tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-147344292024-03-12T19:58:37.747-04:00Movie Cross RhodesFilm reviews from Nancy Keefe RhodesNancy Keefe Rhodeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042283155633287882noreply@blogger.comBlogger254125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14734429.post-83396999427178069432011-10-14T19:31:00.002-04:002011-10-14T19:33:38.808-04:00<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qzYT7JYU9sY/TpjGzSzq0DI/AAAAAAAAAIk/igJlr6s5Pls/s1600/Gravedigger.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 304px; height: 125px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qzYT7JYU9sY/TpjGzSzq0DI/AAAAAAAAAIk/igJlr6s5Pls/s320/Gravedigger.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5663495115942580274" /></a>
<strong>Film Clip #243: <em>Gravedigger</em></strong><br><br>
2011 – Fiction, 88 min.<br>
Director: Sandor Kardos (Hungary)<br>
Cast: Mari Torocsik, Anga Kaksziistvan, Papp Alina<br>
<strong>SYRFILM screening: Friday, October 14, 7:00 PM</strong>, Watson Theatre, Waverly Avenue, SU Campus.<br><br>
Some of us always keep a sharp look-out for the Hungarian and the Czech films that turn up each year as part of the SYRFILM line-up. This evening Sandor Kardos’ feature length <em>Gravedigger</em> is up against what is perhaps the festival’s signature – and usually best attended – event, the silent screen classic accompanied by a specially commissioned live jazz performance. But SYRFILM has put <em>Gravedigger</em> at Watson Theatre on the SU campus (in the Menschel Media Center, next to Light Work, on the corner of Waverly and Comstock Avenues), so maybe the film will catch the campus crowd who are willing to brave the rain but not enough for the trek to Eastwood.<br><br>
Listed as “experimental,” <em>Gravedigger</em> is a series of stills that pan from right to left (and occasionally in the other direction) – much like a photographic story-boarding of a film. But, made with a photo-finish camera like those used to capture the exact instant a race horse’s nose crosses the finish line, these stills are elongated and distorted. If you don’t know this, you may think the DVD is bad or the projector broken, but no: it’s entirely on purpose. There’s an adjustment period involved here – <em>Gravedigger</em> is not immediately and obviously captivating – but it’s worth the wait.<br><br>
Set roughly in the 19th century, <em>Gravedigger</em> easily offers itself as a fable, and opens with the gravedigger of the village of San Rocco having died and the leader seeking a new man for the job. For three weeks there are no applicants and, after all, what is a “’cemetery without a master”? One day a stranger arrives, wanting the job, and he transforms the cemetery into a flourishing garden, not to mention winning the heart of Gita, the village leader’s lonely daughter. Suddenly, the villagers do not fear the weight of death so much. The gravedigger’s wisdom lies in his observation that people’s great sorrow lies not in death but in a failure to reach one another. A premonition of the coming plague and Gita’s death, however, cast a pall over the village and replace the flourishing garden with death piled on death. Suddenly there is no more ceremony around death – instead, the few remaining among living heave the bodies over the cemetery hedge. As an allegory of personal and collective grief alike, <em>Gravedigger </em>literally stertches its images to breaking, and stays with you long after you think it would be gone.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Nancy Keefe Rhodes</div>Nancy Keefe Rhodeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042283155633287882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14734429.post-59049312080990447422011-10-14T18:14:00.003-04:002011-10-14T19:15:42.965-04:00<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nBq50sKLV1g/Tpi5215CEBI/AAAAAAAAAIY/H7N0Z7dRBiA/s1600/Steppes.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 180px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nBq50sKLV1g/Tpi5215CEBI/AAAAAAAAAIY/H7N0Z7dRBiA/s320/Steppes.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5663480883248762898" /></a><br><br>
<em>Above, the aged Miri (Irit Levi) has a tense exchange with Oleg (David Hess) in Rob Nilsson’s The Steppes. Hess was supposed to accompany Nilsson to Syracuse for this screening, but passed away suddenly last week.</em><br><br>
<strong>Film Review #244: <em>The Steppes</em></strong><br>
2011 – Fiction, 107 minutes<br>
Director: Rob Nilsson (USA)<br>
Cast: Irit Levi, Nancy Bower, David Hess<br>
<strong>SYRFILM Screening: Friday, 10/14/2011 @ 9:15 PM</strong>, Redhouse Arts Center, Armory Square/ Downtown<br><br>
Nilsson’s <em>The Steppes </em>premiered a few months ago at the Moscow International Film Festival, which also presented a mini-retrospective of Nilsson’s body of work. Last weekend he premiered a related film, <em>What Happened Here</em>, at the Mill Valley Film Festival north of San Francisco. It’s a shame that the two films can’t be seen together, for their web of associations make that a natural double bill.<br><br>
In the 70s Nilsson read the freshly released edition of <em>My Life </em>by Leon Trotsky and ever since he’s been captivated by the contradictory luminary of the Bolshevik Revolution that overthrew the Russian Czar. Trotsky ran afoul of Stalin, who exiled him in 1929 and whose agents chased and finally assassinated him in 1940 in Mexico. Nilsson was captivated especially by Trotsky’s views on art, which he says few if any other Bolsheviks shared.<br><br>
Ironically, as Nilsson was discovering Trotsky, the revolutionary’s home village in Ukraine was being abandoned and its houses and synagogue (built by Trotsky’s father, Davyd Bronstein) dismantled by area farmers for their materials. Last year, in part thanks to new connections made here in Syracuse, Nilsson was able to travel to Ukraine and seek out the story of Trotsky’s home village’s disappearance. That story includes the Holomodor, a scheme of Stalin’s that resulted in several million deaths by starvation in 1932-33, and the massacre of that village’s Jews by the Nazis in 1941. After a year's research, Nilsson also managed to locate the single survivor of that massacre in Isreal and traveled there to record his story.<br><br>
<em>The Steppes</em>, on the other hand, is a fiction film centering on an aged woman living in a flea-bag in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District called the Odessa Hotel, whose name harks back to her own family’s flight from starvation and Germans in Ukraine in the same period that Trotsky hid out from Stalin’s agents and his home village fell in the Nazi tide. Having just lost her husband and having no plan and no resources, Miri seems close to collapse. Her niece Rachel (Nancy Bower) arrives, determined to save her aunt and get some answers about how come her mother – Miri’s sister Olga – could never love her. Reminiscent of the harrowing single night that a man and woman spent in Nilsson’s <em>Imbued</em> last year, <em>The Steppes </em>recounts how Miri and Rachel mightily resist one another until each budges just enough to let the stories out. Few tellings of an old mysterious trauma on screen manage to be quite as redemptive as this one. <em>What Happened Here </em>is the backstory of those events. <br><br>
Nilsson’s DP, Mickey Freeman, has never been better than he is in <em>The Steppes</em>, and Nilsson moves away from his “direct cinema” approach with a scripted movie that seems to signal a new phase in his work.<br><br>
<em>Read more about Nilsson’s current projects early in 2012 in "Stone Canoe Journal" in the Moving Images section.</em><div class="blogger-post-footer">Nancy Keefe Rhodes</div>Nancy Keefe Rhodeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042283155633287882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14734429.post-41279785225403552742011-10-06T15:33:00.003-04:002011-10-06T22:48:25.531-04:00<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cZ4YxO73ub4/To4HG-nDvII/AAAAAAAAAIE/KwZlCHRiL98/s1600/Gone%2Bmovie.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 180px; height: 233px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cZ4YxO73ub4/To4HG-nDvII/AAAAAAAAAIE/KwZlCHRiL98/s320/Gone%2Bmovie.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5660469598118722690" /></a>
<strong>Film Review #242: <em>Gone</em> </strong><br>
2011 – Documentary, 85 minutes<br>
Directors: Gretchen & John Morning<br>
Cast: Kathryn Gilleran<br>
<strong>SYRFILM screening: Sat., Oct. 15, 1:00 PM at the Palace Theatre</strong>, James St. in Eastwood. Q&A afterward with Kathryn Gilleran.<br><br>
“What is the first word you think of about your son Aeryn?” asks the woman off-screen, filmmaker Gretchen Morning.<br><br>
Kathy Gilleran pauses, swallows deeply – the camera angle emphasizes her long throat – and a single word squeezes out.<br><br>
“Gone.”<br><br>
Although much of it takes place in the Austrian city of Vienna, this is very much a Central New York story. Gilleran is a native of the small city of Elmira in the Southern Tier, who started as a social worker and later switched to policing. In 2006 she retired after more than 21 years as a police officer in Ithaca, New York. During that time she won awards for crime prevention and human rights advocacy, and she was one of the first female police officers in the nation to complete Advanced SWAT training with the International Chiefs of Police. The film’s opening montage has a clip of then-Senate candidate Hillary Clinton mentioning Gilleran’s public comments on community policing during a campaign stop in Ithaca. During Gilleran’s Ithaca police career, she raised two sons in the nearby village of Groton.<br><br>
And by late October of 2007, Gilleran had gotten what she called her “retirement job” at the county SPCA in Cortland and was planning to visit her older son, Aeryn, for an early Christmas. Instead, on October 31st, she got a phone call from Vienna, where he worked for the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. His boss at UNIDO said Aeryn was missing, hadn’t show up for work in two days.<br><br>
Gilleran left for Vienna on November 1st, where she stayed five and a half weeks in her son’s apartment while trying to find out what happened. She recounts on-screen how she showed the police her retirement badge, adding, “In America, police officers take care of police officers,” and mimics the dismissive shrug she got as an answer, a response that was to become standard when police weren’t criticizing her instead.<br><br>
Aeryn Gillern (his mother kept the family spelling of their surname but he dropped the “a”) had started work at UNIDO in 2003. He was an out gay man well-known in Vienna’s gay community, a fact that helped Kathy Gilleran as she started her own investigation. Aeryn had been named Mr. Gay Austria in 2005 and 2006, sponsored by the same upscale sauna, Kaiserbründl, where something happened that sent him fleeing naked through the streets before his disappearance. According to Viennese police theory about common behavior among gay men, he had jumped to his death in the frigid Danube Canal as a “spontaneous suicide.”<br><br>
Despite the behavior of the Vienna police – the U.S. Consulate was not much better, given that a staff there grabbed her crucifix and said she’d pray for Aeryn when his mother said he was gay – Gilleran did find allies in Vienna, among Aeryn’s friends and inside UNIDO.<br><br>
“They called me each morning to make sure I was up – and frankly I think to make sure I was still alive,” Kathy Gilleran told me by phone last weekend. “I would go to UNIDO and eat in their cafeteria, see their psychologist Anjelika, use their phone. They had just hired Anjelika and I was her first case. But she took me for coffee, she went to meetings with me constantly, she checked on me.”<br><br>
Despite Kathy Gilleran’s efforts and persistence over the next four years – she’s met with Aeryn’s partner and his friends, members of Parliament and the Green Party, a founder of the gay police support project in Vienna, a journalist who turned up two witnesses to Aeryn’s run through the streets, staff from the US Consulate and lawyers and police investigators – she has never seen the police report nor has any body ever been found. Through all this, the Vienna police offered wildly, ever-morphing accounts of what happened, who did what and how come.<br><br>
Gilleran returns to Vienna each October to hold a vigil across the street from the Kaiserbründl sauna. But during those first weeks after her son's disappearance, Gilleran had been standing outisde and a young man named Jens, a manager at the sauna who had known Aeryn, invited her in and provided a tour. With the instincts and training of a good cop, she paid attention to whether the elegant, wood-paneled, labyrinthine private club had video cameras – it did, though the police had told her there were none and they never entered the sauna nor interviewed anyone inside that night.<br><br>
Similarly, Gilleran also re-traced many of her son’s routine paths, as well as the steps he supposedly took through Vienna’s streets from the sauna to the canal. She narrates this section as the camera simply shows what’s there, demolishing the credibility of the police claim that no one saw a naked man running through a well-lit, busy neighborhood with a train stop, outdoor cafes and cosmopolitan shops.<br><br>
The husband and wife filmmaking team of John and Gretchen Morning were living in Fayetteville in the fall of 2008 when they first contacted Kathy Gilleran through the Cortland-Ithaca branch of PFLAG, which she'd just joined that summer. (Similarly, I was able to contact her in the same way, through my parents, who are members). The Mornings then met with her in Cortland’s Blue Frog café. They shot the first interview session that December and then provided her with a camera when she returned to Vienna in 2009 and 2010 for her annual vigils, so that she did much of that filming herself while there.<br><br>
Gretchen Morning had been working for the Discovery Channel as an editor, writer and producer when she and her husband heard about this case through local coverage of the anniversary. Both the <em>Cortland-Standard </em>and Syracuse’s <em>Post-Standard </em>ran stories and Channel 5 did a television report as well.<br><br>
You can see that this is very much the first feature-length film made by a film editor. The Mornings employ an editing strategy to structure the film that aims pretty effectively at making it primarily the story of a mother’s quest. So there are three elements: close-up interview segments with Gilleran against a dark background (from her clothing and hair, there appear to have been two major interviews filmed); still photos that are matched nicely with the sound of a slide projector’s click when the image changes; and footage that retraces Gilleran’s journeys (mostly in Vienna but with some Central New York footage), which is doubly effective because it serves to present evidence and to highlight that Kathy Gilleran, as a veteran cop, was equipped to challenge the official story by knowing what to look for.<br><br>
Although the Mornings did interview other people for the film, they have explained their decision not to include any of that material as a way to highlight Kathy Gilleran’s portrait and have argued that such material duplicated what she said anyway.<br><br>
There is one exception to this strategy and it has the force of a slap across the face. Late in the film, the Mornings insert a short home-video clip that Aeryn Gillern made for his mother about three years before his disappearance. Here, in the popular way of grown-up children establishing a household elsewhere, he offers a little narrated tour of his first Vienna apartment, anticipating that she’ll visit sometime, at the end of which we see him saying good-bye and turning off his videocam.<br><br>
This scene also appears to be the only place in the film where Aeryn’s younger brother, who was 26 when Aeryn disappeared, gets any mention. Aeryn points out the many framed family photos on his wall: “Here’s you…. Here’s your Dad …. Here’s Grandmother…Here’s Rahman.”<br><br>
It’s not that Rahman is a secret exactly – there are photos of him on the film’s official website and the bio there lists Kathy Gilleran as the mother of two sons. Despite its undeniable power cinematically, one wonders at the unseen collateral damage of leaving this son and brother out, and whether, in the service of creating a stronger, starker screen portrait of a mother, what kind of position this placed Gilleran in with her remaining child.<br><br>
And it’s hard to erase him entirely, since on-screen Gilleran often describes events in terms of “we” did this or that, “we” went here or there. Gilleran told me that Rahman went to Vienna too in November 2007, arriving five or six days after she did and staying another ten.<br><br>
“He thought as a man he could help,” she told me. “And he idolized his big brother.”<br><br>
Expanding on her screen account of a particularly harrowing interview with two Austrian investigators, one of whom refuses to speak English or even pause for her translator, Gilleran told me that her son Rahman was there too. On-screen we hear how the lead officer, after silently observing proceedings, suddenly strides across the room and disparages her at close range, sarcastically asking, among other things, if she’d really been “just a meter maid.” What’s left out is that Rahman had lit a cigarette while sitting there with her, that the investigator strode up to him first and slapped him across the back of the head, as one might a little boy, before turning viciously on her.<br><br>
If Rahman’s absence in this film is unsettling, one can only applaud another brief scene that survived, shot during her 2009 trip, about a parallel that many filmmakers would have left out. Here, Kathy Gilleran visits Vienna’s Judenplatz, which commemorates the Austrian Jews turned over to the Holocaust. Carefully stating in the voice-over that she doesn’t wish to stereotype the Austrian people, Kathy Gilleran notes that sixty years ago there was widespread hatred toward other groups in Vienna besides gay men.<br><br>
“Some Austrians have criticized me for that scene,” she told me. “But there’s another scene that didn’t make it into the final cut. Last year, 2010, we went back to get the last of the filming. I did some of it too and, you know, that camera was my shield. I wasn’t afraid of the police when I had it! The police are always around the synagogues in Vienna. Last year one of them spoke English and I asked him about this and he said, ‘We have to guard them. People don’t like the Jews – those and the queers.’ Austrian synagogues are guarded 24-7. People here don’t know that!”<br><br>
<em>Gone </em>premiered in April at the TriBeCa Film Festival in New York City and has done well at other festivals and screenings since then. Tula Goenka, who with Roger Hallas co-directs the annual Human Rights Film Festival at Syracuse University earlier in the fall, says they’d tried to get <em>Gone</em> for this year’s program “but SYRFILM beat us to the punch.” Gilleran says that a DVD is possibly in the works and may include extras with interview material of others that wasn’t used in the film.<br><br>
Since 2007, Gilleran has become acquainted with other disappearances.<br><br>
“There are so many Aeryns out there!” she says. “A country as civilized as France just got rid of all their gypsies in this past year. We have the exact same economic conditions that gave rise to the Nazis in the 30s. I want people to know that kind of hatred is still out there. And Americans are naïve about what our government will and will not do. The Department of State publishes no stats on U.S. citizens missing abroad. There will be no translators, no attorneys, no money, no transport, no shipping the remains home for you.”<br><br>
Near the end of our lengthy conversation I asked Kathy Gilleran if she had a theory of what might have happened.<br><br>
After a pause she said, “You know, I spoke with two different attorneys in Vienna and each of them told me I would never see the police report. Each of them pointed out that an exclusive gay sauna existed in this neighborhood – I mean, two doors from the Gucci store! – and was never bothered by police. There was an ultraconservative politician who was killed in a car crash about a year after Aeryn disappeared. There were rumors he’d been at party in a gay bar and rumors that he was intoxicated. He was xenophobic to the max – he had gotten laws passed against homosexuals. And do you know it’s now illegal in Austria to publicize anything suggesting he was gay?”<br><br>
Jörg Haider died two weeks after he made a political come-back climaxed by his election as Austria’s president. When a man who claimed he had been Haider’s lover gave an interview in the press, Haider’s widow pursued legal means of silencing him and any media coverage regarding his claims of an intimate relationship with Haider.<br><br>
“So I wonder if he frequented the Kaiserbründl,” said Gilleran. “If he was there that night. Someone knows something.”<br><br>
*****<br>
<em>Gilleran returns to Vienna later this month for the fourth anniversary of her son’s disappearance. She’ll be here in Syracuse on Saturday, October 15th, answering questions after the SYRFILM screening at 1:00 PM at the Palace Theatre on James St., Eastwood.</em><div class="blogger-post-footer">Nancy Keefe Rhodes</div>Nancy Keefe Rhodeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042283155633287882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14734429.post-11943681500294313642010-12-30T11:43:00.003-05:002010-12-30T13:30:21.892-05:00<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TRy5cj08HuI/AAAAAAAAAHw/07IyBcyY4xo/s1600/TrueGrit1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 213px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TRy5cj08HuI/AAAAAAAAAHw/07IyBcyY4xo/s320/TrueGrit1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5556519940573109986" /></a>
<strong>Film Review #241: <em>True Grit</em></strong><br>
2010<br>
Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen<br>
Cast: Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, Barry Pepper<br><br>
I confess I was skeptical about the Coen Brothers’ re-make of <em>True Grit</em>. Based on Charles Portis’ 1968 novel, the 1969 film adaptation starred John Wayne as crusty old marshal Rooster Cogburn, and made a decidedly comedic and reassuring swerve away from Portis’ darker story-line. The Hollywood producer Hal Wallis, as it turns out, bought the screen rights to Portis’ novel from Simon & Schuster even before the novel’s publication, and apparently helped the novel’s success along by sending employees to buy up cartons of the book at bookstores known to be part of <em>The New York Times’ </em>best-seller list calculations. In retrospect, the 1969 film that he and Paramount released, directed by Henry Hathaway, is a little like the Wild West show that a grown-up Mattie Ross visits in 1903 at the end of the Coens’ re-make – a side-show version of wilder events served up for popular entertainment without real menace.<br><br>
Now, setting the record straight, we have Mattie’s memory-inside-a-memory – that is, from the windswept, lonely hillside of her family’s private burial plot in the early years of the 20th century, the 40-year-old “cranky old maid” recalls her 1903 trip to that Wild West show to see Rooster and, as she alights from the train on her way there, she remembers the trip they made together deep into the “Indian territory” beyond Fort Smith, Arkansas, in 1873 in pursuit of Tom Chaney, her father’s murderer, when she was just 14. As it turns out, older Mattie is three days’ too late – Rooster has just died – a span of time the Coens wisely do not make much of but leave to percolate along with their other Biblical references.<br><br>
