Lust blinds. Love confounds. “Happy, Happy” is the feature-length debut of Anne Sewitsky. Each of us has faced the questions of whether someone is the one for us. Sometimes the answer to that question is easy; it’d be great to know that life. What happens when you have to face the fact that you chose the wrong partner and lover?
“Happy, Happy,” a Norwegian film, confronts that question in sensitive and sloppy ways. There are two very different couples, neither of which is happy. One man is fleeing from the memories of his wife’s infidelity. One woman isn’t sure why her man feels nothing for and in fact belittles her. And why he’s fine with ignoring his reasons why.
A happy marriage – each to someone else. (Courtesy: Magnolia Pictures)
Love is often a compromise, but how much do you give or give up for happiness? In this story of love, which might not be a love story, an educated couple Sivge (Henrik Rafaelsen) and Elisabeth (Maibrett Saerens) rents a house from and is greeted by a provincial and friendly couple, Eirik (Joachim Rafaelsen) and Kaja (Agnes Kittelsen). Elisabeth and Sivge are professionals, while Kaja and Eirik do…we don’t know what. Each couple has a son. Elisabeth and Sivge is adopted from Ethiopia. Why they are in this story is a mystery – neither helps the story. Mysteriously Kaja no longer interests Eirik. Some months ago Elisabeth cheated on Sivge.
Kaja, made vulnerable by Eirik’s chronic disinterest in and belittling of her, finds a role model in Sivge and Elisabeth, and a distraction in Sivge. He finds a refreshing and welcome warmth and sweetness in Kaja. But Eirik faces a different, confusing problem: why’d he choose Kaja? What does he want?
This is a competent film with problems, which make you scratch your head: there’s a bizarre, awkward subplot concentrating on Elisabeth and Sivge’s adopted Ethiopian son. For an inexplicable reason, after having found a children’s book on slavery, Kaja and Eirik’s son decides to play “slave” games with the boy. He somewhat playfully treats him as one.
How does love look when you want the other's partner? (Courtesy: Magnolia Picture)
These distractions work like a musical segment from a circa mid-20th-Century movie: a Negro band plays a song, which is irrelevant to the movie, and, which when played in the South, could be removed so that it wouldn’t offend that region’s sensibilities.
There’s a palate-cleansing devise bombs: a choral group, which sings between acts. While the songs suit the story sometimes, they don’t serve it. The subplots don’t support or propel the main story – they give nothing to it. If the director had omitted either of these problems, she could’ve also omitted at least 15-minutes from the film.
This is a competent film with a nice, quiet and smart story. But doesn’t need to run for much longer than an hour.
In South Africa we have the story of a girl, Chanda (Khomotso Mankaya), who has to confront stigmas that hurt her small one-parent family, which is led by her mother, Esther (Keaobaka Makanyane). It’s “Life, Above All,” by Oliver Schmitz.
We start when Chanda runs an errand to take care of her youngest sister, Sarah’s, funeral. She died from a plague that no one discusses. Above all, in dealing with life, theirs is a story about survival: how they pay their bills, deal with shameful rumors and the sneers from their neighbors are open questions.
Mom and daughter keep hope tight between them (courtesy Sony Classics)
This simple story, about a complicated fight to survive disease and ignorance, both willful and desperate, will show at the Lagoon Cinema starting on August 5th. This story is interesting, beginning too slowly, and getting and giving us its bearings about half-way through.
Chanda, headstrong and critically thoughtful, lives in a provincial, barely educated culture that’s more invested in religion and superstition than in education. She succeeded in school until her family’s burdens, especially Sarah’s death, began to weigh on her. She stands-up for her mom’s health, and stands up to the rumors, deadbeat dad and her traditional family’s scorn, and superstitious neighbors who disdain her.
The plague finally takes the steam out of Chanda’s mom, who is moved away, out of view of gossip mongers. After what seems like weeks without parents, Chanda tracks down her mom, having to ignore some neighbors’ misdirection on the way. Chanda’s smart enough to understand that some questions and topics are beyond herself; she needs her mom.
