list http://www.spout.com/ Recent community activity around Finding Forrester on Spout Copyright 2005-9 Spout, LLC Spout RSS http://www.spout.com/images/SpoutLogoRSS.jpg http://www.spout.com/ 136 30 http://www.spout.com/films/Finding_Forrester/177955/default.aspx Title: Finding Forrester
Year: 2000
Director: Gus Van Sant
Plot: In the spirit of his Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting, Gus Van Sant directs this tale of the unlikely bond that develops between an aging, reclusive novelist named Forrester (Sean Connery) -- who hasn't written anything since winning a Pulitzer Prize decades earlier -- and Jamal (Rob Brown), a 16-year-old with a hidden desire to be a writer. When Jamal is cited for his athleticism in basketball by an elite Manhattan prep school, he is forced to adapt to an environment far from his South Bronx upbringing, and a small mishap leads him to the eccentric, uneasy Forrester. After their initial apprehension of each other, they begin to fuel each other's fire for writing, and become unlikely friends despite their ages and backgrounds. Forrester's devotion to Jamal becomes enhanced when he must defend allegations of plagiarism enforced by Professor Crawford (F. Murray Abraham), jeopardizing Jamal's future. The film also features Anna Paquin, Busta Rhymes, and Zane Copeland Jr.. ~ Jason Clark, All Movie Guide
Times Tagged: 32
Number of Lists: 23
Number of blog posts: 6
SpoutRating: 3
]]>Tue, 25 Nov 2008 22:01:48 GMTFinding Forrester2000Gus Van SantIn the spirit of his Oscar-winning <a href=/films/115894/default.aspx style='text-decoration:underline'>Good Will Hunting</a>, <a href="/players/P___115102/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Gus Van Sant</a> directs this tale of the unlikely bond that develops between an aging, reclusive novelist named Forrester (<a href="/players/P____10646/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Sean Connery</a>) -- who hasn't written anything since winning a Pulitzer Prize decades earlier -- and Jamal (Rob Brown), a 16-year-old with a hidden desire to be a writer. When Jamal is cited for his athleticism in basketball by an elite Manhattan prep school, he is forced to adapt to an environment far from his South Bronx upbringing, and a small mishap leads him to the eccentric, uneasy Forrester. After their initial apprehension of each other, they begin to fuel each other's fire for writing, and become unlikely friends despite their ages and backgrounds. Forrester's devotion to Jamal becomes enhanced when he must defend allegations of plagiarism enforced by Professor Crawford (F. Murray Abraham), jeopardizing Jamal's future. The film also features <a href="/players/P___198605/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Anna Paquin</a>, Busta Rhymes, and Zane Copeland Jr.. ~ Jason Clark, All Movie Guide32Tag Target (>10)2363http://www.spout.com/ProductImages/t89380yn4sw.jpghttp://www.spout.com/films/Finding_Forrester/177955/default.aspxFilm http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2008/11/25/37647.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 11/25/2008 5:01:48 PM
Body: Gus Van Sant’s best-known films (which are not the same as his best films) have historically involved a certain grappling with What Hollywood Does. Hollywood saves a poor-but-smart kid from his environment (and himself) with the help of a bearded, platitude-spouting Robin Williams. Hollywood saves a poor-but-smart kid from his environment (and himself) with the help of a bearded, laughable slang-spouting Sean Connery. Hollywood flatters its flavors of the month by shoe-horning them into paint-by-numbers remakes of aged cinematic game changers. Etc. Anyone cognizant of Van Sant’s turn-of-the-century Hollywood period shouldn’t be surprised by his willing ability to play it straight. To say that Van Sant continues to “play it straight” with Milk isn’t meant as a pun regarding sexuality, exactly, but said pun wouldn’t be entirely off the mark. If his Hollywood trilogy was what Van Sant needed to get from his early meditations on the emotional lives of low-lifes to his much-vaunted Death Trilogy, then that most recent career phase may be what Van Sant needed to work through in order to merge the first two modes of his career. Milk takes the defining moments of a subculture once perceived by the mainstream as deviant, and runs it through the mill of What Hollywood Does, thereby sanitizing its hero for feel-good mainstream martyrhood. Van Sant’s laundering of an outsider hero through the very inside mechanism of the Hollywood biopic has been variously described as heroic and distasteful. As of press time, I think it’s somewhere in between. If you’ve seen the superior documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, you know the story: in his early 40s, a newly-out Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) moved from the East Coast to San Francisco and opened up a camera shop on Castro Street, in what would grow to become the mecca of gay San Francisco. In the early 70s, though, the gay community was still subject to the bigotry (and physical intimidation and attacks) of some straight neighbors and virtually all of the SFPD. As an activist fighting for better treatment of his community, Harvey Milk actively reached out to other groups–blacks, Hispanics, even Teamsters–to form coalitions against the powers that were. After losing a number of local elections but gaining in popularity and notoriety with each one, Milk won a seat on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors alongside future senator Diane Feinstein, and Dan White, a conservative former firefighter from a neighboring Irish-Catholic district. After a serious of personal and political conflicts with Milk, White submitted his resignation to the Board, and then showed up at City Hall the next day and shot Milk and mayor George Moscone. White’s lawyer successfully argued that his client had been mentally incapacitated at the time of the killings due to an unusual consumption of sugar the previous evening. As in Good Will Hunting, here Van Sant does find a few spots to wedge in the haunting, contemplative beauty that governs his best films, but evocative imagery is not Milk’s primary concern. Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black mold Milk out of historical fact and on the frame of disappointingly conventional biopic tropes, including an unnecessary and somewhat illogical framing device and a heavy dependence on thematic foreshadowing. Surprisingly, some of these tropes are employed with such grandness that they could potentially be read as something a step above Biopic 101; they could almost be read as clear-eyed camp. For instance, though Van Sant never gets into the alleged Twinkie binge nor White’s trial for Milk’s assassination and the riots that ensued, he does show Milk and lovers and friends bonding over sugary treats at several key points in the narrative, most notably in a birthday cake-in-bed scene after the (unseen) first coupling of Milk and his long-time lover Scott (a brooding, James Franco — so humorless as to be unrecognizable as an Apatow Player). At some level, this functions as not-so-veiled comment on the merit of the so-called “Twinkie Defense“; on the other, there’s something so incredibly heavy-handed about the image of Harvey Milk with whipped cream on his nose joking that he won’t live to the age of 50. It’s almost something out of Hold Me While I’m Naked-era George Kuchar — a dip into What Hollywood Does that somehow seems to simultaneously swipe at it. But not all of Milk’s nods to Hollywood expectations are as stylized; in fact, in its dealing with Milk’s own sexuality, the film is frustratingly restrained. Penn, though exemplary when embodying Milk in political mode (the film’s various scenes of rallies, protests and vigils are as rousing as this sort of thing gets), often comes off as cartoonish when the topic of sex comes up. Black’s script reduces its protagonist to a doddering, even stodgy old man in the midst of the 70s bacchanal. Often seen doting on young proteges but rarely flirting, when Milk does take lovers, their presence in the film is so awkwardly shoehorned in that when one of the live-in variety is disposed of suddenly, the hyper-speed with which Milk moves on seems so troublingly unrealistic that one wonders why the character was ever introduced in the first place. For a film about the fight for the right to sexual freedom, Milk is shockingly sexless. As baked into the script, this makes a certain kind of sense. Penn’s Milk encourages gays and lesbians all across the state to come out of the closet, based on the rationale that if bigots knew they were trying to restrict the rights of friendly, harmless faces in the community, said bigots would feel bad and back down. But Milk himself is concerned with managing an image of gayness in his personal life that’s based on reminding the straight world of his identity solely through words (no movie character has ever verbally announced his sexual preference so many times in a single film), and not appearance or actions. Just as he, after a powerful gay publishing tycoon warned that he was “too old to be a hippie,” traded in his faded denim twin sets and ragged pony tail for a three-piece suit and clean shave, Milk warns his boyfriends and friends to stay out of bathhouses and to not use canvassing as an excuse for cruising.  