As Cogburn the Coens have cast Jeff Bridges, with Matt Damon as the preening bounty hunter/ex-Texas Ranger LaBoeuf, new-comer Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie, Barry Pepper as the outlaw Lucky Ned Pepper and Josh Brolin as Tom Chaney. There is not a mediocre performance among them, and the bloom is off the rose so far as any romantic notion of frontier life goes. A world of exposition is supplied by attending to the right placement of filthy fingernails, from Dreyer’s long-ago suggestion of how bleak was Joan of Arc’s confinement right down to Mattie’s first encounter with Lucky Ned, into hands and care she falls. That young Mattie, inside the first ten minutes, attends a triple hanging and briskly agrees to share a night’s lodging with the remains – her father’s undertaker has depleted her funds by overcharging her and this is the best hospitality he offers – does prepare us for what she’ll have to take in stride later.<br><br>
Despite pronouncements every few years that Westerns are dead, the genre has endured and even enjoyed resurrection, often in times of war and political conflict. Westerns, after all, are the template for our national tale – or for how we re-cast that to fit the moment’s challenges – and in the decade since 9/11 they’re back again. Portis’ novel recognizably came out of the Vietnam era. And while its first screen version rode that era’s resurgence of Westerns – the Hathaway film closely followed the release of Sam Peckinpah’s <em>The Wild Bunch </em>and preceded Robert Altman’s even darker 1971 film, <em>McCabe and Mrs. Miller </em>(belatedly named this past week to the Library of Congress’ National Registry of Films) – not for nothing do we find John Wayne reassuring the audience that all is well.<br><br>
And though we’ve waited for the Coens’ re-make longer than Mattie waited to see Rooster again, they give us two boys who torture a tied pack-mule with sharpened sticks, echoing Peckinpah’s opening scene of <em>The Wild Bunch </em>where some laughing kids famously set ants and a scorpion afire just to amuse themselves.<br><br>
This <em>True Grit </em>is more <em>Deadwood</em> than it is Andy Devine (if you’re old enough to remember that actor’s Aw-shucks Western persona). Like David Milch’s late lamented HBO parable about how the country civilized itself with all its fissures showing, this film takes its central action out of the settled United States proper, reminding us that any sea-to-shining-sea manifest destiny was a lengthy, bloody struggle that still resurfaces. Just as <em>Deadwood</em> depicted an historic renegade town, the lawless “Indian territory” beyond Fort Smith is much like the tribal areas– the “ungoverned spaces” – of today’s conflicts. The same filmmakers who gave us <em>No Country for Old Men </em>three years ago really revisit the genre with this story of a gutsy, whip-smart girl who “earns her spurs” alright in the pursuit of justice and the payment of accounts – the be-spurred LaBoeuf himself bestows that tribute – but did she, or we as a nation, grow up to be happy?<br><br>
One trait of the so-called “revisionist” Westerns released in times of turmoil has been an overt mention of the Civil War. Traumatized by the national conflict and the immense, often gruesome loss of life it entailed, the country in one sense used settling the Western frontier as a way to simply change the subject. Classic depictions of settling the West on-screen have, depending on the decade and the degree of national consensus, followed suit. Westerns since 9/11 tend, as I have written elsewhere, like the Westerns of the late 60s and 70s, to reject the timelessness of classic Westerns in several ways. They often specifically give us characters with back-stories in the Civil War and who carry that conflict into the frontier. Very early, Cogburn and LaBoeuf clash over this history, though both are former Confederates. The Texas Ranger, after establishing his own credentials as an officer of a Virginia company – implying he was once a gentleman too – accuses Cogburn, who rode with the guerilla force Quantrill’s Raiders, of being a barbaric “marauder” who murdered women and children. Cogburn hotly denies such behavior, but to the end of his life maintains and takes refuge in those ties. Mattie’s visit to the Wild West show leads her to two of Cogburn’s cohorts there: Cole Younger (one of the Younger Brothers who rode with outlaw Jesse James) and Frank James (Jesse’s surviving brother), all of whose associations date from Quantrill’s Raiders. Mattie’s parting remark to Frank James – “You can keep your seat, trash!” – on the surface answers his discourtesy in not standing to speak with a lady. But it’s also about her judgment of his crass betrayal of Jesse, whose grave, history buffs will know, Frank charged money for tourists to visit.<br><br>
Finally, one of the joys here is the cadenced, vivid and sometimes witty language, with much of the dialogue coming verbatim from Portis’ novel. That bracing speech itself comments on how the frontier was settled. It’s not just that the King James Bible and Shakespeare were the two most familiar books on that frontier – and both available by performance from the pulpit or the traveling stage to those who couldn’t read. Listen to the back and forth between Mattie and the stable owner when she comes to settle her father’s accounts over his string of ponies, his missing gray saddle horse and the saddle itself. Or to Mattie’s explanation in the crude mountain lean-to to Cogburn and LaBoeuf of the difference between natural law and man’s law – she pauses to translate the Latin term for them – or indeed to any of the rapid-fire exchanges in the film. What anchors these exchanges is the language’s precision and rhythmic delivery. It’s not exactly iambic pentameter, of course, but it reminds you of what Shakespeare sounds like on stage; at times you glimpse how the language itself is a civilizing, ordering force in both thought and behavior. And Mattie actually does know her place and its precariousness (“That is a silly question,” she chastises Cogburn at one point, reminding him, “I am fourteen years old.”). In a moment when Orwellian double-speak has returned to much public conversation, the Coens give us a film whose language is anything but vague or accidental.<br><br>
After <em>True Grit</em>, I quickly took myself to see <em>The King’s Speech </em>too, a moving and gorgeously acted film, also about the role of language in a nation’s survival during crisis. And I highly recommend it. But I think <em>True Grit </em>is a better, and for us yanks, more important film. It just might be the best this year.<br><br>
*******<br>
<em>A shorter version of this review appears in the December 30, 2010 print edition of “The Eagle” weekly and the full review at www.theeaglecny.com.</em><div class="blogger-post-footer">Nancy Keefe Rhodes</div>Nancy Keefe Rhodeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042283155633287882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14734429.post-86932190614597139262010-12-30T11:34:00.002-05:002010-12-30T11:42:47.364-05:00<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TRy2fmF8DxI/AAAAAAAAAHo/Mdw2yGPQdyo/s1600/Black%2BSwan%2B-%2BNatatlie%2BPortman%2B%2526%2BVincent%2BCassell.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 213px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TRy2fmF8DxI/AAAAAAAAAHo/Mdw2yGPQdyo/s320/Black%2BSwan%2B-%2BNatatlie%2BPortman%2B%2526%2BVincent%2BCassell.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5556516694186004242" /></a>
<strong>Film Review #240: <em>Black Swan</em></strong><br>
2010<br>
Director: Daron Aronofsky<br>
Cast: Nathalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassell<br><br>
Somewhere in the vaults of my family’s old home movies, there’s a reel – yes, that long ago – of the ballet recital that climaxed the after-school classes my mother and grandmother made me go to for a single year. I remember the recital, with myself togged up as one of the white swans – white fluff, white satin, silver trim – running in and out of the circles of other girls. I looked as miserable as I surely was. After that, they let me stop.<br><br>
Quite a few of the audience at Manlius Art Cinema’s opening night screening of Darren Aronofsky’s <em>Black Swan </em>looked like they were young dancers themselves. They had the same slenderness and carriage that Natalie Portman (as Nina Sayers) and Mila Kunis (as her rival, Lilly), even though both already had years of formal dance training, spent months of full-time training and dieting to achieve before shooting began. Two of them sat just behind me and throughout the film one or the other would periodically gasp or exclaim at the proceedings on-screen. As we left after the credits, we shared that universally understood combination of sound and gesture – part eye-roll, part shrug and part dramatic exhalation – that made adding the words “I’m exhausted!” unnecessary. Out in the lobby, somebody did say that.<br><br>
Absorbing, by turn hallucinatory, appalling, gorgeous and deeply sad, and billed somewhat bizarrely as a “dance thriller” in the shorthand of ad-speak, <em>Black Swan </em>contains few lulls and several very fine performances. Besides the principal leads, Vincent Cassell is the controlling, Balanchine-like dance master, Barbara Hershey is Nina’s creepy mother and, somewhere beneath raccoon eyes and a fright wig, an unrecognizable Winona Ryder– who is that? I kept wondering every time this woman appeared – is the waning prima ballerina abruptly and publicly “retired” to make room for younger Nina Sayers to dance the double lead in <em>Swan Lake</em>, who goes round the bend.<br><br>
Well, she is not the only one. Set in Manhattan’s Lincoln Center – as is New York City Ballet in real life – <em>Black Swan</em> concerns the long-held dream of company dancer Nina Sayers to dance the lead in <em>Swan Lake</em>, a double role of the good Swan Queen and her rival/double/shadow self, the Black Swan. The daughter of a former dancer whose unplanned pregnancy abruptly ended her career, Nina lives with her mother in a maze-like apartment on the upper West Side. Her mother ostensibly lives only for Nina’s success, but of course – we are dealing with archetypes here – jealously and cruelly undermines her at every turn. When Thomas casts Nina as the lead, her anxiety sky-rockets even as she struggles to emerge as her own person, upsetting the delicate see-saw between mother and daughter. In a single scene shows us how vulnerable Nina really is – and signals the rising arc in Portman’s astonishing performance – she races to the privacy of a dressing room to telephone her mother and announce, in the tones a child might to her Mommy, that she got the part.<br><br>
Lily’s arrival in the company complicates matters further. Between Lily’s own ambitions, Nina’s insecurity and utter lack of experience in discerning what a real adult friendship might look like, and Thomas’ manipulations of both, very quickly it’s hard to tell what really happens and what Nina imagines. As physically demanding as top-flight professional dancing may actually be, <em>Black Swan </em>extends this considerably here, adding physical abuse and humiliation from Nina’s mother, hallucinated self-mutilation, sexual violation real and otherwise, and murderous attacks with shattered pieces of mirror on the triumphant opening night.<br><br>
On Monday, <em>Black Swan</em> was cited for “Worst Female Images” in a film released theatrically in 2010 by the national Women Film Critics Circle during WFCC’s year-end awards announcements – beating out <em>Burlesque</em>, <em>The Killer Inside Me</em>, and <em>The Social Network</em>. With the sole exception of the unnamed older woman, quiet, focused, dignified, clearly accomplished, who runs the warm-ups and classes for the company dancers during rehearsals – in a film that contains some cinematically brilliant sequences, the comparatively understated moment in which the camera simply watches her back and shoulder muscles for a moment as she shows a dancer a sequence of moves is one of the best – there’s no female character here that we’d want any of our daughters or nieces or godchildren or sisters to take as a role model. And from opening night’s audience, I’d say they pretty much get that.<br><br>
But Aronofsky wasn’t making a movie about role models. Instead of agit-prop, as he’s said extensively and about which there’s no great mystery, he’s exploring ideas of identity and doubles, how we contain our opposites, how performers use their bodies as their medium and the dangerous nature of images (Plato warned us, after all, to ban the artists), a variation and extension of previous films such as last year’s <em>The Wrestler</em>. For those harrowing, edgy achievements, see this dazzling film.<br><br>
*******<br>
<em>A shorter version of this review appeared in the December 23, 2010 print edition of "The Eagle" weekly in Syracuse and at www.theeaglecny.com. “Black Swan” continues at Manlius Art Cinema and has also opened at Carousel Mall.</em><div class="blogger-post-footer">Nancy Keefe Rhodes</div>Nancy Keefe Rhodeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042283155633287882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14734429.post-73320400210651233642010-12-30T11:23:00.003-05:002010-12-30T11:33:53.087-05:00<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TRy0aIbiBtI/AAAAAAAAAHg/CEfG6C3OAYw/s1600/Fair.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 176px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TRy0aIbiBtI/AAAAAAAAAHg/CEfG6C3OAYw/s320/Fair.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5556514401300907730" /></a>
<strong>Film Review #239: <em>Fair Game</em></strong><br>
2010<br>
Director: Doug Limon<br>
Cast: Naomi Watts, Sean Penn, David Andrews <br><br>
Now I want you to drive to Ithaca, in this weather, to see a movie? Right.<br><br>
So, the plan this week was to present you with that box of Christmas candy otherwise known as <em>The Tourist</em>, with Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie. Then Friday afternoon a couple movie buddies – one an intrepid driver with four new tires – said, "Let’s go to Ithaca and see <em>Fair Game</em>.” Directed by Doug Limon (who did his own cinematography too), starring Sean Penn as former diplomat Joe Wilson, Naomi Watts as outed CIA operative Valerie Plame and a wickedly good David Andrews as Dick Cheney’s chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, this film combines the individual memoirs written by Wilson and Plame to recount how the Bush administration justified the invasion of Iraq with doctored intelligence evidence about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program and then retaliated when Joe Wilson went public in a 2003 <em>New York Times </em>op-ed piece about what he didn’t find in the African nation of Niger.<br><br>
Well before the 9/11 attacks, the CIA was already investigating the regime of Saddam Hussein, in particular whether he was developing nuclear weapons (or “WMD,” in the parlance of newspaper shorthand of the day). In 2001, also before 9/11, Valerie Plame was made head of operations for the CIA’s Joint Task Force on Iraq. Plame’s husband had been ambassador to Niger during the Clinton administration and therefore knew the country well, so he was in a position to be asked to informally re-check a persistent story that Iraq was buying “yellowcake” uranium from Niger (a form of uranium necessary for the fabrication of nuclear weapons). He determined this could not have happened and so reported back. In one riveting scene, Wilson watches a TV news broadcast of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell telling the United Nations that the CIA had determined that Niger had indeed sold “yellowcake” to Iraq.<br><br>
9/11 of course changed everything, and some of the most effective scenes in this film involve the fall-out among intelligence agents and organizations once it became apparent that there had been missed clues that, followed up on, might have prevented those attacks. With regard to Iraq and Saddam’s WMDs, agents of the vice-president’s office returned repeatedly to the CIA to press them about the likelihood of various surmises and conclusions, really to change those conclusions to concoct another case. In one such scene a heretofore competent and committed agent is reduced to a stuttering mess by the relentless Libby’s interrogation.<br><br>
It was Scooter Libby who leaked information to the press that Wilson’s wife was a CIA operative – leaked multiple times, as it turned out, for good measure, in case any reporter given this tidbit might have qualms about printing it. Columnist Robert Novak broke the story, which of course cost Plame her career, but – as both her memoir and the film make plain – also cost the lives of many, perhaps hundreds, of civilian “assets” she had developed who were in vulnerable positions and mid-stream operations. The film dramatizes this in the form of the abrupt abandonment of Iraqi scientists whom she had recruited to defect and promised to get safely out of that country along with their families, who were rounded up subsequently and disappeared. And the pressure of Plame’s outing almost cost her and Wilson their marriage, as they each struggled with how to respond publicly, each feeling abandoned and betrayed by the other. In a cameo as Plame’s father, Sam Shepherd burnishes a single scene in which he listens to her anguish and, with all the compact but deeply felt reticence of a career military officer – read, unassailable patriot – answers softly, “What they did [to Wilson and her] was just wrong.”<br><br>
This is a very, very good movie. Naomi Watts gives her best performance in ages and Sean Penn is now mature enough to deliver the performance he clearly aimed for with <em>All the King’s Men</em>. To some extent, that includes his emerging capacity for restraint at the right moments.<br><br>
The same applies to Doug Limon, who as a filmmaker has visited espionage cinema before in two very different films – <em>The Bourne Identity </em>(2002), and <em>Mr. and Mrs. Smith</em>, his 2005 re-make of Hitchcock’s 1941 comedy about married spies and notable as the occasion igniting Brad Pitt’s off-stage romance Angelina Jolie. There has been some criticism of <em>Fair Game </em>as imperfectly blending Plame’s memoir with its “personal” bent and Wilson’s, which is more political in focus. I find that not such an issue; instead, I’m pleased that Limon seems to know, first, that this is not another movie fantasy and, second, that he’s stuck to a fairly straightforward time-line that makes some sense of complex events, when his temptation might have been to tart things up. And did I mention that the sound track is superb?<br><br>
<em>Fair Game</em>, which has just picked up several nominations for year-end awards from the national Women Film Critics Circle, ought to be playing in major multiplexes across the land – and certainly here in Syracuse. If you’ve been wondering, as I have, how come we just don’t seem to be getting some movies very quickly this winter, this one takes the cake. Last Saturday morning I asked on my Face Book page, “Why isn’t this movie playing in Syracuse?” Nat Tobin answered that he had tried to book <em>Fair Game</em> for Manlius Art Cinema but there were simply very few available prints and he couldn’t get one.<br><br>
Even so, it’s still playing at Ithaca’s Cinemapolis the rest of this week and next – that is, held over twice and available until Christmas Eve, with two evening screenings during the week and two matinees added on the weekends.<br><br>
<em>The Tourist</em> is a tasty little bon-bon of a movie. But <em>Fair Game </em>sticks to your ribs.<br><br>
*******<br>
<em>A shorter version of this review appears in the December 16, 2010 print edition of "The Eagle" weekly. “Fair Game” continues until 12/24 (held over two weeks) at Cinemapolis, 120 East Green St., Ithaca, behind the Commons, www.cinemapolis.org, with two evening screenings weekdays (7:25 and 9:25) and two matinees added on the weekend (2:25 and 4:25). </em><div class="blogger-post-footer">Nancy Keefe Rhodes</div>Nancy Keefe Rhodeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042283155633287882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14734429.post-84095924425102224872010-12-30T11:06:00.002-05:002010-12-30T11:22:31.647-05:00<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TRyxvKuQuvI/AAAAAAAAAHY/NKrFxUgXTLU/s1600/Arlene%2BAbend%2Bin%2Bher%2Bstudio%2B-%2BPhoto%2Bby%2BCourtney%2BRile.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 180px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TRyxvKuQuvI/AAAAAAAAAHY/NKrFxUgXTLU/s320/Arlene%2BAbend%2Bin%2Bher%2Bstudio%2B-%2BPhoto%2Bby%2BCourtney%2BRile.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5556511464158706418" /></a>
<strong>Film Review #238: <em>Stretching Boundaries: The Life Work of Sculptor Arlene Abend</em></strong><br>
2010<br>
Director: Courtney Rile<br>
Cast: Arlene Abend et al.<br><br>
Arlene Abend in her studio. Photo: Courtney Rile, Daylight Blue Media.<br><br>
If you haven’t seen the Arlene ABEND retrospective, <em>Resin-ating Metal</em>, which opened at Edgewood Gallery at 216 Tecumsah Road on November 5th, you’ve still got all of December to see it, because it’ll be on view through New Year’s Eve. A survey of more than three decades worth of Abend’s sculpture – in cut, cast and incised steel, bronze and other metals plus the later, ground-breaking cast resin pieces – is a lot to shoehorn into such a small gallery, but this exhibition of 33 pieces has been managed pretty successfully. Well, make that 36 pieces – because the three large, circular wall pieces sold almost immediately. Gallery owner and curator Cheryl Chappell asked Abend to make replacements, which she delivered last Saturday – by mid-afternoon two of those sold too.<br><br>
On Tuesday morning, Abend said, “These were some of the most difficult pieces to do, because they are deceptively simple – every element has such an impact. And it’s a kind of silent conversation between myself and the materials – I pick a hanging point, but they really find their own balance as I make them. And it was a total surprise that people would enjoy them so much! I had thrown these pieces on the floor a couple years ago – they were scrap metal and I wasn’t really doing wall sculptures much anymore. But at Cheryl’s gentle urging I made these.”<br><br>
Although as curator Chappell picked most of the pieces and decided upon the exhibition’s floor-plan, Abend insisted on including one piece depicting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (the snake is there too), an almost-life size upright piece made of a single sheet of steel that, bent and folded, presents front, side profile and back views of the couple.<br><br>
Abend calls it a “big plasma cut,” referencing the torch conventionally used to cut steel, which she has adapted for the intricate, lacey cut-outs of garden vegetation and surface incisions that depict the couple and so resemble drawing with a brush. Years ago, before the need to work in three dimensions overtook her, Abend primarily made drawings and paintings, and this piece reminds us of her facility as a graphic artist.<br><br>
“Well, I make very good rear ends,” she laughed. “But you do need to be able to draw when you work as much on commission as I have. Your client needs to see what you’re only describing, so I make drawings or maquettes. Then I have to become my own fabricator and make the piece and sometimes that is more mechanical. Although I would say that commissions push me in a way that has led me into new areas – when I have to design in terms of the context where a piece will be and consider things I wouldn’t if I were just doing something for myself.”<br><br>
Abend also wanted to point out the arresting three-part wall sculpture <em>Remnants</em>, made in 2005, three oblong pieces of cast bronze with parts of her face emerging in pieces from each surface. I remembered seeing this in her studio when I had first visited and found it retains its hold now.<br><br>
“This started out as wax remnants from something else,” she commented, “and it just wanted to be made. It’s so different from the original piece – really very dark and distorted and emotional. I had an idea of the patina I wanted but I rushed it and it turned green on me.”<br><br>
