This is one of the most moving, horrifying, and insightful films I've ever seen—though it’s about a documentary shot seven decades ago that was never finished. Today, many people care more about "reality TV" shows, such as "Survivor" (and voting scapegoats off their own islands), than about neighbors struggling to survive in real life or a billion people suffering from starvation worldwide. But this film explores such suffering in the Warsaw Ghetto in May 1942 and how the Nazis documented it, in revealing and hypocritical ways, for propaganda purposes. We may think that our current media are immune to such cruelty and hypocrisy. Yet, we also take pleasure, albeit to a much lesser degree, in the sadistic staging of survival experiments onscreen.
The soundless documentary within this documentary, found in an underground vault in a forest, is a rough edit of a film called "The Ghetto," which was never finished. The current documentary presents parts of the original to show the evils perpetrated by the Nazis and their attempt to justify them, by turning their victims into actors. On both levels, this film fascinates and disgusts.
The Nazis practiced their voyeuristic sadism in the extreme, sacrificing Jews so that Germans could survive and prosper. For "The Ghetto" they fabricated scenes of wealthy Jews in plush rooms and at the theatre—but also filmed the reality of starving children begging in the streets, trash and feces piled high in courtyards, and corpses on sidewalks. The current documentary adds Jewish survivors of this ghetto, watching the original film and explaining its lies. Also included are diary entries of those who did not survive. And the testimony of Willy Witz, a cameraman who worked for the Nazi filmmakers, explaining what he remembers of the fictional scenes and real-life horrors.
Today's documentary, as a frame to the former, discloses many mirrors. The Nazis' positioning of upper class Jews as greedy and callous to the suffering of others reflects the Germans themselves, including the audiences of propaganda films. They are the ones who condoned or committed bestial acts toward scapegoats in ghettos and camps.
A half million people were packed into three square miles within the walls of the Warsaw ghetto. Diseases were rampant. Food was scarce. Yet the Nazi filmmakers show plenty of meats and candies in the shops, plus happy patrons in restaurant scenes. They also documented the actual crowds of people in the streets, many wearing rags and some pushing carts with piles of naked bodies, just skin and bones. Mass burials are shown, with Jewish workers stacking the corpses.
Parts of the original seem like an anthropological study of Jewish life, showing rituals of a baby being circumcised and adults bathing. Today, this evokes sympathy for the naked, vulnerable, malnourished bodies, while reflecting the dark sides of social science and cinema in Nazi hands. It also gives the uncanny effect of looking through a Nazi lens at their subjects—as in the first-person point-of-view of the killer in a horror movie. Only a few months after the footage was shot, deportations to the death camps began.
Much more could be reported of what appears in this film: panicked Jews running in the streets; close-ups of shaven heads, sunken eyes, and emaciated faces; or kids forced by Nazis to empty the smuggled vegetables from their bulging clothes. Some of the faces stare back at the camera with curiosity or hope, as if having their situation recorded might somehow save them or give their suffering some meaning. Perhaps this documentary does rescue them, in a sense, from celluloid lies—not by justifying what was done, as the filmmakers aimed, but fulfilling the wish of those who kept diaries that the injustices of the ghetto and potential for evil in all of us be known. Review by Mark Pizzato
Mark Pizzato is Professor of Theatre and Film at UNC-Charlotte. His screenplays, produced as short films, have won New York Film Festival and Minnesota Community Television awards.
A comical look, brave and brash, at a very serious subject: a convicted sexual offender moves into a new neighborhood and is required by law to notify his neighbors. Ray Carlin, age 23, was caught on TV exposing himself to kids in a park. But the film makes its joking tone clear from the start, showing this scene with a reporter giving other news and missing the action behind her. Then, "1-3 Years Later," Ray's family moves to a new home and he practices in a mirror how he will introduce himself. The actor, like a young version of the lead character from TV's "Everybody Loves Raymond," is almost lovable in his conflict with his mirror image and potential words to others. The film gets even funnier when Ray tries to actually talk with the neighbors, fails to say what he has to, and then tries again. To his surprise they accept it—and the film ends with his glee turning into a musical revue, with Ray leading many neighbors in a song and dance number on their wintry street.