The character doesn’t see the irony in this — for him, it’s simply an effort to make sure their movement maintains credibility as a serious struggle for civil and human rights and is not reduced by outsiders to a fight for the right to get laid — but as a mirror to Milk’s mainstream ambitions, that irony is unavoidable. It’s a film about the politics of sex, in which the political process itself not only takes precedence over but seems to stand in for the complexities of real life sexuality. There’s an argument to be made that this is the only way to make a film about this man, set in that place and time, that could be palatable to a mainstream audience, to the point where maybe it could even make a point about a certain present-day political fight better than any number of ill-conceived boycotts. I’m not sure I buy that argument, although if in the end the film’s accidental timing helps to speed along the current fight for equal rights, that’s a good thing. But if such real-world issues weren’t on the table –– if the film wasn’t being asked to do triple-duty as biopic, Oscar contender and teaching tool –– I wonder: if it was going to require such homogenization, is the life and death of Harvey Milk something that should have been tailored for mainstream consumption in the first place? Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Tue, 25 Nov 2008 22:01:48 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog11/25/2008 5:01:48 PMGus Van Sant’s best-known films (which are not the same as his best films) have historically involved a certain grappling with What Hollywood Does. Hollywood saves a poor-but-smart kid from his environment (and himself) with the help of a bearded, platitude-spouting Robin Williams. Hollywood saves a poor-but-smart kid from his environment (and himself) with the help of a bearded, laughable slang-spouting Sean Connery. Hollywood flatters its flavors of the month by shoe-horning them into paint-by-numbers remakes of aged cinematic game changers. Etc. Anyone cognizant of Van Sant’s turn-of-the-century Hollywood period shouldn’t be surprised by his willing ability to play it straight. To say that Van Sant continues to “play it straight” with Milk isn’t meant as a pun regarding sexuality, exactly, but said pun wouldn’t be entirely off the mark. If his Hollywood trilogy was what Van Sant needed to get from his early meditations on the emotional lives of low-lifes to his much-vaunted Death Trilogy, then that most recent career phase may be what Van Sant needed to work through in order to merge the first two modes of his career. Milk takes the defining moments of a subculture once perceived by the mainstream as deviant, and runs it through the mill of What Hollywood Does, thereby sanitizing its hero for feel-good mainstream martyrhood. Van Sant’s laundering of an outsider hero through the very inside mechanism of the Hollywood biopic has been variously described as heroic and distasteful. As of press time, I think it’s somewhere in between. If you’ve seen the superior documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, you know the story: in his early 40s, a newly-out Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) moved from the East Coast to San Francisco and opened up a camera shop on Castro Street, in what would grow to become the mecca of gay San Francisco. In the early 70s, though, the gay community was still subject to the bigotry (and physical intimidation and attacks) of some straight neighbors and virtually all of the SFPD. As an activist fighting for better treatment of his community, Harvey Milk actively reached out to other groups–blacks, Hispanics, even Teamsters–to form coalitions against the powers that were. After losing a number of local elections but gaining in popularity and notoriety with each one, Milk won a seat on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors alongside future senator Diane Feinstein, and Dan White, a conservative former firefighter from a neighboring Irish-Catholic district. After a serious of personal and political conflicts with Milk, White submitted his resignation to the Board, and then showed up at City Hall the next day and shot Milk and mayor George Moscone. White’s lawyer successfully argued that his client had been mentally incapacitated at the time of the killings due to an unusual consumption of sugar the previous evening. As in Good Will Hunting, here Van Sant does find a few spots to wedge in the haunting, contemplative beauty that governs his best films, but evocative imagery is not Milk’s primary concern. Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black mold Milk out of historical fact and on the frame of disappointingly conventional biopic tropes, including an unnecessary and somewhat illogical framing device and a heavy dependence on thematic foreshadowing. Surprisingly, some of these tropes are employed with such grandness that they could potentially be read as something a step above Biopic 101; they could almost be read as clear-eyed camp. For instance, though Van Sant never gets into the alleged Twinkie binge nor White’s trial for Milk’s assassination and the riots that ensued, he does show Milk and lovers and friends bonding over sugary treats at several key points in the narrative, most notably in a birthday cake-in-bed scene after the (unseen) first coupling of Milk and his long-time lover Scott (a brooding, James Franco — so humorless as to be unrecognizable as an Apatow Player). At some level, this functions as not-so-veiled comment on the merit of the so-called “Twinkie Defense“; on the other, there’s something so incredibly heavy-handed about the image of Harvey Milk with whipped cream on his nose joking that he won’t live to the age of 50. It’s almost something out of Hold Me While I’m Naked-era George Kuchar — a dip into What Hollywood Does that somehow seems to simultaneously swipe at it. But not all of Milk’s nods to Hollywood expectations are as stylized; in fact, in its dealing with Milk’s own sexuality, the film is frustratingly restrained. Penn, though exemplary when embodying Milk in political mode (the film’s various scenes of rallies, protests and vigils are as rousing as this sort of thing gets), often comes off as cartoonish when the topic of sex comes up. Black’s script reduces its protagonist to a doddering, even stodgy old man in the midst of the 70s bacchanal. Often seen doting on young proteges but rarely flirting, when Milk does take lovers, their presence in the film is so awkwardly shoehorned in that when one of the live-in variety is disposed of suddenly, the hyper-speed with which Milk moves on seems so troublingly unrealistic that one wonders why the character was ever introduced in the first place. For a film about the fight for the right to sexual freedom, Milk is shockingly sexless. As baked into the script, this makes a certain kind of sense. Penn’s Milk encourages gays and lesbians all across the state to come out of the closet, based on the rationale that if bigots knew they were trying to restrict the rights of friendly, harmless faces in the community, said bigots would feel bad and back down. But Milk himself is concerned with managing an image of gayness in his personal life that’s based on reminding the straight world of his identity solely through words (no movie character has ever verbally announced his sexual preference so many times in a single film), and not appearance or actions. Just as he, after a powerful gay publishing tycoon warned that he was “too old to be a hippie,” traded in his faded denim twin sets and ragged pony tail for a three-piece suit and clean shave, Milk warns his boyfriends and friends to stay out of bathhouses and to not use canvassing as an excuse for cruising.  