aka:
Everything’s Alright
User reviews from imdb
Author: debblyst from
Juarez Barata (Paulo Gracindo) and his wife Elvira (Fernanda
Jabor aims his machine-gun at various issues: fascism, capitalism, imperialism,
mysticism, chauvinism, racism, the bourgeoisie, the military regime, the mixed-up
relations among social classes in
The film benefits immensely from a great cast: veteran Gracindo gives a
tour-de-force performance (probably his best on film), alternating a
respectable façade when he's sober with nostalgic bravura when he's drunk, at
once funny and pathetic; Montenegro (Oscar-nominee for "Central do
Brasil") shines as the hysterical Elvira with her inimitable vocal
delivery and on-target comic tempo; Luiz Linhares, Fernando Torres and
especially Jorge Loredo make a terrific trio of ghosts; Stenio Garcia, José
Dumont and Anselmo Vasconcellos have a ball as the workers; Zezé Motta gets to
show her callipygian nudity, fascinating energy and fine singing voice.
Then-beginners Regina Casé (in her film debut) and Luiz Fernando Guimarăes (his
2nd film) sometimes fall back to stage tricks, but they already knew how to
strut their stuff and it's nice to see them so young and thin!
Allegoric, loud, intelligent, funny, fast and furious, "Tudo Bem" got
a DVD release with so-so quality (they could have remixed the sound: some
dialogs get lost under loud music or the workmen's whamming and pounding), but
it's one of the best Brazilian comedies of the 1970s and one of Jabor's best --
only the ending is rather flat and disappointing (and Paulo César Pereio
hamming it up doesn't help). My vote: 8 out of 10.
Brazil
Film Update Robert Stam from Jump
Cut
TUDO BEM crowds all of
A decision to have workers redo the apartment becomes a
pretext for Jabor to expose the explosive class contradictions of
A cinematic tour de force, TUDO BEM is never
visually boring, despite its spatial constrictions, thanks to its virtuoso
variation of cinematic styles and to the visual interest of the decor itself.
The film ends with a hilarious allegorical sequence in which a
A Palestinian woman agonises over her roots and national identity in Annemarie Jacir's much-anticipated but disappointingly minor Salt Of This Sea. The director's feature debut is clearly made with passion and fuelled by a keen resentment at the plight of the Palestinian people. And the film has an authentic, colour-saturated sense of place. But this is not enough to turn an overlong travelogue-cum-manifesto with a flat romantic subplot into a convincing drama.
With no less than seventeen sources of finance, Salt Of This
Sea was always going to be a commercially fragile prospect. In the end, it
will play best to indulgent liberal audiences and the Palestinian diaspora in
The film starts where its heart lies – in documentary mode, with black and white archive footage of Israeli tanks and bulldozers knocking down Arab homes. But we're soon back in colour and the present day, as feisty politicised Soraya (Hammad) arrives at an Israeli airport on her first visit to what she considers her homeland – only to be interrogated and strip-searched at customs, despite her US passport, when she reveals her Palestinian origins. Arriving eventually in Ramallah, she tries and fails to recover money left in a bank by her grandfather in 1948. Adrift in the city, Soraya meets an intense, bitter young Palestinian, Emad (Bakri), who is working as a waiter while he waits for his Canadian study visa to come through.
The idea is that Soraya is looking for a
The tension is suddenly upped when Soraya, Emad and their film-maker
friend Marwan (Ideis) rob the bank to get back what she feels is hers. But the
pace soon drops again as the threesome escape into
Benoit Chamaillard's carefully-framed photography gives the film's handheld aesthetic a tonal richness and depth, and the use of popular Palestinian music is nicely judged. But there's still a sense that Annemarie Jacir would have done better to make the serious full-length documentary that her fine early shorts seemed to herald.
Jackson, Mark
WITHOUT C+ 78
This is for the most
part a surprisingly uninvolving film, shot entirely on Whidbey Island located
at the northern end of Puget Sound and about 30 miles north of Seattle,
attainable by ferryboat, where the location alone may be of some interest to
viewers, yet nearly the entire film is shot indoors, with just a handful of
views of the area. While shot on video,
which dulls the natural colors, part of the problem appears to be the lead
actress, Joslyn Jensen, who turns out to be something of a despicable
character, seen all along as something of a ditz, a shallow 19-year old girl
with few redeeming values, one of which seems to be her willingness to display
herself naked on the Internet without any thought of the consequences. She arrives on the island to look after Frank
(Ron Carrier), an elderly man confined to a wheelchair living in a vegetative
state, allowing the family to take a week’s vacation together. Initially, Joslyn receives audience sympathy,
as it’s exceedingly difficult to care for such a severely disabled individual,
though there are early signs she’s in over her head as she finds it especially
difficult to move him in and out of his chair.
Eventually, however, the director simply omits these shots, showing
Joslyn instead casually running on an Exerciser, performing other fitness
routines, while also making a daily run for coffee in the owner’s car. There’s very little interaction between
Joslyn and Frank, where he may as well be left to fend for himself parked in
front of the cable Fishing Network while she spends nearly all of her idyll
time by herself, with Frank completely out of the picture.
It should be stated
that Frank’s family left explicit instructions on how to care for Frank,
listing pages of details, including how to set the remote to the proper channel
and sound level, how to reprogram the TV if something goes wrong, what he likes
to eat, how to use the dishwasher, washer, dryer, and other appliances, all
contained in what they like to call The
Bible. Initially, Joslyn stares at The Bible religiously, not really
knowing what she’s expected to do, but over time she’s simply on her own,
ignoring Frank as much as possible. Due
to the remote location, there is no cell phone service and the family never
plugged in the Internet, something she’s able to hook up with little problem,
so she spends most of her time bored, staring at photos on her cell phone,
where one in particular is seen over and over, including YouTube videos of the
two of them together kissing. There is
an amusing routine of Joslyn waking up to her loud and overly aggravating cell
phone alarm every morning, where day after day, her phone is never where she
left it, except the one day she tapes it down to the desk overnight. What evolves is next to nothing about Frank,
the reason why she’s there, and almost everything about her, where the movie
starts to feel like PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (2007), where things tend to move in
the night, where the story fits the horror profile of a girl left alone in a
secluded wood, where bad things are expected to happen.
The director belatedly
pulls things together by the end, where there is a strange side story
concerning the girl in the picture, as her mom owns an art gallery on the
island, revealing yet another side of this girl who’s blend of the real and the
imagined are all a blur to her at times, where Joslyn actually starts
suspecting Frank is locking the doors behind her or getting up in the middle of
the night and moving her phone, getting aggravated that he’s really faking his
disability, yelling and accusing him, though Frank’s given no reason to suspect
him. The whole mood shifts into a
bizarre interior world, where Joslyn gets naked on the Internet and talks
filthy dirty, looks at herself repeatedly in the mirror, begins to see scars or
rashes that are gone by the next day, grows overly paranoid about Frank playing
games with her, obsesses about the girl on her cell phone, goes out with a guy
on the island that she knows is a creep, starts sneaking sips out of the liquor
cabinet, and in just a few short days of utter monotony she’s already
exhibiting signs of cabin fever. One
starts to wonder where they ever found this girl, as she seems utterly
irresponsible and uniquely unqualified. The viewer fully expects Joslyn to lose
Frank by the end of the week, where he’d be found mangled among some dead logs
in a nearby creek, his face half eaten by wolves, or perhaps even murder him
herself out of spite for having to put up with him all week. After all, he was no help to her. Whatever the expectations are, this first
time writer, director, editor, and producer does not disappoint with the way
matters resolve themselves, where there’s always a tinge of underlying
ambiguity, but also a loathsome and unsympathetic feel throughout most of this
film for a girl so out of her depth.
San
Francisco Bay Guardian [Jesse Hawthorne Ficks]
That's right, yet another
low-budget indie film made in the Northwest. But boy, is it memorable. Winning
a Special Jury Mention at this year's Slamdance Film Festival for Joslyn
Jensen's "creative, nuanced and moving performance", you can't help
but feel isolated and even trapped in this character study's life. The
almost-silent film follows a young girl as she tends to every detail for an
invalid over a three-day period; it captures that alone time that for many is
the ultimate fear. Warning: this film is not what it seems. A truly chilling
and meditative experience all at the same time!
The Locarno Film Festival—known as the smallest of the big and the biggest of the small festivals—has, for the last 64 years, lived by the ethos of seeking out and promoting emerging talent. They’re a festival more interested in art than celebrity, and the fact that the festival is so elegant and organized makes one endeared to it even more; they do it well for the sake of art.
This year was no exception—their line up of features by first-time directors
was impressive. One of these feature films was Without, the debut of
The beauty of this film lies in how emotionally connected we become to Jocelyn in such a seemingly simplistic and small filmic world, and how Jackson manages to create tension and develop a relationship between two people, one of whom doesn’t speak or move.
The Hollywood
Reporter [Neil Young] longer article
Part psychological thriller and part minimalist art movie, Without isn't an easy sell (that forgettable title doesn't exactly help) but overall is sufficiently distinctive to perhaps gain limited domestic theatrical exposure. Overseas festivals receptive to genuinely independent American cinema should certainly check it out.
The set-up is familiar
from the horror/suspense genres: A young woman arrives in a remote location to
look after a house for its holidaying owners, and is unnerved by a series of
eerie experiences. Here Joslyn (Jensen shares her character's name) is
simultaneously housesitter and caretaker, tending to the needs of the family's
wheelchair-bound, near-catatonic grandfather Frank (Ron Carrier) while they're
away.
A fitness-conscious,
quietly spoken 19-year-old, Joslyn struggles to cope with the very limited
Internet access on this scenic, leafy island in
While
The film's achievement
is, as with Roman Polanski's 1965 Repulsion,
one obvious influence, to leave us wondering to what extent Joslyn might be in
actual physical danger, and to what extent she's the principle source of that
danger — both to herself and to others. She's certainly far from the model
caretaker. Her increasingly insensitive and cavalier treatment of helpless
Frank crosses various lines of inappropriateness in a film which is frank in
its presentation of nudity and feminine sexuality.
Biting fearlessly into a
role that offers a terrific showcase for a younger performer, Jensen manages to
retain our interest and sympathy even when her character's eccentricities shade
towards madness. She's especially strong during the monologues - some delivered
solo, some in Frank's vegetative presence. These punctuate the sparsely-written
screenplay and are notable for their quicksilver unpredictability. The
generally downbeat tone is leavened by moments of uneasy humor, as when
Joslyn's employers pedantically delineate their exceedingly precise
instructions about what she can and can't do in their absence.
Jessica Dimmock and Diego
Garcia's high-definition digital cameras get up close and very personal to
Jensen on many occasions. Their crisply lustrous imagery is a consistently
hypnotic element as Without — nothing
if not a mood-piece — establishes and develops its various sinister, chilly
atmospheres. Eric Strausser's sound design is a marvel of near-subliminal
effects (a wolf-howl here, a twig-crack there) and growling susurrations.
Without opens with a young and beautiful woman sitting on a ferry
that's heading to
A ferry employee cleans the tables behind her. She arrives on the island, enters town, and hires a ride to her destination. Her driver is clearly attracted to her beauty. She plays it cool, directs him to a driveway for a home on the left side of the road. She settles her business, gathers her things, shuts the door, walks up the driveway with a noisy roller suitcase, and, from the driver's perspective, disappears behind trees and bushes. After a moment of silence, the driver reverses, turns, and heads back to town. After a moment of silence, the young woman reappears from behind the greenery, makes sure the driver is gone, and noisily crosses the street to a home on the opposite side—her actual destination. It's at this moment that I fell in love with this movie. The timing of the editing and performances, the sound design, the photography—all made it clear that I was in very good hands and that the rest of the work would only deepen this initial love.
There is another scene, early in the movie—there are so many great scenes and sequences in this masterpiece of regional cinema—in which the young woman (Joslyn Jensen), wearing a black floral dress, is helping a catatonic elderly man (Ron Carrier) into bed. This is the job she came to the island to do. The job involves caring for the old man while his family is away on vacation. The house is ordinary, the rules of the house are a little odd but not eccentric, and this is the young woman's first night with the wheelchair-bound man. The difficult task of lifting him from the wheelchair to the bed is shown in such a way that makes her ass very prominent. Each pull of the man's limp waist or legs causes, from our perspective, her ass to rise, round, and expand invitingly. Though the old man can't see her ass (it's on the other side of him), we can't help wondering if he is secreting pleasure from her exertions.
Later in the film, yet another scene. This time it's with an animal, a deer. It walks out of the forest and begins to eat the grass in the home's backyard. The young woman sees the animal through a window. The light, the fur, the black hooves, the chewing, the eyes, the stares. It's a moment filled with something that can only be described as cosmic sensuality, a transanimal field of desire. Without is the region's first erotic tour de force—the cleaning of the old body, the surprise erection, the computer orgasm, the horny visitor, her longing for a lover who is seemingly trapped in the hard drive of her signal-less iPhone. (Humpday was certainly a fine film, but it was not erotic.)
Without is a regional film. Its director, Mark Jackson, though
currently living in
The movie was shot entirely on
Without, which premieres this week at Slamdance (it really is scandalous that it's not in competition in Sundance), reinforces the natural cinematic beauty of our part of the world. The quality of light, the sharpness of colors, the lowness of clouds, the closeness of mountains, and the meshing of rural and urban codes. It is now clearer than ever that a film made in this region must exploit its natural wonders and beauty.
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
indieWIRE
/ The Playlist [Erik McClanahan]
Tribune
(Locarno Film Festival report) Neil
Young from Jigsaw Lounge (capsule)
Filmmaker
Magazine [Brandon Harris]
Orlando
Weekly [Justin Strout]
Your Mother
Ate My Dog! a Peter Jackson website
All-Movie Guide Rebecca
The Peter Jackson Guide Bob Bankard
Jackson, Peter They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
The Bastards Have Landed:
Official Peter Jackson Fan Club
DGA Interview by Jerry Roberts, January 2002 from DGA magazine
Hollywood
Reporter Interview (2004) by Philip
Wakefield
Dark Horizons Interview
(2005) by Paul Fischer,
Time Out Interview (2005) by Dave Calhoun,
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Young filmmakers,
take heart; instead of feeling washed up because you haven’t made your Citizen
Kane by the time you hit 25, consider this: Peter Jackson may be the lord
of Lord of
the Rings now, but when he was 25, he was making this scattershot,
borderline-unwatchable (and yet still somehow strangely amusing) psychotronic
splatter flick. Set in an unspecified and not particularly explained future, Bad
Taste is mainly a collection of gross-out gags laid end to end. Defending
the earth from an invasion of alien drones who aim to package human beings as
intergalactic fast food — they particularly like the "chunky bits" —
our human heroes find every possible way to dismember their human-looking foes,
and Jackson lays on the fake blood (and brains, and guts) as thick as can be.
Though it obviously prefigures the obsession with special effects and other
worlds that piqued Jackson’s interest in LOTR, it’s hard to get
through more than several minutes of this earliest feature without your
attention wandering — and when a ravenous alien scooping brains out of a dead
human’s half-exploded head can’t hold your interest, there’s something really
wrong. Skip to the end and savor the truly bizarre climax, which features a
colonial house blasting off into outer space, or savor the occasional deadpan
zinger and Jackson’s borderline-insane performances — as both a ravenous E.T.
and an alien hunter whose brain keeps falling out of his head. Disc two of the
pricier two-disc limited edition features a half-hour making-of featurette that
will no doubt please fans (and Bad Taste certainly has them — check
out badtaste.iscool.net), but is hardly worth the twofold increase in price.
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)
The fact that Peter Jackson, the director of this cheerfully repulsive alien-cannibal comedy, went on to win multiple Oscars fifteen years later is one of the finer ironies of Academy history.
It certainly makes good on its title. Ravenous
extra-terrestrials (“No glowing fingers on these bastards,” growls
Twenty-two when he first began shooting this on weekends in 1983,
Like Raimi, Jackson was never a horror director so much as a comedy director —
even the most disgusting passages (“Aren’t I lucky,” beams an alien as he sucks
down a bowl of steaming vomit, “I got a chunky bit”) and scenes of
ultra-violence are timed for laughs, not shock.
I want this Peter Jackson back. The Peter Jackson who could make a fun, short movie for peanuts. Don't you?
Edinburgh U Film Society [Keith H. Brown/Andrew Hesketh]
Bad
Taste : Special Edition | Film at The Digital Fix Mark
Davis
The
Horror Geek Speaks: Bad Taste - IGN Mike Bracken
The Science Fiction, Horror
and Fantasy Film Review Richard
Scheib
Badmovies.org B-Movie Reviews (Andrew Borntreger)
Classic-Horror another fanboy review by Dellamorte
Monsters At
Play yet another, by
Mutant Reviewers from Hell Justin
HorrorWatch NFlames
Fangoria Michael
Gingold
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)
Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon
DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle
Needcoffee.com - DVD
Review Doc Ezra
The Horror Review [Egregious Gurnow]
There are a handful of films that when they are over you are just forced to contend with the fact that you will never be the same again, such as David Lynch’s Eraserhead, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre, and Werner Herzog’s Even Dwarfs Started Small. The typical reaction to these works is “What the fuck?” before one begins seriously considering therapy in order to be able to return to society. Such is the case with Peter Jackson’s acid-laced, hyper real musical satire of Jim Henson’s The Muppet Show, as he issues his version of what happens between the time the curtain falls and the time it rises once more as only Marquis De Sade would have it. All this with the addendum that the Muppets are real, self-sustaining creatures. Creativity be damned, just get ready because I’m not making this up.
Here’s the roster: A self-conscious hungry hippo named Heidi who, natch, has a weight problem as well as perpetual THO; Wynyard, a mad Kermit parody in the form of a drug addled ’Nam vet who was forced to play Russian Roulette in a POW camp; a rat referred to as Trevor who is everyone’s boss and, to add insult to injury, has the voice of Peter Lorre; Harry, a hare whom, consistent with the reputation of his species, winds up with AIDS as a result; a paparazzi fly that figuratively stays on the wall while collecting all of his journalistic slime when not buzzing amid the actors trying to pry juicy bits for his next article; the production’s director, a fox named Sebastian, who sings an ode to sodomy on live television; a Hindu contortionist who gets his head lodged in his ass; and Daisy, an S & M porn queen who just happens to be a cow (all nipples pierced) with a hemorrhoid problem.
What you can expect to see during the film: excessive amounts of gratuitous Muppet nudity, coprophilia, fellatio, two botched suicide attempts, fornication (would this be considered bestiality?), a menage a trios, masturbation, urination, a drug overdose after an anteater mistakes cocaine for Borax, a homicidal killing spree, and a drug war involving crabs, a bulldog, a rat, and a razorback--is a plot really necessary at this point?
More importantly, does the film work as a satire? Some would say Jackson didn’t know where or when to stop but in the same motion I believe that is part of his deconstruction of the American entertainment industry and the media’s glossy eye, using our most innocent caricatures as a springboard.
I don’t really have any more comments because I can’t seem to find where exactly my jaw fell . . . probably around the appearance of the eleken or chiphant (the bastard child of an elephant and a chicken).
Absolute Horror The 30-Something
Senior
I’m sure I’m not alone when I ask this question. Have you ever wondered what the Care Bears
Movie would have been like directed by David Lynch? What would have happened if Wes Craven had
written for Disney or if John Carpenter had shot The Barney Christmas Special?
What if The Devil’s Rejects had hosted an episode of
Oh wait, Peter Jackson already answered that last one.
That’s right, before the prodigal-celluloid-son of New Zealand went on to enthrall the masses with his homo-erotic trilogy about munchkins with hairy feet, he whiled away his younger years working at a photo shop, listening to LP’s of The Beatles and self-producing a hardcore BDSM puppet exploitation film.
MEET THE FEEBLES,
The story opens backstage, on the set of The Feebles Variety Hour, where Robert our shy, bumbling, hero of a hedgehog is starting his first day in the Feeble’s chorus, immediately falling head over heels for a dancing poodle named Lucile. Sparks fly and the film’s romance ignites. Not to worry though, while the underlying love story is the same as the Muppet’s in the most gut-wrenching sense, the world of MEET THE FEEBLES at least offers its visitors more shit, blood and spunk than a federal penitentiary.
As we “Meet” the Feebles, we find life behind the scenes of a hit television show to be endearingly similar to our own, and are instantly drawn into the drama of such characters as: Heidi the Hippo who fights to win back her big-shot producer, coke-dealing-drug-lord of a husband Belch the Walrus from the arms of a prostitute pussy; Harry the Hare who discovers that his years of humping like a rabbit have left him more diseased than a leper colony; and Trevor the Rat who desperately searches for the right leading lady to star in his next bovine-bondage fetish flick.
All that, plus it’s a musical to boot! Complete with such
unforgettable numbers like “I’ve Got One Leg Missing” and the tear jerking
“Sodomy”, which serves as the perfect backdrop for
This is
It's all done in bad taste. Peter Jackson, way before being tamed by the
voluminous epic of J. R. R. Tolkien, is a genius in low-budget filmmaking. With
funds saved from the grant he got for Bad Taste
(1987), he developed this idea (with collaborators Fran Walsh,
Danny Mulheron, and Stephen Sinclair) of repulsive characters in repulsive
situations. The idea of turning the characters into puppets and mascots is
golden; it allows Jackson and his crew to up the depravity without being
absolutely obnoxious to the middlebrow viewer. No matter how gross and amoral
things become, it'll always be perceived as satirical and not pornographic or
gratuitous.
I think that Meet the Feebles is a
product mainly created for fun and laughs (yes, weird sex and pointless
violence is funny). However, it's not completely depleted of sense --- in fact,
the film makes more sense than most pretentious issue films. The subtext of the
horrors of show business hinges on legends and stories of drug-inducing,
sex-starved, and suicidal stars that have graced the entertainment business.
The sleaze, treachery, sex, drugs, and all that jazz that surround the business
are exaggerated for laughs and giggles; the disturbing bit here is that it's
not necessarily far from the truth. That showbiz people are portrayed as worms,
flies, rats, lizards and hogs ups the statement a few notches higher.
The miracle of the movie is that despite its overt trashiness,
Movie Vault [Friday and Saturday Night
Critic]
Peter Jackson’s “Meet the Feebles” has probably the highest
“Oh, God” count of any movie I’ve ever seen. This means that he repeatedly
wheels his camera into rooms and we the audience witness some ghastly,
horrifying nastiness and we mutter “Oh, God” in disgust. This response, or
something like it, is pretty much universal from the audience. The great
divide, however, is whether you cackle helplessly after being repulsed, or you
leave the theater and pray for the souls of those responsible. Lord help me, I
cackled. Pray for my soul.
“Meet the Feebles” is unashamedly a gross-out movie, but, like
What’s surprising about “Meet the Feebles” is its actual quality as a film.
Ghastly episodes are not simply paraded across the screen and then forgotten by
Many tasteful filmmakers lack
The overall experience is wild, raunchy fun. Most of this probably wouldn’t be
as funny if there people instead of puppets. Certainly the
Badmovies.org review Andrew Borntreger
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
The Cavalcade
Of Schlock [Brian J. Wright]
HorrorDVDs.com Paff
The Science Fiction, Horror
and Fantasy Film Review Richard
Scheib
eFilmCritic.com (Justin Helmer)
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov)
Read
the New York Times Review » Janet
Maslin
aka:
Dead-Alive
If it's over-the-top comic horror you're wanting, forget the stupid, sadistic Scream; Peter Jackson's slapstick holocaust remains the all-time champion splatter flick. The bite of a "Sumatran rat monkey" triggers a contagion of walking death in a New Zealand town; it's up to the hero (Timothy Balme) to confront hundreds of bloodthirsty ghouls with the only weapon at hand--the whirring blades of a lawn mower. Avoid the R-rated version, which, oddly, is more distasteful for being less gruesome; the NC-17 edition is a Tex Avery cartoon of hyperbolic gore, which gets funnier with each disgusting new sight gag. Best of all, you won't feel, as in Scream, that the director made the movie in order to see women tortured. Wes Craven hates his characters; Peter Jackson just liquefies his.
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
The Citizen Kane of Oedipal zombie-cannibal-right to
death-comedy-love stories. Kiwi auteur Peter Jackson -- best known stateside as
the maniac behind the Muppet-perversion Meet the Feebles -- takes the
shopworn flesh-eating zombie genre by its rotting horns, adds a dash of Monty
Python, and comes up with a film so gleefully over-the-top that it's
decidedly hard not to gag while you're laughing yourself incontinent. Rivers of
gore, entrails, and ambulating body parts surround poor nebbish Lionel (Balme),
a mama's boy whose mama (Moody) just happens to have been bitten by a Sumatran
Rat Monkey and consequently degenerates into a flesh-hungry omnivore with a
keen knack for oozing pus in front of the houseguests. Before you can say
George Romero, she's snacking on the neighbors, and Lionel's up to his neck in
overly-mobile cadavers. Though he tries valiantly to keep them sedated (with a
big jar of “Sedative,” natch), it's not long before all hell breaks loose in a
30-minute climax that makes Re-Animator look like Captain Kangaroo on a
bad hair day. Add to this Lionel's newfound love interest, Paquita (Penalver),
his scheming uncle Les (Watkin), and a zombie infant that makes abortion seem
like a really, really good idea, and you have quite literally the most disgusting
comedy ever.
The hilarious prologue to this
The DVD case advertises "Dead Alive" (originally titled "Brain Dead")
as the goriest movie ever made. I would have to agree that it is in contention,
at least the 97 minute unrated version I saw. There is an 82 minute R-rated version
available, but if you're going to watch a movie like this, you might as well
watch it.
The story follows a hapless young man who lives with his domineering mother. He
meets an ethnic girl who has been told by a fortune teller that he is the man
for her. The two go on a date away from the prying eyes of the disapproving
mother. However, she follows them to the zoo, and while spying on them, she is
bitten by the Rat-Monkey, which she squishes with her foot in anger. The bite
slowly turns her into a zombie-like mess of running sores and healthy appetite.
A hilarious scene involves her attempting to serve lunch to members of her
ladies' group while she slowly loses control of her facilities, including the
loss of her ear, which she eats with her pudding. The terrified but loyal son
tries to hide her from the public and his new girlfriend, which is hard after
she escapes from the basement and is hit by a train. Even that won't kill her,
and the disease spreads quickly as her son attempts to contain the epidemic.
Those familiar with Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead"
trilogy will appreciate this film, since it blends the same horrific gore and
slapstick comedy. This film will make most people sick to their stomachs. It
was hysterically funny at times, but the urge to laugh had to compete with the
urge to vomit. Oh, and the director, Peter Jackson, also directed
"Heavenly Creatures", and is directing the "Lord of the Rings"
trilogy. That's range, my friends.
Inside Pulse Brad Torreano
Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Rumsey Taylor]
Badmovies.org review Andrew Borntreger
Best-Horror-Movies.com Lee Roberts
Mutant Reviewers from Hell Justin
Best DVD SBG
eFilmCritic.com DarkHorse
Livejournal [I
Hate Movies] Steve Clark
Mondo Digital also reviewing FORGOTTEN SILVER and THE
FRIGHTENERS
Read
the New York Times Review » Stephen
Holden
HEAVENLY CREATURES A 95
Orson Welles? Aaugh! The most hideous man alive!
There’s something desperately exciting about bodies on stretchers. —Juliet (Kate Winslet)
The happy event is to take place tomorrow afternoon. Next time I write in this diary mother will be dead. How odd, yet how pleasing.
—Pauline (Melanie Lynskey)
This still remains
Peter Jackson’s chilling masterpiece in my eyes, his most thrillingly inventive
work, one that melds all of his many talents together in this brilliantly
edited film, which is a mesmerizing portrait of two dizzyingly adolescent girls
who are so disconnected and estranged from the world that they bond in an
obsessively infatuating friendship that includes writing a novel together, where
the world they write about intersects in their real lives, where the two find
it hard to tell the two worlds apart, relying totally and exclusively on the
friendship and love of the other, at the expense of all else, as their fragile
connection to reality soon loses its hinges.
Based on a real life event, Jackson brings it to life through the
recreated script obtained from the meticulous diary entries of one of the
characters (Pauline), where her exact words are used as much as possible. This is the film that introduces Kate Winslet
to the world as Juliet, and she is in every sense of the word superb, as her
free-wheeling independence and fertile imagination is what lays open the
groundwork for the repressed, darker side of Pauline (Melanie Lynskey) to find
expression in the real world. One of the
best uses of opera music in any film I’ve ever seen, as it so perfectly
expresses that fractured schism, that hole in reality, in this case featuring
the extraordinary talents of legendary tenor Mario Lanza as the ultimate image
of male sexuality, but not in any real sense, only in a fantasized dream world,
while Orson Welles, on the other hand, is despised by Juliet, calling him “It”
and also “the most hideous man alive,” where her detestation of Welles comes
alive in a shadowy THIRD MAN (1949) sequence, where the two girls are racing
against their own internally fantasized images of evil, escaping from him,
escaping from themselves, escaping from reality until they end up naked in each
other’s arms, perhaps the only salvation either one will ever feel over the
course of their entire lives.
Opening brilliantly
with the subversively dry Buńuelian tone used in a travel documentary on
Christchurch, New Zealand in the early 1950’s, a city where only Copenhagen is
more renowned for bicycling, creating an optimistic and positively sun-drenched
view of the city which is quickly interrupted by two young girls running and
shrieking hysterically through the woods all covered in blood, which leads to
the opening title sequence. Pauline is
perfectly miserable in her world with large scars running down one leg, where
her parents run a boarding home, so unwanted strangers are always entering and
exiting her life at will. She seems to
have a constant frown on her face, never smiling, looking like the eternal
grouch, where in her class portrait, she’s easy to pick out as the only one not
smiling. The lovely Juliet enters during
the middle of the school year, an English girl who’s spent much of her life
traveling, who’s been brought to
As the only two girls
who are excused from gym class, the two read and invent stories together,
becoming inseparable, where in one of many Mario Lanza montage sequences, their
lives are a whirlwind of dreamlike happiness, interrupting Juliet’s parents in
their living room, playing a Mario Lanza record, dancing together out of the
room and out of the house, and after another quick cut to the gym class, find
themselves on a rollicking bicycle ride down a country road where a car forces
Pauline off her bike, where the two end up in the woods ripping their clothes
off, actually ending with a quick kiss.
In yet another, they are building a giant sandcastle by the sea when the
camera swoops in through the castle entranceway and enters a fairytale fantasy
world of Borovnia, eventually leading to the 4th world, an idyllic
paradise of unparalleled beauty and enchantment. It is here that Pauline and Juliet meet with
their imaginary friends, where the intensity of their happiness leads to a kind
of intimate closeness that begins to worry their parents, where another ultra
conservative family chosen therapist has a close up on his mouth as he slowly
enunciates the word with exaggerated perfection for the parents as it rolls off
his lips – homosexuality. So to the
film’s credit, it doesn’t shy way from this subject, but it’s also not the
focal point of the film, as neither of these teenage girls seems to have much
of an active sex life. Instead, the film
teeters on their fragile hold on reality, where both have hugely depressing
parental issues where neither feels appreciated or loved, and only in the
protected arms of one another do they feel liberated and safe from the boring
conformist existence that surrounds them.