Even more emotional for Abend, she says, are the series of cast resins she had made, which may include tiny cast metal figures or clear casts of her own face and hands. They are technically difficult – when she began working on them there was some question of whether the material could even do what she aimed for – and demanding in other ways.<br><br>
“The resins ask of a lot of you!” she said. “They are mechanically difficult, they are physically hard to do, they are dangerous because the material takes planning and safety measures and time, and the final grinding and polishing is quite a commitment. And I did these alone. I wanted to work with refractions so I gave them many surfaces – that’s why all these pieces are on turntables so you can see through them from every angle – and I worked with the cracks and bubbles that have been part of the process. And they have been the most emotional for me of any of the work. I started with that one, <em>Breaking Out</em>, which has to do with my need thirty years ago to have more than a life as wife and mother, and this last one, from this year, <em>Fascinating Failure</em>, seems like the opposite – my hands are covering my eyes – like the need to keep from seeing what’s ahead. But will I do more? Well, never say never.”<br><br>
<strong>See the movie this Saturday at 2:00 PM</strong><br><br>
The Edgewood’s opening reception in November also featured a TV monitor looping what documentary-maker Courtney Rile called a “teaser” – you can see that below, at the end of this story – of the documentary <em>Stretching Boundaries: The Life Work of Sculptor Arlene Abend</em>. The film has its premiere this Saturday afternoon at 2:00 PM in the Everson Museum’s Hosmer Auditorium at Harrison and State Streets downtown.<br><br>
Rile and Mike Barletta together comprise Daylight Blue Media. They made last spring’s popular documentary, <em>The 15th Ward and Beyond </em>on commission by Syracuse University’s South Side Initiative. That film had a red-carpet premiere last spring at Syracuse Stage that sold out two weeks in advance and has had several other public screenings since – each of them packed – the most recent on Tuesday night at McKinley-Brighton Magnet School on West Newell St. <em>The 15th Ward and Beyond </em>is eventually destined to wind up on the South Side Initiative’s Syracuse Black History Project’s online “virtual museum,” and there hasn’t been a decision yet among all the parties on whether to make it available separately on DVD.<br><br>
Last Sunday Rile and Barletta let me watch a rough cut of the new film abut Abend, then a tad over an hour long. Rile said they were aiming for 50 minutes or so in length – they had material to edit out, some to add, decisions about music and transitions – but there was enough there to see that this is an even better film than <em>The 15th Ward and Beyond</em>. It’s an excellent film about how an artist works, and an excellent portrait of an artist in our midst who’s now taking stock on what such a lifetime means.<br><br>
Around 50 minutes is a good length for television broadcast, though Rile and Barletta haven’t gotten to discussions about whether that will ever happen. But they have gotten to discussions with Abend about making the film available on DVD and one of the pleasures of Tuesday’s gallery walk-through was learning that they’ll take orders after Saturday’s screening for DVDs and also that they plan to make copies available at the Edgewood through the holiday season too.<br><br>
“Stretching boundaries” is a phrase Abend suggested for the title because she says her entire career as an artist has been about that stretch. She notes for example that when she first turned from drawing and painting to sculpture – she began with ceramics, wedging clay in her bathtub and making constructions rather than throwing pots on a wheel – her adult-ed instructor kept telling her to downsize, that her work was too large for the kiln. In New York City, Abend went on to study at Cooper Union, where she says the entire approach was based on the question, “What if?” After moving to Syracuse and taking up metal sculpture, Abend completed a fine arts degree at Syracuse University with the legendary Roger Mack as her mentor – but she also spent five years in night classes for vocational welding at Central Tech, at a time when one of the instructors thought teaching women to weld was “just wrong.” Abend says that “Pfft!” of a welding torch lighting still excites her after all these years.<br><br>
“She’s only five feet tall,” notes <em>The Post-Standard </em>columnist Dick Case in an interview in the film. “I have said before that she’s a small woman who works on a grand scale.”<br><br>
Abend, whose sculpture <em>Earth’s Energy</em> in the World Trade Center was destroyed in the 9/11 attacks, also had the commission to turn a salvaged, slightly bowed World Trade Center steel girder into a sculpture for the memorial outside DeWitt Town Hall – she says as a welder she understands the degree of heat that was necessary to bend that girder – and the film has footage of that towering piece, far larger than anything in Edgewood, with Abend dwarfed beside it. She’d like to go that large again, she says.<br><br>
Case has been following Abend for years and he relates to Rile and Barletta the fate of Abend’s Carousel Mall commission – 17-feet-high polished aluminum horses for the entrances of the mall: a race horse, a zebra, a Pegasus, a unicorn and two smaller horses – now all taken down and stored, except for the race horse and the unicorn.<br><br>
There are also interviews with Jim Hueber, president of the local steel fabricating company, Mack Brothers, who’s known Abend three decades and speaks about respecting her for her craftsmanship and work ethic. Gallery director/artist Anne Novarro Capucilli of Limestone Gallery in Fayetteville speaks about first meeting Abend in Rochester. Teacher Mary Cunningham relates how Abend tackled the project of teaching welding to public school students. Delavan Center owner Bill Delavan relates how the Labor Day storm of 1998, which destroyed Abend’s studio there, couldn’t destroy her enthusiasm for celebrating her quarter century in his building with a bottle of champagne. Linda Bigness – who pitched in to make the retrospective a success – relates how Abend’s story and example inspired her own leap into becoming a working artist.<br><br>
The film remains ever cognizant that Abend turns 80 next spring and that the Edgewood exhibition is a career retrospective – as she says on screen, “like a period on a sentence” that she is grateful she’s able to have the time to make. There is footage from Abend’s father’s home movies – amazingly, that toddler is clearly Abend herself, playing in the sand at Brighton Beach and even then, she comments now, making sculpture. And there’s a clip from a television interview that must date to the 70’s, when the knock-out lady welder briskly shows how it’s done.<br><br>
Yes, I’m going to the annual Plowshares Crafts Fair too, among Saturday’s many travels – but I wouldn’t miss this. This is what “local treasure” is all about.<br><br>
*******<br>
<em>A shorter version of this review appeared in the December 2, 2010 print edition of "The Eagle" weekly in Syracuse, and in entirety at www.theeaglecny.com.</em><div class="blogger-post-footer">Nancy Keefe Rhodes</div>Nancy Keefe Rhodeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042283155633287882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14734429.post-44287744459027147642010-12-30T10:55:00.002-05:002010-12-30T11:05:58.625-05:00<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TRytuRqX6FI/AAAAAAAAAHQ/2sj74Kq76PA/s1600/Girl1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 263px; height: 320px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TRytuRqX6FI/AAAAAAAAAHQ/2sj74Kq76PA/s320/Girl1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5556507050795067474" /></a>
<strong>FILM REVIEW #237: <em>The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest</em></strong><br>
2010<br>
Director: Daniel Alfredsson <br>
Cast: Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyquist, Georgi Staykov<br><br>
Last April Nat Tobin brought us the first of the Swedish films adapted from Steig Larsson's <em>Millennium Trilogy </em>novels, <em>The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo</em>, and in August the second installment duly arrived, <em>The Girl Who Played with Fire</em>. There was a comfortable year's gap in the narrative between the end of the first and the beginning of the second, a feeling that life went on for crusading journalist and magazine publisher Michael Blomkvist (Michael Nyquist), even as the mysterious Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) herself had repaired to some exclusive tropical isle to gather her own forces too.<br><br>
No such breather this time. <em>Played with Fire </em>ends as a medical helicopter carries Salander, with multiple gunshot wounds including one in the head, grimy from her father's effort to bury her alive, off to a hospital. A second helicopter bears that father, Zalachenko (Georgi Staykov), almost dead thanks to the axe she planted in his head. So exhausting and chaotic is the final harrowing sequence that I found myself needing to sort out exactly who was dead and who was still, though barely, alive.<br><br>
As the third installment begins, those medical helicopters are just arriving at the hospital, and it's a tribute to the power of this story and these characters that the audience's intervening three months – as we have gone back to our lives between films – seem to vanish as we settle into our seats. Like the previous two installments, <em>Kicked the Hornet's Nest </em>is a long movie, almost two and a half hours, and again the time flies past. I even found myself sitting forward in my seat a good deal of the time. Now be honest: how often in a movie theatre are you really on the edge of your seat? <br><br>
As with any good procedural-action thriller hybrid, trying to summarize the plot's various twists and turns in a paragraph or so is folly. Again Salander is framed for murder; again Blomkvist sets out to prove her innocence; again the forces of evil employ a frightening array of subterfuge, blackmail, intimidation and brute force, and a truly chill mastery of apparently passive public institutions. What's satisfying, especially if you've watched this film's two predecessors, is that the seemingly slow arousal of brave and decent people finally pays off here. In the way this films ties up strands from the previous two films it may be most satisfying. The single lone cop with integrity in <em>Played with Fire</em>, Inspector Jan Bublanski (Johan Kylén) returns with a whole shadowy task force this time, empowered directly by the prime minister and capable of lightening speed when needed (will they race across town in time to thwart Blomkvist's would-be killers?)<br><br>
There are also moments of mind-blinding terror that repeat like a musical theme from film to film. In an early scene here, Salander – rescued from the grave, on the mend, seemingly well-protected in her hospital bed with a sympathetic doctor who smuggles in both pizza and a wireless device – hears that Zalachenko is down the hall, also still alive. This news triggers a flurry of reflex effort to free herself from her IV lines and flee: this panic is pure brain stem reaction in a universe where survival depends on mastering such impulse. You too may savor the expression that flickers across her face when she learns he's been killed.<br><br>
Also like musical themes the violations of Salander's life re-play – moments we have seen in each film again – the moment of setting her abusive father afire as a child, her confinement to a psychiatric facility where she is held in restraints (now we learn that the officious Dr. Peter Telorbian kept her in full restraints for 381 days because she would not agree to his sexual advances at age 12), the rape she secretly filmed by her guardian after no official office would take her complaints seriously – though this time expanded upon in a courtroom trial. <br><br>
Salander's attorney is Blomkvist's sister Annika (Annika Hallin), initially there entirely as a favor to her brother. As someone new to the saga, Annika acts as a reality check for us too – those of us returning a second or third time are perhaps used to Salander's strange ways of relating, already rooting for her – and she has her own posse of fanatically loyal misfits onscreen too – but Annika's reactions are a splash of cold water. How well can this young woman survive in the world, really? And Blomkvist's editor Erika Berger (Lena Endre), whose character has been restrained in the previous films, unfolds here as well.<br><br>
Trilogy cinema – after all, these three movies were all filmed together – may be the movies' answer to HBO series story-telling, and this film proves the worth of taking the time to let a story mature and ripen through installments. We call it the "final" Steig Larsson because he died suddenly of a heart attack, actually before these three novels were published, though reportedly he left most of a fourth novel on his laptop of the projected ten-book series; his estate is still disputed by his long-time companion and his family. This film suggests that interruption amounts to a greater loss than we might have imagined.<br><br>
*******<br>
<em>A shorter version of this review appeared in the 11/18/10 print edition of The Eagle weekly in Syracuse, and the full review at www.theeaglecny.com.</em><div class="blogger-post-footer">Nancy Keefe Rhodes</div>Nancy Keefe Rhodeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042283155633287882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14734429.post-12176182840540587992010-10-22T13:03:00.005-04:002010-10-22T13:28:23.321-04:00<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TMHGnZnFhwI/AAAAAAAAAHE/VVXu6wBI6M8/s1600/Never2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 134px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TMHGnZnFhwI/AAAAAAAAAHE/VVXu6wBI6M8/s320/Never2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5530920197579704066" /></a>
<strong>Film Review #237: <em>Never Let Me Go</em></strong><br>
2010<br>
Director: Mark Romanek <br>
Cast: Carrie Mulligan, Keira Knightly, Andrew Garfield<br><br>
Having enthusiastically lent my own copy of Kasuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel <em>Never Let Me Go </em>to a friend after finishing it, I don’t have it here to check the exact page where the Japanese-born British writer actually uses the word “clones” for the first time. I did circle the word when I came upon it, and I’m betting it’s within the last 25 pages out of just over 300. As novels go, this is something of a triumph, because of course you “know” well before that moment, but not having seen the word itself for so much of the story creates a kind of tension.<br><br>
The last time I recall reading a novel that I so could not put down, it was Caleb Carr’s historical murder and detective mystery <em>The Alienist</em>. That was in 1994. I read <em>The Alienist </em>all the way to Vancouver on a plane and was, I’m afraid, fairly anti-social for the first day or so between sessions of the conference I was attending until I finished it. As NPR and <em>Washington Post </em>book reviewer Maureen Corrigan reminds us, such novels are really about thinking – about how we know what we think we know – and <em>The Alienist </em>combines a cracking good serial murder yarn, set vividly in New York City at one of its most fascinating moments, with the very roots and early invention of detective work.<br><br>
But Ishiguro’s novel, which has a huge following of fierce partisans – among them the remarkable English actress Carrie Mulligan, who plays Kathy H., the narrator, and has said she “could not bear” to think of anyone else getting the part – is not really about thinking, except on the surface as something to occupy us and the characters alike, even though there are a number if plot lines that seem to be about finding something out. In fact the 28-year-old Kathy H. is clearly not honest and searching with herself much of the time.<br><br>
Instead, it’s really a story about being. As such, given its meditative style, it’s extremely hard to consider adapting this novel for the screen. Though it’s been called “sci-fi” that label seems odd somehow, because it completely lacks the action-blockbuster arc of its cousins in most contemporary re-tellings of the Pinocchio tale. Such close relatives would be films with characters like Wesley Snipes in the <em>Blade</em> movies, or Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley who takes that ontologically tantalizing swerve in the last installment of the <em>Alien</em> films, for example. But even on a grand scale, movies about being that are not made in the action-blockbuster mold have a hard time connecting – witness Spielberg’s criminally under-rated <em>A.I., Artificial Intelligence</em>.<br><br>
Mark Romanek’s screen version, which released in mid-September, has been eagerly anticipated because the novel itself is so well-regarded, but also because this film has some of the best casting in memory. If you’re old enough to remember the 1982 screen version of John Irving’s 1978 novel, <em>The World According to Garp</em>, you’ll recall it was inconceivable that anyone but Robin Williams could play Garp. Just so here: no one but Mulligan could play Kathy H., Keira Knightly is brilliant as Ruth, and Andrew Garfield – plastered all over American multiplexes in <em>The Social Connection</em>, but first coming to my attention last year in <em>Red Riding Trilogy</em> – embodies Tommy. Moreover, I’ve never seen such good casting of younger versions of movie characters. Isabel Meikle-Small as young Kathy looks like Mulligan – and has her facial expressions and movements down cold. Ella Purnell is immediately recognizable as the child who becomes Keira Knightly’s Ruth. And Charlie Rowe makes Tommy actually clearer than he is in the novel – just as Sally Hawkins does for Miss Lucy, the teacher who abruptly fired for explaining to the students at Hailsham what their lives will be and what they are for.<br><br>
Hailsham is a secluded boarding school in the British countryside where, in the 1970s, we meet Kathy, Ruth and Tommy in what I presume to be the fifth or sixth grade. Charlotte Rampling is headmistress Miss Emily, presiding over the school’s regimen of keeping the children in serene isolation and optimally healthy while engaging them in an education that emphasizes the arts and sports. The arts, as they figure out years later, somehow comprise “verifiable proof” of their true natures. Kathy and Tommy decide that artistic production might be evidence they can truly love – they track down Miss Emily to seek deferrals of their own “donations” of body parts – whereas Miss Emily refines that stab in the dark to mean more precisely that they have souls. A teacher of mine once talked as hauntingly about the ancient cave paintings at Lescaux in this way: that at the moment those prehistoric cave dwellers picked up their charcoal and made images, they became human.<br><br>
Word of mouth and a great deal of buzz have surely informed you that this is a love triangle of sorts: first it’s Tommy and the not-very-admirable Ruth, and then Kathy and Tommy, with the soon-deceased Ruth’s blessing. This occurs over three chapters roughly each a decade apart, in school, leaving the school to be stashed in some backwater cottages and imagine finding their “originals,” separate and some years later reunite briefly as one by one they “complete.” It is Kathy who’s left in the end, gazing into a field on a scrubby back road, her last voice-over an additional piece of dialogue not in the novel, in which she wonders – somewhat jarringly and redundantly, the very opposite of what Ishiguro accomplishes by withholding the word “clone” for so long – if she and the rest of us are not so different after all.<br><br>
These performances are just superb and I will likely see this movie again. But the film has some flaws that explain complaints that it “fails to connect” and arise, ironically, from some effort to make this more “cinematic.” First, there is Rachel Portman’s overbearing and melodramatic score, so intrusive that it becomes distracting. We do not need a note of it, much less the Douglas Sirk-like deluge we get, to feel anguish in the presence of this story and these performances. Second, so much is pared away from the novel in order to emerge with a lean and action-laden, a less “interior,” plot, that I’m left wondering – as I wondered after “Garp” – whether I would like the movie if I had not read the book. That is, perfect casting or not, would the film be as rich, as emotionally intelligible, without already knowing the novel?<br><br>
That is too late for me to answer. Ishiguro himself doesn’t mind. In fact, he’s long met regularly with his neighbor, Alex Garland, who wrote the screenplay, to talk over their work, and besides serving as the film’s executive producer, pronounced himself pleased with the script.<br><br>
So <em>Never Let Me Go </em>is, I suppose, a murder mystery after all.<br><br>
*******<br>
<em>A shorter version of this review appears in the October 21, 2010 print edition of The Eagle weekly. “Never Let Me Go” screens for the second week at Manlius Art Cinema.</em><div class="blogger-post-footer">Nancy Keefe Rhodes</div>Nancy Keefe Rhodeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042283155633287882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14734429.post-21872901820453216682010-10-22T05:15:00.003-04:002010-10-22T05:59:22.421-04:00<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TMFdW4bEUvI/AAAAAAAAAG8/Bj0QeZhecAA/s1600/The+Lodger.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 227px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TMFdW4bEUvI/AAAAAAAAAG8/Bj0QeZhecAA/s320/The+Lodger.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5530804465072100082" /></a>
<strong>SYRFILM Round-up:
7th Annual Syracuse International Film Festival</strong><br><br>
<strong>First, the Winners!</strong><br><br>
Last week I told you in my column "Make it Snappy" that Marek Najbrt's film <em>Protektor</em> (also the Czech official Oscar entry) was the best film in the festival. And on Sunday night, the SYRFILM judges agreed. <em>Protektor</em> took Best Fiction Feature Film, Best Actress (Jana Plodkova), Best Editor, Best Music, Best Screenplay. Syracuse native Mary Angiolillo, who now lives in Prague and teaches at the national film school there, FAMU, sent <em>Protektor</em> to SYRFILM.<br><br>
Other award recipients were:<br>
Best Experimental Film: <em>Homewrecka</em> by Joey Huertas (USA). Huertas has had a film entered in SYRFILM each of the festival’s seven years, and this documentary about domestic violence was the third win for him in this category.<br>
Best Animation: <em>Ariadne’s Thread </em>by Bertóti Attila (Romania).<br>
Special Judges Citation in Animation: <em>Chameleon</em> by Anna Rettberg (USA).<br>
Best Central New York Film: <em>Thicker Than Water </em>by Bradley Rappa (USA), documentary.<br>
Best Short Documentary: <em>One Day Will be Once </em>by Anca Miruna Lazarescu (Germany). <br>
Director’s Special Citation for Short Documentary: <em>Kayatsum</em> by Grigor Harutyunyan (Armenia).<br>
Best Short Fiction: <em>Rosenhill</em> by Johan Lundborg and Johan Storm (Sweden).<br>
Special Judges’ Citation for Short Fiction: <em>Pile-Up/Koccanás </em>by Ferenc Török (Hungary).<br>
Director’s Special Citation for Short Fiction: <em>Requiem for Kosovo </em>by Dhimiter Ismailaj (Albania).<br>
Best Feature Documentary was awarded to two films: <em>Long Distance </em>by Amikam Goldberg (Israel) and <em>The Two Escobars </em>by Jeff Zimbalist and Michael Zimbalist (Colombia/USA).<br>
Judges’ Special Citation for Artistic Achievement in Feature Documentary: <em>Queen of the Sun</em> by Taggart Siegel (USA).<br>
Best Cinematography in a Narrative Feature: Larry Smith for <em>Bronson</em> (UK)
Best Actor: Tom Hardy in <em>Bronson</em><br>
Best Director: Nicholas Wending Refn for <em>Bronson</em><br>
