Change Your Image
jymlarin
Reviews
My Khmer Heart (2000)
Excellent story, concise, truthful, but technically not the best
It is difficult to be mercilessly truthful about a piece of work with such moving content. Miss Geraldine Cox tells her own story, one of a woman adrift in the world, finding herself the "mother" of Cambodian orphans. And the director seems to stay very true to it -- there are no blatant incongruities in the narrative flow. The visuals of the picture (though the cinematography is limited in its variety) illuminate well Miss Cox's story.
The music is a bit overplayed and dramatic for such a realistic and ultimately subtle presentation. Perhaps the haunting pipe melody would have been more appropriate if there had been sweeping pans of the Cambodian countryside, long shots of the children, slow-motion sequences...
All in all, in terms of technical aspects, it is not the best documentary I've ever seen. However, it is a wonderfully compelling story, one I recommend to anyone. There is a subtlety borne of a very strong woman surviving unthinkable obstacles. There are moments of such blatant and difficult truth -- the extremes to which Geraldine must go with her first Cambodian child, the realities of loss in a war-torn country, and the apprehension for the future of her orphanage. These moments stand out, despite a mediocre canvas of filming, and touch on the complexity and adversity of Geraldine's Khmer heart.
Begotten (1989)
A good idea, good moments, overall mediocre effect.
This film seems to totter on a small surface between three genres -- music video, wartime documentary, and expressionist horror film. Be that as it may, without a plot summary (and there are many contradictory ones out there), I would have had no clue what was going on. Perhaps that would have been better, as I think this film was created with the purpose of forcing an audience to reach its own grotesque conclusions. BEGOTTEN is a suggestion, the basis for an assumption -- it could be a day in the life of a post-apocalyptic nightmare world, a mythological/fantasy/ritual piece, or just a film school piece of fluff in which a young director tries to shock and thereby please his professor.
BEGOTTEN has its hypnotic and wonderfully disturbing moments, in which one is reminded of documentary footage of Allied soldiers exploring Nazi concentration camps. Maybe it was just me, but every once in a while I expected to hear Metallica's "One" playing in the background (see that 1989 music video if you don't know what I mean). BEGOTTEN has its highly rhythmic moments, both visual and auditory, reminding me every once in a while of the more cartoonish Fellini. The movie might have benefited from a music soundtrack -- even a highly erratic John Cage piece -- in conjunction with the sounds of water, crunching, wind, and squishing. All in all, the sound element is underplayed.
The movie is not successful in maintaining any hypnotic or shocking effect; some of the scenes are just too long for that. However, I think the film is the birth of some new stylistic elements, elements which may or may not be used again. I would like to see what other directors would do with similar filming techniques.