The character doesn’t see the irony in this — for him, it’s simply an effort to make sure their movement maintains credibility as a serious struggle for civil and human rights and is not reduced by outsiders to a fight for the right to get laid — but as a mirror to Milk’s mainstream ambitions, that irony is unavoidable. It’s a film about the politics of sex, in which the political process itself not only takes precedence over but seems to stand in for the complexities of real life sexuality. There’s an argument to be made that this is the only way to make a film about this man, set in that place and time, that could be palatable to a mainstream audience, to the point where maybe it could even make a point about a certain present-day political fight better than any number of ill-conceived boycotts. I’m not sure I buy that argument, although if in the end the film’s accidental timing helps to speed along the current fight for equal rights, that’s a good thing. But if such real-world issues weren’t on the table –– if the film wasn’t being asked to do triple-duty as biopic, Oscar contender and teaching tool –– I wonder: if it was going to require such homogenization, is the life and death of Harvey Milk something that should have been tailored for mainstream consumption in the first place? Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2008/11/25/37646.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 11/25/2008 5:01:38 PM
Body: Gus Van Sant’s best-known films (which are not the same as his best films) have historically involved a certain grappling with What Hollywood Does. Hollywood saves a poor-but-smart kid from his environment (and himself) with the help of a bearded, platitude-spouting Robin Williams. Hollywood saves a poor-but-smart kid from his environment (and himself) with the help of a bearded, laughable slang-spouting Sean Connery. Hollywood flatters its flavors of the month by shoe-horning them into paint-by-numbers remakes of aged cinematic game changers. Etc. Anyone cognizant of Van Sant’s turn-of-the-century Hollywood period shouldn’t be surprised by his willing ability to play it straight. To say that Van Sant continues to “play it straight” with Milk isn’t meant as a pun regarding sexuality, exactly, but said pun wouldn’t be entirely off the mark. If his Hollywood trilogy was what Van Sant needed to get from his early meditations on the emotional lives of low-lifes to his much-vaunted Death Trilogy, then that most recent career phase may be what Van Sant needed to work through in order to merge the first two modes of his career. Milk takes the defining moments of a subculture once perceived by the mainstream as deviant, and runs it through the mill of What Hollywood Does, thereby sanitizing its hero for feel-good mainstream martyrhood. Van Sant’s laundering of an outsider hero through the very inside mechanism of the Hollywood biopic has been variously described as heroic and distasteful. As of press time, I think it’s somewhere in between. If you’ve seen the superior documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, you know the story: in his early 40s, a newly-out Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) moved from the East Coast to San Francisco and opened up a camera shop on Castro Street, in what would grow to become the mecca of gay San Francisco. In the early 70s, though, the gay community was still subject to the bigotry (and physical intimidation and attacks) of some straight neighbors and virtually all of the SFPD. As an activist fighting for better treatment of his community, Harvey Milk actively reached out to other groups–blacks, Hispanics, even Teamsters–to form coalitions against the powers that were. After losing a number of local elections but gaining in popularity and notoriety with each one, Milk won a seat on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors alongside future senator Diane Feinstein, and Dan White, a conservative former firefighter from a neighboring Irish-Catholic district. After a serious of personal and political conflicts with Milk, White submitted his resignation to the Board, and then showed up at City Hall the next day and shot Milk and mayor George Moscone. White’s lawyer successfully argued that his client had been mentally incapacitated at the time of the killings due to an unusual consumption of sugar the previous evening. As in Good Will Hunting, here Van Sant does find a few spots to wedge in the haunting, contemplative beauty that governs his best films, but evocative imagery is not Milk’s primary concern. Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black mold Milk out of historical fact and on the frame of disappointingly conventional biopic tropes, including an unnecessary and somewhat illogical framing device and a heavy dependence on thematic foreshadowing. Surprisingly, some of these tropes are employed with such grandness that they could potentially be read as something a step above Biopic 101; they could almost be read as clear-eyed camp. For instance, though Van Sant never gets into the alleged Twinkie binge nor White’s trial for Milk’s assassination and the riots that ensued, he does show Milk and lovers and friends bonding over sugary treats at several key points in the narrative, most notably in a birthday cake-in-bed scene after the (unseen) first coupling of Milk and his long-time lover Scott (a brooding, James Franco — so humorless as to be unrecognizable as an Apatow Player). At some level, this functions as not-so-veiled comment on the merit of the so-called “Twinkie Defense“; on the other, there’s something so incredibly heavy-handed about the image of Harvey Milk with whipped cream on his nose joking that he won’t live to the age of 50. It’s almost something out of Hold Me While I’m Naked-era George Kuchar — a dip into What Hollywood Does that somehow seems to simultaneously swipe at it. But not all of Milk’s nods to Hollywood expectations are as stylized; in fact, in its dealing with Milk’s own sexuality, the film is frustratingly restrained. Penn, though exemplary when embodying Milk in political mode (the film’s various scenes of rallies, protests and vigils are as rousing as this sort of thing gets), often comes off as cartoonish when the topic of sex comes up. Black’s script reduces its protagonist to a doddering, even stodgy old man in the midst of the 70s bacchanal. Often seen doting on young proteges but rarely flirting, when Milk does take lovers, their presence in the film is so awkwardly shoehorned in that when one of the live-in variety is disposed of suddenly, the hyper-speed with which Milk moves on seems so troublingly unrealistic that one wonders why the character was ever introduced in the first place. For a film about the fight for the right to sexual freedom, Milk is shockingly sexless. As baked into the script, this makes a certain kind of sense. Penn’s Milk encourages gays and lesbians all across the state to come out of the closet, based on the rationale that if bigots knew they were trying to restrict the rights of friendly, harmless faces in the community, said bigots would feel bad and back down. But Milk himself is concerned with managing an image of gayness in his personal life that’s based on reminding the straight world of his identity solely through words (no movie character has ever verbally announced his sexual preference so many times in a single film), and not appearance or actions. Just as he, after a powerful gay publishing tycoon warned that he was “too old to be a hippie,” traded in his faded denim twin sets and ragged pony tail for a three-piece suit and clean shave, Milk warns his boyfriends and friends to stay out of bathhouses and to not use canvassing as an excuse for cruising.  The character doesn’t see the irony in this — for him, it’s simply an effort to make sure their movement maintains credibility as a serious struggle for civil and human rights and is not reduced by outsiders to a fight for the right to get laid — but as a mirror to Milk’s mainstream ambitions, that irony is unavoidable. It’s a film about the politics of sex, in which the political process itself not only takes precedence over but seems to stand in for the complexities of real life sexuality. There’s an argument to be made that this is the only way to make a film about this man, set in that place and time, that could be palatable to a mainstream audience, to the point where maybe it could even make a point about a certain present-day political fight better than any number of ill-conceived boycotts. I’m not sure I buy that argument, although if in the end the film’s accidental timing helps to speed along the current fight for equal rights, that’s a good thing. But if such real-world issues weren’t on the table –– if the film wasn’t being asked to do triple-duty as biopic, Oscar contender and teaching tool –– I wonder: if it was going to require such homogenization, is the life and death of Harvey Milk something that should have been tailored for mainstream consumption in the first place? Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Tue, 25 Nov 2008 22:01:38 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com11/25/2008 5:01:38 PMGus Van Sant’s best-known films (which are not the same as his best films) have historically involved a certain grappling with What Hollywood Does. Hollywood saves a poor-but-smart kid from his environment (and himself) with the help of a bearded, platitude-spouting Robin Williams. Hollywood saves a poor-but-smart kid from his environment (and himself) with the help of a bearded, laughable slang-spouting Sean Connery. Hollywood flatters its flavors of the month by shoe-horning them into paint-by-numbers remakes of aged cinematic game changers. Etc. Anyone cognizant of Van Sant’s turn-of-the-century Hollywood period shouldn’t be surprised by his willing ability to play it straight. To say that Van Sant continues to “play it straight” with Milk isn’t meant as a pun regarding sexuality, exactly, but said pun wouldn’t be entirely off the mark. If his Hollywood trilogy was what Van Sant needed to get from his early meditations on the emotional lives of low-lifes to his much-vaunted Death Trilogy, then that most recent career phase may be what Van Sant needed to work through in order to merge the first two modes of his career. Milk takes the defining moments of a subculture once perceived by the mainstream as deviant, and runs it through the mill of What Hollywood Does, thereby sanitizing its hero for feel-good mainstream martyrhood. Van Sant’s laundering of an outsider hero through the very inside mechanism of the Hollywood biopic has been variously described as heroic and distasteful. As of press time, I think it’s somewhere in between. If you’ve seen the superior documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, you know the story: in his early 40s, a newly-out Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) moved from the East Coast to San Francisco and opened up a camera shop on Castro Street, in what would grow to become the mecca of gay San Francisco. In the early 70s, though, the gay community was still subject to the bigotry (and physical intimidation and attacks) of some straight neighbors and virtually all of the SFPD. As an activist fighting for better treatment of his community, Harvey Milk actively reached out to other groups–blacks, Hispanics, even Teamsters–to form coalitions against the powers that were. After losing a number of local elections but gaining in popularity and notoriety with each one, Milk won a seat on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors alongside future senator Diane Feinstein, and Dan White, a conservative former firefighter from a neighboring Irish-Catholic district. After a serious of personal and political conflicts with Milk, White submitted his resignation to the Board, and then showed up at City Hall the next day and shot Milk and mayor George Moscone. White’s lawyer successfully argued that his client had been mentally incapacitated at the time of the killings due to an unusual consumption of sugar the previous evening. As in Good Will Hunting, here Van Sant does find a few spots to wedge in the haunting, contemplative beauty that governs his best films, but evocative imagery is not Milk’s primary concern. Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black mold Milk out of historical fact and on the frame of disappointingly conventional biopic tropes, including an unnecessary and somewhat illogical framing device and a heavy dependence on thematic foreshadowing. Surprisingly, some of these tropes are employed with such grandness that they could potentially be read as something a step above Biopic 101; they could almost be read as clear-eyed camp. For instance, though Van Sant never gets into the alleged Twinkie binge nor White’s trial for Milk’s assassination and the riots that ensued, he does show Milk and lovers and friends bonding over sugary treats at several key points in the narrative, most notably in a birthday cake-in-bed scene after the (unseen) first coupling of Milk and his long-time lover Scott (a brooding, James Franco — so humorless as to be unrecognizable as an Apatow Player). At some level, this functions as not-so-veiled comment on the merit of the so-called “Twinkie Defense“; on the other, there’s something so incredibly heavy-handed about the image of Harvey Milk with whipped cream on his nose joking that he won’t live to the age of 50. It’s almost something out of Hold Me While I’m Naked-era George Kuchar — a dip into What Hollywood Does that somehow seems to simultaneously swipe at it. But not all of Milk’s nods to Hollywood expectations are as stylized; in fact, in its dealing with Milk’s own sexuality, the film is frustratingly restrained. Penn, though exemplary when embodying Milk in political mode (the film’s various scenes of rallies, protests and vigils are as rousing as this sort of thing gets), often comes off as cartoonish when the topic of sex comes up. Black’s script reduces its protagonist to a doddering, even stodgy old man in the midst of the 70s bacchanal. Often seen doting on young proteges but rarely flirting, when Milk does take lovers, their presence in the film is so awkwardly shoehorned in that when one of the live-in variety is disposed of suddenly, the hyper-speed with which Milk moves on seems so troublingly unrealistic that one wonders why the character was ever introduced in the first place. For a film about the fight for the right to sexual freedom, Milk is shockingly sexless. As baked into the script, this makes a certain kind of sense. Penn’s Milk encourages gays and lesbians all across the state to come out of the closet, based on the rationale that if bigots knew they were trying to restrict the rights of friendly, harmless faces in the community, said bigots would feel bad and back down. But Milk himself is concerned with managing an image of gayness in his personal life that’s based on reminding the straight world of his identity solely through words (no movie character has ever verbally announced his sexual preference so many times in a single film), and not appearance or actions. Just as he, after a powerful gay publishing tycoon warned that he was “too old to be a hippie,” traded in his faded denim twin sets and ragged pony tail for a three-piece suit and clean shave, Milk warns his boyfriends and friends to stay out of bathhouses and to not use canvassing as an excuse for cruising.  The character doesn’t see the irony in this — for him, it’s simply an effort to make sure their movement maintains credibility as a serious struggle for civil and human rights and is not reduced by outsiders to a fight for the right to get laid — but as a mirror to Milk’s mainstream ambitions, that irony is unavoidable. It’s a film about the politics of sex, in which the political process itself not only takes precedence over but seems to stand in for the complexities of real life sexuality. There’s an argument to be made that this is the only way to make a film about this man, set in that place and time, that could be palatable to a mainstream audience, to the point where maybe it could even make a point about a certain present-day political fight better than any number of ill-conceived boycotts. I’m not sure I buy that argument, although if in the end the film’s accidental timing helps to speed along the current fight for equal rights, that’s a good thing. But if such real-world issues weren’t on the table –– if the film wasn’t being asked to do triple-duty as biopic, Oscar contender and teaching tool –– I wonder: if it was going to require such homogenization, is the life and death of Harvey Milk something that should have been tailored for mainstream consumption in the first place? Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2008/8/7/33699.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 8/7/2008 2:00:31 PM
