Far Flungers

Symbols more real than reality

Omer M. Mozaffar

A few years ago, while sitting in the mosque during a Friday sermon, I noticed a man in the center of the second row. This is an octagonal mosque with bare white walls. On the outside, its bluish brick and yellow dome consciously invoke the Dome of the Rock, which itself, incidentally is not a mosque. This man was sitting on the blue carpet with the rest of us, about six feet away from the preaching Imam, yet interestingly, he was not looking at him. The Imam was dressed in a white thobe, white skull cap, and that contrasted his thick jet-black beard. Instead, the man of salt-and-pepper beard was staring at the giant projection of this Imam on a screen above. I don’t remember what the Imam was speaking about that day, which might explain why I was probably staring curiously at this man as he stared at the live video projection of the preacher standing right in front of him. But, for reasons I will explain below, that moment comes to mind when I think of Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus” (2012).

A gut-chilling Japanese thriller

It begins on the last day of the semester at a classroom of some Japanese junior high school. Though they will return to their school after a month, most of the students are very excited while waiting for the time to leave their classroom and enjoy spring break. They are mostly occupied with talking with or texting to their colleagues in the noisy classroom. They do not give a damn about what their teacher tries tell to them, while never imagining the terror she will soon unleash upon them.

You see me here, you gods, a poor old man

It’s always difficult to put a play on the stage. Actors and crews work hard amid many setbacks that can happen on and behind the stage. If they are lucky, they will survive today’s performance with descending curtain and some fulfillment. Then they will have to struggle for another performance tomorrow with today’s performance faded into yesterday.

It sounds gloomy, but people in “The Dresser”(1983) stick together and try to go on while believing they are accomplishing something in spite of their mundane reality in and out of theater. At one moment, one character confides to the other about her life spent on theater business: “No, I haven’t been happy. Yes, it’s been worth it.” Norman, played by Tom Courtenay, can say the same thing if asked.

Bullhead: A man running from his past

He wants to forget about it, but it is impossible for him to get away from it, because that has driven him to be who he is now. As the opening narration suggests, even if it is buried below and everyone including him is silent about that as if nothing ever had happened, it never goes away. It remains beneath the surface, and it is bound to be brought up again in one way or another, and there is no way of release possible for him.

One of the most disgusting horror films ever made

Some horror movies have mercy on uninformed audiences who have no idea about what they will get. The opening sequence of New Zealand horror film “Dead Alive” (1992), which is also known as “Braindead”, is a good example because it kindly gives the audiences a very clear idea of what it about and how it is about. As the hero escapes from the natives of Skull Island (Southwest of Sumatra) with a mysterious creature dreaded by the natives, he accidentally gets bitten by the animal, hidden in a wooden crate. He says he’s all right, but his local employees are suddenly frightened about that.

The agony of making cinema

Gerardo Valero

When it comes to “Making of” documentaries, I put one above all others. It is “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse” (1991), a full-length feature about the filming of Francis Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now”. Nothing quite illustrates its impact like Francois Truffaut’s statement: “I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not interested in anything in between.” That the pain it captures eventually translated into cinematic greatness only serves to make it more compelling.

“The Messenger” discussed by Omar Moore of London and San Francisco

Hello, I’m Omar Moore. I was born and raised in London, where I grew up before moving to New York City with my parents. After branching out in the Big Apple on my own for a number of years, I moved west to San Francisco. I love America and its promise. We all need to do our small part to make this great country even better for all. Where a film is concerned, it is never “only a movie.” Images mean something. They have unyielding power and influence, whether in “Birth of A Nation”, “Un Chien Andalou”, “Night Of The Hunter”, “Killer Of Sheep”, “Persona”, “Psycho”, “A Clockwork Orange”, “Blazing Saddles”, “Straw Dogs”, “Soul Man”, “Chameleon Street”, “Do The Right Thing”, “Bamboozled” or “Irreversible”. A filmmaker generally doesn’t put images in a film if they are meaningless.

The mesmerizing masterpiece “Memento”

In the wake of the disappointing “Shutter Island”, it’s especially gratifying to look back at Christopher Nolan’s feature film “Memento” (2001), an indie mystery starring Guy Pearce as a San Francisco man in Los Angeles suffering from anterograde amnesia, or short-term memory loss. 

