Directed by Julie Gavras (daughter of Costa-Gavras), this tells the story of a young, nine year-old girl in early 1970s Paris. Born of a well-to-do family, and used to bourgeois comforts, she reacts angrily when her parents become radicalized by events in Franco’s Spain and Allende’s Chile, and by the women’s liberation movement. The movie watches and evaluates the parents through the eyes of the girl, Anna (played by an impressive Nina Kervel-Bey). Not a great film, primarily because the parents’ are never believable, either as radicals or parents, and because the trajectory of the film is too obvious, as Anna softens to the revolution, questions her catholic nun teachers, and comes to like the “beatnik-hippy” friends that her parents make in their solidarity work. It lacks the hard edge of Costa-Gavras’s films, exploring the human reaction to great events rather than the events themselves. Still, it is an affecting film, if only because these were genuinely momentous events going on, and to live through them was to be transformed. As soon as I finished watching I found good versions of ‘Ay Carmela’, ‘Hasta Siempre’ and ‘Bella Ciao’ to download and listen to. It could almost have been the 1970s again.

A gut-punching horror film that captures with almost perfect pitch the pervasive dread of Stephen King’s best work. Okay, sure: this is a giant other-dimensional bug movie, with a creature-feature set-up (a group of civilians trapped in a small space, facing this aggressive unknown), and laden with many of the sorts of corn-poney character tics that sometimes drowns King’s work. Even with such constraints, though, Frank Darabont works some wonders: the creatures are generally be-misted, foggy hints of things we’re left imagining, or–when dragged into the limelight for stop-motion or goofy-puppet attacks, they’re consistently freaky; the group trapped in the supermarket hew to certain stock traits but the actors and the writing make the human dynamics something consistently stronger than you’d expect from a skeletal plot outline (particularly fine are Toby Jones and William Sadler).

But what fucking nailed me was the way the camera would turn and face–unflinchingly, for far too long–raw human fear and anxiety. Sure, the set-up’s silly, but you take the leap (there are things in the Mist!) and suddenly Thomas Jane trying to console his terrified crying boy for what seems like three full minutes is beyond unnerving–it’s deeply unsettling. (more…)

We talked a while back about the remarkable movie Keane, and a couple questions were brought up concerning depictions of mental illness on film that don’t collapse into the redemption-by-love / Sally-Field-TV-movie stereotypes.

We had just finished watching Return of the Secaucus 7 and were talking about filmmakers who self-financed their work through acting and writing for other people’s movies. So we decided to watch a few Cassavetes films.

This is a tough one to start with. (more…)

Watching Beowulf in digital 3D, I’d occasionally “ooh” or “ah” at a very long track back through snow-covered tree branches or men grounding a boat at a great distance from our perspective on a beach made of millions of carefully-rendered grey rocks.

Otherwise, the film sucked. Complete waste of time, unless you like yelling. Oh, maybe Crispin Glover’s interesting–gives his most intelligible performance in garbled pidgin Middle English, with his lower jaw jutting to the right (I kept waiting for him to tell me about sling blades) and oozing blood and pus and mucus from every pore.

…is just about as good as everyone says. I’ll spoil nothing, and say little here–but I’m curious about others’ responses. I enjoyed the hell out of it, and it’s a mean little machine for producing tension.

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