It's hard for an 11 year-old to lead a family (courtesy Sony Classics)
This simple, but gripping coming-of-age story is worth watching.
As with Ree Dolly, from 2010′s splendid “Winter’s Bone,” Chanda must grow-up too early and too quickly, around people for whom education is simply an extra. For her it promises an array of freedoms. She faces a short, but hard journey as she tracks down her mom and needs to suck comfort from that.
Ms. Mankaya’s performance as Chanda is potent; her talent is either natural or her craft so formidable that her nuances and touches make Chanda live, be real. Just as with Jennifer Lawrence’s extraordinary, under-appreciated performance in “Winter’s Bone,” Mankaya her character a similar subtlety.
Broader takeaways: “Life, Above All” is a decent film about a simple family, who must deal with a merciless, taboo disease and neighbors who won’t picture themselves beyond superstitions. These people’s lives are basic. They’re prepared for no questions more ambitious than “how do I feed myself and children?”
One reason to watch Chanda’s and her family story: she is prepared for those ambitions. That’s a different kind of hunger.
“Crime After Crime,” a feature-length documentary by Yoav Potash, about a troubled young woman, Deborah Peagler, who was convicted of homicide more than 25 years ago. This, after having asked neighborhood gangsters to make her abusive lover stop beating and terrorizing her. While a 2003 California law would only demand six years of her life in prison, her 1983 sentence took more than 25. This is her story.
Ms. Deborah Peagler awaits justice and freedom (courtesy Sundance)
Two lawyers, Nadia Costa and Joshua Safran, stepped up to take her case, pro bono, after a 2003 California law was passed that changed the game for victim/survivors of domestic abuse who are convicted of homicide, and free her. In doing so they found a sympathetic client, and a District Attorney’s office, run by Steve Cooley, that has committed and is committing “Crime After Crime,” as Mr. Safran described their conduct, to save face and keep careers.
When you picture justice, this isn’t it: not “Crime After Crime.” It’s a spectacular story, where the themes and stakes will remind some of you of the activist 1970s movie trend with such titles as 1980′s “Brubaker,” 1979′s “…And Justice for All,” and 1975′s “Dog Day Afternoon,” of the underdog.
Winston Churchill, an extraordinary political icon of the United Kingdom, once said that “Democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms…” As it goes with that, so this seems to with justice: she was denied parole at least thrice. At one point Safran describes how the parole and appellate process work in ways, which ignore or preclude the convict’s promise for doing good. Ms. Deagler had been an ideal inmate, had earned a two-year degree, become a mentor to junior inmates and served far more time than 2000s laws demanded. So the case requires Herculean efforts even when the law, precedent and rhetorical are on their side.
Lawyers Josh Safran and Nadia Costa guide Ms. Peagler toward freedom, if not justice (courtesy Berkeley Side)
The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office does so many things that clash with the public’s interests or Ms. Peagler’s. It makes you wretch and doubt America’s commitment to justice, or equal justice. Originally she was sentenced via a legal perspective that lumped women, who lash out is desperation at their abusive husbands or lovers, with those women who kill in cold blood.
The stakes, offenses and perversions of justice, and morals in this story make it a crackerjack whodunit. What makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand is that “Crime After Crime” trains its crosshairs, more and more, on the prosecutors misconduct. The DA’s office conceals a pivotal document, uses unreliable and impotent witness testimony and reneges on compassionate agreements.
California's masses support Peagler's cause (courtesy LATimes.com)
“Crime After Crime” boasts as many plot twists and is as fast-paced as a sweeps week episode of “Law & Order.” In some ways this is similar to 1993′s “In the Name of the Father,” even though that drama, which was based on a true story, exonerates justice in the United Kingdom. In both stories, convicts languish in prison for crimes, and with sentences, more heinous than the evidence warranted.
Ms, Peagler’s odyssey is even more trying and dramatic than another documentary, POV’s “Presumed Guilty,” from 2010. That indicts the Mexican version of justice – and a very non-Western. That candid and uncomfortable exposé provides excellent and telling comparison to Ms. Peager’s story.
