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geckokid
Reviews
An Education (2009)
Adorable little anti-semitic rom-com
Am I really the only one who found this film completely racist? The moral of the story seems to be: "You know all those things that people say about Jewish people? Well, they're right. Jews are not to be trusted." I'm sure the filmmakers (and many viewers) will defend the film by saying it is historically accurate and based on a biography. But that shows an incredible naivety regarding how film works. Film amplifies and generalizes historical or biographical specificities. Were there unscrupulous and greedy Jewish landlords operating in London during this period? Of course (as there were dishonest gentile landlords as well), but to place this particular character at the center of this film and continually reinforce the connection between his Jewishness and his dishonesty is an exercise in cinematic racism. The juxtaposition between good, hardworking, honest, humble protestantism and overly ambitious, crass, duplicitous and hedonistic Jewishness seems to be the contrast that motivates the entire film and is in the end its only perceivable moral message.
Be English, boring, middle-class and honest, not Jewish and greedy. That's "the education" that's served up here.
Hunger (2008)
Cinema at its most powerful
I saw Steve McQueen's film last night and I'm still reeling from the experience. This is an important subject, masterfully expressed through a medium used to its full potential. McQueen's film is neither didactic nor propagandistic, it presents the terrible complexity of the Bobby Sands story with all of its brutality intact. What stood out to me was the way in which the film reminds us that the ideas and rhetoric of leadership on both sides of this conflict are played out on and through the bodies of actual men who must endure the harshest of circumstances. We sometimes forget that politics involves and continues to involve this level of corporeal sacrifice, oppression and destruction. Usually this violence is kept at a safe distance from the view of those that are made comfortable by its existence. We should see this film not so much as an historical drama, but more so a call to examine more closely the ways in which this brutality continues to exist as an intrinsic element of our own political systems.
Rachel Getting Married (2008)
Cirque de Soleil meets Celebration...
...and not in a good way.
This film moves from one maudlin and sappy scene to the next, interrupted by the occasional over the top emotional crisis. These heavy handed breakdown moments don't seem to disturb the festival of multiculturalism going on in the background however. Vague trappings of new age hinduism follow carnival-style steel drumming, follow gypsy folk jam sessions, follow Jamaican dub mcing. It all makes very little sense, except as blatant eye and ear candy to distract us from the vacuousness of the characters on screen. And yes, the dish washer competition scene is excruciating. The "perfect wedding" meets the family catastrophe set up of this film seemed so contrived and labored that it was very hard to stomach. It all amounts to a multi-colored mess of a film that insults the intelligence and tries the patience of the viewer.
Somers Town (2008)
75 Minute Eurostar Ad
I really felt cheated by this film. I had of course heard about the fact that Eurostar had entirely funded the project, but I had also read several reviews that stated that blatant sloganeering for the company was kept to a minimum and didn't overly distract from the narrative of the film. I'm afraid I completely disagree. Although I enjoyed many elements of the story (the gentle humour and refreshingly low-key character development), the film culminates in what amounts to a blatant product endorsement for Eurostar, complete with characters waving their freshly purchased train tickets in front of the camera and a picture postcard visit to the Eiffel Tower, which you could imagine running, looped rotation-style, on a screen embedded in the back of a Eurostar recliner.
This obviously funding influenced choice in direction was doubly troubling. Firstly because it reduced the entire film to little more than a pathos-filled commercial and secondly because it betrayed the narrative of the film, substituting a ludicrously jubilant and quite improbable ending (two boys of that age and economic bracket permitted to go off on a little jaunt to Paris together? where did they get the funds? how did they find Maria? how is Tomo living and supporting himself?) in what had been to that point an enjoyable exercise in social realism.
In short, yes, a film funded in this way obviously does have an impact on the artistic decisions taken by the director. Can we really call this independent cinema? I felt duped and I'm surprised other viewers don't seem to have felt the same way.
Converging with Angels (2002)
dogme disaster
panning this film feels a little unfair, a bit like criticizing a high school drama production. but having read the sterling evaluations given here (which i can only assume must have come from the cast and crew) i felt like i needed to comment. this film is excruciatingly bad and is made all the more so by the 'heavy' subject matter it so poorly addresses. the brilliance of the dogme manifesto is that it leaves cinema bare to its crucial elements (acting, directing, storytelling, etc), there is nowhere to hide. when these elements are at a high level, the result can be wonderful, but when these elements are amateurish and clumsy the result is torture. this film was torture.