culture. ish. page two

The makers of this film had great source material for this. You can read the book of Esther in less time than it takes this movie to draw out the mundane parts of the story.

The film doesn't even qualify as a good Sunday-school lesson. The important parts of the story are pushed to the margins to make the film the story of one woman's courage to change the heart of King Xerxes (also one of the stars of the film 300). At times the film seems forced into trying to be a romantic tale. I found the interpretation of the story to be trite (there are overt references to Haman being a Nazi; red and black flags with a frightening symbol on them).

Where the text allows for high drama, the audience of the film gets bad montages and didactic narration. I have always found the story of Esther to be fascinating, but this version makes it seem absurd.

Labels: gpv, michael sajbel, movies, number twenty-three

I've been making short films since the summer before my Senior year of High School. Since then I've made over 70 short films. As to why I make films on my own, instead of just for classes, it's mainly because I couldn't stop even if I wanted to. I believe this is what I was meant to do.

Labels: mark sanders, movies, number twenty-three, respond

There have been plenty of movies made that tell stories of trauma; in fact, one might argue that almost all films are about traumatic experiences and how this changes and moves people through a narrative, toward either greater meaning or nihilistic chaos. These films need to find resolution in redemption or some level of healing in the afflicted person, or they ultimately settle for despair. When dealing with true tragedy, good films need to find an honest way to allow the audience to imagine the possibilities of hope and love.

Reign Over Me is this sort of film. It never sinks to the level of despair, but is accurate in not providing false hope. Charlie (Adam Sandler) has been a recluse since the loss of his wife and three daughters on 9/11. He has stopped visiting friends and family, and spends his time playing video games, listening to music and collecting records. Alan (Don Cheadle), Charlie's former roommate, sees him scooting around town and tries to reconnect after a long absence. Alan soon realizes that he needs to try to help Charlie, but finds that the institutions in place for dealing with grief and loss are not adequate to the task. He realizes that it will require time and a slow reconnecting with a small group of new friends that might help Charlie to learn to live with the loss, and make sense of his own life. The film is really good at developing the characters, and as weird and random as the group seems, it works. The film doesn't try to make grand statements about death and loss. Rather, it simply shows that a little reflection on life can show us who we are and what it is that we love most.

Labels: gpv, mike binder, movies, number twenty-two

Let’s be honest: James Bond will always be James Bond. There will be explosions, there will be a ridiculous villain, and there will be a fairly offensive and chauvinistic approach to all the female characters. Casino Royale is no exception to the Bond formula. In addition to the sex and violence, however, the latest installment in the series takes an opportunity to slow down and do something very interesting.

In the slower moments of the film, the writers take time to deal with the origins and consequences of the callous mindset that defines James Bond. They take a sensitive look at the casual sex-hound and remorseless murderer, which--while still admiring--shows a certain hollowness to his being.

Over all, Casino Royale is little more than a fun popcorn flick, but its moments of introspection lend it a gravity and sense of dignity seldom found in the blow-'em-up super-spy genre.

Labels: martin campbell, movies, nc, number twenty-two

In this 4 hour documentary, made for HBO, Spike Lee investigates the disaster that was Hurricane Katrina. Lee looks at all the angles: the natural, social, governmental, and human disaster that Katrina created in its wake and aftermath. It is an eye opening film, and tries to ask more questions than it is able to resolve about the stakes and impact that Katrina had and has on the lives of those who were born, raised and continue to call New Orleans home.

The documentary starts with the events leading up to the storm, and the government's failure early on. The second part focuses more on the media, and the good and bad that resulted from information on a mass scale. Lee does a good job of weaving together the big picture with the lives of individuals and the personal stories that those at the center tell about their experience. This film made me realize the filter and blinders that I have as a person who has never been to the southeastern US, and the difficulty of discerning the info-glut of CNN and the Internet.

The best insight of the film is not that we have a race problem in America (which is true, and may be the reason Crash won best picture immediately following Katrina), but rather the film points out the integral nature of human relationships that are mediated by social institutions. A personal disruption of your everyday life can be traumatic, but this can be exponentially damaging when social structures also start to fail in helping people recover a sense of normalcy and meaning. We all want personal freedom, and often times we overlook our intimate connection to the reality of a social world, involving a massive web of relationships. What we need is a politics that takes into account the reality of both.

Labels: gpv, movies, number twenty, spike lee

Going back to the '90s for a TV show that didn’t even air a complete season isn’t always the best idea, but in some rare occasions it’s worth it. Freak & Geeks is the reason I came up with that ridiculous sentence in the first place.

Freaks & Geeks is about teen angst and whole lot more. The show centers around Lindsay and Sam Weir, two high school kids who fall into two specific categories in their high school: the freaks and the geeks (yeah, that only happens in high school). Their two parents, Harold and Jean, stereotypically cannot understand either of their kids, yet at times are just what they need (Harold: "She's hanging with a bad crowd. She's lying and cheating and next thing you know, she's Patty Hearst with a gun to our heads").