Alongside being a splendid true crime drama, this documentary pushes us to consider several uncomfortable questions: what is justice? what color is it? why must it not only have a price, but one that makes our noses bleed? Finally, what do we expect from it vs. what America’s founders wanted us to expect from it.
“Applause” is an almost feature-length movie from Denmark, and director Martin Zandvliet. It’s about a well-known, middle-aged actress, Thea Barfoed (Paprika Steen), who’s struggling to move beyond her toxic personal life. She’s a recently divorced, recovering alcoholic who yearns to see her children again after having literally struck fear into them.
Paprika Steen needs "Applause" to keep up appearances
We see her in two settings: as an actress on-stage arguing with an unseen foe and as a mom off-stage fighting addiction and fighting to spend time with her two sons, William (Otto Leonardo Steen Rieks) and Matthias (Noel Koch-Søfeldt). The bits we see of her performance on-stage are deftly used two-fold: to show her power as an actor and to show how that performance can reflect her broken, needy “former” self. Because while she plays someone else, that character is no fiction, but her as she was before daring to recover.
She’s angry, bitter and has a lot of regrets or at least a few big ones. She keeps those reigned beneath a skilled mask of friendliness that she struggles to hold still. Her ex-hubby Christian (Micheal Falch) is wary of her, and weary after having left her and taken their sons away from her violent hands. But he knows she’s made progress. This story is about what unfolds after a key conversation.
Even if you’re won by the poster or DVD case, you might underestimate “Applaus” if you see how brief it is; you might assume that such a brief story would be mediocre. 85-minutes is as a short as a film can be and still be a feature. This film could be short and succeed because it’s about the woman, and those in her immediate life. The characters, other than she, her ex-husband Michael and their sons and his new wife, are minor. As she’s a constellation – they don’t matter.
As she tells Christian that, away from the stage (where she isn’t herself) she sits or paces in her apartment, she has nothing else – no anchor, apart from alcoholics’ meetings, for her life. She’s a mess. Her life’s a mess. Having contact with her sons would give her a life – or a reason for one.
Thea clings to her ex's new wife, and hopes of time with her boys.
Most movies are concerned with placating, and amusing, but not challenging viewers. Maybe the messy movies are the most potent. The story’s strong as are the performers. Most people know someone just as screwed up as Thea. They’re probably related to their own version. Those stories, which put us off because they’re too close to reality, they make us shift in our seats. That’s good. Why not?
“Applaus” is simple in many ways. The best stories have simple premises. It has a petty problem: its look. Maybe it’s not a “problem,” but something literally foreign to North American viewers. While the lighting is awkward and even off-putting, you can’t ignore the look – definitely indie. But you get used to it.
Minnesota Film Arts presents “A Brand New Life” (which is “Yeo-haeng-ja” in Korean), from 2009, and French-South Korean film-maker, Ounie Lecomte, as a part of the In Search of Asia series at the St. Anthony Main cinema.
After an adorable elementary school-age girl, Jinhee [Sae Ron Kim], who clings to her dad, is left at orphanage by him, she must find a way to deal with it, but cannot. This, even after being treated well and finding friends.
How would you feel or respond if, at around age 10, your dad broke your heart by lying to you…because he had to?
What if he bought you a new ensemble and said that you two were bound for a trip, but deposited you with an orphanage? According to imdb, Ms. Lecompte’s own story inspired this film.
Jinhee’s dad deposits her at an orphanage, a way station for children whose lives might be lifted if middle-class families claimed them.
She has to deal with A Brand New Life in an orphanage.
From the moment that Jinhee – her beguiling grin that is – appears onscreen, she’s just a sweetie pie. Her effervescence hobbles your objectivity and skepticism. That story would be enough, but wait – there’s more. She just can’t get over the fact that her father won’t return – that this could lead to a more stable life for her.
While 10-years old may be old enough for a child to roll with that sock to the chin, Jinhee isn’t that child. She adores her father, so she refuses to accept her lot, and is doggedly stubborn about not rolling with punches that life has knocked into her. Jinhee’s story is partly one of her emotional arrest in the face of an unenviable situation. She might be Korea’s version of Shirley Temple, or an elementary-age Dakota Fanning if you like.
