Gateway Cinephiles

Film Diary: Crossing the Line

2006
Director: Daniel Gordon
Viewed: March 23, 2008
Format: DVD - Kino (2008)

Film Diary: Czech Dream (Ceský Sen)

2004
Directors: Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda
Viewed: March 22, 2008
Format: DVD - Arts Alliance Amer (2007)

Review: Horton Hears a Who!

2008
Directors: Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino
Viewed: March 20, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Dr. Seuss’ stories have rarely translated smoothly to the big or small screen, perhaps because the charms of his works are entwined with the medium itself. There’s a particular pleasure to paging through a Seuss book, to following the predictable rhythms aloud, to lingering over the whimsical illustrations. The occasional successful Seuss adaptations—the 1942 Looney Tunes short “Horton Hatches the Egg” and MGM’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas! from 1966—rest as much on terrific, witty character design and voice talent as on the strength of the source material. I’ll resist discussing the recent, manifestly awful live-action adaptations of Grinch and The Cat and the Hat.

20th Century Fox’s Blue Sky Studios—creators of the successful Ice Age films—returns to the Seussian well with a feature-length computer animated adaptation of Horton Hears a Who! It’s a successful, if forgettable, children’s film that strikes closer to the distinctive Seuss appeal than any other attempt in recent decades.

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Film Diary: Enchanted

2007
Director: Kevin Lima
Viewed: March 20, 2008
Format: DVD - Disney (2008)

Film Diary: Willow

1988
Director: Ron Howard
Viewed: March 19, 2008
Format: DVD - 20th Century Fox (2001)

Film Diary: Bridge to Terabithia

2007
Director: Gabor Csupo
Viewed: March 19, 2008
Format: DVD - Disney (2007)

Film Diary: Hairspray

2007
Director: Adam Shankman
Viewed: March 19, 2008
Format: DVD - New Line (2007)

Ten Awesome 2007 Films You’ve Never Heard Of

It’s three months into 2008, and you’re probably still catching up on all the movies you missed last year. Even non-cinephiles have probably heard of No Country For Old Men by now, but what about quality films from last year that were neither heavily promoted nor lavished with year-end awards? Aren’t they deserving of some attention? Absolutely. There’s only so many hours in the week, however, so I’ve pared my personal recommendations down to ten films from 2007 that intrigued and enthralled me. They’re all available by now on DVD, so move them to the top of your Netflix queue today. You won’t be disappointed.

12:08 East of Bucharest (A Fost Sau n-a Fost?)

Most American viewers will overlook the political jabs in this wry Romanian comedy about Nicolae Ceauşescu’s fall, just as I did. No matter. 12:08 East of Bucharest has a sneaky charm. Simultaneously sweet, agonizing, and hilarious, it twists expectations and finds the droll humor in challenging themes. This is the most beautifully shot comedy in recent memory, and the natural, post-Cold War shabbiness of its setting creates just the right absurd tone. The film’s crowning jewel is the marvelous performance by Mircea Andreescu, whose Mr. Piscoci lays claim to one scene-stealing moment after another.

Blame It on Fidel! (La Faute à Fidel!)

One of last year’s best performances came from an eight-year-old French girl. Nina Kervel-Bey dazzles as Anna, whose world of well-ordered contentment is overturned by her parents’ conversion to radical socialism. The political dimension to the film’s plot is fairly incidental. Blame It on Fidel! is no pro- or anti-socialist polemic, but a graceful, empathic film about how children deal with confusing changes in their lives. Persepolis mined similar themes last year with searing autobiographical honesty, but Blame It on Fidel! achieves something equally touching with mature and deft fiction. One of the best films about childhood in a decade.

Deep Water

If you’re neither a Brit nor a sailing enthusiast, you’re probably not familiar with the extraordinary story of the 1969 Sunday Times Golden Globe or the tragedy of this round-the-world yacht race’s most curious competitor, Donald Crowhurst. The tale is riveting on its own merits, but the documentary Deep Water suffuses it with an aura of epic suspense and sorrow that feels completely earned. Intertwining archival footage, interviews, and eerie recreations, Deep Water is a case study in absorbing documentary storytelling. Even if you know how it ends, this film roils with more tension than most thrillers.

God Grew Tired of Us

In God Grew Tired of Us, we meet the Lost Boys, southern Sudanese men who fled their nation as children during its second civil war. The film profiles a handful of these men, selected by a charity for a plane ticket to America and a brief stipend. What begins as a fish-out-of-water story unfolds into something remarkable. The Boys’ journey through a promising, confusing America—and through their own horror and guilt—is moving beyond words. This is a film of commendable humanity, punctuated with moments of such naked emotion that it will pain you to witness them.

In Between Days

An icy jewel of a film, In Between Days captures a short span in the lives of two immigrant Korean teenagers finding their footing in a cold, nameless North American city. Aimie and Tran are best friends, but their relationship is at a crossroads. Their latent sexual attraction simmers as they fidget through a heartbreaking, exasperating dance of affection. (Or is it possession?) Deliberately vague in its setting and details, this authentic romantic tragedy zeros in on the curiously analogous agonies of adolescence and the immigrant experience. Brutal and bitter, In Between Days hurts, but it hurts good.

