Aug

“The Names of Love” is a fantastic French romantic dramedy about two clashing lovers

“The Names of Love” (« Les noms des gens » in French) is a story, from director Michel Leclerc, that one could easily say is “so French.” It pits Baya Benmahmoud (Sara Forestier), a 20-something, hypersexual, left-winger, born of an Algerian dad, against Arthur Martin (Jacques Gamblin) a middle-aged healthcare professional born of a Jewish mom. They clash politically and ideologically. But they face an undeniable chemistry despite occasionally rational thought.

This shows at the Edina Cinema for a week from August 26th.

Baya Benmahmood (Sara Forestier) is a lefty charmer in "The Names of Love" (courtesy Music Box Films)

Still each tries to be rational because they don’t know how they could be together and not go nuts, or kill each other, if not both! Arthur is the story’s star, but also Baya’s milquetoast straight man in this fantastic, joyous and hilarious story.

The first scene is indelible. Arthur is on-air on the radio in the middle of discussing bird flu on a call-in show. Baya shows up at the station for work, screening the show’s calls. Finding his ideas dangerous, she abandons her cube and barges into the studio, and then calls Arthur out, with animated zeal.

The story follows this clashing couple’s relationship from accidental meetings to meant ones and the milestones. Their romance’s absurd comedy feels like a smart version of Abbott & Costello.

After that auspicious beginning they go to an eatery where Baya offers Arthur sex on the first date – that’s her policy. She strikes him dumb and speechless, and he flees the awkwardness and opportunity. His daily luck with women? Let’s put this way: to steal a line from The Prince of Tides: “he had the opposite of the Midas touch!”

Baya meets Arthur's conservative parents in "The Names of Love" (courtesy Music Box Films))

The first act’s mania and hilarity follow the first sequence’s lead: Baya and Arthur each tells us how they were brought up and by what sort of parents. Arthur’s memory plays games on him, and in-turn on the story. For example: he can’t imagine his dad when he was young. No matter how young he should be in his son’s flashback, like as a college freshman he looks like a retiree, and loopily out-of-place. It’s often hilarious. It works. With Baya, there’s less drama. Her mom was a daughter of middle-class privilege who rebelled, eventually loving an Algerian, a former soldier. Her memory plays tricks in different, subtler ways.

Her sexual conduct and attitude has a political agenda. She lives by the creed “make love, not war.” She uses it as a weapon, as another prong of rhetoric. Kind of like a one-off from Carl VonClausewitz’s “On War:” a continuation of political struggle by erotic or erotic and rhetorical means. She uses her erotic and sensual skills to convert her conservative foes to her way of seeing.

Strolling in "The Names of Love" (courtesy Music Box Films)

“The Names of Love” provides a bounty of charming, witty, amusing characters, scenes and sequences and touches of technique. And these at such a quick pace that we’re swept up. It’s not profound. It is a profound gem in how it can make a viewer smile, chuckle and then guffaw.

Other sight gags: in other important scenes, the camera plays with point of view. This works some subtly potent wonders; it shows a two-shot of a couple, that makes sense, and then pans to reveal a third wheel that changes the scene’s meaning entirely.

Because of temporary “lessons” with her piano teacher as a child, subtly played out, the college-aged Baya holds none of a common sexual or erotic conservatism that’s familiar to most Americans. If a tit peaks or bounds out of her often loose blouse by accident, it’s a non-event to her.

In one of the many memorable sequences they meet accidentally each other at a polling place. There, she offers him sex again. On the way to that, they stop at a grocery. In line, she flees to find the last vital ingredient, coriander.

And then her scattered brain goes full-tilt: she runs into someone. He reminds her to make a 180 degree change in plans. Not toreturn to Arthur, but to prepare for a party. She goes home to collect something, strips, forgets to dress, and then leaves home to take care of yet another scatterbrained errand. On the way, she passes the market, naked save for boots. Arthur, incredulous, seesher. He’s still waiting for her inside. This concisely summarizes the movie’s looniness and charms.

Baya and Arthur charm each other in "The Names of Love" (courtesy Music Box Films)

La pièce de résistance: before the mania of that sequence ends Baya winds up on a train flashing a Muslim couple the female half of which is dressed in what is almost a burqa.

