Author: gio

SiCKO

i have no idea why the title is spelled the way it is, but this is a damn fine movie. unlike bowling for columbine and fahrenheit 911, it’s nicely organized and focused, so you don’t have to spend precious mental energy figuring out how we got to Z from X and Y. the first part is devastating. the most devastating part is that you know everything about it. you have heard the stories, you know people who have gone through that, you know that, but for your nice university job if you are lucky enough to have one, you would be going through that too. you know all of this because it is your waking nightmare. you live under the constant threat that it might, that it will one day happen to you. Continue reading SiCKO

laurent cantet’s time out (2001)

a few words on time out, which i just saw. it covers some of the same ground as caché, in that it addresses the pervasive discomfort of the first world’s ruling class. just like in caché, the protagonist is a middle aged man haunted by secrets, which he works strenuously at keeping from his family and in particular from his wife. also like in caché, the wife is “innocent,” not part of the husband’s secret life, outside the circle of his tormenting ghosts. unlike the binoche character, she doesn’t express this outsider status with relentless and frustrated questioning, but, rather, with long silences and wrenching looks. the silences between these people who clearly have so much they should be talking about saturate the movie and are perhaps its most disturbing feature. at the end, when vincent runs from home, the wife’s voice on the cellphone feels for a moment like a relief: finally they’ll talk! but no. vincent is out of auditory range and, in any case, muriel is once again making soothing noises without addressing any of the issues that are torturing vincent and their marriage.
Continue reading laurent cantet’s time out (2001)

flag of our fathers

has anyone seen this?

heart in the right place, i guess — heroes schmeroes, PTSD, the banal brutality of war. but why oh why do american directors have to spell everything out so damn explicitly? and why oh why do they feel a need to give us the same damn soundtrack every single time?

i wish i hadn’t seen it.

the pursuit of happyness

i’m somewhat embarrassed to say that i liked this. i kept waiting for the schmaltziness to make me cringe, but it never happened. maybe i have high schmaltziness tolerance tonight, maybe it’s just a good movie. anyway, i realized only when i saw the special features that will smith chose an italian director to do pursuit. the guy barely spoke english at the time of the shooting. the funniest parts of the whole dvd are the ones in which muccino communicates with smith using the gesticulations for which italians are famous around the world while making some incomprehensible but frenetic sounds with his mouth. god, it must have been dreadful for him. i get a headache just thinking about it, because i have of course been there. with hindsight, i can see the italian style. unless we try to make american audiences go gaga, we italians are a surprisingly unemotional people who find wearing positive feelings on our sleeves mortifying (we are just fine with negative feelings). we like american movies, but wouldn’t imagine for a second that people might actually talk to each other like that in real life.

some nice shots of san francisco, no gratuitous nastiness (it’s life that’s getting gardner in the teeth, no people’s cussedness), no gratuitous miracles (no one shows up in the nick of time to rescue him), great restraint in showing gardner’s slow but determined climb into solvency, and fantastic chemistry between smith and his son. fast and effective editing, good pace. i enjoyed myself.

half nelson

just saw nelson. without gosling, epps, some cool photography, and the occasional good lines, this would be offensive, all those stereotypes lined up like pins and all. as it is, it’s watchable. gosling is an incredibly charismatic actor. i saw him for the first time a few days ago in fracture, which held mostly because of him. he seems to have been born in front of the camera. i wonder, though, if he ever acts without all those twitches. in fracture the twitching was even worse than in nelson, even though his character was as sober and clean as a whistle.

the last king of scotland

remarkably, if the search i just did is reliable (it didn’t look very reliable), no one has posted on this yet. we just saw it, at the theatre no less, and it was a well well spent $9 (it’s a cheapo theatre). forest whitaker is, of course, fantastic (did he win an oscar? i can’t remember and i don’t feel like checking); but it’s not just him. the whole cast is really good, gillian anderson is there only long enough for us to appreciate how good her english accent is and how damn beautiful she is, and james mcavoy, whom i had never seen before, looks a bit like russel crowe and is very attractive indeed. i don’t know any of the african (or meant-to-be-african) actors, but i really thought the ensemble was most effective. this is, however, indisputably, whitaker’s film. what an actor. Continue reading the last king of scotland

shadowboxer

i liked shadowboxer very much. this is a little, ambitious-slash-pretentious film that i suspect no contributors to this blog will want to watch unless dragged to it by wild horses — i hope i’m wrong. helen mirren and cuba gooding jr are a team of hired killers who are also (adopted) mother and son and lovers. their different colors (as in skin) and age difference makes them triple taboo breakers, which of course is one of the main attractions of this film. director lee daniels is not timid about this. rose and mickey are frequently shown in bed and in various tender situations. their love for each other is, arguably, the main focus of the film. the visual representation of their relationship, though, betrays hidden complications. in one scene, mickey is asleep at the bottom of the bed, curled up, while rose lies normally, head to bottom. in the extras, lee says he didn’t want to show them side by side. i don’t know what kind of hierarchy he meant to emphasize, but the racial one is the one that jumped at me in that moment, even though mickey’s fetal position at the bottom of the bed evokes the mother-child theme as well. Continue reading shadowboxer

the ground truth and the road to guantanamo

i’ve been trying to write these reviews for days now. these are troubling movies, not only for what they say about the iraq war and the war on terror, but also for the feelings of identification and alienation they evoked in me.

according to the ground truth, the iraq war’s difference from other wars the US fought consists in the fact that a) the psychological conditioning of soldiers to kill people they don’t hate without inhibition has achieved a phenomenal success, b) the enemy is pretty much indistinguishable from the non-inimical civilian, and c) body armor and surgical technologies save many more lives than in past wars but don’t save limbs, faces, and psyches. what you get is a phenomenal, brutal, free-for-all bloodbath and a lot of seriously damaged veterans. none of this is news to any of us, but filmmaker patricia foulkrod gives these known facts the support of some pretty amazing (and shocking) footage, and a remarkable cast of interviewees. Continue reading the ground truth and the road to guantanamo

sherrybaby/maggie gyllenhaal

since people on this blog are clearly bored, here’s a crackling recommendation. in sherrybaby, which is hereby joining my best-of-2006 list with full grades, sherry is an ex-con just out of jail and on her way to the halfway home that is to be her domicile. in the halfway home, she immediately does two things, in the following order: 1) she calls her child, to whom she’s not talked for three years (the child is about four), and 2) she fucks the director. this is pretty much what she does for the rest of the film, too: she attempts to establish a connection with her child, and she has lots of sex. sex seems to be the only way sherry knows of connecting with people and, for a change, these connections are not the abusive, exploitative, violent type films about dysfunctional women tend to portray. the men sherry beds may not all be rescuers, but they are all right. director laurie collyer is hell-bent on not giving us targets for easy judgment. even when sherry gives a matter-of-fact, bored blow-job to an employment counselor who’s understandably reluctant to put her to work in a kindergarten, you don’t hate the guy. he’s got a lousy job, and it’s not like he asked. Continue reading sherrybaby/maggie gyllenhaal