The city in the film is large, but the area that we see most is small, that of men who work with their bodies—and yet the tensions among them are those known to society at different levels, in many countries. What is the ultimate standard of value? What is the ideal for maturity; and what is the basis of loyalty; and what are the requirements of justice?
Category: Film Reviews
Earth Under Attack, As Entertainment: Attack the Block, and Cowboys & Aliens, two humorous science-fiction films
One of the interesting aspects of this vivid film, full of anticipation, amusement, and anxiety, is the fact that at first the young people are irritating and threatening, the kind that one would cross the street to avoid. Their attitude is rude, language offensive, and acts easily contemptible. It is a lesson that the film allows us to see another side to them—that they can be both resilient and sweet.
Notes on an African-American Canon in Cinema: On Sidewalk Stories, Daughters of the Dust, Eve’s Bayou and other films
African-Americans have wanted to claim and define their own public images in every art—literature, paintings, sculpture, dance, music, film, videos, television. The presentation of African-Americans in the legendary moving picture Birth of a Nation—which presented blacks as both culturally ambitious and personally barbarous—was a continuation of old stereotypes that led to actual violence against blacks. People—blacks and whites—protested the film, inspiring its director D. W. Griffith to make Intolerance, an anti-prejudice reaction to his own film. The African-American image has yet to cease to be controversial.
The Heroic Age of Denzel: the films Antwone Fisher and Unstoppable, starring Denzel Washington
I had thought the film a lot simpler than it was—I thought it was some kind of celebration of ghetto life, but I could not have been more wrong: it is about how an abused boy joins the military and meets a navy psychiatrist who helps him to understand his past and use his anger as energy for self-improvement, and to use his loneliness as a spur to connect with a healthy branch of his family. Consciousness leads to purpose.
Heroism, after Wayne and Cooper, in the Work of Eric Bana: Eric Bana’s Love the Beast; and Joe Wright’s Hanna, starring Bana and Saoirse Ronan
Bana has been featured in an impressive panoply of films—I immediately think of Munich and Troy; Bana played an assassin with a conscience in the first and a reluctant royal warrior in the second—and it is hard to predict what Bana might do next or how that will be received or remembered.
Memory, Time Travel, Terrorism, Romance, and Gyllenhaal: Source Code
Will the film seem visionary or shallow to people alive in the future? It is perfectly entertaining to me, and there are aspects of it that are provocative. How much responsibility does one want to take for others? Is it possible to stop unpredictable and uncontrollable disturbed individuals who intend to do things that put the mass public at stake?
The Abundant Spirit of a Poor Girl: Winter’s Bone
What intelligence or strength exists in such persons and lives can feel like the grace of divinity, though it is really a sharpened survival instinct that refuses to die, that insists that it will do everything before it gives in—that, in fact, it will never give in but must be destroyed by greater and more relentless forces. In the film, the young woman, Ree, not yet eighteen, visits the friends and relatives of her father, asking questions, looking for clues.
The Spanish Element: Don’t Let Me Drown, a film by Cruz Angeles; and Sugar, a film by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck
How can we pretend as if everyone has an equal chance in life? There is a willful forgetting involved in the sustaining of many of our trumpeted principles; and Sugar is an act of sympathetic remembrance. Both Don’t Let Me Drown and Sugar are immigrant stories, humble and profoundly American stories.
The Drama of Death: Steven Soderbergh’s film Contagion
The film is a major effort, and looks good, but I did not think of it as beautiful; and while I can admire all the actors in it, some of whom are among my favorites, I was not surprised that Gwyneth Paltrow, an actress of charm and cool temperament, of intelligence and instinct, was the alpha and omega of the film.
The Deceptions of War: Green Zone, starring Matt Damon and Khalid Abdalla
The film is one more dramatic demonstration of how power works, or rather, how it does not work: government bureaucracy, the military, and journalists do not live up to the best ideals. Through the film’s story—through investigation—Damon’s soldier will learn that the intelligence is a lie, that the Iraqis had rid themselves of weapons of mass destruction and had no active plans to produce more, but that those facts were misrepresented to Washington and the world by American bureaucrats eager for war.