The topics range everywhere from friendship to just trying to fit in (Lindsay: "All my new friends think I'm a goody-two-shoe and all my old friends think I'm throwing my life away. What am I supposed to do?"), but no matter what the show covers, there’s bound to be something hilarious in every episode, and something very descriptive about life even beyond the high school years.

The show was canceled for who-knows-what-reason (TV shows I watch have a habit of doing that), but you can pick up the complete first season on DVD from Netflix or from the store.

Labels: cc, movies, number twenty, pail feig, tv

This film is about originality of dialogue and story structure--OK, I can't say that with a straight face. This film could not be further from it. Most of the lines are cliches and or slightly plagiarized from other works (there are actual clips from Gladiator in this film!...almost). However, this film is a cgi marvel, allowing the viewer to enter into a fantastical ancient culture, where gods, men and wild beasts struggle for survival and honor.

Based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller (Sin City, Batman: the Dark Knight Returns), Zach Snyder adapted and directs this film about the Persian/Greek battle at Thermopylae in 480 B.C. The Spartan warriors are the inspiration of this film about the human struggle for honor and courage in the face of death. One of the films best qualities is its take on the religious structure of the time, with the Persian King Xerxes speaking and acting like a god among men. The visuals are stunning and the blood flies, splatters, and many other verbs. The sub-plot of family in Sparta actually gets in the way of the action-packed bloodbath. This is a film where you get a little history-lite and learn not to take yourself too seriously.

--gpv

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imdb
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Labels: gpv, movies, number twenty, zack snyder

As biopics go, this film is as good as Walk the Line and Ray. Amazing Grace is about the life of English politician William Wilberforce, especially his work in bring about the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807. The movie chronicles a small part of his life as he grows more and more confident of his convictions and influence in the political sphere. The film highlights the people that were around him that kept him going, especially his live-long friend William Pitt.

Amazing Grace mentions a few other important parts of his life in passing: the Clapham Sect that he was a part of, his friendship with former slave-ship captain-turned-composer John Newton, and his fast romancing of his wife, Barbara. I feel like I had an advantage in knowing a lot about Wilberforce before seeing the film--viewers with less background may need to do some research following viewing in order to fully understand the film, but the movie is a much-needed introduction to a great example of a man struggling and eventually finding his vocation.

Labels: gpv, michael apted, movies, number nineteen

Lucky Number Slevin is delightful–not only visually, but entertaining in its twist-filled plot. In staying away from spoiling the twist and plot the movie is about two mob bosses who used to run their mobs together. The main character Slevin (Josh Hartnett) gets thrown in between these two bosses because of a mistaken identity, and has to pay off the debt by some means to each boss. To make it even more complicated, he also meets a girl.

The visual cues in the cinematography played so well together that is was almost a reminder of the Sixth Sense. With these cues in mind, not all the flashbacks would have been needed; if someone can remember something from forty-five minutes ago they could puzzle it together.

Sure, the plot isn't completely original, but with good acting (including Morgan Freeman, Lucy Liu and more), awesome cinematography and thought-out direction Slevin is a completely pleasurable movie. So, delight yourself and watch.

Labels: jc, movies, number eighteen, paul mcguigan

This is not your typical film about a teacher in an urban school. Most of the films in that category usually work on the premise that the teacher comes in as a sort of renegade savior, and changes students, the school and the world.

There are, of course, degrees of this. Dead Poet's Society, the History Boys and Stand and Deliver do a pretty good job of staying in the realm of the real, which gives them more relevance to actual situations; films like Dangerous Minds and Coach Carter, on the other hand, make education trivial and simple if the teacher just asserts themselves.

This film does the opposite of these films. You are sympathetic to the main character Dan (Ryan Gosling), a junior high history teacher in an urban school. He is somewhat of a renegade teacher in that he frequently leaves the set-out curriculum to give his students his own view of how history works. Added to all this is the important fact that he is hiding his drug addiction from everyone. One of his students, Drey (played excellently by Shareeka Epps), accidentally discovers this secret and their relationship is forever changed.

The rest of the film develops the nuances of this relationship and how it changes both Drey and Dan. This secret connects them to the truth and while it doesn't ultimately set them free, it allows them to recognize the potential to be set free.

Labels: gpv, movies, number eighteen, ryan fleck

Attempting to depict the oppression and the turmoil endured in South Africa during the 1980s, Catch a Fire illustrates the unfair treatment that blacks faced during apartheid.

This film tells the true narrative of Patrick Chamusso, a black South African man who led a simple life with his wife and two daughters. Careful to never challenge the “bosses” (police), he repeatedly kept his head down when enduring humiliation. But, when he is charged and tortured for a crime he did not commit, and sees his battered wife after the police beat her, Patrick is pushed over the edge. As he turns towards violence and joins the rebel organization ANC, it is difficult to not empathize with his actions. Ironically, the government seems to have turned him into their enemy. The very acts they were punishing an innocent man for are the acts he now performs.