This witty, funny, often hilarious film will suit you whether or not you want to think; it provides an intelligent escape. The romance’s common peaks and valleys are drawn with great gaiety.

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Aug

“Life Above All” is a simple, but potent story about coming-of-age in the face of a taboo plague

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.

Jul

“Crime After Crime” is a moving documentary about a woman’s perseverence, and the sausage-making in “justice”

“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.

This suspenseful true story will show at the Film Society of Minneapolis/St. Paul starting on July 29th.

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.

Jun

“Bride Flight” is a great romantic drama about three disparate 1950s brides who reunite in 2000s

“Bride Flight” is an engrossing, dramatic romance from the Netherlands, and director Ben Sombogaart. According to the film’s website, the story was inspired by 1953′s Last Great Air Race, from London to New Zealand. Three eligible & engaged women meet on the bride flight, and in the process are touched and beguiled by a magnetic outdoorsman, Frank de Booy (Waldemar Torenstra when young, Rutger Hauer when old).

Marjorie (Elise Schapp) is photographed for record-breaking posterity (courtesy Music Box Films)

Each is bound to meet a man, other than him, who is all but a stranger to her, and choose between doors one and two à la “Let’s Make A Deal.”

This plays at the Edina Theater for a week starting on June 17th.

The flight’s turbulence ensures moments that attach each of them to the other for a generation to come, and more, whether they think they want to or not. That’s where they click with one another; the flight leaves them shaken and stirred! It sparks fears of flight, mortality and other equally profound personal qualms and questions. Each of these beauties and their stories is drawn and portrayed fully, beyond being simply one-offs of archetypes or stereotypes.

Frank de Booy (Rutger Hauer) beguiles each woman while marrying neither of them (courtesy Music Box Films)

We find a sheltered, pregnant and buxom blonde beauty Ada van Holland (Karina Smulders when young, and Pleuni Touw when old). who’s also sweet and provincial. And she’ll find a polite, self-righteously religious man who’s morality is rigid.

Another bride is a pretty, flamboyant fashion designer, Esther (Anna Drijver, when young, and Willeke van Ammelrooy when old), She’s an independent-minded Jew who lost all biological ties in WWII; her persona and sensibility are out–of–time and –place for mid-20th-Century New Zealand – or anywhere. She finds an affable, but conservative conformist. Quickly she knows that, as he chafes her, she will him – much more so. She ditches him and gets into “trouble” as pregnancy was called then.

This leads to a complex subplot with the final woman, Marjorie (Elise Schaap when young, and Petra Laseur when old), a beautiful, cheery brunette who hasn’t yet any backstory or baggage. It’s she who winds up with the most conventional path.

This is a story more about the detours that these women’s lives take incidentally, than whatever plan that any of them had laid out on a map. They get to know Frank better than they do either of their fiancés; Frank shuffles the playing cards in their minds. As John Lennon once said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy doing other things.”

This film makes images from 1994′s “Legends of the Fall” and 1995′s “The Bridges of Madison County” bubble up in our minds: Frank is both the disrupting and uniting force in these beauties’ lives, like Tristan Ludlow in “Legends of the Fall;” Ada is like Francesca Johnson in “The Bridges of Madison County,” which takes place around the same time. She’s cruelly torn between obliging love for her children, and erotic love for that flight connection. Like Ludlow, Frank is the rock that each of these women though broke themselves against.

Esther (Anna Drijver) and Frank (Waldemar Torenstra) remain connected despite life's storms (courtesy Music Box Films)

There’s a power in the details, the nuances, the moments, which tell what dialogue, no matter how precise or eloquent, can. It shares this with Robert Redford’s sensual and attentive visual style. For example: the glances and body language between Ada and Frank. In a scene where she tries on Esther’s wedding dress in the plane’s bathroom, and he walks in to check it out (airborne bathrooms must’ve been roomy then!). This’s a great, chuckle-worthy scene.

In another, later in the flight Frank dozes off seated beside Ada, with has hand resting in a lewd spot. When she wakes up, she blushes but doesn’t budge it. In addition upon landing there are moments between Esther and her betrothed, which show they are clearly mismatched! The mismatch is subtler between Ada and hers. When she meets he and his father, one of her blouse buttons is unfastened. The flight was rocky!