Jackson does a simply
exquisite job blending the fantasy and the real, finding an inner tension from
that tenuous grasp on reality, while relishing in some brilliantly colorful
fantasy sequences that are as visually bold and inventive as anything he’s ever
done over his entire career. Winslet and
Lynskey are both amazing, and Jackson provides an illuminating dream world to
surround them that blends seamlessly into their real lives, where they enter
and exit at will, a beautiful mix of ecstacy and anguish as the turbulent world
around them grows ever grimmer. The use
of Nabucco’s “Humming Chorus” is
stunning, one of the more intimately ethereal works in all of opera, feeling
like one of the more exquisite death marches ever portrayed onscreen, which
couldn’t be more eerie and unbelievably haunting. The tenderness is the key, and that superbly
holds the entire film together. Written
by Jackson and his real-life spouse, Frances Walsh, it’s a brilliantly written
story, perhaps Jackson’s most luminously photographed film, perfectly acted,
including the measured performance from Pauline’s overworked, working class
mother, uncomfortable at times and hauntingly edgy, while dazzling the audience
at other moments with a sublime grasp of cinematic ecstacy and pure joy. The film is simply oozing with inventiveness,
making this a remarkable experience that holds up better than anything else
this multi-talented director has ever done, perfectly mixing a near documentary
realism with a hallucination tinged phantasmagorical fantasy world that is
never less than enchanting.
Heavenly
Creatures Mark Deming from
All Movie Guide
After winning a cult following for several offbeat and darkly
witty gore films,
User
Reviews from imdb Author: ManhattanBeatnik
from Waynesville, OH
While watching Heavenly Creatures, we bring ourselves to
sympathize with two unlikely heroines, and then they betray our trust by
committing an unthinkable crime; by the time the film has ended, we feel as if
our emotions have been chewed up and spat back out to the degree where we don't
know WHAT to feel anymore. Heavenly Creatures is either the greatest act of
manipulation ever put on film or a brilliant masterpiece about the dark side of
life: personally, I think it's a little bit of both. Either way, I'm still
trying to get my pulse to return to its normal rate. Director Peter Jackson
(who before this had only made a number of cheap nasty horror movies -- Bad
Taste and Braindead being the most popular --, but later became one of the most
talked-about film-makers as a result of his film interpretation of The Lord of
the Rings) does some remarkable things with bringing this horrendous true story
to the screen: not only is this one of the most amazing motion pictures I've
ever viewed, but it is one of the most important films to date. Period. Pauline
(Melanie Lynskey) and Juliet (Kate Winslet) have developed an inseparable
friendship whose intimacy is questioned by their strict parents -- Pauline's
being the most stern. As their lives (and our sentiments) are suddenly torn
apart, they decide to run off together -- but this could mean having to murder
someone. I will not go any further in describing the plot (and I fear that I
may already have said too much), not because I want it to surprise you, but
because this film is so powerful that I would be doing a disservice to it if I
tried to describe it in mere words. Written by Jackson and his real-life
spouse, Frances Walsh, the screenplay for Heavenly Creatures is nothing short
of remarkable (it even garnered the Academy's attention, earning the film's
singular nomination). We both hate and love the two main characters, but most
of all we just want them to be happy, to which Jackson and Walsh ask us the
question, "at what cost?" Their scenes together -- ESPECIALLY the
joyous ones -- are drenched with an unbearable amount of foreboding
hopelessness that makes the inevitable conclusion even more tense. In her debut
film role, Kate Winslet displays much of the potential she fulfilled later on
in her career, but Melanie Lynskey (who has only achieved modest success since)
deserves an equal amount of praise -- if not more. By the time we're sucked
into the story (which doesn't take long), we forget that they're even acting,
and our eyes are peeled to the screen with a voyeuristic intensity that is
utterly discomforting.
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)
After a few gory items well-loved by the relative few who saw them, Peter Jackson decided to tackle more mature material. Except he didn't. 'Heavenly Creatures' is a quantum leap in substance from gleefully sick flicks like 'Meet the Feebles' and 'Dead Alive,' but it retains Jackson's restless devotion to the delirium of fantasy.
After a diabolically goofy prologue — a heartily square
travelogue of 1950s Christchurch, New Zealand — we're thrown rudely into bloody
chaos: Two girls, Pauline (Melanie Lynskey) and Juliet (Kate Winslet), running
and shrieking, smeared and spattered with gore. We don't know them yet, and we
don't know where the blood came from (though Pauline says "Mummy's
terribly hurt"), but we sure are intrigued. The rest of Heavenly
Creatures explains how the girls got to that state.
Pauline, a defiantly frumpy girl (played by Lynskey with uncompromising
unpleasantness that still manages to be likable), lives with her parents
in a clean but cramped house, where boarders sometimes rent a room. The glamorous
Juliet arrives from England, instantly antagonizing her new French teacher by
correcting the old lady's grammar. Pauline, who's in the same class, is
impressed. Soon the girls, sitting out gym class, bond over their illnesses —
"All the best people have bad chests and bone diseases. It's all frightfully
romantic," gushes Juliet with the sort of passion only Kate Winslet seems
able to access. These two were goth and emo before there were goth and
emo, and in due time they construct an elaborate fantasy world drawing on
standard mythic templates as well as pop culture of the day (Mario Lanza, Orson
Welles, etc.). They're escaping their families — Pauline's forbidding drudge of
a mother, Juliet's intellectual but cold mother and father — and hurtling toward
a place that gives them the status and sense of belonging they crave.
Jackson is always chasing after the girls with his camera as they sprint along
the landscape of New Zealand, morphing in and out of the land they call
Borovnia. Heavenly Creatures has been called a lesbian film, but even
though the girls do kiss and snuggle while acting out the fantasy narrative,
they go way beyond sexuality into pathology. Of course, back in the '50s,
homosexuality was pathology (the massive close-up of a doctor sibilantly
enunciating the word homo-ssseck-shuality is good for a laugh), and the
girls' parents — Pauline's working-class family and Juliet's far more
cosmopolitan parents — decide the girls have been spending far too much time
together. Which, undeniably, they have. Jackson acknowledges that the
girls' feverish fantasy life, while rich and satisfying to them, is also
leading them down a path from which there is no sane return.
Heavenly Creatures acquires emotional heft partly because of Sarah
Peirse's honest performance as Pauline's unsophisticated but hardworking
mother. Pauline despises her and is mortified by her very existence, but
Jackson paints the mother as a frightened woman who made a lot of mistakes as a
girl and possibly sees Pauline unconsciously following in her footsteps. The
final reel, in which Pauline encourages her mom to have another piece of cake
before their fateful walk in the woods, is exquisitely sad. The girls have been
driven to the point where their actions, meant to unite them forever, will do
quite the opposite. As the moment of truth approaches, Lynskey and Winslet
perform a duet of regret — the awful weight of what the girls are about to do
settles rock-like in their stomachs.
On one level, Heavenly Creatures is a stellar true-crime story, which
Jackson probably grew up hearing about. The movie also outed Juliet, who'd
changed her name to Anne Perry and written a series of popular mystery novels;
Pauline now goes by Hilary Nathan. As per court order, they haven't seen each
other since 1954. The movie, upon repeat viewings, only becomes more poignant
with that knowledge.
I truly don't think Jackson's filmmaking has gotten better since 'Heavenly Creatures' — just bigger. Here, at age 32, he nailed a difficult tonal mix of exultation and anguish he hasn't approached since, though his forthcoming adaptation of 'The Lovely Bones' may restore the old magic. The inner tension of the film emerges from Jackson's enjoyment of the girls' bustling insanity and then his gradual withdrawal from it — turning out the lights, one by one, in the kingdom of delusion.
You have to adore a movie in which one of the characters refers to Orson Welles as "It."
Based on the infamous 1954 matricide in New Zealand involving two ninth-grade schoolgirls, Peter Jackson's stunning "Heavenly Creatures" tells the story of an uncommonly powerful love. When Pauline and Juliet are together, the wind is filled with butterflies and the trumpet call of Mario Lanza, "the greatest tenor in the whole world!!" Their universe is an exclusive realm of two, existing half in reality where they are ostracized as peculiar, half in fantasy, where they escape to a highly evolved system of dream lovers and romantic alter egos.
The film begins with Pauline (Melanie Lynskey), a miserable child whose mother runs a boardinghouse. In the photo for her class at her proper girls' school in Christchurch, New Zealand, she sticks out amid all the blond hair and proud smiles like a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake (with apologies to Raymond Chandler). She's the fat one in the back, the disaster, the smudge with the ugly scowl and unruly black curls.
Because of a bone disease that left her with brittle legs, Pauline is unable to share in the sunny, athletic life of her classmates. Then one day her life is changed forever, when a new student named Juliet (Kate Winslet) joins her in her private war against the bores and commoners of Christchurch.
Like Pauline, Juliet thumbs her nose with proud disdain at parochial Christchurch society. But, unlike her new friend, Juliet is not an ugly duckling, but a kind of fairy princess who plucks Pauline from her lily pad, kisses her, and transforms her.
Because she suffers from tuberculosis, Juliet has had to spend almost as much time in the hospital as Pauline, and the girls' common status as invalids sparks a friendship that grows into a murderous passion.
Jackson, who directed and wrote the screenplay, moves through each of these phases with daring and imagination. His camera follows his lovers as they run breathless through the woods before collapsing into each other's arms at the end of the day, spent from the exertions of their special bond.
To his credit, Jackson doesn't patronize this romance as a girlish crush gone ballistic, or pigeonhole it merely as "lesbian." These girls are in love and, clearly, he envies them their abandon and their complete, unguarded commitment to each other. In Jackson's view, theirs is a great romance that, unfortunately, others were not equipped to deal with.
Perhaps, if the world were more enlightened, more flexible, things might not turn out as gruesomely as they do. The problems begin when Juliet's parents begin to see the girls' relationship as "unwholesome." Because of marital problems, her parents are returning to England and plan to send Juliet to South Africa. Rather than be separated, the girls devise an elaborate plan to, as Pauline says it, "moider mother" and escape to Hollywood.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands of movies have been made about girlfriends and their unique bond, but I can't think of another one where the topic is addressed more frankly or openly. Though the film's subject is sensationalistic in the extreme, Jackson's style is poetic. He presents Pauline and Juliet, who eventually returns to England, where she becomes an author of mystery novels, as singularly blessed. And he raises the question of whether there is any love purer or more gratifying than this same-sex soul-mating. Because their love ends in murder, it's at least implied that the romance is tainted somehow. Does the fault lie with the girls, or with the cramped morality of the time? Thankfully, this powerful, evocative movie leaves the question wide open.
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Read
the New York Times Review » Janet
Maslin
When Forgotten Silver
was first shown on New Zealand television, it sparked a minor scandal when some
viewers discovered that the film's protagonist, pioneering Kiwi filmmaker Colin
McKenzie, didn't really exist, leading some wags to denounce director Peter Jackson
as the perpetrator of a fraud, which speaks volumes about just how well
executed a satire Forgotten Silver
is -- it's one of the most accomplished mock documentaries ever made,
flawlessly re-creating "long lost" bits of silent cinema as well as
offering a superbly deadpan spoof of television documentaries. While Peter Jackson's
oddball humor provided a welcome subtext in horror films like Brain Dead
and The Frighteners,
here his sly wit is brought to the forefront, and if Forgotten Silver
never clearly presents itself as a joke, in many ways that just makes it more
potent as it bears the ring of possible truth. Jackson and
co-director Costa Botes
are also ably assisted by their crew (especially cameraman Alun Bollinger,
who is asked to emulate nearly 80 years of cinematography technique and never
misses a trick) and the cast (the actors in the silent segments capture the
broad histrionics of D.W. Griffith-era
filmmaking with commendable accuracy, and the contemporary interview subjects
hit their marks just right). Forgotten Silver
is crafted with so much attention to detail that it takes a fairly committed
film buff to see through the surface and catch all the jokes, but anyone who
loves movies will delight in it -- and if you take it at face value, it's still
a fascinating story about a truly remarkable man.
eFilmCritic.com [Rob Gonsalves]
Together with Costa Botes, Peter Jackson pulled the wool over
It's of course vastly more funny if you know it's all fake,
though it'd be interesting to watch it with someone who's not in on the joke.
The conceit is that
Quite aside from being perhaps the most elaborate prank in Jackson's career to
date (or since), Forgotten Silver is a brilliant piece of moviemaking in
and of itself; Jackson obviously relishes the opportunity to
"re-enact" McKenzie's "work," dabbling in the language of
silent film and paying tribute to the birth of cinema. This is easily the
least-known must-see film in
This, of course, would come in handy when it came time for
DVD Verdict [Mitchell Hattaway]
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Bright Lights Film Journal [Gary Morris]
(capsule review)
Mondo Digital also reviewing BRAIN DEAD and THE FRIGHTENERS
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
Tucson Weekly [Stacey Richter]
Peter Jackson's follow-up after the critically acclaimed Heavenly Creatures is a surprisingly unambitious, B-style horror movie. Michael J. Fox stars as Frank Bannister, a "psychic investigator" who uses his genuine ability to commune with the dead to swindle the bereaved into using his services. Then a real, totally malevolent ghost shows up and begins knocking off townspeople left and right, and Bannister must finally use his powers for good. Part horror movie, part comedy, The Frighteners tries to play both ends against the middle and ends up not being consistently funny or consistently scary. The special effects are great though, and you can't beat that campy, seventies, B-movie feeling.
At last, a big-budget summer movie that actually delivers on its promise of
entertaining escapist entertainment, without insulting the audience's
intelligence in the process. While it's inevitably a bit of a disappointment,
coming as it does on the heels of Jackson's staggeringly brilliant Heavenly
Creatures, The Frighteners is nonetheless first-rate goofy fun,
marred only by a rather weak first act and a truly lame denouement (the final
five minutes or so seem to have been imported from some other, considerably
dumber summer movie...maybe that one with the tornadoes and Helen Hunt running
around in a flimsy white tank top...can't remember what it was called...). And
get this: the movie actually has a plot. You remember plots, don't you
-- those sequences of events that keep you wondering what might happen next?
(If you've forgotten, I can't say as I blame you, as it's been quite some time
since a film with a budget this big featured one worth paying attention to.)
Granted, it's a fairly derivative plot, incorporating elements from Ghostbusters,
Ghost, The Shining, and various other supernatural flicks, but
Jackson and his co-writer, Fran Walsh, manage to combine these influences into
a surprisingly satisfying blend of over-the-top comedy and ghoulish horror.
Ultimately, though, it's
Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs)
Peter Jackson's The Frighteners is a rare thing, an intelligent, funny, dynamic movie. It even has ideas. It also has Michael J. Fox, but really, that's okay here. As "psychic investigator" Frank Bannister, Fox gives a deft and understated performance, no small feat in a film where he's interacting with bluescreens more often than he is with people or even machines (just think of all the dopey drop-jawed reaction shots you've seen in recent special effects-heavy films, and you'll get a sense of what I mean).
Frank's con is a trendy one (post-Ghostbusters and post-X Files): after a near-death trauma some years ago (one which involved the death of his wife, for which he feels extremely guilty), he can see and communicate with ghosts. So he and three of them (played by Chi McBride, Jim Fyfe and John Astin) scam neighbors and newcomers alike: the ghosts make ooky noises and shake up household appliances, the afflicted homeowner calls Frank, and he — after a lively, thingamajiggy-jazzed performance — declares the place "clean," for a fee of course. (The team also has a side business in allowing grieving relatives to speak to the recently departed: Frank shamelessly passes out his cards at funerals.)
While all this might provide the entire plot of someone
else's movie, for
It's hard to distill the plot to a few lines, it twists and turns so continually. Suffice to say that it involves a haunted house (really haunted, not by Frank's crew), a social worker (Trini Alvarado) who is trying to help the woman (Dee Wallace Stone, who is perfect, and it's good to see her again) trapped in that house, a serial killer (Jake Busey), and a terrifically goony FBI agent (Jeffrey Combs, playing what might be called the anti-Mulder) hot on the trail of Frank, whom he believes to be a ruthless murderer. In other words, there's too much going on here to lay out in a straight line. The slides between past and present, between bodies (the ghosts here are constantly renegotiating their relationship to the material world), between life and death, all make the movie pretty much nonstop, culminating in an especially trippy final action sequence.
Quick
Change Artists | Jonathan Rosenbaum July 19, 1996
Who cares “What Lies
Beneath”? - Salon.com Michael Sragow, July 20, 2000
Cinevistaramascope:
'90s Horror Poll: Day 7 - The Frighteners
Andrew Bemis
James Berardinelli's
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Peter
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Frighteners (1996): Peter Jackson's Overlooked Gem | Popcorn ... Robert Beveridge
Mondo Digital also reviewing FORGOTTEN SILVER and BRAIN
DEAD
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Frighteners | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum (capsule)
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Chronicle [Joey O'Bryan]
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Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Read
the New York Times Review » Janet
Maslin
DVDBeaver Yunda Eddie Feng
My favorite moment of
the entire epic saga, which was rewritten from the book, and occurs early in
this first film when Gandalf notices Sam Gamgee lurking outside Frodo's
window while he was explaining the dangerous history of the
ring. Asked what he heard, Sam blurts out: "Nothing
important. That is, I heard a good deal about a ring, a Dark Lord, and
something about the end of the world."
Michael
Wilmington looks at the DVD from the Chicago Tribune (link lost):
J.R.R. Tolkien's
"The Lord of the Rings" is one great literary achievement that
reached the screen without being much altered, diminished or betrayed. Instead,
Peter Jackson's faithful and elaborate three-film adaptation (comprising
"The Fellowship of the Ring," "The Two Towers" and "The
Return of the King") preserves and translates much of the original's
fantasy and thrill, along with its huge Middle Earth canvas. The excitement is
there and the supernatural beauty, but the complexity is there as well: the
sense of a whole magical world opening up before us.
You might wonder, with this embarrassment of riches, which DVD issue of
"Lord of the Rings" you should own. I'm fond of the old extended
edition, with the director's cuts and numerous documentaries. But the new
"The Lord of the Rings" Limited Edition set, featuring DVDs of all
three films, deserves the nod. These editions contain both the original theatrical
releases and the extended director's cut versions, as well as three newly
released behind-the-scenes documentaries by Costa Botes
((star)(star)(star))--all shot cinema verite-style. Even if you've got one of
the "Rings" DVD sets, these issues are pure magic.
HERE Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge
The Lord of the Rings : The Fellowship of the Ring is three hours of
persuasive, exciting, heart-pounding, eye-popping, spectacular nonsense.
There’s nothing wrong with epic entertainment, of course, but you have to
wonder whether it’s worth lavishing so much time (theirs and ours), money,
talent and effort on the fatuous 50-year-old mental doodlings of an
Tolkien, of course, made no bones about his borrowing from Beowulf, Arthurian legend, Wagner’s Ring of the Valkyrie, Homer’s Odyssey and other sources to create his own legend as an excuse for a series of concocted languages and cultures. The book has been described as ‘an exercise in philology’ (the study of language), with the story pretty much secondary and arbitrary: Frodo Baggins (Wood) inherits an all-powerful ring from his cousin Bilbo (Holm). His wizard friend Gandalf (McKellen) realises that the ring must be destroyed before it can be reclaimed by its maker, the satanic Lord Sauron. But the ring can only be destroyed where it was made in Mordor, Sauron’s kingdom. Frodo and Gandalf set off on the perilous trek to Mordor, accompanied by hobbits Sam (Astin), Merry (Monaghan) and Pippin (Boyd), dwarf Gimli (Rhys-Davies), human warriors Boromir (Bean) and Aragorn (Mortensen) and elf archer Legolas (Bloom): the nine-strong Fellowship of the Ring…
‘Rings’ caused little stir on its first appearance back in the 1950s –
Mervyn Peake’s ‘Gormenghast’ attracted much more interest and serious
consideration. It was only when ‘Rings’ was re-issued in American paperback
that it clicked with the same late-60s altered-states crowd that turned 2001
into a blockbuster, and its influence on impressionable prog-rock musicians
was immediate and profound. For years it lingered quietly on in the shadowy
world of Dungeons&Dragons fantasy-game playing - until now. But no matter
how dramatically
Watching Fellowship is like being teleported into a series of Roger
Dean mid-70s prog-rock album covers, with the occasional foray into the
sulphuric world of their bastard cousins, the sleeves of heavy metal LPs. In
movie terms, it’s like alternating between Ridley Scott’s Legend and
Michael Mann’s The Keep, except with worse music. Tolkien – whose
fantasy is strictly Anglo-Saxon – would have hated the movie’s relentless
Celtic pan-pipes soundtrack, but they’re perfect for the soft-rock mood
While the other actors avoid such embarrassment, it’s painful to watch classically-trained performers like McKellen, Holm and Bean dignifying Tolkien’s dialogue by treating it like Shakespearean battle poetry. No such problems with Christopher Lee – he’s been mouthing this kind of portentous nonsense for six decades, and actually thinks it’s good, important, psychologically intricate material. In fact, Rings has no more depth than Harry Potter, which, for all its faults, never took itself this seriously. As a movie, Rings is a more exciting experience – the opening battle against Sauron and the climactic confrontation with the demon Balrog in the ruins of Moria, are genuinely stunning moments. But to be the truly great film some viewers and critics have hailed, shouldn’t Rings do as much for the mind as it does for the eyes and the nerves?
If anything, the movie is anti-thought: the more you think about it,
the worse it gets. Leaving aside the very dodgy racial angle, Tolkien’s fable
is an anxiety dream about the industrialisation of the British countryside –
specifically, the growth of
And if Fellowship of the Ring actually is about anything, shouldn’t it at least be about fellowship? If so, who does Sam, who’s supposedly Frodo’s best friend and no kind of social inferior, keeps calling him ‘Mister Frodo’ all the time like he’s some kind of servant flunkey. At the end, after the pair have been through all manner of tribulations, Sam says it again - Frodo turns round with an understanding smile on his face and we think: at last, he’s going to say ‘Sam, just call me Frodo’. But no: “I’m glad you’re with me, Sam,” is all he can manage. As the credits roll and Enya’s warblings fill the cinema, you find yourself hating Frodo, Elijah Wood, Peter Jackson, John Tolkien, and everyone else involved in the whole damn palaver. Even as you impatiently start wondering what’s going to happen next.
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
"Much that once was is lost" is the poignant opening phrase in Peter Jackson's long-awaited, mega-million-dollar production of Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Absent fidelity may be less the issue than temps perdu—there's an elegiac tone to this lavish first installment of J.R.R. Tolkien's cult trilogy.
Robustly ranging from the cozy nook of a hobbit's parlor to the blasted pitch-pots of darkest Mordor, visualizing Nordic elves and subhuman, blue-faced orcs, staging wizard wars with the panache of a Hong Kong master and building slowly to a boffo ending, Peter Jackson's adaptation is certainly successful on its own terms. Like the animated skeletons in a Ray Harryhausen adventure flick, the relics have come to life. With the release of The Fellowship of the Ring, American critics of a particular age (and possibly gender) have their own Harry Potter.
Indeed, watching the smoky, twisted images of the computer-generated masses in hand-to-hand combat with decomposing goblins or listening to the wit and wisdom of Gandalf the Grey (an unrecognizable Ian McKellen), I was forced to acknowledge the degree to which Tolkien's imaginary universe had impressed itself on my 12-year-old brain—and, despite the timeless struggle between good and evil, how little that mattered to me now. For me, the trilogy's appeal was exemplified by its maps, the invented languages, and the hundred pages of appendices at the back of the final volume. Unlike C.S. Lewis's Narnia, Tolkien's Middle Earth has no discernible religion. The book itself is a sacred text—which is to say, it proposes the world as a text, a literary analogue to the abstract pleasures found in the purely statistical universe of baseball.
Back in the day, the whole idea of a Lord of the Rings
movie would have seemed a desecration. Where Ralph Bakshi's ill-fated and
largely forgotten animated version lacked gravitas,
Although the Elvish settlement of Rivendell resembles an
Alpine ski lodge for garden gnomes, and the more rustic Elves of Mirkwood would
appear to dwell in a kind of tree house expansion of the Enchanted Tiki Room,
the movie only rarely achieves a sense of kitsch grandeur—as in the image of
colossal statues in the river mist. More often, it's a cluttered attic of
cloying pre-Raphaelite visual notions. The equivalent of Tolkien's often turgid
descriptions, a single
The phantom zone where Frodo finds himself whenever he slips on the sinister ring he is charged to destroy is similarly restrained—a blurry, blustery realm of negative images. I was amused to see that these include noisily suggestive cutaways to the fiery slit of doom that is the object of the quest, but then I'm no longer a believer. (My faith was shaken back in high school when I flippantly referred to The Lord of the Rings as the greatest novel of the 20th century and a friend's older brother asked if I was talking about The Magic Mountain.) Still, it's a religion I remember, particularly as a spell cast over the more fanciful wing of the '60s counterculture. What happened to those "Frodo Lives" pins, the anti-war graffiti written in Elvish, the underground newspapers with names like Gandalf's Garden, the fey psychedelic troubadours singing songs of Middle Earth?
The metaphors were surely relevant. I doubt I'm the only one to survive a lysergic experience in which the world was unpleasantly divided between hobbits and orcs or who recognized Richard Nixon as some sort of miserable Gollum. How much fun it would have been to see a real desecration of Tolkien that periodized the trilogy's cosmic adventures by having them played out inside the brain of some acid-ripped hippie—the Fellowship leaving the snug communes of northern Vermont on a perilous mission to cast the "ring of power" into the boiler of some fetid East Village basement. But that would defeat the entire concept of timeless fantasy.
In the essay "On Fairy-stories," written in the late '30s at the time that the idea for The Lord of the Rings was taking shape, Tolkien argued that "the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds was the heart of the desire of Faërie." Some will surely find a parallel between Tolkien's cosmic struggle and our own current crusade, but reference to this world is the last thing that The Fellowship of the Ring wishes to make.
Mastering
Middle Earth: Fellowship of the Ring - Bright Lights Film ... Phil
Cooper from Bright Lights Film Journal,
January 2, 2002
World Socialist Web
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DVD Verdict Bill Gibron
PopMatters Todd R. Ramlow
The
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Film as
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Extended Edition
The
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring - Wikipedia
more rampant carnage
Can't prestige be coupled with something invigorating, like
box-office clout? It can be, and it is in The Two Towers, the new
installment of the immensely popular, award-winning The Lord of the Rings.
I confess I was less than thrilled by the first installment, The Fellowship
of the Ring, which amounted to a long series of fights and battles,
interrupted by episodes of sexless mooning. The Two Towers is better, if
only because it's got a single big battle, which it saves till the end. It's
also brightened by the introduction of Gollum (voice of Andy Serkis), a
pathetic, wasted creature who once possessed the evil Ring. Whenever Gollum
struggles with his conscience, the movie twitches into life. For the most part,
though, The Two Towers is preoccupied only with inanimate forces: the
flood of water that engulfs a wizard's tower, or the flood of pixels that pour
across the screen as computer-generated armies. I began to wonder, as the waves
crashed about: Is it still possible for a movie to get excited about people?
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
The Empire Strikes Back notwithstanding, the middle parts of trilogies don't have the best of reputations, composed as they are mainly of connective tissue, the bits that fall inbetween the introduction and the conclusion. It's no surprise that the characters in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers spend an awful lot of time walking. Pippin (Billy Boyd) and Merry (Dominic Monaghan) spend at least an hour of screen-time being carried through the forest by an ambulatory tree (known to Tolkien fans and crossword buffs as an Ent), while more intrepid Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin) make it all the way to the gates of the dread forest Mordor before backing off and circling around to try an alternate route.
Even if you're not familiar with the scope of J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy, this can't come as much of a surprise. Having decided in The Fellowship of the Ring that all their hopes rest on the success of Frodo's quest to drop the ring of power into the molten heart of Mount Doom, destroying it and the dark lord Sauron with it, the characters have but one objective -- which is to say if they actually made it all the way to Mount Doom in part two, all that would be left for part three would be three hours of people standing around going, "Whew, that was a close one." But the reduced burden of plot actually allows The Two Towers to be a better realized and more satisfying experience than its predecessor (even in the superior, more leisurely version released on DVD). For all the sorcery and swordplay -- and, it should be noted, The Two Towers has plenty of both -- what the film really offers us is a chance to inhabit Tolkien's world, which this time we get to do without worrying about how we got there or where we're going next.
If you look back at the movie's end, you may realize that
very little has happened to the major characters, but it's hardly likely to
occur to you while you're watching the movie. It begins with a great bang, a
dream flashback to Gandalf's demise, this time expanded to show the
frail-looking wizard plummeting through space, grabbing a sword out of the air
and hacking at the flaming Balrog as they both descend. And it ends with one,
too: the battle to protect the human stronghold of Helms Deep, which in the
book occupies only a few dozen pages, but is here expanded to occupy most of
the movie's last hour, in one of the most elaborate and complex battle
sequences ever committed to film. Since all three films were shot concurrently,
there's no noticeable difference in style, but the digital effects, which
progress one film at a time, are noticeably improved, particularly when it comes
to Gollum, the shrivelled creature who once held the ring, and has been reduced
to a reptilian hulk by its loss. Entirely digital (though based on the
movements of actor Andy Serkis), Gollum seems nearly as real as the
furry-footed hobbits he shares scenes with -- which is to say, real enough, but
not too much so. And in essence, that's the secret to
When it comes to making trilogies, the second film is always the
hardest. While they often contain plenty of conflict and complications, they
can't offer any final resolutions. Repetition is also a problem — while some
background info is needed to bring newcomers up to speed, filmmakers can't
waste too much of well-informed series fans' time for fear of boring them.
The best solution is to hit the ground running. The Lord of the Rings: The
Two Towers literally does, joining three of the Fellowship of the Ring's
protagonists — the dwarf Gimli (John
Rhys-Davies), the elf Legolas (Orlando Bloom),
and human Aragorn (Viggo
Mortensen) — as they sprint into the rolling hills of Rohan, a kingdom of
noble cavalrymen. They're hot on the heels of a group of fearsome Uruk-hai orcs
who kidnapped two hobbits, Merry (Dominic
Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd),
in Fellowship's finale.
However, instead of catching up to the wee abductees, the trio runs into the
middle of a full-fledged war. The malevolent wizard Saruman (Christopher
Lee), creator of the Uruk-hai, is now openly allied with the dark lord
Sauron, the once-omnipotent forger of the ring of power. While the latter is
still massing his armies in the wasteland of Mordor, the former is on the move,
dispatching a group of wild barbarians to burn Rohan's outlying villages. A
10,000-strong phalanx of Uruk-hai is also marching on the realm's capital,
Edoras, the not-so-restful locale where Aragorn and his companions find
themselves.
Meanwhile, hobbits Sam (Sean Astin)
and Frodo (Elijah
Wood) are trudging toward Mordor and the completion of their mission, the
destruction of the ring in the volcano of
Frodo's fascination with the ring pales in comparison to that of Gollum (voiced
by Andy
Serkis and based on his on-set movements), the twisted creature from whom
Bilbo Baggins originally stole it. Seen only momentarily in Fellowship,
the computer-generated character emerges from the shadows here. Unlike The Phantom Menace's
poo-poo-joke-spouting abomination Jar-Jar Binks, Gollum delivers a full-fledged
dramatic performance. On one hand, he's a poor wretch, his body withered and
mind poisoned by centuries of contact with the ring. On the other, he's a devious
psychopath, laying murderous plots to separate Frodo from his malevolent cargo.
These two sides clash in brilliantly edited, schizophrenic internal dialogues
during which Gollum's good and bad personalities argue, Raising Cain-style, as though
they were different people. Although the CG creature isn't always 100%
convincing in medium shots, in these close-ups, he's totally mesmerizing.