IMBALANCE
USA, 2009
Director R.B. Ripley
11 minutes
Clues and cliches turn back on themselves in this superficial mystery. A muscular man has the scales of Justice on his arm with a too dark tattoo (looking like it was recently inked on). He gives a light to a woman at a bus stop, admits he was in jail for 8 years after a failed robbery of millions, yet she gives him her phone number. And then she picks up his dropped wallet, returning it to his home. There, she admires his paintings and says she's "Constance Chatterley." With drumbeats and clacking sticks in the soundtrack, he undresses and kisses her. But then she asks, "Who am I?" They turn out to be twins. She points a gun at him. He demands a share of her inheritance money. She shoots but the gun has no bullets. So it's left to the audience to decide who they are and what's real. Confusing cuts throughout this short film, with sudden changes of locations and costumes, makes it even more dreamlike, confusing, and imbalanced.
TAKE MY WIFE
USA, 2009
Director Brett Carlson & Sherry Mason
22 minutes
In this nearly pornographic comedy of mannners, two plots intertwine to cause farcical confusion. To spice up their sex life, a husband and wife decide to get a gigolo from Craig's List. Another husband sees his wife with the pool boy (not realizing he's gay) and decides to hire a hit-man, through Craig's List, to get revenge on her. The black hit-man and white gigolo switch places when meeting their clients in a bar. (You'd think they'd be more careful about things like that.) The dialogue's clever, with witty confusions in sex/death allusions. But stilted acting makes the comedy less funny, as its characters seem less earnest, even when facing death or getting physical in other ways onscreen.
Reviews by Mark Pizzato
Mark Pizzato is Professor of Theatre and Film at UNC-Charlotte. His screenplays, produced as short films, have won New York Film Festival and Minnesota Community Television awards.
Why would a nice, smart Jewish boy, in Hassidic costume and curls, become a drug smuggler? Based on actual events in the 1990s, this film explores the tensions between a conservative sheltered community and the international attractions of fast money through criminal camaraderie—involving different sides of a certain ethnic identity.
20 year old Sam works in his father's NYC fabric shop, while studying to be a rabbi and awaiting an arranged marriage to a beautiful neighbor. But another neighbor, Yosef, notices Sam's impatience with the limited lifestyle of his upbringing and entices him toward the wild side. Yosef uses Sam and his friend, Leon (Yosef's own brother), as innocent couriers of "medicine" in suitcases they carry back from Amsterdam, via Montreal, to New York. When they both learn what they've done, Leon refuses to continue the illegal activity, though it brings them much "Geld." But Sam rationalizes it, as he learned from Yosef, saying it helps people to relax. His fiancée's family cancels the wedding plans, marrying their daughter to Leon instead. This pushes Sam further into the night life of weekend flights to Amsterdam, mixing with "cool Jews," such as Jackie, a drug dealer, and his blonde girlfriend, Rachel.
Sam tells his father that Jackie is an Israeli "importer." And he helps Yosef skim tens of thousands from Jackie's profits in bringing Ecstasy across the Atlantic. Rachel induces Sam to take the drug with a passionate kiss—and the pill on her tongue. Later, she jokes with him about running away together and having 10 kids. (His fiancé had wanted 8.) But when he takes this seriously, after an argument with Jackie, Rachel calls him a "kid." Then, other Hassidic Jews that Sam recruited as couriers get stopped by US customs and searched. Sam escapes and tells Yosef, who makes a plan to run away with him to California. But Sam returns home instead to take his punishment—longing for the family, neighborhood, and faith he'd lost.
In beautiful imagery, quick witted dialogue, and extending themes, this film investigates hard choices between loyalty and freedom, integrity and pleasure, rules and rebellions through a microcosm of conflicting immigrant-American values.