That rockiness leaves us wondering about and hoping for a continued spark between Frank and Ada beyond the airport.

After the pivotal flight, Esther and Marjorie make a poisonous pact, creating a dilemma. On one end, when Esther is pregnant and her daring goals preclude her from keeping it; and on the other, Marjorie yearns for a child, but finds troubling news, that it’ll nary happen. She and her husband take on Esther’s baby, but she holds chip on her shoulder because of how they got it. That grabs us and creates a key subplot. But when Ada’s story comes back in to play, after having begun with plum gusto before our characters land, it feel like when need to ask why this cherry star-crossed romance was put off.

The climax comes up as an afterthought – flacid – against these women’s great dramas. But that criticism is petty against a strong drama with the quality of characters and portrayals that we receive, and the glimpse that “Bride Flight” gives us into the bounds of women’s opportunities in the middle of the 20th-Century.

May

“Incendies” is story of family history, forgiveness and one mom’s daunting, final request

With their enigmatic mom, Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal), dead, her astonishing last will & testament sends her fraternal twins Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon Marwan (Maxim Guadette), who are Canadian, on an odyssey in the Middle East.

This is just the edge of the flame that is “Incendies,” from director Denis Villeneuve. Upon her death, Nawal’s will sends them to pursue another brother and a father – utter mysteries to them both.

Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin and Maxim Guadette consider mom's will in "Incendies" (courtesy Sony Classics)

“Incendies,” which is fire or flames in French, is a daring tale of family history & forgiveness that describes what ruins Nawal has left behind for Jeanne and Simon to walk through. It tells one mom’s life story while hinting at how her daughter might reconsider hers. This, while the pessmistic son, who feels none of the guilt, which he’s sure Jeanne does, just ignores Nawal’s final request.

Minneapolis’ Uptown Theatre shows this for a week starting on May 13th.

The twins’ journey will upturn their lives and themselves. It might or might not reveal truths, which’ll hurt them, and change how they know themselves and their mom.

The film introduces Nawal as a young lover, pregnant and unmarried. In these circumstances, she shames her family and is shunned, and then is sent to a madrassa to be educated. After she goes through to college, and writes for the school newspaper, her political zeal leads her to an agonizing descent: she commits an act of political violence, and lands in prison.

The dusky light within Nawal becomes dark when she’s sent to jail for several years, languishing. Her agonies are so intense and profound that she hasn’t dared to confide to anyone. Upon her death, Jeanne and Simon grew up with the image of her a long-time secretary, no more no worse.

Nawal seizes her view to a kill in "Incendies" (courtesy Sony Classics)

Armchair soldiers often talk, with puffed-out chests, about the “glorious” realities & ravages of war. Her story reeks of those imprints – they mark her body, her life and herself. Those harrowing scars might just rival Sophie Zawistowska’s in 1982′s “Sophie’s Choice.” Nawal’s story, which only Jeanne takes on in full, shows the grimiest and grimmest of her life’s shadows. Nawal couldn’t bare herself enough to share these with her children.

One hint: the three dots on one boy’s or man’s heel tell 1,000s of words about Nawal’s twisted, unbelievable life.

One problem: Mesdames Azabal and Désormeaux-Poulin, and the geographic landmarks, resemble each other too much, so it can be hard to tell the difference between the scenes where mom walks her life or her daughter retracing those steps. We might not know what or how to feel.

“Incendies” is a witty and difficult film to watch; while some plot elements might sicken you, this story and its message are valuable.

Apr

“Potiche” is a French retro farce of sexual & workplace politics, which might remind you of “Nine to Five”

“Potiche” a French farce of sexual politics, set in the 1970s is an amusing, campy and retro story. This story of a trophy wife (the translation of potiche) who takes her CEO husband’s place at the umbrella factory, which he claimed from the marriage.

This feels like a flipside telling of the 1980 workplace comedy movie, “Nine-to-Five.” The look, feel is out-dated, but that retro view helps to make this basically smart, but also shallow story amuse us.

“Potiche” takes place when the U.S. was amid its feminist and labor revolutions, which were also marked by “women’s work” sections of the newspaper want ads.