In J.R.R. Tolkien's book The Two Towers, Frodo's and Aragorn's tales are
told separately in its first and second halves. In the film, co-writer/director
Peter
Jackson alternates between the plots, but ultimately gives the latter
primacy. Hobbit-spotters may be disappointed by the ring-bearer's decreased
role. However, this decision allows for spectacular amounts of action,
particularly during the battle of Helm's Deep. Although it only took up a few
pages in the book, the clash is the film's climax, a full 45 minutes of
orc-hewing, elf-skewering action which make Gladiator's opening
skirmish look like a Pee-wee soccer game. The battle is even more suspenseful
because
There are plenty of other examples of effects wizardry besides Gollum and
Helm's Deep. The film opens with a jaw-dropping continuation of the fight
between the Balrog and Gandalf (Ian McKellen)
which knocked the wizard down, but didn't necessarily take him out. Viewers get
to see the impregnable gates of Mordor, the nattily dressed new villains the
Easterlings, the seven-story-tall war pachyderms called Oliphaunts, and a group
of old nemeses who return astride even more terrifying mounts. The film also
introduces the Ents, a group of mighty tree-creatures straight out of a
lumberjack's nightmare. Although their slow-moving gait looks odd (and elicited
some chuckles from the crowd), these woodland guardians are depicted exactly as
described in Tolkien's book — a testament to
However, while
The film's other main shortcoming is its pace. Although the build-up to Helm's
Deep is methodical, the rest of
However, these faults are dwarfed by
Film
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Extended Edition David Johnson
Despite
the obvious attention to detail, the natural settings, the set design,
especially the look of immortality expressed by the world of the elves, always
shot in a glowing, shimmering light, like a world of angels at play under
the moonlight contrasted against the warlike swords and novel uses
of armor, my biggest surprise in Lord
of the Rings, other than the discovery in the opening of Pt III
that Gollum was once a man, was that so much of it was about Sam, and not one
of the more athletic "star" figures. Despite the epic battles,
the legendary myth and lore, the endless battle sequences of human
slaughter wrapped in superhuman strengths and spectacular imagery, this is
really Sam's journey, a simple man who is called upon to endure one disaster
after the next, yet is expected to maintain his bearings and all sense of
reason. In the end, he's a good man surrounded in mythological subtext designed
to take our eyes off him, but he is one of us. Like Jiminy Cricket to
Pinocchio, Sam is Frodo's conscience, a constant reminder of why they've left
everything behind and must go on their perilous journey, against all odds, and
why they have no choice – they must succeed. It's significant that this
is not the voice of a wizard or a warrior, or a person possessing amazing
traits, but simply an ordinary man (or Hobbit) that is willing to sacrifice all
to protect a friend.
Another
surprise was that so few of the original Fellowship died, only 2, and one,
Gandalf, came back to life. Throughout all the incessant battle sequences
of the 2nd and 3rd films, none of the others lost their lives. Had they,
as they did in SEVEN SAMURAI or THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, which certainly came to
mind in comparison, it might have put into perspective the arduous journey at
the end for Frodo and Sam, where they were so exhausted they could only crawl
("like insects"), and even then only in short bursts. If those
around them in the original Fellowship had paid a price with their lives, their
final efforts may have felt more desperate, like a last breath of hope before
life was extinguished altogether. But it never felt that way.
Instead, they were like super heroes who were immune to death. Even
the elf that got shot in battle protecting the
Peter
Jackson utilized the same stereotypical imagery of John Ford's vision of battle
personified by his Westerns, begun in 1939 with STAGECOACH, where whites are
surrounded by "savage" Indians, and every shot by whites knocks an
Indian off their horse, and sometimes knocks the horse down as well – all with
a single shot, while the hordes of savages, who greatly outnumber the whites,
rarely hit their target. Throughout decades of westerns, this exact same
pattern reoccurs again and again. Likewise in Lord of the Rings, the blond elf (Legolas)
never runs out of arrows, never misses his target, always kills a foe, and
never receives so much as a scratch in return. More laughable in my eyes
were scenes after scenes where soldiers on horses rode into throngs of the
enemy on foot, on battlefields as well as narrow bridges, and the enemy
just dropped like flies, falling in all directions, while none of these
riders was ever pulled off a horse, or had their horses brought down.
I don't believe the book would be guilty of this same over-exaggeration which
typifies an unintended depiction of racist superiority of one race over
another. The grotesque and disfigured look of the enemy all too much
resembled H.G. Wells's depiction of the
In
this film, the horrors of war, where all is lost and certain death appears
imminent is immediately replaced with wish fulfillment, like the arrival of the
wizard who resembles the cavalry ("Look for me at dawn – look to the
East!") and instant victory occurs. This sudden turnaround was so
amazing that the rotating battle sequences, especially in Part II, become
inconsequential. For my part, having never read the book, I couldn't tell
who was fighting who, who captured the 2 Hobbits or who captured Frodo.
And while I understood the obvious metaphor of the talking trees as earth, the wearying
back and forth editing from intense scenes of certain death in battle on the
one hand to a leisurely paced conversation of a couple of Hobbits talking to
trees felt all too ludicrous after awhile. (In battle, the trees
resembled the Apple Bonkers in YELLOW SUBMARINE). Similarly, the
importance placed on destroying the ring, where evil will be wiped
off the face of the earth, is so overly simplistic that it discounts all the
other human factors that contribute to disagreements, dissatisfaction, and
war. Yes, this is a fantasy adventure story, perhaps spawned by how
quickly humans surrendered their free will to the advancing age of industrialization
(what, are we expected to return to the era of the Amish?), but if we think of
the ring as an inevitable force that threatens to take away our
freedom, I can think of a few living forces placed in leadership positions
in our own country that are guilty of the same. Not all leaders are the
personification of evil, nor are their destructive influences so easily wiped
off the face of the earth. Some are just petty and make poor
decisions, usually based on narrow interests and greed, yet we have to learn to
live with these collective forces of poor judgment and wisdom all wrapped
into one earth, a highly volatile and constantly changing equation,
as things are not so rosy even in times of no war.
Some
interesting similarities between
Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings:
Harry
and Ron resemble Frodo and Sam
Dobby
resembles Gollum
Dumbledore
and Gandalf
Voldemort
and his evil minions are like Sauron and the Dark Lord, with his legion of
spies
The
Flying Dementors and the Dark Riders, especially the Black Captain on the
Winged Nazgul
Aragos
in the
Buckbeak
the Hippogrif and the Flying Eagles
Harry's
invisibility cloak and the ringbearers invisibility
Sirius
Black fights to save Harry as Aragorn fights to save Frodo
The
Order of the
The
healing power of the
The back
and forth struggle between good & evil taking place inside the scarred
souls of Professor Snape and Gollum, both eventually succumbing to evil
The
Sorcerer's Stone and the Ring, which make Nicholas Flimel and Bilbo
Baggins ageless, yet both must eventually be destroyed
The
invented language, the parsel tongue language of snakes and the subtitled
language of the elves
Harry
carries the scar of Voldemort on his forehead while Frodo feels the effects of
his Spider wound for the rest of his life
Both
feature themes of the old vs. the young, the ageless wisdom of wizards vs. the
journeys and adventures of the young
Both
feature recurring themes of rescues at the moment of peril, while at stake is
the doom of the entire world
DVD Times -
Extended Edition Mike Sutton in #5
Posted Comment from DVD Times
I personally think the LOTR trilogy is vastly overrated and
well made without being particularly interesting. They're impressive
adaptations in the sense of being close to the books but there's no real
cinematic imagination put into them, certainly not in the sense that Fritz Lang
reimagines Norse myth in his Siegfried films. The secret of great adaptation
lies in how well the filmmaker can escape the confines of the book rather than
simply recreating it on screen - and the incredibly badly edited
"Return" demonstrates how
I can think of several cinematic trilogies which are infinitely better in every
respect - John Ford's majestic "Cavalry Trilogy', the Bergman
"Trilogy of Faith", the Leone 'Dollars' trilogy immediately spring to
mind. There's not a single moment in
Would you care to explain what makes any of the LOTR films better than,
say, "Winter Light" or "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon?"
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
With Christmas rapidly approaching, I don't have adequate
time to give Peter Jackson's mesmerizing The Lord of the Rings: The Return
of the King its due. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to extol, however
briefly, the virtues of this series' awe-inspiring finale.
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
The most hallucinatory of war films, The Return of the King concludes the Lord of the Rings trilogy with a burst of smoky grandeur. As our suffering Frodo (Elijah Wood), his faithful Sam (Sean Astin), and the grotesque Gollum (Andy Serkis) continue on their mission behind enemy lines, Gondor is besieged. Will the United Nations of Middle Earth be too late? As a wizard tells an elf—or is it vice versa?—it's "the great battle of our time."
Be that as it may, Peter Jackson's hobbit epic is certainly
the greatest feat of pop movie magic since Titanic—albeit more boy's
tale than romance. Speaking as a deprogrammed, once-upon-a-time Tolkien
cultist, I imagine that fans will be ecstatic. The multifarious characters all
come to fruition; even if the movie hadn't had the mystical good fortune to
coincide with the wars against the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, its complex
mythology would still have the inevitability (and superior CGI) of a perfect
storm. Truly, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; it's fruitless to
point out that
What else is there to compare this to? The Matrix trilogy imploded; the Star Wars series seems but a pale Tinkertoy Tolkien imitation. For three and a half hours, Jackson deploys multitudes of digital and digitally enhanced creatures—not just orcs and ents, but dive-bombing pterodactyls, Humvee mega mastodons, dragonic battering rams, lava ogres, and the scariest spider that ever spun a web. Conflict is eternal. The extravagant battle scenes are spiced with flash-forward telepathies and enlivened by stray shards of character psychology: Gollum's divided consciousness, Frodo's anxious paranoia, the filial conflict between the grand grouch of Gondor (John Noble) and his son Faramir (David Wenham), the fiery torch carried for Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) by the amazon Rohan babe (Miranda Otto).
Look, don't listen. (Aragorn's
In short, this Krakatoa is at once exhausting and riveting. It's a technological marvel, and for those not with the program, a bit of a bore. And that's before the interminable farewells, Celtic airs, longing looks, Shire celebrations, and expeditions into a New Age sea of light that make up the lugubrious closer. The Ring trilogy may be fiercely chaste, but its hobbituary denouement is gayer than anything in Angels in America. Now, there's a scenario worthy of Lang. Watching Angels on TV, I couldn't help but wonder how many people might be prepared to graduate from Tolkien's millennial fantasy to Kushner's.
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
To say that the Lord
of the Rings trilogy is a singular accomplishment in movie history is
almost too timid praise; there are many things that have only been done once,
and in many cases, it was one time too many. Likewise to say that it’s the
great commercial trilogy of our day: There are decongestant commercials I’d
sooner re-watch than all the Star Wars or Matrix movies. It
may be exaggerating to say that Peter Jackson and his cast and crew of
thousands have redefined the rules of moviemaking, but it’s probably closer to
the truth, and if a three-film, nine-hour saga doesn’t inspire a bit of
exaggeration, something has gone horribly wrong.
It's possible to
single out sequences, like The Two Towers' breathtaking battle of
Helm's Deep, or The Return of the King's equally stunning assault on
the last human stronghold of Minas Tirith, or performances, like Sean Astin's
surprisingly moving turn as the faithful hobbit Samwise, or the mind-blowing
blend of computer animation and Andy Serkis' performance that brings tactile
life to the malicious but tormented Gollum. But above all, the Rings
cycle is a triumph of careful construction, an elaborate jigsaw puzzle whose
pieces fall magically into place. (Compare the blithering incoherence of the
simultaneously shot Matrix sequels.) And yet, like a jigsaw puzzle,
completion becomes almost redundant after a certain point, and you know just
how things will look in the end.
Having hit its
stride with The Two Towers, the series continues apace with The
Return of the King, whose three-hour, 20-minute running time shows the
extent to which the DVD "extended editions" have colored Peter
Jackson's approach to editing -- and even then, the film arrives with reports
that a nine-minute prologue featuring Christopher Lee and Brad Dourif was cut at
the last minute. (It will, of course, be on the DVD.) With the twists already
twisted, the exposition exposed, there's not much left to do except suit up and
dive in, and The Return of the King wastes no time (well, not much)
before the first swords are crossed. As in the Helm's Deep sequence, the
defense of Minas Tirith flawlessly balances hand-to-hand combat and battlefield
tactics, never losing sight of the characters or the overall struggle. In the
midst of a massive onslaught by Orcs and mercenary humans, there's still time
for Legolas (Orlando Bloom) to climb a lumbering beast, dispatch the enemies
from its back, slay the creature, then slide down its trunk as it crashes to
the ground. It's the sheer audacity of such stunts that makes you cry out in
joy, but it's the sense of the overall battle that makes you feel like you're
not just being taken for a ride.
Still, The
Return of the King seems to retreat somewhat from the moral complexity of The
Two Towers. While that movie saw Frodo (Elijah Wood) being ever more
tempted by the power of the ring he is charged to destroy, and Gollum and his
schizophrenic better half, Smeagol, battle for control, The Return of the
King draws the battle lines more clearly. Even the traitorous spirits
Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) calls on for aid opt to join humanity for one last
battle, while the humans who fight for the evil eye, Sauron, remain distant,
masked figures. Jackson and his many collaborators have given us the battle to
end all battles, but the battle between good and evil which the movie
ultimately depicts has no real ending.
Any fantasy series
that externalizes our internal demons ultimately dead-ends in the same
cul-de-sac: How do you proclaim victory over something that we know will never
be vanquished? (I mean, without lying.) Buffy the Vampire Slayer
approached the subject in its final season, then turned away. Harry Potter may
owe some of his power to Voldemort's sting, but it remains to be seen how close
J.K. Rowling will bring the young wizard and his malignant counterpart in the
final two installments. The Return of the King opens with a
recapitulation of Gollum's story, how the once-lighthearted creature named
named Smeagol was seduced and deformed by the ring's chance discover. But by
the final scene's he's reduced to pure antagonism, a grasping caricature. The
movie's lengthy postscript ends in a surprising place, with the simplest of
characters, suggesting that all the great struggles we've seen were fought in
defense not of some overarching good, but the ability to live a simple,
undisturbed life. It's the perfect grace note, undercutting the story's mythic
dimensions and replacing them with domestic needs. It isn't evil that's been
defeated, it's instability.
World Socialist
Web Site Margaret Rees
Reverse Shot Suzanne
Scott
Return
of the King - Bright Lights Film Journal
Scott Thill, January
31, 2004
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and Critics - Limited Ed. DVD Review [Jeff Swindoll]
DVD Verdict Bryan Byun
The holiday movie season that began with the Narnia lion has reached its climax with the giant ape--and you can guess which beast I'm rooting for.
Writer-director Peter Jackson, relaxing after The Lord of
the Rings, has slacked off by making a King Kong that runs a mere
three hours, involves only a dozen or so major characters (plus uncounted
extras) and deploys just enough special effects to rebuild 1930s Manhattan,
with an entire prehistoric world thrown in.
She's so splendid, by the way, that she upstages the special
effects, as
Well, that and the mammoth carnivorous worms.
Crazy for Cinema Lisa
Skrzyniarz
Being a fan of both
Given that she had nothing to act against,
Edward Copeland on Film Josh R. from Review
Comment #1
I agree with you that the fawning critical response to Peter
Jackson's King Kong has been, for the most part, disproportionate to the film's
actual merits. You've outlined in good detail exactly why the first third of
the film is pretty rough going - the limitations of Team Jackson's
screenwriting skills are painfully apparent in scenes that feature more talking
than running (or, in the case of the LOTR trilogy, decapitating Orks).
That said, I found more to enjoy in Kong than you did. It's obviously no match
for the 1933 original, which retains a kind of beauty in its simplicity - the
cutting-edge effects from the Meriam C. Cooper version look fairly primitive by
modern standards, but they're executed with a kind of gonzo ingenuity that
still elicits gasps. Peter Jackson has that same kind of breathtaking,
barnstorming ability when it comes to the crafting of action sequences. In
terms of the way they've been conceived and choreographed,
If there's one thing I would point to as...well, I won't call it an improvement,
since that would be tantamount to sacrilege...but if there's one respect in
which
The decision to humanize Kong to the point where he actually functions on the
level of a human character yields a very unexpected and satisfying result. The
bond between Kong and Darrow is rendered in such a way that it does
manage to achieve the kind of mythic-romance proportions that
BFI | Sight & Sound
| King Kong (2005) Kim Newman from Sight
and Sound, December 20, 2011
King
Kong - Bright Lights Film Journal Alan Vanneman, February 1, 2006, also seen
here: Bright Lights Film Journal
[Alan Vanneman]
King
Kong (2-Disc Special Edition) | Film at The Digital Fix Eamonn
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The Lumičre Reader examines all the Kong releases
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(registration req'd) A.O. Scott
”What am I now? The
dead girl? The lost girl? The missing girl? I’m nothing.” —Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan)
A gentle and loving
portrait of death as seen through the eyes of a young 14-year old girl who is
brutally murdered, Saoirse Ronan as Susie Salmon, who’s not yet ready to let go
of her life just yet, so after death she remains lingering in “the in between,”
a hereafter between heaven and earth, still holding onto as much of her life as
she can before finally moving on. It’s
always interesting to hear narrations from characters that acknowledge they’re
already dead, such as SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950) or AMERICAN BEAUTY (1999), as it
adds an eerie dimension of extra depth, as there’s a foreboding shadow that
hovers over everything the audience sees.
But unlike those others, Susie is a child, so her world is still
decorated in a child-like fantasy of rainbow colors and wonderment. Ronan is really very good in the narration,
as her knowledge about herself is wise beyond her years and challenges the
audience to share her uncommonly sharp perceptions about the world from this
place where none of us have ever been.
Since a good deal of this film comes from the afterlife, where one can
look down from above and sympathize with their own family trauma but they can’t
see you, it’s interesting how much of our lives remain unfinished and
incomplete even after death, as the questions and reverberations about our
death may linger in people’s minds for a long time afterwards. In this way, the movie makes us appreciate
the short time we have in life, as we never know when it could abruptly be
taken away so unexpectedly.
Susie has an ordinary
life, with loving parents and a younger brother and sister, and she’s
discovered her first boy, Ray Singh, played by Reece Ritchie, who’s actually
interested in her, that leaves her dreamily off-guard, a contributing factor in
her death, as she was too easily distracted and missed visible signs that might
have warned her away from her eventual killer.
But as she points out, in the early 1970’s, there were no TV stories, no
amber alerts or child hotlines, and no pictures on the sides of milk
containers, as no one had any idea that these kinds of things actually
happened, so she was totally caught off-guard by her life’s final chapter,
which is menacingly suggested without being shown shown, deleting rape or other
sexual deviations that occurred in the book, as this is a family picture. Her life suddenly turns into a dream world
where she remains invisible, where she’s left to wander silently, having no
impact on what she sees, where she hopes her family can figure out the clues,
but the loathsome killer (Stanley Tucci), who lives just a few doors down the
block, feels more comfortable every passing day believing he’s actually gotten
away with it. The gist of the story
becomes the dramatic contrast between her father’s grief and the killer’s
compulsions, as the audience wonders if the killer will get his comeuppance and
the father can avenge his daughter’s horrible murder. Moving back and forth between the two worlds,
Susie discovers that while her own family’s life is in utter turmoil from the
grief, despair and complete disbelief, there are also several other victims of
the same killer.
While the film does
feel overly long, and moving back and forth between worlds eventually does grow
tiresome, the lyrical tone of the film remains appealing, as it’s hard not to
feel for what Susie and her family are going through, as her experience fills
us with the same regrets that she has.
It’s interesting that even in the afterlife what she most regrets is
never knowing the feeling of that first kiss.
There is an offbeat side character living on the outskirts of town that
no one likes, Ruth (Carolyn Dando), but Susie grows to appreciate her from the
world beyond, as she’s a seer who senses the presence of dead souls and
channels them into her life, while Susan Sarandon is weirdly introduced as the
free spirited alcoholic family grandmother that supposedly holds the family
together, an improbable notion and probably a completely unnecessary one, as
her comic tone doesn’t fit with the devastation of the family loss. When the killer starts getting ready to
strike again, this time targeting Susie’s younger sister, a certain panic sets
in. Might he actually get away with
it? The idea that different levels of
awareness exist side by side is intriguing, as is the visual conception of the
afterlife, suggesting there are stages to pass through before entering heaven,
but even more compelling is the idea that the living could potentially interact
with the afterlife, or vice versa.
Certainly there are connecting thoughts, but this is one of the few
films that blends a dialogue between both worlds.
One of the underlying
subplots of the movie is the film’s history, where Lynne Ramsay was initially
hired to adapt a screenplay from the Alice Sebold novel and direct the
film. But once Stephen Spielberg came
onboard to produce the movie, she was fired in favor of fellow blockbuster
filmmaker Peter Jackson, who it turns out was probably the wrong choice, as
while the interplay between worlds, the living and the in between, is
miraculously conceived with some eye-popping computer imagery, the brightness
of tone is all wrong for a story involving brutal victims of rape, serial
killings, and even dismemberment. It’s
missing the dark edge that Ramsay would no doubt have brought to the story. One would have to be familiar with the book
to be aware of all the grisly details, which are completely omitted from the
movie, and while the choice of narrator is excellent, all the rest feels oddly
inconsistent with a strange reliance on a candy colored afterlife.
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
review [2.5/4]
Loyal readers have waited since 2002 to see the movie
version of Alice Sebold's novel; the project has changed hands a few times,
unfortunately bypassing Lynne Ramsay and winding up in the hands of Peter
Jackson. I suppose that if
The New Yorker (David Denby) review (Page 2)
Of all human illusions, the hardest to give up is the belief that consciousness exists after death. This may seem a stiffly rational response to anything as shrewdly executed as Alice Sebold’s best-selling 2002 novel, “The Lovely Bones,” but it becomes inescapable when you see the bizarre and sentimental movie that Peter Jackson has made from the book. In the movie, as in the book, Susie (Saoirse Ronan), a fourteen-year-old girl, narrates her own murder, in 1973, at the hands of a neighborhood creep (Stanley Tucci). Then she watches him cover his tracks, and her father (Mark Wahlberg), her mother (Rachel Weisz), and her sister (Rose McIver) try to cope with her death. She is not merely present in their minds; they can’t quite see her, but she is there, prompting, warning, claiming a kiss from her handsome teen boyfriend.
The book was brought off with considerable delicacy—it’s really an
affectionately detailed portrait of a suburban girl’s life. Literalized in the
movie, the material is closer to a high-toned ghost story.
The
Onion A.V. Club review [C] Tasha Robinson
Everything about Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Alice Sebold’s
bestselling book The Lovely Bones is worked out to an excruciating
fault. The décor is precise for the early-1970s middle-America setting, with
photo cubes, period knickknacks, and hideous wallpaper dominating the sets.
Atonement’s Saoirse Ronan stars as the story’s narrator, a murdered girl (and rape victim in the book, though the film elides that entirely) who refuses to move on to heaven; trapped in a beautiful between-realm shaped by her desires, she watches her sister and parents (Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz) struggle emotionally over her death, while her murderer (a convincingly creepy Stanley Tucci) plots his next crime. Her fixation on her incomplete life and the man who cut it short mirrors Wahlberg’s fixation on finding her killer; Wahlberg provides an early key to the story when he gives Ronan a banal primer on obsession. He also explains a snow globe in terms that will later become significant when she, too, is trapped outside of time, within a perfect world. It’s that kind of film, where every casual utterance later winds up draped in weighty significance or irony, and where Ronan, in a breathy little whisper of narration, spends nearly every moment of the film reminding viewers what they should be thinking or feeling.
And yet The Lovely Bones is often moving, almost in
spite of itself.
Time Out Online (Dave Calhoun) review [2/6]
Let nobody say that Peter
Jackson doesn’t like a challenge. After filming Tolkien’s three ‘The Lord
of the Rings’ books and spending over $200 million on a new three-hour version
of ‘King Kong’, the New Zealand director who started out making splatter horror
in the late 1980s has turned to Alice Sebold’s hugely popular ‘The Lovely
Bones’, the 1970s-set American novel narrated from beyond the grave by Susie
Salmon (Saoirse
Ronan), a 14-year-old who is raped and murdered by a neighbour in a field
near her suburban home . From a vantage point somewhere between heaven and
earth, Susie follows the reactions and behaviour of her parents (Mark
Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz),
her sister (Rose McIver) and her killer, Mr Harvey (Stanley
Tucci), as she struggles to gain the closure that will allow her to depart
this earth completely.
Not that we see anyone raped or even murdered in this $100 million, 12A version
of the story:
However, these are mere niggles compared to the film’s fatal flaw: perspective.
Who’s telling us this story? The answer, of course, should be Susie Salmon, and
at points, we hear some of the book’s first-person narration as voiceover,
including the well-known opening – ‘My name was Salmon, like the fish; first
name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on
There are good points. Saoirse
Ronan is a compelling presence as Susie Salmon, especially as she must have
been acting alone and against a green screen for much of the shoot, and both
her and the film are strong at capturing her burgeoning attraction to her
schoolmate Ray (Reece Ritchie), a hint of adult sexuality cut short by tragedy.
Stanley
Tucci is creepy as Mr Harvey (even if he resembles a million movie
paedophiles), and
For those so inclined, I remind them that an interview with Peter Jackson, featuring reader-generated questions, and conducted by myself, is up now at The Auteurs' Notebook, here.
I've mentioned this before, but I think it bears repeating: I was quite a bit more excited about the prospect of Alice Sebold's novel The Lovely Bones being made into a movie when Lynne Ramsay, the Scottish visionary behind Ratcatcher and the spectacular Morvern Callar, was attached to said adaptation. Not excited enough to go out and read the novel, which is told from the point of view of 14-year-old Susie Salmon, the victim of a horrific rape and murder. I did wonder if Ramsay would jettison the book's first-person narration, as she did with Morvern Callar, also an adaptation of a novel, and find a new way to tell the story. I wondered quite a few things. And then, for reasons never made fully clear in the trades, at least to my knowledge, Ramsay was off the project, replaced by writer/director Peter Jackson and longtime partner and co-writer Fran Walsh, and longtime co-writer Philippa Boyens. At first I rather resented this, not least because it likely meant that I was going to wait that much longer for the next Lynne Ramsay film. (Morvern Callar came out in 2002; Ramsay, it appears, is currently preparing to shoot We Need To Talk About Kevin.) As my investment in the actual source material was minimal, I didn't feel much beyond that, except, you know: Peter Jackson, whose sensibility I like and whose films a largely admire, was going to direct it, and so I was probably going to want to see it on some level. Had a studio handed it over to Joel Schumacher we wouldn't be having this conversation.
And so, Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones, a film I found, well, enormously frustrating. I was not put off by the elaborate CGI visuals that many viewers of the film take to depict "Heaven" (and as a matter of fact, they don't depict Heaven, which you'll understand if you're paying attention; Jackson addresses the issue very diplomatically in the above-mentioned user-driven interview I conducted with him for The Auteurs' Notebook); and I don't think that it looks too much like What Dreams May Come, or some such—have you seen What Dreams May Come lately? Totally different thing, and bad.
No, my frustration stems from the picture's thoroughly inconsistent tone,
the way it can grab you by the throat one minute and make you throw up your
hands the next. A picture that can cut from a searing depiction of a father's
grief to a goofy montage of his tipsy mom moving in to "help," scored
to the tune of The Hollies' "Long Cool Woman," to cite the one
instance that doesn't involve dropping a major plot spoiler. The
sore-thumb-like lapse in judgment is not an entirely new feature for Jackson;
remember the depiction of the Skull Island natives in his King Kong,
or the ill-advised soft-show with which Naomi Watts entertains the titular lug
in that film? (Although
First, it's a fantasy/thriller, and as the film depicts Susie's awful death,
and how she sees her killer from the afterlife getting away with murder, the
thriller aspect here is particularly ferocious. Bones also wants to be
an intimate portrait of how a family heals, or doesn't heal, in the wake of
such a terrible trauma. And a little of it wants to be an affectionate
half-sendup of the American '70s. And of course there's no reason this film
can't be all three. But
And more I cannot say, without giving away major parts of the film's storyline. I will note that I had many of what I call "Deuce" moments watching the film; that is, times when I felt like yelling something up at the screen. Not in a good, excited way, like "Get out of that vent you stupid motherfucker the demon is crawling right up your ass," knowing all the while that the demon's gonna catch up with whoever anyway; but in a bad, irritated way, like "What the hell is wrong with you people why aren't you calling the goddamn police RIGHT NOW!" Of course you can't do that in a screening room. After the picture's been out for a while maybe we can get into it, and we can get into my...wait for it...philosophical objection to the film, too.
Before I go, though, a word about Brian Eno's score. Again, I am frustrated, and I'm a big Eno fan. Actually, I'm frustrated on account of being a big Eno fan; viewers who aren't familiar with the guy's work are simply not going to have this problem. Which is: about one-third of the score (at least) is adapted, mashed-up, or remixed from previously-released Eno work from the '70s. Mostly. Which meant that during crucial stretches of the picture, this viewer, and a colleague who's also similarly knowledgeable, were sucked into a game of "Name That Brian Eno Tune" for much of the movie. You're supposed to be galvanized, emotionally fraught, by some on-screen violence, and instead you're thinking, "Interesting how he staggered the intro to Robert Fripp's guitar solo on 'Baby's On Fire' so that the most frenzied part would hit just as [name redacted] is getting whalloped with a baseball bat..." But as I said, the majority of viewers won't have this problem, and nice for them.
Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review
Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review
Slant
Magazine review
Ed Gonzalez
Pajiba (Daniel Carlson) review
The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review
filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti) review [3/5]
Critic's
Notebook [Robert Levin]
Addictive
Thoughts John
Mark Reviews
Movies [Mark Dujsik]
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review
[2/5]
Screen International (Mike Goodridge) review
Q Network
Film Desk (James Kendrick) review
[2.5/4]
Urban
Cinefile (Australia) - [Louise Keller + Andrew L. Urban]
DVD
Talk (Jason Bailey) review [1/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [1/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [2/5]
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
The
Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review
[B]
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
About.com Hollywood Movies (Rebecca Murray)
review [B-]
CHUD.com (Devin Faraci) review
One Guy's
Opinion (Frank Swietek) review
[C]
FilmJerk.com
(Brian Orndorf) review [C] also seen here: Briandom
[Brian Orndorf]
CineSnob.net
(Kiko Martinez) review [C]
"The
Lovely Bones" trailer gives us a glimpse of heaven ... Dorothy Snarker from After Ellen,
Gerald Peary -
interviews - Lynne Ramsay April,
2003
Lynne: People quote
your films at parties. Mike: Those are lousy ... Oscar contender Mike Leigh and Lynne Ramsay
talk about what works on screen - and what doesn't, by Leo Benedictus from The Guardian, February 4, 2005
Entertainment
Weekly review [C+] Lisa Schwarzbaum
The Hollywood Reporter review Kirk Honeycutt
Variety (Todd McCarthy) review
Time Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [3/6]
Time Out Chicago (Ben Kenigsberg) review [2/6]
The
Lovely Bones attracts most complaints in 2010 Ben Child from The Guardian,
Austin Chronicle review [1.5/5] Marjorie Baumgarten
San
Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [1.5/4]
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
The Lovely
Bones (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lynne Ramsay - Wikipedia, the
free encyclopedia
The director is the son
of experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs, but zeroes in on a fairly likeable
Sundance indie feel with this film about a teenage social outcast Terri (Jacob
Wysocki) who is continually teased about his enormous size. Little is made of the fact that he also wears
pajamas around town (“because they fit”) as well as to public high school
without anyone raising objection, which by itself suggests a certain tolerance
for the character, which just doesn’t have the feel of credibility, as kids
themselves would likely raise an uproar about broadening the acceptable dress
code standards for one kid while adults would be sending him off to see the
shrink. Instead the film focuses in on
his gently attentive daily routines, where he lives with his eccentric and
senile uncle, Uncle James (Creed Bratton), who has an extensive collection of
books and old record albums, occasionally showing the clarity to impressively
play the piano, much to the delight of Terri, who is something of a quiet
recluse himself, used to taking care of him, making sure he takes his medicine,
watching his moods and his behavior so he doesn’t do something he’ll regret,
and also putting him to bed at night.