Review by Mark Pizzato
Mark Pizzato is Professor of Theatre and Film at UNC-Charlotte. His screenplays, produced as short films, have won New York Film Festival and Minnesota Community Television awards.
Ann Marie Oliva is the producer/editor of ARTS à la Mode. She is a playwright, and a freelance writer who reviews both film and theatre.
Not far from Charlotte, about 18 miles west of Chapel Hill, in a former factory building, people volunteer for months to build huge fanciful masks, hands, and other forms, attach colorful fabric, walk on stilts, invent music, rehearse, and then eventually perform with large-scale puppets. This documentary follows a grass-roots theatre company, Paperhand Puppet Intervention, for six months, as they create a new show, "A Shoe for Your Foot."
Numerous interviews, interesting closeups, odd angles, and glimpses of the show as it forms provide another kind of drama here, climaxing with key scenes of the production when it premieres. Some of the artists have been with the company for 15 years, others are new. The founders (who are high school and art school dropouts) were inspired by the Bread and Puppet company of New York and Vermont, which goes back to the 1960s. Paperhand's work, like that predecessor's, has a decidedly leftist bent. Yet the pleasure of the large-scale puppetry, for audiences young and old, opening minds to perceiving dragons, hybrid creatures, and worlds within worlds, is the main "revolution" in political and personal awareness that the group seeks.
The documentary maps the many decisions, the creative work, the time pressures, the hope for "flow," and the courage of the originators and performers. One of the stilt walkers breaks her arm in a fall during rehearsal and yet performs in the opening show, just three weeks later. Two hours before that premiere, one of the drummers calls in sick, so the group finds another who worked with them before and can quickly learn the beats for each scene. They eventually perform 19 shows, for thousands of spectators in an outdoor "Forest Theatre"—and for many more through this excellent documentary.
Review by Mark Pizzato
Mark Pizzato is Professor of Theatre and Film at UNC-Charlotte. His screenplays, produced as short films, have won New York Film Festival and Minnesota Community Television awards.
Mark Pizzato is Professor of Theatre and Film at UNC-Charlotte. His screenplays, produced as short films, have won New York Film Festival and Minnesota Community Television awards.
The setting is familiar, though eerie enough: an isolated cabin in the woods. A brother and sister travel to visit their father and his wife. Tensions are evident immediately as the siblings are cool to their father and rude, at times, to their stepmother.
Director Greg Holtgrewe creates a foreboding atmosphere with no let up. The family dog is attacked, then a wounded man breaks into the cabin and must be subdued. Creaking noises, wind, darkness, no phone service, obtuse comments add to the terror. The stranger says "it" is out there, and it's going to get them. They ask him what "it" is--several times, but, no answer. So what is it?
That is the problem. Despite a well-crafted, carefully thought out film with a good cast, the resolution may leave the audience less than satisfied. I suppose if you think a sinister mood is enough you may be content, but modern audiences are pretty sophisticated and don’t appreciate being manipulated then left high and dry. Just ask M. Night Shyamalan. Review by Ann Marie Oliva
Ann Marie Oliva is the producer/editor of ARTS à la Mode. She is a playwright, and a freelance writer who reviews both film and theatre.
Crossing Borders is a film about a thought-provoking experiment to increase understanding between cultures at odds, allowing us to observe a rare honest, but unsentimental, dialogue. Four American students travel to Morocco to meet and travel with four Moroccan students.
There is giddy anticipation as each group has preconceived notions about the other. While the Americans are basically ignorant of the Moroccan culture, the Moroccans have outright negative perceptions of Americans. Two men and two women represent each country. While one of the Moroccan men has an expansive and engaging personality, the rest of the students are unsure of themselves, and initially hold back.
Each group is hungry to find out about the other, and although discussions are polite, the inevitable confrontation about American imperialism, 9/11, and the Muslim religion come up. The Americans are also exposed to the poverty that plagues Morocco. Rather than keeping the visitors away, all the eye can see is open for the camera to witness.