Body: We’re less than a week away from the release of Tropic Thunder, and as the reviews and puff pieces make their way onto the web, there’s one thing clearly uniting the media’s coverage: talk of Tom Cruise’s appearance in a small role as a Hollywood studio boss. Everyone seems to agree that he steals the show and that his performance — or the joke surrounding it — is one of the comedy’s major highlights, if not the actual best part. Of course, we can expect a good cameo from Cruise every now and then. He showed up for a bit part in Young Guns and played himself as playing “Austin Powers” in Austin Powers in Goldmember. But from what it sounds like, his role in Tropic Thunder is featured for longer than might qualify as a cameo. Some are regardless referring to the performance as an “extended cameo”, and in theory it certainly fits in with the huge crop of so-called “ironic cameos” that have become popular in movies and TV in the last ten years. Still, despite my not having yet seen the movie, I’m thinking that Tom Cruise’s involvement in Tropic Thunder is more like the following list, which consists of merely small roles filled by big stars. You might consider some of them to be technically cameos, especially the ones that aren’t integral to the plot and/or call attention to themselves. But with each of the roles I’ve included, I consider them to be either the best part of their respective movies or at least a major highlight, which is how Cruise’s appearance is being touted. Anyway, forgive me for trying to come up with something different than simply a best cameo list, even if the focus here seems less than clear. 10. Marlon Brando as “Jor-El” in Superman - He was probably paid too much for the part, especially if all the trivia surrounding his involvement (reading his lines off baby Superman’s diaper; desiring that only his voice be used; demanding to be paid double if any footage was to be used in the sequel) is true, but it’s pretty cool having Brando appear at the beginning of what I still consider to be the best superhero comic book adaptation of all time (sorry Dark Knight fans). He’s not the best thing about the movie, but he’s an immediate highlight. As for his payment (reportedly $3.7 million), Warner Bros. has leveled out his worth a little by featuring him in the Donner cut of Superman II and in Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns — a movie that also creatively employs Brando’s On the Waterfront costar Eva Marie Saint appropriately as Superman’s adopted mother. 9. Drew Barrymore as “Casey Becker” in Scream - Having your biggest star killed in the opening scene is kinda like having your best action sequence at the head of the movie (a la Bad Boys II), but fortunately the rest of the first Scream is pretty good, and Barrymore’s (don’t call it a cameo) part doesn’t overshadow the movie too much. In a way, since this wasn’t a sequel yet the movie was a bit of a parody of all slasher movies, the familiarity of Becker’s face could be taken to be akin to how, often, horror sequels begin by killing off the heroine of the previous installment in the first few minutes. 8. Arnold Schwarzenegger as “Prince Hapi” in Around the World in 80 Days - There isn’t much to enjoy about Frank Coraci’s 2004 version of the Jules Verne tale, especially since there appears to be a lot of missed opportunities in terms of guest appearances (Wikipedia counts 45 “cameos” in the 1956 version; I count maybe 10 that could be considered “cameos” in the newer movie). Therefore, Schwarzenegger’s hilarious appearance as a lecherous Turkish prince — one of his last roles filmed before becoming Governor of California — is one of the few highlights, if not the sole highlight (personally, I enjoy Jackie Chan in anything, and I liked more of this movie than most people did). The role is especially funny and creepy if you’ve ever seen that old footage of Schwarzenegger being sleazy at Carnival in Rio. 7. Orson Welles as “Unicron” in Transformers: The Movie - Welles’ voice had been overpowering in films before — he had a good side career going throughout his life as a narrator — but considering this was ridiculously his final performance and considering he easily overshadowed his fellow celebrity voice lenders (including otherwise commanding vocal talents Leonard Nimoy, Robert Stack and Casey Kasem), his part completely dominates the movie, both diegetically and extradiegetically. 6. Bruce Willis as “Harry Rydell” in Fast Food Nation - Far and away the only good part of Richard Linklater’s botched attempt to dramatize Eric Schlosser’s non-fiction classic (I consider the book a kind of bible since it inspired me to give up fast food and subsequently lose 60lbs., so it pains me even more to think about Schlosser being a co-writer and producer of the movie), and not just because of his oft-quoted line about how we all have to eat a little shit from time to time. His whole characterization of the cynical meat supplier is brilliant, enough that he unfortunately makes the rest of the movie play even less interesting that it already is. 5. Charlie Sheen as “Charlie” in Being John Malkovich - I wanted to stay away from roles in which actors play themselves, mainly because that’s a big percentage of the ironic cameo stuff that’s so overused these days. However, Sheen’s part here is a little more than a mere cameo. And it’s kind of an ironic parody of the ironic cameo, even as it predates a lot of these cameos in Entourage and Extras and the like (by crediting the role as “Charlie” rather than “as himself”, it’s also a precursor to the more exaggerated than exaggerated “Neil Patrick Harris” character of the Harold and Kumar films). Perhaps intended to redirect the audience’s perspective on John Malkovich’s titular character, which is up until Sheen’s entrance possibly accepted as an authentic self-portrayal, the overstatement of the role raises the already ingeniously funny film up another notch to put it at the level of best comedies ever made. 4. Matt Damon as “Donny” in Eurotrip - I’ve actually never seen Eurotrip, but I hear there’s no reason to watch it other than to see Damon’s bit role as the singer of a pop punk band (the otherwise real Lustra). And I’ve seen that on YouTube, so I’m good. Even more than Cruise and some of the others, Damon seems to love doing guest stints in movies and on TV (he’s also given us the only reasons to ever watch Jimmy Kimmel). Some of his other small roles and cameos can be found in Youth Without Youth, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Finding Forrester, Jersey Girl and The Majestic (the last in voice only). 3. Sean Connery as “King Richard” in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves - After making us suffer through Kevin Costner’s terrible performance in the lead role, the producers of this disappointing version of the classic legend actually rub it in how bad their casting choice was by sneaking Connery in at the last minute. Of course, despite the way his appearance increases our dissatisfaction with the rest of the movie, he’s still the highlight. Especially since he’s immediately followed by that awful Bryan Adams song playing over the credits. 2. Alec Baldwin as “Blake” in Glengarry Glen Ross - Sure, the rest of the film is really good, mostly because of the stellar cast filling out the rest of the ensemble, but the first thing you remember about this David Mamet adaptation is Baldwin’s monologue. It’s good enough that I almost also included on this list the Blake-inspired character from Boiler Room as played by Ben Affleck. But it’s also too good to actually accept Affleck’s ripoff as being in the same league. 1. Gene Hackman as “Blindman” in Young Frankenstein - I’m in the minority as far as my appreciation of Mel Brooks’ parody of James Whale’s Frankenstein films. I think it’s really funny, but I don’t think it’s one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen. Yet the few minutes that Hackman is on screen always leave me in tears, enough that I wholeheartedly accept the movie’s status as one of the greatest comedies ever made. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:00:31 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com8/7/2008 2:00:31 PMWe’re less than a week away from the release of Tropic Thunder, and as the reviews and puff pieces make their way onto the web, there’s one thing clearly uniting the media’s coverage: talk of Tom Cruise’s appearance in a small role as a Hollywood studio boss. Everyone seems to agree that he steals the show and that his performance — or the joke surrounding it — is one of the comedy’s major highlights, if not the actual best part. Of course, we can expect a good cameo from Cruise every now and then. He showed up for a bit part in Young Guns and played himself as playing “Austin Powers” in Austin Powers in Goldmember. But from what it sounds like, his role in Tropic Thunder is featured for longer than might qualify as a cameo. Some are regardless referring to the performance as an “extended cameo”, and in theory it certainly fits in with the huge crop of so-called “ironic cameos” that have become popular in movies and TV in the last ten years. Still, despite my not having yet seen the movie, I’m thinking that Tom Cruise’s involvement in Tropic Thunder is more like the following list, which consists of merely small roles filled by big stars. You might consider some of them to be technically cameos, especially the ones that aren’t integral to the plot and/or call attention to themselves. But with each of the roles I’ve included, I consider them to be either the best part of their respective movies or at least a major highlight, which is how Cruise’s appearance is being touted. Anyway, forgive me for trying to come up with something different than simply a best cameo list, even if the focus here seems less than clear. 