His uncle is friendly enough, but has a tendency to easily forget
things. With the film opening on their
morning routine, making sure his uncle has what he needs before he sets out for
school, it’s easy to see why Terri has a history of arriving late, which gets
him sent to the Principal’s office, none other than the always offbeat John C.
Reilly as Mr. Fitzgerald, who welcomes him as a buddy, suggesting they meet
regularly just to see how things are going.
With Mr. Fitzgerald,
one is never sure who’s weirder, him or the misfit kids that are sent to see
him, which includes Terri, though he soon comes to question why he has been
included with this group of outcasts.
Fitzgerald appears to be sincere, but he is clearly unlike other school
authority figures who would just as soon banish Terri from their classrooms or
gymnasiums than have to look at him, as his unmotivated mild manner and seeming
disinterest in school alarms them, as they think he’s just a big fat oaf, not
bothering to see beyond that blank expression on his face. Terri is unusually clever, however, as he
spends much of his time observing others as they continually try to annoy him
or ignore him, developing a kind of third eye, sensing what’s going on around
him even as he withdraws socially.
What’s soon apparent is how the film quietly becomes fascinated
exclusively with unconventional characters, where outsiderism becomes the norm,
as there are few glimpses of anything resembling mainstream behavior. Instead what we see touches on the bizarre
without ever actually going there, never fully exploring the
ramifications. Outside of Terri, few
other characters are fully explored, including Fitzgerald, as they are only
seen within the context of their relations with Terri. One of the other misfit kids, Chad (Bridger
Zadina), an angry kid who continually pulls his own hair out and is likely to
do just about anything, having no cautionary feelings, attempts to befriend
Terri, but the closeness catches him offguard and comes as something of a
surprise, like why me? —something he’s perhaps not expecting or even ready for
yet.
The heart of the film
changes when Terri observes an attractive girl, Heather (Olivia Crocicchia),
being taken advantage of sexually by a boy appropriately enough named Dirty
Jack (Justin Prentice) during Home Economics, which quickly becomes the subject
of unstoppable school rumors, where the girl is about to be expelled from
school until Terri speaks up to the Principal, claiming it happened against her
wishes, changing the entire perspective of the event. This sequence also changes the tone of the
film, as the focus is finally on someone other than Terri, as the entire
student body turns against the girl, except Terri, becoming even more
ostracized than the previously identified group of misfits. This leads to a friendship, of sorts, which
only proceeds in the most offbeat path imaginable, where for a moment, Terri,
Heather, and Chad become a psychologically demented, John Hughes style
BREAKFAST CLUB (1985), where they have to decide what to do when they have too
much time on their hands. One thing is
for certain, and that is the languid pace of Terri’s unhurried life, which
allows this film to develop slowly, accumulating pertinent details and
developing character traits, all of which combine to paint an unusual portrait
of teenage alienation when seen under this probing miscroscopic scrutiny, where
life on the edges stops feeling so miserablist and alone, where shared
experiences, even the most atypical and bizarre, make these kids feel less like
the monsters they have been portrayed as and more like something closer to
their own skin. This film, perhaps overly
optimistic and upbeat, has a way of taking the teenage spirit of rebellion and
insurrection and somehow offering it a safe place in this world, where, in
reality, one is not so assured that safe havens like this exist outside the
realm of the imagination.
Review: Terri -
Reviews - Boston Phoenix Gerald
Peary
He's gawky, obese, and neither charming nor funny, so why would we want to spend a whole movie with Terri (Jacob Wysocki), an unpopular high-schooler who annoys the teachers with his lateness and lethargy? Credit indie director Azazel Jacobs for building a case for Terri, so that — without manipulation or sentimentality — we begin to appreciate the clumsy lad at the same time that he starts to shed his self-loathing. Maybe the respect begins with our enjoyment of Terri's wardrobe, a different pair of pajamas for every day of class. And we are warmed by Terri's weird friendship with his school's deeply out-to-lunch assistant principal (a superbly fruitcake John C. Reilly). Finally, Jacobs and co-screenwriter Patrick Dewitt manage the impossible, getting Terri involved, sort of, with the perkiest girl at school (Olivia Crocicchia). Terri is subtle, sweet, and eccentric, and marks Jacobs, who earlier succeeded with Mama's Man (2008), as an independent filmmaker of formidable talent.
Nick Dawson
interview with the director from
Filmmaker magazine,
Azazel Jacobs’ profile has grown steadily since he made his striking, black-and-white debut feature, Nobody Needs to Know, in 2003. He followed it in 2005 with the delightfully quirky and inventive The GoodTimesKid, a film which found a devoted audience on the film festival circuit and was eventually released theatrically in 2007. Jacobs’ third feature, Momma’s Man, a poignant tale of adult regression into childhood, had its world premiere at Sundance. It became one of the hits of the 2008 festival, and played in theaters later that year to universal acclaim.
Jacobs, the son of experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs, grew up in
The
Village Voice [Karina Longworth]
Azazel Jacobs' higher budget, much more conventionally polished follow-up to his 2008 Sundance hit Momma's Man, Jacob Wysocki stars as Terri, a fat kid loner who lives with his mildly mentally ill uncle and lumbers off to school wearing pajamas to school every day.
Chronically tardy and harassed by the other
kids for his "double ds," Terri is embraced as a problem case by his
high school's assistant principal Mr. Fitzgerald (John C. Reily), who has
problems of his own. When Mr. Fitzgerald asks Terri to meet with him every
Monday, the grown-up bills it as a friendly gesture--"What's weird about
two guys sitting down, sharing snacks and shooting the shit?"
But Terri soon realizes that he's one of a half dozen other misfits who meet
with the adult weekly, and that since the others are either physically deformed
or obviously crazy, the tap from Fitzgerald only confirms that Terri is
"part of a group of ... monsters."
Humanistic without being moralistic, and very funny, Terri is a
measured, observational examination of the stratification of teenage loser-dom.
It sketches out the steep learning curve of high school, in which the playing
field between a mean-spirited burnout and a sweet kid who simply doesn't fit in
is leveled with a single incident, and a lapse in self confidence can plunge a
would-be mistress of the universe several levels down into the freakiverse. At
the same time, Terri bitter-comically reveals that the disciplinary
structure of teenage life is a farce compared to the muddled, endless purgatory
of adulthood.
Its climax, a glorious extended three-hander in which Terri, his love interest
and a frenemy get wasted and confront their basest impulses, is perfectly
modulated. The kind of scene that would be played for nihilist shock in a
typical Amerindie, Jacobs stages it to reveal depths, layers, and
vulnerabilities to characters who couldn't reveal their vulnerabilities until forced
by intoxicants. Crowd pleasing without being pandering, Terri above all
else feels true.
Film Comment
[Amy Taubin] at Sundance
Letters wasn’t the only movie where an enchanted
forest provided refuge for an outsider. In Azazel Jacobs’s Terri,
a shy, overweight adolescent (Jacob Wysocki) leaves the ramshackle house that
he shares with his only caring relative, an uncle in the early stages of
dementia, and walks to school through a wooded glen that we see though his eyes
as a place where he can lose his self-consciousness and even feel empowered. As
he pauses on a ridge to look down on the high school sports field, we know he
is trying to marshal the strength he gained from his brief idyll so that he can
face yet another day of not being accepted by a pitiless teenage hierarchy.
Working with a beautifully observed script by Patrick deWitt, perfectly pitched
between comedy and pathos, Jacobs makes the silence around dialogue come alive
through the gestures and gazes of his marvelously understated actors
and the way subtle changes in light can illuminate not only the outside
world but a shift in the inner life of the person on whom it falls. (Tobias
Datum’s 35mm cinematography is outstanding.) Neither sentimental nor
exploitative, Terri depicts high school as a place where, as the
assistant principal (John C. Reilly) explains, Terri has the opportunity to
come to terms with the fact that “life is a mess, dude, but we are all just
doing the best we can.” Terri bonds with this unusually honest adult and with
two other students who are also receiving counseling: anxiety-ridden
Jacobs made such brilliant use of concrete autobiographical materials in his previous feature, Momma’s Man, that one wondered if he could let go of the mother-lode. But Terri is every bit as personal to Jacobs’s filmmaking voice.
Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin
It is not unfair to look upon the story being told in Azazel
Jacobs's new film Terri on paper and groan heavily -- if not tear off
your clothes, curl up in a fetal position, and cry from sheer exhaustion. The
39-year-old Jacobs's sixth film concerns the titular overweight outsider (Jacob
Wysocki) as he is taken under wing by his friendly, odd, and oddly honest vice
principal, Mr. Fitzgerald (the great John C. Reilly), following a string of
homeroom tardies and general anti-social behavior. His home life with his
dementia-ridden uncle (Creed Bratton of The Office) is weird, to say the
least; he has a crush on a popular, damaged but essentially kind-hearted girl,
Heather (Olivia Crocicchia); the only people he could possibly call his friends
are Chad (Bridger Zadina), an outlandish deviant suffering from
trichotillomania, and Mr. Fitzgerald. The funk of presaged, quirk-heavy
familiarity is enough to make one pass out -- which makes Jacobs's sublime
triumph all the more surprising and riveting. This is a clear sign of a major
film artist breaking through the chrysalis.
Jacobs himself has spoken of the film as a break from the personal storytelling
of his previous feature, the superb Momma's Man,
though it doesn't seem that this has affected his highly intimate style. Even
so, it's hard not to see the significance of Terri's jolly, energetic stroll
through the woods in the morning, freed from the cluttered environs of his
uncle's house, which is something like the loft the "hero" of Momma's
Man shared with his parents transplanted to a
Jacobs embeds his film with pathos which blends beautifully with the film's
robust humor, which can be attributed to both Patrick deWitt's witty, nuanced
screenplay (based on his own short stories) and Jacobs's deft work with his
talented cast. The humor derives from the inherent innocence and gentleness of
our lumbering hero, contrasted against the cynicism, wisdom, hormones, and
discipline he encounters at school. Heather's near-immediate fall from grace,
precipitated by her willingness to get fingered publicly by a boy in home
economics, is followed immediately by a scene in which the boy holds out his
still-moist fingers for Terri to sniff. The scene is inherently raunchy, but
Jacobs handles it with a sense of sincere discovery that befits the tenderness
that Terri exudes. It's the same tenderness that everyone but Terri withholds
from Heather when she returns to school and is essential to the friendship that
blossoms between the two outcasts and, to a lesser extent, between Terri and
What is perhaps most striking about Jacobs's film is how perfectly he pitches
it between waking life and real life, with Terri as his oversized Little Nemo
and the dreadful age of maturity galloping towards him like a wild, haunted
steed. The death of Mr. Fitzgerald's secretary, for example, begets a stirring
speech about the small horrors and mediocre triumphs of adulthood, which Reilly
delivers with his patented shaggy dog honesty. It's told by a man who has been
disappointed by life, but the essential message is that of understanding, of
doing your own thing while trying to tolerate what other people do.
Terri's relationships with Heather and
REVIEW:
Terri Is More Than Just Another Fat-Kid Movie | Movieline Stephanie Zacharek
Terri : DVD Talk Review of
the Theatrical Jason Bailey
Movie
Shark Deblore [Debbie Lynn Elias]
notcoming.com | Terri Katherine Follett
indieWIRE
[Eric Kohn] at Sundance
Terri
Review | "Angus" with a Side of Cruel, Brutal Truth | Pajiba ... Dustin Rowles from Pajiba
'Terri' Review | Screen
Rant Kofi Outlaw
Film-Forward.com [Adam Schartoff]
PopcornReel.com [Omar P.L.
Moore]
Hollywood
Jesus [Darrel Manson]
Film
School Rejects [Robert Levin] at
Sundance
Terri -
Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli
Temple of Reviews
[Nathan Adams]
Monsters
and Critics [Ron Wilkinson]
HitFix
[Daniel Fienberg] at Sundance
Terri | Film | Movie Review
| The A.V. Club Noel
Review: 'Terri' | KPBS.org Beth Accomando
Screen
Daily [Anthony Kaufman]
Gordon and the
Whale [Allison Loring]
Terri:
movie review - CSMonitor.com - Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
The NYC Movie Guru [Avi
Offer]
Moving Pictures
Magazine [Caroline J. Nelson]
Daily Film
Dose [Alan Bacchus]
ColeSmithey.com
[Cole Smithey]
Sundance
2011. Azazel Jacobs's "Terri"
David Hudson at Sundance from Mubi,
Nick Dawson
interview with the director from
Filmmaker magazine, January 18, 2011
The
Hollywood Reporter [David Rooney]
Time Out New
York [Joshua Rothkopf]
Austin
Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
'Terri'
review: a fresh adolescent misfit film - SFGate Walter Addiego
Terri
Review | 'Terri': Review - Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey
Terri
:: rogerebert.com :: Reviews
Movie
Review - 'Terri' - 'Terri,' Directed by Azazel Jacobs ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times,
Conversation
with Ken Jacobs, Film Artist 5-part
series by Harry Kreisler,
Jacobs, Ken They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
USA (115 mi)
1969–71 color and b&w, silent
This special edition of Jacobs' classic work Tom Tom the
Piper's Son includes the two-hour film, which is recognized as a
structuralist masterpiece, as well as A Tom Tom Chaser (2002), Jacobs'
never-before-seen poetic riff on the transformation of his film from chemical
to electronic form during the telecine process.
Writes David Schwartz of the
Ken Jacobs writes: "Ghosts! Cine-recordings of the vivacious doings of
persons long dead... I wanted to 'bring to the surface' that multi-rhythmic
collision-contesting of dark and light two-dimensional force areas struggling
edge to edge for identity of shape... to get into the amoebic grain pattern
itself - a chemical dispersion pattern unique to each frame, each cold still...
stirred to life by a successive 16-24 frame-per-second pattering on our
retinas, the teeming energies elicited (the grains! the grains!) then
collaborating, unknowingly and ironically, to form the always-poignant-because-always-past
illusion. A movie about penetration to the sublime, to the infinite..."
The VHS (or 1/2") format editions also include a 214-page bilingual book.
The publication is a special "Tom Tom" issue of Exploding, the
French magazine of analysis in film experimentation, and includes articles by
Xavier Baert, Nicole Brenez, Frédérique Devaux, Vincent Deville, Ken Jacobs,
Emeric de Lastens, Loďg Le Bihan, Stéfani de Loppinot, Christophe Passemard,
Emmanuel Siety.
User
Reviews from imdb Author: Son
of Cathode from New England
I must confess; when I saw this legendary avant-garde
experiment in 1972, in some weirdo hippie church in
Thirty-odd years later, my aesthetic taste veers dangerously close to certain
aspects of Jacob's work, and I see how brilliant, unique and revolutionary this
film is. Jacobs turned me on to a radical new perspective that I wasn't ready
to embrace until years later, as if he had planted an intellectual seed which
took, in my case anyway, a long time to germinate. Better late than never!
By dissecting an old film, one not only explores and comments on it, one
threatens to annihilate it. Jacobs eschewed the narrative structure of the old
silent cinema by replacing it with the shockingly nihilistic uber-structure of
post-modernism. This wildly revisionist exercise has the power to rewrite
history itself, symbolized here by a simple children's yarn turned into sheer
aesthetic mayhem. Brilliant, disturbing, frustrating, even frightening, Jacobs
challenged the structure, indeed the very essence of the filmic experience as a
fictional temporal reality, by deconstructing it with extreme prejudice. The
results, although unnerving in the extreme, are revelatory.
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
User reviews Author: from United States
All in all, I thought this movie was fantastic. The plot
grabs you from the beginning and never lets go. I was expecting the movie to
deal with the daily rigors of life as a cop named 'Keaton', but the director
really took it in a different direction.
Helen Ackerman turns in an exceptional performance as the crying lady. She
deserves her own starring role in a major
Kenny Freed loves the movie 'Waiting', not because it was funny, but because it
gives him many opportunities to stare at guys' balls. He likes that.
User reviews from imdb
Author: Michael Sicinski
[Hey! Who’s this Michael Sicinski guy??] from
The cinema of Ken Jacobs is most importantly about experiencing light, shadow, and motion on the screen, as stunning phenomena which don't require a "story" or a "plot" to thrill. "Opening the Nineteenth Century: 1896" is a Jacobs piece comprised of an 1896 tracking shot from a European train window, shot by the Lumiere brothers. In re-presenting this film, Jacobs distributes light-polarizing filters on wands, which audience members are asked to hold over one eye, then the other, and back again. This filter takes the "flat" information on the screen and imbues it with astonishing multi-planar depth. Trees, buildings, telegraph wires, all move horizontally across the screen in recessed space, all at different rates and in different three-dimensional spaces. The filter allows us to see this film in ways unimaginable to its makers. As Jacobs said at the conclusion of his presentation, "There it is, folks, 3D, 1896."
USA (114 mi)
2002
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
Having first seen In Praise of Love in
No less than his acerbic Swiss contemporary, Jacobs is a cine-philosopher whose continually innovative and richly eccentric movies mix heady formalism with deeply intuited film-historical and social concerns. Circling Zero is less focused on the attack than its aftermath. Jacobs, who lives on Chambers Street (formerly in the shadow, literally, of the Trades), was out of town the day the buildings fell, and much of Circling Zero concerns his and his wife Flo's attempt to slip past the police barricades that marked the militarized forbidden zone and re-enter their loft. (Amazingly, they get through. Pasted on a neighbor's door is the scrawled note, "I Just Started Walking North.")
Jacobs interpolates some footage of the WTC aflame that was
shot by his daughter Nisi from the building's roof. It's striking to note how
many other people are up on their roofs similarly documenting the unfolding
disaster. (One result is the real-time WTC Uncut, screening at AMMI
September 11.) Circling Zero is intensely personal—in visual terms, it's
totally first-person—but it's also a portrait of the body politic. The crowds
of cops, volunteers, vendors, and tourists that circle the absence are as
organic as antibodies surrounding a wound. The tape's last half explores
another fact of nature: the
[At the Q&A following this multimedia performance
(film and video sequences along with Nervous System light objects), Jacobs
noted that in his recent formal explorations, he's been increasingly interested
in velocity. How can you generate effects by making abstract forms move in
space? To be honest, the forms didn't seem to be hurtling by that quickly, but
I will say that my mind was definitely lagging behind my eyes and ears, so
perhaps Ramble's speed-demon intent impressed itself on my body. I
always want to be more eloquent when addressing Jacobs' Nervous System works,
for a number of not-very-original reasons. For one thing, these pieces move me
more than just about any ongoing series of film explorations. I tend to sit
before them in a state of slack-jawed amazement, a sort of "oh,
fuuuuuuuck" disbelief in what I am witnessing. So when work is this
enthralling, I would like to have something at least nominally intelligent to
say about it. For another thing, not many people write about this work, and the
reasons given are usually some variations of the same basic copout -- they are
so abstract, so visceral in their impact, they defy description. But I think
maybe we're just not trying hard enough. So here goes. Ahem.]
Interstellar Lower East Side Ramble consists of a
halting amalgam of four distinct components. The two non-Nervous System
elements are projections of single-channel film works that, if you will,
"interrupt" the main action of the other two components, the Nervous
System "magic lantern" play and a phenomenal (in both senses --
wonderful and physically bone-rattling) electronic score performed live by Ikue
Mori and John Zorn. If you've seen Jacobs' recent video completion of Star
Spangled to Death, certain "remixed" portions of that piece will
be familiar as they reappear here. There are moments of
One of the last
surviving giants of avant garde American cinema, Ken Jacobs spent 50 years
assembling this six-hour epic video commentary on a half century of US
mischief, mistakes and occasional downright madness. This found-footage feast
of cartoons, information films, documentaries and musicals, given fresh context
and impact when threaded with Jacobs' own sequences. Primarily from
street-level late '50s NYC, these chart the emergence of a new cinema, society
and way of being. It's a panoramic vision of a country's schizophrenic stumbling
towards this delirious now. Moments to savour include a pre-presidential Nixon
seeking the modest man's vote with a telling lift from Abe Lincoln: 'God must
have loved the common people, he made so many of them.'
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman] May 2004, later
named Hoberman’s #1 Film of the Year in 2004, seen here: J. Hoberman: 1977-2006
Finished—or perhaps abandoned—after nearly half a century of work, Ken Jacobs's monumental, monstrous Star Spangled to Death receives its first ever theatrical run this week at Anthology Film Archives. The movie is a six-hour assemblage of found audio-visual material ranging from political campaign films to animated cartoons to children's phonograph records, interwoven with gloriously eccentric original footage shot mainly on the streets (and in the dumps) of late-'50s New York.
Do these underdog antics gloss the evidence Jacobs has gathered?
Or is it vice versa? The movie is a vast, ironic pageant of 20th-century
American history and consciousness. Fantastic street theater alternates with
classroom hygiene films or dated studies of behavioral modification; Jacobs's
performers, notably the young Jack Smith, hobnob with Mickey Mouse, Al Jolson,
and American presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to George W. Bush. Obsession
overflows as Jacobs's private mythology and outspoken cultural criticism merge
with relentless documentation of
Jacobs has availed himself of advancing technology by adding
all manner of annotation, some even subliminal. As a work of art, Star
Spangled to Death has as much in common with the
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman] October
2003
The ultimate underground movie, Star Spangled to Death, Ken Jacobs's epic, bargain-basement assemblage, annotates a lyrical junkyard allegory with chunks of mainly '30s American movies—or is it the other way around?
When Parker Tyler identified the cinematic desire to "provide a documentary showcase for the underdog's spontaneous, uncontrolled fantasy," he was surely thinking of Jacobs's desperately beautiful immersion in childish behavior and political despair. Jacobs began shooting Star Spangled in the late '50s, and the movie has become his life's work. Over the years, he's screened it in various versions—for the 1976 Bicentennial as Flop, heavily Reaganized in 1984, and a few years later for his AMMI retro. The movie has always been "too long," but this six-hour, possibly definitive, version, showing at the New York Film Festival, adds even more found footage—including a 30-minute prologue drawn from a documentary of Osa and Martin Johnson in Africa—while updating sections with references to the war in Iraq.
Jacobs alternates between marshaling evidence and showcasing
manic performance. The young Jack Smith appears variously as a sheikh, a
matador, a bishop, and an odalisque. Smith is fearless in making a public
spectacle of himself. Repeatedly mixing it up with his environment—erupting on
the Bowery in gauze-festooned splendor or materializing on St. Marks Place with
a paper-bag crown and brandishing a mop—he provides a constant Feuillade
effect, introducing wild fantasy into the sooty neorealism of '50s New York.
Jacobs provides him with a foil—an emaciated piece of human wreckage, Jerry
Sims, typically seen amid the creepy clutter of his
Jacobs uses movies throughout—a Warners short made to publicize the NRA; an early, scummy Mickey Mouse cartoon; an excerpt from Kid Millions in which Eddie Cantor opens a "free" ice-cream factory—to ground the action in Depression flashbacks. This found material, often layered with added sound, allows Jacobs to brood on human programming, military triumphalism, and—most insistently—American racism. There's a devastating progression from a virtual Nazi-toon version of Uncle Tom's Cabin through Al Jolson's infamous "Going to Heaven on a Mule" and an excerpt from Oscar Micheaux's God's Step Children to Khalid Muhammad's speech in praise of LIRR gunman Colin Ferguson. The Holocaust figures here as well—although Jacobs ultimately apologizes for typecasting the outcast Sims as suffering ghetto Jew.
Although the movie's collage structure is designed to boggle the mind, individual shots can be breathtaking. Jacobs's dynamic compositions use mirrors, scrims, and random debris in a manner anticipating Smith's Flaming Creatures. (Indeed, shown as performance, Star Spangled to Death provided the model for Smith's own unfinished epics—particularly No President.) In the end, the movie turns mournfully self-reflexive. With its intimations of aesthetic utopia amid the rubble of social collapse, this is a tragic meditation on what Jean-Luc Godard called "the film of history."
Star
Spangled to Death Ken Jacobs’s own
comments about his film from Cinematexas
Philadelphia Weekly
[Matt Prigge]
New York Times (registration req'd) Dave Kehr
DVDBeaver.com [C.P. Czarnecki]
Ken Jacobs spends almost ninety minutes digitally taking
apart and exploring A.C. Abadie’s 1903 short for the Edison company Razzle
Dazzle in as many ways as one can imagine only to reach the conclusion that
there are nearly an infinite amount of details of motion, distortion, horror,
surprise, and secrets in any given amount of moving film. Abadie’s single-shot
short is of a fairground ride that is a gigantic suspended circle, upon which
ride mostly children and some adults, and is spun and tilted around and around
by men pushing the orbital ring. The oscillation of the ring as it approaches
the camera and recedes gives an almost three dimensional sense of space to the
film, one which Jacobs becomes fascinated with. He juxtaposes the false sense
of dimensionality of this short with stereopticon photographs (the ones where
binoculars combine two images taken adjacently to produce an optical illusion
of three-dimensionality) which he cleverly edits together, cutting rapidly back
and forth between the two images so that they appear animated. Coupled with
additional digital warping (the entire film is digitally made, processed, and
projected) makes these “still” photographs almost look like the camera is
moving around a three dimensional object, unlike the clips of Razzle Dazzle
which for all its false dimensions is but a flat projection. Meanwhile,
Abadie’s short is being endlessly explored: for the most part changing the
color scheme to a bleeding red, white and black, Jacobs deeply zooms in,
stutters motion, slows it down, performs picture in picture, overlaps the
footage with slower or faster footage, and so on. As in Lars von Trier’s
excerpts and remakes of Jřrgen Leth’s short in The Five Obstructions we
never see the source material in its original form all the way through, though
a tantalizing glimpse of unaltered, unzoomed footage about fifteen minutes in
becomes an unexpected physical relief on the eyes. All the manipulations find
unique elements inside what seems like the limited motion and content of
Abadie’s beautiful but simple film, everything from miniscule human gestures to
abstractions of shapes and movement beyond recognition. These often tilt
towards the horrific; zoomed in so far, the colors saturated and warped, and
the footage slowed down to grotesque levels of distortion, often times the
human faces seem to melt, the eyes turning hollow and ghastly very much like a
nightmarish Edvard Munch character. These silent, screaming figures that seem
to erupt from the footage or more likely lurk beneath its surface gaiety are
reflected in the turn the film takes in its last third, moving most overtly
away from all the varied and repeated manipulation of Razzle Dazzle and
moving towards a montage of the stereopticon images, almost all dealing with
war (specifically the Spanish-American war of this proto-cinematic era), the
soundtrack quoting Edison’s “first” recording of his voice in giving his
support to what sounds like American intervention into World War I, and a final
use of the three dimension effect to bubble out a pile of skulls as eerie and
undercutting as Holbein’s implicitly referenced optical illusion in The
Ambassadors.
To what end is all this? It is not clear; the film’s burrowing absorption with
Abadie’s short and experimentation with digital manipulation (much of it
inspired, some of it unfortunately baring the marks of someone not used to the
conventions of computer imagery—some of the three dimensional uses Abadie’s
short with spheres, squares, and receding imagery looks awkward and dated) is
indeed alarmingly painful, exhilarating, tiresome, revelatory, rhythmic, and
fascinating in and of itself, as much about film texture (and the digital
texture of film) as it is about Abadie’s specific photographic content. The connection
with the optical view of the life inside the film with its digital
manipulation, and its comparison to the more surreally paradoxical “still
lives” from stereopticons, unreally animated into partial movement, lightly
touches on phenomenological questions about cinema as a medium. There is a
strange gap in the idea and perception that the still images, taking place over
space (next to one another) cognitively approximate real life better than the
two-dimensional Razzle Dazzle. Yet Abadie’s short, taking place over
time, provides real movement that can only be simulated in Jacob’s manipulation
of the stereopticon (just like the 3D effect of the short is likewise only
approximated digitally). And it seems like it is movement in time rather than
space that is most interesting overall, as Razzle Dazzle seems to
provide an immense catalog of details and moments that the stereopticon lacks
in its powerful spatial “thereness”. Yet it is these latter images that call
into question most directly and literally the state of the world, both around
the time of their creation and now, during another imperialist state of war.
This theme’s connection to the
USA 2007
2007 New York Film Festival
"Views from the Avant-Garde"
Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
Much of Jacobs' recent post-Star Spangled to Death output has consisted of his finding new and unique ways of employing video to create permanent versions of the 2D / 3D pulse-and-flicker film-performances known as the Nervous System. Although the rate of flicker is different, and Jacobs has a slightly altered set of tricks at his disposal when sitting down to the editing console, video has served him well. The hypnotic, deeply physical character of the Nervous System has carried over, even if the specific quality of light and shadow is less tangible. However in many if not most of these new works, Jacobs is examining a concrete artifact of visual culture -- an early movie, a stereoscope card, a set of photos -- and this lends significant optical weight to the pieces in question. Surging Sea of Humanity is a fine example of this work. In it, Jacobs uses digital superimpositions, kaleidoscopic reverb and flange, and differential focus to take us around an image of a late 19th century crowd gathered at the World Columbian Exposition of 1893. Jacobs shatters the picture but always brings it back together with a tunnel-like focus on a single individual from the crowd, as though both the orthogonals of the image and the crowd itself were organizing and reorganizing itself around a single body. In time, figures becomes paneled excerpts which strobe and flicker, and the two parallax views of the stereoscope are presented in rapid succession, giving the visual field a 3D, hologrammatic feel. But Jacobs' continual realignment of "the mass" around shifting individual souls hints at a social theory, a radical democracy of both the image and the public sphere. Surging Sea provides a glimpse of how we might act collectively without sacrificing our subjectivities to the mob.
USA 2007
Dreams That Money Can't Buy Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
In all fairness, this is the sixth Nervous System-derived performance work I've seen, and while every single one of them entails dazzling effects and visceral thrills you will never find anywhere -- Jacobs is an American master in every meaningful sense of the word --, Dreams was the first that struck me as uneven and rather murky in its overall structure. One way through the piece, a productive one that offers some concepts without minimizing the pure phenomenology of the work itself, is to recall that Jacobs has dedicated Dreams to Phil Solomon. The performance has concrete correspondence to Solomon's work, particularly the thick, hovering tactility of his work in celluloid. Jacobs' work here produced fewer individual forms across time, instead opting for craggy sheets of visual material that allude to the surfaces of Solomon's films while also momentarily solidifying into semi-objects. Dreams is the most purely abstract Magic Lantern work I've seen from Jacobs, and it makes perfect sense here -- Jacobs is performing (no firm object or residue) and producing effects, not forms (nothing much to "apprehend" in an acquisitive, vicarious-ownership kind of way). As one might expect, the results are somewhat inconsistent across time, and Reed's soundtrack reflects this. It's more a series of musical snippets that a symphonic work, per se. All in all, Dreams is usually lovely, and often a dark, shimmering world in which it's a pleasure to lose oneself.