The most heart-breaking scene takes place when another of the Moroccan students tells about leaving the university where he was studying for reasons beyond his control. Yet, he decides to help people from his neighborhood who are suffering, too, by starting a non-profit group. His obvious emotion leaves everyone in tears.
Friendship, respect, trust, and appreciation come from listening to each other and trying to understanding other points of view. If only governments could do the same thing. Review by Ann Marie Oliva
Ann Marie Oliva is the producer/editor of ARTS à la Mode. She is a playwright, and a freelance writer who reviews both film and theatre.
Ivory is a rare commodity. So is true artistic talent. So is a pure heart to anneal that talent. Andrew Chan’s parable about the artistic journey is set literally in territory where ivory is precious indeed: a classical pianist competition. It is a rarified and terrifying atmosphere where few are fated to realize the dreams to which they’ve enslaved their youth. Peopled by characters both familiar and flawed, this film’s complexity lies in its layering of multiple betrayals, and the impact of those betrayals.
Andreas (Tim Draxl), a 23 year old American whose life has been shaped by hours of numbing practice in studios and small recital halls, knows that a win at the International Liszt Competition in Budapest will be his last chance to be catapulted into the ranks of iconic concert pianists, as his grandfather had done. Despite his anxiety and almost nerdish disposition, Andreas nourishes an ego and conviction that the right mentor will provide the credibility and clout he needs to win. His rival and friend, Jake (Travis Fimmel), shows flashes of keyboard genius and originality that are at odds with behaviors and an outrageous streak that would be more at home in rock musicians; he, too, is Budapest-bound, if he does not self-destruct beforehand. Both fall for a beautiful girl, Alicia (Beau Garret), whose love is most fierce when it comes to her own burgeoning opera career. Andreas’ desperate bid for success leads him to abandon his longstanding mentor, Leon Spencer (the redoubtable Martin Landau) for the more politically advantageous Russian coach, Olga Primakova (Erika Marozsan). A year of training at Oberlin will end in Budapest, where there can only be one winner, but all will come away with a score of life lessons.
Chan wrests strong performances from his actors, even when their characters are broadly drawn. He has also created a cinematographically beautiful film, with interesting light and shadows; the scenes of Budapest are particularly evocative of the old world and the weight of all those historical musical traditions, breathing heavily in the ears of the driven new world and third world competitors. One montage of various pianists’ hands during the competition is a particularly strong sequence. The musical score is also a character in the film, though it might have been an interesting choice to stick to a more homogenously classical repertoire for most of the film.
The weakest element in this film is its use of Andreas’ retrospective narration. This creates an exposition of events and motivations that could certainly be conveyed through otherwise strong and believable dialogue, or through visual devices. Some plot elements (particularly the romantic subplot) are predictable, and the first two-thirds of the film are slowly paced in places; however, once the action switches to Budapest, the whole pulse of the film quickens, in synchrony with that of the competitors.
The characters’ psychological complexities are this film’s strongest suit. To some, the setting of competitive classical music may seem arcane. But in truth, this film has much to say to everyone. It examines “the burden of promise”, a burden naively aspired to by many, and carried, as Chan unflinchingly shows us, by only a few. Review by Elizabeth Peterson-Vita
Dr. Elizabeth Peterson-Vita is a clinical psychologist by day, a theatre producer/director by night, and writes theatre and film reviews.
The keys to this buddy film, based on famous Baltic Sea pirates from the 14th century, emerge in its opening scenes, though the chests to be unlocked appear much later. Michels Goedeke is brought to a public hanging. Though he is being executed as Klaus Stoertebeker, he accepts his fate and gives "Freedom" as his reason. This scene also ends the film. But then we see Michels, earlier in their story, sucking the dirty bare toe of Klaus while they sleep together, otherwise clothed, aboard their ship.
Their adventures after that involve homoerotic, not homosexual, bonding and fighting. The pirates repeatedly rally to Michel's speeches about "F...ing the Hanse" (the ruling council of Hamburg and its economic territories). They sail alongside other ships, slaughter the crews, and plunder the wealth. At times, the pirates return to shore, to carouse in drink with each other and start fights. But they return again to the "Freedom" of their charming, heroic villainy at sea.