Judges’ Special Citations: <em>Sand</em> by Rob Nilsson (USA) and <em>To Catch a Billionaire</em> by Tomas Vorel (Czech Republic).<br>
Director’s Special Citations: <em>Pizza with Bullets </em>by Robert Rothbard (USA) and <em>Touching Home </em>by Logan and Noah Miller (USA).<br><br>
SYRFILM occupied a new spot on the calendar this year, moving from late April to mid-October. Students, who have usually been scarce at a festival that ran during final exam week, were much more in evidence this year. SYRFILM also shortened its run to four and a half days, down from the previous gargantuan nine, and reduced local screening venues to four (The Palace in Eastwood, Redhouse Arts Center in Armory Square, Watson Theater on Syracuse University’s campus and Grewen Auditorium at LeMoyne College). But the festival also added four “satellite” venues in the out-lying communities of Hamilton, Rome, Geneva and Oswego. By Friday evening it was apparent that festival-goers liked this more relaxed schedule with fewer films, less rushing around the city and more chance to interact with one another. This year festival judges also escaped spending their days locked in a room watching one film after another until they were hollow-eyed; provided with screeners of the films in competition two months before the festival, they also relaxed, networked, and caught other films they usually wouldn’t have time for.<br><br>
As one of those local arts organizations that saw its county budget totally cut the same week it opened for the seventh year, SYRFILM is used to reinventing itself and remains determined to make a go of it. Christine Fawcett Shapiro remains an integral part of the festival, but she’s retired as managing director and now focuses on outreach and development. Until the fate of managing director is determined – Syracuse University funds that position – KC Duggan has been interim managing director for this year’s fest. Duggan, a filmmaker herself who returned to Syracuse to do this job of nuts and bolts madness, is worth at least her weight in gold. If SYRFILM can’t find a way to keep her, she’ll be somebody else’s Genuine Find.<br><br>
Both SYRFILM’s opening night (the screening of <em>Pizza with Bullets </em>and the presence of its star, Vincent Pastore, and director, Richard Rothbart) and closing night (besides the awards ceremony, the screening of two Ed Harris films, <em>Touching Home</em> and the still-lustrous <em>Pollack</em>, plus Harris himself) have had attention. Some of what happened in between – and whom – well, not so much. Here are just several thumbnails.<br><br>
<strong>Javon Jackson Channels Alfred Hitchcock for <em>The Lodger</em></strong><br><br>
Every year since its inception, SYRFILM has shown a classic silent film accompanied by a live jazz performance. While this has become increasingly popular nationwide in the last several years, it’s been a SYRFILM signature event that usually sells out. This year’s event was packed too, despite a freezing downpour and whipping, icy wind. But after all, such weather was appropriate to the 1927 tale of a serial murderer who preyed on young blondes in London’s foggy night streets. Lemoyne College and the Society for New Music co-sponsored this event, the latter finding some local musicians to fill in some of the seats for Los Angeles-based saxophonist Javon Jackson, who brought just the rhythm section – the drum, the bass and the piano players – of his octet.<br><br>
Society for New Music also located local singer Bridget Moriarty, who got Jackson’s score a month before the screening and made do with a marathon rehearsal of four or five hours the day before. Jackson said after the performance that Moriarty “came in so meek and got behind the mic and turned into a maniac.”<br><br>
That was Christine Fawcett Shapiro’s idea, the singing. As far as they know, the current crop of live jazz-silent classic screenings hasn’t included any choral component until now. Jackson, who calls her “my surrogate sister,” met Christine Fawcett Shapiro at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester during an event where he was a presenter. Both say they “immediately clicked.”<br><br>
SYRFILM chose Hitchcock’s early thriller - the English master director director was in his 20s when he made it - as part of a focus on Hitchcock in collaboration with Syracuse Stage, which opens <em>The 39 Steps </em>this week, a comedy based on the Hitchcock film of the same name. <em>The Lodger </em>is available for instant streaming at Netflix, and that’s how Javon Jackson first watched it himself. He says it was a difficult commission.<br><br>
“There are a lot of abrupt tempo changes in the score,” he said last Friday night after the screening and performance. “Unlike live performance, if we were recording, we’d just splice the pieces.”<br><br>
Jackson said he started the score last February with a goal of finishing the score by July 15th and he made his deadline. “I’d go through and watch about ten minutes at a time and work on that. I went on two European tours while I was writing the score. The themes would just come as I watched and I actually saw a lot of humor in some parts. We’ve had a lot more diabolical characters since that time – Jason, for example. I wanted a balance between the music of Tin Pan Alley in the 1930s and 40s and jazz now. That great stride piano stuff at the end, that’s from the period of Tatum and Fats Waller.”<br><br>
Jackson, who also talked with two Lemoyne classes during his visit here, will be back in Central New York on Tuesday, December 7th at SUNY Oswego, where he’ll do a musician’s clinic and a concert. His next tour takes him to New York City, Pittsburgh, points in California and Kansas City, and sometime in there a date in Albany at “the Egg” in the State Capital.<br><br>
<strong>Haim Bouzaglou’s <em>Session</em> Premieres; <em>Hotel Syracuse</em> in the Works</strong><br><br>
On Friday eve the fest buzzed with more than Javon Jackson’s sizzling jazz performance. This year’s weird election doings even penetrated the fest; that day a State Assembly candidate’s mailer accused his opponent of enormous payoffs to the “special interests” of “Hollywood” while at the same time excessively taxing New Yorkers. This refers to tax incentives to attract film production to New York State, which has the second largest film and television industry in the nation. Most often such productions have very little to do with “Hollywood” studios but everything to do with indie productions and in the case of SYRFILM, a particular focus on attracting foreign filmmakers who wish to make their first American feature. SYRFILM has been at the forefront of efforts to attract such film productions upstate, where local talent and facilities and permit fees are all less expensive than those in New York City. Jerry Stoeffhaas of the Governor’s Office on Motion Picture and Television attended the entire conference. According to one recent study, in 2008 such productions paid $3.3 billion in wages directly to New Yorkers, before even mentioning other revenues generated by rents, purchases and use of New York-owned facilities. While such film production has long been centered in New York City, in recent years upstate cities and regions have actively developed packages to attract filmmakers. Visit www.nylovesfilm.com to learn more about upstate’s regional film offices.<br><br>
Israeli filmmaker Haim Bouzaglou’s feature film <em>Session</em>, which premiered on Thursday night at the Palace Theatre, is one result of such efforts. With a score by Oscar-winning composer Jeff Beale – a result of the two meeting at last year’s festival – Bouzaglou’s film is now set to screen in Los Angeles, with a number of European festivals in the offing. Bouzaglou has been here before, both as a festival entrant and as a visiting professor at Syracuse University. <em>Session</em>, which he developed with SYRFILM’s Owen Shapiro, is part of a two-film project. The second film, <em>Hotel Syracuse</em>, has signed John Malkovich as the lead actor.<br><br>
“We are aiming to shoot next summer at this point,” Bouzaglou told me Friday night. “While John’s schedule is hard to work around, he has also invested in this film and led me to others who support it.”<br><br>
This includes the lead actress whom Bouzaglou said they would not reveal publicly until she had actually signed. Bouzaglou shoots his next film in France, which he says he’ll enjoy because, “I have a baby – well, four – and another child, and I can take them all with me to France.”<br><br>
<strong>From Israeli Consulate to SYRFILM Judge</strong><br><br>
Herself from an Israeli family of filmmakers, Shani Hashnaviah‘s relationship with SYRFILM dates back several years. From early 2006 until late 2008 she worked with the Israeli Consulate in New York City as director of film promotion and outreach for the US and Canada. In this capacity she managed distribution of Israeli films in North America, Oscar campaigns, and interactions with film festivals and touring filmmakers. A documentary filmmaker herself, Hashnaviah left the Consulate to work full-time in her own new company, Phantasia Films, in film production, filmmaker event production, and lectures on Israeli cinema. Her talks include the history of Israeli cinema from the 1950s and teaching peace through Israeli documentaries. She returned to the festival this year as a judge in the categories of short fiction and feature documentary.<br><br>
“Now I can see Syracuse!” she exclaimed, chatting on Saturday morning in her hotel lobby. “It was a great change - this year we got the competition films two months in advance. I could go back and watch one again and take my time. It’s a huge responsibility – I’m a filmmaker myself and the way a film is received early in your career can really affect you.”<br><br>
The night before, Owen Shapiro had noted, “This festival is really a family. We have filmmakers and judges who come back a second and third time. Each year it expands a little and they bring someone else in. Our lifetime achievement winner from last year, Rob Nilsson, sent us another film this year called <em>Sand</em>, which I know you've seen. It's briiant, and he would be here himself except that he’s being honored this weekend at what’s really his home festival in Mill Valley, California. Last year Tom Bower and Robert Knott were here with the film <em>Appaloosa</em> and now each of them is back here – Tom’s chair of the honorary board, he had a role in Haim’s film <em>Session</em>, and he’s brought us Robert Young, this year’s lifetime achievement winner. Rob Edwards is one of the rising young Black screenwriters. He did Disney’s <em>The Princess and the Frog </em>. His son is at Cornell and he says he’s good to come back the next three years too. The three of them have done a three-day screen-writing seminar with SU film students – one of the students emailed us that those three days have been more useful to him than all his years of study. And filmmakers meet each other here – they create projects, they network, they stay in touch with each other and with us.”<br><br>
Hashnaviah echoed that sentiment, saying that she considers many of the filmmkaers she worked with friends now. And as the festival wound to a close, she’d signed on with the West Coast folks to bring Robert M. Young’s film <em>Human Error </em>back to the screen. A FaceBook page has already followed and the “gang,” as Tom Bower calls them, is off and running.<br><br>
<strong>Robert M. Young Awarded SYRFILM’s First Sophia for Lifetime Achievement</strong><br><br>
He’ll be 86 next month and he hadn’t eaten since lunchtime, but at twenty past midnight in the Palace lobby, with a reception still expecting him, director Robert M. Young was patiently gracious with one festival-goer who wanted to register his opinion about whether the ending of <em>Caught</em> was the best one. Young had just received the first Sophia that SYRFILM awarded that evening. The new inscribed crystal sculpture uses the festival logo designed several years ago by the Italian master poster-maker Compaggi from his own painting of Sophia Loren, masked with a strip of celluloid. (Actually Young gets the second one; earlier Owen Shapiro had surprised his wife with her own Sophia for her service to the festival, though he’s still claiming that Christine “hoodwinked” him into starting SYRFILM in the first place).<br><br>
Young’s debut feature was the 1964 <em>Nothing But a Man </em>with Ivan Dixon and Abby Lincoln. Netflix has a handful of his films and there are more online if you look. The festival screened four of Young’s films: the noirish 1996 <em>Caught</em>, based on Edward Pomerantz’ novel, a key episode of <em>Battlestar Gallactica </em>(both starring Edward James Olmos, often a lead in Young’s films and here to present the award to him as well as spend an afternoon with Latino youth on the West Side), the 2004 <em>Human Error </em>with Tom Bower and Robert Knott and – for the screenwriting seminar students – a 43-minute documentary made in Italy that is otherwise unavailable.<br><br>
Said Olmos in presenting the award, “In one hundred years, people will be watching Robert Young’s films for their psychological truth, which is his trademark. In one hundred years people will still be watching <em>Dominick and Eugene </em>– they will not still be watching another film released the same year, also about two brothers, one of them autistic, <em>Rain Man</em>. And this is one of the most important film festivals that we have. I’ve been trying to get here for two or three years now. This is one of the few places you can see this kind of film.”<br><br>
“I think Eddie loves me and that is why he’s so generous,” said Young in accepting the award. “I also want to mention my wife Lily and my brother Irwin, who are in teh audience, because both of them have lost a lot of money on me. And Tom Bower and Ursula, and Bobby Knott. How can you fail if you are surrounded with people who love you and are very talented and also very honest? I have tried to follow my heart.”<br><br>
Young said the last time he’d seen <em>Caught</em> was several ago at another festival screening. “I never see a film I’ve made unless it’s at a screening like this,” he said. “I go back to the place I was when I made it and it can be very emotional for me if it doesn’t ring true now.”<br><br>
<em>Human Error</em>, the story of a futuristic (or perhaps not so much) industrial plant producing toxic materials deep in a jungle and the toxic relationships that develop among the three white supervisors at the plant, premiered at Sundance in 2004 and had a short theatrical release in New York at Landmark Sunshine Cinema in the fall of 2005. But the film was quickly tied up in probate after that and just turned loose in time to screen it here. Tom Bower and Robert Knott and Xander Berkeley – the three stars – have in mind touring it again, to college campuses and galleries and museums.<br><br>
“Distributors told us young people wouldn’t like this film,” said Bower. “But the students who came to the campus screening the other night got it! They were very receptive, and they understood it just fine. So we want it to get out there again.”<br><br>
And as a post-script, my annual plea to the festival’s tee-shirt designers: please put the logo on the chest.<br><br>
*******<br>
<em>A shorter version of this article appears in the October 21, 2010 print edition of The Eagle, a Syracuse weekly, where Make it Snappy is a regular column. </em><div class="blogger-post-footer">Nancy Keefe Rhodes</div>Nancy Keefe Rhodeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042283155633287882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14734429.post-6721537113523620942010-10-08T23:36:00.004-04:002010-10-08T23:47:34.132-04:00<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TK_ka8FS-UI/AAAAAAAAAG0/EqMZaC7v8cQ/s1600/Mao.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 212px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TK_ka8FS-UI/AAAAAAAAAG0/EqMZaC7v8cQ/s320/Mao.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5525886419262961986" /></a>
<strong>Film Review #236: <em>Mao’s Last Dancer </em></strong><br>
2009<br>
Director: Bruce Beresford<br>
Cast: Cao Chi, Joan Chen, Bruce Greenwood<br><br>
In his weekly email bulletin to patrons of Manlius Art Cinema on the eastern outskirts of Syracuse, Nat Tobin announced on Monday that <em>Get Low </em>had done so well he was holding it over for a third week. Since Nat has stuck to a firm opening date of Friday the 15th for <em>Never Let Me Go</em>, that meant that the single week’s run he had scheduled for Australian director Bruce Berseford’s <em>Mao’s Last Dancer</em> just got squeezed out of the queue. Good news if you haven’t got around to <em>Get Low </em>yet – not so much if you put off a drive to see <em>Mao’s Last Dancer</em> so you could catch it here. That film ends today at Rochester’s Little Theatre, but it’s being held over again in Ithaca at Cinemapolis.<br><br>
Furthermore, this Sunday the theatre hosts Cornell University Law School’s own nationally recognized immigration attorney, Steve Yale-Loehr, who leads a discussion after the 4:25 PM screening. As it happens, Yale-Loehr is old friends with Houston attorney Charles Foster, who won asylum for Li Cunxin in 1981 after the 19-year-old Chinese dancer, on a summer exchange program with the Houston Ballet from the Beijing Dance Academy, decided to defect so he could remain in the US.<br><br>
Filmed in China, Australia and Houston, Bruce Beresford’s film is based on Li Cunxin’s best-selling 2003 autobiography of the same title. Portraying Li is Chi Cao, principal dancer with the Birmingham Royal Ballet in the north of England, who was himself trained first at Beijing Dance Academy and whose parents, both dorm directors there when Li was a student, remember the 11-year-old poor farm boy plucked from a remote Chinese peasant village’s freezing one-room school for dance training.<br><br>
In 1981 Li Cunxin went to Houston as one of the first two visiting Chinese students finagled by the British dancer, choreographer and ballet director Ben Stevenson. Formerly a dancer with the British Royal Ballet, Stevenson directed the Houston Ballet from 1976 to 2004 (he now directs the Texas Ballet Theatre in Forth Worth). Also in 1976, China’s Mao Zedong died and his wife, the eccentric, doctrinairely literal and brutal Jiang Qing – aka “Madame Mao” – was denounced and imprisoned, creating an opening for some change. In 1978 Stevenson first went to China as part of a cultural exchange program and long returned almost annually to teach at the Beijing Dance Academy. Stevenson brought teachers of modern dance and jazz to China – for example, Gwen Verdon, and in the film Stevenson (Bruce Greenwood) brings Gershwin’s music – and in 1985 helped create the Beijing Academy’s Choreography Department. Stevenson is the only foreigner to be named “honorary faculty” at that school.<br><br>
We see only the tip of this lengthy and deeply significant relationship with the infrastructure of Chinese dance in <em>Mao’s Last Dancer</em>, though perhaps enough to account for Stevenson’s fury when Li Cunxin first admits he’s secretly married the young American dancer Elizabeth Mackey (played by the San Francisco Ballet’s Amanda Schull) and plans to defect, aided by several defiantly sympathetic Houston Ballet board members. “How could you be so selfish!” Stevenson demands at first of the young man whose name means “keep my innocent heart,” perhaps stung that all Li’s evenings at Kung Fu movies must’ve been something else, and adding that Li’s defection would “ruin all I have worked for.”<br><br>
That moment occurs on-screen inside China’s Houston consulate, which briefly held Li Cunxin prisoner after the young man agreed to go inside to state his case, and quickly catches the attention of the international press, not to mention the drawling judge awakened from his night’s sleep by attorney Charles Foster (Kyle MacLachlan), the FBI and one Texan vice-president who negotiated Li’s release from Washington. In fact Stevenson got over his angst at Li’s defection, forged ahead and that relationship with Beijing dance endured, his long-range plans only briefly deflected. In July 1995 – in the film this is compressed to a short text scroll before the final credits that highlights Li Cunxin alone – Stevenson took the Houston Ballet on a two-week tour of China with performances in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. The Houston Ballet was the first full American ballet company invited by the Chinese government to tour the country. The opening night performance of Stevenson’s production of <em>Romeo and Juliet </em>– Li Cunxin danced the lead – was broadcast live on television to over 500 million Chinese.<br><br>
Li Cunxin danced with Houston Ballet for 16 years. Elizabeth Mackey left him to pursue her own dancing – though the credits thank her especially for her cooperation on the film – and in 1987 Li married Australian ballerina Mary McKendry (Australian Camilla Vergotis, who dances with the Hong Kong Ballet). Later in 1995 – after the China trip – they moved to Melbourne, where Li became principal dancer with the Australian Ballet. Now 49, Li makes his living as a stockbroker. The 2003 autobiography this film is based on stayed on that country’s best-seller list for a year and a half. So Li is a much appreciated figure is his adopted land. And despite the international cast and location shooting, this is very much an Australian film – director Beresford, screenwriter Jan Sardi and principal producer Jane Scott are all Australian, as are many in the production company and the film’s choreographers Graeme Murphy and Janet Vernon.<br><br>
Hence perhaps the unusually detailed sequences about how dancers learn their profession – I found myself so wanting to watch this film with a dance teacher to check out my intuitions there – and the undercurrent, since Australia has had its own racial tensions, of quiet pride in both this adopted son’s odyssey and success and Australia’s own growth. Hence also the patient affection with which Beresford draws Li’s village and family and his Chinese teachers. The great Chinese-born Joan Chen plays Li’s mother – coincidentally she too landed in the US in 1981 to begin an American career. Zhang Su is the gentle, non-doctrinaire teacher Chan, who reveres Russian ballet and, spotting young Li’s talent, gives the boy a VHS tape of Baryshnikov soaring across a stage after his defection. Thus when the performance scenes occur – Li’s sudden elevation in Houston, when the lead dancer strains a muscle, in Strauss’ <em>Don Quixote</em>, then later <em>Swan Lake</em>, and Stravinsky’s fiery <em>Rite of Spring </em>– they are both magnificent and coherent because they come out of a discernible process. And I defy you to come away from Li’s surprise reunion with his parents dry-eyed. For such moments was the word “unabashed” devised.<br><br>
*******<br>
<em>A shorter version of this review appeared in the Octber 7, 2010 issue of The Eagle weekly in Syracuse. “Mao’s Last Dancer” is held over another week at Cinemapolis, 120 Green St., Ithaca, 607.277.6115. Following this Sunday’s 4:25 PM screening, a discussion with Cornell University Law School professor Steve Yale-Loehr. Go to their website at cimemapolis.org for directions and screening schedule. Cinemapolis is located at the edge of Ithaca Commons, with tickets and popcorn both cheap enough to offset your gas from Syracuse. </em><div class="blogger-post-footer">Nancy Keefe Rhodes</div>Nancy Keefe Rhodeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042283155633287882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14734429.post-39305134019197537102010-09-19T15:19:00.004-04:002010-09-19T15:41:27.873-04:00<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TJZkEYJ7EmI/AAAAAAAAAGs/3vK9lwYsUzE/s1600/Town.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 223px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TJZkEYJ7EmI/AAAAAAAAAGs/3vK9lwYsUzE/s320/Town.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5518708419755446882" /></a>
<strong>Film Review #235: <em>The Town</em></strong><br>
2010 <br>
Director: Ben Affleck <br>