Nov Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
When confronted with experimental film or video, it's not an uncommon response for viewers to find themselves at a loss for words. This typically hasn't been a problem for me; in fact, I'd tend to say I throw rather too much verbiage at the avant-garde films I love. But for weeks now, I've been at a bit of a loss for just how to grapple with Ken Jacobs's Capitalism: Slavery, a videowork of deceptive simplicity. Like many of his recent videos, Capitalism: Slavery is a transcription of certain procedures Jacobs has adapted from his Nervous System performances. In this case, he has taken a stereoscope image of slaves in a field picking cotton, with a white overseer monitoring them on horseback, and zeroed in one certain portions of the image. Furthermore, he has once again chosen to alternate rapidly between the two parallax views, resulting in a twisting, pulsating 3D force field in which the image "moves" but does not progress. I have now seen this three-minute video three times, and only this time do I really feel prepared to comment on it in any substantive way.
The piece is quite remarkable, in part because its rather
straightforward presentation of an emotionally volatile historical fact slowly
reveals itself as a far more complex, more plangent work of art -- a silent
threnody, if you will. At first I couldn't get past the content of what I was seeing
-- the visual record of one of the most unfathomable injustices in human
history. What's more, Jacobs's pairing of the piece with the longer Capitalism:
Child Labor makes a larger, crucial political point, that our present New
Gilded Age, and all wealth amassed since the foundation of the American nation,
is borne on the backs of the oppressed, a ledger forever stamped in blood. No
reparation, no monument, and no day of remembrance can change this. But
Jacobs's video actually accomplishes something more. In the opening shot, we
see a young woman, scarf-covered head down, in the airy, entwined tendrils of
the cotton field. She is lovely, and in any other context her pose and poise
would make her a candidate for immortalization by Vermeer. At this split second
of the camera's click, her misery has accidentally assumed a classical pose.
Jacobs allows us to admire her beauty and her dignity, and then slowly he
reintroduces her surroundings -- the cotton field, the other slaves, the
slavedriver. Near the middle of the film, Jacobs again isolates individuals,
allowing them to come forth in their individual radiance and singularity before
they are, in essence, forced to return to "the field" of visual
generality. As with his other recent works, Jacobs has found abstract aesthetic
means to promote a rigorous intellectual program that asks nothing less than a
reimagining of our social relations. Like those earnest pamphleteers who tell
us next to nothing, all he asks is a few minutes of your time. The rewards are
immeasurable.
Pushcarts of Eternity
Street Michael Sicinski from the
Academic Hack
In his brief comments before the screening, Jacobs (tongue presumably in cheek) noted that since "everything is futile," he had given up on grand endeavors and was (temporarily?) restricting himself to "small gestures." I suppose this makes a lot of sense after spending decades completing Star Spangled to Death, a film so trenchant and anarchically righteous that should have brought about instant regime change. Working in an entirely different vein, Pushcarts is in every way a deliberately minor work, and although it is quiet and lovely, it is the sort of piece that might function more successfully as a gallery installation. Jacobs extends an early actualité of street vendors and their clientele milling about a city street, using video to introduce a periodic stutter into the footage. Naturally this allows us to see isolated gestures and fragments of the original film that, if it were moving at normal speed, we'd never notice. But Jacobs has been working with these strategies for quite some time, and Pushcarts is the first piece of his that seems limited in the spectatorial possibilities it could generate. From Tom, Tom through the Nervous System pieces, to say nothing of Jacobs' infamous pedagogical work with the analytical projector, there has been a trajectory of increased dispersal, "cinema" as an ever-expanding galaxy. Pushcarts, despite its beauty and built-in nostalgia, feels comparatively small -- not reductive, exactly, but certainly bounded tightly on all sides. The imagery flickers but doesn't lose its forms in abstraction. The stuttering advancement of the film is measured out, but no clear impact results from this structure. Jacobs asks us to see this short film with new eyes, but it would require a more expansive framework, or Jacobs himself at the podium, to really let the original film mutate into something new.
AUDIENCE OF ONE D- 52
When his overseas
adventure doesn’t work out, he sets up his film crew in an abandoned warehouse
on an island in the San Francisco Bay (See:
Treasure
Island (California) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). But when his alleged funding doesn’t come
through, he is quickly served eviction notice for non-payment of rent, where he
preaches to his flock that the politicians are also being tested by God, as are
they, to have faith that it will come, yet can be seen still spending money (on
credit) that they don’t have. Unlike
AMERICAN MOVIE (1999), a terrific movie about making a home grown movie on the
fly, there’s little to learn here about the moviemaking process itself or the
crazy notions that inspire a vision, as unlike other documentaries that
actually attempt to educate the public about a certain subject or issue, this
one simply shows this preacher and his congregation in operation, where his own
mother, the previous pastor, all but disowns him, claiming she never should
have turned the ministry over to her son.
One disaster after another, they continue on their path of believing
that this is what God has told them to do.
Out of nowhere, in the direst hour, the pastor comes up with his latest
solution, the 8 Arrow Path, which includes owning a Christian airline as well
as the first Christian colonization of another planet, which is met with
enthusiastic applause, as they all pray that God will somehow provide this
miracle. While the filmmaker never
interjects or asks for sensible explanations, he simply records their actions,
but in doing so, he never attempts to hold them rationally accountable for any
of their actions and instead quietly goes about the business of making his own
film, come what may. In this manner,
there is absolutely no lasting value to anything offered up in this film. Some may sit back and laugh “at them,” but
that is equivalent to watching the Saturday morning cartoons on TV. There is no reason to sit through this
film. I found it mind-numbingly
vacuous.
Audience
of One Andrea Gronvall from The Reader
Richard Gazowsky, pastor of San Franciso's Voice of Pentecost Church, saw his first movie at age 40 and, claiming a divine mandate to create "the greatest movie ever made," persuaded his small but loyal flock to pool their money and energies on what he described as a cross between Star Wars and The Ten Commandments. The flamboyant clergyman seems like an ideal target for cheap shots, but Michael Jacobs, who directed this rollicking 2007 documentary, treats him and his parishioners with compassion and restraint. Still, this is a chronicle of delusion and hubris: everything that can go wrong on a movie set does, from equipment failure to budget problems to disgruntled crew members who realize too late that Gazowsky's heavenly instructions don't include any pointers on directing. 89 min.
AUDIENCE OF ONE Facets Multi-Media
Near the end of
the 20th Century, a Pentecostal pastor from San Francisco was praying on a
mountain top, when he received a vision from God to "spread the Gospel
through filmmaking." Using donations from his congregation, he slowly
transformed his church into a fully functioning movie studio, and the
production company Christian WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) Filmworks
was born. After experimenting on a number of small projects, Pastor Richard
Gazowsky announced that he and his WYSIWYG crew were to begin production of the
sci-fi epic, Gravity: The Shadow of Joseph – a biblical science fiction
movie that would redefine the Hollywood epic! Audience of One chronicles a
journey - from pre-production meetings in the church basement, to principal
photography in Italy, to the leasing of a gigantic Bay Area studio –that would
ultimately test the limits of everyone’s faith. Hilarious, provocative, and
always entertaining, Audience of One, expertly documented by director
Michael Jacobs, is a story of stupendous ambition, staggering inexperience and,
ultimately, the sort of faith that few of us can muster for anything, much less
a divinely ordained feature film in all its convoluted glory. Directed by
Michael Jacobs, USA/Italy, 2007, 35mm, 88 mins.
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
San Francisco Pentecostal minister Richard Gazowsky received
word from God that he was to make a movie. Not just any movie, but an epic
science fiction, Biblical epic shot in 70mm, with a budget that eventually
swells past $100 million. Documentary filmmaker Michael Jacobs documents the
process, which -- to say the least -- goes slightly less well than Noah's
building the ark. The new documentary -- largely shot in my neighborhood --
breaks down into two main sections. We see all the planning, and all the aliens
and gizmos that Gazowsky dreams up for his movie, followed by a quick trip to
User comments from imdb Author: JustCuriosity
from
This film screened at the SXSW film
festival in
The film captured the incredibly bizarre story Reverend Richard Gazowsky's San
Francisco-based
Despite persistence and dedication, they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars
and are never able to come anywhere close to creating a real film. Audience of
One is really a study of the meaning of fundamentalist faith and asks us where
we should draw the line between reason/rationality and faith in God. Rational
Modernists could view their actions as insane and irrational and wonder whether
these people would actually "drink the Kool-Aid" if asked. The film
is also a study of the power of charismatic leadership to make people act in
ways that seem irrational to outsiders. Still, while their pursuit may seem
wasteful and a little foolish it is ultimately fairly harmless compared to, for
example, the Rev. Fred Phelps "God Hates Fags" ministry as portrayed
in the brilliant documentary "Fall from Grace" (which also screened
this year at SXSW).
Audience of One is a truly enjoyable film to watch. It is both humorous and sad
at the same time. While Audience of One serves as a warning about the dangers
of fundamentalism, it should also offer secular viewers people a useful window
into the power of religious faith to inspire believers. Perhaps the real lesson
is that faith is a powerful tool and if harnessed for the right means can
actually inspire believers in many ways. Here the task that people are inspired
to pursue is one that is beyond their means, but that should be contrasted with
the vast amount of good deeds that is accomplished by religious believers on a
daily basis. I hope that people don't take from this film only the message that
faith is dangerous and destructive, but rather the message that faith needs to
be balanced with rationality.
User comments from imdb Author: Adam
Donaghey (anonymous.kook@gmail.com) from
After the screening of Audience of One, much to the
surprise--nay, the horror--of viewers, Pastor Richard Gazowsky and some of his
congregation approached the stage with director Michael Jacobs. I, for one, had
my hand over my mouth; my eyes were widened; and I certainly didn't know what
to expect next.
But I'm getting ahead of myself--let's backtrack.
It took Gazowsky forty years to see his first feature film. Now the mission
statement of his
Jacobs doesn't really interfere much, in this film. He simply sits back and
watches the roller coaster that is WYSIWYG Filmworks. Throughout the
documentary, we see a highly inexperienced crew, a director who treats the set
as a dictatorship instead of a collaboration, and a train wreck of goofs,
mix-ups and failures. Anyone outsourced--and with any experience--ends up
leaving, due to the misguided creative vision of the wannabe director. The crew
spends money they don't have, relying on "investors" we never see;
who end up dropping the whole project in the grease. Yet, the troupe hold on to
that crazy vision and pray like there's no tomorrow because they are bound by
faith! Just about the entire film made me laugh out loud, but at the same time,
I felt a little ill in my stomach. The real question here--despite all the
buffoonery and delusion--seems to be of immense import: is all of this a tad
bit dangerous? Going back to the Q&A session, after the film; one audience
member asked the pastor if he'd immediately turn to operate, if God had asked
him to be a surgeon. And while the pastor's answer is an obvious one, the
question still lingers in the air. Is this man's ambitiousness capable of
hurting others around him? I certainly don't doubt this man's determination or
his conviction--he actually sold his house to help the project--however, I do
have doubt in his ability to deliver. And while he may be blinded by his own
ambition, it's simply no excuse to waste the hopes and aspirations--and
money!--of true believers, on the weak foundation of a deluded dream. This
problematic, cultish mentality might be funny from the outside; but as we've
seen so many times over: fundamentalism can be a very dangerous thing.
The pastor's response to all of this?
"It's like watching yourself go to the toilet," he says with
sincerity. "I don't like to see myself cry. I feel like a total idiot in
front of you guys. But what if we end up getting funded, dude? Then I'm not so
stupid. Maybe." Maybe. Or, perhaps you're just a charlatan, who's just
wasted another large sum of money--and someone else's dreams--due to false
promises, based on absurdity and lofty goals, impossible to meet.
Karate Party Steve McCleary
Audience of One is the documentary about Richard Gazowsky, pastor of the Voice of Pentecost Church in San Francisco (you know, the types of churches that tend to involve groups speaking in tongues and having dancing fits), and his belief that God spoke to him and told him to take his congregation on the path to creating the biggest Biblical epic in film history. It was to be entitled Gravity: The Shadow of Joseph and set in the future. This is the story of Pastor Richard and his goal that has shaped the life of his Church for the last ten years as they attempt to fight against all odds, with none bigger than their own naivety and ignorance. But then the question remains…is this any different than any other aspiring filmmaker?
This documentary is extremely fun to watch, although tinged
with sadness. If you remember the end of Borat, where he visited a
I’m a pretty big fan of documentaries like this one. And right from the get-go I think you already know whether there is any chance of you going to see it…if this type of thing doesn’t interest you then you're not going to go. If it does, the main questions are ‘will it be any good…will I be preached to…what angle is taken?’ Simply; yes, it’s a good one. And the pleasant thing about this filmmaker is that there is no preaching, or anti-religion message, from them. They remain completely neutral and you never get an idea for how they feel about the situation as it unfolds. That is a key point here, as you need an impartial eye to follow the Pastor and his dedicated flock, as well as follow the tales of the poor people taken along for a ride they never signed up for. Things, of course, are edited a certain way (as with all docos) to create a certain effect, but the events that take place are still things that actually happened. It’s a good job by all.
This is worth seeing for the bizarre people involved. From the poor actor (with no specific religious inclination-just looking for work) who gets trapped in their production, to the naming of their production company ‘WYSIWYG’ (What You See Is What You Get…catchy) to another main actor who I’m pretty certain is Tommy Chong’s illegitimate child. There is much humour and many awkward moments contained within for your viewing pleasure. And hey-you haven’t heard of this film taking the world by storm, so there’s an indication of how it all turns out...
Having seen a lot of these types of documentaries, ones about filmmaking and ones about religious groups, I found this quite entertaining and fascinating. I heartily recommend it for an enjoyable watching experience.
Village Voice (J. Hoberman) review
Cinematical James Rocchi
The Lumičre Reader David Levinson
Ruthless Reviews review Matt Cale
Providence Journal Michael Janusonis
Hollywood Jesus Elisabeth Leitch
Slant
Magazine review
Keith Uhlich
Variety
(Ronnie Scheib) review
Austin
Chronicle James Renovitch
San
Francisco Chronicle (Walter Addiego) review
Jacobsen, Jannicke Systad
TURN ME ON, DAMMIT! (Fĺ meg pĺ, for
faen) B+ 92
While the film title
reflects a whimsical, almost comic book style silliness, where there’s not
likely to be anything to take seriously, this is instead a hilarious,
surprisingly complex and insightful youth film, told from the point of view of
one 15-year old Norwegian girl, Alma (Helene Bergsholm), who is smart and
sarcastic as hell. Just the opening
segue introducing her tiny Norwegian town in the mountains as a place of empty
roads and sheep, where absolutely nothing ever happens, where the girls her age
give the village sign the finger every time they enter town, which is in stark
contrast to the majestic mountainside forests with a pristine lake down below
set in the rugged fjords of the region.
In fact, it looks like a perfect vacation destination, but every kid
loathes the town they get stuck in. Alma
hangs out with two sisters, Ingrid (Beate Střfring), a buxom Scandinavian
Brünnhilde with a love for lip gloss and Saralou (Malin Bjřrhovde), an edgier
outcast with a social conscience closer to Thora Birch’s
Based on a novel by
Olaug Nilssen, about a girl in a small place with very active hormones, the
story could be anyone and is not unique to Alma, but the director wraps this
film around Alma’s snappy wit and personal charm, making this something of a
Scandinavian delight constantly poking fun at itself, a film that would never
be made in the United States, as the uninhibited sex scenes are scandalous
showing teenagers actually enjoying themselves—how novel an idea. For instance, in the opening scene, Alma gets
down and dirty on her kitchen floor, fingering herself while listening to
Stigge, an overfriendly phone sex operator from “Wet and Wild Dreams.” But the real object of
This is like every
15-year old’s worst nightmare, expressed in a laceratingly dark comic style
that also contains a touch of poignancy, as despite the fact her fantasies do
resemble the sexually hyper-exaggerated world of musicals, she is completely
devastated by the turn of events. Making
matters worse, her mom finds out about her phone sex bills and blabs about it
to everyone she knows all over town.
This is the true portrait of small towns where everyone knows everybody
else’s business, where you can’t do a thing without the whole world knowing
about it. In panic, Alma runs away to
Oslo to visit Saralou’s older sister Marie in college, hoping she can offer
some perspective, where after hearing Alma’s story one of her boyfriends
actually composes a tender tribute song on the spot called “Dick-Alma.” Wonderfully capturing the awkward age of
teenagers, this is a coming-of-age comedy where
Film-Forward.com
The landscape of teenage daydreams
(the raunchy kind) are captured with titillating precision in this stylish
comedy about one girl’s explosive sexual awakening. Stuck in a tiny Norwegian
town,
ColeSmithey.com
[Cole Smithey]
Finally, there is a coming-of-age teen comedy that addresses the
confused effects of horniness from a young girl’s perspective. That such an
inevitable viewpoint comes from Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, a Norwegian woman
filmmaker, seems fitting. Jacobsen’s debut film draws its twitching heart and
soul from its 15-year-old leading character
Momentarily addicted to masturbating with the aid of a paid phone
sex line,
We’re halfway through Tribeca and “Turn Me On, Goddammit” still holds up as my favorite narrative film premiering at the fest. I wrote about it before in our pre-festival recommendation post, but in the context of the rest of the World Narrative Competition, I need to sound off a bit more. The first word that comes to mind when I think on the Norwegian sex comedy is “refreshing,” a point which I think can’t be over-stated when it comes to coming of age movies of this caliber.
Alongside “Turn Me On” in the competition is “She Monkeys,” a drama
that is a sort of understated companion piece from across the border in
There are a few obvious points to make first. The actors in the films are
roughly the age of their characters, none of this 20-something or even
30-something casting that seems to pervade every teen movie produced in the
More importantly, however, is the way that these two films take seriously the goal of creating well-constructed and genuine young women to lead their narratives. I acknowledge that I’m the kind of guy that just can’t turn off the Bechdel test in my head, but it is definitely worth pointing out that both “Turn Me On” and “She Monkeys” bring some much needed humanity and vitality to the generally boy-crazy teenage girls that populate their genre.
The two films and their protagonists, Alma (Helene Bergsholm) and Emma
(Mathilda Paradeiser), are very different.
Culture
Blues [Jeremiah White]
The last few years have been pretty good for teen comedies. We've finally
evolved past the American Pie induced era of gross out fests, and have
been getting more choice offerings like Adventureland, Superbad
and last year’s terrific Youth in Revolt. It seems the trend is not
limited to the States, as
Based on a novel by Olaug Nilssen, Turn Me On tells the story of
Alma (played with poise by newcomer Helene Bergsholm), a relatively
unspectacular teenager whose overactive imagination and hyperactive hormones
only exacerbate her frustrations with a concerned mother, a nosy old neighbor,
and bitchy friends. Unlike many movie teenagers obsessed with sex,
An awkward pseudo-sexual encounter with her popular crush turns
Turn Me On acts out a number of
Turn Me On is the first narrative film from veteran documentary filmmaker Jannicke Systad Jacobsen. Her understated direction furnishes the film with a dry sense of humor and a melancholy appropriate for a bunch of kids who can’t wait to graduate high school but don’t know what they are going to do afterward. The laughs aren’t constant, but they’re well earned and Turn Me On’s atmosphere and story don’t require constant gags to hold the viewer’s interest. Consider it further evidence of the teen comedy renaissance.
TRIBECA
REVIEW | Despite the Crude Title, “Turn me on, goddammit” Is a Delicate Drama Eric Kohn from indieWIRE
Tribeca
Film Fest Review - “Turn Me On Goddammit” > Shadow and ... Tambay from the indieWIRE blog
Turn Me On,
Dammit! - Filmcritic.com Movie Review
Chris Cabin
Anomalous
Material [Nick Prigge]
Village
Voice [Melissa Anderson]
Smells
Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]
also seen here: JEsther
Entertainment [Don Simpson]
The
Velvet Café [Jessica] (English)
Slant
Magazine [Andrew Schenker]
Review:
'Turn Me On, Dammit!' A Fun Yet Uneven Look ... - indieWIRE Christopher Bell from the IndieWIRE Playlist
Movie
Buzzers [Alex DiGiovanna]
Turn
Me On, Dammit! - BOXOFFICE Magazine
Sara Maria Vizcarrondo
HollywoodSoapbox.com [John
Soltes]
Pick 'n' Mix Flix [Colin
Harris]
Jannicke Systad Jacobsen × Helene
Bergsholm “Turn me on ... Cool Bilingual Art Magazine, including
an interview with the director and lead
actress,
Turn
Me On, Goddammit! - The Hollywood Reporter
Variety Reviews
- Turn Me On, Goddammit - Tribeca Reviews ... John Anderson
Time Out New York
[Matt Singer]
Hollywood could exist in no other
place but Los Angeles, the city of dreams, a place malleable enough to
accommodate fantasists of all stripes because it doesn't have a particularly
strong identity of its own. In David Jacobson's strikingly beautiful Down In
The Valley, Edward Norton stars as one of those fantasists, a
pistol-slinging, 10-gallon-hat-wearing cowboy who turns contemporary Death
Valley into his personal OK Corral, willfully oblivious to the times. And for
as long as it can, the movie plays it straight: There's no suggestion of who he
really is or how he came to embrace this persona, and Norton's enormous
charisma sells him as a charming naďf, cheerfully out of step with an ugly,
vulgar world. So, too, Down In The Valley, which recalls George
Washington or The Brown Bunny in the way it looks and feels like
nothing on the independent scene, and the way it owes more to idiosyncratic
'70s films like Badlands, Taxi Driver, and Two-Lane Blacktop
than to today's arthouse quirkfests. It's no wonder a film this accomplished
took so long to find a distributor.
Lean and handsome, with an easy
drawl that could pass for Montgomery Clift's, Norton first appears as a gas-station
attendant, smiling his way through the veiled insults of a station wagon full
of teenage girls en route to the beach. But one of those girls, a lithe beauty
played forcefully by Evan Rachel Wood, takes an instant liking to him and
invites him along, perhaps in part because she knows it'll tick off her
domineering father (David Morse), who goes toe-to-toe with her every night.
Though they seem mismatched, Norton and Wood connect deeply and palpably, in
spite of—and in some ways because of—his anachronistic manner, which can be
gentlemanly and full of surprising romantic gestures, like stealing a horse for
a gentle gallop around an unspoiled landscape. Norton also takes a shine to
Wood's young brother (Rory Culkin), a shy kid who feels empowered by a father
figure who isn't so obviously disappointed in his weakness.
Of course, reality inevitably comes crashing down on Norton, whose beautiful vision curdles into a frightening obsession, and Wood, who's too fundamentally levelheaded to not see the cracks in his façade. Jacobson (Dahmer) makes their relationship work through exceptional direction, which turns the city's few undeveloped territories into a sun-dappled idyll, the only place where such an unlikely affair could flourish. It's almost a shame that the film has to shift into murkier psychological ground in its second half, when Norton's true nature starts coming into focus, because the film could just as easily be about the modern world encroaching on paradise. Either way, it's mysterious and bold at every turn, and refreshingly removed from the commonplace.
Set
deep in the San Fernando — depicted here largely as an infertile crescent of
looming power lines and anonymous housing tracts — David Jacobson's terrific
new film probes the absurdities of contemporary suburbia in time-honored (and
still potent) fashion: by introducing a walking anachronism. En route to the
beach to escape her domineering sheriff father (David Morse) and her
perpetually needy little brother (Rory "the talented Culkin" Culkin),
rebellious hot-pants teen Tobe (Evan Rachel Wood) meets up with a courtly,
aw-shucks stranger in jeans and a Stetson. Harlan (Edward Norton) seems to have
wandered into town directly from some long-forgotten B-Western. Creepy age
difference notwithstanding (and bravely uncommented upon), Harlan and Tobe
begin a passionate affair, much to the consternation of her dad, who's
convinced that Harlan's genial twanginess has to be a put-on. And indeed,
Harlan turns out to be something other than he seems, though not necessarily in
the cut-and-dried way you might expect.
Mostly ignored when it premiered at last year's Cannes
Film Festival (in the smaller Un Certain Regard section), Down in the Valley
has reportedly since been trimmed by about twenty minutes, though I didn't
notice anything of import missing in the shorter cut. Still present, for better
(aesthetically) and worse (pragmatically), is a key scene in which Harlan practices
his gunslinging moves before his boarding-room mirror, which has prompted lazy
critics to dismiss the character as a dime-store psycho and the film itself as
a pale retread of Taxi Driver. But Harlan's reasons for creating his
lone-warrior persona are far more personal than sociological, and Down in
the Valley soon veers in a completely unexpected and fearsomely complex
direction, making it clear that Jacobson's true interest is exploring the
definition of masculinity, and, by extension, paternity. (Norton has repeatedly
said in interviews that he sees the film as a companion piece to Fight Club.)
Distinguished by dynamic widescreen compositions and a quartet of superlative
performances, the movie is essentially an old-fashioned showdown between John
Wayne and Montgomery Clift, duking it out over the soul of a small boy. That
you're never entirely sure who you want to see prevail is a testament to its
power.
The New York
Times (Stephen Holden) review
Down in the Valley Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
Auteur
Seeks Complex Character / Writer-Director David Jacobson ... Lily Percy interviews the director for MovieMaker Magazine,
TOSCA B+ 91
Filmed in Rome, while
nearly impossible to transport opera to the screen, and this film version is
NOT for the purists, as it's extremely stylized, but this is *the*
emotional powerhouse of opera, and it's simply rapturous, here the
heightened passion is delivered with in-your-face close-ups, capturing a much
more intimate feel than you would ever get in an opera house, featuring a
real-life husband and wife team as the lovers on screen, some wonderfully original
set designs, which includes a few video asides, and stunning, luminous
color – Angela Gheorghiu as Tosca is nothing short of breathtaking.
For those who
enjoy kitsch, Just (Emmanuelle) Jaeckin's adaptation of Pauline Réage's
S&M novel is a must. There's puffy, blank-faced O (Cléry) with cruel lover
René, (Kier), the one with the husky eyes and 'I'm an arsehole' hairdo. So far,
so risible. But then the film gets a story. It's Sir Stephen (Steel) who does
it, the older man who brands O's bottom with his own initials. She suddenly
seems madder, but not in a photogenic, wild child way; what she comes to
resemble most is a raging bourgeois housewife, a role she's been prepared for
from childhood. Having lived the modern life, complete with her own apartment
and Vogue photoshoots, O gravitates towards a house with servants and
lacy tablecloths and realises her taste for them. Thus, when she finally turns
the tables on Sir Stephen it doesn't feel like a coda tacked on to appease
feminists: she's just discovered what it means to be adult, and her attendant
sensations rush over us too. As anyone who's seen Romance will know, the
film has obviously been influential - but not enough so. Stanley Kubrick
borrowed the visuals - the ornate face masks and the cloaks - but his orgy
slaves were pure Barbara Cartland. The Story of O disturbs precisely
because it takes us through the dumb mask, to the damaged, unpredictable human
brain beneath.
filmcritic.com Christopher Null
This is old-school cheesy softcore porn. We're talkin' dinosaur
cheesy softcore porn. The standard, with Emmanuelle, against which all
late-night Cinemax films are measured. The start of it all. Well just about,
anyway.
And now at last The Story of O (based on the classic, scandalous erotic
novel) comes to DVD, 27 years after its introduction way the hell back in 1975.
And it's just as salacious as ever. Filled with fuzzy lighting, soft focus, large
hairdos, and sounds-like-classical synthesizer/vibraphone music, O
set a benchmark for its genre.
As the film begins, O (Corinne Clery) finds herself abruptly dropped off by her
boyfriend (Udo Kier) at a kind of brothel/dungeon, where she is to be educated
in the ways of sex and servitude. Whippings, chains and handcuffs, easy-access
outfits, and of course near-constant sex training sessions quickly fill the
day. O takes this all in stride, philosophizing all the while. She's into it!
Eventually she moves on to a series of five or six "masters," each
with their own sexual proclivities. (And don't miss the final scene, aped
nearly exactly in Eyes
Wide Shut.)
As an NC-17 (originally rated X) movie, O is pretty tame save for the
constant nudity. The bondage is tame, and the sex is off-camera. Only the
subversion of an utterly submissive woman (and her companions in the
castle/schoolhouse/whorehouse) as the film's star is cause for much alarm. Even
that's kind of tongue-in-cheek jokey -- Clery doesn't exude the wanton idiocy
of the women that have followed her into the hard-R and beyond. She's playing a
role here as a subtle deviant, and she's doing a damn fine job of it -- even if
it's unconvincing that anyone is actually even touching her with that whip.
The Story of O is hardly a great movie. It's completely silly and cornball,
but it's that it's pioneeringly silly and overwhelmingly cornball -- and a true
part of cult movie history -- that make it a must-own for any true movie buff.
Not into naked chicks? Open a bottle of wine, warm yourself up to period pieces
on a Jane Austen adaptation, and ease yourself into O.
You go, girl.
BFI | Sight & Sound |
The Story of O (1975) Linda Ruth Williams from Sight and Sound, December 1999
FilmFanatic.org [Sylvia
Stralberg]
MediaScreen.com Paul
Brenner
Pornography
and doubleness of sex for women Joanna Russ from Jump Cut
Interview
with women porn stars Annette
Fuentes and Margaret Schrage from Jump Cut
James, Eugene S.
A FACE OF WAR
User comments from imdb Author: John
Schindo (jschindo@twcny.rr.com) from jschindo@twcny.rr.com
I not only saw this documentary but I served with Mike Co. during the filming of it.
This is an exceptionatly well made
film about the Vietnam war during 1966, during a time when we as Marines
thought we were doing something that was helping the people of
Time Magazine May 3,
19968
Combat photography has become almost a commonplace, an
adjunct to the
What Jones and his crew caught in their cameras and microphones is a superbly balanced sampling of this war of snipers and booby traps, night patrols and burning villages, in which the enemy is almost always at hand and almost never seen. No commentator's rhetoric comes between the audience and the action. All that is on the sound track is the noise of what is happening —the tense silence of a patrol exploding into a racketing firefight, the terrible pleadings of wounded men, the ominous urgency of a chaplain's sermon about death. The men of Mike Company are not identified by name until the epilogue; by that time many of them have already established their personalities by what they say and do.
The excellence of A Face of War is not only in its fine
camerawork but also in its sense of completeness. Its 77 minutes encompass the
totality of
A Face of War grinds no axes, pleads no cause. The war it shows is the specific war of small and large necessities, braveries and sacrifices, and its record of this battleground should endure long after the agony is ended.
The winning and losing of hearts and minds: Vietnam, Iraq, and
the claims of the war documentary
Tony Grajeda from Jump Cut,
Spring 2007
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4] who describes THE FACE OF WAR as he reviews
THE ANDERSON PLATOON
The New York Times (Howard Thompson) review
James, Steve
HOOP DREAMS A 98
People say, “When you make it to the NBA, don’t forget
about me.” I feel like telling them,
“Well, if I don’t make it, make sure you don’t forget about me.”
—William Gates, in the final
scene
Winner of an Audience
Award at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival, HOOP DREAMS became the first documentary
to close down the prestigious New York Film Festival, and ended its theatrical
run at the time as the highest-grossing documentary in U.S. history. Shot on Betacam, blown up to 35mm, it now
lies at #26 (Documentary
Movies at the Box Office - Box Office Mojo), described by film
critic Roger Ebert as “the great American documentary” and “one of the best
films about American life I have ever seen.” Long before 2014
Top Ten List #1 Boyhood, Steve James and his crew followed two young
basketball hopefuls around Chicago for a period of six years, from 8th
grade until a year after they both graduated from high school, where their
dreams to play in the NBA alongside Michael Jordan and Isiah Thomas shifted
dramatically as each came face-to-face with more pressing real-life issues in
their lives. And that’s what separates
this film from other well-intentioned documentaries, as the cameras of this
film take us places viewers have simply never been before, providing access
into the hallways of an integrated but largely white suburban St. Joseph’s
Catholic High School in Westchester and the Chicago public school, all-black,
inner city Marshall High School, including their tiny, jam-packed basketball
courts filled with the frenzy of over-enthusiastic cheerleaders and fans, but
also inside the daily lives of families living in crime-riddled black neighborhoods
and tenement housing projects where the surrounding dilapidation, vacant lots,
and a complete absence of businesses or medical centers reveals an impoverished
world in decay, where drug dealers pick up the slack and can be seen openly
selling their wares on playgrounds where young kids are playing
basketball. The film opens on the Delano
Elementary School playground from Chicago’s West side, where Earl Smith, a
portly middle-aged black man acknowledges he works downtown during the week as
an insurance executive, but catches weekend pick-up basketball games on the
city’s outdoor playgrounds searching out young local talent, where he acts as
an “unofficial” freelance recruiter for legendary coach Gene Pingatore at St.
