Month: October 2013

The headline in 1985 read something like “Police Bomb Osage Avenue MOVE House, 11 MOVE Members Dead, 61 Houses Destroyed.”

Where there’s police brutality, citizen pushback isn’t far behind. When the peace of innocent residents of a block is disrupted by unruly neighbors (threats of violence, the constant blare of bullhorns, filthy conditions–the group did not believe in exterminating vermin–) public opinion in the neighborhood swings back against the former victims, giving authorities renewed confidence for suppression.

Add in suspicions of a double police cover-up in incidents seperated by seven years and you’ve got a template for the MOVE disaster. Director Jason Osder, brings the havoc back to life using only archival footage. He makes use of public hearings, TV coverage, and the deposition of one of two survivors, 11-year-old Birdie Africa.

Was the police officer killed in the first incident in 1978 shot by police friendly fire? Were seven MOVE members subsequently sentenced to lengthy prison terms actually scapegoats? Did MOVE members who came out of the burning house in 1985 only to go back into it, return because they were being shot at by police?

Osder makes a case for both suspicions–a stronger one for the latter. What does seem sure is the Rizzo administration overreacted and the Goode administration waited too long to act, that both police and MOVE shared blame, and that, the uniformly condemned decision to bomb the property and then let the fire burn probably ranks as the most asinine government blunder in Philadelphia history. It also cost the city around $50 million to relocate displaced residents.

It’s sad that although the investigative commission condemned city officials (they used the word “malicious” referring to Mayor Goode) their conclusion led to zero criminal prosecutions.

Goode won’t be on the post-screening panel at the film’s next Philadelphia Film Festival screening of the film on Saturday, October 26 at 2pm. Ramona Africa, the other remaining survivor, will be though, as will Jim Berghaier, the Philadelphia policeman who heroically pulled Birdie to safety….The film opens theatrically at The Ritz Bourse on November 1.

4 Raging Infernos of Shame (out of 5 stars)

Every once in a long while a film comes along where seeing it can be considered not only essential, but practically a duty. Setting aside even the lowest tolerance for violence can be a relative small price to pay for the reward gained. In 12 Years A Slave, the mindless atrocities brought against American slaves in the pre-Civil South, is not merely shown, it’s brought to the screen with an artistry that puts the viewer squarely inside the shoes of the tormented.

British director Steve McQueen is interested in telling this based-on-a-true-story of a kidnapped formerly free black man unabashedly from the viewpoint of the slaves. The constant tension of what will happen next–the terrible uncertainty–fills the empty spaces McQueen leaves between his parade of harsh scene after harsher scene. The stillness between the sadism is the glue that brings the viewer in closer and closer. McQueen’s remarkable use of sound provides a jarring counterpoint to the haunting quiet that gives us time to reflect “How would I handle this? COULD I handle this?”

As Solomon Northrup, Chiwetel Ejiofor, in the year’s most impressive performance thus far, portrays shock, vulnerability, resilience and fear, often in the same scene. McQueen regular Michael Fassbender, as Ejiofor’s second slave owner, brings a new definition to insanity. Unabated grotesque cruelty knows no bounds in Northrop’s’ new world, yet McQueen’s overriding concern is that we experience it as if it were happening to us. With things this intense a catharsis is too much to hope for, but since we’re practically tied by an umbilical chord to Northrup, we come to identify with his strength against all odds. There may be a way out of the madness but only if Northrup continues ratcheting up his superior stamina, and even then, any deliverance of Northrup would be nothing short of a miracle.

Crumbling the likes of Gone With The Wind into la-la land shambles, McQueen, 43, has been here before. His film Hunger placed us inside the walls of a Northern Ireland jail full of abused IRA prisoners and inside the hunger strike of Bobby Sands’ fight to death. Subsequently he tackled a troubled sex addict’s voyage to an inner hell. With 12 Tear’s A Slave you won’t confuse him with Quentin Tarrantino anytime soon. Nor will you ever be able to watch any previously made film about slavery in quite the same way.