10. Marlon Brando as “Jor-El” in Superman - He was probably paid too much for the part, especially if all the trivia surrounding his involvement (reading his lines off baby Superman’s diaper; desiring that only his voice be used; demanding to be paid double if any footage was to be used in the sequel) is true, but it’s pretty cool having Brando appear at the beginning of what I still consider to be the best superhero comic book adaptation of all time (sorry Dark Knight fans). He’s not the best thing about the movie, but he’s an immediate highlight. As for his payment (reportedly $3.7 million), Warner Bros. has leveled out his worth a little by featuring him in the Donner cut of Superman II and in Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns — a movie that also creatively employs Brando’s On the Waterfront costar Eva Marie Saint appropriately as Superman’s adopted mother. 9. Drew Barrymore as “Casey Becker” in Scream - Having your biggest star killed in the opening scene is kinda like having your best action sequence at the head of the movie (a la Bad Boys II), but fortunately the rest of the first Scream is pretty good, and Barrymore’s (don’t call it a cameo) part doesn’t overshadow the movie too much. In a way, since this wasn’t a sequel yet the movie was a bit of a parody of all slasher movies, the familiarity of Becker’s face could be taken to be akin to how, often, horror sequels begin by killing off the heroine of the previous installment in the first few minutes. 8. Arnold Schwarzenegger as “Prince Hapi” in Around the World in 80 Days - There isn’t much to enjoy about Frank Coraci’s 2004 version of the Jules Verne tale, especially since there appears to be a lot of missed opportunities in terms of guest appearances (Wikipedia counts 45 “cameos” in the 1956 version; I count maybe 10 that could be considered “cameos” in the newer movie). Therefore, Schwarzenegger’s hilarious appearance as a lecherous Turkish prince — one of his last roles filmed before becoming Governor of California — is one of the few highlights, if not the sole highlight (personally, I enjoy Jackie Chan in anything, and I liked more of this movie than most people did). The role is especially funny and creepy if you’ve ever seen that old footage of Schwarzenegger being sleazy at Carnival in Rio. 7. Orson Welles as “Unicron” in Transformers: The Movie - Welles’ voice had been overpowering in films before — he had a good side career going throughout his life as a narrator — but considering this was ridiculously his final performance and considering he easily overshadowed his fellow celebrity voice lenders (including otherwise commanding vocal talents Leonard Nimoy, Robert Stack and Casey Kasem), his part completely dominates the movie, both diegetically and extradiegetically. 6. Bruce Willis as “Harry Rydell” in Fast Food Nation - Far and away the only good part of Richard Linklater’s botched attempt to dramatize Eric Schlosser’s non-fiction classic (I consider the book a kind of bible since it inspired me to give up fast food and subsequently lose 60lbs., so it pains me even more to think about Schlosser being a co-writer and producer of the movie), and not just because of his oft-quoted line about how we all have to eat a little shit from time to time. His whole characterization of the cynical meat supplier is brilliant, enough that he unfortunately makes the rest of the movie play even less interesting that it already is. 5. Charlie Sheen as “Charlie” in Being John Malkovich - I wanted to stay away from roles in which actors play themselves, mainly because that’s a big percentage of the ironic cameo stuff that’s so overused these days. However, Sheen’s part here is a little more than a mere cameo. And it’s kind of an ironic parody of the ironic cameo, even as it predates a lot of these cameos in Entourage and Extras and the like (by crediting the role as “Charlie” rather than “as himself”, it’s also a precursor to the more exaggerated than exaggerated “Neil Patrick Harris” character of the Harold and Kumar films). Perhaps intended to redirect the audience’s perspective on John Malkovich’s titular character, which is up until Sheen’s entrance possibly accepted as an authentic self-portrayal, the overstatement of the role raises the already ingeniously funny film up another notch to put it at the level of best comedies ever made. 4. Matt Damon as “Donny” in Eurotrip - I’ve actually never seen Eurotrip, but I hear there’s no reason to watch it other than to see Damon’s bit role as the singer of a pop punk band (the otherwise real Lustra). And I’ve seen that on YouTube, so I’m good. Even more than Cruise and some of the others, Damon seems to love doing guest stints in movies and on TV (he’s also given us the only reasons to ever watch Jimmy Kimmel). Some of his other small roles and cameos can be found in Youth Without Youth, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Finding Forrester, Jersey Girl and The Majestic (the last in voice only). 3. Sean Connery as “King Richard” in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves - After making us suffer through Kevin Costner’s terrible performance in the lead role, the producers of this disappointing version of the classic legend actually rub it in how bad their casting choice was by sneaking Connery in at the last minute. Of course, despite the way his appearance increases our dissatisfaction with the rest of the movie, he’s still the highlight. Especially since he’s immediately followed by that awful Bryan Adams song playing over the credits. 2. Alec Baldwin as “Blake” in Glengarry Glen Ross - Sure, the rest of the film is really good, mostly because of the stellar cast filling out the rest of the ensemble, but the first thing you remember about this David Mamet adaptation is Baldwin’s monologue. It’s good enough that I almost also included on this list the Blake-inspired character from Boiler Room as played by Ben Affleck. But it’s also too good to actually accept Affleck’s ripoff as being in the same league. 1. Gene Hackman as “Blindman” in Young Frankenstein - I’m in the minority as far as my appreciation of Mel Brooks’ parody of James Whale’s Frankenstein films. I think it’s really funny, but I don’t think it’s one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen. Yet the few minutes that Hackman is on screen always leave me in tears, enough that I wholeheartedly accept the movie’s status as one of the greatest comedies ever made. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/tadiv/archive/2008/5/27/30030.aspx Post By: tadiv
Post To: tadiv Blog
Post Date: 5/27/2008 3:20:00 PM
Body: City Lights Pictures, in association with Whitest Pouring Films and Kilo Films, presents Manda Bala (Send a Bullet), a film by Jason Kohn. The film runs 85 minutes and is not rated by the MPAA. Based upon some of the hostage video content, this film would likely be rated NC-17 by the MPAA. Manda Bala is a documentary film covering several social and economic issues in modern Brazil. These issues include political corruption, the kidnapping of the wealthy by the poor, and resulting industries such as frog farming, specialized plastic surgery, Helicopter taxi service, and the retrofitting of automobiles to make them more or less bullet-proof.Very well photographed and cleanly edited, Manda Bala, to a great extent, lacks a central theme. This picture has a good, complimenting soundtrack. Because of a mixture of translation and subtitles, the presentation is at times awkward for the viewer. Manda Bala greatly benefits from stunning cinematography. However, while watching this film I recalled a scene from Finding Forrester where the audience reads criticism that says “Where are you taking me?” And so, while there is stunning cinematography, there is a similar magnitude debt in the way of communicating the central point. There is a lack of content that ties everything together. Stunning cinematography is the highlight