Saw Earhart last night, which somehow managed to be both schmaltzy and lifeless.

Found this when searching for crochet patterns. *Shudder*

Across the street, behind a cordon, the Rabbi Avraham Greenberg took his Israeli passport from its plastic wallet and slowly set it on fire with a gas lighter until its ashes floated around him. He explained to the small crowd on the pavement that he had been born in the state of Israel but he was ashamed to hold a passport from that country. He stood with more than a dozen Orthodox rabbis who joined in chants of “Judaism here to stay, Zionism no way”.

But many more thousands of Jews attended in support of the rally rather than opposing it, waving Israeli flags and placards saying End Hamas Terror and wearing Stars of David on their faces.

I’m only three episodes in to this six-episode BBC miniseries and I’m already sad in anticipation that it’s going to be over in three episodes. It’s that good. Put it at the top of your Netflix queue.

I did some rooting around, though, and found that it’s being adapted into a film starring Ben Affleck and Russell Crowe. Barf. It’s a conspiracy thriller so it’s not like it’s some sacred text that’s being defiled but it just has such perfect chemistry that there’s no way a dumb U.S. version condensed to two hours and starrring those bozos will be as good.

It’s to be released in 2009, so we’ll see.

Cynthia hated slumdog millionaire, what is wrong with you people. 12:23am – 10 Comments

Aaron Dobbs at 1:12am January 3

You hate a lot of good movies. Your hating this one isn’t particularly surprising.

Cynthia Rockwell at 9:20am January 3

and you like a lot of crap, so likewise.

Cynthia Rockwell at 1:06pm January 3

i will add:
-great music
-possibly cutest kids i have ever seen
-the outhouse scene is worth the price of admission alone

but that’s about it.

RT at 1:10pm January 3

is there a short answer to why you hated it? was gonna go see it today? Too Sappy? Manipulative? Etc?

Cynthia Rockwell at 1:28pm January 3

it may not be hollywood but it’s the height of hollywood melodrama, manipulative and obvious and big and bombastic. i scoffed through the entire thing. except the outhouse scene.

RT at 2:10pm January 3

seen this? I don’t know much about this org, but their picks & categories seem very lame..what are they thinking? http://awfj.org/eda-awards/2008-eda-award-winners/

TE at 7:55pm January 3

oh, lighten up. it was entertaining and visually grand. i pay good money to be manipulated!

TE at 7:56pm January 3

and yes the kids were adorable, makes me want to bring home a little slumdog.

Cynthia Rockwell at 9:24pm January 3

“what will we live on?” “LOVE.” vomit! he is a shellshocked zombie and she’s a gorgeous party girl, they will break up a week later.

MP at 4:29am January 4

i’m with you, cynthia — it was cliched, poorly acted, full of holes, and shamelessly unimaginative. if we pay for manipulation let it at least be good manipulation.

but at least it was fast with lots of music and shiny colors.

A quick scan through the critical reactions on a review aggregator like Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes reveals a fountain of excessive praise, as if, with the year’s end approaching and the award-movie field looking paltry and weak, many critics found themselves in possession of use-it-or-lose-it superlatives and decided that Slumdog was their only chance to get rid of them.

Slumdog isn’t a terrible movie, but it’s sappy, suspense-free, and packed with one-note characters, including a female lead who’s more object than person. In terms of violence, it’s grittier than most similar pictures, but mostly in a desperately “edgy” way that seems designed to gloss over its blatant sentimentality. The best you can say about it is that it’s stylish schmaltz.

I was wrong.

Spoiler ahead.

Please no more movies where the big secret, the root of all evil, is pedophilia. Cheap. Use a little imagination, screenwriters.