Jinhee and friend Sookhee chill out over pilfered cake
A key scene happens when the orphans attend church, where Jinhee sees a man whose resemblance to her father hits home. A beat after that, the pastor’s lesson about Jesus asking his father, “why hast thou forsaken me?” tells us just what agony is festering within Jinhee. It’s not that she likens herself to a martyr or as Messiah, but she is still struggling to reconcile her dad’s nasty, loving lie with her reality.
Either you sympathize with her refusal to roll with these punches, or you can find her as her soon-to-be good friend, Sookhee, [Do Yeon Park] will: “a wench,” who needs to stop being a baby! Children do not comprehend or consider their situations as adults do (or as we would like or expect adults to). They’re used to either being good or being punished. She’s being as good as she can muster, but she must still suffer.
Jinhee content with her father (who hasn't a head?)
If a screen title didn’t tell us that this is fiction, taking place in 1975, then the semi-documentary style might nearly have fooled me. But some of the shots are rarely found in documentaries. Otherwise we should compare this to a PBS film from its Point of View series, “Wo Ai Ni, Mommy,” a Chinese documentary on trans”racial” international adoption; there is a lengthy scene where the girl is smack dab in the middle of change. That scene is unsettling, with angst and agony. That’s a hint at why the pastor’s lesson registers with our aggrieved young protagonist.
This story is one that, as with Thomas McCarthy’s “The Station Agent,” from 2003, or other small, personal films, demands that you are patient – frankly, mature – enough to allow it to defy American expectations for pacing. That forecasts a niche audience who will have to seek out the opportunities to watch this. “A Brand New Life” isn’t slow, but is deliberate. It’s charming and quiet. Are you patient enough to let this child’s story unfold before you, or will you shift in your seat wishing that something, something cool would happen? The story defies American cinema’s banal conventions. But it was made by a French-South Korean film-maker.
Minnesota Film Arts’ In Search of Asia festival opened on Wednesday November 3rd with “That Girl in Yellow Boots,” a drama by Anurag Kashyap. At that hour, this was the film’s one showing.
Twenty-year old Ruth [Kalki Koechlin] is a mixed Indian-British girl amid a minor odyssey toward…whom else…her long since light-footed father, for which she finds perverse closure (naw, it ain’t that!) in the end. Ms. Keochlin also co-wrote this story. On a student VISA, she makes her way as a masseuse, and actually does a few legit jobs sans “happy ending” – or handshake as she calls it.
It asks questions of love, which are as interesting as they are awkward, and taboo ones about sexual boundaries.
When she isn’t working as a soft-core hooker, she spars with and then spurns an Indian hustler boyfriend, who seems to only want same as her clients, but authentic intimacy. Essentially she’s an illegal, white British sex worker, whose odyssey – outside from an exploitive and world-widening sojourn in Mumbai – is to pursue the Indian father, whose own figure and face is a mystery to her – and who abandoned family after older sister’s mysterious death. That want for a dad wreaks a cornerstone of Ruth’s morose, exotic reality and lifestyle.
From Indian cinema we expect three-hour plus fantastical musicals where the color palette is often as boisterous as the music. “That Girl in Yellow Boots” is a radical detour from that set of expectations. While Ruth’s story is about love, it’s more about how she protects herself, cordoning herself from intimacy and keeps her control within her own clutches.
Late in her story, after her boyfriend writhes through his self-installed detox, he asks why she does massage; she blurts confiding “because I need somebody..!” She does splendid and remarkable if also typical work of avoiding opportunities for that intimacy (or is it a reckoning) for which she’s hungry.
Her dad, Arjun Patel (which may or may not even be his name), for whose attention she yearns, married Ruth’s mother for perverse reasons different from love: those we know are awkward, those we learn of make our skin crawl, our jaws gape. Her dad is the key to twisting the scimitar, which his abandonment had already shoved into her gut, into a hemorrhaging emotional gouge.