This film encourages critical thought about South African apartheid while also offering hope because this apartheid of injustice was eventually resolved in peace. Considering the violence that occurred in South Africa, the film makers carefully keep the movie from being gory, although in an attempt to accurately portray the story, it contains scenes of torture and killings. This film never appears overdone and fake, and is successful in connecting the main character in the movie to the real Patrick Chamusso.

The film has definite improvements it could make in plot development, detail, and emotion. It resembles a weakly made movie that was a slight upgrade from a documentary, though it is possible that this was an intentional effort. Certainly not a movie to relax to, this does not disregard the fact that this film brings up crucial issues regarding violence and peace worthy of consideration.

Labels: movies, number seventeen, phillip noyce, sk

In February and March of 1945 America and Japan struggled in a 35 day battle over an island in the Pacific Ocean named Iwo Jima. Clint Eastwood (director of Million Dollar Baby and Mystic River) has made two films chronicling the lives of American (Flags of our Fathers) and Japanese (Letters from Iwo Jima) soldiers.

Both of these films follow in the anti-war tradition by focusing on the human face of social conflicts. Flags tells the story of three men, John "Doc" Bradley, Ira Hayes and Rene Gagnon, who became famous for being in a photo, raising a flag on Iwo Jima (see movie poster). They are soon sent for by the government to be the spokespeople for raising money for the war effort. The story is told by the son of Bradley, one of the flag raisers. Using interviews and flashbacks, the story comes to a climax in the final scenes when Bradley tells his son about the catastrophe of war and the construction of heroes. The main theme of Flags is the way in which we define heroes and give political meaning to our actions. The film does a great job of making the viewer more reflective about the complexity of war.

Letters is a more traditional film, following the lives of Saigo, General Tadamichi Kuribayashi and Baron Nishi, as they dig in for the long and continually bleakening battle ahead. Through flashbacks you come to know these men and the tension they feel in fighting for their country and the longing for home and family. In the end, these men realize that fighting is not the purpose of their lives; rather, it is the dignity and worth they have as human beings in life and in death. Rather than killing themselves, as so many of their fellow officers do, they value the honor of their lives. Like Flags, this film also allows the viewer to critically reflect on the tragedy of war. The directing is well done and there are good performances by Ryan Phillippe, Adam Beach, Ken Watanabe and Kazunari Ninomiya.

Labels: clint eastwood, flags of our fathers, gpv, letters from iwo jima, movies, number seventeen

Guillermo del Toro has the gift of seamlessly putting the real and the otherworldly side by side without the audience blinking. The story here is both beyond belief and it succeeds in helping the audience suspend their disbelief.

Set in Spain during WWII, young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) moves with her mother to live with a new father who is a military commander in charge of suppressing a rebel movement that hides in the surrounding woods. Her mother is pregnant, and it becomes apparent that this second marriage is more for political reasons than any sort of love. Ofelia's love of reading allows her to explore the surrounding area and hear the story of who she really is: the princess of a world beneath the earth. A fairy leads her to a faun who tells her the tasks she must complete in order to take her place back in the kingdom. These two stories and world are weaved together magically and with visual brilliance.

The harsh and brutal reality of the war is intentionally juxtaposed to Ofelia's fantasy world, until the very end of the film where the two worlds collide in a heart wrenching confrontation. In an NPR interview, del Toro talked about how the imagination is a way to cope with childhood traumas and the reality of evil in the world, not as a way to escape it but as a way of survival. While a portrait of a child's experience, this is neither a film for children nor a fantasy film. Instead this film explores the depth of human evil, and the imagination required to recognize the good, to love, and to hope.

Labels: gpv, guillermo del toro, movies

Labels: ap, movies, the queen

This is a great film about the "dumbing down" of America from writer/director Mike Judge (Office Space). An average Joe (Luke Wilson) and a Ho (Maya Rudolph) get frozen in a military experiment and are eventually jarred from there slumber to find that it is 2505.

The world is a very different place. So dumb, in fact, that if Lloyd and Harry from Dumb and Dumber strolled in they would be seen as tragic characters for being to rational in their stupidity. Which is what the main characters find when they reemerge after a 500 year gap. They were pretty average when they started the freezing process and now they should be in charge of the government, which they eventually do.

The film ends with a rather interesting and deep comment on the anomie (feelings of social alienation) that come with knowledge in relation to the social world that one lives in. It is not a happily ever after; it is merely survival. It begs the question of whether anything more is possible. I suspect the audience is suppose to answer yes, and then do something about it now. While a funny film, the moral of the story comes across well: go read a book or two and vote intelligently in 2008.

Labels: gpv, mike judge, movies