Cast: Ben Affleck, Jeremy Renner, Rebecca Hall, Chris Cooper, Pete Postlethwaite <br><br>
Quick: how many movies can you name that depict the crook’s decision to go straight after this one last job, one last run, one last fight or race? Sometimes he’s not the bad guy, but what he does is usually really dangerous and makes him a loner. Usually there is somebody in the story who’s not letting him go gently. Often some new connection that will be outside his grasp unless he does change has inspired this. Sometimes, he is even a she. Anyway, faulting Ben Affleck’s <em>The Town</em> for being “formulaic” is short-sighted and misses the point. Of course we know what’s coming. But we’re interested, again and again, in how it arrives, and in this titillating notion that one might, as Affleck’s Doug MacRay says gutturally, groping for words for this new idea, “make a change.” <em>The Town </em>opened in wide release last Friday and went right to first place at the box office, so apparently quite a few of us still wonder enough about this to pay the ever steeper ticket price.<br><br>
<em>The Town</em> opens shortly after another similar film, Dutch director Anton Corbijn’s <em>The American </em>with George Clooney in the title role as the assassin Jack. Affleck began his later-in-life debut as director with <em>Gone Baby Gone</em> and <em>The American </em>is also Corbijn’s second feature film, following his formidable 2007 debut, <em>Control</em>, about the band Joy Division and their lead singer, Ian Curtis, who hung himself on the eve of the band’s big American break.<br><br>
<em>The American </em>and <em>The Town </em>are radically different in some ways on the surface. Jack lives anonymously, traveling where he’s told by his Rome-based handler, his few incipient attachments a dangerous weakness. When attacked, he erupts with icy, unhesitating ferocity, chasing down and killing his enemies. Previously a photographer, Corbijn places Jack against vast landscapes – first a frozen Swedish lake beside a brooding forest and then the sparse Italian hill country – and proceeds to disrupt American expectations of this genre by long, patient, often largely quiet blocks of story. Granting Jack a lovely young woman who agrees to go away with him, Corbijn has Jack give her an instruction utterly out of character for its sheer logistical improbability – Jack’s nothing if not coolly strategic – when Jack tells her to meet him “by the river,” all for the sake of returning Jack to their private Eden for his last breath.<br><br>
Clooney’s an absurd figure in a fragmented world where the center does not hold, but Affleck’s bank-robber Dougie MacRay is so rooted in his working-class Irish enclave that he can’t get free to turn around. Lifelong resident of Charlestown, just across the bridge from Boston proper, MacRay’s never been out of this metro area except for one ill-fated trip to hockey camp – he blew that picking fights – and trips to visit his father (Chris Cooper) in prison. No quiet, lingering pans of vast hillside in <em>The Town</em> – ough there are some sweeping pans of metro Boston - it’s fast and tight, fully urbanth, and fully orchestrated. Doug lives with fellow robber Jem (Jeremy Renner), whose family took him in as a kid after his mother disappeared, and Jem’s sister Krista (Blake Lively). Unlike Jack, Doug prefers not to kill, his reluctance framed against the constant menace of Jem’s jittery, tightly coiled violence. (Intriguingly, Jon Hamm’s special FBI agent is not far from Jem in his own edge of menace.) Both Jem and Krista expect Doug to stay – according to “the rules we grew up with,” says Jem – as does local boss Fergie (Irish actor Pete Postlethwaite).<br><br>
Here is a point of overlap: Jack’s handler and Doug MacRay’s handler are equally business-minded and merciless. Another: Doug and his girl – the bank manager Claire (Rebecca Hall), who’s kidnapped in the first robbery and stalked by Doug to the local laundromat, where romance ensues – also have a sort of Eden, though this time it’s a community garden. And then there’s the scene in each movie of the star doing his calisthenics – derided as vanity – but that comes right out of Luc Besson’s <em>The Professional</em> (1994), and surely before: the body as weapon, not temple.<br><br>
You can make these lists all day – what we expect of any genre and how somebody making a movie goes against it. Even if <em>The American </em>does go off the rails, I still want to see what Corbijn does next and it’s nice to see Clooney try this stretch as an actor. But Affleck has a winner, populated with one terrific performance after another, all of them wrestling with whether we could change – and get away with it.<br><br>
*******<br>
<em>This review appears in the September 23, 2010 print edition of The Eagle weekly. Ben Affleck’s “The Town” is playing in wide release and so is Anton Corbijn’s “The American” with George Clooney. </em><div class="blogger-post-footer">Nancy Keefe Rhodes</div>Nancy Keefe Rhodeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042283155633287882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14734429.post-59790891416158954942010-09-19T15:11:00.003-04:002010-09-19T15:18:42.346-04:00<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TJZhgMfhNUI/AAAAAAAAAGk/_pZguH97qyk/s1600/Bone4.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 300px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TJZhgMfhNUI/AAAAAAAAAGk/_pZguH97qyk/s320/Bone4.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5518705599126254914" /></a>
<strong>Film Review #234: <em>Winter's Bone</em></strong><br>
2010<br>
Director: Debra Granik <br>
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Lauren Sweetser <br><br>
“Oh, lord!” mutters the girl under her breath. She climbs out of the pick-up with a suddenly impatient sigh, using the same inflection as innumerable, usually much older women before her who have followed their men, their fathers, their sons – this one is her uncle – into some dive to haul them out. Once inside, 17-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is already practiced at the right balance between deference – she locates him across the crowded, smokey room and stays far enough away that she’s not interrupting – and no-nonsense demand – one jerk of her head toward the door. Pausing a single beat to show he’s the one deciding, Teardrop (John Hawkes) follows her outside.<br><br>
One of our best character actors, John Hawkes is easily matched in every scene they share by Kentucky native Jennifer Lawrence, about whom you’ll be hearing a lot and, if there’s any justice, part of that will include an Oscar nomination. Ree and Teardrop were supposed to be looking for her father, Jessup Dolly, who’s vanished, missing his court date. Teardrop doesn’t get much farther than she does. We never see Jessup, except in an old photo album snap with Ree’s mother, taken when they were kids themselves and Ree’s mother is almost unrecognizable as the vacant-eyed woman Ree now gently tends.<br><br>
Jessup is a meth cooker, “known for,” as Ree tells a neighbor who tries to convince her Jessup burned up in a meth lab explosion, “knowing what he’s doing and not making any bad batches.” His disappearance has put his place – a rickety log cabin accessorized with a great deal of plastic and what must have been an expensive trampoline in the yard for the kids – along with his 100-year-old timberlands, at risk for bail forfeiture. At this point in the story where she retrieves Teardrop from the tavern, Ree is pretty sure her father’s dead, but she has to prove that in order to stave off the bail bondsman. Eventually she retrieves the proof from a fetid pond, with the help of a chainsaw and two crones right out of MacBeth. <br><br>
Women grow old fast in the raggedy backwoods of southwestern Missouri, the region we know as the Ozarks. Ree has a little sister named Ashley Dawn, 6, and a 12-year-old brother named Sonny – like many of the cast, drawn from the local people during the on-location shoot – to whom she’s teaching survival skills equally. So they both learn how to shoot a gun, hunt squirrels and skin and gut them and make a stew. (This scene, in which Ree tells Sonny there are things he’ll have to get over when he balks at gutting the squirrel, nicely foreshadows what the two crones’ insist she must get over too.) But Ree’s friend Gail (Lauren Sweetser), who’s already got a baby and doesn’t ask her husband why when he won’t let her take the truck, tells Ree, “It’s different when you’re married.” Writer-director Debra Granik, who adopted this film from Daniel Woodrell’s novel of the same title, avoids adding melodrama about how it is that Gail shows up with Baby Ned and the truck one day at Ree’s cabin, having left the husband and his head-banger music, but it’s easy to imagine there was some. Ree’s own single attempt to get away is demolished by a patient, practical Army recruiter who explains, in unusually knowing terms, that it will actually be braver for Ree to remain at home.<br><br>
Lest we start thinking about the people in <em>Winter’s Bone </em>in terms overly mythic or picturesque, I should say that this film is as good a study as you’re likely to find of how come most kids into drugs most anyplace and right here in Syracuse too aren’t about to snitch, and how come whole communities remain implacably against the law’s perceived intrusion. When Teardrop tells Thump, a distantly-related patriarch – played by another non-actor who goes by the nickname “Stray Dog” and evidently got to wear his own biker vest for the part – that Jessup “went against our ways,” he’s not talking about Jessup’s illegal activities. And when Teardrop, in one of the final scenes, suddenly says he knows who killed his little brother, about the only people you don’t suspect – outside Jessup’s own household – are the musicians at a house-party Ree visits, who provide much of the film’s marvelous Ozark music.<br><br>
Marideth Sisco, whose own busy summer festival schedule probably has rivaled the director’s, is the singer at this house-party with her band, the Davis Creek Rounders. Sisco also sings many of the songs in the film – “High on a Mountain,” “Farther Along,” “Fair and Tender Maidens,” “Missouri Waltz,” and “Teardrop’s Ballad: Bred and Buttered.” Twice Ree reminds the sheriff that she’s “a Dolly, bred and buttered,” indicating a depth of loyalty and identity that we learn as the tale unfolds can go either way.<br><br>
******<br>
<em>This review appears in the September 9, 2010 print edition of The Eagle weekly. “Winter’s Bone” opens at Manlius Art Cinema on Friday, September 10. Both the DVD and the soundtrack come out on October 26. </em><div class="blogger-post-footer">Nancy Keefe Rhodes</div>Nancy Keefe Rhodeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042283155633287882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14734429.post-42139635597405497052010-09-19T14:52:00.003-04:002010-09-19T15:11:19.928-04:00<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TJZftIEtMbI/AAAAAAAAAGc/474v7m6pbFI/s1600/Girl.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 213px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TJZftIEtMbI/AAAAAAAAAGc/474v7m6pbFI/s320/Girl.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5518703622255096242" /></a>
<strong>Film Review #233: <em>The Girl Who Played with Fire</em></strong><br>
2010<br>
Director: Daniel Alfredson <br>
Cast: Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, Per Oscrasson <br><br>
“I used to live in that city!” exclaimed one of my companions as Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) arrives in Göteborg on Sweden’s southwest coast, having driven the 250 miles or so from one side of the country – the capital city of Stockholm in the east – to the other through the night, in search of Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), who’s made the same journey a few hours ahead of him. “And I made that same drive every week I was there,” she added. <br><br>
Most US audiences watching <em>The Girl Who Played with Fire</em>, the second of the Swedish screen versions of the late Steig Larsson’s <em>Millennium Trilogy </em>novels, won’t have that advantage, or even know that the filmmakers actually shot the Göteborg scenes on location (even IMDB gets that wrong). But Swedish audiences will know that, especially those who actually live in and around Göteborg, where the film had a special screening at that city’s international film festival in January.<br><br>
I mention this because there’s been some grumbling about this film and you should not let it keep you away. This installment retains key cast members – the remarkable Rapace as fugitive computer-hacker Salander and Nyqvist as <em>Millennium</em> magazine publisher Blomkvist; also Lena Endre as Erika Berger, Blomkvist’s editor-with-benefits, and Peter Andersson as Salander’s slimy legal guardian, Nils Bjurman – and also wisely kept on Jacob Groth to provide the understated but hugely effective, disturbing score. (A word about US-tailored promotion: the image on the movie poster appears nowhere in this film and the trailer’s generic thriller music may come from some movie but not this one.) But this film has switched directors (from the virtuoso Niels Arden Oplev to the more workman-like Daniel Alfredson) and cinematographers (from Jens Fischer and Erik Kress to Peter Mokrosinski, whose look is considerably more workmanlike and sometimes out of focus for no discernibly good reason). And you might spend some time objecting to both. But – proof of the pudding – this film is over two hours long, and I didn’t wonder once how soon we’d get there, especially during the rising dread of the second half.<br><br>
In <em>Played with Fire</em>, crusading publisher Blomkvist hasn’t seen Salander for a year. (The first film ended with hints – a glimpse of her exiting an expensive car, dressed with uncharacteristic elegance, at some clearly exclusive tropical resort – though this new film neglects her sojourn there, which occupies a significant section of the novel, cutting to the chase of her Stockholm return.) Instead a breaking story about a sex-trafficking ring occupies Blomkvist, until the young couple who’ve researched that turn up executed and the police blame Salander. Sure that she’ll contact him, he sets about solving the murders and her connection, as his <em>Millennium</em> editorial staff set about finishing and publishing the story. Along the way – the reason for that cross-country dash – Salander finds her long-lost father (Georgi Staykov), determined to finish with an axe what she started as a child with a match and a gas can.<br><br>
What carries this film is the intriguing, increasingly layered and unconventional relationship between Blomkvist and Salander (those in turn carried by wonderful lead performances – I particularly recommend Rapace’s extended scene of reunion with her father). In a story about how we know the truth about anyone else, it’s worth thinking about how they have come to utterly trust one another. They don’t physically share a single scene until the end, but the film extends their virtual relationship with convincing immediacy; in one scene Salander turns off a door alarm with three seconds to go – watching Blomkvist remotely on a security camera – from the other side of Sweden. And amidst much deeply sordid behavior, Blomkvist isn’t the only good man here; there’s the young free-lancer Dag, Salander’s old advocate Holger Palmgren (Per Oscarsson, from the 1966 classic <em>Hunger</em>), and a promising cop named Bublanski. I’m more than ready to see where #3 goes.<br><br>
<em>The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo</em> packed Manlius Cinema in April. Nat Tobin is pretty sure he’ll keep <em>Played with Fire </em>around a couple weeks anyway, and reminded Friday night’s crowd that the finale – <em>The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest</em> – has a mid-October US release. He’s also arranged for a one-time screening at 6:30 p.m. next Tuesday, the 31st, of the documentary <em>Millennium</em>, about the book-to-movie project with Larsson’s novels. That screens at Manlius Library (in the Village Center plaza, past Little Cesar’s Pizza). <br><br>
*******<br>
<em>This review appears in the August 26, 2010 print edition of The Eagle weekly. “The Girl Who Played with Fire” is screening locally at Manlius Art Cinema. Next Tuesday, August 31st, at 6:30 p.m. you can also see the documentary “Millennium,” about Steig Larson and the Millennium Trilogy novels, at Manlius Library. </em><div class="blogger-post-footer">Nancy Keefe Rhodes</div>Nancy Keefe Rhodeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042283155633287882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14734429.post-12466400259921502712010-08-08T15:08:00.004-04:002010-08-08T15:24:25.843-04:00<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TF8B-CqGwQI/AAAAAAAAAGM/TN_ZNddKfDc/s1600/Kids.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 213px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TF8B-CqGwQI/AAAAAAAAAGM/TN_ZNddKfDc/s320/Kids.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5503119435047026946" /></a>
<strong>Film Review #232: <em>The Kids Are All Right</em></strong><br>
2010<br>
Director: Lisa Cholodenko<br>
Cast: Annette Bening, Julainne Moore, Mark Ruffalo<br><br>
At long last her good manners have snapped, but her dignity has never been more intact. Striding to the front door from the supper table in a way that makes you breathe, “Uh-oh!” – I remember my grandmother was able to do this too – Nic (Annette Bening) comes up behind her 15-year-old son Laser (Josh Hutcheson) to have a word with his father. Actually Paul (Mark Ruffalo) was the sperm donor of Laser and his older sister Joni (Mia Wasikowska), and has come belatedly into their lives during that transitional summer between Joni’s high school graduation and departure to college. Just as Joni needs to pull away a bit from her family, Laser has convinced her to seek out their common dad, who runs a local eatery supplied by his own garden and seems to have his pick of the women staffing both.<br><br>
“…Well, this is not your family,” concludes Nic, just before slamming that door in Paul’s face. “This is my family. If you want a family, go make your own.”<br><br>
Filmmaker Lisa Cholodenko has said of Nic – older partner of Jules (Julianne Moore), family breadwinner, OB-GYN physician, guardian of shaping the children’s social graces, who has endured much from the genial, shambling Paul as has everyone in her household – that “she’s a bit of a mama bear.” This is not clear earlier in the film or even for quite some way into the story, not before the quite remarkable dinner scene in which Nic first wills herself to see what about this man her partner and kids find so appealing, reveals her own tender side – they both love the vintage album <em>Blue</em> by Joni Mitchell, Nic’s daughter’s namesake – and then discerns from Paul’s bathroom the betrayal a lover would grasp in a flash.<br><br>
Cholodenko has been nursing this film project since 2005, when Julianne Moore, for whom she wrote the part of Jules, was already on board. Cholodenko was delayed in making the film and meanwhile she and her partner had a sperm-donor child of their own, an experience she attests sharpened the final script as well as her direction of its singular performances. It may also sharpen your experience of this film to realize that since the film’s wide release on July 23rd, a California court has struck down that state’s ban on gay marriage – put in place by voter referendum in 2008 as Proposition 8.<br><br>
The film takes it name, of course, from “The Kids Are All Right,” the Pete Townshend song that first appeared on The Who’s 1965 album <em>My Generation </em>and has become an enduring, often-recorded anthem of successive decades asserting that the young folks are turning out just fine, thank you. Cholodenko has the same answer for those worrying about children growing up in gay unions, and in doing so avoids the legalistic “balanced argument” pitfall that is so deadly when it shows up in fiction. Cholodenko does this with a terrific script, terrific performances – there is not a slouch among them, even in very minor characters – and the strategy to frame the “issue” initially as a comedy of manners.<br><br>
Instead of creating characters as mouthpieces for opposing positions, <em>The Kids </em>presents real and memorable people doing the best they can, which often falls short of what any of us would hope. Cholodenko systematically explores each character’s experience and point of view for a few scenes and then quietly shifts to the next. This is risky; to see why Jules and the kids and Paul find Nic overbearing and fussy and a little comical, we have to see her as – well, overbearing and fussy and a little comical. The reversal has to be, as in the dinner scene, pitch perfect – or Nic becomes merely lugubrious and we feel jerked around by a filmmaker who can’t decide on or manage her tone.<br><br>
Reversals and misunderstandings among the earnest are the stuff of farce too, and this is a very funny movie, often at the expense of people behaving in the ways they think are proper and expected. But it’s not just a device that, for example, Nic insists the kids learn to write timely thank-you notes – of such details one builds the social freedom to navigate far and wide, to engage in respectful relationships, to be courteous when you don’t feel like it but know you must, to build a life one chooses. Marriage is hard, as Jules says late in the day, and I join those who find this the best and most knowing movie about that in a long time.<br><br>
*******<br>
<em>This review appears in the August 12, 2010 print edition of the Syracuse "Eagle" weekly and also in the A&E section of Eagle Newspapers' online site, www.cnylink.com. “The Kids Are All Right” is screening locally at Manlius Art Cinema and Carousel Regal Cinemas.</em><div class="blogger-post-footer">Nancy Keefe Rhodes</div>Nancy Keefe Rhodeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042283155633287882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14734429.post-64934624450031677012010-07-25T20:37:00.003-04:002010-07-25T20:55:06.809-04:00<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TEza3ymeIAI/AAAAAAAAAGE/LCib523o-G0/s1600/Salt.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 213px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TEza3ymeIAI/AAAAAAAAAGE/LCib523o-G0/s320/Salt.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5498009897123323906" /></a>
<strong>Film Review #231: <em>Salt</em></strong><br>
2010<br>
Director: Phillip Noyce<br>
Cast: Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber, Chiwetel Ejiofor<br><br>
It’s true that Angelina Jolie’s fugitive spy Evelyn Salt will remind you of Jason Bourne’s sheer full-tilt physical courage and propensity to throw himself off high places. And if you caught the third installment, <em>The Bourne Ultimatum </em>(2007), you’ll be able to see Salt’s nighttime leap from the helicopter into an icy Potomac coming – though <em>Salt</em> director Phillip Noyce doesn’t repeat that mesmerizing shot from below Bourne’s still body when, stunned and drifting, back-lit by some light far above, he suddenly jerks to life, making of New York’s freezing East River a place of re-birth for this man with no identity. What Salt won’t remind you of is Tom Cruise, originally destined for the part.<br><br>
Many readers know – as I write this, <em>Salt</em> battles <em>Inception</em> for box-office first place – that Evelyn Salt is a CIA operative whom a “walk-in” Russian defector named Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski) accuses, as she interrogates him, of being a Russian infiltrator set to assassinate Russia’s current president when he gives the eulogy at the funeral of the US vice-president in Manhattan. The two men had engineered a major thaw between their nations. Orlov’s claim turns on a decades-old, Cold War-era plot to train a vast, fanatic, unbreakable team of Russians from birth to pass as ordinary folk until “Day X.” To leap ahead, the plan also involves hi-jacking the US nuclear codes to launch strikes on Tehran and Mecca so that Muslims will be provoked to finish destroying the US.<br><br>