5 Excruciating Evils From A Nation’s Shameful Past (out of 5 stars)

Even a strong performance from Marion Cotillard and a fairly good one from Joaquin Phoenix fail to ignite the stodgy if rigorous The Immigrant. Supporting characters are uniformly stock, the story stretches plausibility more than once, and Ellis Island seems like Alcatraz one day, a Barnum & Bailey circus the next. Jeremy Renner as a magician and fraternal nemesis to Phoenix, provides a counterpart to the rest of the overtly serious leads, Cotillard could make me cry doing a commercial, and it’s fun to watch Phoenix get angry and put his Marlon Brando on, but sorry to say immigration woes shouldn’t feel this nondescript.

2 Once Upon A Times in A Flat Period Piece (out of 5 stars)

Gloria Cumplido (Paulina Garcia, Best Actress winner at The Berlin Film Festival) is a late-50s divorcee, mom, and garndmother who regularly hits a Chilean dance hall to meet meet men of a similar age and bent. She does so with aplomb, and with sufficient savvy to offset her vulnerability. Most of the time.

Her challenge comes in the form of a professed fellow divorcee who, although on the aloof side seems a nice enough chap. While kind and caring (he reads poems to her), he also becomes increasingly deceptive. Gloria’s solitary life is portrayed well enough it’s difficult to turn on her for any poor decision-making. We understand her situation, again thanks largely to Garcia’s performance. What’s more difficult is to equally ignore that the screenplay here, which, while containing some fine moments, is often thin and too whimsical for its own good.

Still, it is hardly common that a film about the amorous adventures of a 50-something is even this sharply observed, and while it’s fair to wonder if Garcia was really better than the rest of the actresses in Berlin, she’s pretty damn good as a Plain Jane with anything but a plain spirit and perseverance.

3 1/2 Over-50 Dating And Sex Escapades (out of 5 stars)

Cultural traditions, in all their splendor and confinements, envelop the exquisite Mother of George. Beginning with a sensuous Nigerian wedding celebration, the film offers a first-hand glimpse into a hard-working and dutiful family living among the Nigerian immigrant population in Brooklyn.

What sets the film apart is the subtle touch of Nigerian-American director Andrew Dosunmu and one of the year’s best lead performances from Danai Gurira (The Walking Dead). Gurira plays Adenike, the new bride who butts heads with expectations and familial pressures associated with child rearing and fertility. Her yet-to-be-conceived baby has already been pronounced “George” by her new mother-in-law (Bukky Ajayi), who will be on Adenike like a hawk for the next 18 months.

With her husband Ayodele basically sheltered from his mom’s pressure, Adenike will ingest potions, take on fetyility charms, including a belly necklace, and increasingly find her own fertility no longer a private matter. Worse, when the inevitable visit to a fertility doctor occurs, Ayodele declares it unaffordable, even though, adhering to another cultural norm, he won’t allow Adenike to work. Additionally, although it’s unstated, his macho state of mind doesn’t want to be upset with the unsettling notion of his manhood being questioned. The mother-in-law suggests Ayodele take on another woman, apparently an accepted practice.

Shot by Sundance prize-winning cinematographer Bradford Young, Mother of George is carefully framed with the spare language of close ups and cropped scenes and sharp cuts often replacing any undue dialogue. What could have in the wrong hands been melodramatic overkill, soars to the level of a modern-day classic on the dire difficulties facing a tight-knit diaspora in search of keeping old ways without losing themselves in total chaos.

Patriarchy fights matriarchy, emotional states become rivetingly exposed, and the struggle to stay human against inhuman odds spark this second film from Dosunmu. A former fashion director for Yves Saint Laurent, Dosunmu not only knows his way among colorful print dresses and headwraps but he takes first -time screenwriter Darci Picoult’s compelling story and fashions one of the year’s best films. Gurira will give you goosebumps. Her portrayal of Adenike’s retains dignity and grace as she faces enormous hurdles and moral dilemmas overwhelming enough for a lifetime.

