest of the film records the result. Breath-taking scenery and provocative ethnographic questions make this a very special film. In Mongolian with English subtitles.
Before I saw this film I had dismissed it as a piece of lightweight pop cinema. In a sense it is, but in another sense it is a serious documentary about a national epidemic whose name is obesity. Here in California, a recent newspaper article reported that only one quarter of 1.3 million school children tested could pass minimal physical fitness requirements. At the current rate, obesity will pass smoking as the leading cause of preventable death. Perhaps it is unfair that Super Size Me picks on McDonalds, but it is, nevertheless, far and away the largest purveyor and most powerful icon of junk food morbidity. What would happen, wondered Morgan Spurlock, if he ate three meals a day for 30 days at McDonalds? This film shows you. He followed three rules: everything he ate had to be on the Mickey D menu; he had to sample every offering at least once; and he would only order "super size" when prompted by the cashier. Spurlock consumed about 5,000 calories a day of sugar, fat and salt, added 25 pounds, jacked his blood pressure and cholesterol numbers into the stratosphere, experienced head aches and chest pains, and came pretty close to killing himself. McDonalds denies any cause-effect relation, but after this film it discontinued its "super size" option. The humor in this film makes it an excellent vehicle to communicate to kids, but also adults, the serious consequences of our junk food epidemic. In the end, Spurlock survives his experiment, and his vegan girl friend, who had complained that even their sex life suffered, restores him to culinary sanity.
"We're all just one happy family," insists grandfather Adolph, "and we all love God." How and why that tragic falsehood got perpetuated in his horribly dysfunctional family is the subject of Jonathan Caouette's intense, emotionally raw, and deeply sad autobiographical documentary. His mother Renee—for all her madness, mental illness, 200 shock therapy treatments as a child, drug abuse, rape, and over a hundred psychiatric hospitalizations from 1965 to 1999, knows better: "Screwed up parents raise screwed up kids. I just wanted to break the cycle." She did not and could not, and her son Jonathan, writer and director, has paid a horrible psychic price: ''I don't want to be like my mom," he frets in a final scene. But he repeated the past and more, including growing up gay in Texas, and developing a "depersonalization disorder" in which one views one's life in a detached, third person manner as if in a dream. Caouette incorporates numerous media into his cinematic catharsis —super 8 home movies that he started taking when he was 11, still photos, phone messages, movie clips, tape recordings, and even simple text. He fires these at the viewer in a non-linear fashion and at a staccato pace, often filling split screens with dozens of overlapping frames. The disorienting effect mimics his life, and even draws the viewer into his own state of mind. Caouette is a gifted film maker. As a human being he gets high marks for sheer bravery for confronting his horrific past, and for his deep tenderness toward his deranged mother who came to live with him in New York City. No person should bear even a fraction of the curse that he inherited. Tarnation makes at least two claims to fame. It has won a place as one of the "Top Ten Films of the Year" on over 50 such lists, and was reputedly made for $218 on a Macintosh and edited with the bundled iMovie software.
In this his debut as a director, Tommy Lee Jones plays Pete Perkins, a grizzled cattle rancher on the Texas-Mexico border. Pete befriends and bonds with an illegal immigrant named Melquiades Estrada whom he hired as a ranch hand. He also promised to bury Melquiades back in his hometown if he happened to die north of the border. In a freak accident, a rookie border patrol agent named Mike Norton murders Melquiades, who had fired in his direction at a coyote. Pete knows that the redneck immigration authorities will do nothing, so in an act of vigilante justice he exhumes Melquiades, forces Norton to carry his body across the most lonesome, isolated, hostile territory you can imagine, and eventually gives him a proper burial. In the end, Norton asks forgiveness for killing Melquiades (disproving his wife Lou Anne's judgment that he's “a sonofabitch beyond redemption”), who otherwise remind us of all the many obscure, insignificant people whose fates are forgotten by the world—but not by someone as loyal as Tommy Lee Jones. Written by screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros, 21 Grams).
