MOVIE REVIEW
Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo (2009)
The Times BFI 53rd London Film Festival
As reality television and documentary filmmaking become more prevalent in everyday society, it is accepted that the act of observation changes the people being observed. The question is therefore how to create an authentic experience while addressing this fact. Some documentary filmmakers such as Nick Broomfield or Michael Moore include themselves onscreen, others provide a voiceover narration once the editing process is complete. But what Bradley Beesley has done is more dangerous and disingenuous than that.
Continue reading “Caged Rodeo Heat” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
Fox Searchlight Pictures
“Fantastic Mr. Fox” is identifiably based on a short story by Roald Dahl: the anthropomorphized animals, the analysis of the English class system and the marginalization of one gender of characters are all his trademarks. But what makes this movie special is that it is identifiably also a Wes Anderson film: the father doing his best for his family in his own peculiar fashion, the slightly remote mother more interested in her own goals than her children and the lonely son desperately seeking his parents’ approval.
Continue reading “Fox Can’t Keep Out of Hen House” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Micmacs (2009)
Bruno Calvo/Sony Pictures Classics
Bazil (Dany Boon) had the bad luck as a child to lose his father, a bomb disposal expert, in an accident with a land mine. Thirty years later, he has the bad luck to be shot in the head as a bystander to a drive-by shooting. Bazil eventually exits the hospital with nowhere to go and the bullet still in his brain, too dangerous to remove. On the streets of Paris, he soon encounters a fellow beggar, Slammer (Jean-Pierre Marielle), who takes him back to Micmacs, a shelter made entirely from salvaged goods beneath a Parisian underpass. There — with the cheerful assistance of the other homeless outcasts — he decides to orchestrate his revenge. That’s revenge against the C.E.O. of the manufacturer of the landmine (André Dussollier) that killed his father, and of the C.E.O. of the arms-dealing company (Nicolas Marié) that made the bullet in his head.
Continue reading “The City of Mass Destruction” »
MOVIE REVIEW
My Big Break (2008)
Bryn Mawr College
A young man moved into a house share in the Los Angeles suburbs in the 1990s and — to demonstrate his filmmaking skills with a camcorder, no script and no money — began documenting his housemates. They were also young men, all jobbing actors newly arrived in Hollywood looking for their big break. Two of them, Brad Rowe and Chad Lindberg, got steady and noticed work in films and television, and the third, Greg Fawcett, had an unshakable belief that his turn was right around the corner. The fourth was Wes Bentley.
Director Tony Zierra then turned this prototype reality-show footage into a film called “Carving Out Our Name,” which was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2001 before being sunk by lawsuits and studio fear, among other things. This movie actually opens with Mr. Zierra smashing up the master reels of that first movie before urinating on them.
Continue reading “Hollywood Screen Kiss-Off” »
MOVIE REVIEW
I Need That Record! (2008)
Brendan Toller/Unsatisfied Films
Independent record stores — as with most independent retailers — are dying out. Small chains simply can’t compete with big-box or Internet retailers on price or the “long tail” — the ability to stock small amounts of the majority of items, which sell only very small numbers. But what they lack in mainstream success, the smaller shops make up for with a synesthetic shopping experience that simply can’t be replicated elsewhere. Some call this heart, others authenticity, still others community spirit.
Director Brendan Toller taps into the longing for this experience in “I Need That Record!” via the owners of Record Express and Trash American Style, two shops near his hometown in Connecticut. Record Express’s closing was the impetus for the film, in which Mr. Toller went on a road trip to other small record stores in Illinois, Ohio and Massachusetts to discuss how the music industry and retail markets have changed, and what small store owners are doing about it.
Continue reading “Die Fidelity” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Heart of Fire (2009)
Senator Film Verleih
Making a kids’ movie about child soldiers should be impossible. The cruelty and horror of their daily existence seems like something it’s better not to discuss. On the other hand, to ignore something that awful can only serve to perpetuate it. “Heart of Fire” is based on a German bestselling memoir by Senait G. Mehari, who as a child was forced to fight in the Eritrean wars of independence. The film does an age-appropriate job of demonstrating how people always have choices, even in situations where they have no choice.
Continue reading “This Woman’s War” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Chevolution (2009)
Fortissimo Films
Everyone knows the image this film is about. Everyone might not know who he is or when or where the photo was taken, but he or she knows what the image means. It’s cool, edgy and rebellious. It’s got that little frisson that moves it beyond just another photograph to one of the most reproduced images of all time. It’s so famous that blind items can run in the gossip press about starlets getting their tattoos of it removed. In a London restaurant restroom, a mash-up of the image and the Mona Lisa hangs on the wall. And from its first appearance, it took very little time to morph into shorthand for — well, whatever you want it to mean.
Continue reading “A Warholian Mosaic of an Iconoclast” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Echoes of Home (2007)
Polyfilm Verleih
Folk music has a difficult time of it in this modern world. There’s the need to preserve the old sounds and traditions, but also the need to make them relevant to people now. Without contemporary interest, the music is reduced to museum status and the performers to archivists, but when the music is moved forward into a modern style, it becomes something new and more uncategorizable.
“Echoes of Home” is about three Swiss musicians who are caught between these two conflicting needs. The traditional music of Switzerland is yodelling – the perfect way to ensure sounds and messages are carried across the enormous mountain ranges, and up and down the valley. But this specific need of theirs speaks to something wider within their culture. As demonstrated by the eager mature students featured in an evening class, yodelling seems to be an excellent way for the proper, polite Swiss to really let rip.
Continue reading “Yelp It From the Rooftops” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Grocer's Son (2007)
Film Movement
Suddenly we can’t turn around for French paeans to rural life. In 2008, not only did a comedy called "Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis (Welcome to the Sticks)" smash box-office records to become the most successful French film ever, but "Modern Life" won the Louis Delluc Prize for being the year’s best French film. And now "The Grocer’s Son," which mines what is apparently a very deep vein. It has enough panache that it doesn’t feel past its sell-by date.
Continue reading “Prodigal Son Takes Over Mom-and-Pop Grocery” »
VIDEO
Festival de Cine Internacional de Ourense
It is such a pleasure to hear the Irish language spoken fluently as it is throughout “Fairytale of Kathmandu.” Cathal Ó Searcaigh (pronounced Ca-HULL O’Sharkey) is a well-known Irish-language poet. I have one of his books acquired in the mistaken belief it was a bilingual edition, and on the flyleaf a review by Maire Mhac an tSaoi is quoted: “Ó Searcaigh is Mozartian, following the Gaelic classical convention of the dramatic first person, which disinfects the ‘I,’ moving easily from traditional metres to free verse and back, distilling the intense emotions of same-sex love into a lyric form that has not, I think, been equaled since the days of the Greek anthology.”
Continue reading “The Orient Excess” »