of this picture. Without making a study of Brazil, one would never imagine that its modern cities are so very beautiful. To contrast the beauty of the modern high-rise buildings and seemingly clean streets, we see the slums at the edge of the metropolis falling away from the center like the crumbling slopes of a pillar in Monument Valley. Suburbia does not seem to exist around these mountains of wealth, just poverty and squalor. All of this is richly photographed and presented. The only portions of the film that do not stand out from a cinematic perspective are some of the views of the frog farms and some views of the poorer areas of the country. The picture, after a view of a modern Brazilian city, starts in the country at a frog farm. One of the two who run the farm is interviewed and is reluctant to talk about “the scandal”. Farther in the presentation we find that the scandal was a corrupt politician’s alleged embezzlement of public funds intended to be seed money for new frog farms in poorer areas of the country.From the frog farm, we are transported into the city of Sao Paulo to meet “Mr. M.” He is identified as a businessman and sounds like a transplanted American. He tells of being robbed at gunpoint on the streets of Sao Paulo while stopped in traffic. He discusses the crime faced in the city every day and methods used to foil the criminal. These include carrying his real wallet in a hidden pocket and a criminal’s wallet that has only a bit of cash in it. Also in his defense, he has a bullet-proof car. His car is a turbo-charged Porsche 911 – maybe he would less of a target were he driving a Ford Taurus… The Porsche, it seems, cost Mr. M about $415,000 US. I don’t know why we are not told how much ear reconstruction surgery costs.Moving on, we meet a pretty young woman who was a kidnapping victim. Then we meet the plastic surgeon who replaces severed ears. It seems that removing an ear is the kidnapper’s method of choice in making their point that they are not fooling around. Then we meet a policeman who is part of the eighty-strong anti-kidnapping squad. Then we meet a civil lawyer who has had the fortitude to sue an alleged corrupt politician, then back to “M” again. He explains that the really wealthy travel by helicopter since nobody can walk up to you and demand money at gunpoint, and so we see the world’s largest fleet of privately-owned helicopters. On and on it goes – we move between the Dr, the victim, Mr. M, an assistant Attorney General, the policeman, a kidnapper, and, of course, the frog farmer. During one of the frog farm sequences, we see a huge shipment of live frogs departing for JFK. With a hint of related guilt, as in Blood Diamond, there is an inference that the United States supports the political corruption in that it purchases the product from the frog farms. While Manda Bala is a technically high-quality production, the presentation falls short in connecting the themes addressed. We meet many Brazilians. While they all have stories to tell, there is not a complete thread connecting them all. Is the problem the political corruption? Or is it the crime that the leadership seems to choose not to address? A presentation is made on the colonization of Brazil – is there an ingrained culture of raping the wealth? Like Out of Balance, Manda Bala ultimately fails to pinpoint the issue; it fails to deliver a summation of the issues presented. While it is very worth seeing, I’m not sure that it really gets the job done when it comes to making a solid point. So there is evil hidden within the great beauty of modern Brazil – what a surprise!
]]>Tue, 27 May 2008 19:20:00 GMTtadivtadiv Blog5/27/2008 3:20:00 PMCity Lights Pictures, in association with Whitest Pouring Films and Kilo Films, presents Manda Bala (Send a Bullet), a film by Jason Kohn. The film runs 85 minutes and is not rated by the MPAA. Based upon some of the hostage video content, this film would likely be rated NC-17 by the MPAA. Manda Bala is a documentary film covering several social and economic issues in modern Brazil. These issues include political corruption, the kidnapping of the wealthy by the poor, and resulting industries such as frog farming, specialized plastic surgery, Helicopter taxi service, and the retrofitting of automobiles to make them more or less bullet-proof.Very well photographed and cleanly edited, Manda Bala, to a great extent, lacks a central theme. This picture has a good, complimenting soundtrack. Because of a mixture of translation and subtitles, the presentation is at times awkward for the viewer. Manda Bala greatly benefits from stunning cinematography. However, while watching this film I recalled a scene from Finding Forrester where the audience reads criticism that says &ldquo;Where are you taking me?&rdquo; And so, while there is stunning cinematography, there is a similar magnitude debt in the way of communicating the central point. There is a lack of content that ties everything together. Stunning cinematography is the highlight of this picture. Without making a study of Brazil, one would never imagine that its modern cities are so very beautiful. To contrast the beauty of the modern high-rise buildings and seemingly clean streets, we see the slums at the edge of the metropolis falling away from the center like the crumbling slopes of a pillar in Monument Valley. Suburbia does not seem to exist around these mountains of wealth, just poverty and squalor. All of this is richly photographed and presented. The only portions of the film that do not stand out from a cinematic perspective are some of the views of the frog farms and some views of the poorer areas of the country. The picture, after a view of a modern Brazilian city, starts in the country at a frog farm. One of the two who run the farm is interviewed and is reluctant to talk about &ldquo;the scandal&rdquo;. Farther in the presentation we find that the scandal was a corrupt politician&rsquo;s alleged embezzlement of public funds intended to be seed money for new frog farms in poorer areas of the country.From the frog farm, we are transported into the city of Sao Paulo to meet &ldquo;Mr. M.&rdquo; He is identified as a businessman and sounds like a transplanted American. He tells of being robbed at gunpoint on the streets of Sao Paulo while stopped in traffic. He discusses the crime faced in the city every day and methods used to foil the criminal. These include carrying his real wallet in a hidden pocket and a criminal&rsquo;s wallet that has only a bit of cash in it. Also in his defense, he has a bullet-proof car. His car is a turbo-charged Porsche 911 &ndash; maybe he would less of a target were he driving a Ford Taurus&hellip; The Porsche, it seems, cost Mr. M about $415,000 US. I don&rsquo;t know why we are not told how much ear reconstruction surgery costs.Moving on, we meet a pretty young woman who was a kidnapping victim. Then we meet the plastic surgeon who replaces severed ears. It seems that removing an ear is the kidnapper&rsquo;s method of choice in making their point that they are not fooling around. Then we meet a policeman who is part of the eighty-strong anti-kidnapping squad. Then we meet a civil lawyer who has had the fortitude to sue an alleged corrupt politician, then back to &ldquo;M&rdquo; again. He explains that the really wealthy travel by helicopter since nobody can walk up to you and demand money at gunpoint, and so we see the world&rsquo;s largest fleet of privately-owned helicopters. On and on it goes &ndash; we move between the Dr, the victim, Mr. M, an assistant Attorney General, the policeman, a kidnapper, and, of course, the frog farmer. During one of the frog farm sequences, we see a huge shipment of live frogs departing for JFK. With a hint of related guilt, as in Blood Diamond, there is an inference that the United States supports the political corruption in that it purchases the product from the frog farms. While Manda Bala is a technically high-quality production, the presentation falls short in connecting the themes addressed. We meet many Brazilians. While they all have stories to tell, there is not a complete thread connecting them all. Is the problem the political corruption? Or is it the crime that the leadership seems to choose not to address? A presentation is made on the colonization of Brazil &ndash; is there an ingrained culture of raping the wealth? Like Out of Balance, Manda Bala ultimately fails to pinpoint the issue; it fails to deliver a summation of the issues presented. While it is very worth seeing, I&rsquo;m not sure that it really gets the job done when it comes to making a solid point. So there is evil hidden within the great beauty of modern Brazil &ndash; what a surprise! http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2008/1/10/23718.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 1/10/2008 12:00:39 PM
