Month: November 2007

Directed by Julie Gavras (daughter of Costa-Gavras), this tells the story of a young, nine year-old girl in early 1970s Paris. Born of a well-to-do family, and used to bourgeois comforts, she reacts angrily when her parents become radicalized by events in Franco’s Spain and Allende’s Chile, and by the women’s liberation movement. The movie watches and evaluates the parents through the eyes of the girl, Anna (played by an impressive Nina Kervel-Bey). Not a great film, primarily because the parents’ are never believable, either as radicals or parents, and because the trajectory of the film is too obvious, as Anna softens to the revolution, questions her catholic nun teachers, and comes to like the “beatnik-hippy” friends that her parents make in their solidarity work. It lacks the hard edge of Costa-Gavras’s films, exploring the human reaction to great events rather than the events themselves. Still, it is an affecting film, if only because these were genuinely momentous events going on, and to live through them was to be transformed. As soon as I finished watching I found good versions of ‘Ay Carmela’, ‘Hasta Siempre’ and ‘Bella Ciao’ to download and listen to. It could almost have been the 1970s again.

A gut-punching horror film that captures with almost perfect pitch the pervasive dread of Stephen King’s best work. Okay, sure: this is a giant other-dimensional bug movie, with a creature-feature set-up (a group of civilians trapped in a small space, facing this aggressive unknown), and laden with many of the sorts of corn-poney character tics that sometimes drowns King’s work. Even with such constraints, though, Frank Darabont works some wonders: the creatures are generally be-misted, foggy hints of things we’re left imagining, or–when dragged into the limelight for stop-motion or goofy-puppet attacks, they’re consistently freaky; the group trapped in the supermarket hew to certain stock traits but the actors and the writing make the human dynamics something consistently stronger than you’d expect from a skeletal plot outline (particularly fine are Toby Jones and William Sadler).

But what fucking nailed me was the way the camera would turn and face–unflinchingly, for far too long–raw human fear and anxiety. Sure, the set-up’s silly, but you take the leap (there are things in the Mist!) and suddenly Thomas Jane trying to console his terrified crying boy for what seems like three full minutes is beyond unnerving–it’s deeply unsettling. Continue reading The Mist

Watching Beowulf in digital 3D, I’d occasionally “ooh” or “ah” at a very long track back through snow-covered tree branches or men grounding a boat at a great distance from our perspective on a beach made of millions of carefully-rendered grey rocks.

Otherwise, the film sucked. Complete waste of time, unless you like yelling. Oh, maybe Crispin Glover’s interesting–gives his most intelligible performance in garbled pidgin Middle English, with his lower jaw jutting to the right (I kept waiting for him to tell me about sling blades) and oozing blood and pus and mucus from every pore.

I’m interested in what you all think of this, not least because there is probably some experience of student films produced on a tiny budget on this blog. The only reference I can find to it here was a comment from Michael earlier this year about the problems getting the movie released because the songs used on the soundtrack had not been licensed. In any case, this was made by Charles Burnett (of To Sleep With Anger and Glass Shield) for $10K in 1977. It has only just been released on DVD and it is a revelation. Done in documentary style, in black and white, the camera just captures life in South Central LA, presumably contemporaneously, though there is a 1940s almost rural feel to many of the scenes. It is unlike any depiction of urban African American life I have seen (and of course The Wire is much on my mind right now). There is a joyousness on the part of the characters, especially the children who are playing in and on vacant lots, railyards, rooftops and so on, and Burnett shows a deep affection for his characters. It is just poor people working away on their lives (one of the best lines has a character actor explain that he is not poor because he gives stuff away to the Salvation Army). The explosion of films in the 1990s about South Central gang warfare seems a million miles away. The DVD comes with a commentary track and three other Burnett shorts, all worth watching. The first, dating from 1969 looks like a study for Killer of Sheep. Oh, and the soundtrack is incredibly good.

But my real question is: how can a film maker this good have made so few films of note? Apart from Killer and the two I mentioned above, it is a very thin resume including a fair amount of forgettable TV.

well, comrades, I’d like to pick your brains. It is time again for me to wrack my brains for a theme for my writing courses for next semester, and in my half-assed way I have come up with a title but no content. “Film and Global History”–how’s that for vague and overweening? anyway, what I want is a combination of readings (literary, essays, commentary) and films that explore the relations between recent global history and film, particularly films that might look at American experience from an international point of view. So far the only film I have decided on is the remarkable documentary (now available on DVD) The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On . any suggestions? I am wary of the earnest historical film (which many of them would love!)–say, those of the Schindler’s List variety–so I’d particularly like black comedies, absurdist farces about horrific events, obscure avant-garde exercises and squirm-inducing documentaries. if you know of readings and films that would work particularly well together, let me know.

The title refers to Frank Lucas, who controlled a big chunk of the New York heroin trade for the first half of the 1970s. The movie follows two parallel tracks: first the rise of Lucas, played by Denzel Washington; second, the efforts of Ritchie Roberts, played by Russell Crowe, to catch him. This is enjoyable, and the first half is compelling, but somehow it didn’t quite cohere for me. Continue reading American Gangster