Joseph’s High School, the same guy that coached Isiah Thomas and has won more
than 960 games in his still active 46-year career. (They just won the state championship in
2015. Ironically, it is Pingatore that
encourages the filmmakers to check out another young prospect with even more
potential, William Gates.) On this day
Smith singles out 14-year old Arthur Agee, a shirtless kid that just graduated
from grammar school who has the quickest first step he’s seen in years, telling
Steve James behind the camera, “In four years you’re going to be hearing from
this guy.” In no time he has the kid
signed up to enroll in St. Joseph’s in the fall, though it involves a 90-minute
one way commute just to get there, “way out to la-la land,” where it may as
well be a completely different world than what this kid is used to, clean
hallways in the schools, plenty of trees and grassy lawns with homes in
well-manicured neighborhoods, and a predominance of white people, probably
never before venturing more than a few blocks from his West Garfield Park
neighborhood during his whole life. With
dueling stories about two inner city kids heading out to the promised land of
the suburbs, Arthur starts for the freshman team at St. Joe’s, while William
Gates is another entering freshman from the near north Cabrini-Green
Housing Project who will be starting on the varsity squad that is one of the
elite teams in the entire state.
Alec Banks from High Snobiety, October 20,
2014, How
'Hoop Dreams' Became a Reality | Highsnobiety
The second child and first son of Arthur “Bo” Agee Sr. and Sheila Agee – memorable characters themselves who certainly played a large role in the filming of Hoop Dreams – Sheila was initially skeptical of Arthur’s claims that Hollywood beckoned. “I went home that day and said, ‘Yo, mama. These dudes want to make a movie about me!’ She laughed at me and looked at me and said, ‘Boy get your ass out of here! Nobody wants to make a movie about you!’ The next day these three guys come with the cameras on, with the boom mic on, up the stairs. Mama comes to the door and she didn’t have her teeth in. Her top teeth were false. So she came to the door and saw the cameras and ran to the back and put her teeth in. So she comes back to the door like, ‘Hello! How are you guys doing!? Arthur told me you were coming!’ I’m like ‘mama stop lying, you didn’t even believe me!’”
With a $2,000 grant
from the Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, what starts out as a five day shoot
in the summer for a possible thirty-minute documentary to be aired on PBS
television turns into something altogether different once these kids are
followed into their respective homes, where William has an older brother Curtis
who averaged 39 points a game at Wells High School, earning a scholarship to
Marquette, but instead, due to poor grades, attended Colby Community College in
Kansas where he showed little discipline and did what he wanted on the court,
eventually transferring to Central Florida where he rode the bench for repeated
philosophical differences with the head coach, eventually dropping out of
school and heading back home. Arthur’s
father Bo has a similar experience, regretting the fact he never went to
college, believing that if he went to college he would have ended up in the NBA
(a priceless moment, where his boasting leads to his wife Sheila just rolling
her eyes in astonishment), but instead he had a son, Arthur, which inevitably
altered his future, where now his dreams have been transferred to his son. Among the most prominent social factors on
display are the weak or altogether missing father figures, where these kids
have to make it on their own, yet also carry the burden of generational
pressure placed on their shoulders to carry out this mythic dream to make it in
the NBA where they would become instant millionaires. While never mentioned, the odds of high school
seniors just being drafted by an NBA team is three in 10,000, or .03 percent,
roughly the same chance of being dealt four-of-a-kind in a game of poker, so
much of the success lies not only in talent, but body size, where people
towering six feet four inches may be giants to the ordinary public, but are
among the smaller players in the game.
Reality was never an issue to the players in this film or kids around
the country as they approached high school, as they were driven by a similar
desire to succeed, urged to “Be Like Mike,” as this memorable Gatorade
commercial that first aired in 1992 suggests, BE LIKE MIKE -
GATORADE COMMERCIAL ... - YouTube (55
seconds). The tragic element is that
kids from impoverished black neighborhoods have far fewer outlets to succeed,
as one out of every three black men can expect to go to prison in their
lifetimes, 58 percent of black youth
in juvenile detention will be sent to adult prisons, more than half of the black Americans born into the
lowest fifth economic percentile remain there at age 40, black children are
much more likely to be raised in a single-parent household, black students
attend worse schools, black wealth barely exists, while seven out of ten black
Americans born into the middle class will fall into a lower percentile as
adults, where even black Americans who make it to the middle class are likely
to see their children be less financially successful. These are the stark realities underlying this
film. The other is the lure of Isiah
Thomas, who Arthur idolizes throughout his entire childhood, with his picture
plastered on the walls of his bedroom, where the sheepish look of adulation on
his face when he has a chance to meet the NBA star on the court at a St.
Joseph’s summer camp is simply priceless.
Alec Banks from High Snobiety, October 20, 2014, How 'Hoop Dreams' Became a Reality | Highsnobiety
As filming progressed, the narrative was starting to take shape given that both he and Agee were enrolling at St. Joe’s. Yet, Arthur found himself completely in the dark when it came to the production. “They would film three times a week for that first year because they didn’t have any money. This is just a small production company on the North Side of Chicago. After the third and going into the fourth year, that was when I was like ‘damn, y’all ain’t through with this project yet?! When are you going to be done with it?’ Even through those years they didn’t tell me that the project is just on me and my family and Will and his family. I’m thinking for three or four years that they’re doing a film about different basketball players. They said we’re not going to be done with it until you graduate and go off to college.”
Shooting only seven
days of freshman year, and ten days of sophomore year, James was able to
receive several grants to expand his film, most notably $250,000 from the John D. and Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation, one of the largest non-for-profit organizations in
the world, where they shot 40 days in junior year, and 100 days between the
summer following junior year and the end of the film. Tests at the beginning of the school year
reveal both William and Arthur are struggling academically, where both have the
equivalent of a 4th or 5th grade education, which was simply overlooked at
their previous schools. But the first
signs that this is no ordinary film is the financial trouble experienced by
Arthur, where his family is unable to make tuition payments, which keeps him
out of school for a period of two months in the beginning of his sophomore year,
losing all credits for that semester, where he has to transfer to Marshall High
School in the middle of the school year.
Simultaneous to this happening, St. Joe’s is able to provide a financial
sponsor for William, none other than Patricia Wier, President of Encyclopedia
Britannica, who not only pays for his entire tuition throughout high school,
but also gives him a summer job working for her company. What’s revealed here is a two-tiered system,
implying that basketball coach Pingatore was disappointed with Arthur’s play,
“Coach keeps asking me, when are you gonna grow?,” failing to intervene when
his family experiences financial difficulties, even allowing the kid to leave
school, while William is one of his premiere players, so he pulls out the red carpet. Arthur’s mother Sheila feels betrayed by the
coach and the recruiters, claiming they promised to take care of books and
expenses, leaving them in a precarious situation. Marshall’s no-nonsense basketball coach
Luther Bedford sums it up, “If he had gone out there [to St. Joseph’s] and
played like they had predicted him to play, he wouldn’t be at Marshall, and it
don’t take no brilliant person to figure that out.” Making matters worse, Bo loses his job, any sense
of self-esteem, and begins drifting back onto the streets, where we see him go
one on one with his son on the playground before heading off to the distant
corner for the drug dealers, where Arthur, in one of the most poignant moments
of the film, is left to stare in pained disillusionment. After twenty years of marriage, Bo eventually
leaves the home. Shortly afterwards,
Sheila loses her job as well as a nurse’s assistant due to chronic back pain,
resorting to welfare with no other alternatives. At one point, in obvious distress, she turns
to the camera and says, “Do you ever ask yourself how I get by on $268 a month
and keep this house and feed these children?
Do you ever ask yourself that question?”
It’s a moment where this stops being a film, where all artificiality is
stripped away, and becomes a life-embracing plea for sanity and
understanding. Just how does any of this
make sense?
While Arthur makes the
varsity in his junior year, there are additions to the family, as Sheila’s
sister moves in, along with her newborn, and also Arthur’s best friend Shannon,
who is escaping troubles in his own family.
While both are the same age, the time they spend together prevents
Arthur from doing homework, where each year he just barely gets by, but is never
once seen studying or answering a question correctly in class, even the
softballs lobbed to him on camera. Coach
Bedford offers acute commentary on guys like Arthur, who never seems to be able
to focus on the moment, as his mind is always somewhere else, where he sees
plenty of guys on the streets after high school talk about how if they had the
opportunity to go to college they would have ended up in the NBA, but instead
they’re left with nothing to show for it.
With a lackadaisical effort, he worries Arthur may end up one of those
guys. Sheila’s welfare benefits are cut
off for missing an appointment, going 3 months with no income whatsoever,
causing her electricity and gas to be turned off, where the family ends up
living in the dark. While it’s not shown
in the film, the director, to his credit, actually paid the bills to get the
utilities turned back on. Marshall Coach
Luther Bedford, unbeknownst to the filmmakers, also brought groceries to the
Agee family when they needed help.
Nonetheless, it’s a particularly painful segment, as we also learn Bo
has become a crack addict, with signs of physically abusing his wife,
eventually spending seven months in prison for burglary, causing a huge
emotional rift between father and son.
Mirroring this downward spiral, William injures his knee in practice, a
torn ACL that requires surgical repair, which makes him miss most of his junior
year. What’s most intriguing about these
doctor visits is that no adult accompanies him, as he’s a 16-year old kid left
on his own to figure out the myriad of medical options, where it’s clear he’s
in over his head. Nonetheless, he
receives the best of care, completely paid for by the school insurance. In yet another shocking twist, as if he
doesn’t have enough pressures, William is next seen holding a baby in his arms,
a tiny girl named Alicia, along with his longtime girlfriend since middle
school, Catherine Mines, where both have been a carefully kept secret,
something neither his coach nor his teammates had even the slightest inkling,
placing his life in an entirely new perspective. It says something about William’s needs and
his character that he keeps this family hidden from his coach for as long as
possible. While William’s father was
never around during his lifetime, he’d make it his life’s mission to be fully
present in her life, expressing wisdom even at the tender age of 16. With his injury and the birth of his
daughter, William’s grades plummeted. As
he’s getting offers from various colleges, he takes the ACT college entrance
exams, but disappointingly scores only a 15, while 18 is the minimum score to
receive a college scholarship. As a
result, the school contacts Encyclopedia Britannica which pays for a college
exam preparatory course to help him be more successful taking the test.
While it’s clear both
kids are indifferent students, where getting a good education might have been a
better career path, it’s certainly not surprising to see how obsessed the
sports dream, however fragile, remains such a prominent focus of their lives,
spurred on by older authority figures that wish to realize their own failed
dreams through these kids, where it defines their identity from an early age,
as it’s one of the few things they excel at, giving them a sense of pride and
self-satisfaction, where aspiring to be great is simply the natural outgrowth
of the dream, despite being beyond the reach of most mortal men. William’s injury, and the warnings of how it
could tear again, and will likely make him a candidate for arthritis down the
road, are the first steps in the disintegration of that dream. In Arthur’s case, while Marshall (9-16) had
their worst season in twenty years, as a junior in 1990 he got a firsthand view
of a sensational King High School scoring guard Jamie Brandon, the standout
player in the Chicago public leagues. At
6-4, and about 200 pounds, he was a three-time All-Stater, named Mr. Basketball
of Illinois in 1990, the year his undefeated team, ranked #1 in the country,
won the state title, where he could score from the inside or behind the arc, totaling
3,157 points in his career, third most in state history, with his team going
63-1 in his final two years at King, where he got a scholarship to play at LSU
alongside Shaquille O’Neal. But despite
all the accolades, and the stats to back them up, where Brandon was the
Chicago-area’s most publicized high school athlete of his era, and perhaps any
era, yet this guy was never drafted by the NBA.
This little piece of trivia was left out of the film, but it would
certainly have been common knowledge to Arthur.
By the time William gets cleared to play, it’s the last game of the
season as they get ready to enter the state tournament. While he has spurts of his former glory, perhaps
he returns too soon, as in the tournament he’s also troubled by his lingering
injury, and in the final elimination game to make it downstate, he’s actually
taken out during the 4th quarter stretch run for a medical evaluation allowing
the other team to take the lead. By the
time he gets back, with the game on the line, he seems to lose his confidence
and the final moments are disheartening.
Afterwards, he’s even examined by the Chicago Bulls team doctor where
another surgery is performed, rehabbing afterwards at their professional facilities. He’s invited to a Nike summer basketball camp
of the hundred best high school players, including future Michigan Fab-Five
stars Jalen Rose, Chris Webber, and Juwan Howard, where as many as two hundred
fifty college coaches attend in search of talent, with the inspection
resembling a “meat market,” where director Spike Lee makes a chilling reminder
that what all these coaches see in them are dollar signs, as to them “it’s all
about money.” William performs well,
giving him a huge boost of confidence, where afterwards he’s recruited in his
home living room by Marquette University’s basketball coach Kevin O’Neill,
offering him a full athletic scholarship for four years, irrespective of what
he does on the court, giving him an opportunity to earn a degree. While there are other offers, Marquette’s
well-designed recruiting visit turns his head and William jumps at the
chance. After the earlier travails with
his injuries, he’s so ebullient, it’s as if he’s reached the Promised
Land.
Bo returns to the
household as a born-again Christian, claiming he’s off the drugs and is a
changed man, while Arthur and Shannon spend the summer working at Pizza Hut
earning $3.35/hr. They’re also required
to take summer school classes to earn credits for classes they otherwise
wouldn’t pass, though Shannon soon drops out from disinterest. In a fascinating twist that you won’t find
anywhere else, the drug dealers in the neighborhood give these guys money so
they can dress more stylishly, singling them out as future NBA stars, giving
them pizzazz and more attitude. Arthur
still has unfinished business with St. Joe’s, as they won’t release his
transcripts with an outstanding bill of $1800, causing his parents to make a
special trip to the school where a payment plan can be drawn up, and the
credits will be released only after the receipt of two months of “good-faith”
payments. Spike Lee’s comments are
especially appropriate when it comes to a school holding a student’s records
hostage for ransom. Surprisingly Arthur
finally grows a few inches and becomes a star in his senior year, despite his
academic deficiencies, where it’s the closest school comes to being part of his
comfort zone, where he and the other players are noticeably happy and having
the time of their lives, called giant killers, as they knock off some of the
most favored teams in the league.
William, on the other hand, has to endure the demonstrative rants and
overly critical assessments from Coach Pingatore, who frequently berates his
team with expletives, where he and the other players are always on edge for
fear of what to expect next. A perfect
example is the team bus to an away game, where Pingatore sends a solemn
message, “Now remember, think about the ball game,” resulting in dour faces and
a hushed silence afterwards where you can hear a pin drop, while Arthur’s team
bus is entirely different, as loud music can be heard from boom boxes as a
boisterous group can be seen laughing and playing cards, where this all-black
group couldn’t be more relaxed and ready to have some fun. It’s like a party atmosphere, remaining one
of the most unique portraits of the visible differences between the black and
white worlds, beautifully expressed in the parallel shots of a single
sequence. Part of the brilliance of the
film is capturing the small, day-to-day details that accumulate over time,
providing a superbly rich feel for the times and what they entailed. The camera literally brings the viewer along
for the ride, where our interest is always rewarded, as these are complexly
defined characters with unique life experiences. In William’s awkward final scene with Coach
Pingatore as he nears graduation, the disappointment and coldness in his tone
are unmistakable, “I need to know your number so when you ask me for money, I
can turn you down.” Shannon eventually
ends up on the streets and succumbs to the dope dealers, while Arthur’s in for
the ride of his life, as in 1991 the Marshall Commandos not only win the Public
League Championship, beating King, which in the previous year won the state
championship, now featuring two starting seven footers, but earn a trip
downstate to compete for the state title.
What Marshall featured with Arthur was dazzling speed, where they were
renowned for stripping the ball, for applying relentless defensive pressure and
creating utter mayhem on the court, causing multiple turnovers, where they
could steal the ball on successive possessions and literally demoralize bigger
and taller opponents, finishing in third place with a season record of 25-7.
One of the unsung
success stories in the film is Arthur’s mother Sheila, who graduates at the top
of her class to become a nurse, finally making her way off of welfare. Brushing tears from her eyes, she hugs her
teacher while commenting, “I didn’t think I could do it. And people told me I wasn’t gonna be
anything.” It’s an especially proud and
celebratory moment that is not missed by the filmmakers, who were not even
aware that she was attending school. Interestingly,
adding another parallel, William’s mother Emma also works as a nurse’s
assistant. With the focus on the other
two, William struggled to obtain the required score of 18 on his ACT exams to
earn a scholarship, but eventually, on his fourth try, he obtained an aggregate
score of 17.5, which was rounded up to 18, attending Marquette on a four year
scholarship, where he appeared in every game during his first two seasons, but
left in the spring of his third year when he reinjured his knee and was unable
to make the starting lineup. He dropped
out for a while, but eventually returned to graduate with a communications
degree. As Arthur’s grades are marginal,
he receives an athletic scholarship to Mineral Area Junior College in
southeastern Missouri, where all seven of the school’s black students play on
the basketball team and live together in one house, a small cinderblock
structure that sits all alone, seemingly in a vacuum, but Arthur uses the
experience to obtain an athletic scholarship to Arkansas State University,
where he plays for two more years at a Division I school. While neither of
these guys ever played a single game in the NBA, they certainly had their
successes, part of which, even while they were going through it, was dragging a
crew of three white guys following around behind them with a camera, which must
have caused a sight in high school classrooms or hallways, bringing extra
attention to these already complicated young lives. The naturalism throughout is unadorned, where
you couldn’t script these kinds of experiences, which are artfully captured by
these filmmakers, even from the opening frames, where there’s a beauty and
rhythm to the street shots with the elevated train rumbling overhead, with
added emphasis on the musical soundtrack by composer Ben Sidran, much of which
resembles the soulful and meditative style of John Coltrane’s quiet tenor sax
introduction to the song, “Alabama,” JOHN COLTRANE Alabama -
YouTube (6:03), providing surprising depth to what we are
experiencing. Despite the passage of
more than twenty years, there are few, if any, films that provide such a vast
and extensive examination of the black community from such an intensely
personal perspective, where the film takes us into the homes, playgrounds,
schools, and churches of the inner city, which is like being immersed into the
heart of a James Baldwin novel, where the film’s meticulous detail matches the
literary description in his novels, where there is a similar dramatic narrative
arc following two appealing subjects that is never less than inspiring and
profound. It’s a critique of the
American Dream, while providing a starkly honest and frank representation of
everyday life in black America, where the lifeblood of the film are the aspirations
of the urban poor, where racism, poverty, drugs, and education intrude into
their daily lives, where it would be hard to invent a more grating story of how
white America uses and discards young black men. At times it’s filled with the blistering rage
of injustice, including a descent into domestic violence and drug abuse,
sinking lower than anyone could have ever imagined, yet there are multiple
scenes showing the influence of a near-empty church, humble in tone, with the
family gathered around to provide faith and inspiration, where it’s also about
elevating one’s stature in life, transcending the personal struggles with
unforeseen triumphs, finding a purpose when all hope seems unattainable. It’s one of the great American documentaries
because of its spirit of openness, never knowing what lies ahead, yet still
believing in yourself, following your own path into an unknown future that
awaits us all.
Postscript
The film was not
nominated for an Academy award in the Best Documentary category. According to Roger Ebert, the Academy’s
documentary committee had a system as they collectively viewed potential films,
each carrying little flashlights. When a
viewer had seen enough and given up on the film, they waved a light onto the
screen. When a majority of flashlights
flashed their lights, the film was switched off. HOOP DREAMS was stopped after fifteen
minutes.
William Gates got a
Bible degree at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and became pastor at the
Living Faith Community Center in Cabrini-Green, a position he held until July
2012, when he relocated his family to San Antonio, Texas. Gates has four children and his sons are now
being recruited to play basketball just as he was during the filming. His older brother Curtis was shot and killed
in an apparent car hijacking in 2001 at the age of 36 (Man
chased down and slain - tribunedigital-chicagotribune Rick Hepp from The Chicago Tribune, September 13, 2001).
Arthur Agee runs the Arthur Agee Jr foundation which he
founded in 1995, whose main goal is to “educate parents and families that they
are role models for their kids – and they shouldn’t be looking up to entertainers
and athletes as a [outlet] to get out. The parents should be setting the morals
and grounds for them to be successful.
And it starts with education,” while also working as a motivational
speaker for inner-city youth. He started
a Hoop Dreams sports clothing line in
2004 with the slogan, “Control Your Destiny.”
Agee now has five children and still lives in the Chicago area.
His mother Sheila works
as a private nurse for affluent families.
On Thanksgiving morning 1994, Agee’s older half-brother, DeAntonio, was
gunned down at Cabrini–Green, while his father Bo, a minister and clothing
salesman, was shot in an alley behind his home in 2004 while attending to
merchandise in his garage (`Hoop
Dreams' father slain - tribunedigital-chicagotribune Hal Dardick from the Chicago Tribune, December 17, 2004). Berwyn police charged Ronnie Taylor, 33, of
Chicago with first-degree murder and for allegedly accepting money in a
contract hit-for-hire to kill Arthur “Bo” Agee Sr, but Taylor was acquitted of
all charges in January 2010.
The Hoop
Dreams Live On, by Seth Davis from Sports Illustrated, August 30, 2006, boardsanddimes
Arthur’s mother, Sheila, was so devastated by her husband’s murder that she moved to her original hometown of Birmingham, Ala. (Arthur told me a burglar broke into his mother’s house in Alabama last month.) That left Arthur with the responsibility of selling his father’s house. “I’ve never sold a house, dude,” Arthur says. “It got so bad I had to take out a loan on my car title just to rent a truck to move everything out of my dad’s church. My family got broken up when my dad got killed. Now I’m just trying to get back on my feet as far as my personal life is concerned, because my stuff was way out of order.” In an effort to gain some financial security, Arthur applied for a bank loan. That led to another disturbing revelation. The woman at the bank told him he was registered as deceased. According to Arthur, it turns out Bo had used Arthur’s social security number to take out some two dozen credit cards in Arthur’s name, and some of them were delinquent. That left Arthur several thousand dollars in debt and his credit in shambles. It also put him in the position of contacting the Berwyn police to, as he puts it, “file a report on a dead dad.” “He scammed me,” Arthur says. “I actually would have to press charges against him if he were alive.” Asked if he feels anger toward his father, Arthur replied, “Do I? You don’t understand. If my dad was alive, I’d want to kill him. To just swallow it and say like God wants, to turn the other cheek? That’s hard to do.”
Coach Pingatore and St.
Joseph’s High School filed a lawsuit against the filmmakers in October, 1994
claiming their school, and varsity basketball coach Pingatore, were depicted
“in a false and untrue light,” claiming the school provided access to the
filmmakers because they promised the film would be used exclusively for
educational purposes, having been told it would be a non-profit project to be
aired on PBS, not a commercial venture, where the recent commercial release
suggests the film could earn several millions.
The suit was settled the following year on February 15, 1995 when the
filmmakers agreed to donate scholarship money for students at both St. Joseph
and Marshall High Schools. Pingatore now
uses the film as a recruiting tool. The
film grossed about $8 million dollars, where the director split the profits of
about $200,000 with both the Agee and Gates families. Agee subsequently bought a house for his
mother in the western suburb of Berwyn, a short 10-minute drive from their old
apartment in the West Garfield Park neighborhood in Chicago.
Hoop Dreams, directed by
Steve James | Film review - TimeOut
Steve James'
essential inner-city epic chronicles the lives of two young blacks growing up
in a Chicago housing project. At 14, basketball prodigies Arthur Agee
and William Gates
win scholarships to a suburban high school, St Joseph's. Then their fortunes
diverge. William looks set to follow in the footsteps of St Joe's favourite
son, all-star Isiah Thomas. Arthur doesn't make the cut. Skinny and immature,
he finds himself back in the inner city when his parents fall behind on the
fees. Over the next four years, however, the boys' lives are to intersect more
than once, and in unexpected ways. A three-hour documentary about basketball is
probably not most people's idea of a night out, but this one rewards the
effort. James and his collaborators shot more than 250 hours of footage, and
the cumulative emotional power is simply devastating. Sport is the only dream
Arthur and William are allowed, their only ticket out of the ghetto, but they
also have to carry the weight of their parents' aspirations - and if they make
it, they will become role models for thousands of kids just like them.
Unforgettable.
Hoop Dreams
Review | Movie - Empire
In American Cinema, baseball is always associated with nostalgia and fondly-imagined virtues of family and country, but the current rash of basketball films (Blue Chips, White Men Can’t Jump etc.) are about a divided, desperate American present. Easily outclassing the fiction films is this extraordinarily compelling near three-hour documentary, which follows a pair of black kids from Chicago’s Cabrini Green housing project through four years of high school, examining the assumption that their basketball talent is a chance to get out of the ghetto and into college, and which is being heavily talked up as a possible Oscar contender outside(ital) the documentary category.
Both Gates and Agee are spotted as 14-year-olds by a recruiting man who arranges basketball scholarships for them at an up-scale school. Both struggle, Gates with injuries and Agee with low academic achievement, but continue to shine on the court. With exceptional skill at distinguishing drama from the raw footage of fly-on-the-wall shooting, James hits on a real irony: Agee’s presence peps up his no hope team into a winning streak while Gates is troubled by doubts and a “good but not great” career.
Though there is plenty of hoop action, the film focuses on the
various pressures on the heroes (and heroes they become) from families,
schools, coaches, friends, sponsors, college recruiters and hanger’s-on.
Confident enough to leave plenty to implication — both kids are fathers by the
time they leave high school and Agee has a friend who seems to be leading him
into a life of crime — this is the best type of documentary, giving an
intensely personal story you can’t help but become involved in, and also raises
fundamental issues about America in the 90s.
eFilmCritic.com
(Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
The documentary "Hoop Dreams" has the sprawling force of the best fiction. In fact, it's the closest movie equivalent to the great American novel I've seen in years.
If you're wary of a nearly three-hour film about basketball, so
was I, at first; sports bore me to tears. Yet I watched the movie in an absolute
trance of fascination. Hoop Dreams is less about hoop than about dreams
-- dreams nurtured, dreams annihilated. In its understated, journalistic way,
the movie is overwhelming in its cumulative impact. It's both depressing and
exhilarating; it's truth and it's life.
The film tracks two 14-year-old boys -- Arthur Agee and William Gates, both
from squalid sections of Chicago -- whose one and only passion is basketball.
Watching them sitting mesmerized and ecstatic in front of a game on TV, you
realize you're seeing the primal moment of awakening: This is what you were put
on Earth to do, so go practice your jump shot. William, who is taller, and who
develops a thick neck and imposing build as the years pass, is a dependable
shooter with balletic moves. Arthur, a shorter boy with a quick, casual smile,
is a more erratic player but also more electrifying; his are the kind of moves
that look foolish when they don't work but dazzle when they do work. The movie
is a parallel study of these boys as they grow into young men, father children,
and respond to various forms of crushing pressure.
Pressure. We often take sports stars for granted, mumbling about their
astronomic salaries. Hoop Dreams implicitly challenges our perception of
athletes as spoiled rock stars. For these boys, the question of whether they
have the skills to make it to the NBA is the least of their worries. The film
suggests that grabbing the gold ring in the pitiless world of sports requires
inhuman persistence and resilience -- the ability to weather constant blows to
the body, the mind, the soul. William and Arthur are sent to the suburban
school St. Joseph's, alma mater of the legendary Isiah Thomas. Arthur, whose
parents can't come up with the tuition, is forced to drop out and enroll in a
city school, where he keeps playing but sinks into a haze of disappointment.
William, meanwhile, in his comfortable position on St. Joseph's team, is nearly
crippled by a knee injury. His knee becomes an almost metaphysical villain in
the film's second half; William's frustration at being sidelined is so palpable
you can feel the angry heat of his flesh.
Hoop Dreams makes the unsurprising point that the boys, who are both
goof-offs in school, have been shaped into basketball machines -- incomplete
people, who worship the game to the exclusion of almost everything else. (By
the end, one of them will have learned that there are other things in life.)
Who can blame their parents for pushing them? This is the boys' ticket out of
the ghetto, and the film daringly focuses on family members -- Arthur's
screw-up father and William's disillusioned brother, both former high-school
hoop stars -- who hang over the boys' careers, experiencing their triumphs
vicariously. (The boys' mothers, less sensuously obsessed with the game,
encourage their sons but keep a hard eye on their grades. We come to love these
women.)
The blame falls on the shoulders of the coaches and recruiters, themselves
entrenched in the bizarre, punishing culture of high-school athletics. Gene
Pingatore, the coach at St. Joseph's (he resembles Mandy Patinkin in the cruel
lines around his tight mouth), bullies his players towards greatness. When
William's knee gives him trouble during an important game, Pingatore takes him
aside and says, "Of course, if your knee is bad, you shouldn't be
playing." This is an innocuous remark on the face of it, but Pingatore's
tone gives him away; we know he's trying to shame William into playing hurt.
Pingatore emerges as a Dickensian figure, a remorseless man who never stops
justifying his callousness and bursts of temper. Yet you also see that he's
powerless to be anything other than what he is. If his team doesn't win, his
ass is at stake, and so is St. Joseph's. The culture of sports doesn't respect,
doesn't even acknowledge, the concept of benevolence. The boys are in the rough
hands of wrathful, insecure gods.
As Arthur bucks the odds and cracks the books, and William studies
half-heartedly and grows disgusted with the game, Hoop Dreams pulls its
themes together. The filmmakers -- Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter
Gilbert -- began this project as a study of playground hoop. What they came
back with goes far beyond the usual sports movie. Passing awkwardly into
manhood, the boys create themselves out of the rubble of their dreams. At the
same time, the people who love them are either enjoying their own triumphs or
destroying themselves.
Watching this documentary about basketball (which I don't care about, in and of itself), I kept brushing tears away. "Hoop Dreams" seems to encompass everything and resolve nothing. The metal hoops, so seductive and high, await the next generation of boys, ready to exalt or humble them.
Hoop Dreams -
Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Rob Edelman from Film Reference
Hoop Dreams is a richly human and profoundly American film. It is at once an allegory about striving to achieve, and the politics and pressures of achievement; and a story of the anguish of poverty in urban America and an indictment of the meat market aspect of contemporary scholastic and professional athletics. While the film is a documentary, there is as much drama and suspense as any deftly plotted fiction. The difference is that the emotions and lives unfolding on screen are real.
The film opens with the NBA All-Star game being played in Chicago. Just a few miles beyond the fanfare, two boys are coming of age in rough urban neighborhoods. Both watch the game on television, almost in awe, while nurturing aspirations for stardom as professional basketball players. Both dream of one-way tickets out of the ghetto, complete with new houses and spiffy cars.