On the last day of school, teacher George Lopez dismisses his students for the final time with hugs and kisses. He is nearly in tears, and so are we the viewers. To Be and To Have, France's highest grossing documentary ever, follows Lopez and his class of a dozen elementary kids ages 3-11 in rural France for most of the academic year. The film is entirely without comment or narration, except for a two or three minute segment towards the end when Lopez explains how and why he spent 35 years as a teacher. The reason? Pure love and joy, which goes a long way toward explaining why he was a master teacher, and this otherwise slow-moving film is so powerful and even magic. We see the kids reading and writing, fighting and farming, baking, sledding and celebrating class birthdays. In my favorite scene, Lopez coaches little Jo Jo to discover that he can count to a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, and even a billion or more. You see his little mind reeling with the unfolding realization that numbers never stop! For the most part the kids are oblivious to the camera. The true story of a life well spent, the spontaneity of children, and spectacular scenery of rural France make this film a visual and emotional delight. In French with English subtitles.
Pick up most any hit record beginning in the late 1940s, especially any recording done with Atlantic Records, and you will likely see that one Tom Dowd was the producer or recording engineer. In this loving tribute to Dowd, who died October 27, 2002 before the film was finished, those inside the guild honor the memory of one whom they universally acknowledge was a legendary genius and wonderful human being. In his younger years Dowd was a physics student at Columbia, and even worked on the atom bomb project (he was present at the Bikini Atoll tests), but his mother was an opera singer and perhaps he was destined for music. Dowd was a master technical innovator, musical aesthete, coach, father figure, and psychologist. He himself narrates most of the film, but we are also treated to original concert footage (Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, etc.) and retrospective interviews with a number of the stars whose sounds he perfected, including Ray Charles, Eric Clapton, and Greg Allman. The five minutes or so when Dowd sits at a console and walks us through the thirty-year-old master copy of "Layla," starting with only the guitars and then adding the various parts until they pulse with that incredibly evocative sound that defined an era, interspersed with poignant reflections by Clapton, are worth the entire film. One disappoint in this otherwise fascinating glimpse of the history of music recording since the late 1940s is that we learn nothing at all personal about Dowd, and nothing at all about any weaknesses, failures, misjudgments, and the like, that would have made this entirely likable person even more richly human.
In this documentary about her life and work, the percussionist Evelyn Glennie (a Grammy award-winner) does for sound what her fellow Scot and environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy did for sight in the film Rivers and Tides (2002). In fact, both films were directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer. "My whole life," says Glennie, "is about sound; it's what makes me tick as a human being." That's a remarkable statement when about thirty minutes into the film you learn that by the time she was a teenager she was profoundly deaf. From playing a snare drum in New York's Grand Central Station, improvising with Fred Frith in an abandoned warehouse in Germany, visiting her brother at their family farm in Aberdeenshire, or staging an impromptu session in Tokyo using chop sticks on restaurant paraphernalia, Glennie explores the aesthetics, psychology and physicality of sound. Splattering water, pneumatic hammers at construction sites, a tap dancer, and general urban din all provide material for her reflections. Most of the sounds in the film are experimental, eerie, and dissonant, but to her credit Glennie amazes us with the complex miracle of one of our five senses.
This true story of two British mountain climbers, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, will hands down be one of the most gripping and inspirational films you will ever watch. After scaling the 21,000 foot Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes, their descent morphed into a nightmare disaster when Simpson fell and broke his leg. Yates tried to lower him down the mountain, but eventually cut the rope and sent his partner to his death. Or not. The remainder of the film shows how Simpson fell even further into an enormous crevasse and made it down alive by actually lowering himself deeper into that crevasse. The film makers re-enact the drama with actors, but continually switch back to interviews with both Simpson and Yates who describe exactly what happened, what they thought and how they felt. The only story of human bravery, courage and survival that compares to this is Shackleton's failed Antarctica trek in 1914–1916 (recounted in the Imax Endurance). After six surgeries, and an unflincing defense of Yates for cutting the rope, Simpson still climbs today.
In a remarkable performance that reminded me of Charlize Theron's transformation into Eileen Wuernos, Felicity Huffman plays a transsexual man named Bree who is a few days shy of having his male-to-female sexual reassignment surgery. When she discovers that she fathered a son long ago, her therapist will not sign off for the surgery until she confronts her past, so Bree travels to New York City and meets her son Toby. Toby is a street prostitute and drug abuser who aspires to make porn movies in Los Angeles. Bree poses as a missionary sort, and the two of them take a way-too-long and boring road trip from New York to California. This film did not work for me for many reasons. The relationship between Toby and Bree was not believable, nor was the film's ending. But Huffman's portrayal does an incredible job of capturing the pain, emotional isolation, and confusion of a person who lives in this nether world of unspoken taboos. She is intelligent, modest, deferential, homely, and has no interest in making any political statement. Why has this film been billed as a comedy? Anyone who has experienced these very real life issues would not find any of it laughable.
