Archive for the ‘history’ Category
Author: Gerald
‘Conducător’
Monty Python’s weaponized killer joke may have been used for offensive purposes, writes Gerald Loftus, but under the Ceausescu regime humor was mainly in self-defence: “Humor is what kept Romanians alive, and Tales from the Golden Age (2009) aims to re-capture that mood, portraying the survival of a nation having to face every day the twisted logic of a dictatorship.”
Author: James
Playing for his life
One that I have been meaning to do for some time – without doubt, one of the finest films ever made about the Holocaust and one that, in differing its approach from the similarly superb Schindler’s List (1993), manages to convey the unique horrors of those anti-human times in a way that is peculiarly intimate and personal.
Author: James
Digging up Franco’s Spain
Honour thy father and mother. José-Luis Peñafuerte does this in the most effective way possible in his documentary Los caminos de la memoria (2009). The son of Spanish exiles, this Brussels-born film maker has been on-topic since his very first TV documentary, Niños (2001), about the orphans of the Spanish Civil War, writes Gerald Loftus.
Author: James
‘We will not walk in fear of one another’
It was around this time, 2005, that George Clooney really began to prove what he could achieve, both as an actor, director and, in the case of Good Night, and Good Luck., both at the same time.
The year also saw the release of Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana, one of the most complex, intelligent and unforgiving examinations of the oil industry, in which Clooney delivered a performance that was brilliantly at odds with any of his previous screen personna and, while his interpretation of 1950 CBS producer Fred Friendly in Good Night, and Good Luck. may have the charm and swagger more traditionally associated with a Clooney interpretation, there is no doubting the sincerity of his direction, nor his excellent complementing of anchorman Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn), in this charged, thrilling account of the men who took on McCarthy.
Author: Gerald
Romania emerging
The EuroCine27 festival, on May 9th’s Europe Day, presented a dilemma to the cinephile. Which one(s) do you go see, with a film from each EU country to choose from? Easy choice, given the day’s big WW II commemorations in Moscow: Medalia de onoare (Medal of Honor) (2009) – about an ageing Romanian vet who is notified that he’s about to get a medal for something he did in the Second World War.
Author: James
No going back
Paul Greengrass has proved himself to be a world leader when it comes to the blending of fact and fiction – he is perhaps cinema’s most adept exponent of the ‘docu-drama’ approach, as he went on to prove with United 93 (2006), which was a far superior account of another day on which the world changed, namely 11 September 2001, than Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006).
Author: Gerald
Benito Mussolini – what a fascist!
And I’m not talking only about his political ideology, writes Gerald Loftus.
Nowadays, the term ‘fascist’ gets thrown around indiscriminately, especially in political circles. But in Marco Bellocchio’s 2009 Cannes-nominated film Vincere, we go back to its roots, and Mussolini’s personal fascism was clear in his attitude towards his first wife and their son.
Author: James
A worthy try
Certainly, he’s a director in vogue. Clint Eastwood has made a remarkable transition over the years from the spaghetti-western, moody-strong-silent type and amoral urban avengers that characterized his earlier roles, as well as the broad (though thrilling) sweeps of his first directorial efforts, such as Play Misty For Me (1970) and High Plains Drifter (1973), into a nuanced, creative helmsman of some of the most intelligent films of recent years.
Author: James
Suffer the children
Directors before Michael Haneke have asked the same fundamental question that permeates his elegiac, trenchant study of darkness and light, Das weiße Band (2009) – namely, with specific reference to Germany, from whence did the affiliation with fascism rise, and how did a people turn a blind eye to the atrocities in their midst during the 20th century?
Author: James
A life (and death) less ordinary
Spanish director Manuel Huerga (Diario de un astronauta (2008)) is brave enough to provide a frank and unflinching account of one of his country’s darkest periods, namely the 1970s dictatorship of Francisco Franco and the life and times of anarchist and bank-robber Salvador Puig Antich (Daniel Brühl), whose execution in 1974 (based on distinctly dubious evidence provided by the Spanish police after one of their number dies (accidentally?) in a shoot-out involving Antich) ushered in a period of extended civil unrest that brought Spain to democracy.
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