Landmark Theatres’ shows this at the Edina Cinema for a week from April 29th.

There is une petite leçon beyond the campy and ironical comedy. It’s worth seeing.

Apr

“The Princess of Montpensier” reminds us that wars have been fought over women

“The Princess of Montpensier” is a costume romantic drama, from Bertrand Tavernier, and set in the 1500s. The fight over the princess’ favors reminds us of what much of classical poetry and literature has observed: “wars have been fought over the favors of a woman.”

This is an era that damns the men, even the kingdom and dooms her. Marie (Mélanie Thierry) is torn between two men, two cousins’ love (unrelated to her). One she wants, Henri de Guise (Gaspard Ulliel). The other, who she doesn’t, Prince de Montpensier, (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet) but her father does – for politics and property. He coerces her into marrying the prince, but the prince is too young and too immature to be a good match for his newly arranged wife.

poster (courtesy Flickr/Creative Commons)

This will be showing at Landmark Theatres’ Edina Theater for a week from Aprill 22nd.

This princess’ life and the story become more fraught when we see that all the men who spend a lot of time around the princess are enchanted by her, succombing to her assets. The prince’s mentor and tutor, the Comte de Chabannes (Lambert Wilson) a gentleman, warrior and scholar – a rarity. And the prince’s commander, Duc d’Anjou (Raphael Personnaz), also vies for Marie. While the Comte is deliberate about this, showing his maturity, the Duc is younger, impulsive and urgent (or just lusty) about it.

This is one of those “if only” stories, where you notice that, if not for one road taken, there’d be none of this trouble – but also this intricate story, this romantic and political tumult and suspense wouldn’t interest us.

An exchange tells a lot about the princess’ and the prince’s bond: on their way into his castle…

He asks “When will you love me?”

She says, “When you order me to?”

–If only she didn’t cave in to her dad.

–If only women hadn’t been considered chattel and beasts of burden then. And head-strong women were such oddities as to be thought mad.

The most interesting subplot belongs to the best-drawn supporting character, the Comte de Chabannes; he’s a warrior turned pacifist. He laid down his long sword after having killed a very vulnerable woman by accident, but in the heat of a fight.

The romantic and political intrigues are complex to a Shakespearian level. More than a few shades of truths and lies push Marie, her husband, her tutor and the Comte away from one another – but mostly her.

The beautiful colors used in the costumes and photography overall draw our attention, but the plot, the performances and the plotting over love and lust command that attention. Those scenic colors are incidental to the great characters and the ways in which their stories clash with one anothers’.

See this film!

The big problem: the more than two hour sitting might make you antsy, even though the story’s great. Also, if you want sword fights, serious ones from this, you might find the few in this to be pale and shallow.

Dec

Why do New York film critics, among others, lift “The Social Network” as 2010′s best?

Upon seeing this week’s headlines indicating that the Los Angeles and Toronto Film Critics Associations and the New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC) had all lifted “The Social Network” as 2010′s best film, a question leaped to mind: what?! That?!

Yes. The masses typically highlight conventional, studio-produced films as “the best.” Those films also typically have brawny budgets lifting their wings.

Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg in David Fincher's "The Social Network"

A different question, one of money and exposure or hype pops to mind as much as the incredulousness. So which criteria did these groups use? How much of the choice came down to the intensity of the promotion? Was there some budget-based bias?

When a film critic hasn’t seen a film, and when he or she has scant if any interest, they’re a fool to write about it. Hoards are preoccupied by and have latched onto Facebook, fascinated with its lifestyle utility. People are hungry to see the backstory, particularly if that boasts dirt.

A vital question: why don’t the New York film critics, in that metropolis that hosts New York University’s film school (i.e., a storied training ground for indie film-makers: Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, Jim Jarmusch, among other lesser icons), at least consider an independent movie, a phenomenal one? The NYFCC is the one organization that stands out from its East Coast and Canadian peers by declaring, on the history page of his website, in part, to “…have consistently recognized, championed and defended films that may otherwise have been slighted by audiences and the entertainment industry.” Neither the Toronto nor the Los Angeles groups’ websites distinguish themselves with that stance on behalf of film art.