With a newly acquired ship, they find a skeleton and a cannon, the former evoking fear, the latter giving them a new technological advantage in their plundering—though the pirates despair, divide, and almost perish before discovering its power.
But Klaus starts to change after surviving a deep stab wound in his chest, which he interprets as returning from the dead. He falls for a young woman, Bille, who already has a little girl and proposes a loving family life as alternative to piracy. He returns to his pirate buddies, but tries to stop the cruelty of Michels and others. He also tries to solve disputes among them without violence and by sharing their plunder fairly. He longs to return to land, to be a farmer again, but Michels refuses to let him go.
And yet, Michels also met a girl on shore, Okka, whom he pines for while away at sea. Apparently, he wasn't manly enough in his lower regions to please her. (His pirate buddies make fun of him for that and he then punishes one of them cruelly.) When he visits her again, she tells him she's engaged. So he commits to an endless pirate life and tries to keep Klaus with him as the leader of their crew—and the most famous among them, with a reputation that will last, Michels boasts, for a thousand years.
The implications of such plot twists, along with intriguing camera angles, make up for the film's annoying soundtrack of rock music during fight scenes and large holes in its plot logic. (For example, Michels blows a hole in the side of his ship, accidently firing the cannon for the first time while trying to commit suicide and setting the ship on fire, after his buddies leave it. But we are never shown how the fire is put out, the hole is patch, or the cannon can used after that with an endless supply of gunpowder and cannonballs.) This "true history," as the film's subtitle coyly announces, is more of a dreamy fantasy, though shot in a mostly realistic style, with fire and cannon perhaps taking on other symbolic meanings.
Michels's final sacrifice, allowing himself to be caught and hung instead of Klaus, shows that his love for and envy of his buddy was built not only on homoerotic desire, but also heterosexual and historical ideals. Yet, this 10 million dollar, big studio (Warner Brothers) film provides more entertainment than insight—as a buddy, pirate, historical, and sea-faring melodrama, hinting at today's concerns in revising the myths of the past. Review by Mark Pizzato
Mark Pizzato is Professor of Theatre and Film at UNC-Charlotte. His screenplays, produced as short films, have won New York Film Festival and Minnesota Community Television awards.
Mark Pizzato is Professor of Theatre and Film at UNC-Charlotte. His screenplays, produced as short films, have won New York Film Festival and Minnesota Community Television awards.
The concept is simple and familiar: “arm” someone with a camera, ask them to photograph the important people, activities, and interests in their lives, and voila: you’ve got their autobiographical picture. But it’s not so simple or familiar when the people with those cameras have arms that don’t function well or at all, or whose perspectives are shot from the height of their motorized wheelchairs. Indeed, the culture of disability is one that able-bodied people react to with confusion or avoidance, as eloquently expressed through words and photographs by one of the participants in this film. Shooting Beauty tackles confusion and avoidance head-on, never with anger, but with irony, sly humor, and poignancy.
Photographer Courtney Bent, scion of a fashion-conscious family, wonders about the experiences of those who do not fit conventional conceptions of beauty, and whose lives are constrained by the most significant physical challenges. Her questions lead her to a United Cerebral Palsy center in Watertown, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, where her initial photographs of participants evoke a kind of queasy anxiety in her colleagues. She intuits that a culture can only really be conveyed by the people who live it, and so she turns the tables, distributing cameras to the residents and asking them to create “a day in the life”. It is no easy matter: many of the participants need extraordinary accommodations to make their cameras work for them. Bent’s approach to solving these issues is not that of a technician, nor does she react to their human plight in the manner of a social scientist or counselor: she is a friend. It is the warmth of that friendship, kindled over a number of years with an astonishingly diverse group of people, which emotionally ignites the film
Shooting Beauty does not permit the audience to look away, and certainly has a strong emotional pull, though not in a manipulative way. It is honest and clever, and Kachadorian’s direction and editing tells a neat true-story arc of transformations within an hour. It delivers its universal humanity message straightforwardly, but is not pedantic or merely a disability curriculum centerpiece. This film is engaging, down-to-earth, open, and funny: clearly an award-winner. Review by Elizabeth Peterson-Vita
Dr. Elizabeth Peterson-Vita is a clinical psychologist by day, a theatre producer/director by night, and writes theatre and film reviews.