Ruth is in a toxic emotional situation, but she’s no Dorothy visiting Oz; she’s an impressionable youth, but also deftly politic and cunning: She’s solidifying her Hindi in order that no one exploit her. She also knows how and when to offer bribes so that she can work via her student VISA so she can work and avoid jail. Snarky people ward men off from women who have “daddy issues” because enormous messes lay in those women’s wakes. Chris Rock said that a father’s main job: “keep my daughter off the pole.” Ruth’s mindfuck is at least as bad as that reality.
It’s difficult to name comparisons to this story. For the scope of the taboos, which “That Girl in Yellow Boots” picks at hint at “Priest”, from 1994, the self-righteous polemic against Catholicism’s suite of shortcomings, for the rough, incendiary potency. When it comes to director Kashyap’s twist in the final act, consider the ending to Adrian Lyne’s “Jacob’s Ladder,” from 1990, about “a traumatized Vietnam war veteran finds out that his post-war life isn’t what he believes it to be…” per imdb; that messed with your mind and messed you up! That last jerk or twist of emotional perversion in the end here…is at least as profound as what we get from Jacob’s bodybag being zipped up.
Imdb and wikipedia provide some peculiarities and head-shaking confusions in regards to this drama: each describes Ruth’s story as a thriller. I disagree: this is a drama that has brief segment of suspense, in the last act. This falls well short of flirting with an Alfred Hitchcock sensibility.
September 19th through the 25th is Deaf Awareness Week. Unless you have a handicap or a disability, or someone close to you has one, you rarely consider the consequences of that life, that culture, or that lifestyle – how differently that life is led.
What does Deaf Awareness mean for movies? When’s the last time you heard of a “Deaf movie?” (Please, forgive the pun.) Children of A Lesser God came out in 1986, nearly 25-years ago. The story, which takes place in a school or the deaf and hearing impaired, was adapted by director Randa Haines, from a play by Mark Medoff.
Hearing teacher, deaf lover; two disparate worlds, one bed
One of the indelible exchanges from the film:
School’s principal to new teacher: “Yelling at the back of a deaf person. Very good James.”
Principal turns to bystander: “He’s been at all the best schools.”
Even if you or a friend saw or remembered that film, modern titles are scarce. You wrack your brain to think of another film that provides the hearing community a view through the looking glass onto the deaf and hard of hearing culture(s). After having sought more than a few experts on this subject, I found that they felt they had meager to say as it relates to the movie theaters.
Deaf characters on movie screens are usually sidekicks: think of Four Weddings and a Funeral, from Britain in 1994, where the character of Hugh Grant’s deaf brother, David, is splendid if minor. In Mr. Holland’s Opus, the following year, the character of the title character’s deaf son, Cole, affects Mr. Holland more vitally than the brother in Four Weddings does it.
Two modern television productions stand out: Breaking Through, from 1996, directed by Fred Gerber, with Kellie Martin and JoBeth Williams; and Wildflower, from 1991, directed by Diane Keaton from Sara Flanigan’s novel “Alice,” with Patricia Arquette as an epileptic who is hard of hearing in what resembles the 1940′s rural Georgia. Both of these latter two characters and their stories involved young women who need the hearing community’s help in fleeing ignorant, even provincial, and brutal family settings.
Away from fiction there was John Aronson’s documentary, Sound and Fury, from 2000, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. It exposed a controversy that keeps the deaf and hearing cultures from listening to each other: the story of what changes the cochlear implant wreaks or would wreak on deaf children whose parents yearn for them to be “normal.” The DVD case asks you:
If you could make your deaf child hear, would you?
How many deaf or hearing-impaired people are there? That’s hard.According Gallaudet University’s latest count, from a non-governmental source in 1990-91, their community amounts to nearly nine percent. But then the U.S. population was not the 310-million we know now, but according to them a little over 236-million – our population grown by 20 percent. It’s fair to suppose that the deaf and hearing-impaired amount to nearly 10 percent of the U.S. Maybe you’re asking: how big does your minority community have to be to expect to see movies that specifically and explicitly tell your story? Another brief description of the community is below:
According to the Better Hearing Institute:
1 in 14 Generation Xers (ages 29-40), or 7.4%, already has hearing loss;
It is estimated that 3 in 1,000 infants are born with serious to profound hearing loss.