(Mother of George will screen on Friday, October 25, at 7 pm at The Ritz Bourse.

4.5 Ancestors Rolling Over In Their Graves (out of 5 stars)

4 Plopping Definitons and Word Games Every Which Way (out of 5 stars)

The zany The Congress, Israeli director Ari Folman’s follow-up to the Oscar-nominated Waltz With Bashir, is twice as playful and half as coherent. No worries.  Once one gets used to Folman’s keeping us guessing throughout the film’s back-and-forth switches from a live-action present to an animated 2033, it’s fun to sit back and rake it all in. Some of the animation, a million miles stepped up from Waltz With Bashir, can be breathtaking in a Betty Boop meets Yellow Submarine sort of way. Harsh characters pop up in surprising places, and a dystopian future can be terrifying one moment and hilarious the next.

Once The Congress gets rolling into its trippy animated scenes, you’ll have no trouble spotting a toothy Tom Cruise, or  an hilarious Dr. Strangelove reference. You may, however, want to also keep your eyes peeled for additional take-offs of Clint Eastwood, Grace Jones, and Pablo Picasso, or, for that matter, John Hamm who’s not a caricature but actually a co-star of the film, doing voice-over as Robin Wright’s animator, who desperately falls in love with her.

Wright is very good as the has-been movie star Robin Wright, who’s talked into selling her “scan” to a movie studio that will revolutionize filmmaking.  Once her images and mannerisms are scanned she is asked to agree to be finished as an actress, although her scan is the studio’s to use as they see fit. (The hopelessly cheesy Rebel Robot Robin eventually results). Reluctant at first, Wright agrees to the deal due to her son’s degenerative disease. The film’s satire of the Hollywood scene of studio lawyers and agents (Danny Huston and Harvey Keitel, respectively) is spot on. Paul Giammatti also stars.

Sure it could have been a better film if there weren’t so many confusing, dangling loose ends. It’s also one of the most inventive films you’ll see at this year’s Philadelphia Film Festival.

3 1/2 Trippy It’s-All-In-Your-Mind Fantastic Animations (out of 5)

The brilliant, haunting last scene of Captain Phillips features a real-life Navy medic and Tom Hanks in an improvised scene that sums up the emotionally wrecking experience Hanks has just endured. It underscores both Hanks’ amazing acting talent and director Paul Greengrass’s ability to turn his extraordinary rendering of realism on its side and look at the human scale of a near-disastrous confrontation. It is as if Greengrass is saying, “OK, I brought you there for all the tenseness and confusion, now with equal frankness I’m going to show you the human toll that results.”

Greengrass, who directed the second and third installments of the Bourne franchise, also made two excellent documentary-style dramas: one about the Northern Ireland conflict, Bloody Sunday (2002), and the other, the 911 hijacked jet that crashed in Pennsylvania, United 93 (2006). The use of Navy personnel in Captain Phillips hardly represents a new tactic for Greengrass. In United 93 numerous speaking roles, including the lead traffic controller, were played by their real-life counterparts, who recreated their stressful roles in the day’s tragedy far better than we can imagine any professional actor could have. Greengrass’s equally trademark use of hand-help cameras and a jittery, effectively kinetic style, bring Captain Phillips an immediacy that is often exciting and suspenseful.

