While I heard the alarming reports coming from the Fukushima I nuclear power plant, an unforgettably intense sequence from “The China Syndrome” (1979) immediately came to my mind. An earthquake occurs without warning. The power plant is automatically shut down. They get a problem with the level of the coolant. The plant is on the verge of nuclear meltdown. The catastrophe of epic proportions may happen as a consequence.
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There is a shot in “Voices from the Shadows” that shows a man in his twenties lying forlornly in bed.
Like the rest of the documentary, it exists to illustrate the miserable effects of the illness Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, or ME, which is often unhelpfully called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
There is a detail in the shot that haunts me. The man has a beard, of a length and thickness unusual, and unsuitable, for someone his age. He has the beard because he is unable to stand up long enough to shave and because having his parents, or a nurse, sit and shave him as he lays in bed is messy, uncomfortable and undignified. Every morning he thinks about shaving but his reserves of energy are so limited that he has to choose between being able to go to the bathroom because he wants to shave or, later in the day, being able to go to the bathroom because he needs to go to the bathroom.
If you haven’t heard about Stephen Glass, who was a former employee of the New Republic, you may think he is a nice lad who occasionally screws things up while you watch him at the beginning of “Shattered Glass” (2003). Sometimes it’s not easy to be angry about him because he is so sweet and considerate to the people working with him. If it seems they find a problem or error caused by him, he quickly admits and apologizes to them while looking like he is nervous about whether they won’t like him any more for that. He frequently asks to them as if he wanted to check that: “Are you mad at me?”
There is a 20 second moment in Jason Reitman’s “Young Adult” that just floored me. Here is the story of a High School Prom Queen — Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) – revisiting her hometown on a targeted mission to reclaim her old boyfriend. She walks through her parents’ house and sees a large wedding photo. I thought it was a photo of her parents; her mother looks just like her? But, no, it is her own wedding. Not only do her parents keep the photo, but her father casually praises her ex-husband. I don’t remember how long she’s been divorced, but I was devastated just listening to his comments. Any normal parent would break his or her back to provide the child with every benefit; any child knows this. Still, the child also needs to hear the “I love you” and the “I value you” and the “I’m proud of you.” But, when the child’s ears hear, “I like your ex-spouse,” from the two people she needs validation from, they are saying, “I like your ex-spouse, though he is worth nothing compared to you.” What she instead hears is, “You’re no good. You failed. I’m siding with him.”
Is it love at first sight? It’s certainly lust at first sight between them in the beginning. Something clicks inside. They soon begin their secret affair, and then, motivated by their common desire to escape from the world they’re stuck in, they hatch a scheme to solve their problems once for all. They have a good plan. They can succeed if they carefully tiptoe along the thin line they draw. However, in the world of film noir, it is usually easier said than done.
Yesterday it was cold and rainy and glum. I searched for background movies to put on while I wrote, but my usual George Cukor go-tos weren’t doing the trick. I branched out. Shane, Forbidden Games, Love & Anarchy, Mogambo, and various classic TV shows were turned on and shut off. Nothing worked. I decided to take a twenty minute nap to shake the damp.
Of late, I’ve been thinking about how I got here. Here, in love with movie watching and movie making. Here, in a design school in India, and not an engineering college or a medical school like predetermined for most Indian students. Here, in correspondence with a huge role model of mine. Here, doing what I love.
There are a few spoilers here. Because I am mentioning that there are spoilers, I am implying that there are things you do not want to know in advance, thus making you curious, thus lifting your expectations higher than they should be, thus making it harder for you to enjoy the film. So, enter at your own risk.
Occasionally I receive a paper from a student that is so outstanding in content and ideas, that in grading it I am compelled to overlook the shortcomings in argument, style and polish. Such is my experience with Christopher Nolan’s “Inception.” This movie is very ambitious, not only in the ideas it explores, but also in the expectations it has of its audience. In my estimation, having watched the film on a giant screen with a packed theater of cheering, laughing, and groaning moviegoers at a popular suburban multiplex, it fulfills its ambitions of big-budget intelligent storytelling.
Regardless of how one feels about the Vatican and its handling of its recent crises, one cannot help but doubt how much we feel let down. Religion of any sort has long been regarded as our moral authority. Some today will think it is outdated, others still necessary.
Everyone should be able to believe want they want to, but there is no doubt that when it comes to belief, there is nothing quite as dangerous as blind faith.
• Grace Wang in Toronto, whose four-part video interview with Chung is below her essay.
Lucky life isn’t one long string of horrorsand there are moments of peace, and pleasure, as I lie in between the blows.
– Lucky Life by Gerald Stern
Ringing true to the poem the film is inspired by, Lee Isaac Chung’s “Lucky Life” avoids the typical horrors of cookie-cutter narratives, and belies itself to moments of peace and pleasure that lull within its memory-shaped form.
With the exception of “The Matrix” and the odd documentary, movies tend to pay only lip service an architect’s job. “Sleepless in Seattle’s” Sam Baldwin is an architect, but he might as well be a meat-packer. The movie is a romantic comedy with little room for anything but serendipity. It takes us to a couple of architectural landmarks, but not because Sam’s profession compels him to.