Writer and director Sylvain Chomet has created what many have hailed as one of the most creative animated films ever. The film, which has no dialogue, is full of sounds (barking dog, trains, frogs, jazz) and populated with exaggerated characters that are at once grotesque (obese, pigeon-toed, etc.), hilarious, poignant, and deeply human. The satire follows the fortunes of an orphaned boy named Champion, who, after obsessive-compulsive training by his whistle-wielding grandmother Madame Souza, enters the Tour de France. He's kidnapped in the middle of the race by square-shouldered, cigarette-smoking French mafiosos in sunglasses. The bad guys take Champion and two other cyclists to Belleville, a surreal world where like horses in harnesses they ride stationary bikes in a betting parlor. But the grandmother and their faithful dog Bruno follow in hot pursuit, and with the help of the triplets of Belleville—three eccentric, spinster, burlesque buddies—they rescue Champion. This simple plot, though, does not even begin to suggest the surreal quality of this delightfully quirky film which deserves its uniformly rave reviews.
The Soweto gang leader Tsotsi (literally, "thug") appears to be a hoodlum without a conscience. The film begins with his gang's murder of a subway rider, a brutal beating of his colleague who dared to raise issues of morality, and then a car-jacking. Tsotsi crashes the new car and finds a newborn baby boy in the back seat. This film won an Oscar for best foreign film, but just at this early point in the film I believe the plot becomes entirely predictable. We know that the little baby will humanize Tsotsi (he does), and that the little guy will be returned safely to his parents (he is). So, the film really hinges on Tsotsi's character development and road to redemption. I also thought the film ended somewhat ambiguously, as perhaps it should have, with Tsotsi's arrest. Director Gavin Hood clearly intends not only to tell a personal story but also to comment on the horrendous socio-economic inequalities in the post-apartheid South African townships that contributed to Tsotsi's life as a criminal. In Zulu, Xhosa and Afrikaans with English subtitles.
In this documentary Tupac Shakur—gangsta rapper, movie star, rape convict, and murder victim—narrates the story of his own life and work. And what a work, with 36 million albums sold (most of them since his death in 1996 at the age of 25), and 150 songs still unrecorded. As I watched this film I moved through successive waves of fascination, even admiration, empathy, and then anger and revulsion. Born to a crack-addicted mom who was in prison when she was pregnant with Tupac, with no father around, Tupac insisted that he spoke for the many hopeless people he grew up with who were trapped in chronic unemployment, police brutality, hunger, poverty and racism. Just as the news media shocked viewers into the horrors of Vietnam with their gruesome images, so, Tupac insisted, he was only chronicling the ghetto "war zone" most Americans would otherwise never see: "All my songs deal with the pain I experienced in childhood." But you know you have big problems when your own community censures you, including the likes of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Dionne Warwick. With his trash-talking vulgarity, misogynist lyrics, and rage, Tupac made himself an easy target. In his better moments he admitted he was "young and dumb." In the end, you can only lament the self-destructive life and tragic death of an immensely talented artist.
Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi situates this poignant film in a Kurdish refugee camp on the Turkish-Iraq border just before the outbreak of the US-Iraq war. The film revolves around a 13-year old boy nicknamed "Satellite" for his enterprising ways. Satellite barters, buys and installs TV dishes so the village can get foreign news about rumors of war. He organizes the village children into an economic cartel. They clear fields of land mines, which they then resell, and stack discarded empty artillery casings. Parallel to this big picture of village life among displaced Kurds runs an important smaller story. Satellite has a crush on the orphaned girl Arin, who along with her armless brother Hengov takes care of the blind toddler Risa whom she bore when she was raped by Iraqi soldiers. Only in the last few minutes of the film does the war begin, and of course the Kurds were happy for liberation from Saddam by America. But when you learn what happens to Satellite, Arin, Hengov and little Risa, you understand why in the final scene Satellite turns his back on the American army vehicles as they roar through the muddy village in the rain, as his buddy exclaims, "I thought you always wanted to see the Americans." I think Ghobadi intends a deeply human commentary rather than a political statement, to the effect that seen through the surreal experiences of these children, war is hell on earth. It is difficult to know which is more real or more terrifying, the nightmares that Hengov has or the "reality" of their waking hours. In Kurdish with English subtitles.