William Gates and Arthur Agee have honed their athletic skills on the neighborhood playgrounds. William is seen practicing slam-dunks in a park, by a bare brick building: a world away from the glare of a Madison Square Garden or an Orlando Arena. Both teens are recruited to play basketball at St. Joseph, a suburban Catholic high school. Years earlier, former Detroit Pistons hoop star Isiah Thomas (who also appears in the film) graduated from St. Joseph. The film now asks the question: "If Isiah can become not only a professional athlete but a perennial All-Star and certain Hall of Famer, why not William and Arthur?"
As William's career at St. Joseph progresses, the media compares him to Isiah, while Gene Pingatore, the school's basketball coach, sees within Arthur the potential to become a "great player." Later on, the image of Arthur shooting hoops in a playground garbed in a red basketball uniform with the name "Thomas" stitched on the back speaks volumes about his dream. Being accepted at St. Joseph, however, is the initial step of a lengthy, arduous process. Arthur and William will have to acclimate themselves to a school outside their neighborhood, in an interracial climate. Each day, they must endure a three-hour commute to and from school. Once there, they will have to succeed academically as well as athletically.
Hoop Dreams is an up-close-and-personal look at five years in the lives of William and Arthur. It opens with their enrollment at St. Joseph, and concludes with their heading off to college. In between are the traumas and victories they experience on and off the basketball court, and the answering of questions which are posed as the boys begin attending St. Joseph: How will William and Arthur relate to the school, and how will the school and the drill sergeant-like coach relate to them? How will their athletic skills develop? How will their lives and perspectives change over the years? How will all this impact on their relatives? Arthur's dad, Bo, is a failed athlete who feels he "could have made the pros," and does not want his son to experience the "bad things" he has known in his life. William's older brother Curtis is another ex-jock who lives through his sibling while observing that "all my basketball dreams are gone."
With keen insight, the film reflects on the value system of contemporary American society. Their basketball prowess certainly affords Arthur and William an opportunity for education, and self-improvement, in an academic environment far superior to their neighborhood high school. When William begins his freshman year at St. Joseph, his reading skills are at the fourth grade level but, by the time he is a sophomore, his reading level has gone up several grades. The film raises several societal questions here, including: "What about all the ghetto kids who do not have William's physical aptitude?" and "How many kids will never have their ability tapped because they are unable to slam a ball through a hoop?" Furthermore, Arthur and William are attending St. Joseph not out of altruism. Are they being exploited for their talents? Are they perceived as being little more than bodies, who will help a team win a championship? If they were to fail on the court, or suffer a potentially career-ending injury, will they be discarded? Arthur is only on a partial scholarship and is booted out of school because his parents cannot keep up tuition payments, then loses all academic credit. St. Joseph refuses to release his transcript until his family pays $1800 in back tuition. The welfare of the teenager becomes secondary to the collecting of a bill from a family where the breadwinner is a minimum wage-earner.
In telling the story of William, Arthur, and their respective families, Hoop Dreams serves to reaffirm the humanity of black males. Bo Agee sadly fits a negative stereotype of the African-American man as an irresponsible, violent, drug-abusing loser. At one point, he even abandons his family and is later seen pushing drugs in the playground where his son plays basketball. Bo's fall continues when he becomes a crack addict, beats his wife, is arrested for battery, and spends seven months in jail for burglary. While his behavior is not condoned in the film, it is clear that he is unable to adequately support his family on a minimum wage and is tragically weakened by his loss of self-esteem.
Despite the specifics of its setting and subject, Hoop Dreams is a film with universal meaning. Arthur is eventually enrolled in a Chicago high school, and leads his unranked team to the city championship. He and his teammates then travel downstate, to play for the state title. In one sequence, Arthur's parents are seen walking across the University of Illinois campus, where the game will be played. One of them notes that "a child" should have the experience of attending such a school. This idle observation expresses every dream that every parent has ever had for any child.
But what resonates long after seeing Hoop Dreams is an unavoidable fact of contemporary American life. For every Michael Jordan, Shaquille O'Neal, or Isiah Thomas, there are thousands of young men like Arthur Agee and William Gates: young hoop dreamers who are forged in the ghetto, and who never will earn all of the glory and affluence they so desperately crave.
Hoop
Dreams Movie Review & Film Summary (1994 ... Roger Ebert, July 8, 2001
There is a point in ''Hoop Dreams'' where the story, about two inner-city kids who dream of playing pro basketball, comes to a standstill while the mother of one of them addresses herself directly to the camera.
''Do you all wonder sometime how I am living?'' asks Sheila Agee. ''How my children survive, and how they're living? It's enough to really make people want to go out there and just lash out and hurt somebody.''
Yes, we have wondered. Her family is living on $268 a month in aid; when her son Arthur turned 18, his $100 payment was cut off, although he was still in high school. Their gas and electricity have been turned off in the winter. The family uses a camp lantern for light.
Arthur cannot graduate from Marshall, his Chicago high school, without transfer credits from St. Joseph's in suburban Westchester--the suburban school that recruited him, dropped him, and won't release the transcripts until $1,300 in back tuition is paid. Since this debt would not exist if scouts had not found Arthur on a playground and offered him a scholarship, there is irony there. The rich school reaches into the city, not to help worthy students, but to find good basketball players. If they don't make the grade, they're thrown back in the pond. But then it's payback time. Arthur becomes a star at Marshall and helps them finish third in the state. St. Joseph's is eliminated earlier in the playoffs. And William Gates, the other kid who, as an eighth-grader, was recruited by the school, has missed months of playing time because of injuries. When Arthur plays in the state semifinals at the University of Illinois, both Gates and his coach, Gene Pingatore, have to sit in the crowd.
No screenwriter would dare write this story; it is drama and melodrama, packaged with outrage and moments that make you want to cry. ''Hoop Dreams'' (1994) has the form of a sports documentary, but along the way it becomes a revealing and heartbreaking story about life in America. When the filmmakers began, they planned to make a 30-minute film about eighth-graders being recruited from inner-city playgrounds to play for suburban schools. Their film eventually encompassed six years, involved 250 hours of footage, and found a reversal of fortunes they could not possibly have anticipated.
Early in the film, we see the young men get up at 5:30 a.m. for the 90-minute commute to the suburbs. One of them talks about St. Joseph's with its ''carpets and flowers.'' From the beginning, William Gates is more naturally gifted than Arthur Agee. He stars on the varsity as a freshman, while Arthur plays for the freshman team. William is quick, brilliant, confident; Pingatore compares him with his great discovery Isiah Thomas, the NBA star who was also recruited by St. Joseph's. Both students arrive at the school reading at a fourth-grade level, but Gates quickly makes up the lost time, suggesting that his neighborhood schools were to blame. Arthur makes slower progress, in classrooms and on the court. ''Coach keeps asking me, 'When you gonna grow?' '' he smiles. He is eventually dropped from the squad, loses his scholarship, and after two months out of school enrolls at Marshall.
Gates seems headed for stardom, but injuries strike him. A ligament is repaired in his junior year. Torn cartilage is removed. Maybe he returns to the court too soon. He injures himself again. He loses confidence. Meanwhile, at Marshall, Arthur grows into his game and leads the team to a brilliant season. But the spotlight is still on Gates. He attends the Nike All-American Summer Camp at Princeton, where promising prep stars are scrutinized by famous coaches (Joey Meyer, Bobby Knight) and lectured by Dick Vitale (a showboat) and Spike Lee (a harsh realist). Arthur spends that summer working at Pizza Hut at $3.35 an hour. Then comes the senior year where Arthur leads his team to the state finals.
Both young men are recruited by colleges. Gates, despite his injuries, gets an offer from Marquette that promises him a four-year scholarship even if he can never play. He takes it. Agee, whose grades are marginal, ends up at Mineral Area Junior College in Missouri. There are eight black students on the campus. Seven of them are basketball players, and live in the same house. If his grades are good enough, he can use this as a springboard to a four-year school (and he does).
The sports stories develop headlong suspense, but the real heart of the film involves the scenes filmed in homes, playgrounds and churches in the inner city. There are parallel dramas involving fathers: Arthur's leaves the family after 20 years, gets involved with drugs, spends time in jail, returns, testifies in song at a Sunday service, but does not quite regain his son's trust. William's father has been out of the picture for years; he runs an auto garage, is friendly when he sees his son occasionally. The mothers are the key players in both families--and we also glimpse an extended family network that lends encouragement and support.
Every time I see ''Hoop Dreams,'' I end up thinking of Arthur's mother Sheila as the film's heroine. During the course of the film her husband leaves and gets into trouble, she suffers chronic back pain, she loses a job and goes on welfare, Arthur is dropped by St. Joseph's--and then, in the film's most astonishing revelation, we discover she has graduated as a nurse's assistant, with the top grades in her class.
There are moments in the film where the camera simply watches, impassively, as we arrive at our own conclusions. One is when Arthur and his parents visit St. Joseph's to get his transcripts, and are told they need to come up with a payment plan. ''Tuition provides 90 percent of our income,'' a school official says. Yes, but the school was not looking for tuition when it recruited Arthur; it was looking for a basketball player, and when it didn't get the player it expected, it should have had the grace to forgive him his debts.
Coach Pingatore and the school were parties to a suit to prevent the film from being released theatrically. The school comes off looking pragmatic and cold, but then ''Hoop Dreams'' reflects a reality that is true all over America, and not just at St. Joseph's. As for Pingatore, I think he comes across pretty well. He has his dream, too, of finding another Isiah Thomas. He wants to win. His record shows he is a good coach. He gives William sound advice, although perhaps he's too eager to see him return after his injury. William tells the filmmakers that the coach thinks sports are all-important, but I covered high school sports for two years and never met a coach who didn't. After saying farewell to William, Pingatore observes ''One goes out the door, and another one comes in the door. That's what it's all about.'' There is sad poetry there.
The movie was produced by the team of director Steve James, cinematographer Peter Gilbert and editor Frederick Marx. They benefitted from a remarkable intersection of opportunity and luck. They could not have known when they started how perfectly the experiences of Agee and Gates would generate the story they ended up telling. Over the years, there have been updates on their progress. William played for Marquette for four years and graduated; he did social work while supporting his wife's college education, then planned to return to law school. Arthur got into Arkansas State, played two years, has done some movie acting, has formed a foundation to help inner city kids get to college. Neither one played for the NBA. (Of the 500,000 kids playing high school basketball in any given year, only 25 do.) But their hoop dreams did come true.
Hoop Dreams | The Nation Stuart Klawans from
The Nation, January 3, 2009
…are made to be broken, as Arthur Agee and William Gates learned the hard way over the five years their lives on and off the court were filmed.
Filmed by three white guys in Chicago from a script by God, Hoop Dreams is an epic of American life in the here-and-now. It’s about the near-total divorce in our cities between black society and white; about the grind of poverty, by the day and by the year; about the various ways in which the impoverished respond – with courtliness, optimism, self-control or self-loathing – as they see dollars showered in frivolity all about them.
The hope that some of those dollars might float their way drives the people in Hoop Dreams onward; in the simplest terms, the film is about two young black men from the Chicago ghetto, Arthur Agee and William Gates, who are determined at all costs to become players in the National Basketball Association. We learn, in great detail, what the words “at all costs” might mean to such young men. We also learn the somewhat different meanings of those words to their families and friends, to coaches and teachers, to recruiters and broadcasters and the onlooking throng. As the film takes in this very broad sweep of American society, it also works up portraits of Agee and Gates, portraits that are unexpected–breathtaking–in their intimacy. It’s this combination of the panorama with the close-up that makes Hoop Dreams a landmark film–that, and the valor of the film’s subjects, the persistence of its filmmakers, the cunning of that scriptwriter who was working out of sight.
Some background: In 1986, Steve James, Frederick Marx and Peter Gilbert approached a distinguished documentary production company, Kartemquin Films, with a proposal to make a movie about schoolyard basketball players in Chicago. As the trio has since explained – with a laugh – they were envisioning a half-hour program for public television. Then, touring the playgrounds with a freelance scout named Earl Smith, they met Arthur Agee, a 14-year-old grammar-school kid from the Garfield Park neighborhood. Smith wanted to take Arthur to a tryout at St. Joseph, a nearly all-white, Roman Catholic high school in the suburbs. The filmmakers tagged along; and so they found themselves recording how the St. Joseph coach, Gene Pingatore, recruited Arthur, hooking his parents with talk of a college education while dazzling the young player by introducing him on court to St. Joseph’s most famous graduate, Isiah Thomas.
Pingatore was happy to acquire Arthur for the freshman squad; but his dreams of a state championship rested with another 14-year-old, William Gates, whom he had recruited from the Cabrini-Green housing project and put straight onto the varsity squad. With William’s permission and that of his family, the filmmakers started following him as well.
Did they approach any other young basketball players? At a recent press conference at the New York Film Festival, the filmmakers explained that they had not; having started with $2,500 in their pockets, they barely had enough money at any one time to keep filming William and Arthur. But they did keep filming–for four and a half years, all the way through the young players’ high school careers, until some 250 hours of footage had piled up. Once edited to a release length of a little over two and a half hours, Hoop Dreams turned out to have the insane shooting ratio of 100 to 1.
None of this would matter, of course, had James, Marx and Gilbert amassed 250 hours’ worth of garbage. But life turned out to be marvelously accommodating, for the filmmakers if not for the subjects. As Hoop Dreams unfolds, William’s story winds up complementing Arthur’s almost point for point, giving the film a depth and completeness that are all the more thrilling for having been impossible to plan.
Born into a family of stolid, roundfaced people, William sets to work at St. Joseph with a determination that’s as quiet as it is joyless. Coach Pingatore tells him what to do; so does his older brother Curtis, whose own hoop dreams have failed; so, in her way, does the St. Joseph fan who helps pay William’s tuition and gives him a summer job. William, soft-spoken and shy, mostly listens and obeys. He asserts himself with pleasure in two areas only: in the classroom, where he discovers that he can stand up to the white students academically, and at home, where he starts a family of his own by the time he’s in the eleventh grade. It says something about William’s needs and his character that he keeps this family hidden from his coach for as long as possible.
Singled out for success, relentlessly pressured and promoted, William is the type of player who soars on the court. Arthur, by contrast, is the type who scoots. Like his parents, Sheila and Bo, he’s high-strung and rabbity. Like them, he can be vividly demonstrative or else shut out other people entirely; but he will not practice the guarded courtesy that William excels in, nor does he get the first-class treatment that William enjoys.
Having disappointed Coach Pingatore with his erratic play, Arthur somehow never encounters any tuition-paying fans. So, midway through his first semester of tenth grade, the school sends him packing. His mother, suffering from a bad back, has had to give up her job and cannot pay St. Joseph. As for Arthur’s father, he has been laid off from a series of jobs by now and is settling into a period of unemployment, drug use and street crime. It’s not clear in the film whether the drug habit caused the job losses or was caused by them. (It’s not always clear in life, either.) To all of the Agees, though, it seems very clear that St. Joseph would have tolerated the debt had Coach Pingatore thought more highly of Arthur’s skills. Marked a failure at 15 and still reading at the fourth-grade level, Arthur has to plunge at midterm into the metal-detector atmosphere of Chicago’s Marshall High School, joining classmates and basketball players who are not used to having him around.
It would be hard to invent a more grating story of how white America uses and discards young black men; and if Hoop Dreams concluded at this point, it would be a memorably devastating picture (not to mention a much shorter one). But the filmmakers’ virtue, like Arthur’s, was to keep going. More reversals ensue, in Arthur’s fortunes and in William’s, enough of them for a whole novel. Meanwhile, as the subjects’ lives arrange themselves into a pattern of Dreiserian irony, the movie fills up with multitudes of detail. To the average viewer, these particulars may seem repetitive, even downright exhausting; but only a fool would give them up.
It’s important to see, for example, that the Agees and their community organize a ceremony to mark each change in life. Humble in tone, despite the participants’ great care to look their best, these events usually involve a lot of unoccupied folding chairs and invariably feature a gospel singer, who rises above the pings and echoes of the hail’s amplifier to perform a heartfelt solo. One such ceremony, incorporated into a film, would amount to local color. Hoop Dreams gives you three or four, so you can feel the cumulative rhythm in the Agees’ lives of struggle and thanksgiving.
Other elements of Hoop Dreams also have their cumulative effect: the basketball games, with their rising intensity as each season wears on; the physical changes that overtake the subjects, as children grow to maturity and parents lose their teeth; the words–all those orders and counsels, blandishments and threats–that pour in a steady torrent over William and Arthur. Since Arthur has a way of going deaf around authority, a casual viewer might think him unaffected by the yak-yak, for good or ill. But the increasing steadiness of his play leads me to believe he must have paid some attention to his coach at Marshall, Luther Bedford, who as a black man has, shall we say, a different perspective from that of Gene Pingatore. We hear Bedford speak forcefully about the one-time hoop-dreamers who now stand on street corners in Chicago, owning nothing but the empty boast that they once played for Marshall. A vivid picture – though Pingatore seems strangely unfamiliar with it. His talk is all about the disappointment gnawing at Isiah Thomas’s heart to this day, because he never led St. Joseph to a state championship. It does not surprise me that William Gates, after listening to this stuff for four years, said goodbye to Pingatore in one of the coldest scenes ever to be recorded on celluloid.
“I have to play basketball:’ William has said at one point to his girlfriend, Catherine. “It’s my way out. It’s the only way I’m ever getting to college.” Her reply: “Well, I’m going to college, and I don’t play basketball.” By the end of the film, William seems to have learned what she already knew. He will go to college, but he will study as much as play, knowing he needs a life beyond basketball. (What will he study? Communications, he tells Pingatore–“so when you come asking me for a contribution, I’ll know the right way to turn you down?’) Arthur, too, is disillusioned, though still intent on a basketball career, he now pursues his goal with cold eyes.
By this time, Arthur has learned what he amounts to in the sports business, and in the society that business serves. If he’s good–if he’s very, very good–then he’ll be what a coach in Hoop Dreams admits he’s searching for:
“Professional meat.”
Hoop
Dreams: Serious Game Criterion
essay by Jay Edgar Wideman, May 9, 2005
Hoop
Dreams: The Real Thing Criterion
essay by Robert Greene March 31, 2015
Hoop Dreams (1994) -
The Criterion Collection
Rude
Awakenings | Miscellany | Chicago Reader
Ben Joravsky, April 20, 1995
"Hoop
Dreams" by Murray Sperber - Jump Cut
Hollywood Dreams, by Murray Sperber from Jump Cut, March 1996
Hoop
Dreams Hoop Realities, by Lee Jones
from Jump Cut, March 1996
How
'Hoop Dreams' Became a Reality | Highsnobiety Alec Banks, October 20, 2014
Hoop
Dreams: the Struggle and the Triumph | E t h e r i e l ... Grace Wang
Hoop Dreams |
Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine
Chuck Bowen
Hoop Dreams: Criterion
Collection (2004) | PopMatters
Cynthia Fuchs
Ultimate
Book of Sports Movies Ray Didinger
and Glen Macnow
Cut
to the Left | Movie Review | Chicago Reader
Bill Stamets, October 27, 1994
Steve
James, Peter Gilbert and Frederick Marx's 'Hoop Dreams ... Scott Foundas from Documentary magazine
Collector's
Corner [Wes Marshall]
ReelViews
[James Berardinelli]
CINEMA:
False Hoops - TIME Richard Corliss
from Time magazine
Review for Hoop Dreams (1994) -
IMDb Scott Renshaw
DVD Savant (Glenn
Erickson) dvd review Criterion
Collection, also seen here: Hoop
Dreams - Turner Classic Movies
DVD
Talk - Criterion Collection Bill
Gibron, Criterion Collection
The DVD
Journal | Quick Reviews: Hoop Dreams: The Criterion ... Clarence Beaks from DVD Journal, Criterion
Collection
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Jon Danziger) dvd review Criterion
Collection
Q Network Film Desk
(James Kendrick) dvd review [4/5]
Criterion Collection
DVD
Verdict [Patrick Bromley] - Criterion Collection
Hoop Dreams
Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest
Shannon T. Nutt, Criterion Blu-Ray
DVDizzy.com
- Criterion Collection Blu-ray [Luke Bonanno] Criterion Blu-Ray
Hoop Dreams (Blu-ray)
: DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray
Ryan Keefer, Criterion Blu-Ray
Criterion
Collection: Hoop Dreams | Blu-ray Review - U.S. ... Jordan M. Smith from Ioncinema, Criterion
Blu-Ray
DVD
Verdict - Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) [David Johnson] Criterion Blu-Ray
Hoop
Dreams · Film Review Two teens reach for their Hoop ... A.A. Dowd from The Onion A.V. Club
eFilmCritic.com
(M.P. Bartley) review [5/5]
Bill's
Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
Anthony's
Film Review [Anthony]
filmcritic.com
(Christopher Null) review [4/5]
AboutFilm.com
(Jeff Vorndam) review [A] Top 25
Films of the 90’s
Movieline
Magazine review Stephen Farber
Hoop Dreams - A
Review - Documentary Films .NET
Ronnie D. Lankford Jr.
'Hoop
Dreams' (1994) - 30 Best Sports Movies of All Time ... Rolling
Stone magazine, August 10, 2015
CriterionForum.org:
Hoop Dreams Blu-ray Review film
discussion website
Hoop Dreams - Top
Documentary Films
An
oral history of Hoop Dreams, 20 years after its premičre ... Jason Guerrasio interviews from The Dissolve, January 15, 2014
Twenty
years of Hoop Dreams | Dazed Jason
Ward interview from Dazed, October
14, 2014
William
Gates still marvels at Hoop Dreams success
Christopher Dempsey interview from The
Denver Post, April 1, 2015
Entertainment Weekly
review [A] Owen Gleiberman, also
seen here: Movie
Review: 'Hoop Dreams' | EW.com
Hoop Dreams -
Movie Reviews and Movie Ratings ...
TV Guide
My
favourite film: Hoop Dreams
Christian Bennett from The
Guardian, November 11, 2011
Hoop
Dreams: where are the main figures now? | Sport ... Gabriel Baumgaertner from The Guardian, February 18, 2015
'Hoop
Dreams' - Washington Post Hal Hinson
Looking
Back At Broken 'Dreams' (washingtonpost.com)" Mike Wise from The Washington Post, July 5, 2004
Metro
Pulse (Knoxville TN) [Joe Tarr]
Austin
Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
San
Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Movie
Reviews : 'Hoop Dreams' Hits Nothing but Net : The ... Kenneth Turan from The LA Times
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
October 21, 1994
Siskel &
Ebert org - Hoop Dreams (video)
The
great American documentary | Roger Ebert's Journal ... Roger Ebert on the 15th anniverary, November
5, 2009
Movie
Review - Hoop Dreams - FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW ... Caryn James, also seen here: The
New York Times (Caryn James) review and here: Hoop
Dreams - The New York Times
Hoop
Dreams Blu-ray - Steve James - DVDBeaver.com Gary W. Tooze
Hoop Dreams - Wikipedia, the
free encyclopedia
Hoop
Dreams [Book Review] - I Spit Hot Fire
book review by Michael Nguyen
Hoop Dreams - Ben
Joravsky - Paperback 1996 book by
Ben Joravsky, 320 pages
Hoop Dreams by
Ben Joravsky — Reviews, Discussion ...
1996 book
Hoop
Dreams by Steve James |Steve James, William "Pop ... 1996 book
Watch Hoop Dreams Online | Hulu (2
hours, 51 minutes)
the complete film
online. from Joost (2 hours, 51
minutes)
`King'
Wheat's Killing Mirrors Change In Gangs ...
George Papajohn from The Chicago
Tribune, August 19, 1994
St.
Joe's Calls Foul On Film - tribunedigital-chicagotribune Janita Poe from The Chicago Tribune, October 6, 1994
`Dreams'
Exposes Reality Of A Big-time Basketball Program ... Barry Temkin from The Chicago Tribune, October 7, 1994
"Hoop
Dreams: Dreaming the Dreams, Realizing the Realities." Caryn James from The New York Times, October 7, 1994
Lives
Forever Changed The costars of Hoop Dreams didn't ... L. John Wertheim from Sports Illustrated, September 20, 1999
Man
chased down and slain - tribunedigital-chicagotribune Rick Hepp from The Chicago Tribune, September 13, 2001
"The Best 1,000
Movies Ever Made" The New York Times, April 29, 2003
""Hoop
Dreams" father slain"
Benji Lipsman from The Chicagoist,
December 17, 2004
`Hoop
Dreams' father slain - tribunedigital-chicagotribune Hal Dardick from the Chicago Tribune, December 17, 2004
"Father
Of "Hoop Dreams" Star Slain"
Hal Dardick from Black Athlete,
December 19, 2004
Looking
Back At Broken 'Dreams' (washingtonpost.com) Mike Wise from The Washington Post, July 5, 2004
1
of 2 suspects held in Berwyn killing - tribunedigital ... Angela Rozas from the Chicago Tribune, July 24, 2005
"IDA's Top 25
Documentaries" Listed as #1, by
Tom White from Documentary magazine,
November/December 2007
One
dream, two paths - tribunedigital-chicagotribune Sarah Olkon from the Chicago Tribune, November 14, 2008
"Dreams
don't cost a thing" Rob
Harrington from Independent Weekly,
April 1, 2009
What
Ever Happened to the Stars of 'Hoop Dreams'? - U.S. Kathy Shwiff from The Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2012
Why 'Hoop Dreams'
still matters | SI.com Seth Davis,
July 21, 2009
Acquittal
in 'Hoop Dreams' case - tribunedigital-chicagotribune Chicago
Tribune, January 20, 2010
STEVIE A- 94
This certainly
resembles a welfare film – a truly remarkable look at the world of social
services in crisis that we have all seen before, some of us have actually
worked in it as well, but probably never seen reflected back in our faces quite
so memorably as this does. Filmed in
Murphysboro and the neighboring Southern Illinois rural community, this is an
oddly affecting film, an unbelievably accurate portrayal of a backwoods,
trailer park outcast who is one truly flawed and messed up individual, who
represents every bit of the welfare system, beaten and abandoned by his mother
at an early age, raised by his grandmother until he was 11, spending the rest
of his adolescence raped and/or neglected in every single juvenile
foster home in Southern Illinois, building a huge rap sheet of petty crime
upon his release, spending time at Choate Mental Health Center, and finally,
through a horrific trial process revealed as part of this film, sentenced to 10
years for a Class X felony conviction for molesting his 8 year old cousin. My guess is he'd already been well known in
the
If ever the purpose of
art was to expose the world to a particular time and place that is unlike their
own, this is it, as we come to know this man's world and the few people who
populate it, by examining him through the lens of all the people who know him,
and we hear all persons concerned point of view, until we are able to see, in a
more objective light, the kind of man, and the kind of world, he lives in. Despite the personalized vantage point of the
filmmaker, who happened to be the Big Brother of this troubled kid when he was
in college, a potentially exploitive attachment that remains troublesome to the
viewers throughout the film, this is the kind of film that makes the world seem
like a different place afterwards, deep in the heart of Steve Earle country
where you hunt rattlesnakes and where the character in question was not afraid
to run with the brothers of the Aryan nation.
Aghast as it sounds, their appearance in the film is significant, as
they are appropriately connected to his life and the choices he faces, and they
actually help paint this rather extraordinary portrait of a wretched and
miserable soul, the heart of which is provided by the continued hope of his
learning-impaired girl friend, who may not even know why she has hope, but in
this rather decrepit world, she has it.
STEVIE Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
THE
INTERRUPTERS A 96
We got over 500 years of prison at this table. That’s a lot of fuckin’ wisdom. — Zale Hoddenbach, former gang member, now a CeaseFire interrupter
First of all, gang
violence is not something most people understand or have any insight into,
considered a cultural phenomenon unique to neighborhoods infested with gangs,
and largely ignored, out of sight, out of mind, by people living in safer
neighborhoods. It’s like prison reform,
as you never stop to consider the ramifications of undermanned and overcrowded
prisons until the day you find yourself incarcerated. But in large urban areas across the country,
this is the story that usually leads off the evening news, another senseless
death, a child accidentally shot down in a gang shooting crossfire, where it’s
rarely the intended victim that’s harmed.
The stories are relentless, with few, if any solutions offered, because
the perpetrators are outside the reach of the police, family, or church
influence, and therefore usually end up dead or in prison at an early age,
supposedly immune to the powers of persuasion, or so we thought.
In the aftermath of
this 2008 New York Times piece, a thoroughly engaging essay by Alex
Kotlowitz that scientifically examines the root causes of Chicago gang
violence, offering treatment along the lines of neutralizing a medical
epidemic, actually offering a bit of insight into the seemingly impenetrable
gang culture for a change, documentary filmmaker Steve James, the heralded
director of HOOP DREAMS (1994), enlisted the assistance of Kotlowitz in
following on camera some of the individuals mentioned in his article who were
providing gang intervention, known as “violence interrupters,” as they hope to
stop the neverending cycle of revenge and prevent future shootings before they
happen. With the experience of having
been in gangs and prison and survived, some for committing murder when they
were teenagers, these interrupters already understand the mindset of the
upcoming gang youth who shoot before they think, never for a second thinking
about their own lives they are throwing away, instead it’s all about getting
immediate retribution in a moment of anger, thinking that in some way killing
makes things right, at least in their eyes—Death before dishonor. This kind of thinking is what fills the
prisons.
This is one of the most
heartbreaking and excruciatingly painful subjects of any film you’ll ever see,
as the camera searches out families of recently shot teenagers, including their
younger brothers and sisters or their grieving parents, focusing on their
immediate reaction, oftentimes on their front steps, in their living rooms, or
at the funeral and burial services.
Unlike the news media that exploit these situations, the violence
interrupters routinely put their own lives on the line, trying to diffuse anger
by placing themselves in harm’s way, where they have unique insight into just
what these kids are feeling and how they intend to resolve the conflict. But violence isn’t inherited at birth, it’s a
learned behavior that reflects the world around them, where kids are just
following the examples of people they know.
The interrupters have an obligation to re-educate them on the spot,
using as examples those around them who are dead or imprisoned, where they
could become just another statistic or they could have a second chance at
life. The interrupters are placed in the
precarious position where they are not cops and do not inform on illegal
activity, and while they don’t condone gang activity, they’re not in a position
to change or even alter that culture, only the hair-trigger response of certain
individuals to shoot whoever shot one of them.
The film documents a
year in the life of an inner city organization called CeaseFire, founded by an infectious
disease physician Gary Slutkin who spent a decade in Africa with the World
Health Organization attempting to halt the spread of infectious diseases,
returning home to Chicago where he viewed the spread of youth violence as
similar to an infectious outbreak. Tio
Hardiman, a neighborhood social activist with a prior history of drug and
alcohol abuse, invented the interrupters program, attempting to stop the
violent outbreaks using individuals who have street credibility not just with
gangs, but in the eyes of youth who have few positive role models. Especially because they are so familiar with
the effects of violence in their own lives, having somehow survived, now
returning back to the streets offering an alternative, this is an extremely
volatile and highly personalized approach to mediation, getting in the faces of
gangbangers and angry kids who just lost a brother or an innocent nephew,
attempting to redirect their hostility, which usually means staying with them,
continuing a lengthy dialogue much like negotiating with a hostage taker or a
downbeat individual considering suicide, until the inflammatory anger passes,
and then following up afterwards, continuing to offer crisis intervention
services.
