Category: classic

has anyone reviewed this? i can’t see it. regardless.

this film starts with a couple talking to a judge. the camera is on the couple. the judge is invisible throughout but we can hear his questions. he sounds very reasonable. the couple discusses heatedly the question of their separation. the wife wants to leave the country; the husband says it’s impossible because he has to take care of his ill elderly father. they are both fetching (the wife is beautiful), articulate, passionate. they mostly look at the judge. neither gives an inch. the judge says that the only option is for them to separate. enter the problem of the 11-year-old daughter. the wife wants the daughter to go with her. the husband says the daughter doesn’t want to go. the judge (if memory serves) leaves it at that. the film starts as a family drama. Continue reading a separation

This is best film I’ve seen all year and will be released on DVD next Tuesday so I thought I might encourage all to bump it up to the top of your Netflix queue. Jacques Audiard’s film (which was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Foreign Language Film this past February) is best described as magical neo-realism and tells the story of Malik, a passive, scared, eighteen-year-old who speaks French and Arabic but has been a ward of the state for so long, he really doesn’t know who or what he is. Serving a six-year prison sentence for assault, Malik’s first days are grim, but he is soon made an offer by the Corsican crime syndicate who runs life behind bars . . . let’s just say it’s an offer he can’t refuse (and one which will change the course of his life in ways not even Malik can fully comprehend). As the days and weeks and months and years accumulate, Malik grapples with issues of loyalty, morality, religion and guilt in a coming-of-age drama which is truly epic in scope. Un Prophète instantly evokes comparisons to Coppola’s The Godfather, Scorsese’s Goodfellas, and Meirelles’ City of God. It really is that good.

This is best film I’ve seen all year and in honor of its DVD release next Tuesday, I thought I might encourage all to bump it up to the top of your Netflix queues. Jacques Audiard’s film (which was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Foreign Language Film this past February) is best described as magical neo-realism and tells the story of Malik, a passive, scared, eighteen-year-old who speaks French and Arabic but has been a ward of the state for so long, he really doesn’t know who or what he is. Serving a six-year prison sentence for assault, Malik’s first days are grim, but he is soon made an offer by the Corsican crime syndicate who runs life behind bars . . . let’s just say it’s an offer he can’t refuse (and one which will change the course of his life in ways not even Malik can fully comprehend). As the days and weeks and months and years accumulate, Malik grapples with issues of loyalty, morality, religion and guilt in a coming-of-age drama which is truly epic in scope. Un Prophète instantly evokes comparisons to Coppola’s The Godfather, Scorsese’s Goodfellas, and Meirelles’ City of God. It really is that good.

I rented this almost out of obligation — oh, critical acclaim, some kind of prominent artist behind it all, the Troubles, Bobby Sands. Yes, sure, sounds good for me, let’s scan through it quickly. But I found this film astonishing, powerful and beautiful and brutal and unexpected in its force and aesthetics. I can’t recommend it more highly.

And, yes, it is about the group of Irish prisoners leading the blanket [no uniforms accepted, prisoners naked but for woolen blankets] and dirty [urine spilled into the halls, shit smeared all over the walls] protests, demanding political status from Thatcher’s government, and about Bobby Sands, more centrally, deciding upon a hunger strike and then slowly, painfully whittled away. But Steve McQueen’s focus is on the body, as a complex site of political and aesthetic will. Continue reading Hunger

I very much enjoyed Armando Iannucci’s film In the Loop (buried after nattering on about The Hurt Locker), but the original series which spawned the film–The Thick of It–is even better.

In the interests of sweeping characterization of national identity, let me say that no one does the comedy of viciousness like the British. There are some great American satires, but such comedies here often counterpose the brute nasty with a sense of sentiment or meaning. Or just soften the blows in other ways — no one is totally ruthlessly mean, or if they are, then someone around them is a counterbalance, a Candide-like innocent protecting the audience from the caustic. But a great vicious British comedy (Waugh, Amis–father or son, Cleese’s Fawlty) mocks everyone and everything. There are no heroes.

Continue reading Come the fuck in or fuck the fuck off

Spike Lee’s well-choreographed record of the last performance of the musical Passing Strange may have a (very) familiar narrative arc–young alienated man, seeking true expression and self and art, misses the reality of relationships and love. Yet it has this rock-(and-r&b-and-soul-not-to-mention-cabaret-and-a-little-Kraftwerk-and-a-thousand-other-eclectic-musical-allusions-)operatic vigor that made me forget I’d ever seen a musical before. Narrated by singer/writer Stew and his greek-chorus band, this movie is as funny, moving, and deliriously melodically gorgeous as any I’ve seen in some time. The cast is sweaty and superb; Stew is a fucking wonder; the songs are as lyrically twisty as Sondheim, and there are moments of thumping keyboard and percussive soaring guitar and choral chant that almost had me, alone in my living room, on my feet.

In the critical din about Spike Jonze’ vision of Sendak’s glorious little book, count me one more small voice in the chorus of unqualified love and admiration. It is now a hat-trick: the three most affecting, technically intriguing, emotionally-complicated films I’ve seen this year have all been children’s films. (And I still await Wes Anderson’s stab at the genre, and it’s not counting Miyazaki’s very fine but thinner Ponyo.) I really want to see it again–this time without the two toddlers behind me chattering and cooing over various sequences and/or various snacks and/or other things that popped into their head when the film wandered off rumpus into reverie. But, at the moment, it feels like the best film I’ve seen. Continue reading Wild Things