The end of the Civil War in 1865 freed about 4 million slaves in America, a significant number of whom lived into the 1940s. During the Depression, the Federal Writers Project hired people to interview and record first person narratives from these former slaves, the last first-hand resource that could document their experiences. Today the Library of Congress houses 2,000 such interviews, in their original "dialect" and broken English, in the simply-titled Slave Narratives. This film uses original still photographs, contemporary re-enactments, slave music, a running commentary by Whoopi Goldberg, and, most notably and thus the film's title, dramatic readings of those original slave narratives by contemporary African-American actors and actresses like Oprah Winfrey. In just over an hour you learn about the daily horrors of slave life from those who lived to tell of it—relentless work, horrendous housing and diet, the denial of education, sexual violence, and how the "masters" used Christianity to keep their slaves passive. This is a deeply moving film about our nation's very recent past. I recommend watching it in conjunction with the seven-part PBS documentary on the civil rights movement called Eyes on the Prize. Narrated by Robin Williams, this 60-minute film tells the story of the Flemish priest Damien de Veuster, better known as Father Damien, who followed God's call to serve the leper colony on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. Beginning in 1866 the government segregated lepers to the barren island of Molokai where they were abandoned to hostile, isolated and horribly primitive conditions, with no housing or even potable water. In 1873, at the age of 33, Father Damien arrived to serve the 600 dispossessed people. Passionate, driven, and the object of baseless criticisms from Protestants, Father Damien provided for the material needs of the people (housing, food, medical care) as well as their spiritual needs. He even built their coffins and dug their graves. Sixteen years later, in 1889 he died there of leprosy. In 1995 Pope John Paul declared Father Damien "blessed" (beatified), which is the second of three stages to canonization as a saint.
As with the movie Ray, I would think that it would be difficult to make a dull film about such a larger than life figure as Johnny Cash. Beginning with the trama-inducing death of his brother Jack in rural Arkansas, his overbearing father who blamed him for his brother's death, a tour in Germany with the Air Force where he wrote his first song, and his self-destructive addictions, the film takes us to Cash's eventual marriage proposal to June Carter on stage in Canada. Carter and her parents, for all practical purposes, saved Cash's life and career. Both Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon (who won an Oscar for best actress for her performance) sing Cash's songs; no voice-over lip syncs here. My only disappointment with this film, like the film Ray, is that it ends while Cash is still a young man. He only got better with age. Others have complained that the film makes almost no mention of Cash's rather outspoken Christian faith. But these are minor quibbles about a good film about a great man and musician.
In 2002 Israel began constructing a 400-mile "fence" along the Green Line that separates Israel and the West Bank. This "wall" consists of 25' concrete panels, trenches, endless razor wire, guard towers, sensors, alarms, cameras, radars and check points. It is only 50 yards wide, but in fact it symbolizes an immense geo-political gulf. Director Simone Bitton was born in Morocco, educated in Paris, and resides in Jerusalem. Fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, French and English, she uses the crude architecture of this "wall" as a rich metaphor of the political debacle in the region. Yes, in some sense the wall "protects" Israelis from terrorists, but of course it also imprisons them, exacerbates the strife, and partitions normal citizens on both sides, almost all of whom who were interviewed in this documentary hate the wall. "Without peace," remarked a foreman on the job, "this fence is worthless." In Hebrew and Aramaic with English subtitles.
By many accounts James Nachtwey is the premier war photographer of our time. This powerful documentary of his life and work runs along three tracks. First, we learn from Nachtwey and his friends who are interviewed about his personal story, how and why he became a war photo-journalist, and what he is trying to accomplish in his work. We learn, for example, that this most famous of artists who makes a living by taking the "express elevator to hell" is, in fact, an introverted, retiring and even mysterious man. He reflects on to what extent he has benefitted from other people's misfortune. Second, the film makes a powerful statement on the horrific atrocities that he records in Kosovo, Rwanda, Jakarta, and the West Bank, whether war, urban poverty, or famine. One cannot watch this film without lamenting the stupefying dehumanization and depravity that takes place in so much of the world. Third, one is forced to consider the extraordinary, evocative power of images to capture and define reality in ways that text never can. In much of the film we see exactly what Nachtwey sees when he does his work, since he has a mini-camera attached to his own camera. It is not pleasant. For Nachtwey, twenty-five years in photojournalism has provided an extraordinary moral-aesthetic vocation. I count this as one of the best films I have ever watched.
