Posted on January 23, 2008 at 9:47 am
Heath Ledger’s death is a terrible loss. He was an actor of great sensitivity and commitment. Most of the appreciations and obituaries focus on his Oscar-nominated performance in Brokeback Mountain
Today, though, I want to think of him in his lighter films. He made the silly but irresistible rock-jousting movie A Knight’s Tale
Posted on January 21, 2008 at 8:00 am
Writer-director-editor-actor John Sayles has made some of the most consistently literate, subtle, and engaging films of the last three decades, including The Secret of Roan Inish
Would you say there is one theme in your movies, one idea that you like to explore?
The ones that are set in the US, a lot of them are about that tension between the American dream, what we think of as our ideal, and the reality. I like to show people who think they have nothing to do with each other listening to each other. Music is the way people pay attention to each other first, listening to and borrowing from each other’s music, before they are willing to share ideas.
Your last few films have been contemporary. What is different about doing a film set in another time?
Period films are more fun for the art dept. They read a lot of books and look at a lot of pictures, looking at cars, guitars, everything that appears in the film. I am thinking through the characters, how did they think back then, what did they accept, what did they question. This takes place in 1950, before the media started calling it the Civil Rights Movement. Southern towns were not on the alert yet that there was going to be a movement. They were still saying, “We thought all our colored people were happy.” You have to get yourself back into that head. I read autobiographies and biographies, to just get the vibe of the time. It’s within my lifetime, but we’re talking to people who are younger. Our audience is adults who were born years after Martin Luther King was assassinated. He’s somebody on the history channel to them and they do not have that personal experience of how radical he was.
For me the heaviest line in the movie is when the sheriff says “Take your hat off,” not because he’s the sheriff, it’s not a question of his legal authority. It is just because he is white. Unlearning what we know, every character you have to kind of work that equation in. The political activist in the film is the Pullman porter . They were the guys who got around and delivered the message. They had the most radical union. That was the era of A. Philip Randolph.
Posted on January 17, 2008 at 8:00 am
Yes, most critics love to read what our colleagues think about movies. And so I spend time just about every day on the wonderful Rotten Tomatoes website, the best place to read what everyone has to say, from Roger Ebert to Film School Rejects and a wide, provocative, hilarious, and often surprising and insightful range in between. This is the place to go to compare the New York Times review with The Movie Boy (Dustin Putman), Reelview’s James Berardinelli, everyone from Entertainment Weekly to bloggers with more opinions than readers. The RT community does not hesitate to weigh in with their own reviews and rebuttals as well.
RT’s new redesign is a joy to navigate, very fresh and clean, and new editor Matt Atchity promises they will be rolling out more new goodies than a Criterion Collector’s Edition Director’s Cut DVD. Can’t wait.
Posted on January 15, 2008 at 6:00 pm
Andrew Neel and Luke Meyer are the writer-directors of an exceptionally entertaining and engrossing film called “Darkon,” a documentary about LARPers — participants in live action role-playing games. Think of a mash-up between Civil War reenactors, a “Star Trek” convention, and a computer game with elements from “Lord of the Rings” and the Crusades.
Every other week, Darkon players meet for battle in the fields around Baltimore wearing armor and carrying shields and swords. No longer at their boring jobs, no longer their boring selves, Darkon gives them scope for their imagination and lets them be epic and heroic. And sometimes they discover things about themselves that carry over into their daily life as well.
The film, a festival award-winner, is sympathetic to its subjects, drawing us into their battles on and off the field.
Posted on January 14, 2008 at 7:54 am
Caitlan Flanagan’s elegant prose and exceptional grasp of vital detail make it easy to miss the single most important fact about what she writes — her absence of any insight about anything outside her own experience and her own head. In the New York Times, she wrote an op-ed about the movie Juno that has a mind-boggling misread of the movie’s conclusion.
The final scene of the movie shows Juno and her boyfriend returned to their carefree adolescence, the baby — safely in the hands of his rapturous and responsible new mother — all but forgotten.
On the contrary. The final scene is bittersweet. The screenplay notes their “ambiguous smiles” at each other. Everyone in the film is changed in unexpected ways as a result of the sexual encounter that begins the film, one which, as Paulie reminds her, was not the impulsive act of a bored teenager but a deliberate choice. And that conversation in particular and the film as a whole make clear that Juno fully recognizes the consequences of her choice for herself and for her child.
Flanagan’s review of a new book about Katie Couric appears in the current issue of “The Atlantic.” As usual, the first third of the piece is not about the book or about Katie Couric but about Flanagan herself and how she used to feel watching the pre-Couric “Today Show” when she was in college. As usual, when she does get to the topic she is supposed to be discussing whatever she has to say about Couric is more about her than it is about her subject. It would be one thing if she decided to be this generation’s Joyce Maynard, obsessive self-awareness redeemed by felicitious writing, provocative opinions, and entertaining candor. But her self-awareness does not extend to awareness of how limited her vision is. She cannot keep from extrapolating every thought and feeling to her entire generation or to women everywhere.
I was sorry to see, at the end of the op-ed, a note that Flanagan is working on a book about “the emotional lives of pubescent girls.” I hope she lets them speak for themselves instead of making her own emotional life the template for everyone else.