What’s most notable about the film’s use of blackface is how much softer it is compared with the rather more vulgar and far less loving exploitation of what you might call Jewface. Hands down the most noxious character in “Tropic Thunder” is Les Grossman, the producer of the movie-within-a-movie, who’s played by an almost unrecognizable Tom Cruise under a thick scum of makeup and latex. Heavily and heavy-handedly coded as Jewish, the character is murderous, repellent and fascinating, a grotesque from his swollen fingers to the heavy gold dollar sign nestled on his yeti-furred chest.  link

Jewface? Huh? Other than his name (Les Grossman) there is nothing “coded as Jewish” in his appearance or demeanor, and most certainly not “heavily and heavy-handedly,” unless Manhola considers baldness, hairy chests, gold chains, and belligerent attitudes to be code for Jew. I’m afraid  Jews don’t have a monopoly on those traits, Manhola. This is what I would more precisely term as heavily coded for Jewish:

And this is what I call worth the price of admission to a film that is really not very funny and full of belabored jokes:

via

While I was as wowed by China’s opening cermony for the Olympics as the rest of the word was,

I was struck by how much it reminded me of the film Hero and its fascist imagery.

Only a few days later did i find out that Hero director Zhang Yimou directed the ceremonies.

I wanted to do a little “Hero or Opening Ceremonies?” photo-guessing game but either my web connection or my computer has slowed to speeds that make such a photo-finding mission unpalatable. So this taste will have to do.

I was on the programming committee for Silverdocs this year, which has made the question of blogging a bit confusing for me—how do you review an event that you had a hand in creating? My answer for now is to review just those films I hadn’t yet seen in the programming process, those I did not vote on.

One of which was Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World, in which the director continues on the path of the aging artist who no longer has patience for subtlety and now spells out his ideas for you in plain English. Or with a brick over the head. Back in 1971 Herzog made Land of Silence & Darkness, which is about people who are both deaf and blind, and I still think about the scene where the camera just sits, and sits, and watches a deaf-blind woman as she sits on her bed. The silence, to use a cliche AND pun, is deafening, as we watch her and ponder, where *is* she?

In some later films, as his patience wears thin, Herzog’s camera will linger on a person’s face, but in voiceover he’ll *tell* you what he thinks that person is thinking. And in Encounters at the End of the World, in which Herzog travels to Antarctica to photograph the breathtaking ‘ecstatic imagery’ of the landscape and interview its odd inhabitants, all tact is lost and he moves to damping down the sound while a subject is talking and coming on in voiceover to paraphrase and interpret what the subject is saying as he says it. At least he’s not hiding anymore the fact that he often invents scenarios in his “documentaries”; it’s almost as if he’s making a joke out of it. He does it twice in the film and the audience got a hearty laugh out of it. Much of the film is funny, in fact, which is another, more refreshing trait that has emerged in Herzog’s films as he ages. Most of his early films were deadly dramatic and bombastic, but he seems to have embraced the knowledge that enlightenment means lightening up (to quote that mad genius in his own mind, Mike Myers). In interviews he has always been hilarious while at the same time poetic and thought-provoking, and his films now embody that as well.

And nothing is funnier than the exchange in the film between Herzog and a scientist who studies and lives with penguins. “Can a penguin go crazy?” he asks the laconic man. And he clarifies, “I don’t mean that a penguin will suddenly think he’s Napoelon, but do penguins ever just get fed up with their colonies and leave?” And what follows is the most poignant sequence in the film, a film he vowed in voiceover would not be “another penguin film.” We watch a line of penguins waddling toward the sea in the distance, while one stops and seems confused for a moment, and then begins wandering off alone on a path toward the mountains, and as Herzog points out, toward certain death.

The parallel to humans is obvious, as Herzog has throughout the film (and indeed, throughout his career) been interrogating the various weirdos and “castoffs” who inhabit such an inhospitable place. And I think in his youth Herzog would have let that point make itself.