Into Great Silence (Die Große Stille)

Nothing really happens during the nearly three-hour running time of Into Great Silence. Accordingly, this documentary about the silence-sworn monks of Grande Chartreuse requires boundless patience and an open mind. The monks pray and chant, tend to the gardens, walk the halls, play in the snow. They stare out at us, long and hard. There is no story in this film and almost no dialogue. There is nothing but these men and their world, captured with a breathtaking elegance. This is film as sublime meditation, and one of the finest works of pure cinematic art to emerge from 2007.

Killer of Sheep

It took thirty years for Charles Burnett’s black-and-white, neorealistic drama about life in Los Angeles’ Watts neighborhood to reach American theaters. It was worth the wait. The film portrays the exhausted and frustrated Stan, who divides his time between a slaughterhouse job and efforts to keep his house and his household together. Killer of Sheep isn’t so much a story as an utterly credible glimpse into ghetto life, with all its indignities and absurdities. What a pleasure that this unsentimental, earnest, and erotic—yes, erotic!—treasure has finally seen the light of day.

My Kid Could Paint That

My Kid Could Paint That chronicles the swift emergence, ascent, and fall of an unlikely abstract expressionist painter: a five-year-old girl from upstate New York named Marla Olmstead. The story is compelling on its face. Is Marla a prodigy or just a playful kid? Have her parents or art world hucksters coached her? Director Amir Bar-Lev exhibits a keen appreciation for the thorny questions his subject matter raises, but he also boldly entwines his film directly in the controversy. The result is an uncommonly reflective and daring documentary that unfolds as a drama within a drama.

Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience

In a year strewn with mediocre Iraq War films, Operation Homecoming stands out a laudable bright spot. This stark and apolitical documentary presents the gritty, candid perspectives of the men and women neck-deep in the conflict. Nimbly straddling the uncanny confluence of warfare and artistic expression, Operation Homecoming features short vignettes narrated with prose and poetry written by Americans serving in Iraq. Authentic footage, stylized reenactments, and even animation lend visual life to their words. The film forcefully conveys these amateur warrior-artists’ uncluttered sense of duty as well as their bloody understanding of war’s absurd cruelty.

Private Property (Nue Propriété)

Intimate family drama meets stinging Greek tragedy in Private Property. This cruel tale cuts to the quick in its depiction of the sudden souring and curdling of the close bond between a mother and her two older teenage sons. The impetus for this dissolution is a dispute over their fate of their home, and Private Property embraces the themes of ownership and obligation with a grave demeanor and superb artistry. The liberated French values embodied in Pascale, Thierry, and François slip away to reveal a familial triangle as poisonous as any romantic one.

3-Minute Intro: Naked Lunch

Screened: March 17, 2008
Format: DVD - Criterion (2003)
Selected By: Lara

The phrase “film adaptation of an unfilmable novel” reliably brings to mind David Cronenberg’s 1991 metatextual horror mash-up of William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. St. Louis native Burroughs fostered a reputation as one of the most controversial artistic personalities of twentieth century America: elder statesman of the Beat movement, heroin addict, homosexual, globetrotting writer, fugitive, spoken-word artist, and lifelong dweller on society’s fringes. His 1959 novel Naked Lunch, written during his years in Tangier, Morocco, is often considered his most important work. An exemplar of Burroughs’ nonlinear “cut-up” style, Naked Lunch has been dismissed as unreadable drug-fueled dreck, prosecuted as legally obscene violent pornography, and hailed as one of the most important works of twentieth century American fiction.

A film adaptation of Naked Lunch had long been a dream of ambitious auteurs. It took three decades for Canadian filmmaker Cronenberg to rise to the occasion, buoyed by his cult acclaim and mainstream horror successes such as The Dead Zone and The Fly. By necessity, Cronenberg’s approach deviated from a strict adaptation, which he admitted would “cost 100 million dollars and be banned in every country in the world.” Instead, Cronenberg incorporated characters, situations, and themes from Burroughs’ novel into a hallucinatory horror story, adding elements from the notorious author’s own life and other works. The result is a sort of cinematic homage to the persona of William S. Burroughs, as well as a distinctly Cronenberg commentary on artistic creation.

Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch features little of the direct political and cultural criticism that runs through Burroughs’ novel. The director focuses on his perennial themes of evolution and control, elicited through grotesque biological and technological horror imagery. Peter Weller, best known for the titular role in Robocop, portrays explicit Burroughs alter ego Bill Lee with deadpan wit. With conspicuous performances from Iam Holm, Julian Sands, and Roy Scheider, Naked Lunch might be Cronenberg’s driest and most amusing horror film. Unlike its source novel, the film does employ something like a narrative, nightmarish and ludicrous though it may be. The mutating typewriters, giant insect spies, and narcotic centipedes are just cinematic flourishes. What Cronenberg preserves is Burroughs’ sense of artistic torment, ably conveying the terror, confusion, and catharsis of the creative process.

Film Diary: Romance & Cigarettes

2005
Director: John Tuturro
Viewed: March 18, 2008
Format: DVD - Sony (2008)