90210 (or another TV soap) meets Sixteen Candles set in East Texas in the 1980s. The charming Richie is having so much fun with his girl Michelle, her tale-spinning brother Brent, and their rich friend Kenny that he doesn't care about plans for the future. His little sister pushes Richie to apply for college, but he's too busy writing fiction, working at the skating rink, and palling around with his buddies (which means lots of cigarettes, beers, and wise-cracks).
But then the rink has to close. Richie's father announces a divorce. His mom confesses she's been having affairs with other men for seven years. Brent is challenged into a high-speed car chase by three troublemakers and tragedy ensues. Though he beats the bad guys at their dangerous game, Brent is killed suddenly. Michelle breaks up with Richie while in mourning for the loss of her brother—and because she saw Richie with another girl at a party the same night.
Yet, our teen hero summons the courage to overcome despair. On the Skateland rink's closing night, he gets revenge on his enemies, nearly breaking the windpipe of one and bashing the skull of another with a limbo-dance pole.
As in any good melodrama, though, there are no repercussions for this melodramatic victory of heroic violence against purely evil antagonists. In the end, Richie gets a scholarship due to his writing skill—after Michelle secretly sent his application in, along with hers, so they could both get out of Dodge. Of course, they kiss and make up then. And all signs point to their living happily ever after.
Like a tall glass of ice-tea with plenty of sugar, this movie provides relaxing entertainment, with sweet nostalgia, a bit of bitterness, and brief stimulation. Beautiful young faces, charming actors, many extras on skates and in hot tubs—what more could we want? Review by Mark Pizzato
Mark Pizzato is Professor of Theatre and Film at UNC-Charlotte. His screenplays, produced as short films, have won New York Film Festival and Minnesota Community Television awards.
And a tragedy there was in Guatemala where for years tens of thousands of people became the “disappeared,” taken away by the dreaded National Police squads never to be heard from again. An explosion led to finding the archives of the police. As a team goes through millions of documents the stories of several families are highlighted, but they are only a few of the many who suffered unspeakably at the hands of a corrupt government.
The interviews with family members are cut with flashbacks of newsreels and footage of unrest in the streets, shootings, and a cemetery where there are thousands of unmarked graves because family members were too afraid to claim their bodies.
Gruesome photos of tortured bodies are included in the archives as well as thousands of pictures of people never heard from again because they were suspected, not proven guilty, of being enemies of the state.
This moving account of those who are trying to find out what happened to missing people for the families is heart-breaking in its implications.
The film feels a bit long as it begins to repeat itself, but the inhumanity is stunning. Review by Ann Marie Oliva
Ann Marie Oliva is the producer/editor of ARTS à la Mode. She is a playwright, and a freelance writer who reviews both film and theatre.
Based on the true story of Stan Herd, an earthwork artist from Kansas, the film documents his environmental artwork on land owned by Donald Trump in New York. Stan had been toiling for years on his farmlands, but in order to get notice for his special kind of art, he offers to create the earthwork for free, thinking he will get plenty of publicity, and make money later.
As Stan begins to clear the land and prepare it, he meets several homeless men who help him in unexpected ways. Stan’s wife and son back home support him and hope “this will be the one.”
Fate intervenes, yet the relationships Stan develops show the true nature of art for art’s sake. A touching story of one man’s belief in his dream. Review by Ann Marie Oliva
Ann Marie Oliva is the producer/editor of ARTS à la Mode. She is a playwright, and a freelance writer who reviews both film and theatre.
I don't know about this one. Perhaps it's a warning against home-schooling. And against parents' fears of outside influences on their kids, which can produce even worse results, whether in modern Greece or other patriarchal cultures.
