You can watch the full video of “Nostalgia for the Light” (2012) on the PBS POV website until January 23, 2013. Also available to watch instantly on Netflix.
The desert light in the daytime is sharp and destructive, slowly blinding you as you age. I grew up in what had been a desert, and that taught me to love the night, yet I never looked up to contemplate the stars. Perhaps if I had I would have learned to love the desert as Patricio Guzmán.
The plot in “Face/Off” (1997) may sound ridiculous in real life terms but allowing our imaginations to experience and accept such preposterous events, the kind none of us will ever be able to live through, is a prime example of the great feats that cinema can achieve. And what a fantastic concept “Face/Off” had to begin with. There have been recent features where I’ve had a hard time grasping how boardrooms full of film executives could possibly green light the spending of millions of dollars when being pitched ideas that no filmmaker, however talented, could ever have succeeded with (“A man cures his depression by talking to a puppet beaver!” “A young archer princess grows closer to her mother when a witch turns her into a bear!”).
Dedicated to all those who lost family members prematurely, and to two students — one struggling with addiction, and the other who lost her father.
This is grief. The silence that comes with a loved one’s death is like no normal silence. It is in our culture that we respond to this stillness with stillness upon stillness. We try to think of death as that leap into some great beyond, perhaps finally letting our loved one’s fluorescent inner radiance free. In the process, those loved ones take with them the air from within our lungs. So, in coping, we respond to their perceived new freedom by restricting ourselves with strict boundaries. And, as we cope with loss, we find relief in reunions. Time begins to jump around as we sit in the moment in front of us, leaping between moments in the past, frightened by the cloud in the future. The reunions open old happy memories that help turn that searing, salty burn of the tears into a blankety warmth. But, in our culture, the reunions often end quickly, leaving us alone in the darkness, unable to sleep. This is grief. And, this is what I observed in the first half hour of Susanne Bier’s soft-spoken “Things we Lost in the Fire” (2007).
Benh Zeitlin’s first feature film, “Beasts of the Southern Wild” (2012), is at times a wonderful and at times a gripping story of a little girl making sense in a forgotten land of trees and rust. It follows in the tradition of movies about happy children running through an unhappy world, in an America we never see on the screen. If she does not steal your heart in the first hour, she will surely grab it in the final thirty minutes. So, if you have your own little Ruthless Gradeschooler her age, then I pity the levees that hold back your tears.
La Luna available via VOD on YouTube.
The traditional end-of-the-year list-making craze is bound to dominate the Internet for the entire month of December (as well as stir many a Twitter feud). It’s hardly a stretch to foresee that most of the upcoming Top 10 lists will be dominated by three movies featuring remarkable kids. Benh Zeitlin’s “Beasts of the Southern Wild”, Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom” and the Dardenne brothers’ “The Kid with a Bike” all featured children as characters whose temperament, imagination and sheer physical energy couldn’t be contained by the (very different) worlds which they happened to inhabit.
* Available on Netflix Instant
The deliberate omission of a film’s plot point draws intrigue, anticipation, and dread toward its eventual reveal, but in “The Loneliest Planet,” director Julia Loktev’s terse, quixotic drama, that secretive center should rightly be the least emphasized aspect. Its narrative indeed hinges on a gesture best left discovered (although easily imagined), but it excels instead in exploring what shifts that crucial action represents. Etching into relief the mislaid assumptions on which relationships are founded and forgotten, there is a quiet, terrifying accuracy to Loktev’s work – one without fanfare or supernatural copout – that reveals itself under the guise of expressionistic travelogue into the Georgian mountains.
Some people hate “Dune” because it’s nothing like the novel, but venerate “The Shining” for the same reason. You can’t please everyone when you adapt a book to film, so you’re better off hoping you’ll please anyone. Even if it’s just a handful, it’s those few who will be your fiercest defenders against the purists. So let’s start with what Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit” isn’t: If you read the book, it’s not the book you read. It includes plot elements from “The Hobbit,” details that weren’t fleshed out in “The Lord of the Rings” movies, bits from the “LOTR” appendices, and stuff that was created for the sake of this new trilogy.
Robert Redford’s “Quiz Show” (1994) depicts the early days of television during the 1950s, a world that evoked fantasy but was run by real human beings. Unlike today’s TV programming, the shows from those days were innocent and naïve (much as portrayed in “Pleasantville”) but the people behind the scenes were like their colleagues in Sidney Lumet’s “Network” (1976). “Quiz Show” shares some basic themes with the latter: the wrongdoings that network executives repeatedly commit, those that good people can occasionally perpetrate as well through greed, and the common denominator between them.
Gathering the notion that excess equals legitimacy, studios as well as independents seem to have recently relegated the term “black” filmmaking to mean diversity-centric productions with market potential. In the past few years, as films like “Pariah,” “Restless City,” and “Middle of Nowhere” carve out singular representations of black perspectives. It seems damaging to believe that simple bait-and-switch tactics, as seen in Neil LaBute’s remake of “Death at a Funeral,” can fall under the same blanket classification.
It seems to be an unwritten rule that every superhero origin movie should have a scene in which the main character excitedly experiments with his or her powers before fully donning the mantle of the titular hero.
Consider the scene from “Spider-Man” in which Peter Parker scales walls and jumps from building to building joyously, or the one from “Iron Man” in which a reckless Tony Stark flies too far into the higher reaches of the atmosphere just to break that altitude record, or that scene from “Superman” in which the young Clark Kent races with a train.