But Metropolis’ film critics circle has stood up for a film that needs no one to stand for it.

Hmm. What should a viewer make of that when the circle lauds a movie that suffered from no want for publicity? That’s ironic. It’s incongruent. After you’ve lived long enough, you learn, accept or resign yourself to the fact that organizations don’t always walk their talk. But it would be nice.

Out of a few engrossing independent stories, at least one stands out: “Winter’s Bone.” This isn’t a story many people have yet seen: a young resilient, perseverant woman must engage an odyssey in order to keep her family together, even while some of that family clash with her.

This story made its Minnesota premier this summer, around early June. What an awesome treat. It’s a new, innovative story about a young woman whose strength is way beyond her years, beyond the call of family. Also, “Winter’s Bone” was made by a woman. As a feminist, the chronic, persistent want for strong, engrossing female characters is old and tired – just backwards.

People will say that independent movies are just less popular or less profitable than profit-oriented ones. Reportedly according to Motion Picture Association of America’s numbers from early 2005, “approximately 15% of US domestic box office money came from independent films.” 2010′s Academy Awards broadcast had an average of about 41.3 million viewers over its more than three-hour-long program.

With the U.S. population at 310 million that stacks up to about 13% of America that watched the Oscars. An equal percentage of film-lovers seem to attend commercial movies as attend independent ones. Even if twice as many movie lovers attend movie theaters as watch the Oscars, that still connotes that commercial movies aren’t bludgeoning independent movies by the numbers.

Oct

“Night Catches Us,” a bold, refreshing drama, has debut at Twin Cities Film Festival

Night Catches Us is Philadelphia-based independent filmmaker Tanya Hamilton’s first feature film. It made its debut at the Twin Cities Film Festival on September 30th. The heart of the film is the connection between Marcus Washington [Anthony Mackie of The Hurt Locker and Million Dollar Baby], a pragmatic drifter, and felon, and Patricia Wilson [Kerry Washington of The Last King of Scotland and She Hate Me].

Night Catches Us gives us relationships. And secrets. And reckonings. And reconciliations. That’s a lot for 90-minutes, but it works well, except for this film’s twitchy volume dial; occasionally the dialogue or score would drop or leap a few decibels. That’s only a problem when you’re trying to pay attention.

There are the political stories, and the erotic. Some secrets to protect those adults from truths, which hurt more than their chosen, accepted myths. Other secrets to protect a child, letting her keep her fleeting innocence. Maybe the film’s title comes from the idea that the night catches us with our guards down, and secrets more accessible.

There are three or so pivotal relationships are tense, each carrying historical baggage. On the political tip, Marcus must move past or through Dwayne AKA “Do Right” [Jaime Hector], a former Panther and local thug, who just knows that Marcus’ snitching killed a Panther. On the erotic tip, he rekindles with his lost lover, Patty (That’s Patricia, damn it!) after what she calls abandonment.

In this tight, largely segregated community, their neighborhood is family; that family’s post-1960s politics has cooled into the pragmatic. In order to keep Patty’s home space calm, Marcus confronts a morose, young, wannabe Panther, Jimmy [Amari Cheatom], who is ne’er do well, lost in the romance of activism. Amid Marcus’ confrontations and rekindlings, Patricia strives to smooth the scuffles, which he leaves in his wake – she wants him to stick around.

Marcus has to reckon with “Do Right” for being the snitch that the whole neighborhood “knows” he is, but that he knows he isn’t. “Do Right” needs to assert and affirm his defacto reign over the area. Marcus has meager time for that viril, righteous, boasting. That doesn’t slow “Do Right” even a bit.

The knuckle-head character, Jimmy [Amari Cheatom], is a forthright jab at the myriad young Black men who are lost, scared, and struggling, but dare not let on. Weakness does nothing for street cred. He’s like the cats who spout off Malcolm X or Stokely Carmichaels’ well-worn words, but barely understand how much study and struggle went into them. Jimmy knows too little to carry the words, or the respect that he expects to earn by speaking them. He is a lesson.

Marcus and Patty reconnect.