Well, Salt is a double agent, though what she’ll do with that, and why, and what the set-up really is, provide the pull here. Jolie has said that re-writing the part for a woman was tricky. For example, this character wouldn’t have a child because a mother wouldn’t so endanger her child. But Salt has a husband, Mike (August Diehl), a spider researcher, a gentler, more retiring type than we expect for Jolie’s partner, so her fear is for his safety. All of Salt’s relationships are with men – except for the little girl who agrees to look after Salt’s Toto-like dog when she first goes on the run – and none of them is quite Atticus Finch, so next time I’d like another woman in the mix. The excellent actors Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor play, respectively, her laid-back superior Ted Winter and the more aggressive, suspicious counter-intelligence agent Peabody, who see-saw over how to contain her. Only once, as a last resort, does Salt use her feminine wiles and for a minute you’re not sure she doesn’t mean it.<br><br>
Go back further than Bourne to Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley and you grasp better what Jolie has done here. Of course, it’s scarcely possible to imagine a host of women’s film roles without that Ripley ancestor, especially in that quartet’s second film, <em>Aliens</em>, directed by James Cameron in 1986. Believe me, some fans can recite much of the dialogue from repeated watchings of <em>Aliens</em>. There’s the time when the gutsy soldier Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein) plunges down a tunnel to certain death with the line, “Let’s rock and roll!” Or the exhilarating moment when Ripley, clad in her giant forklift – a.k.a. the “exo-suit cargo loader” – faces down the mother monster to protect the orphan Newt. Right before you see this, Ripley utters the line, “Leave her alone, you bitch!” Cameron brought unmistakable echoes of Vasquez and Ripley to last year’s <em>Avatar</em>, casting Weaver as his chain-smoking ecologist and finding a Vasquez look-alike in Michelle Rodriguez as his rebel helicopter pilot.<br><br>
All of these stories of action heroes involving clandestine loyalties, espionage and empire riff on images of death of self, resurrection, birthrights and lost identities that shuttle between the rootless orphan and the disguised, unknowing lost heir. By adding the mind-bending factor of a woman hero, the <em>Alien</em> films took these images to sci-fi extremes, first with the acid-dripping mother monster and her brood of offspring implanted in the chests of human hosts, then further with the cloning rebirth of Ripley and her own discovery of her various trans-species selves.<br><br>
Political spy yarns like <em>Salt</em> really run on a parallel track, especially in the past decade. It’s unsurprising that such films aren’t concerned with literal plot credibility, and unsurprising that the subject of a Russian menace returns when it provides that resonant image of “Mother Russia.” You can enjoy <em>Salt</em> for its accomplished brute spectacle alone. <em>Salt</em> also offers performances and ideas about the ways we have gotten lost that will linger.<br><br>
*******<br>
<em>“Salt” opened nationwide last Friday and is now on multiple local screens. This review appears in the July 29, 2010 print edition of the Syracuse "Eagle" weekly. </em><div class="blogger-post-footer">Nancy Keefe Rhodes</div>Nancy Keefe Rhodeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042283155633287882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14734429.post-57754871544636503732010-07-08T13:25:00.004-04:002010-07-08T13:34:36.306-04:00<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TDYKmR56L6I/AAAAAAAAAF8/fYKqBPQkMps/s1600/Maid.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 185px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TDYKmR56L6I/AAAAAAAAAF8/fYKqBPQkMps/s320/Maid.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5491588448382496674" /></a>
Catalina Saavedra in the title role as Raquel. Photo: Elephant Eye Pictures.<br><br>
<strong>Film Review #230: <em>The Maid/ La Nana</em></strong><br>
2009/DVD 2010<br>
Director: Sebastiàn Silva<br>
Cast: Catalina Saavedra, Claudia Celedón, Mariana Loyola<br><br>
How different the second surprise birthday party is! Sebastiàn Silva’s <em>The Maid </em>opens with a profoundly reluctant Raquel, just turned 41, refusing to come out of the kitchen for the lit cake and presents she knows await in her employers’ dining room after supper. After all, she has been with the Valdez family for 23 years, since before the birth of the oldest, Camila (Andrea García-Huidobros). Mundo, the father (Alejandro Goìc), furiously rings the hand bell they use to summon her – “Can’t we move this along?” he asks, impatient to get back to his ship model-building – and the mother, Pilar (Claudia Celedón), sends Raquel’s favorite among the four children, Lucas (Augustín Silva), to fetch her. He decides, and reports back to the table, that she is “too embarrassed.” Eventually drawn into the moment when the family bursts out with cheers and applause – presumably this beneficent ritual surprise occurs annually like clockwork – Raquel reacts with an equal mixture of pleasure and resentment. This turns into ammunition later when she cuts short a call from her own mother, saying, “I have to go – we are celebrating with the family!” She savors this especially since she thinks she’s just fended off Pilar’s suggestion to hire a second maid to help her.<br><br>
Near to the film’s end comes the second surprise party, which Raquel herself has organized for that second maid, Lucy (Mariana Loyola). Bestowing a genuine surprise out of real though unexpected affection, Raquel turns the format she’s endured from the Valdezes into a moment of enthusiasm everyone shares. Like the first party, this one is also followed by an unwelcome announcement: Lucy has decided to leave and return to her family. Raquel is bereft. There’s been quite a lot of water, as they say, under the bridge.<br><br>
<em>The Maid</em> is set in Santiago, Chile, in the filmmaker’s own parents’ gated compound where, he informs us before the end credits by way of an old family photo, there once really had been two maids named Raquel and Lucy and a favorite son who was an acute observer of domestic relations. The boy Lucas – played by Silva’s son – is in part so appealing because we feel Silva means him as a sort of self-portrait and, while the boy empathetically describes Raquel as “embarrassed,” Silva’s willing to recall his younger self as equally so. One of the running comic threads here is Raquel’s almost daily task of washing the 12-year-old’s sheets and pajamas. When she finally complains to Pilar about this extra work, the boy’s mother chastises him about masturbation. Stiff-faced and mortified, Lucas marches outside to find Raquel – Silva drolly has her watering the lawn with a hose for this scene – where he delivers a single explosive word, “Thanks!”<br><br>
There are other moments that explore the spectrum of gratitude in this film where what’s given and owed is sometimes so ambiguous and class boundaries can be so abruptly declared in small ways. Determined to defend her corner of the universe against encroachment, Raquel – prone to headaches, dizzy spells, fits of stiff-faced rage and some emerging mental instability – sent two second maids packing before Lucy, one a gentle girl, the other a battle-ax. But Lucy disarms Raquel – intriguingly she wonders what the Valdez family has “done to” Raquel – with humor, kindness, an invitation home for Christmas, the promise that she “won’t be here forever.”<br><br>
Astute, witty and blessed by excellent performances, <em>The Maid</em> is the second film made by Silva and his writing partner, Pedro Peirano. Premiered at Sundance in early 2009, it took a special jury award and won Saavedra the best actress prize. Released here theatrically last October, <em>The Maid</em> earned some acclaim – the National Board of Review named it among the five best foreign language films of 2009 and Saavedra was nominated for a number of year-end awards – but fell short of the Oscars. These days, not making that cut halts marketing efforts for most foreign films, and may make the difference in whether one-screen indie movie houses like Manlius can feasibly book a title. But two weeks ago Oscilloscope released the DVD.<br><br>
Claudio Celedón worked with Silva and Peirano on their 2007 debut film; the three, along with Saavedra, reunite for the just-completed <em>Old Cats</em>, due out later this year. The ensemble is a taste you’ll want to acquire sooner rather than later.<br><br>
*******<br>
<em>This review appears in the July 7, 2010 print issue of “The Eagle” in Syracuse, New York, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular film column. “The Maid” on DVD is available at Netflix, Video on Demand and rental stores. </em><div class="blogger-post-footer">Nancy Keefe Rhodes</div>Nancy Keefe Rhodeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042283155633287882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14734429.post-79072231805786757962010-07-05T10:54:00.003-04:002010-07-05T11:04:02.892-04:00<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TDHz1n-pVjI/AAAAAAAAAF0/eW2z5L26fD0/s1600/Ellen.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 234px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TDHz1n-pVjI/AAAAAAAAAF0/eW2z5L26fD0/s320/Ellen.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5490437523331700274" /></a>
Photo © Ellen M. Blalock, used with permission.<br><br>
<strong>Film Review #229: <em>Beyond Boundaries in Ghana</em></strong><br>
2010<br>
Director: Ellen Blalock<br>
Cast: Beyond Boundaries members and residents of Ghana<br><br>
In the last moments of one of the most powerful sequences of Ellen Blalock’s new film, <em>Beyond Boundaries in Ghana</em>, two small children play on the massive white-washed ramparts of the Cape Coast slave castle in Ghana, West Africa, even dancing a bit to some music in the air, it seems, though that music has been on the soundtrack, cutting back and forth with the sound of the immensely deep ocean waves washing unceasingly over the rocks below. What has been a fairly straight-forward documentary until this sequence – the chronicle of the 2006 visit to northern Ghana by the Syracuse-based organization for cultural exchange, Beyond Boundaries, whose group stops in Cape Coast on their way back to the States – catches you unawares in something less contained, soaring well beyond the journalistic. Overlaid images that suggest recollection, dream and the presence of ghosts, dark passageways into dungeons, the reactions of these travelers once they step foot onto this actual site of the Atlantic slave trade, and glimpses of the churning, unchained ocean visible just past the gunner’s slits in the castle wall – all these combine in an intense metaphor of revelation over what this trip means and what endures long past the castle’s eventual crumbling.<br><br>
After the premiere screening finished last Sunday afternoon at ArtRage Gallery, the photographer Marjory Wilkins, who had raptly occupied a front row seat, declared, "This needs to be shown in the schools! Children need to see where they come from and that they come from something!"<br><br>
Blalock is a multimedia artist and this is her first feature-length film. Besides her professional photojournalism and short profile videography for the local daily <em>Post-Standard</em>, she is a painter, portraitist and quilt-maker of note who has exhibited in galleries and been a university-level teaching artist in residence a number of times. Coming in at just over 41 minutes, <em>Beyond Boundaries in Ghana </em>is a confident and winning work. Blalock edits with grace and precision, catches exactly the telling comment and moment, and shuttles with ease between narrative and metaphor.<br><br>
Every four years or so Beyond Boundaries makes another trip to Bolgatanga – an abbreviated version is scheduled for later this year – the community in northern Ghana they visited first in 1994. Beyond Boundaries was founded by local activists Mardea Warner (who was born and raised in Liberia) and Aggie Lane, devoted to providing cross-cultural experiences and creating lasting partnerships with the communities they visit that support women’s health and financial independence and the idea that all children should be in school. In the beginning, says Warner, they were clear they wanted to contribute more than, say, building a school and leaving – instead, they wanted, says Warner, to “bridge the gap between all those divisions in our lives.” They have also made trips to Native American communities such as Pine Ridge out west, to Canada and to the Gullah community in the Sea Islands off the Carolinas. They hope future trips will include Puerto Rico and – Mardea Warner walked from the front of the room at ArtRage, when this film premiered last Sunday afternoon there, to a wooden door and rapped on it – “Knock on wood,” she said - “eventually to Cuba.”<br><br>
But the Ghana connection has remained special, and in 2006 Blalock went along to document that trip. Fellow travelers included journalist and musician Jacque “Kofi” Thomas, speech pathologist Stephanie Cross and her daughter Alex (Cross said this was a 50th-birthday present to herself and a 13th-birthday present to Alex, who rates it in the film as far better than a more conventional present like a new iPod), special education Pre-K teacher Valeria Escoffery, and occupational therapist Barbara Flock. The group hires a van and drivers – Gordon Akon-Yamga has been their “chief navigator” since the year 2000 – and they travel and eat as Ghanaians would on a similar trip, landing first in the capital city of Accra and passing through the city of Kumasi on the 450-plus mile trip to Bolgatanga in the northern corner. It is not, deadpans Mardea Warner, your typical Club Med experience.<br><br>
In Bolgatanga the group meets with partners from local organizations. CENSUDI (Center for Sustainable Development Initiatives) was created by sisters Franciska and Mary Margaret Issaka, whose work includes educational initiatives. Mary Margaret Issaka says on screen of Beyond Boundaries, “We see them as our brothers and sisters. When they came here” – this would be about 1998 – “we just melted into each other. For us, that is equally important as any resources we get from the group.”<br><br>
Stella Abagre of the Single Mothers Association, which is now training 259 women to process and sell rice and provide feeding programs in schools as well as marketing the distinctively styled woven “Bolga” baskets, says, “Beyond Boundaries was the very first friends we made.”<br><br>
They also visit the Sirigu Women’s Organization of Art and Pottery, geological formations, a crocodile pond, the Mole National Park and, on the way back through Kumasi, the huge open-air market, the Manhyia Palace Museum of Ashanti kings and queens, and further on, the suspension bridges through the tree-tops of Kakum National Park, before they make their detour to Cape Coast. But the sum of the trip - and the film - is more than its parts. Escoffery noted that she now experiences Africa as her home, and the musician Thomas commented, "I was not born in Africa, but Africa is born in me. Now I know people there, I have seen the land, and it's more real."<br><br>
ArtRage Gallery on Hawley Avenue has been quietly building itself a solid track record for screening good film right along with exhibiting visual art and photo. Besides the film program curated there by Jeff Gorney ArtRage has hosted a number of notable premieres by local filmmakers. This one took advantage of the wonderful photo show of work by Mima Cataldo and Ruth Putter, <em>Images of Resistance</em>, that had had its opening reception the night before. Blalock says the film will be shown again, and she’s making DVD copies available.<br><br>
*******<br>
<em>A version of this review appeared in the June 17, 2010 print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle and also on the Eagle Newspapers website, www.cnylink.com - click A&E.</em><div class="blogger-post-footer">Nancy Keefe Rhodes</div>Nancy Keefe Rhodeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042283155633287882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14734429.post-45960116891922198832010-06-14T16:15:00.004-04:002010-06-14T16:31:59.610-04:00<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TBaOfXx7NTI/AAAAAAAAAFs/wtg4k8JDo1U/s1600/Louise.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 230px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TBaOfXx7NTI/AAAAAAAAAFs/wtg4k8JDo1U/s320/Louise.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5482726265980663090" /></a>
Review #228: <em>Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and The Tangerine</em><br>
2008/DVD 2009 <br>
Directors: Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach<br>
Cast: Louise Bourgeois, Gerry Gorovoy, Deborah Wye<br><br>
When French-born American artist Louise Bourgeois died after a heart attack in New York City on June 1st, obituary writers were clearly ready. After all, she was 98 years old. (Born on Christmas in Paris in 1911, Bourgeois had her first solo show – twelve paintings – in 1945.) Even so, her last exhibition – <em>Fabric Works</em>, sculptures of her signature spiders woven from ribbons – opened four days later (last Friday) in the Italian city of Venice at the Fondazione Vedova. Last summer Bourgeois was also inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame in nearby Seneca Falls (along with noted local feminist attorney Karen DeCrow), and in 2009 she also enjoyed a retrospective at the Hirshhorn in Washington, DC.<br><br>
Bourgeois’ death might now hasten Netflix to stop dawdling and add the wonderful documentary about her by filmmaker Marion Cajori and art historian Amei Wallach, which has been out on DVD for the past year. Cajori, who died in 2006 before the film’s completion, also made well-respected films about the artists Joan Mitchell and Chuck Close. Wallach was able to finish the film in time to premiere in New York City in June 2008, two days before the opening of a full-career retrospective of Bourgeois’ work at the Guggenheim.<br><br>
This film was made over fourteen years, assembled from some 190 interviews, vintage footage and photographs, and more recent interviews with Bourgeois’ long-time assistant, Jerry Gorovoy, and her middle son, Jean-Louis. There are also key curators and commentators, all of whom have themselves published work on Bourgeois, as has Gorovoy himself. Carlotta Kotik was curator of the US Pavilion at the 1993 Venice Biennale, where Bourgeois was the first woman to represent to US with her room – she called them “cells” – housing the arresting <em>Arch of Hysteria</em> sculpture, a woman's legs and torso bent backward in spasm. Writer and curator Robert Storr, former dean of the Yale School of Art, knew Bourgeois well before her marriage to the American art historian Robert Goldwater (who pioneered our understanding of primitive art, took Bourgeois out of war-time France and introduced her to the Manhattan art scene on the 1940s that included Peggy Guggenheim, exiled French Surrealists whom she did not like and later, Abstract Expressionists, whom she did, and dealers such as Leo Castelli, himself now the subject of a new biography). Deborah Wye met Bourgeois in 1976 and, as chief curator of prints at MoMA New York, engineered the first major retrospective by a woman - Bourgeois - at MoMA; this was in 1982, when Bourgeois was 71 years old. Frances Morris was curator at the Tate Modern in London when, for its inaugural exhibition at the turn of the Millennium, that museum unveiled Bourgeois’ massive, mirror-hung three-tower installation, <em>I Do/I Und0/I Redo</em>.<br><br>
<em>I Do/I Undo/I Redo</em> in fact serves to title each of the three chapters of the film, and it’s especially satisfying, after this has been used to structure the story, that the film winds up with a detailed section that documents the installation and opening of that work at the Tate Modern. This illustrates a certain trust the filmmakers have in their audience, who may or may not be familiar with this installation or the artist herself - chronicler of the body's vulnerability, memory, the family's abandonment and reconciliation, equally at home in the representational and the abstract - and an approach to making a film about an artist that gets on with its exploration without too pedestrian a recitation of the facts and figures. The film has often been criticized for assuming too great a knowledge of Bourgeois’ life and work on the part of the viewer and, particularly by Eleanor Baden of the <em>Feminist Review</em>, for including far too little on Bourgeois’ views on feminism, marriage and motherhood (she and Goldwater had three sons).<br><br>
On the contrary, I found the balance just right. There is plenty here about her views on all these issues – albeit through the art itself rather than through literal pronouncements – if one cares to pay attention. The film’s title refers to Bourgeois’ signature giant spider sculptures, which she called her <em>Maman</em> or mother pieces (the family business was embroidery and tapestry restoration and her mother was a master weaver); to her father’s live-in mistress Sadie, ostensibly the governess; and to the humiliating, sexually-charged Sunday dinner game her father played in front of guests involving the skin of a tangerine. All have their explanations in due time.<br><br>
And all exemplify the dilemna of balancing biography with aesthetic standards of judgement. Both Robert Storr and Jerry Gorovoy discuss, for example, the first time that “the mistress story really came out,” in an exhibition that included old family photos, and Bourgeois’ subsequent regret at revealing this bit of biography. Says Gorovoy in the film, “She decided telling the story of the mistress was a mistake, because people used that to interpret the work. And that’s crazy. The work is much more complex than that.”<br><br>
Set this next to Bourgeois’ own resonant, multi-layered observations about having met Constantin Brancusi, observing that when he became very old and could not longer lift enormous, heavy pieces of wood, “this was his changing time” as an artist. There’s a voice-over of Bourgeois that plays over old footage of the scaffolding needed for the erection of Brancusi’s iconic 1937 sculpture <em>Endless Column</em>, in which she wonders if he knew that the pillar is a mother image and that “when you’re angry at the mother you cut it in pieces.” Or compare it to Bourgeois’ own recollection of how come she couldn’t stand most of the exiled French Surrealist “father figures.”<br><br>
Feminists want to claim Bourgeois. In fact in 1992 they protested that the Guggenheim Soho’s planned inaugural exhibition was “four white boys” and got Bourgeois added in a show re-titled <em>From Brancusi to Bourgeois</em>. There’s a 2007 clip of a couple of the Guerilla Gurlz recalling that and proclaiming, “She’s our icon, whether she likes it or not!”<br><br>
Bourgeois didn't like it, but - gun-shy of the literal - she may have resisted any declared allegiance as too constricting. Wye tells the story that even Bourgeois' dealer wasn't certain how much work she had and how Bourgeois showed Wye a cellar-full of sculptures but abruptly shut the light off with the remark, "I've showed you too much."<br><br>
Certainly Bourgeois experienced a resurgence of work and new attention after her husband died in 1973 and she returned to making art (buying a studio in Brooklyn in 1980 allowed the larger work to unfold) that also coincided with convergence of a number of trends in the 70s and 80s. Both Gorovoy and Wye speak incisively about this time – the waning of formalist standards in the judgment of art and the rise of protest art, women’s consciousness, and the opening up of what art could be – and how it supported Bourgeois’ own later flowering.<br><br>