How does a normal Pakistani engineering student who graduated from the University of Maryland, then studied in Paris, become a suicide bomber with a plan to bomb Grand Central Station? The War Within tries to imagine one scenario through its main character Hassan, who is kidnapped off the streets of Paris by Western agents, tortured in prison, and ends up in New York City as a radicalized Muslim. His friends there, Pakistanis enjoying all the forbidden pleasures of secularized America, barely recognize the new Hassan. "Man," asks his childhood friend Sayeed, "what has happened to you?" After their first, grandiose terrorist plot fails, Hassan must decide whether and how he will still carry out a smaller, deeply personal mission. This is complicated but not ultimately compromised by a love for Sayeed's sister Duri that Hassan refuses to embrace or enjoy. Thus his ultimate jihad, the personal war within his psyche and how it will externalize itself in his actions. This is a good film, but not as good as the Palestinian version on the same theme called Paradise Now.
If you have ever spent a frustrated Friday evening wondering what film to watch with your entire family, rent Wallace and Gromit. Clever word-play, whimsy, remarkable animation, oddball humor, and side-splitting laughter make for wholesome fun. Roger Ebert has described Wallace, an eccentric cheese-loving inventor, and his silent companion canine Gromit who cares for him, as "the two most delightful characters in the history of animation"—yes, better than Bugs Bunny, Nemo and Goofy, and "in a category of their own." In this film the duo must track down villainous bunnies who pilfer veggies at Lady Tottington's 517th annual Giant Vegetable Fete. This is the first full feature film for Wallace and Gromit, after three short films, by the British animator Nick Park. If you like quirky English humor you'll love this film.
Set in 1938 India and Ghandi's rise to power, Water opens when Chuyia's father awakens her and asks, "My child, do you remember getting married?" She says no, and her father responds, "Your husband is dead; you are a widow now." Chuyia is eight years old, and as one of India's 34 million widows her head is shaved and she is banished for life to a home where Hindu widows live in penitence. They are a source of ritual impurity for anyone who touches them or is even darkened by their shadow. But this does not stop the authoritarian and obese Didi who runs the home from pimping. Director-writer Deepha Mehta (who received death threats for her work and had to move filming to Sri Lanka) uses Chuyia's plight as a window onto the larger degradation of widows by crafting a major sub-plot when another widow, improbably gorgeous Kalyani, falls in love with the liberal-minded Brahmin and follower of Ghandi Narayan. To divulge the twists and turns that their relationship take would spoil unexpected suspense. The marginalization of widows in Hindu society, remarks Narayan, is all about "one less mouth to feed, four less saris, and a free corner in the house. It's disguised as religion, but it's all about money." In Hindi with English subtitles.
I watched this film after a friend who was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam recommended it as the best film on that war. Starring Mel Gibson as Lt. Col. Hal Moore, the film tells the true story of the first major encounter between American troops and North Vietnam. There, in the la Drang Valley ("the Valley of Death"), 450 Americans were dropped by helicopters into a clearing and subsequently ambushed and surrounded by 2,000 Viet Cong from October 23 to November 6, 1965. In addition to capturing the bravery, patriotism, heroism, horror, and idiocy of war, this film is special for at least two reasons. First, it portrays the battles that the families who were left at home also had to fight while their loved ones were 12,000 miles away. The entire first third of the film focuses on the families at home, and the rest of the film repeatedly cuts back to them. Second, the film humanizes the enemy. The enemy must be fought, but they are not "evil." In fact, we learn that they are just like us. There are five prayers in this film, one of which is by a Viet Cong and which, verbatim, could have been uttered by any human being. Similarly, right after watching a young American widow grieve, the film cuts to a young Vietnamese widow crying as she clutches a diary returned from her dead husband (the diary contains her own picture that her husband had carried). The end of this film names the Americans who died at la Drang; it also pays tribute to "the members of the People's Army of North Vietnam who died in that place." There are no winners or losers in this film, or any political statements, for in the last few minutes we learn that these soldiers "fought not for country or for flag but for each other." We Were Soldiers is based upon the book We Were Soldiers Once, and Young (1992) by Lt. Col. Hal Moore and Joseph Galloway, a photo journalist who was embedded with the American soldiers for the duration of the battle. The Weather Underground (2002) Terrorist bombs in America? Yes, most people have forgotten them, but a small group of far left radicals of the the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) bombed a number of buildings to protest the Vietnam War. We don't need more social violence like this, but where are our student protesters today? This documentary takes you back to the tumultuous sixties and early seventies. Whale Rider (2002)—New Zealand/German Pai, a 12-year old Maori girl in remote New Zealand, is raised by her deeply angry grandfather who wants to pass on the traditions of his tribal culture and history, but must face the realities of a modernizing world. But the tables are turned when Pai teaches him and becomes the new leader. Exquisite scenery and a powerful story, I took my teenage daughter and girlfriends after seeing it with my wife.