The budding rapport between Marcus and Patricia’s daughter, Iris, is significant and special for the trio. The girl’s point of view is also a door that connects this film to To Kill a Mockingbird through her Scout-like precocity. Marcus’ quiet strength endears and engages her. He resembles the father figure whom she has lacked, nevermind that Patty already has been sharing her home, bed and herself with one steady man. Marcus is a different refreshing one; in being so, he eases Patty’s burden.

This is an atypical, even radical film, particularly for a Black person, and especially a woman, to make, in at least three ways. First off, there’s no urban blight. Secondly, Patty’s household is basically in-tact, and thirdly we are reminded of or given a primer on the Black Panthers.

The film flaunts no prototypical ghetto blights – neither drugs, nor prostitutes, nor typical gun play, nor casual swearing. In addition to those omissions, Ms. Hamilton’s story is subtly radical. We have an improvised, functional nuclear family with the temporary trio. Both adults are smart, warm, and educated. That isn’t even the radical stuff: Marcus and Patricia’s respective stories provide a primer on the Philadelphia Black Panthers – at least in broad strokes.

Marcus and Iris get close

I ought not fawn over this film or the satisfaction. Chris Rock has joked about “Givin’ people extra credit for doin’ shit they’re already supposed to be doing.” I know: I’m a film snob, along with my other assorted snobberies. But I yearn for stories like this, that are quiet and simple, and which remind me of Akeelah and the Bee. When cynical or quietly bigoted Anglo money men drag their feet, they insist that there’s no audience. Night Catches Us is a splendid surprise. There are scant well-made films for thinking Black people (or for brown or beige one). I hope this refreshes viewers and draws them to the cinema when Night Catches Us comes out on December 3rd. I give extra credit, hoping that that emboldens other filmmakers who want to follow suit.

Ms. Hamilton found inspiration for Night Catches Us from and made connections to To Kill a Mockingbird. When she had just arrived in high school, she found some of her “aunt’s” things: memories from her activism, like an arrest outside the White House. She was engaged and curious. Her “aunt” wasn’t – at all. Both surprises, the discovery and the stern reticence, opened her mind. In some ways, the girl, Iris, is the filmmaker. Ms. Hamilton’s experience was the slow drip through her life, which impelled her to finally translate that experience, and soem dogged research into this film.

On the technical and aesthetic tips, even though this is Ms. Hamilton’s first feature, she already has a film grammar that distinguishes her work from most of her peers. In a conversation with her, she said that her thesis film at Cooper Union also showed her chosen editorial style: a taste for a mélange of dramatic, archival, and different types of animated footage.

The opening or title sequence can tell a lot about the film and its maker. Is it banal or conservative, is it boldly artistic or vibrant, does it command your attention and interest? Much as out television themes used to describe the show’s world, objective, and attitude, this title sequence does too. It uses hip-hop music, hip-hop influenced images, and movements between those two, to outline the world, history, and dramas within Night Catches Us. Bottom-line: is it used to support the story; in a robust way? These sequences rarely merit a conversation. You can debate whether it should draw our attention, whether it should be subtle and conservative, or should resemble children as W.C. Fields often supposedly said, “be seen and not heard.” I am already biased and convinced.

How about the editing style or aesthetic? I cannot recall the last film I saw that dared to exploit more than dramatic and archival shots in one film, consistently. Night Catches Us moves beyond that: it uses animation, two different types, and does it in as many ways. It’s refreshing. A crude, hand-made Black Panthers comic book of mediocre line drawings comes to moving, swaggering life before Iris eyes as she thumbs through it. It grabs out attention too. It’s a remarkable and motivating animation until Marcus tells knucklehead Jimmy the truth about the propaganda’s source. He pops Jimmy’s bubble, and deflates some of its militant sweetness and fire.

If we’re going to rate this film, 4 1/2 out of 5.

Sep

How often do you consider Deaf movies? This is Deaf Awareness Week

Please pardon the pause in writing.

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, or revere 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.

611 days ago Short URL 1 Comment

Analysis/Film

"Breaking Through"/"Children of A Lesser God"/"Four Weddings and A Funeral"/"Mr. Holland's Opus"/"Wildflower"/Deaf Awareness Week/deaf movies/film with female lead/Marlee Matlin/movie analysis/movie criticism/movies for hard of hearing/strong tough female lead

Will Wright. Reporter. arts & public affairs

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