A Tarantinian Bank Job

Gerardo Valero

One of the best things that can happen to a moviegoer is showing up expecting a standard genre film and ending up seeing something better. This was my experience with Roger Donaldson’s “The Bank Job” which at first sight seemed like just another Hollywood caper movie in which the inevitable elements could be timed with a stopwatch.

Omer Mozaffar, a Pakistani Chicagoan, discusses James Cameron’s “Avatar”

Omer M. Mozaffar

I was born in Karachi, Pakistan, at a very young age. My beloved parents rode the huge wave that was the South Asian diaspora, landing here in Chicagoland, where I’ve been ever since. Thus, like many of my peers, I’ve been in a state of constant exile.

On the South Side of Chicago, I’m a Pakistani. In the rest of Chicago, I’m a Southsider. In the rest of America, I’m a Chicagoan. In the rest of the world, I’m an American. That is today’s “normal,” isn’t it? We are simultaneously, unintentionally local and global.

Still, the most comfortable spot for me is a center seat in the anonymous darkness of a crowded theater on the opening night of a movie. If you are reading this note on Roger Ebert’s blog, then perhaps you feel the same way.

Lisa Nesselson from Paris: On the man who made you think you spoke French

Lisa Nesselson

Paris, Jan. 11 — The phone rang at 5:30 p.m.. It was France’s around-the-clock cable news station France24 asking if I could speak about the death of Eric Rohmer, live, in about 10 minutes. The news was very fresh in France and this was the first I’d heard of it.

Except for François Truffaut and Louis Malle, who both died relatively young, the most prolific talents of the French New Wave era are still at it. Claude Chabrol makes at least one film a year; Jacques Rivette and Alain Resnais released new features in 2009; Agnes Varda is busy mounting conceptual installations when she’s not making her delightful documentaries; Jean-Luc Godard is still tinkering away on digital video.

You begin to think they’re immortal — that much like symphony conductors who live to ripe old ages because waving their arms around is excellent exercise, that “pointing into the distance” pose so characteristic of film directors may be a boon to their longevity.

A letter from Cairo on February 11, 2011

Today I walked the streets of Egypt proud–proud of my people and my country. It took us 18 days of protests to force Mubarak and his corrupt regime to resign. Their accounts will be frozen and the billions of dollars that should’ve gone into building a better and cleaner country will finally be restored for the good of our nation.

Mubarak left and we’re all proud of getting rid of a corrupt dictator but it’s the incidents I’ve witnessed with my own eyes throughout this revolution that has me swollen with pride. When Muslims prayed on a bridge, the police sprayed them with water and even though some slipped and fell, they stood back up and resumed. Egyptians of all religions were moved by this and when the water was pointed back at them, they created another front line of prayers. People kept coming in to reduce the impact of the water.

A world of one’s own

In a science magazine I used to read during my high school years, one of my favorite sections was on the science in SF movies. (The magazine is still published; whenever I come across it at the campus book store, it takes me back to when I was less jaded and more anti-social.) It answered my doubts on the climax sequence in “Total Recall” (1990), and pointed out that there were several implausible aspects in the premise of “Jurassic Park” (1993). In case of the movies like “Armageddon” (1998) and “Independence Day” (1996)–well, it didn’t require a lot of scientific knowledge to discern that they were brainless.

“Kill Bill” and the love of cinema

Gerardo Valero

It’s hard to come up with many directors willing to take the leaps of faith that Quentin Tarantino does in every scene of his every movie. It’s even harder to come up with any who have the talent to back-up even trying. The biggest reason Tarantino has such a huge following may be how he goes all-out with seemingly little or no concern for crashing — which, amazingly, he never seems to do.