Science and spirituality merge in this film to explore some of the most important questions that a person can ask. What can we truly know about ultimate reality, and how do we know it? Is there an independent reality "out there" beyond the subjective knower, or do we merely project and so create reality? The film combines interviews with a half dozen scientists in medicine, quantum mechanics, physics, and neuroscience, along with a theologian and a channeler-spiritualist, to attempt answers. The film also utilizes animations and all sorts of technical effects to simulate time travel, memory, brain function, and so forth. This is not a great film, but it might well provoke some great conversations and more in depth analysis of the issues raised.
I like to watch most anything by the documentarian Werner Herzog, and Wheel of Time was no exception. This film finds him in Bodh Gaya, India, where tradition has it that the Buddha first found enlightenment 2,500 years ago under the bo tree. Every few years a half million Buddhist pilgrims travel to Bodh Gaya for a sacred rite convened by the Dalai Lama called the Kalachakra ("Wheel of Time"). The pilgrims come from near and far, many by foot, making prostrations the length of the body the entire trip. One monk from Tibet took three years to travel the 3,000 miles, genuflecting the entire way. Others will make 100,000 of these prostrations once they arrive, a rite that takes six weeks. Central to the series of religious activities is a "mandala" or sculpture made of colored sands that the monks craft from a large stencil. The intricate work of art is destroyed after the rites, the sand returned to the earth, a symbol that all is transitory. In one scene the pilgrims circumambulate the 25 mile base of Mount Kailash (22,000 feet). Wheel of Time has less narration than other Herzog documentaries, leaving you to wonder what some of the throngs of worshippers are doing. Herzog is also much more circumspect with his typical critique. But the combination of color, scenery, history, religion, culture, and language make this a very good if not great film.
A documentary by director Werner Herzog (cf. Grizzly Man) is never as simple as its plot and subject first suggest. In 2004 Herzog joined the quixotic British aeronautical engineer Graham Dorrington who traveled to remote Guyana in South America to fly his two-seater contraption over the rain forests, ostensibly for scientific research. But filming that quest is really a side show to Herzog's broader interests. He pokes and prods at the eccentric Dorrington, especially the guilt he tries to assuage over a fatal accident that killed his friend Dieter Plage in Sumatra in 1993. He trains his camera on the spectacular scenery, especially the thousands of swifts who nest there. In one phenomenal close-up of a single tiny rain drop he captures the reflection of the thundering Kaieteur Falls in the distance. Like an anthropologist he explores the lives of the bare foot Guyanan locals who slop through the mud to help Dorrington, like Mark Anthony who loves his pet rooster and epitomizes Rastafarian harmony. In other scenes we see the appalling environmental degradation of the diamond mines, a teenage boy beside the Falls moon-walking to the reggae from his boom box, and Dorrington's tear-dropped dirigible meandering over the river and forests. Herzog demonstrates how even the simplest plot lends itself to rich explorations.
Fast, sleek, quiet, affordable, and environmentally friendly, the EV1 seemed liked a dream car come of age. Right? Wrong. For about ten years (1996–2006) General Motors and other car companies invested in, built and then leased (but never sold) the EV1 to the public. At one point GM CEO Roger Smith even bragged about the car. GM then pulled the plug, claiming there was too little consumer demand and no profit to be made. This documentary argues that is patently false. Rather, the film makers contend that GM, the Bush administration, the California Air Resources Board, and the oil companies combined to kill the project. In fact, when customer leases expired, GM repossessed every single EV1, refused to allow customers to keep or buy them, then crushed and shredded them in secrecy. I especially appreciated the distinctly optimistic note this film ended on, with its belief that technological innovation and customer common sense cannot be thwarted forever, despite the greed and propaganda of oil and car companies.
