MOVIE REVIEW
Steam (2009)
Seattle Lesbian & Gay Film Festival
"Steam’s" inclusion in the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival is a bit tenuous, as only one of the three interweaving story lines has a gay theme. But any film with Ruby Dee, Ally Sheedy and Lane Davies is an embarrassment of riches. What a pity writer-director Kyle Schickner didn’t know what to do with the talent he had to work with.
MOVIE REVIEW
Patrik, Age 1.5 (2008)
Per-Anders Jörgensen/Regent Releasing
Sometimes movies should show new things that hadn’t been seen or considered before. Sometimes they delve into human emotions in fresh ways. Sometimes it’s pretty people blowing things up, or just the oldest sins in the newest ways. "Patrik, Age 1.5" tells us an old story, but one that’s still the best: that even though life is messy and complicated and imperfect, it’s still possible to be happy. It’s been a long time since a movie has so perfectly achieved this uplifting affect. And if you’d told me a gay Swedish adoption comedy with a country-music soundtrack would have achieved this, I would have laughed in disbelief.
Dime Western Productions
One could almost bet the farm that “Lady Trojans” director Elizabeth Hesik was the little sister of the focus her film, Annameekee Hesik. Known as Anna, she played basketball throughout her high school career in early 1990s' Tucson, Ariz., and the team and its players were the means through which she discovered her sexuality. A quick Google reveals, to my surprise, the director is actually the older sister, who appears to have been away at college during the events depicted. (Good thing I don’t have a farm.) This closeness to, yet distance from, the events depicted in “Lady Trojans” gave her the means to make this film, perhaps it didn’t also give her a sufficient remove to be objective about the story she is telling.
Providence Productions
When a young, white gay man, Matthew Shepard, was beaten up and tied to a fence to die in Wyoming in 1998, there was international outrage, huge coverage in the mainstream American media, anti-hate crime legislation drafted in his name and even a movie as a result. But Sakia Gunn’s equally homophobic murder five years later was largely ignored – because she was black? A girl? Someone whose sexual identity was a little harder to describe? For whatever reason, Charles Bennett Brack decided to make "Dreams Deferred: The Sakia Gunn Film Project" in an attempt to redress the balance.
Continue reading “Dual Identity Makes an Outcast in Two Communities” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel (2009)
Lionsgate
Richard Curtis has a lot to answer for. This does not apply to “Blackadder,” the most amusingly misanthropic show ever. Nor does it apply to his charity work with Comic Relief and the astounding amounts of money it has raised. But it does apply to “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and everything that followed it. Not only the subsequent films he has written, but also those he inspired, “Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel” included.
MOVIE REVIEW
Modern Life (2008)
Soda Pictures
Director Raymond Depardon is also a photographer of some renown. His website is just astonishing, with painterly, well-composed landscapes and also portraits. This eye for capturing images and ability to position the camera to maximize the beauty of the local landscape is truly remarkable. But he did not win the Louis Delluc prize for the best French film of 2008 due to his eye for images. He won for his ability to tell the French a story about themselves.
MOVIE REVIEW
Fifty Dead Men Walking (2009)
Whistler Film Festival
I’m an American who lived in Belfast for a year, and in that year met my husband. The whole of his family lives in Northern Ireland, and our circle of friends in London includes several from Northern Ireland. None of them are "political" – i.e., with direct involvement to paramilitary activity – although some do have family relationships or unwise connections from their youth, which they prefer not to discuss. Most of them recoil in horror at the thought of perpetuating the traditional nationalist-unionist struggle or indeed prejudice of any kind, although some are less enlightened. But regardless of their political outlook, religious belief, class, or personal experience of the Troubles, every last one of them I know from Northern Ireland adheres to the code: “Whatever you say, say nothing.” Everyone, but everyone, hates a grass.
MOVIE REVIEW
Three Monkeys (2008)
Pyramide International
If Nuri Bilge Ceylan had been born 100 years ago, he would have been a painter of some renown. No one has the ability to capture looming storm clouds the way he can. It’s easy to imagine the shots from the apartment rooftop becoming those large paintings which museums take such pride in displaying. Mr. Ceylan is also a photographer, and the composition of all of his shots is careful and considered, with the framing almost as important as what the image shows us. The pity is that this careful attention captures “Three Monkeys” in a bell jar.
MOVIE REVIEW
Chosyu Five (2006)
「長州ファイブ」製作委員会
Japan – a country which fiercely guarded its international isolation until 1852 – has, 160 years later, become a member of the G8, at the top table of nations worldwide. Its genius with software technology, cars and entertainment is feted globally, with products from Walkmans to Game Boys now ubiquitous in Western culture. This success is all the more amazing when we consider modernity was only introduced to Japan sporadically after 1852, with more rapid technological expansion only arriving after 1945. To be alive at this time in Japan was to live through a whirlwind of change, and not just in how Japan managed the outside world. The feudal system was still in place in the 1860s, with clans of samurai controlling different regions similar to Italy’s city-states, and local conflicts breaking out all the time.
MOVIE REVIEW
Now, I… (2009)
chiyuw
In Japan, these young men are called hikikomori. They barricade themselves in their rooms, forbidding other family members from entering, leaving only late at night to use the bathroom or raid food from the fridge. Perhaps they’ll go outside, but only at a time when they’ll run into as few people as possible. The word means “acute social withdrawal” and is a trend that seems to be on the recent increase across Asian Pacific. It seems to affect mostly young men who are disinterested in the pressure cooker of the educational system, but too intelligent to be happy working the unskilled jobs left over for the dropouts. In Britain, such young people are called NEETs (not in education, employment or training), but this doesn’t imply being a shut-in as well. Yasutomo Chikuma certainly has tapped the zeitgeist by choosing this as the topic for his first film, "Now, I…"
Continue reading “Permanent House Arrest With No Conviction” »