Their stories are probably as fascinating as the hearing communities’. For centuries even millennia peoples and cultures have told stories from and about themselves to one another, so they could express themselves artistically, entertain one another, and be understood by others. It’s a fundamental pillar of artistic expression.
Gender archetypes frame and constrain this. The portrayals also conform, maybe cling, to gender archetypes: men = strong, vital; women = weak, needy. These also lack the prestige of a theatrical that has historically meant something to us as audiences. But that contention deserves some deliberate attention.
Do we venture beyond Children of A Lesser God, orrevere and in-turn cling to it? There are groups for deaf artists who are making and want to make films: Deaf Women in Film and the Deaf Rochester Film Festival. That festival’s last web update is from 2009. I suppose that the tougher and tactical questions of access and audience are left for discussion. But of course the bigger badder ones of budget and box office nag us.
On August 27th, Mademoiselle Chambon, will open at Minnesota Film Arts’ St. Anthony Main Theater. It’s a French film, by Stéphane Brizé, and adapted from a novel by Eric Holder. An elementary school teacher, Ms. Veronique Chambon (Sandrine Kiberlain) clicks with a work-a-day dad, Jean, (Vincent Lindon) whose son she teaches. They click all the way into a tryst.
Mlle Chambon, the teacher, is enrapt with Jean's job talk
The trouble starts after she asks him to talk to her class about his work, construction. He agrees, with a shrug. He comes. He talks. He answers the students’ questions. He has a good time. Ms. Chambon likes Jean.
Love.
Lust.
Mid-life questions.
Wanderlust.
These are at Mademoiselle Chambon’s foundation.
This slowly becomes an affair. Jean and his wife, Anne-Marie, follow a predictable, seemingly content life with their son. They are manual laborers. One in construction, the other in a factory. And then Jean and we meet Mademoiselle Chambon. The predictability and contentment begin to crumble. The film starts in a deceptively daring way: it’s slow and tests our patience, and our typical conspicuous desire for action and fast-paced cutting. From the first POV shot where Jean glances at Ms. Chambon, from behind her as she sits atop a student’s desk, you know what will follow.
This meeting is supposed to be between parents and teacher. He has her undivided attention because his wife has fallen ill at the factory, and is on bed rest at home. The question to be answered: how deftly will, the director, Ms. Brizé execute their tryst? A fundamental and slippery rule of storytelling is to be predictable, but make sure that we’re surprised how it’s delivered. The tranquil and gentle tone and pace could lull us. But the way in which Jean and Veronique’s flirting grows from their lingering, even coy conversations, into something subtly disturbing is refreshing.
Jean and Ms. Chambon
The key scenes are cloaked in the guises of window repair, music appreciation, and where Veronique plays music at Jean’s home, during his father’s birthday. Somehow that scene strikes notes that are sweet, and creepy, at once. These subtle scenes played so that each might go either in the impulsive and lustful path, or the sensible and responsible one. We see what the film and its maker are doing when the duo’s conversations creep into a kind of small talk, which only happens when you can’t yet dare yourself to say what you need to. Jean and Veronique’s relationship is told more through silence, and coy body language than any explicit sentiments, as opposed to a North American movies’ typically forthright sensibilities.
Mademoiselle Chambon awaits destiny or..?
Neither of them is any more “at fault” for their attractions than the other; Jean pursues Ms. Chambon with as much interest as she does him. Ultimately Jean decides how and where their infatuation will go. That decision harkens to Richard Linklater’s mature 20-something romance, Before Sunrise, from 1991, where the défacto duo seriously asks each other whether they want to make love. Shall we do this when we’ll probably want more, and we have no idea if we’ll see each other after?
One more (ok, a few) open question: Each wants the other; each has found something that they lack in that other. Why is this story Mademoiselle Chambon’s; Why is it named for her? Won’t their wanderlust reap or wreak the most upon Jean and his family?
Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal suspense thriller “Psycho,” had its New York City premiere on June 16 in 1960. That was 50 years ago. It was released nationwide that August.
It’s daunting to think back through five decades of psychological thrillers to ask yourself whether any of those that followed can rival this one. Many filmmakers have dared to imitate Mr. Hitchcock’s instinct and flair; Gus Van Sant was delusional and egotistical enough to remake “Psycho” itself several years ago. There are some stories that just ought never be tampered with.
So you gotta wonder: if you’re gonna reminisce about the best, most unnerving who-dun-it films, where do you start?! But wait. Before you lunge toward an answer, consider that approximately two generations, and a very different aesthetic, separate us from that which makes “Psycho” special. The best thrillers emphasized suspense, not gore. They are mind games. A viewer’s patience was very important. The experience is about foreshadowing, wondering, and worrying about that which lurks behind dark corners or overly gentle smiles. The editing wasn’t nearly as fast with “Psycho” as we expect it to be in the 21st-Century. It’s unfair to compare any film to Hitchcock; No filmmaker’s work wins against his.
There are those titles that you might dare to compare with “Psycho,” but which are so renown that there’s barely a point in doing so. You could name Jonathan Demme’s “Silence of the Lambs,” from 1991, but it’s not like that had to crawl its way to a profit or renown. Practically everybody knows it. The film’s inspiration and source material shares common threads with the novel on which “Psycho” was loosely based. Still, “Silence of the Lambs” is strong and distinct enough to stand on its own mind games with the audience.
I can help you catch him, Clarice.
David Fincher’s “Se7en,” from 1995, is in a similar situation. While it may have earned fewer column-inches in newspapers and magazines back then, it won’t take many people very long to recall that film’s creepy and utterly grotesque crime scenes.
...The shower scene.
All you have to do is utter “the shower scene” to start a conversation about “Psycho.” And that’s not necessarily the most gringe-worthy scene. But there are a couple suspense stories that deserve your attention.
“Presumed Innocent” was adapted in 1990 from Scott Turow’s profitable 1987 novel. It’s the tale of a sometimes happily married chief deputy prosecutor whose colleague and former mistress is found dead. When his boss names him to prosecute her murderer, then all roads seem to point to him. The truth is more complex, surprising, and shocking – it presents an ethical and moral dilemma that jeopardizes his family.
Here’s the trailer:
“One False Move,” written by Billy Bob Thornton and directed by Carl Franklin, is about Los Angeles police detectives cooperating with a small town Arkansas sherriff, in pursuit of a deadly and unstable trio of murderers. The killers themselves are on the trail of a drug score. This is a thoughtful and smart take on a crime film that calmly considers questions of “race.” At the time, this film’s major actor was Bill Paxton, who plays the sheriff, Dale. He’s one of the most subtle and interesting protagonists. He’s key to the pacing and the story’s simplicity. “One False Move” is a little film. It’s a subtle psychological thriller that grows far smarter and more complex, and more engaging than you expect.
While you can probably name good solid suspense thrillers, they might lack the taught pacing and well-developed narrative that these ones offer.
On June 11, 1922 the “father of documentary film,” Robert J. Flaherty, made his most significant work, “Nanook of the North.” This film is reputed to be the pinnacle of his documentary career as “Citizen Kane” is routinely deemed the pinnacle of Orson Welles’.
Nanook of the North 1922
So roughly 90 years later, I figure that it’s good to ask two questions:
How many people watch documentaries?
Which recently released ones, by or about people of color, are worth watching?
Documentaries seem to be some of the least respected and loved films. Unless critics or viewers have raved about a film, and then it has been carried by word of mouth, it seems to be left to sink or swim in the media market place. The trailers and previews for documentaries seem to be very few and far between. One well-established and well-known Minneapolis producer, Craig Rice, an African-American, corrects us about the idea of an abyss for documentaries.