For their class project a group of students makes a film with the title "The Bored Murderer." When the male lead falls ill, that role falls to the very weird Takeda. At first this meets with enthusiastic approval, but when he plays his role a little too intensely they begin to wonder if he is sane or not. Before too long we realize that this film is not only about the student film and all its problems of story, budget, cast, sites, etc., but about their own lives and how their film roles and real lives merge. Goofing around with their hand held videos and camera phones they film each other making the film. Problems abound in their personal lives even more than with their film project. The girlfriend of the director Naoki is badly co-dependent and tried to commit suicide. Naoki sleeps around. Nakajo, a famous film professor, has quit working, is lonely for his deceased wife, and is obsessed with a gorgeous student. The assistant director Kiyoko breaks down in tears. In this film about film-making, life imitates art. Who's Camus Anyway? won the Best Film award at the 2005 Tokyo International Film Festival. In Japanese with English subtitles.
Two times in this film Mark Bittner insists that he is not "eccentric." But he describes himself as a failed musician who lived on the streets of San Francisco, who bounced around from one odd job to another, and who has not paid rent in 25 years. His pony tail, which he promised not to cut until he had a girlfriend, reaches almost to his waist. As for his tender care for a flock of 45 wild parrots (cherryhead conures from South America) on Telegraph Hill just below Coit Tower, well, "it wasn't a plan, it just happened." Bittner knows them all by name and by their individual personalities—Connor and Mingus, Picasso and Sophie, Scrapper and Scraperella, and so on. By the end of this endearing film, you are pretty sure that he is likely the most articulate street person and self-taught ornithologist ever. You are not surprised that the city council honored his work, that scientists envy his daily field logs, that his still photography of his feathered friends is breathtaking, or that he has a memoir entitled The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill: A Love Story With Wings. The only surprise is the incredible last two minutes of this outstanding documentary of an eminently likable human being.
In the first few minutes of this South African film two young teenage friends discover a dead body with a huge pistol and a video camera. The shy introvert Madiba chooses the camera, while cocky Sipho takes the gun. The film explores the consequences of those choices. Madiba hides the VCR in a home-made wooden camera, enabling him to shoot everyone and anything on the sly. He experiments with the aesthetic, technical and voyeuristic aspects of film-making. Refracting light with different lenses, candles, floating plastic bags, and even the bubbles of a drink awaken his artistic bent. His cinematic creations form a significant portion of the film. "Some day," he hopes, "my pictures will hang in houses." Sipho's gun awakens in him foolish bravado, and we watch him descend to petty crime, drugs, gangs and finally horrible tragedy. Between them both is an improbable, budding romance between Madiba and a rebellious white girl, Estelle, from a wealthy family with racist secrets of their own. This film is good, not great, but well worth watching for its themes of adolescence, choices, fate, friendship, and racism in a post-apartheid township of Cape Town.
Not until the final sentence or two of this film does The Woodsman reach anything like dramatic resolution, and even then it is a resolution of the sort befitting the deep complexity and ambiguity of its subject matter. The film begins when Walter is released from serving 12 years in prison for his conviction as a sex offender, and he tries to make a new life for himself. He takes an apartment across the street from an elementary school (yes, a bad choice), and rides the bus to his job at a lumber yard. Except for his therapist, all those outside of and around Walter ostracize him as a monster and a freak. His sister refuses to talk to him or allow him to see his niece, a detective monitors his every move, and when his work colleagues discover his past they "out" him in a most bizarre way. Within himself another war rages. Neither Walter nor the viewer really knows to what extent he has moved beyond his past and is, therefore, safe. Involuntary hallucinations plague him, and poor choices born of habit implicate him. Three important sub-plots, all revolving around child molestation, contribute to Walter's unfolding narrative. Watching this film I was reminded of Faulkner's unnerving observation that "the past isn't gone; it isn't even past." Still, and not to reveal too much, this incredibly tense and powerful film ends on a hopeful note that is nevertheless sobering for all of us who seek redemption this side of eternity. Zoolander (2001) This movie got some seriously bad reviews, but I liked it as a biting and farcical satire of the idiocies of the modern fashion industry. |
Posted the week of March 19, 2007: 
