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Reviews
Love Hunter (2013)
A bittersweet urban road movie.
What a wonderful movie! Love Hunter has so much heart. The main character, Milan, is very appealing, a genuine star. The story, the pacing, the cinematography, the tone of the film — it's all very accomplished. I found myself agreeing with Milan's philosophy of life-and-art, which is that if you try hard enough, luck will come. It is a way of saying: in this life, we make our own luck. The philosophical question is one about destiny. If you have talent (and like their main character, the young directors of Love Hunter most definitely do), then "success" will depend on how much drive you have. But "drive," surely, is a matter of fate or destiny. How much drive a person has is a question of individual character — which had me wondering: is "character" hard-wired in each of us by the time we are five years old? Freud says something like this in Civilization and Its Discontents, when he observes about "happiness": "There is no golden rule which applies to everyone: every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved." The Bala brothers are to be congratulated! They capture something wonderful about New York as a great world city where the talented and ambitious come to seek and make their fortune. With subtle humor and observation, they explore that eternal challenge: how to find a balance between making art and having a life.
Zero Degrees of Separation (2005)
It's a courageous film that is actually very low-key in its approach.
I knew immediately from the above user comment (see comment by plypress) that this is probably an interesting film when the fanatics start frothing at the mouth, you know you have to see the film for yourself! Now I've seen it, and I think "Zero Degrees of Separation" is a fascinating glimpse into the bizarre society that is Israel. It's a courageous film that is actually very low-key in its approach. For example, the image of Flanders' wealthy British grandmother on a visit to Israel in 1950 (as a prelude to immigrating), standing in the desert in her leopard-skin coat and movie-star sunglasses, is surreal, in its way. Flanders knows that there is no need for commentary at moments like these. There are plenty of facts and figures in the film to support the filmmaker's contention that the creation of the State of Israel has been massively problematic on many levels, but with her humane and sympathetic eye, she strikes a delicate balance between fairly evoking the Zionists' dream and showing some of the harsh realities of the present in Israel realities which create misery and frustration for Palestinians and Israelis alike.