Archive for the ‘social drama’ Category

Let’s take a look in the dictionary…

Otilia Ilie returns…

Police, Adjective (2009) is an already well-acclaimed movie from director Corneliu Porumboiu (12:08 East of Bucharest (2006)) – it was officially selected at the New York and Toronto Film Festivals 2009 and was a double prize winner (Jury and Critics Prize) at Cannes 2009.

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Tough tricks

Writer-director Fernando León de Aranoa (Los lunes al sol (2002), Caminantes (2001)) here turns his gaze towards a world far removed from that of Pretty Woman (1990) – the grubby, frequently sickening lives inhabited by sex workers, where hope is a truly precious commodity, a different currency from the prices that women haggle for their own bodies.

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Stellar stuff

Gerald Loftus is back…

Before some genius PR person decides to package this as another ‘coming-of-age’ film, please note that, while Stella (2008), by writer-director Sylvie Verheyde, does have a few of the traditional elements that go into a typical ‘feel-good’ picture, this film is an original.

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Punchy

Polish debut director Slawomir Fabicki doesn’t pull punches with his debut feature Z odzysku (Retrieval) (2006), about a young boxer struggling to do the right thing but finding himself being dragged ever deeper into the criminal mire. While the story takes a little time to find its rhythm, once it’s ducking and diving, the result is a solid, adult and engrossing portrayal of the best that a man can do when faced with the worst.

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Out, proud and fighting

Sean Penn’s at it again – as one of the premier actors of his generation, he has joined forces with American auteur Gus Van Sant in this affecting, impassioned tribute to California’s first openly gay public official, Harvey Bernard Milk (1930–1978).

A force for good and for change who, as is so often the case in the Land of the ‘Free’, had his life cut tragically short by an assassin’s bullet (are you reading this, Mr Obama?), Milk became a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977 as a result of his earlier, unsuccessful, but theatrically impassioned election campaigns, and the broader social changes the city was experiencing at the time. Milk had not previously felt the need to be open about his homosexuality or participate in civic matters until he began taking part in the great 1960s counterculture that swept America, aged around 40, which is when we join his story. At that time, homosexuality had yet to be made completely legal in the US, and gays were the frequent victims of social prejudice and hate crime.

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Stolen chances

A slick, well-made effort from Spanish director Jaime Marques (El Paraíso perdido (1999)) – writers Juan Ibáñez and Enrique López Lavigne offer an insight into the life and mind of Álex (Juan José Ballesta), a child abandoned by his kleptomaniac mother after she’d taught him how to ‘lift’ from passers-by, and the relationship he forms, now as a young man (with an uncanny resemblance to Matt Damon), with attractive middle-class student Sara (María Valverde), whom he promises to teach all that he knows about the fine art of street theft. It goes without saying, of course, that there will be a price to be paid for both star-crossed lovers…

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Learning curve

The clear favourite to take the top prize at Cannes (and it duly lived up to expectations, scooping the Palme D’Or), Laurent Cantet’s seminal study of ‘the blackboard jungle’ (which fully deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Richard’s Brooks 1955 work, Robert Mulligan’s Up the Down Staircase (1967) and James Clavell’s To Sir, With Love (1967)) features former teacher François Bégaudeau (who also wrote the screenplay from his own autobiography) as himself during a school year spent with a class of 14-year-olds, trying to impart lessons in French and life.

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Too black and white

Bille August (Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (1997), Les Miserables (1998)) heads up this multi-European country co-production, but his take on the tale of the relationship between a white South African prison guard and Nelson Mandela is flawed from the outset.

Approaching the immensely marketable material (James Gregory’s autobiography, detailing how his life became entwined with apartheid’s enemy-number-one Nelson Mandela because of his fluency in Xhosa, Mandela’s mother tongue) purely from a predictable, ‘How long will transformation take?’ perspective, badly vitiates the story’s suspense, rendering what could so easily have been a nuanced, subtle exploration of two men’s psychologies trite and curiously bereft of passion.

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Picturenose would take this opportunity to pay tribute to Hélène Noël, late of Brussels – a good friend of Colin’s and the love of James’s life, who was taken from us way too soon, at the age of 42, on 16 June 2008. Hélène was a woman of much love and many gifts and talents, not least of which was her ability to light up a room with her smile. A frequent contributor to Brussels’ Together, she also loved film (and Ireland), as the following review shows. Thank you for your attention.

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Angst Lee

Well, this ever-so ‘umble critic is putting his reputation on the line – Brokeback Mountain (2005) really isn’t quite as good as everyone else seems to believe. There, I’ve said it. Accusations of hard-heartedness may follow, but that doesn’t change the fact that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) director Ang Lee‘s simplistic, overindulgent work is little more than a competently made ode to nature and male-bonding.

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