While the city’s interrupters
meet weekly with Hardiman to discuss their works in progress, James chooses
three to follow, all extremely charismatic individuals with tortured pasts
whose impressive turnabout makes them uniquely qualified. Ameena Matthews gives what is perhaps the
most wrenching performance of the year, whose no nonsense authenticity,
directness under pressure, and personal charm gives her an overwhelming
onscreen presence. The daughter of Jeff
Fort, iconic founder of the Black P. Stone Nation and imprisoned-for-life
leader of the notorious
Ricardo “Cobe” Williams
is a big man with a similar purpose, a kid who went haywire when his father was
beaten to death by a baseball bat, spending his youth in and out of prison
until he also found religion, where he seems determined to offer a path of
redemption for others that he never experienced himself. Another easy going guy, whose wife says is
really “nerdy,” where according to Hardiman, among his many talents is knowing
when to walk away in dicey situations. This is a guy so dedicated that he continued
going to work even after the funds dried up and he was laid off for a period,
because like a CIA undercover operative in the field, once you make a promise
to be there in saving people’s lives, people in high risk situations where
their lives may be in danger, you have a commitment to be there. One of the most riveting scenes in the film
is Cobe bringing a young 19-year old armed offender known as Li’l Mikey, a
youth who spent nearly 3 years in prison, back to the scene of the crime where
he held up a barber shop. This kind of
theater you can’t invent, as it’s among the most dramatically powerful and
intensely personal moments of the film.
Mikey is so committed to finding that redemptive path that Hardiman actually
considers him as their first teen interrupter.
Eddie Bocanegra shot a
killed another kid when he was 17. Now,
like the other two, he’s on a spiritual mission to make up for it, talking to
disaffected youth, offering an art class for those kids who have been affected
by violence, where one 11-year old girl describes the experience of her brother
getting shot in the head and dying in her arms.
Because of the tender age of many of these kids, he’s more like a big
brother offering them positive alternatives or a shoulder to cry on, where
their heartfelt comments are remarkably unfiltered. One of the more poignant moments is joining
the family at the cemetery site, where they gather every single day, offering a
silent communion for their loss. While
Eddie is able to console the young girl, the figure of her father sitting there
in silence every day is a haunting and tragic sight.
For 25 years murder has
been the leading cause of death among black men between the ages of 15 and 34,
while more than 11% of black males age 25 to 34 are incarcerated, while black
women are incarcerated at nearly 4 times the rate of white women and more than
twice the rate of Hispanic women.
Nothing seems to put a dent in these numbers despite neighborhood marches,
media speeches, church activism, a Mayor’s attempt to ban handguns (which was
overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court), and the police continually asking for
crime witnesses to step forward. While
it’s impossible to measure the results, CeaseFire claims they show a 40 – 60%
reduction in shootings in six targeted neighborhoods, which would include West
Garfield Park, Englewood, Maywood, Logan Square, Roseland, and Rogers Park,
with as much as a 67% reduction in others.
Despite these claims, the interventionist program has continued to face
budget cuts, where 50 or 60 interrupters were reduced to less than 20, where
the elected politicians seem as far removed from this problem as those living
in the isolation of the rural plain states.
As profoundly relevant as any documentary seen in the past 5 years,
there’s a soulful, organ drenched
rendition of “Don’t Give Up on Me” by Solomon Burke that plays over the end
credits, an ominous reminder of just how hard it is to remain committed to a
lifelong project fraught with this degree of intense tragedy and pain.
THE INTERRUPTERS |
siskelfilmcenter.org Barbara
Scharres
In this stirring and powerfully insightful year-long journey through Chicago’s inner city, Oscar-nominated director Steve James (HOOP DREAMS), in collaboration with author Alex Kotlowitz (There Are No Children Here), follows three courageous “violence interrupters” working for the innovative organization CeaseFire, as they patrol the city’s meanest streets to defuse scenarios of heart-stopping volatility. Interrupters, including dynamo Ameena Matthews, daughter of notorious gang leader Jeff Fort, are seen to be the only force standing between a killer and his victim when gang vengeance threatens. With unprecedented access, and with the specter of Derrion Albert’s horrific death hanging over the community, James captures the increasingly urgent one-on-one encounters where lives hang in the balance. HDCAM video
The
Interrupters Tom Huddleston from Time Out
Stories of life on the mean streets of
Most of James’s subjects are ex-bangers themselves,
even articulate activist Ameena, the undoubted star of the piece, a woman so
intensely self-possessed she can stand in the midst of a group of six-foot
teenage thugs and still look like the toughest person in the room. ‘The
Interrupters’ lacks the crowd-pleasing sports movie arc that fired ‘Hoop
Dreams’ – this is, by necessity, a more fractured, disparate piece of work –
but the political and emotional power behind it is impossible to ignore.
The Interrupters
: The New Yorker Richard Brody
(capsule review)
Steve James’s documentary, based on an article by Alex Kotlowitz (who also co-produced), follows members of CeaseFire, a Chicago-based conflict-mediation group, over the course of a year of their attempts to defuse potentially violent situations. Most of the group’s activists, as seen in the film, were once criminals themselves, which, together with their roots in the community, gains them the respect of the people they advise, cajole, dissuade, and mentor. James centers the film on a few of these “interrupters” and a handful of young people in need of guidance, and, with his insistent yet compassionate camerawork, gathers poignant, troubling stories. Among the recurring themes are the nefarious influence of gangs, the allure of easy money, the emotional toll of families broken by violence and drugs, and the need for jobs—and the hard-won wisdom the elders convey also includes their frequent mention of incarceration as the ultimate dissuader. Law enforcement comes across as awkward and misguided, yet it looms, ubiquitous and unexamined, in the film’s margins. James’s approach is not analytical but emotional; his depiction of people bearing inextinguishable pain is empathetic and powerful, and the struggle toward stability of one profound and troubled soul (a thirty-two-year-old man who has spent fifteen years in jail) has a Dostoyevskian intensity.
The
Wooden Kimono [Joe Gastineau]
Next up was a film I was hugely
excited about, Steve James' The Interrupters. James' Hoop
Dreams is one of the best films I've ever seen, so this certainly had a
lot to live up to. Much like Hoop Dreams, The Interrupters
takes a sobering look at life in
It's a hugely powerful work, focussing as it does
on flawed but inspirational individuals trying to make a real difference. It
never once feels patronizing or voyeuristic and stays fixed on getting beneath
the surface of the Ceasefire team and those they are most desperately trying to
reach. Also, if I see a funnier introduction to a character this year than when
we meet the furious dealer Flamo, I'll be god damned. Touching and tragic, The
Interrupters is essential viewing.
They were once gang-bangers. They were
teenagers when they gunned down enemies on the streets of inner city
Steve James (who directed the Oscar-nominated Hoop
Dreams) follows three Violence Interruptors over the course of a year as
they negotiate with headstrong young men and women to lay their guns down and
stop the bloodshed. They don't hold back and speak in hard, frank terms.
Ammena, Cobe and Eddie grew up in a spiral of drugs,
sexual abuse and poverty. The program they work for, CeaseFire, views inner
city violence as a virus, in that the disease must be snuffed out at the
source. They literally stop fights on the street, knock on the doors of those
they counsel and at the darkest moments, attend funerals. They risk their
lives, as we see in one tearful scene where an Interruptor lies in a hospital
bed after getting shot in the back.
Though running at 142 minutes, The Interrupters is
one lean, unapologetic film — there isn't a wasted frame. It's gritty and
harsh, but also inspiring. There's nothing sentimental here — no voiceover to
reveal someone's inner feelings. It's all on screen. This is one of the best
films of this festival.
The Interrupters
| Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club
Scott Tobias
Unlike many other socially engaged documentaries, the films of Steve James (Hoop
Dreams) are more descriptive than prescriptive, exposing deep,
intractable problems that may not have solutions, in spite of the best efforts
of those concerned. James’ heartbreaking 2002 documentary Stevie
relayed his own challenges and shortcomings as a Big Brother to a violent,
erratic young man in rural
Filmed over the course of a year that saw more killings on the streets of
The Interrupters was shot at a time when violence in
James’ camera is present for moments of extraordinary tension: A contrite ex-con apologizing to the family he terrorized in a barbershop robbery; a street fight that escalates with a butcher knife and a hunk of concrete; a pair of brothers so hostile that they come to blows whenever they see each other. Witnessing outreach workers intervening in these situations is inspiring enough, but their subtlety and nuance in neutralizing people of different backgrounds and temperaments is especially impressive. Given such a wealth of material, James has trouble wrangling it all: Different cuts have been screened at 164 minutes and 145 minutes, and the current 125-minute version feels rushed, with a uncharacteristically pat postscript. If there’s one lesson to be learned from violence interrupters, it’s that their work is never done.
The Interrupters reviewed: This
documentary on Chicago gang violence is the most necessary film of the year. Dana Stevens from Slate
The Interrupters (The Cinema
Guild), a documentary about an initiative to stop urban violence in
Filmed over the course of a year—we watch the seasons progress in four separate chapters—The Interrupters does a magnificent job of establishing what's at stake for the workers at CeaseFire: Consumed with regret over the sins of their youth (which, in the case of at least one, included murder), they will stop at nothing to keep kids in their community from making the same mistakes.
As in his classic 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams,
director Steve James (collaborating with
Cobe Williams, a former gangbanger who's now a suburban family man (his wife describes him dryly as "a very, very nerdy person"), is shown intervening in several different cases, most notably that of Flamo, a volatile loner whose resistance to being helped at times places Cobe in physical danger. And Eddie Bocanegra, a Latino ex-con with a monklike devotion to his work, teaches a painting class to young children who live in fear of random violence, then counsels a depressed girl who watched her older brother die in her arms.
Some scenes are difficult to watch; I wasn't the only one on my row occasionally shielding my eyes as if from a horror film. A group of women runs down a city block seeking revenge for some slight done to their brother, one of them wielding a kitchen knife, as children age 4 or 5 tag along after. At a teenager's funeral, his friends pose for pictures next to the open casket, taking turns playing the role of the corpse. On a wall mural with the names of local kids who've lost their lives to violence, a graffiti scrawl reads "I am next."
Just when you're about to despair, though, The Interrupters offers glimpses of the hope that must be what keeps the interrupters plugging away at their exhausting work. Li'l Mikey, a young man who held up a barbershop two years ago, agrees to return to the shop with Cobe to apologize to everyone who was there that day. His reconciliation with a woman whose children are still traumatized by the memory is harrowing and uplifting at once. The movie's epilogue, in which we follow up with each case after the year is over, contains a few joyful surprises—not happy endings, perhaps, but at least the prevention of endings that could have been so much worse.
“Blocking the
Transmission of Violence” New York Times Magazine, Alex Kotlowitz Alex Kotlowitz from The New York Times, May 4, 2008, also seen here: Blocking the
Transmission of Violence - Alex Kotlowitz - Gang ...
Meet
Chicago's Interrupters… Andrew
Anthony from The Guardian,
Slant
Magazine [Lauren Wissot]
Pick
of the week: Real-life crime drama "The Interrupters" - Andrew ... Andrew O’Hehir from Salon
Movie
Review: The Interrupters | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Andrea Gronvall
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Film of the month: The Interrupters (2011) Michael Brooke, September 2011
In
Theaters: "The Interrupters" - Film Writings by Jason Bailey
The
Film Pilgrim [Frances Taylor]
indieWire
[Eric Kohn] also seen here: Sundance
Review | Fighting Gang Violence in Steve James’s “The Interrupters”
Village
Voice [Melissa Anderson]
Film-Forward.com [Nora Lee Mandel]
The
Interrupters: Heroes in an Urban War Zone - TIME - Time Magazine Richard Corliss
The
House Next Door [Christopher Ellis Gray]
Gordon
and the Whale [Brian Kelley]
Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin
The
Interrupters: Steve James and Alex Kotlowitz document CeaseFire Deanna Isaacs from The Chicago Reader
Cinematical
[Christopher Campbell]
Moving
Pictures Magazine [Jeremy Mathews]
The
Interrupters — Inside Movies Since 1920 - Box Office Magazine Vadim Rizov
The
Interrupters | Review | Screen - Screen International Tim Grierson
Best For
Film Lara Choksey
Little
White Lies Magazine [Matt Bochenski]
The
Interrupters - 2011 - Movie Review - Documentaries - About.com Jennifer Merin
'Interrupters'
Take On Chicago's Youth Violence NPR
interviews with various cast and crew,
Interview:
Steve James and Alex Kotlowitz Interview
Elise Nakhnikian interview from Slant,
Gang
'Interrupters' Fight Chicago's Cycle Of Violence : NPR NPR interviews with some of the film’s
participants ,
'The
Interrupters'—Stopping Violence Before It Spreads in Inner-City ... Ari Berman interviews the fimmakers from The Nation,
'The
Interrupters' Look to Stop Inner-City Violence Nick Anderson interviews the writer and
director from The Wall Strreet Journal,
The
Interrupters: Sundance Review - The Hollywood Reporter John DeFore
The
Interrupters and Elite Force 2 – city violence spreads to the big screen Danny Leigh from The Guardian,
The
Interrupters – review Peter Bradshaw
from The Guardian
The
Interrupters – review | Film | The Observer Philip French from The Observer, also seen here: The
Interrupters – review
The
Interrupters (15) - Reviews, Films - The Independent Anthony Quinn
The
Miami Herald [Rene Rodriguez]
The
Interrupters - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times
Letters:
Blocking the Transmission of Violence
Letters to the Editor from The New
York Times,
“Upending Twisted Norms” New
York Times, Bob Herbert Op/Ed Piece,
Murder of Derrion
Albert - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"4 Teenagers
Charged in Youth’s Beating Death"
Emma
Final sentencing
in Fenger beating case Jason Meisner
from The Chicago Tribune, August 29,
2011
Last
suspect in beating death of Derrion Albert gets 32 years Don Babwin from The Chicago Sun-Times,
Daily
Journal - Violence 'interrupter' says police outreach better after ... The
Daily Journal,
Chaos Theory Part I Josh Gryniewicz from CeaseFire,
Chaos Theory Part II Josh Gryniewicz from CeaseFire,
Chaos Theory Part III Josh Gryniewicz from CeaseFire,
“Homicide that Didn’t Happen” Chicago
Tribune, Dr. Gary Slutkin
“Chicago’s
CeaseFire Program Targets Poor Youth in Dangerous Urban Neighborhoods” The
Huffington Post, March 26, 2011
Evaluation of CeaseFire
Copy of the full report
CeaseFire Evaluation Report
Jeff Fort - Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
Black P. Stones -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Moorish
Science Temple of America - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Blackstone
Rangers/ Black P. Stone Nation/El Rukns (c. 1957--c ... Black Past
FBI — El Rukns FBI Records
El
Rukn - Terrorist Organization Profile - START - National ...
The
Chicago Crime Scenes Project: El Rukn Leader Jeff Fort's Home
The
Chicago Crime Scenes Project: El Rukn "Temple"
El
Rukns Indicted In Libya Scheme - Chicago Tribune Maurice Possley and William B. Crawford Jr.
from The
Jury
Convicts 10 Members of Notorious Gang - New York Times
El Rukns had
early terror ties Carlos Sadovi from
The Chicago Sun-Times,
New
book on the Black P. Stone Nation - Chicago Tribune Courtney Crowder interview with Natalie Y.
Moore, the author of the new book, The
Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of an American
Gang
Qaddafi: Ties
to the El Rukns Chicago Gang Natalie
Y. Moore from The Root,
Gatsby’s house was
still empty when I left — the grass on his lawn had grown as long as mine. One
of the taxi drivers in the village never took a fare past the entrance gate
without stopping for a minute and pointing inside; perhaps it was he who drove
Daisy and Gatsby over to East Egg the night of the accident, and perhaps he had
made a story about it all his own. I didn’t want to hear it and I avoided him
when I got off the train.
I spent my Saturday
nights in
On the last night,
with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at
that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an obscene
word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the
moonlight, and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I
wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand.
Most of the big shore
places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy,
moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the
inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old
island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast
of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s
house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human
dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the
presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he
neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with
something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there
brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first
picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way
to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly
fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere
back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the
republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the
green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded
us then, but that’s no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our
arms farther. . . . And one fine morning ——
So we beat on, boats
against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby finale, 1925, Ebert’s favorite literary passage
Arguably the most
powerful documentary seen so far this year, as it’s like witnessing the passing
of a close personal friend, adapted from Ebert’s 2011 autobiographical memoirs,
written five years after thyroid cancer left him unable to speak, eat, or
drink, but he “began to replace what I lost with what I remembered,” making a
resurgence on the Internet with his interactive Ebert blog where he only became
more prolific and influential as a writer, where his legacy is contained on his
revamped website (www.rogerebert.com)
that currently receives 110 million visits per year, where there are some 70
writers offering diverse opinions and views carrying on his name. The only film critic with a star on the
Born as a middle class
kid from
Improbably, or perhaps
not, Roger developed a close association with schlock sexploitation maestro
Russ Meyer, writing the screenplay for the cult film BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE
DOLLS (1970), which captured the thoughts of young director Martin Scorsese,
who started amusingly with the title, claiming they meant it when they say it
goes “Beyond…Far Beyond,” always remembering the editing sequence when the girl
has sex in a luxury Bentley car, which edits the grill of the Bentley into the
middle of the sex act. Scorsese recalls
the interest a young Ebert took in one of his earliest efforts, WHO’S THAT KNOCKING
AT MY DOOR (1967), seen when it was entitled I CALL FIRST, already recognizing
the talent behind the camera, which he recalls in his book here, Scorsese
by Ebert by Roger Ebert, an excerpt.
In one of the lowest periods of Scorsese’s life in the early 80’s, after
several failed marriages, he acknowledges he was actually contemplating
suicide, but before he had the chance to act, he received an invite from Siskel
& Ebert to join them in a retrospective panel discussion about his works at
the Toronto Film Festival, something he never forgot, as it literally saved his
life. Scorsese’s comments were
particularly heartfelt, even as Ebert lambasted his film THE COLOR OF MONEY
(1986), which struck a nerve, but he insisted that even when writing a negative
review, Ebert never lost his professionalism or went for the juggler, a trait
that describes his innate humaneness.
Similarly, Errol Morris attributes much of his success to Ebert’s
enthralling endorsement of his first documentary film GATES OF HEAVEN (1978), a
small film about pet cemeteries that Roger championed throughout his life. The same could be said about Werner Herzog,
who calls Ebert a “soldier of cinema, a wounded comrade,” but it is Morris who
acknowledges, “Here I had someone writing about my work who was a true
enthusiast. His enthusiasm has kept me
going over the years, and the memory of his enthusiasm will keep me going for
as long as I make movies.” The
director’s own association with Ebert dates back to 1994 when Siskel &
Ebert used their television show as a platform to endorse his unheralded urban
basketball documentary HOOP DREAMS (1994) as one of the best films of the year,
where both listed it as their #1 Best Film.
All of this attests not only to his influence, but his personal
generosity, reflected by countless others who recall how Ebert took the time to
acknowledge their work when nobody else was, like Charles Burnett’s KILLER OF
SHEEP (1979) or Gregory Nava’s EL NORTE (1983), where kindness is a recognizable
human attribute one never forgets.
After winning the
Pulitzer Prize, The Washington Post
editor Ben Bradlee tried to lure him away with a big-money offer, but Ebert
continually refused, replying, “I’m not gonna learn new streets.” Much is made of Ebert’s professional legacy,
specifically the thumbs up/thumbs down shorthand of film criticism, a technique
that film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum dismisses, claiming it is not film
criticism, which Ebert is not ashamed to acknowledge, as television time restraints
demand a simplistic rating system, a short cut style of divulging sufficient
information for viewers to make an intelligent choice. But other serious cinephiles were equally
appalled by the system, including this erudite March/April 1990 Film Comment attack by Richard Corliss, All Thumbs: Or, Is There a Future for Film
Criticism? that attacks the dumbing down, sound bite mentality of movie
reviews as little more than television marketing. In the next edition of the magazine, Ebert's reply may be as meticulously detailed, lengthy, and
well-argued as the original piece, delivering a strong defense for the
show. This perfectly illustrates Ebert’s
clear-headedness, as according to newspaper colleagues and friends, Ebert never
spent more than a half hour writing a review, that he comes from a newspaper
background where the secret is outlining the ideas in your head before you
start to write. Ebert had the ability to
write, and speak, in whole paragraphs while retaining the ability to remain
clear and concise, displaying old-fashioned Midwestern logic and common
sense. Even when writing about complex
artists like Bergman, Dreyer, or Bresson, Ebert never wrote above the heads of
the audience by describing often incomprehensible film theory (which he was known
to do in classrooms, spending hours dissecting movies shot by shot), always
aware that he was writing for the widest possible readership. When paired with philosophy major and Yale
graduate Gene Siskel, a man who never met one of his own opinions he didn’t
prefer, Ebert was often stunned by his inability to convince his partner of the
error of his thinking, where both stubbornly refused to acquiesce to the other,
which provided the fireworks for the show.
As someone ingeniously acknowledged, “Gene was a rogue planet in Roger’s
solar system.” Of course there are film
clips from the show, including inflammatory shouting matches objecting about
the incredibly poor taste of their partner, over BENJI THE HUNTED (1987), of
all films, where Ebert strains to yell over another Siskel snide remark, “I
disagree particularly about the part you like!”
But the worst behavior occurs during a series of outtakes where both are
seen continually trading personal insults, captured on camera as they dutifully
flub line after line of promo shots, eventually walking off the set in a
huff. Eventually, perhaps because of the
amount of time they spent in such close quarters together, they grew a special
affection for one another.
Among the many
surprises of the film is not about Roger, but Gene Siskel, former playboy, who
was part of Hugh Hefner’s inner circle of the early 70’s before he became a
movie critic, seen jet setting around the country with a bevy of beautiful
models on the Playboy private jet. And
who would have guessed that among Roger’s favorite literary works was a special
affection for The Great Gatsby, often
asking his lifelong friend Bill Nack to recite the final lines in the book from
memory, which he proudly does onscreen, as he has done hundreds of times, where
the overriding hope and optimism of a new and better world ahead seems to have
been Roger’s guiding light. At the
beginning of the film he offers his description of cinema as “a machine that
generates empathy,” which has an almost science-fiction feel to it, suggesting
there is a healing power in cinema, which may have transformed his life. He wasn’t particularly proud of his reckless
behavior on display during the 70’s while working for The Chicago Sun-Times, describing himself as “tactless, egotistical,
merciless, and a showboat,” where he was also a preeminent storyteller that
could hold a room, a womanizer, and an alcoholic, eventually joining Alcoholics
Anonymous, where he remained sober since 1979.
In his book, Ebert claims Ann Landers introduced him to his eventual
wife Chaz at a restaurant in Chicago, but the film tells another story, that he
met the love of his life at age 50 in an A.A. meeting. A former chair of the Black Student Union at
her college, and perhaps the least likely person to choose a white man for a
husband, Chaz steadfastly remains at Roger’s side throughout his most difficult
ordeals, often understanding the underlying anguish and despair even as Roger
tends to remain optimistic. Despite the
graphically uncomfortable moments where Roger has to continually return to the
rehab hospital five times, each time thinking it would be his last, that it
would lead him on the road to recovery, where he was initially informed, “They
got it all. Every last speck,” only to
realize the cancer had continued to spread elsewhere. This stream of medical news is exhausting and
demoralizing, none of which is hidden from view, where among Roger’s more acute
observations was his wife’s inextinguishable support, “To visit a hospital is
not pleasant. To do it hundreds of times
is heroic.” In a startling revelation,
Chaz describes the final moment when they finally decide to let go, easily the
most heartbreaking moment in the entire film, where death has rarely felt more
genuine. Yet it is this heartfelt
intimacy that carries us through this film that helps us understand the power
of love, where it nearly has the capacity to raise the dead, perhaps best
expressed by Kenneth Turan from The
If you had asked me ahead of time
what I would have found most interesting about Life Itself, I would
have guessed that it would be the parts I knew least about, specifically
Roger’s harum-scarum days as a young film critic about town in high-spirited
Roger loves
Chaz | Roger Ebert's Journal | Roger Ebert
July 17, 2012, a selection from Life
Itself: A Memoir:
The greatest pleasure came from
annual trips we made with our grandchildren Raven, Emil and Taylor, and their
parents Sonia and Mark. Josibiah and his
son Joseph came on one of those trips, where we made our way from
“Why?”
“Because they look happy.”
Ramin Setoodeh 5 of
the Film’s Most Surprising Moments, from
Variety at Sundance, January 19, 2014
Roger Ebert knew that he wouldn’t live to see “Life Itself,” the documentary based on his 2011 memoir. In one of the most touching scenes of the riveting film by director Steve James (“Hoop Dreams”), Ebert learns that his cancer has metastasized to his spine. The doctors estimate he only has six to 16 months to live, although he doesn’t make it that long. Ebert died in April 2013 at 70.
“It is likely I will have passed when the film is ready,” Ebert calmly predicts on-camera.
At the Sunday premiere of “Life Itself,” James broke into tears as he introduced his film, which will air on CNN. The next two hours were a sobfest, as most of the audience cried — and often laughed, too. When the credits rolled, Ebert’s wife Chaz took the stage joined by Marlene Iglitzen, the wife of Ebert’s longtime movie sparring partner Gene Siskel.
Chaz talked about how people called her a saint for taking care of Roger as his health failed after a thyroid cancer diagnosis in 2002. “What they didn’t know is how much my heart grew from having been with him for all those years, for loving him, for taking care of him, for having him take care of me,” Chaz said. During the Q&A, an audience member asked what Ebert would have thought of “Life Itself.” Chaz knew that “he would say two thumbs up.”
The stirring documentary, which was shot during what would be the last five months of Ebert’s life, includes interviews with Ebert’s director friends Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, as well as critics A.O. Scott and Richard Corliss. Here are five of the film’s most surprising moments.
1. Ebert never got to say good-bye to Gene Siskel. In the documentary, Marlene talks about how Gene hid his brain cancer diagnosis in 1998, out of fear that Disney would replace him on ABC’s “Siskel & Ebert.” Ebert had planned to visit Gene at the hospital, but he passed two days before the visit. Chaz said that Ebert was so heartbroken, he was determined to share the details of his own health after he got sick.
2. Ebert signed “a do not resuscitate.” In the final days of his life, he sent James emails like “i’m fading” and “i can’t.” He said his hands were so swollen, he wasn’t able to use a computer. He secretly signed a DNR at the hospital without telling Chaz, which she learned about on the day of his death. In the film, she described the moment of his passing as “a wind of peace” and “I knew it was time to accept it.”
3. Ebert met Chaz at Alcoholics Anonymous. In his memoir,
Ebert claims to have first talked to her at a
4. Laura Dern once gave Ebert a present that belonged to Marilyn Monroe. After Ebert presented Dern with a Sundance tribute, Dern sent him a heartfelt letter with a special memento. It was a puzzle that Lee Strasberg had given her, a gift from Alfred Hitchcock to Marilyn Monroe. Ebert later gave the puzzle to director Ramin Bahrani, with the instructions that one day, “You have to give it to someone else who deserves it.”
5. Ebert loved “The Great Gatsby.”It was his favorite book. He had his journalist friend Bill Nack recite the final lines back to him hundreds of times. Here it is, Roger: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Ebert compiled "best of the year" movie lists beginning in 1967, thereby helping provide an overview of his critical preferences. His top choices were:
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Roger
Ebert Documentary Life Itself Is a Poignant ... - Vulture David Edelstein
Steve James’s Roger Ebert documentary, Life Itself, is a tender portrait of the late film critic, who managed to put an apparently Brobdingnagian ego to benevolent, ultimately life-affirming ends. James—whose Hoop Dreams was the beneficiary of a fervent campaign by Ebert—cuts back and forth between Ebert’s last days and the story of his rise, first as a daily newspaper critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, then as co-host with Gene Siskel of Sneak Previews (later Siskel & Ebert & the Movies). Friends and colleagues allude to the hugeness, the Chicago-ness of the man—the appetite for food, booze (until he sobered up in 1979), raucous storytelling, and sex. (“He had the worst taste in women … gold-diggers, opportunists, or psychos,” says one old pal.) But that portrait is poignantly at odds with the man who appears on-camera missing much of his lower face, a flap of skin hanging in the approximate shape of a chin. The surgery—which eliminated Ebert’s ability to speak, eat, or drink—gives his face a simpleminded, Quasimodo-like cast that is constantly belied by the words he types and that are spoken aloud by a computer. Not even The Diving Bell and the Butterfly drives home the mind-body schism as movingly.
According to friends and colleagues, Ebert was “facile”—he never spent longer than half an hour writing a review. He was an old-fashioned newspaperman: clear, succinct, logical. His concentration was phenomenal. He had the ability to outline in his head, to write (and speak) in whole paragraphs. That’s one reason he paired so well with Siskel, no less an egomaniac but a random sputterer, an often touchingly vulnerable blowhard.
James does a superb job chronicling their hate-love relationship, suggesting in the end that apart from his wife, Chaz, Ebert never had a truer bond. That might be because no one else got away with challenging him—he hated being jarred out of those elegant paragraphs. Nevertheless, he reached out to other critics. A few of the best—A. O. Scott, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Richard Corliss—attest to his influence and personal generosity. More surprising is the number of directors who appear and with whom he hobnobbed: Werner Herzog, who calls Ebert “a soldier of cinema, a wounded comrade,” and Martin Scorsese, who credits Ebert and Siskel with shoring him up at a very low point in his career. But it’s easy to see why they deferred to him. He was, for a time, the most powerful critic in America and a TV celebrity. He was one of them.
Love him or not, the modern film critic must define himself or herself against Roger Ebert—especially in how he adapted to changing technology, finally building a community via blogging and tweeting around his titanic self. The modern human being must define himself against how he lived his final years, when he lost his (big) mouth and discovered an even stronger, truer voice.
jonathan
rosenbaum | The Cape Cod Film Society
also seen here: richard
corliss | The Cape Cod Film Society
When I was preparing to go to the Nantucket Film Festival, the
first thing on my list of films to see was Life Itself. I wanted to
see it because it is a documentary about Roger Ebert, a film critic who was so
central to the development of film criticism in
I’ve gone back and forth in my mind as to whether or not this was a disappointment. Life Itself does tell Ebert’s story, and there was a lot to his professional development that I did not know about, but because James’ focus is on the man behind the thumbs, the documentary is more about Ebert’s spirit. Yes, there are interviews with directors whose work he championed (most notably Werner Herzog and Martin Scorsese, both of whom I admire), and other film critics, such as A.O. Scott, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Richard Corliss are interviewed about his contributions to their field, but a good portion of the film is spent on the footage James got of Ebert in his hospital room and in rehabilitation as he tried to recover from cancer, which had plagued him for 10 years. It is that end-of-life struggle that resonates most.
Ebert is depicted as a character of depth and complexity, which is rare in contemporary documentaries. In fiction films, we are given complete access to the characters created for the story–their emotional lives, as well as their behaviors. But in a documentary, we are often limited by the subject’s power to reveal only what (s)he wishes to make public. In this case, the film is based on Ebert’s previously published memoir of the same name, but in James’ hands–with this footage of Ebert at the end of his life, the choice to include his step-children and grandchildren, who learned a lot from him, as well as early outtakes from the Siskel and Ebert television show that demonstrate the very real animosity between the two critics–we see many layers to Ebert’s personality. He is a loving and beloved husband, stepfather, and grandfather. He is a sometimes arrogant film critic and writer who had no trouble defending his views, but who, unlike the stereotypical critic, was just as passionate in promoting outstanding films as he was in cutting down poorly conceived, bad films. It is not all a show for the cameras, although Ebert seems to have been very pleased to have become a film subject in his last days. There are things missing from this documentary (for example, Siskel’s successor, film critic Richard Roeper is never mentioned, although he co-hosted At The Movies with Ebert for eight years), but then how could there not be; no one’s life story can be told in 116 minutes. This depiction feels very real.
Ebert was criticized, along with Gene Siskel, for having simplified criticism with the thumbs up/thumbs down designations, but for those of us who have act