Cranky and difficult and sometimes self-destructive – her intimates are clear she was challenging – Bourgeois yet consistently understood that a too-literal correlation of her work with her biography would prove reductive. The filmmakers understand that too – magnificently.<br><br>
*******<br>
<em>A shorter version of this review appeared in the June 10, 2010 print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle on page 12. “Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine” is readily and reasonably available online at Amazon.com and other sites, but you can encourage Netflix by adding it to your “Save” queue. You can also watch online PBS’ “Art 21” segment on Identity (from 2001), which features Bourgeois and four other artists.</em><div class="blogger-post-footer">Nancy Keefe Rhodes</div>Nancy Keefe Rhodeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042283155633287882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14734429.post-49764480478937047232010-05-29T11:45:00.004-04:002010-05-29T11:57:57.071-04:00<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TAE4sb1u0zI/AAAAAAAAAFk/v9eKmhpEXaE/s1600/Secret.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 190px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/TAE4sb1u0zI/AAAAAAAAAFk/v9eKmhpEXaE/s320/Secret.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5476720957897757490" /></a>
<strong>Film Review #227: <em>The Secret in Their Eyes</em></strong><br>
2009 <br>
Director: Juan José Campanella<br>
Cast: Ricardo Darín, Soledad Villamil, Guillermo Francella<br><br>
Thanks to starring in this year’s Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language film, Ricardo Darín, one of Argentina’s most successful and well-regarded actors, may finally get the attention here that he deserves. Only a handful of his films have been available in the US. Notably he played the lead in Fabián Bielinsky’s only two films before that Argentine’s director’s untimely death in 2006 – as the double-crossing master crook Marcos in <em>Nine Queens </em>(2000), a deeply pleasurable whiplash of a tale about a scam involving counterfeit stamps whose images provide the film’s title; and then as the amateur taxidermist from the city, Esteban, out of his depth in more ways than one in the remote countryside, whose epilepsy provides the title for <em>The Aura</em> (2005). In 2001, Darín also starred in Juan José Campanella’s comedy, <em>The Son of the Bride</em>. The first two are available at Netflix and the Campanella is slated for US DVD release, also thanks to this year’s Oscars.<br><br>
In Campanella’s <em>The Secret in Their Eyes/ El secreto de sus ojos</em>, Darín rejoins that writer-director and heads a fine ensemble cast as Benjamin Espósito, both a retired police investigator trying to make sense, in the year 2000, of the Morales case, a vicious rape and murder that occurred almost a quarter century before, and in flashback as Espósito’s younger self in 1974 Argentina as the nation descended into what would become its Right-wing “dirty war.” Darín is now in his 60s, but has the sort of face and carriage that make him easily believable as the younger man with darker hair and a full beard, in the flashback sequences. The same is true of the excellently matched lead actress, Soledad Villamil, who plays the aristocratic Irene Menéndez-Hastings, both as a young Cornell-educated lawyer who joins the prosecutor’s office as a law clerk and supervises Espósito, and as the older, successful judge whom Espósito contacts again in the new century.<br><br>
The film’s ensemble is rounded out with these principals: famed Argentine stage comic Guillermo Francella, making a rare foray on-screen as Pablo Sandoval, Espósito’s prodigiously alcoholic and fiercely loyal investigative partner; Pablo Rago as Ricardo Morales, the mild-mannered bank clerk whose only passion was his young wife; Javier Godino as Isidoro Gómez, soccer enthusiast, useful petty henchman and the murderer; and José Luis Gioia as the corrupt Inspector Báez.<br><br>
Cold case procedurals that uncover the marriage between thuggish domestic or private-sector behavior and Right-wing politics have abounded recently – Britain’s <em>Red Riding Trilogy</em>, Sweden’s <em>The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo</em>, France’s <em>Une Prophete</em>, and of course <em>The White Ribbon </em>from Austria’s Michael Haneke. The last two of these competed with <em>The Secret in Their Eyes </em>for the Best Foreign Language Oscar and played recently at Manlius Art Cinema, where the Campanella film opened last Friday for a two-week run. Despite some of Haneke’s earlier accomplishments, <em>The White Ribbon </em>fell short for me and I thought there were some serious problems with its editing, particularly in one scene that even had me wondering if Manlius might’ve had a damaged print. But <em>Une Prophete </em>was way better than I anticipated, so <em>Secret</em> had a lot to live up to for me.<br><br>
What all these films have in common in their use of a particular genre type as scaffold is, first, a mastery of the elements of that type that raise these films beyond good pulp entertainment – it should come as no surprise that Campanella has directed a bunch of US television dramas, including 17 episodes over the past decade of <em>Law and Order</em> – and second, a treatment of character that radically shifts them out of the plot-driven mode to something else. This is why one properly starts with a look at the cast of characters in <em>The Secret in Their Eyes </em>rather than the working out of the plot twists – while there’s a real doozy at the end too, as breath-stopping for the audience as it clearly is for Espósito – and how come it matters what particular traits the actors possess.<br><br>
Not that Campanella doesn’t give us an elegantly, deftly handled plot. As book reviewer Maureen Corrigan reminds us so well about really good mysteries, their working out is really about thinking – thinking is all its both-brained glory that weds logic and intuition. And the method here is immersion followed by the sudden insight – the “research,” if you will, is qualitative, asking what the evidence will give up, rather than proceeding from a preconceived abstraction that one sets out to prove. This is vastly enjoyable to partake of an audience member.<br><br>
It also merges with the aesthetic working out of stories – thus does Esposito, in his retirement, return to this case as a novel he means to write, imagining his way to the answers. And in flashback, thus does Espósito discover his suspect from a string of reappearances in old photos and Sandoval alight upon Gómez’s passion for soccer and thus the place to find him. (Last Friday Manlius Art Cinema’s Nat Tobin remarked, “I still don’t know how they filmed the chase in the soccer stadium,” something he shares with more than one fan of the film.) Thus Sandoval’s sudden insight that the assassins who kill him don’t know what Espósito looks like – Espósito figures out what must have happened 24 years later himself, illuminating one puzzling detail about the murder scene. Thus does Irene sadly call Espósito a “dummy” when he fails to see what he feels for her she has always returned. This is why they need to say so little in the final scene.<br><br>
And like the other cold case procedurals above, <em>Secret</em> has a strong feminist strain. When Gómez resists Esposito’s interrogation, it’s Irene who breaks him down, playing on his outsized machismo and resentful entitlement. This is a fairly extreme scene, shocking to Espósito and perhaps to us, but lays the groundwork for how a character like Irene has the savvy to survive the “dirty war” above and beyond the protection of her wealthy family (it’s likely her father was an American who’s married into an old Argentine family, and she sends Espósito to a distant province – once Gomez is on the loose again and a danger to him – where she says her cousins rule “like feudal lords.”). Their nemesis, Inspector Báez, the one who releases the convicted Gómez because he makes a good thug and informer, understands he can’t touch her.<br><br>
All of this unspools from the discovery of the body in the Morales case and the long moments that Espósito takes this in, because of the kind of man he proves to be and the affront to the very core of his being that this crime is – not because the director “aestheticized violence” by the artful arrangement of the body, as some have claimed – a scene of mournful taking-in that is echoed near the film’s end by Esposito’s visit to Morales’ on the ex-banker clerk’s distant farm.<br><br>
*******<br>
<em>The Secret in Their Eyes</em> runs through next Thursday, June 3rd, at Manlius Art Cinema. Re-printed here from the Syracuse City Eagle web version, published on 5/27/2010 at www.cnylink.com - click A&E.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Nancy Keefe Rhodes</div>Nancy Keefe Rhodeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042283155633287882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14734429.post-88965816263140271092010-05-19T10:45:00.004-04:002010-05-19T11:01:25.488-04:00<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/S_P8UWAV2TI/AAAAAAAAAFc/LqtOFHGlQ3A/s1600/Messenger2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 249px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/S_P8UWAV2TI/AAAAAAAAAFc/LqtOFHGlQ3A/s320/Messenger2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5472995398619879730" /></a>
<strong>Film Review #226: <em>The Messenger</em></strong><br>
2009/DVD 2010 <br>
Director: Oren Moverman<br>
Cast: Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson, Samantha Morton<br><br>
“I’m not gonna be giving any hugs,” Staff Sgt. Will Montgomery (Ben Foster) assures Capt. Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson), in a tight, careful voice. Sent home from Iraq after a combat injury, Montgomery lands in Fort Dix, New Jersey, where the Army finds something for him to do in the last few months of his hitch. Stone, an older career soldier and veteran of the first Persian Gulf War, has been briefing him on proper deportment with the “N.O.K.” – next-of-kin – during a Casualty Notification call. There’s a manual that covers every eventuality in excruciating detail, which Stone goes through with the younger man over diner coffee, demanding twice that Montgomery look him in the eye when he answers.<br><br>
Always tethered to beepers, Montgomery and Stone are racing to beat CNN and FOX News and Face Book to survivors. They speak only with designated next-of-kin – never to neighbors or mistresses – and can, if asked, relate how a soldier died and call someone for the next-of-kin if needed. When they cross one wide yard in a tract of military bungalows and a line of silent women press against a chain-link fence watching them, knowing what two officers in dress uniforms means, you start to wait for the IED to explode and begin to see that is what happens for families who get this visit.<br><br>
Stone is completely earnest about doing his duty correctly here, not because he likes the power of rank, but because this is the way he can serve. Stone is an alcoholic shakily on the wagon – later he and Montgomery share an epic binge during which each stands up for the other, recreating in a lakeside brawl and a drunken invasion of a decorous wedding reception the battlefield solidarity each feels he has so fallen short of – and beneath Harrelson’s big-lug exterior you can see both Stone’s fastidiousness and his decency. Casting Harrelson in this role was audacious, and he picked up a slew of nominations and awards last winter for his performance.<br><br>
Ben Foster first hit my radar in the 2007 re-make of <em>3:10 to Yuma</em>, playing the jittery, primping outlaw Charlie Prince, almost feral in his closeness to thoughtless savagery, in thrall of Russell Crowe’s outlaw Ben Wade and of a type as capable of turning on Wade as say, Robert Ford did on Jesse James or Jack McCall on Wild Bill Hickok. Foster has some of that same riveting, tightly-wound quality as Will Montgomery, enough to generate an attentiveness in us that’s mirrored in Montgomery’s own hyper-alertness and, here, a deceptive calm. He is all watchfulness, this soldier, and fittingly his injury endangered his vision (the film opens with him putting drops in his eye and inspecting his eye socket, scarred with a delicate crescent, in a mirror).<br><br>
Montgomery has seen things he can’t talk about and done things he’s ashamed of, his old girlfriend Kelly (Jena Malone) is marrying someone else, and he doesn’t feel much like the hero the newspapers make him out to be. Kelly visits him on base and it emerges that she came to retract the invitation she ill-advisedly mailed him to her wedding. She also takes this opportunity to sleep with him one last time. Somehow, because she’s on top, you understand this was her idea, and that he’s letting her, just as he lets her spin him a tale of how she came to leave him and tells her it’s alright. And it is alright too, even a relief, because in this small part, Malone conveys that the vapid, pretty Kelly would never be equal to what Montgomery will need now.<br><br>
That would be a grown up, and on one of his notification calls with Stone, Montgomery meets Olivia Pitterson (the great Samantha Morton), whose first response is regret for how hard this duty must be on the men who brought her the news. She has a nine-year-old biracial son, Matt, and when Montgomery comes back, she lets him stay for pizza. Olivia has a watchfulness that matches Montgomery’s as they inch toward one another. And as it happens, he does give hugs: one day in a tiny convenience store run by the next dead soldier’s parents, to Stone’s incredulous dismay. When the elderly father vomits and collapses, Montgomery crouches on the floor next to the couple and gathers them in his arms, completing his script in a low voice.<br><br>
There are six vignettes of notification in this film around which Montgomery and Stone form a friendship and Montgomery and Olivia tentatively start a relationship. Former Israeli paratrooper Oren Moverman has spent a couple decades learning screenwriting and that shows here; he is also directing his first feature-length film. He shepherds remarkable performances from Foster, Harrelson and Morton, as well as vivid cameos from Malone and also from Steve Buscemi as one angry father. (Both Foster and Buscemi are working on one of Moverman’s new film projects, titled <em>Rampart</em>.) <em>The Messenger</em> was shot over 28 days in May 2008 in half a dozen New Jersey towns around Fort Dix, and premiered at the Sundance Festival in January 2009. It opened theatrically in November, just in time for a couple Oscar nominations. While it’s remained on a few screens ever since – at most, 36 one week nationwide – it never did hit Central New York. Of course we are already fighting the terrorists here, and I don’t mean in Times Square.<br><br>
*******<br>
<em>Posted for the Syracuse City Eagle weekly on 5/18 at www.cnylink.com – click A&E. “Make it Snappy” is a regular film column that appears in the Syracuse City Eagle weekly.</em><div class="blogger-post-footer">Nancy Keefe Rhodes</div>Nancy Keefe Rhodeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042283155633287882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14734429.post-37682362225511763892010-05-02T14:26:00.002-04:002010-05-02T14:37:56.473-04:00<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/S93GeICZNyI/AAAAAAAAAFU/OQiLvysl7ag/s1600/disgrace-3.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 197px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/S93GeICZNyI/AAAAAAAAAFU/OQiLvysl7ag/s320/disgrace-3.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5466743743553550114" /></a>
<strong>Film Review #225: <em>Disgrace</em></strong><br>
2008/VD 2010 <br>
Director: Steve Jacobs <br>
Cast: John Malkovich, Jessica Haines, Antoinette Engel, Eriq Ebouaney<br><br>
Serious area film buffs may be noticing a curious lull about now – for years now, end-of-April-beginning-of-May has been spring film festival season in Central New York. It still is downstate, where TriBeca’s been running full blast. West of here, the re-named Rochester 360/365 festival opens next Wednesday with James Ivory’s <em>The City of Your Final Destination</em> (2009), the first Merchant Ivory Productions film made without the late Ismail Merchant, who died in 2005. Ivory will be on hand for that, which is doubly significant for the region because the George Eastman House has just acquired the Merchant-Ivory film archive.<br><br>
But this year, the Syracuse International Film festival makes a move to mid-October for its main events, though SYRFILM has been busy with monthly special screenings at the Palace in Eastwood since mid-winter, has hosted several visiting filmmakers and just completed its annual round of public pre-screenings of festival entries.<br><br>
Word was, there’d be another kind of run-up over the summer to this year’s SYRFILM. Actor John Malkovich is expected to arrive here in August to shoot <em>Hotel Syracuse </em>with Israeli director Haim Bouzaglou. Set in the venerable old downtown landmark, which also houses SYRFILM’s offices and has been a sometime festival screening venue, this film is a project put together by SYRFILM’s Owen Shapiro. It would be the second film collaboration with Bouzaglou, whose already-completed, Syracuse-made <em>Session</em> will opens this year’s festival in the fall. Final green light on the Malkovich project still awaits the signing of the lead actress, so far a carefully guarded secret.<br><br>
Meanwhile, another Malkovich film released this week on DVD.<em> Disgrace</em> has had scant upstate screen time except for four showings earlier this spring at Cornell Cinema. This 2008 film brings South African J. M. Coetzee’s Booker prize-winning 1999 novel of the same name to the screen, the first feature-length film by Australia-based husband and wife team Steve Jacobs and Anna-Maria Monticelli. <em>Disgrace</em> is a difficult and unsettling film, but Malkovich’s daring performance as David Lurie has been widely and I think correctly praised as worth the price of admission; it was certainly worth the drive to Ithaca. Whether or not SYRFILM eventually arranges a local screening once Malkovich is here, you don’t have to wait.<br><br>
As David Lurie, Malkovich plays a Cape Town professor of Romantic poetry who loses his job after his student, Melanie Issacs (Antoinette Engel), reports his unwanted attentions after first attempting suicide and her boyfriend and then her father confront him. US reviewers tend to call Melanie Issacs simply a “mixed-race student,” though I suspect to a South African audience – the film has been shown in 17 countries so far, but notably not yet there – this status might be more complicated. One of the early scenes suggests this, as Lurie is hauled resentfully before a panel of colleagues who will make a recommendation. He is completely uncooperative and unrepentant. This scene astutely presents a good many things – the dynamics of male faculty who bend over to help Lurie keep his post, the women who don’t, and Lurie’s obstinate refusal to play by the commonly understood script, which sets up his later act of penance and perhaps the comeuppance that provokes that – but it also lays out in some detail what comprises, in that setting of international crossroads, a jury of one’s “peers.” That is, given the names and hues of the panel, one of wider variety and background than we may be accustomed to imagining in South Africa.<br><br>
US reviewers also customarily call Lurie a “university professor” when really he’s teaching at a somewhat lowlier “technical college” in a department that’s now, we are to understand, downgraded from “Literature” to “Communications.” His colleagues are worried for him that losing this job – “in these times,” as one murmurs – will make his precarious situation worse. So David Lurie has come to rest on a rather shabby rung of the ladder and, despite his pretensions, he knows it, which sharpens both his disappointment and the fact that he is not a likable man. Once fired, he toys with an idea he’s had for a while – one he dangled before Melanie Isaacs to impress her – that he’ll write that opera about Romantic poet Lord Byron’s sojourn in Italy.<br><br>
Professor Lurie’s fall from academic grace occupies a good half of the film, after which he repairs to the rural farm of his daughter Lucy (Jessica Haines, in a stunning performance), on the eastern Cape. Lucy had settled there with another woman with the idea of homesteading, raises flowers and vegetables for the local marketplace, and now that her partner has left her, has sold part of her land to Petrus (the excellent Eriq Ebouaney, Patrice Lumumba in Raoul Peck’s 2000 film about the martyred African politician).<br><br>
Petrus works relentlessly and noisily – a fact that pokes some droll fun at David’s disturbed contemplation – building his own cinderblock home, acquiring a new wife, planting a garden, and acting as the benign patriarch of an apparently large extended family. This clan includes a “troubled” boy named Pollux (Buyami Duma) who, with two other teenagers, rapes Lucy, sets David on fire and shoots Lucy’s guard dogs. It is Petrus who ultimately brokers a solution to this situation.<br><br>
Both the novel and the film (quite faithful though the film rearranges events to change the ending) play a bit with the likelihood that many in teh audience want to see <em>Disgrace</em> primarily as David and Lucy’s story – whites who have not yet found their footing or their bearings in the roiling post-apartheid South Africa. <em>Boston Globe</em> film critic Ty Burr notes that these Europeans are themselves much like “stray dogs.” David volunteers at a veterinary clinic in town and assists in putting down stray dogs – even one lame pup he takes a shine to – and Petrus introduces himself to David, “I look after the dogs and water the garden. The dog man – yes.”<br><br>
But really this is a tale with, if not a parallel track, a shadow image – a tale of two aggrieved fathers, two violated daughters, two acts of what seem – at least to David – like attempted suicide, two initial refusals to repent, despite the one being tricked out as cultured and the other as what some European characters first see as savage.<br><br>
*******<br>
<em>Appeared in the April 29, 2010 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. “Disgrace” is available on DVD already from Netflix. </em><div class="blogger-post-footer">Nancy Keefe Rhodes</div>Nancy Keefe Rhodeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042283155633287882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14734429.post-1671694461615037452010-04-25T13:24:00.003-04:002010-04-25T13:36:19.778-04:00<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/S9R7SJx4z-I/AAAAAAAAAFM/7FiVhEGN018/s1600/Dragon3.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 197px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/S9R7SJx4z-I/AAAAAAAAAFM/7FiVhEGN018/s320/Dragon3.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5464127799700279266" /></a>
<em>Lisbeth Salandar (Noomi Rapace) and Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) in “The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo.” Now at Manlius Art Cinema, also elsewhere upstate at The Little in Rochester, at Spectrum in Albany, and opened Friday at Cinemapolis in Ithaca.</em><br><br>
<strong>Film Review #224: <em>The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo</em></strong><br>
2009<br>
Director: Niels Arden Oplev
Cast:Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, Sven-Bertil Taube<br><br>
What’s most exhilarating is the moment of “disappointment” when his victims realize they won’t get away, confides the killer, a connoisseur of single malt whiskey and calibrated cruelty, to Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist). The journalist, with six months at loose ends before he begins prison term for libel, had been hired to unravel the long-ago disappearance of a wealthy industrialist’s favorite niece. “You’ll experience that too,” the killer promises Blomkvist, who’s by now tightly bound, a noose around his neck.<br><br>