These men could have been friends

Gerardo Valero

A few film directors end up becoming masters of specific subjects. Scorsese grew up in an environment that allowed him to understand organized crime from the inside. Tarantino has a grasp on the language that some street people, their drugs of choice and their methods of use, and so on. Michael Mann is the Hollywood Epic Techno-Crime expert. Did he grow up with it? Did he research it? A few years ago, I came across an old 70s Starsky & Hutch episode which happened to be written by him; in it, a serial killer claimed to receive his murdering orders from outer space and wore a tin-foil pointy-shaped hat for just that purpose. This means I’m basically leaning towards research, but your guess is as good as mine.

Services at Santa Barbara

Anath White

“The church of baseball.” That’s a term from Annie Savoy, Susan Sarandon’s vivid character in “Bull Durham,” that film of men, women and baseball, written and directed by Santa Barbara native Ron Shelton. I’m lifting the phrase here, adapting it for films and film festivals.Call it the church of cinema. That’s been my experience and my “church” since age 18, a kid in college. I’d escape the campus upheaval, both political (this was the anti-war era) and personal (the sexual revolution hitting big time), and my search for identity, with a respite every Wednesday afternoon; with a couple dozen others, I became a weekly acolyte at screenings of the International Film Series at the University of Colorado at Boulder. There I discovered Belmondo, Bertolucci, “The Battle of Algiers.” My world blew open and I never looked back.

The do-it-yourself auteurs

Steven Boone

• Video by Kevin B. Lee • Text by Steven Boone

German Expressionism, Soviet Montage, Italian Neo-Realism, the French New Wave , the Japanese New Wave, the Australian New Wave, Cinema Novo, the New American Cinema, Cinema du Look, the Black Pack, Dogme 95, mumblecore…

In the cinema world, film “waves”–movements of like minded filmmakers bound by generation, nationality, stylistic tendencies or social/political position–rise, crest and fall away every decade. But the latest wave is something different.

Ashes Are For Ever

Michał Oleszczyk

The original poster for “Ashes and Diamonds” resembles a desperate message written down in blood. Indeed, when Andrzej Wajda’s film opened in Poland in March 1958, it was greeted with a sense of urgency by the nation at large. Finally (thirteen years after WW2 ended) a movie got made that acknowledged the plight of the Home Army: the true war heroes whose vision of a free Poland didn’t include a communist takeover. For more than a decade, these people have been banned from collective memory and referred to only with state-approved derision. Suddenly, a Home Army officer was the focal point of a major film. And even though he died at the end, the viewers were identifying with his lost cause rather than with the winning one. They knew the latter all too well from their everyday lives to cheer it.

Racing toward oblivion

Omer M. Mozaffar

As we race further and faster toward a global war between Christians and Muslims, and as we feel compelled to choose sides, I have to think back to my childhood. One of the blessings of my youth is that my parents raised me in the simple, small life of the South Suburbs of Chicago. When we landed, the overwhelming majority of South Asian immigrants took residence in the North and West sides. The blessing is not that I was raised away from most other Pakistanis and Indians. Rather, that I grew up in a town that boldly, humbly calls itself a “Community of Churches.” It is a small town that banned all business on Sundays and prohibited any liquor sales any time of the day or week. And, what becomes more important is that when watching a film like Ridley Scott’s “Kingdom of Heaven” (2005), I remember my wonderful neighbors, childhood friends, and teachers far more than I remember the television and internet bigots who today masquerade as Christians, no matter how many of them there seem to be.

Mike Rix of Johannesburg discusses “District 9,” filmed in South Africa

I was born on the 20th of March 1974 in sunny Johannesburg. My love of movies began at a very young age. 80’s classics like “E.T. The Extra Terrestrial,” “Back to the Future” and “Rain Man” inspired me to study film after leaving school. At the Pretoria Technikon Film and Television School, my natural talent for low budget clay-mation was discovered when I threw together a one minute mixed-media animated short in the space of a day, which went on to score a unanimous 95% from the resident lecturers.

Since leaving film school in 1996, I’ve been involved in numerous productions for South African television, working as writer, director, animator and editor on shows such as Options, Arts Unlimited, Rise up and Read, Red Bull Flugtag, Sanlam Money Game, Golf Digest TV and Ultra Simple Golf, as well as numerous music videos, commercials and corporate training films. I also wrote, directed and edited Man in the Street, a micro-budget feature film screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2003.