A funny thing happened in the screening of Dust, a German film about the infinitesimal particles that we consider insignificant yet battle daily, in futility, to get rid of. I had high hopes for the film, as it seems there is such poetic possibility in this tiny disregarded stuff that is much stronger than us, more ubiquitous, and ultimately even lethal. When the film started, the projectionist had the wrong aspect ratio so the bottom portion of the film was cut off, leaving us able to see only about half the subtitles. We all sat for about 10 minutes wondering what the hell we were watching—we only got about every third sentence, and even then it was just a partial sentence, leaving me puzzled as to whether the film was so poetic I just didn’t get it or if something was missing. After I checked with the theater manager and they resolved the problem, I was glad to see that even with full sentences, the film does attempt poetry, and inspires thought—the images of the obsessive-compulsive housewife wiping down everything in her home, even the inside of her television, in a battle against dust; images of terrifying dust storms about to swallow whole towns in Oklahoma in the 1910s; and the image above, part of a sequence showing the impossibility of ridding the floor of all traces of a pile of red dust. These tiny particles seem to rule the world, even the universe, the film points out. But despite the Godardian narration, which constantly brought to mind the coffee cup scene in Two or Three Things I Know About Her, unfortunately the film is rather heavy-handed at times, forcibly making and repeating its philosophical points and pounding some of the film’s mystery—yes, I’ll say it—into dust. And it didn’t help that some of the more scientific explanations were too technical to be understood by the layperson, or perhaps just too dryly presented, and dragged on way too long. Overall the film provided plenty of food for thought, and I admire the effort and the intention, but would have preferred a bit more mystery.

Leave it to me to get teary-eyed from a film about Iranians installing illegal Satellite TV dishes. But near the end of this film, which takes an often humorous approach to the proliferation of foreign TV programs and internet access in Iran despite the government’s tireless efforts to prevent it, two of the film’s subjects offer plaintive cries about the way the government’s restrictions are stifling their thoughts, their dreams, their desires. One is a former journalist whose paper was shut down by the government, who now operates a roadside tea stand where he offers free newspapers to his clientele, and the other is an underground rock musician who dreams of playing his music “above ground”, where he can be heard and not have to hide in a hole. The musician says he will continue playing underground, because such agitation, even if futile, is better than apathy. He will continue to play in opposition to the govenment’s plan to separate the people from their desires. (Sniff, sniff.) And the journalist searches the Internet every day for news from around the world, even though most sites he visits are blocked by the government days after he finds them. But he persists, saying that it helps him to still feel like a journalist, and not just a former one.

And yet, the film is not so simplistic as to claim that access to media will cure everything. We see families (who have illegal Satellite dishes installed) eating dinner around a TV set, staring trance-like at images of Christina Ricci and Hugh Jackman and not interacting with one another. And the very image of the technology itself—the crude dishes, the old TV sets, the antennae boosters—is ugly, marring the gorgeous Iranian mountainside.

But there are moments of transcendence. A man riding a donkey down a hill sings at the top of his lungs, as the film cuts to a television set showing a music video for the song he’s singing, offering us the source of the man’s inspiration, his dreams.

Another lovely little short is Shikashika, a dialogue-free film about the process of making Shikashika, or shaved ice treats. The film follows a Peruvian family whose business is selling shaved ice at a weekly market. Each week the entire family climbs a mountain in the Andes, hacks out a large chunk of ice, straps it to a donkey’s back and brings it back down the mountain, and takes it to market, where mom shaves bits off and douses them with sweet fruity syrup for eager customers. With beautiful cinematography, a lyrical structure, a happy family, and the gorgeous Andes, the film, like the shaved ice, is saturated with color.

Stay tuned for the next post, with a few more shorts and a profile of the features I’m looking forward to…

So I haven’t blogged much. But expect a Silverdocs preview coming soon…

Q: I don’t watch that one.
A: Not to be confused with Dancing with the Stars or America’s Dance Crew, or Dance on your Own Grave. That’s the one where you kill yourself and dance on your own grave.

NYMAG: People say that we’re living in a time of resurgence for documentaries, but it seems to us that most of the documentaries coming out are designed to prove some political point.

WISEMAN: Yes, they’re ideological movies. They have a political point of attack. They’re very different from what I’m doing. What’s taking place in documentaries doesn’t interest me at all. I’ve found that things are more complicated than even I assume they are when I start. And I hate the idea of simplifying material for political purpose.

Maybe its time for a manly-girl who knows how to fight dirty and get even.”

link