What rises the film above that of its ilk, is his ability to interject moving snapshots of the desperation of the Somali pirates alongside the bravery/vulnerabilty dynamics of Hanks’ Captain Phillips. Their chess game points to the larger issue of how there are no real winners is such a high stakes game. Nor does Greengrass go overboard in allowing us to feel a certain empathy for the enemy. Any such sentiments are tempered by a mutual feeling of pity for their careless action and an awareness of of their socioeconomic plight that caused it. The good guys and the bad guys square off, then there’s a chilling afterburn as we realize global capitalism can have nasty side effects. Captain Phillips, the second film this year to rewardingly tackle the subject of Somali pirates and cargo ships, is a fine counterpart to the Danish film, A Highjacking, which approached the topic from the angle of the negotiations of a shipping company as it deals with the effects a successful highjacking has on a crew kept largely in the dark about the company’s actions.

Hanks, fascinating to watch, has as good a chance as not for his third Oscar. Opposite him, the film’s other captain, Muse, is played by Barkhad Abdi, a Somali refugee from Minneaplois, who never acted before in his life. Although Billy Ray’s screenplay errs somewhat on the side of portraying the film’s Somalis in a cartoonish fashion, Abdi is real good. Long invulnerable to attacks from a small band of fishermen in a tiny skiff, the fact-based story depicted in captain Phillips may be a one-off. International laws prohibiting crew members from arming themselves have been amended and cargo ships like the one depicted here are now wrapped in razor wire to fend off any “attacking” ladders. In Greengrass’s vision the ladders used by the Somali prates to board the Maersk Alabama, might also be said to symbolize their human basic wish to climb to a higher economic station. The vast differences in size between the two vessels, dramatically scaled in the film, can only be breached temporarliy before Navy seals reaffirm their distinctions. Life goes on, but at a brutal cost for all.

4 Frail Attackers Whip Out Their Skiffs, Ladders and Assault Rifles (out of 5 stars)

A magician masquerading as a filmmaker, Alfonso Cuaron delivers a fim experience that shakes our senses while it wows our sensibilities. Suspense hangs in nearly every frame of the tight 90-minute Gravity, one of the rare films that is a must-see in 3-D. Space travel serves as the ultimate backdrop for not only physical survival but as a barren landscape upon which to rebel against the notion of man being a mere speck in the grand ether. It’s always been so within this genre, only Cuaron works wonders instilling the dreadful feeling that at any given moment almost anything can happen.

Stylistically, space’s enormity vies with and simultaneously complements the severity of the predicament of space travel novice, Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock). The larger and more empty the landscape, the greater and more dramatic the immersive shift to the hard realities seen from the interior viewpoint inside her space helmet. At risk of coming off claustrophobic in a film where the majority of the scenes have the actors inside their helmets, Cuaron and company hold sway over the project. It’s ironic that the film is presenting new systems of technical virtuosity almost incidentally. You’ll be so immersed in both beautiful and terrifying images, you’ll eventually stop trying to figure out how Cuaron pulled this off. Starting with a dazzling 13-minute opening single shot, you soon realize the film isn’t so much out to test technologies as to test our ability to withstand anxiety, and perhaps, to test our souls.

On hand as a razzing, lovable, yet do-or-die, no-nonsense commander, is Matt Kowalski (George Clooney). He tells Stone she’s the real deal on the mission; he just “drives the bus.” When the bus breaks down due to hurtling debris, Kowalski alternates his supportive, inspirational slaps on the back with valuable advice for survival. As an excellent Bullock takes over the movie, Stone’s choices resonate a struggle between self-doubt and confidence. No matter how overwhelming the simulated space portrayed, there’s always a human center.

Like space itself, Gravity never clobbers us but goes about its business quietly and eerily. It’s a special achievement that Cuaron (Children of Men, Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban, and the marvelous Y Tu Mama Tambien)
is able to marry comic-strip and arthouse interests. Special effects whiz Tim Webber, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, and composer Steven Price, who knows the value of understating, all contribute beautifully.

A title card at Gravity’s beginnjng reads, “There is nothing to carry sound. No air pressure. No oxygen. Life in space is impossible.” With Gravity, Alfonso Cuaron, like in all pure cinematic art, makes the impossible possible.

A 4.5 Star Unparalleled 3-D Masterpiece (out of 5 stars)