No one is certain about dreams. If they tell you they are, they’re either fooling you or themselves. There isn’t a universally accepted definition of dreams. The whole idea behind them isn’t wholly understood. Even scientists aren’t sure about the purpose of dreams. And most of us don’t understand, or heck, even remember, our own dreams.My moseying around different blogs and websites has brought me a bit of random knowledge about the subject. I read there are two kinds of dreams: Authentic and Illusory. Authentic dreams are those that reflect actual memories and experiences of the dreamer. I guess that would mean they stick to the laws of physics and stuff too. Illusory dreams, on the other hand, contain impossible, incongruent, or bizarre content. Dali-esque stuff, maybe?I guess my brain must be messily wired or something, as I have, or at least remember having, mainly illusory dreams.
I’m not naive enough to believe that, at some point in history, the media political coverage (national or international) was in fact absolutely impartial. After all, controlling the typewriter and, later, computer keyboards were human beings with their own passions and ideologies – and it is clear that, even if they tried to be objective (those who tried, at least), they couldn’t avoid filtering one fact or another by following their particular beliefs. Unfortunately, even though that occurs, I doubt that the level of indoctrination exhibited by professional journalism in History reached the alarming level of proselytism we have witnessed in recent years: while in United States 9/11 turned the media into a spokesperson of Bush’s government, allowing him to lead the country to a war based on lies (something that many realized only a while ago), in Brazil large “journalistic” vehicles clearly embraced right-wing candidates during recent elections with no attempt whatsoever of masking their partisanship.
Mirrors and reflections have always been an obsession for filmmakers from all over the world – something that came as a result of the wealth of symbolism that they inspire, of course, but also of the psychological development all of us go through in order to recognize ourselves as individuals. (That led, for instance, to Jean-Louis Baudry’s brilliant analogy of the film spectator as someone regressing to the “Mirror Stage” described by Lacan). From Buñuel to Hitchcock and from Fritz Lang to Tarkovsky, directors from different eras and different styles have used doubles as a thematic basis of one or more of their works — but perhaps it has seldom been used so intensely and organically as in Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan.”
“Breaking Away” is a movie about four working class friends from a college town who are better know as “The Cutters” a term for the stone quarry workers from town who never got to go to college, and how cycling becomes their unexpected ticket into bigger and better things.
It is populated with original characters who feel completely real, they all have their ambitions, their fears and their regrets which are hardly unlike ours. Each of their numerous idiosyncrasies only serve to make them all the more endearing.
“With great power, comes great responsibility.” How many times have we superhero fans heard this line, let alone understand its implications? Do we really take to heart how much sacrifice such heroism involves, or comprehend what would be at stake? Superhero films tend to glorify ability over altruism. That is after all the main reason why we flock to the genre, to see amazing sights never seen before. But one film is special in how it focuses on the gravity of selflessness in spite of such might. And it does so not by showcasing its hero’s greatness, but his ordinariness. It’s Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man 2.”
Every couple of years I stumble upon a film that transcends its traditional entertainment purposes and goes for something more divine, ambitious and philosophical. When a film like this comes along, it reassures me that film is indeed the greatest art form of our time. Movies that had that awe-inspiring effect on me include: “Last Year At Marienbad”, “The Exterminating Angel”, “Persona”, “2001: A Space Odyssey”, “Dark City”, “Enter the Void”, “The Thin Red Line”, “Eyes Wide Shut” and “Synecdoche, New York”. I like to call them life-changers.
The Academy Award winners for the past thirty years have followed consistent molds, primarily in the categories of Best Actress, Best Actor, and Best Picture. It is a very simple set of templates that I will explain with excessive evidence. This is not to say that the Academy Awards are a conspiracy run by some secret society, although that idea would be quite fun. Rather, at the very least, there is a subtext to American culture that plays out in the ideas and ideals in American cinema, and it plays out consistently. At the very least, I’m illustrating some unwritten ideals in American culture. Whether or not they are healthy or corrupt, they are there in us. So, “Best Picture” is not a great movie; rather, it is a great movie that fulfills the mold.
I’m under the impression that people settle on an all-time favorite movie at a relatively early age. With time they become increasingly difficult to displace, no matter what cinematic greatness may follow. This is what best describes my experience with “Jaws” (1975). Eventually I may have acquired a greater admiration for “The Godfather” films but by then it was too late. My first viewing of “Jaws” felt perfect. I later learned it wasn’t.
After discovering that a cancer will take her life within a few months, Ann, a young 23 years-old, makes two important decisions: to hide the disease from everyone (including her husband and their two young daughters) and to draw up a list of things she wants to do before her death – and her wishes include “making love to another man” and “causing someone to fall for me.” This is the point at which “My Life Without Me,” directed and written by Isabel Coixet, risks scaring away its viewers: the attitudes of Ann show, yes, selfishness and immaturity.
Robert Zemeckis’ new film “Flight” (2012) returns us to the terrain of live action after his three consecutive animated films (two of which were happy movies about Christmas). Here, he makes it clear from the very first scene that this is a far edgier Zemeckis. It is far more graphic and far more emotional than anything we have previously seen from him. The result is on the outside a big budget public service announcement, while on the inside, a film far more complicated than it seems.