All the carefully built details of Nyqvist’s quiet performance come together here and pay off. We’ve spent much of this film so far watching Blomkvist’s own laser-like watchfulness – as he assembles shreds of evidence on the wall in an ever-spreading collage and stands before it immersed, visits crime scenes and imagines anew the bodies discovered there, and peers into every interaction as if into darkness. Now he watches the killer, struggling to restrain his own animal fear lest it switch off that attention. In really well-done films of this kind, our own suddenly blossoming discovery of crucial secrets – which has been working underground, so to speak – occurs just as the character sees them too, perhaps a magnifying millisecond before. That’s what sent me back to Shyamalan’s <em>The Sixth Sense</em> (1999) a second time, wanting to see how he did that. While I confess that, among the string of secrets driving this film, I figured out pretty early where that niece went, few films that clock in this long – 152 minutes US, 180 at home in Sweden – are this relentlessly satisfying.<br><br>
April has been quite a month already for serial killers in the arts, with films like <em>Red Riding Trilogy</em> and <em>The White Ribbon</em>, and Stephen Chalmers’ photo project on mass murderers’ “dump sites” at Light Work Gallery, <em>Unmarked</em>. <em>The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo</em> comes widely to Central New York, with Nyqvist as the disgraced Swedish reporter and, in the title role, Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander, the brilliant computer hacker with a taste for Goth who joins his effort. Niels Arden Oplev directed this film, based on the first of Stieg Larsson’s three crime novels about Salandar and Blomkvist.<br><br>
A good and decent man, the cultured family patriarch hiring Blomkvist in this trilogy’s launch tale – Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) – is nonetheless beset by a nest of viperous relatives, greedy, cruel, some of them with deep-rooted and persisting Nazi ties and other, more private weaknesses. He’s survived these intervening years since the disappearance of his niece Harriet (played in flashback as a sixteen-year-old by Julia Sporre) by his unflagging search to uncover what became of her. As a character, Blomkvist is close to Larsson, also a crusading anti-fascist journalist whose life was often in danger and who wrote these novels to “relax.” In 1995, Swedish neo-Nazis killed eight people, something that Larsson’s investigation uncovered and prompted his founding of the Expo Foundation and its magazine of the same name. Like <em>Red Riding </em>and <em>The White Ribbon</em> (echoed too in Chalmers’ <em>Unmarked</em> project), this film meditates on the ways that power, once corrupt and unleashed – the doing of violence simply because it’s “so easy,” as the killer tells Blomkvist – seeps into every layer of life, large and small.<br><br>
Larsson’s novels are sometimes called “the Salandar novels” because the figure of Lisbeth is so unlikely and so striking, but also because – as happens perhaps even more vividly on-screen – in the course of the story the weight shifts from Blomkvist to her. It’s Salandar whose background investigation vets Blomkvist for the Vanger job in the first place. It’s Salandar’s own past that comes to illuminate and deepen the mystery of Harriet Vanger, and Salandar’s stance in the world serves as counterpoint to Harriet’s. Noomi Rapace makes a wonderful Salandar and an equal in many intriguing ways to Blomkvist.<br><br>
In Syracuse last October for a talk about crime procedurals, <em>Washington Post</em> and NPR book reviewer Maureen Corrigan called them “guilty pleasures.” Despite high-brow dismissals, the popular detective novel, she said, “introduced a new subject to literature – they are about thinking.” I think Corrigan’s arguments for these novels as explorations of epistemology – a working out of how we know what we think we know – as well as broader social troubles, apply as well to their robust on-screen incarnations too. It’s no surprise to learn that Corrigan liked <em>The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo</em>. In her 2008 review of the novel, which could certainly describe the film equally well, Corrigan wrote that the book was “super-smart, witty, wrenchingly violent in a few isolated passages, and unflinching in its commonsense feminist social commentary.”<br><br>
All three of the <em>Millennium Trilogy</em> novels (named after Blomkvist’s magazine) are heading our way on-screen. Daniel Alfredson directs the next two (<em>The Girl Who Played with Fire</em> and <em>The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest</em>), keeping Nyqvist and Rapace in the lead roles. The novels, first published in 1999, have been tremendously popular and translated into 37 languages. (There’s also an unfinished fourth Millennium novel if Larsson’s still-unsettled estate – he died suddenly in 2004 – lets it loose.) Meanwhile, Oplev’s version of <em>The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo</em>, released here in mid-March, has opened in 20 other countries too. David Fincher also starts shooting an English-language version of <em>The Girl with Dragon Tattoo</em> in October.<br><br>
Judging from last Friday night’s opening night crowd, Larsson has quite a Central New York following. <em>The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo</em> is as taut a thriller as you’ll find and, after 152 minutes, you’ll understand a little Swedish too.<br><br>
*******<br>
<em>This review appeared in the regular film column “Make it Snappy” in the Syracuse City Eagle weekly in the April 22, 2010 issue. See my review of Stephen Chalmers’ “Unmarked” at www.cnylink.com - click A&E. </em><div class="blogger-post-footer">Nancy Keefe Rhodes</div>Nancy Keefe Rhodeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042283155633287882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14734429.post-84530817310519007532010-04-10T20:23:00.004-04:002010-04-10T21:16:50.229-04:00<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/S8Efsh-0SPI/AAAAAAAAAFE/Efrnya-gans/s1600/Red+Riding+3.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 126px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/S8Efsh-0SPI/AAAAAAAAAFE/Efrnya-gans/s320/Red+Riding+3.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5458679073246300402" /></a>
<strong>Film Review #223: <em>Red Riding Trilogy</em></strong><br>
2009 <br>
Directors: Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, Anand Tucker<br>
Cast: Andrew Garfield, Warren Clarke, Davd Morrissey, Rebecca Hall, Sean Bean, Paddy Considine, Maxine Peake, Robert Sheehan<br><br>
Even with advance planning, it’s a pain to schedule the screenings of three linked, full-length feature films so that audiences can choose whether to see all five hours’ worth of viewing on the same day or one installment at a time. Last week Cinemapolis, Ithaca’s downtown indie multiplex on East Green St., rose to the challenge of opening the British <em>Red Riding Trilogy </em>two weeks earlier than its long-scheduled April 16th start-date. While no one has said so, U.S distributor IFC Films may have pushed up theatre bookings here in reaction to last week’s release of the DVD set in England, which became available to us almost immediately at amazon.com. <em>Red Riding Trilogy</em> is one of the latest in the ever-more respectable genre of “long form television” (think <em>Prime Suspect</em>, <em>Rome</em> and, still my personal favorite, <em>Deadwood</em>). <em>Red Riding </em>premiered on U.K.’s Channel 4 in March 2009 and then was introduced to US audiences first via five film festivals including last October’s New York Film Festival. But the trilogy only opened theatrically state-side in February, beginning in Manhattan with a week at IFC and additional on-demand availability in a few regions before making its slow trek to the kinds of theatre that can offer both the right audience and enough screens to let you – as Cinemapolis said – “map out your strategy” for seeing the set.<br><br>
Even if all the kinks aren’t worked out for distributing this sort of hybrid work, <em>Red Riding</em> lives up to its sterling pedigree. Set in and around the West Yorkshire city of Leeds in northern England, <em>Red Riding </em>is based on David Peace’s 1999 quartet of cult “Northern noir” novels. There is a shared cast, three interlocking scripts written by Tony Grisoni, and three directors – Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, and Anand Tucker – who got to hand-pick their own DPs, editors and crews, and who say they never felt particularly constrained by limited resources. England’s Channel 4 commissioned the adaptation of the Red Riding novels by Grisoni, whose scripts were then produced by Michael Winterbottom’s partner in Revolution Films, Andrew Eaton. All the directors and many in the cast say that the scripts so excited them that they lobbied hard to be part of the project.<br><br>
Set in 1974, 1980 and 1983 – the third novel in the quartet has been left out except for some scenes that furnish flashbacks in the final film – the stories are based on real events in the region: the first, on the “Moors murders” of five children over 1963-65; the second, on the “Yorkshire Ripper” murders of thirteen women in 1975-80 by one Peter Sutcliffe; and the third on case of Stefan Kiszko, who served sixteen years for a 1975 murder he didn’t commit.<br><br>
<em>Red Riding Trilogy</em> uses these elements as plot scaffolding, but the films are much more concerned with how character unfolds among those trying to untangle events than your usual procedural. Perhaps for this reason, though Grisoni reportedly did make charts to keep the storylines straight as part of his writing process, we probably find remarkably little need for that as sets of characters return or fade, come into close-up focus or recede for a time. All this occurs in the context of police corruption and greed, the region’s simmering resentment against outside governance, and larger political events of the time – the mining strikes, unrest related to IRA activities in the North of Ireland and social conditions that spurred the rise of Margaret Thatcher. Though best seen in order, the films are meant to also stand alone, and the first two could. The third one depends too much, I suspect, on the device of flashback for that to really work.<br><br>
So for example, the first film – Julian Jarrold’s <em>Red Riding: The Year of Our Lord 1974 </em>– begins with a scene – which all three contain in some variation very early on – of someone driving, traversing the vast bleak, often rain-soaked or fog-blurred hills of the North, establishing the region’s remoteness from the buzzing metropolis of the nation’s hub. By the time we zoom in, any marks of global connection – national TV news or the hulking nuclear stacks that loom above the stubby public housing known as “estates” – seem as blunted in effect here as the outsider behind the steering wheel. In Jarrold’s film that’s Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield), a cub reporter who’s come back home “from the South” and whom his older colleagues quickly dismiss on that basis as a “young Turk” who won't last a month.<br><br>
In Dunford’s effort to cover breaking news of a third gruesome local child mutilation and murder, he gets fatally involved with the mother of one girl, Paula Garfield (Rebecca Hall). This cannot end well; once they decide to flee to the sunny South, he promises to return in two hours to pick her up. But spotting this convention doesn’t diminish the fascination of watching it play out one jot. Before his own demise, Dunford uncovers much of what unravels years later about the connection between local police Bill Molloy (Warren Clarke) and Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey), and the nouveau riche construction magnate John Dawson (Sean Bean, who provides a gauche, perversely fascinating Brit version of Josh Brolin’s lip-smacking George Bush the younger). Dawson, possessor of what he calls a “private weakness,” meets a bloody end in the bar of his Karachi Club, a shoot-out that echoes down the years to come.<br><br>
Here we first meet characters who seem minor but emerge in later films for their own spotlight turns – the young hustler BJ (Robert Sheehan), the priest Martin Laws (Peter Mullan), the sociopathic henchmen Bob Craven (Sean Harris) and Tommy Douglas (Tony Mooney). The second film introduces additional ensemble characters, as does the third.<br><br>
James Marsh’s <em>Red Riding: The Year of Our Lord 1980</em>, the tightest of the three, begins again with an outsider's arrival, Manchester police detective Peter Hunter (Paddy Considine), who's sent to investigate the investigators when a separate string of serial murders – rapes and tortures of adult women – yields another victim. Hunter in one of Considine’s best performances ever, restrained, decent, anguished by his life’s narrowing choices. As Eddie Dunford was tagged right away for his youthful disloyalty in moving South, Hunter’s appearance coincides with news reports of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands and Yorkshire police’s offer derisive jibes about his passing up dinner as a sympathetic gesture toward another “Roman” (Catholic, that is). Hunter’s joined by detective Helen Marshall (Maxine Peake) – the two comprise this film’s doomed romance – and the turn-coat detective (we see how thoroughly in the last film) John Nolan (Tony Pitts). The priest Martin Laws and the detective Maurice Jobson reappear and inch further into prominance.<br><br>
Anand Tucker’s <em>Red Riding: The Year of Our Lord 1983</em> shifts from outsiders to those who must wrestle with their loyalties as insiders and the consequences of choices that label them disloyal. Attorney John Piggott (Mark Addy), visting his mother's old apartment after her death, is pressured by her elderly neighbor to help a mentally challenged son, locked up for the child murders; she appeals to Piggott’s shared roots in the estates with the plea, “It’s us!” Paired with this, the detective Maurice Jobson, so often his superiors' water-carrier over the years, awakens to the fact that he sent the wrong man is prison. A bit older and just out of prison, BJ returns too, making his way by train and foot toward the estates, his voice-over, "BJ's coming!" promising a reckoning.<br><br>
<em>Red Riding Trilogy</em> is a study in the greed, corruption and extremity of lusts that can fester unchecked in out of the way places – the phrase, “To the North, where we do what we want!” becomes a kind of incantation – but it also carries the metaphorical theme of redemption that emerges through images of angels. BJ is an avenging angel; others are horribly mutilated aproximations, Frankenstein-like, the flesh of injured swans' wings stitched to the shoulders of dead children. In the third film John Dawson explains that his ultra-modern monstrosity of a house - he is chiefly proud of its cost - was designed on the shape of a swan's wings. When John Piggott emerges, in a cloud of pigeon down shot through with light, from the darkness of what we can only call a kind of hell, with the last victim in his arms, the story needs only the final, surprisingly lyrical voice-over of BJ. This is spoken from the sea shore, far to the South, sunny as West Yorkshire seems never to have been. Like Ismael, he's survived to tell the tale. <br><br>
<em>Red Riding Trilogy</em> is exhausting, harrowing and completely worth the time. Some may apply the term "Dickensian" - after that most cinematic of novelists - to <em>Red Riding Trilogy</em>. Four years ago, <em>Deadwood</em> creator David Milch told me during an interview that he thought if Dickens were alive today, he'd be writing serials for HBO. We have some glitches to work out in how we market, distribute and screen these kinds of films, and that will be worth it too.<br><br>
*******<br>
<em>This review appears in the April 8, 2010 Syracuse City Eagle weekly. Though “Red Riding Trilogy” on the big screen closed that night in Ithaca, check out other screenings at Cinemapolis online at www.Cinemapolis.org, for show times, directions and sign-up for Cinemapolis’ weekly e-list announcements. The just-released British DVD set of “Red Riding Trilogy” is available at amazon.com (though only on PAL-format disc for now).</em><div class="blogger-post-footer">Nancy Keefe Rhodes</div>Nancy Keefe Rhodeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042283155633287882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14734429.post-34555916601672329862010-03-27T13:34:00.003-04:002010-03-27T13:49:31.202-04:00<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/S65CJnWt3eI/AAAAAAAAAE8/Nyw-agitj-Q/s1600/Ghost4.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ttVxotJUYa0/S65CJnWt3eI/AAAAAAAAAE8/Nyw-agitj-Q/s320/Ghost4.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5453368931742768610" /></a>
<strong>Film Review #222: <em>The Ghost Writer</em></strong><br>
2009<br>
Director: Roman Polanski<br>
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan,Olivia Williams, Kim Catrall, Timothy Hutton, Tom Wilkenson, Eli Wallach <br><br>
“I’m your ghost,” says Ewen McGregor’s unnamed ghost writer to ex-British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) when they meet on the tarmac at the Edgartown Airport on Martha’s Vineyard. Lang, who has just arrived by private jet and is later described as having "never had a thought in his pretty head,” looks like he’s just emerged from a night’s sleep and a shower. McGregor’s writer – weary, rumpled, fading fast from his own jet-lag, easy to underestimate and actually looking a bit insubstantial – has been dragged along to meet Lang on this appropriately dark and stormy night by Lang’s wife Ruth (Olivia Williams). Lang pauses a beat, doesn’t quite grasp his meaning. Ruth Lang rescues the moment, deftly unsnags Lang’s puzzlement by re-casting the writer’s fairly straightforward self-introduction, at his expense, as a lame attempt at humor – “He’s not usually so humorous” – allowing them all to move on.<br><br>
Of course it turns out she’s been managing such moments throughout Lang’s whole career in public life, since their mid-70s student days at Cambridge. Now he’s ensconced in his publisher’s beachfront vacation compound, trying to finish an overdue memoir between sorties out on a lecture tour and a just-unfolding crisis of war crimes accusations that brings angry protesters and media frenzy to the compound’s gate. McGregor’s writer steps into this situation to replace the first ghost, a long-time loyal aide who’s washed up on the beach.<br><br>
More than a few reviewers have noted that Martin Scorcese’s <em>Shutter Island</em> and Roman Polanksi’s <em>The Ghost Writer </em>opened on the same weekend in US commercial release last month, and a couple have admitted they even wished they could say Scorcese’s was the better film. One went so far as to call <em>The Ghost Writer </em>– reluctantly, grudgingly – “even, at moments, wise.” <em>Shutter Island</em> got here right away – reminding me of the younger Scorcese whom I suspected had an evil twin who directed the clunker scenes sandwiched in between the brilliant ones – but Polanksi’s film has just pulled into Carousel's multiplex this past Friday. And perhaps because <em>The Ghost Writer</em> is what Roger Ebert calls “a Well-Made Film,” the notion that it might be “about” something surfaces quietly and later. Beyond being an exceptionally well-executed and stylish political thriller, an obvious what-if speculation on former British PM Tony Blair’s connections with the CIA and the Bush White House torture policies, and quite possibly also a comment on Polanski’s own legal troubles and exile from US soil, <em>The Ghost Writer</em> is a film of ideas. Polanski directs from a script he wrote with Robert Harris that adapts Harris’ own novel – and makes more of “the ghost in the machine” than the ready catch-phrase that term has has lately been reduced to.<br><br>
Sara Vikomerson used that phrase upon <em>The Ghost Writer</em>'s release last month to title her <em>New York Observer </em>review of the film, but she used it there as it’s often used, having seeped into the culture, detached from its source – a ready, somehow familiar phrase, a multi-purpose and archly allusive near-pun that, depending on placement and inflection, evokes sarcasm, dismissal or jaded disbelief. Thus have Toyota’s efforts to account for the Prius’ sudden acceleration problems been dubbed derisively as the car-maker’s search for the “ghost in the machine.” It provides a title for a new book just coming out on the stock market’s unexplained swerves. The phrase appears in films like <em>Brazil</em> and <em>I, Robot</em>, and titles episodes in television series over the past few years as diverse of <em>Inspector Morse</em>, <em>X-Files</em>, <em>Medium</em>, <em>Stargate Atlantis</em>, <em>Ghost Whisperer</em>, and the new <em>Caprica</em>.<br><br>
If we think of its source much as all, we probably go back only about half-way, to 1981 and the British rock group The Police, whose fourth album was a bleak commentary on modern political and technological culture. The Police’s Sting was an avid reader of the writer Arthur Koestler. In 1967 Koestler used the term to title his 1967 book and explore the idea that modern consciousness and higher brain functions are built atop more primitive, still working parts of the brain, parts that our “higher” selves can’t fully regulate and contain, which accounts for our self-destructive impulses and behavior, and these for rampant violence and paranoia, which Polanski often makes the subject of his films. Koestler himself – and if you pick up the current issue of <em>Harper’s Magazine</em>, there’s a lengthy review of a new biography – took the term from Gilbert Ryle’s 1949 book <em>The Concept of Mind</em>, in which he rejected the persistent and often trouble-provoking Western idea of a mind-body split arising from Rene Descartes’ conviction that only the mind animated the otherwise merely mechanical body.<br><br>
You absolutely do not need this information to take great pleasure from Polanski’s film. The riveting scene near the end where a note from the ghost writer to Ruth Lang passes from hand to hand across a crowded scene has gotten much attention, but that patiently, precisely built tension is evident throughout and has been much commented upon. There is the mordant Polanski wit; Lang's former foreign secretary tells the ghost writer at one point, "They can't drown two ghost writers - you're not kittens!" There are the excellent performances that Polanski coaxes from even middling actors, from McGregor’s writer turned sleuth, to Brosnan as the wind-up politician that many have sought to animate, to Kim Cattral as his executive assistant, to the cameos – Tim Hutton as Lang’s lawyer, Tom Wilkinson as the shady US academic Paul Emmett, and even a small but striking cameo from a nearly unrecognizable 94-year-old Eli Wallach. Olivia Williams’ Ruth Lang is the most complex portrayal and hopefully we’ll see much more of her.<br><br>
But “the ghost in the machine” as a set of persisting ideas fills in the brooding form of Polanksi’s film and provides its most resonant and variant images, making it more than a well-made thriller. These range from the stark gray of the rainy weather and the chilly modernist house that itself performs like a machine – during a security check the house locks itself down, metal doors plunging over the floor-to-ceiling windows and sirens blaring – to the BMW’s GPS system whose disembodied voice provides the ghost writer with directions that unlock the story's secret, to the machines that Lang’s very persona and by extension his organization and the networks that envelop him have become.<br><br>
*******<br>
<em>This appeared in the March 25, 2010 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle.</em><div class="blogger-post-footer">Nancy Keefe Rhodes</div>Nancy Keefe Rhodeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11042283155633287882noreply@blogger.com