So naturally, I was curious to know what the architectural community thought of “Inception,” where the discipline is actually effectual. I was a bit disappointed to discover that while architectural journalists were entertained by the film, they didn’t care much for its buildings. James Benedict Brown calls Ariadne “a dependable square,” Aaron Betsky says her work is “banal,” and David Neustein finds that Cobb and Mal’s dream city is “hardly a honeymoon destination.”
While he has been called “the Master of Suspense,” Alfred Hitchcock has also been called “the Master of the Macabre,” and that title is exemplified by his delightful black comedy “The Trouble with Harry” (1955). On the surface, it looks quite atypical compared to Hitchcock’s more famous works, but this is a vintage story from a great director with a wry sense of humor, and it is also one of the most liveliest works in his exceptional career. Although somebody is dead, there is no suspense or danger or blond lady in the movie, and all we have to do is leisurely enjoy a pleasant walk with its funny characters as they try to deal with bizarre trouble on one fine autumn day in their ordinary peaceful rural town in Vermont.
Call it a bloodbath. Not literally, of course, but it sure felt like one.
It was a Friday afternoon in late spring 1993 at The American Film Institute. The Class of 1992, which had pretty much killed itself making short films (“cycle projects”) since starting the program in September, was waiting for a list. Dreading it, too. Because everybody’d known all year that of 168 “Fellows,” as AFI calls them — only 40 (or just 8 across 5 disciplines – directing, producing, cinematography, editing, production design) would be invited back, making that coveted Second Year cut for the opportunity to produce a second year film.
A top secret selection committee debated late into the day. Even I, then Special Projects Coordinator and right hand to the Dean of Studies, didn’t know who was meeting. There was tension everywhere, clinging like the humidity of a Midwestern summer, as the committee decided, and the Fellows waited.
Revenge is served raw and simple in “Bedevilled”(2010). The movie delivers exactly what it promises to us, but that is not for free. There are barbarous scenes that make you wince, and then there are bloody scenes that make you cringe, but this South Korean revenge thriller has gallons of emotions to spurt on the screen in its sad, wretched character. It carefully prepares its ground while seemingly following the typical formula of revenge movies featuring abused heroines. It continuously accumulates explosives beneath its surface as the plot progresses. And then, when the time comes, it explodes its anger magnificently like a harrowing bloody aria.
I told Roger it would take me 48 hours to review “Sin Nombre” and yet hours turned to days and days to months, and I still had not reviewed it. Scratch that. I did write four reviews, but not a satisfactory one. The first review was too much about my views on immigration and didn’t elaborate much on the film. The second was the other way around. The third was about how the film was great based on the way it was shot. That one was too technical. The fourth review was too personal; a review should be about the
Sometimes people learn a hard life lesson about their world when they are young and innocent. Molly, a young white South African girl in “A World Apart” (1988), learns it in a way far more hurtful than usual. She wants her normal comfortable life to resume again, but her world is Johannesburg in the 1960s. She begins to grasp lots of injustices in her world, even while confused and hurt a lot by her parents as well as what happens to her and her family.
As the quiet, fragrant hickory quality of the American Small Town fades into disposable plastic franchises, we find ourselves longing. For some, the American small town is the home they have been handed, being the home that they have chosen to keep. For some, it is the refuge away from the complications of city into a new simple life of inconspicuous rebirth. For many of us, however, the small town is an idealized yesterday that we mourn, nostalgic for a return to a black and white television show with Opie and Andy. The strange thing about Victor Nunez’s “Ulee’s Gold,” is that it made me long to return to a hometown, an American small town, that I never lived in.
There exists a stationary phase in wars unless they end quickly. The soldiers on both sides doubt whether they can survive; they are more exhausted day by day and it seems their hardship will last forever until they are killed in the battlefield. Even so, when the time to battle against the enemy comes again, they have no choice; they always do whatever their survival instinct drives them to do, and there come more scars and pains to be stored in their hurt lockers.
Legendary movie critic Pauline Kael formally recognized Morgan Freeman’s talents in her review: “Morgan Freeman may be the greatest American actor.” It’s hard to argue with that title now, but it was in 1987 when she wrote her review for “Street Smart.”
From the perspective of more than 20 years after its theatrical release in the US, it’s rather surprising to think that this small, flawed movie boosted the career of one of the great American actors of our time. It garnered him his first Oscar nomination (he lost to Sean Connery in “The Untouchables”) and that was just the start. He has been nominated for an Oscar five times in total and received the Oscar for best supporting actor for “Million Dollar Baby”. He is now one of the most formidable actors in Hollywood and is consistently watchable on the screen.
Don Siegel’s “Dirty Harry” (1971) may not be the greatest film of Clint Eastwood’s career but its title character is certainly the one that best defines it. Looking back, it’s hard to imagine it took five years for such an acclaimed picture to arrive here in Mexico. Censorship wasn’t common in those days but there was something about “Harry.” The only other feature that I can recall getting a similar treatment was “Two Minute Warning” with Charlton Heston. Both dealt with mad snipers on the loose so my guess is that someone decided it was better not to give anyone ideas.
