Film is Truth 24 Times a Second

On the off-chance that there’s anyone still unaware that Pan’s Labyrinth is amazing, here’s a link to the review I wrote for it after I saw it at the Pickford.

Link

Tideland opens with what has to be the most ominous, least promising beginning of all time: the face of the director, Terry Gilliam, telling you that there’s a strong chance you’re going to hate it. And I must admit that there’s a strong chance he’s right. A quick look at the reviews for the film shows that an awful lot of film critics really did hate it quite a lot. I didn’t hate it, but I couldn’t exactly say that I enjoyed it either, although it is often quite funny. The most I can hope to do is to attempt to understand it.

In his cautionary introduction, Gilliam advises the audience to forget everything they have learned as adults and to try to return to the innocent state of childhood. This theme of childhood innocence and fantasy has always been central to Gilliam’s films in the past, almost all of which seem to revolve around the idea of creating fantasy to escape brute reality (hence the tragic perfection of abortive attempt at a film based on Don Quixote). For the first twenty minutes or so, Tideland plays like Time Bandits’ White Trash cousin: the protagonist, a girl of about twelve named Jeliza-Rose, lives with the most comically ghastly, unpleasant, uncaring junkie parents, cooking up heroin for her father (played by Jeff Bridges) while her mother (Jennifer Tilly in the role she was born to play) alternates between hurling abuse and craving affection. Before long, like Time Bandits’ Kevin before her, she is liberated from these most undeserving authorities and freed to pursue her adventures.

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People might remember that City of God was a very popular Brazilian film about gangsters in the slums (or “favelas”) of Rio de Janeiro. It was a very stylish film that an almost absurd amount of on-screen violence and a Scorsese/Tarantino influenced music-video aesthetic with an attempt to represent the reality of Rio’s slums. Although it has a lot of strong moments (especially the ending, which I thought was excellent), I thought on the whole that it was a well-directed film whose leanings towards Hollywood (and “independent”) gangster films worked against its intent, glamourising the violence that it depicts.

City of Men is a TV series produced by Kátia Lund and Fernando Meirelles, the co-directors of City of God. One of its stars is Douglas Silva, who played Dadinho (or L’il Dice) in the movie. The series also shares the same frenetic style as the film. But there the similarities basically end: this is definitely not The Sopranos in Rio (the first episode even gives a dig at the film, when Acerola says that the rich from the city “only come to the favela to make movies and buy drugs.” It is essentially a socially conscious, comic soap opera, set in a slum, starring non-professional actors, surrounded by poverty, degradation and violent gangs, and overlooking one of the most beautiful cities in the world. The series is not about gangsters and drug lords; gangsters and drug lords are simply an ever-present fact of life for Acerola and Laranjinha, two boys who live in the hillside shantytown.

Before I get into all that social-conscience stuff, let me say that City of Men is wonderfully entertaining. By turns dramatic and hilarious, the excellent writing in the series and the stars’ natural charisma (Douglas Silva’s face alone is inherently funny) combine to make an extraordinarily entertaining show that walks the delicate line between comedy, drama and social commentary with apparent ease. (Also, the music is great.)
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Considering that we haven’t even got through January yet, some might consider what I’m about to say somewhat hyperbolic. But still. If I see a better film than Pan’s Labyrinth between now and the end of 2007, I will consider it an act of God on the level of the feeding of the five thousand. So I’m going to get in a glowing review of it now, before it wins all those Oscars.

Pan’s Labyrinth is a beautiful ordeal of a film; a brutal, harrowing experience that creates the impression of the very best kind of nightmare, in which one is left battered and bruised and yet unaccountably relieved, as if a great psychic weight has been lifted. Set in Spain in 1944, it tells the story of a young girl, Ofelia, who is taken by her pregnant mother to live with her new step-father, a captain of Franco’s
nationalist army, who is stationed in the mountains to root out the surviving republican fighters hiding there. A lover of fairy stories, Ofelia begins to be drawn into one of her own as soon as she arrives. Ofelia’s journey further and further into this magical world counterpoints with the Captain’s vicious regime against the republicans.

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In reviewing Jesus Camp I am going to work very hard to ensure that I do not resort to easy attacks on religion, stupid Americans or rat-tails. Many on the Left find it all too easy nowadays to follow Richard Dawkins in believing that without religion we would all inhabit some magical free-thinking paradise.

That said, Jesus Camp is the scariest movie you’ll see all year. The filmmakers avoid editorialising the action themselves: they allow everyone, adults and children alike, to speak for themselves, and they present them with humanity and respect. They do offer the angry monologues of Air America host Mike Papantonio as a counterpoint. Even this is arguably too much, as the footage really speaks for itself. Just as you may have heard, you will witness children as young as nine or ten praying to a cardboard cut-out of George W. Bush. You’ll see these same children driven to fits of agony by stories about the plans God had for all the aborted foetuses. (One has to wonder if God decides your future to the smallest detail before you’re even born, shouldn’t he be to blame for the abortions?) You’ll see a grown woman tell a roomful of children that “had it been in the Old Testament, Harry Potter would have been put to death!”

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The Holy Mountain

The Take

The Wind Will Carry Us

Watership Down

Those other ‘best of 2006’ lists are rubbish. Here’s some real class right here.

Top 10 New Releases of 2006:

The Constant Gardener
This was my favourite of the year. It has been accused of peddling a clichéd ‘white guilt’ approach to crises in Africa, and that might be true, but I don’t give a crap because the tragic love story at its centre was the most heartbreakingly beautiful thing I saw all year.
Edmond
Don’t believe the DVD case: this is not a “sexy thriller.” It is an upsettingly bleak black comedy. Neither is it “Mamet’s finest work,” but it is a very intelligent film filled with witty and occasionally disturbing insights into the workings of fear and the American male’s neurotic relationship with sex.
House of Sand
Little Miss Sunshine
Sophie Scholl: The Final Days
The Take
This has to be one of the most interesting and certainly the most optimistic of all the political documentaries I’ve seen. Co-written by Naomi Klein, author of NoLogo, it’s about the workers’ co-op movement in Argentina. This was my other favourite of the year. Everyone should see it.
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
Transamerica
Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
Water

Top 5 Re-Releases:

A Canterbury Tale
A Fish Called Wanda
Mr. Arkadin
Play Time
Reds