Two young women and a young man are kept on the family compound, along with their mom, through the parents' stories of danger beyond the fence. Yet the father drives his BMW outside, to a factor he manages.
There's humor initially as young adults act like naïve, joyless, yet still playful kids. Nudity and sex are shown in a matter of fact way, without pleasure or eroticism.
The father brings Christina, a security guard where works, to the home to give the son some sexual release (or to breed him). But his sisters take more interest in her. She secretly gives them gifts in exchange for lickings. The women then continue the gift/licking exchanges in non-sexual, comical ways.
The film's camerawork is playful, too, framing people at times with their heads off-screen. Dialogue (in Greek with subtitles) involves the family using incorrect words for objects, in a shared code. The mom also plays strange, silly games with the grown-up kids, sometimes involving a blindfold.
But things get darker when one of the young women cuts her brother's arm with a kitchen knife. He then kills a cat with gardening shears (a gruesome act, sure to shock the audience). The father says that another son was killed by monstrous cats because he ventured outside the family fence. The father trains his offspring to pose on all fours and bark like dogs. Indeed, the entire film shows him controlling them like pets, using firm words and corporal punishment at times, while also waiting for a dog trainer to finish the "five stages" of making his dog ready to bring home.
But one of his daughters gets videos from Christina, in exchange for licks. This brings new ideas from the outside world, which spread among the siblings. The father beats her with the videocassette and then beats Christina with her VCR player. But it's too late. The eldest daughter continues to rebel by knocking out her own "dogtooth" (her canine), since she and her siblings were told that children are not mature enough to leave home until such a tooth falls out.
This film is intriguing, mysterious, and absurd—an emotional and intellectual puzzle, humorous at times, yet often painful to watch. I'm not sure it's worth it, especially with scenes of incest and sudden brutal violence. Though these scenes are not gratuitous, the points they make are more haunting than insightful. Review by Mark Pizzato
Mark Pizzato is Professor of Theatre and Film at UNC-Charlotte. His screenplays, produced as short films, have won New York Film Festival and Minnesota Community Television awards.
Did you know there's a subculture of poster artists? Well, there is, and they are as idiosyncratic as any group of creative people you will find. In this eye-catching documentary director Eileen Yaghoobian goes across the country interviewing these (mostly) men about what poster art is, what separates the good from the bad, and why they do what they do to make posters. She obviously won their trust and some rare moments of understanding emerge. Great title, too.
First off, it’s not about the money. The interviews take place in their messy studios, work areas, or even on the street. It’s more grit than glamour. Examples of the posters are shown throughout sometimes with explanations of the images, which is informative since you get that there is a method behind what they do, rather than just slapping images on paper. They may make 100 posters for a band that plays one time and moves on, but they treat each poster they create with jaded deference.
Often these poster people are unintentionally funny, and there are certainly “characters” among them. Yet, they remind us that more goes on than we are aware of, and there are still some people who defy the norm to do what they do best, not necessarily to make a statement. But it is harder to be subversive in a culture where there’s more competition than ever to get attention, and less opportunity to shock others. Review by Ann Marie Oliva
Ann Marie Oliva is the producer/editor of ARTS à la Mode. She is a playwright, and a freelance writer who reviews both film and theatre.
As you might expect from the title, this is not a non-violent film. There are escalating shoot-outs in exotic locales as a French chef (and former hit-man) visits his critically wounded daughter in Macau and then, like John Wayne in a Western, seeks revenge in Hong Kong. Yet this film not only appeals to spectators' appetites for vicarious rage and survival thrills. It also puts comic surprises and ironic paradoxes into the mix, raising questions about memory, gender, and the self-destructive futility of vengeance.
The film begins with the horrors of a home invasion in which innocent children are doomed. Then the Frenchman, Costello (Johnny Hallyday), brings his chiseled face, icy blue eyes, and clenched sorrow into the revenge tragedy. Like a Shakespearean play (such as Titus Andronicus), as well as Hollywood melodrama, this movie has many leaps in logic that seem incredible on the surface, yet its passions override them, while its juxtapositions provide further insights.
