in the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery:
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42 Up |  |
This installment of director Michael
Apted's long-running cinematic and sociological experiment will prove engrossing even to
viewers unexposed to the previous editions. "42 Up" is akin to watching human
beings develop via time-lapse photography, and it's fascinating to behold. The concept is
simple. Apted checks up on his subjects every seven years to see how they're doing and
interviews them about their lives. Three of them have dropped out of the series since the
last edition, citing a desire for privacy; ironically, one of the drop-outs is now a
documentary filmmaker himself. Previous installments seemed to concentrate on the
subjects' hopes and dreams for the future; by now, most of them have settled into a
relative stability in their lives, with the result being that "42 Up" has more
of a summing-up quality than the others.
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Julien Donkey-boy | |
From Harmony Korine, the screenwriter of
Kids and the director of Gummo, comes the first American film to be certified by the
strictly realist Danish Dogma group. It's also one of the first works to fully exploit the
hallucinatory, impressionistic possibilities of digital video. Scottish actor Ewen Bremner
(Trainspotting) slips into the itchy skin of Julien, a teenage holy fool from Queens with
a harshly disciplinarian father (director Werner Herzog) and a loving, burstingly pregnant
sister (Chloe Sevigny). The brilliant camera work uncovers a whole new palette of electric
colors, as Korine traces-sometimes comically, sometimes tragically, always
outrageously-his hero's efforts to find a place for himself in an absurd, violent world.
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Earth | |
Writer-director Deepa Mehta, whose last
film was 1997's sexually charged Fire, can make even a bloody massacre look
voluptuous. In Earth-like Fire, a study of individuals pressured by societal demands-Mehta
establishes the pampered world of 8-year-old Lenny (Maia Sethna), doted-on daughter of
wealthy Parsees who manage to maintain a neutral, cultured home in Lahore even as the 1947
partition of India is forcing neighbors to take sides in a brewing religious battle. Lenny
is cared for by a beautiful Hindu nanny (Fire's exquisite Nandita Das), whose two most
ardent suitors, Muslims both, react very differently to the escalating violence: One,
after witnessing family members hideously butchered, moves from tolerance to militancy;
the other offers to sacrifice identity as an act of love...
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The Iranian Cinema: A Dream With No Awakening | |
Along with China, Iran has been lauded as
one of the exporters of great cinema in the nineties. World-renowned German filmmaker
Werner Herzog, along with many film critics from around the world, has praised Iranian
cinema as one of the world's most important emerging artistic cinemas. Gaining momentum
since the late 80's, the Iranian wave reached a symbolic crest in the summer of 1997, when
Iranian films won the top prizes at the Cannes, Locarno, and Montreal Film Festivals. With
the Iranian revolution in 1979 came a ban against all Hollywood movies. Only a few years
later, Iranian films are capturing major prizes at many of the world's most prestigious
film festivals. Here in America, Iranian cinema is something of an unknown quantity,
thanks in part to the American media's one-dimensional depiction of Iran. In fact,
American audiences are becoming aware of Iranian films just as the wave seems to be
cresting...
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Princess Mononoke | |
Japanese animé - that strain of Japanese
animated film featuring brilliantly colored, richly textured backgrounds, child-like
heroes and often fantastic, mythical storylines-reached astonishing new heights with
Princess Mononoke, directed by Japan's leading animator Hayao Miyazaki. The story begins
as Ashitaka, the last young warrior of the Emishi clan, is forced to kill a monster
threatening his village. After discovering that the beast was actually a forest god...
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