dir. Warwick Thornton
Australia, 2009
Utterly surprising, wonderful film about Aboriginal teens in the middle of Australia in love and running away to the nearest city. They hardly talk to each other, communicating in looks.
Amazingly, it manages to make the "white man's world", as one hobo describes it, look utterly alien. There's a scene where the girl (who is never named, but we assume she's called Delilah) watches to blonde-haired, blue-eyed teen schoolgirls sitting on a park bench talking on their mobile phones, and Thornton manages to make these two normal girls look so strange, so odd, it's unbelievable - the film is so entirely through and from the perspective of S & D that everything that isn't their world seems part of another planet altogether.
She's a total hero too, especially for the last third of the film where in a leg brace (after getting run over) she carries logs for firewood, kills and cooks dinner, makes a shack into a home, starts up the pump for the water, all whilst he lolls around in gas-fume-enduced oblivion (by this point he is going through cold turkey). She has such a wonderfully understated expressive face that she can communicate love, slight irritance and amusement all at once.
Saturday, 3 April 2010
Walk The Line
dir. James Mangold
USA, 2005
Flicking channels found it on C4. Very good, like everyone's said, held together by great performances by Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon.
USA, 2005
Flicking channels found it on C4. Very good, like everyone's said, held together by great performances by Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon.
Monday, 1 March 2010
Loulou
dir. Maurice Pialat
France, 1980
Can't get past the oafishness of Depardieu. Although it was interesting to see Isabelle Huppert young - I've only ever seen her in recent films from the 2000s.
France, 1980
Can't get past the oafishness of Depardieu. Although it was interesting to see Isabelle Huppert young - I've only ever seen her in recent films from the 2000s.
Precious
dir. Lee Daniels
USA, 2009
Surprisingly good - once you settle into it, the strange mix of social-realism, camp and Oprah-tackyness becomes rather wonderful, if flawed. But then the flaws are part of the wonder.
USA, 2009
Surprisingly good - once you settle into it, the strange mix of social-realism, camp and Oprah-tackyness becomes rather wonderful, if flawed. But then the flaws are part of the wonder.
Lovers of the Arctic Circle
dir. Julio Medem
Spain/France, 2000
If someone were to describe the stereotypical "art-house" movie, then it would be this. Not that that's particularly bad...
Spain/France, 2000
If someone were to describe the stereotypical "art-house" movie, then it would be this. Not that that's particularly bad...
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