Costello is a fish out of water with a bullet in his brain from mysterious gunman activities 20 years ago. He hires three local hit-men (though he's almost killed by them at first) and takes Polaroid photos to "remember" them—like the lead in Christopher Nolan's Memento. When they investigate the ravaged home of Costello's daughter and her lost family, we see more details of the violence as they explore for clues. Yet Costello uses the remnants of his daughter's interrupted dinner to make a fine meal with red wine for his killer friends. He also shows that he's as nimble with guns as they are, reassembling a pistol while blindfolded. These scenes play on different levels: mystery and terror, vengeance and communitas, camaraderie and competition.
The entire film develops these themes in seductive yet self-critical twists. Here, for example, the peaceful food-sharing with new-found friends and fine food, despite the bullet-ridden and blood-stained setting, turns back into the phallic lure of playing with guns. They're taken apart, into harmless pieces of metal. Then the parts are reunited to killing machines. And a dinner plate is thrown into the air for target practice.
The film is beautifully shot—and was presented by CFF with the subtle textures of 35mm, rather than the usual expediency of DVD. Scenes of big-city busyness and bosses' wasteful wealth contrast with the gangsters' dingy hideouts and their makeshift surgery on gun wounds, as the high and low of male machismo, oriental style. Yet, these attributes of organized crime contrast even more with the young mothers and children of the hit-men, on Costello's side and his enemies'—when they meet in a park for their shoot-out and later, when he loses his memory and will to revenge, finding peace in playing with kids on a beach.
The demands of the genre push this movie beyond that ironic gesture, toward bigger showdowns with the evil crime boss. But like the best of Scorsese's and Coppola's American and Sicilian investigations, this gangster melodrama, set in the East, brings a yin of compassion to the yang of vengeance. It entertains with bountiful bullets and bloodshed. Yet it challenges spectators to question their action movie appetites, regarding boyish games with guns and manly rules of revenge. Review by Mark Pizzato
Mark Pizzato is Professor of Theatre and Film at UNC-Charlotte. His screenplays, produced as short films, have won New York Film Festival and Minnesota Community Television awards.
The Charlotte Film Festival opens with Night Catches Us, a taut drama of dangerous secrets and divided loyalties. Starring the excellent Anthony Mackie, who was so effective in last year's Academy Award winner The Hurt Locker, and the talented Kerry Washington, as two people trapped by their past.
The movie takes place in 1976 when Marcus (Mr. Mackie) returns to Philadelphia for his father's funeral. He had been part of the Black Panther movement and left the city almost ten years ago under less than friendly circumstances with his former comrades. Old feelings of resentment and betrayal are triggered when he shows up even though he wants no part of that old life. Patricia (Miss Washington) is the wife of Marcus’ best friend who was left with a young baby daughter when her husband was killed. She’s an attorney now taking care of those around her.
Writer/director Tanya Hamilton creates a tense atmosphere with the threat of violence always lurking just below the surface. Newsreel footage of the Black Panthers raising fists, giving speeches, or at funerals adds to the uneasy mood. Racist cops and vengeful neighborhood men are at war, but too often guns are the means of settling scores as peaceful citizens are left on their own to deal with the chaos.
Interesting opening graphic credits and first-rate cinematography with creatively framed shots give the film a distinctive look. The music selection is just right; never overpowering the action.
Ms. Hamilton works well with her cast and draws good performances from all, especially the two leads, and also Amari Cheatom as the unstable Jimmy, and Jamara Griffin as Patricia’s ten year old daughter Iris, the most poignant character in the movie. She longs to know about her father even as the men in her mother’s life keep leaving.
Night Catches Us is well worth seeing and is playing again Tuesday evening (Sept. 21). Get there if you can. Review by Ann Marie Oliva
Ann Marie Oliva is the producer/editor of ARTS à la Mode. She is a playwright, and a freelance writer who reviews both film and theatre.