They’re “more popular now than they ever were before” Rice said. He said that, whatever fans of popular films might assume, documentaries are out there. “And they’re making money.” When asked about people of color, particularly African-Americans’ interest, he said, “I don’t think we watch documentary films! It’s always about popular films.”
The ones that are worth watching, like those that I’ll recommend, have as much drama, or action, or whatever you want in a movie experience, as the films at the cineplexes.
I’ll recommend three films:
Ken Burns’ “Unforgivable Blackness,” from 2004, is about a brazen iconoclast. He is Jack Johnson, an African-American. He was a boxer competing with Anglo (white) foes, in the 1910s when that was neither typical, nor safe. Anglo men were expected to win and retain the heavy weight title well before the opposite was assumed. He was such a force of personality that he couldn’t have been ignored in this century and certainly not 100 years ago at the start of the 20th.
He preferred and openly romanced Anglo women. So 100 years ago, nearly 50 years before the criminal courts made miscegenation legal, he ignored the colorline and lived.
The Film:
“Unforgivable Blackness” is an exceptional film. It is a compelling story about a 20th century character, Jack Johnson, who seems barely known and rarely discussed in mainstream media. But he was larger than life. His bravura preceded, and may have rivaled, that of Mohammed Ali. At the time, boxing was one vital pillar of Anglo (white) American manhood. By wanting to compete, as an equal, with Anglo fighters, Mr. Johnson showed his desire to knock that pillar down. White manhood was at stake.
Marshall Curry’s “Street Fight,” from 2005, is about a brawling political contest in Newark, New Jersey. It was that year’s Academy Award nominee for best documentary feature. This was a mayoral contest between two strong-willed African-American men from disparate backgrounds and who carry themselves with very different swaggers. There was the 32 year incumbent, Sharpe James, and the Rhodes scholar upstart, Cory Booker. They are from disparate generations and each one fights to keep and maybe lift the beleaguered city of Newark, New Jersey out of its economic and criminal justice abyss.
The Film:
The film shows those unorthodox and guerilla campaign tactics which Mr. Sharpe’s team used to keep to his mayoral power within his clutches. He used his official power to have city employees do his crony work, while Mr. Booker strove to run a professional and civil campaign. With the way that Mr. Booker seems to have chafed against the voters, they seem to have sided with the corruption they know and understood, Mr. James, in lieu of taking a chance with a different smooth talker who might just be an updated Mr. James. “The Washington Post” called it the best political documentary since “The War Room,” which was a chronicle of James Carville’s and George Stephanopoulos’ work with the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign.
Gail Dolgin and Vicente Franco’s “Daughter from Danang,” from 2002, is a gut-wrenching story about two women’s reunion: a trans “racial” Vietnamese and American daughter, Heidi Bob, (born Mai thi Hiep) and her Vietnamese birth mother. It was that year’s Academy Award nominee for best documentary feature. Ms. Bob, now in her 30s, hadn’t seen her mother since she was taken away at seven years-old.
Their story is complicated by the context and questions of the United States’ Vietnam-era foreign policy. So, this is the dual narrative of these women’s intertwined stories and an even-handed criticism of that slim portion of American foreign policy.
The film:
“Daughter” opens with the story of how Ms. Bob, a trans “racial” adoptee, was “evacuated” you might say from Vietnam. This broaches a phalanx of rich, mixed, and probably bittersweet emotions on the parts of the Vietnamese and North American families. They each want to believe that they are acting for virtue; for the children’s, their families’, and even their respective nations’ sakes.
One stunner. An irony is that she is one of many adoptees who were relocated to the United States as supposed orphans when they were not; their families were often assured and trusted that the U.S. would reunite them with their children…at some point.
This film opens viewers’ eyes and minds to a little discussed chapter of post-Vietnam war history and the story of trans “racial” adoptees. As “Daughter” shows it is as simple and as complex as that.
It reminds me of a fiction film: Oliver Stone’s “Heaven and Earth,” from 1993. It is the third in his defacto Vietnam trilogy. In its essence it’s a very complex story, with composite characters, about making a life and recreating oneself in a new, foreign, and at times forbidding reality.