Body: What if this movie were not directed by acclaimed filmmaker Gus Van Sant? What if it had not been honored with a special prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival? What if it had not been an official selection of the Toronto and New York Film Festivals? What if it wasn’t nominated for three (Independent) Spirit Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Producer? What if Manohla Dargis didn’t consider it, “one of the most moving and delicately felt films of Gus Van Sant’s career”? Would Paranoid Park still seem that appealing? Not to me, but then I’ve seen enough films involving teens covering up an intentional or accidental murder. And that’s despite having enjoyed most of them, including Mean Creek, Bully, George Washington and even (though much, much less so) I Know What You Did Last Summer. Honestly, if this new domestic trailer for Paranoid Park didn’t mention all its prestigious claims, I probably wouldn’t be that compelled to see it. In fact, even if it simply mentioned that it was directed by Van Sant and featured one or more positive review blurbs, that wouldn’t be enough to sell me. Van Sant did direct such lame films as Finding Forrester and Even the Cowgirls Get the Blues, so he’s not a name that is completely synonymous with greatness. And this specific film has received enough negative reviews that critical acclaim is also not constant enough to attract my attention. (more…) Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Thu, 10 Jan 2008 17:00:39 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com1/10/2008 12:00:39 PM What if this movie were not directed by acclaimed filmmaker Gus Van Sant? What if it had not been honored with a special prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival? What if it had not been an official selection of the Toronto and New York Film Festivals? What if it wasn’t nominated for three (Independent) Spirit Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Producer? What if Manohla Dargis didn’t consider it, “one of the most moving and delicately felt films of Gus Van Sant’s career”? Would Paranoid Park still seem that appealing? Not to me, but then I’ve seen enough films involving teens covering up an intentional or accidental murder. And that’s despite having enjoyed most of them, including Mean Creek, Bully, George Washington and even (though much, much less so) I Know What You Did Last Summer. Honestly, if this new domestic trailer for Paranoid Park didn’t mention all its prestigious claims, I probably wouldn’t be that compelled to see it. In fact, even if it simply mentioned that it was directed by Van Sant and featured one or more positive review blurbs, that wouldn’t be enough to sell me. Van Sant did direct such lame films as Finding Forrester and Even the Cowgirls Get the Blues, so he’s not a name that is completely synonymous with greatness. And this specific film has received enough negative reviews that critical acclaim is also not constant enough to attract my attention. (more…) Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/jimbell/archive/2007/3/3/5956.aspx Post By: JimBell
Post To: JimBell Blog
Post Date: 3/3/2007 4:08:00 AM
Body: I saw Finding Forester (2000) again, this time on television. It is the story of a famous, reclusive old writer (Sean Connery) who mentors a young black kid (Rob Brown). The movie has excellent acting all around and a touching happy ending. But the event that gets the young Jamal into trouble at his prep school is ludicrous. The teacher/professor belittles a kid for not knowing the author of a quotation. This goes on far longer than it would in real life and far longer than necessary for the story. When Jamal challenges the teacher, the teacher challenges the 16-year old with a series of quotations, some of which I’d never heard before, and the kid rattles off the authors, sometimes before the quotation is finished, sometimes finishing the quotation. I know that Ph.D. students in English cannot do this, so a talented ghetto teenager is unlikely to be able to do it. I wonder why movies so seldom get the classroom right. One cause of inaccuracies is externalizaton. In scuba diving, for example, if a diver descends, he or she descends and the bubbles go up for all to see, but in education if a student has learned a great deal, film makers can only show that by some external demonstration. In addition, every viewer, not just a select few, should be able to get the point that the student has learned a lot. Spouting lines of poetry is an obvious manifestation. In another rhelm such as romance, however, the clues to internal emotions are often quite subtle. In Finding Forester, a white girl asks Jamal if the seat beside him is taken, and we know that she supports his fight against the vindictive teacher, and we are not surprised when, later, she holds his hand. But for some reasons that I cannot quite fathom, portrayals of education are often charicatures. Unfortunately, the director of this film, Gus Van Sant, is telling a lot of the world what schools are like. He directed Good Will Hunting (1997), an excellent film, where the young, working class janitor can solve abstruse mathematical equations that the elite university students cannot get. He also directed the recent Elephant which investigated high school shootings in the USA. I hope it was more accurate.Jim Bell
]]>Sat, 03 Mar 2007 09:08:00 GMTJimBellJimBell Blog3/3/2007 4:08:00 AM I saw Finding Forester (2000) again, this time on television. It is the story of a famous, reclusive old writer (Sean Connery) who mentors a young black kid (Rob Brown). The movie has excellent acting all around and a touching happy ending. But the event that gets the young Jamal into trouble at his prep school is ludicrous. The teacher/professor belittles a kid for not knowing the author of a quotation. This goes on far longer than it would in real life and far longer than necessary for the story. When Jamal challenges the teacher, the teacher challenges the 16-year old with a series of quotations, some of which I&rsquo;d never heard before, and the kid rattles off the authors, sometimes before the quotation is finished, sometimes finishing the quotation. I know that Ph.D. students in English cannot do this, so a talented ghetto teenager is unlikely to be able to do it. I wonder why movies so seldom get the classroom right. One cause of inaccuracies is externalizaton. In scuba diving, for example, if a diver descends, he or she descends and the bubbles go up for all to see, but in education if a student has learned a great deal, film makers can only show that by some external demonstration. In addition, every viewer, not just a select few, should be able to get the point that the student has learned a lot. Spouting lines of poetry is an obvious manifestation. In another rhelm such as romance, however, the clues to internal emotions are often quite subtle. In Finding Forester, a white girl asks Jamal if the seat beside him is taken, and we know that she supports his fight against the vindictive teacher, and we are not surprised when, later, she holds his hand. But for some reasons that I cannot quite fathom, portrayals of education are often charicatures. Unfortunately, the director of this film, Gus Van Sant, is telling a lot of the world what schools are like. He directed Good Will Hunting (1997), an excellent film, where the young, working class janitor can solve abstruse mathematical equations that the elite university students cannot get. He also directed the recent Elephant which investigated high school shootings in the USA. I hope it was more accurate.Jim Bell http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/love/MemberTagFilms.aspxlove
Number of films tagged: 12479

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]]>Wed, 23 Dec 2009 05:51:34 GMT124793381481Tag http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/Great/MemberTagFilms.aspxGreat
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]]>Fri, 04 Dec 2009 17:11:49 GMT231202371Tag http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/Loved-It/MemberTagFilms.aspxLoved-It
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]]>Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:56:35 GMT509179921Tag http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/friendship/MemberTagFilms.aspxfriendship
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]]>Fri, 20 Feb 2009 20:10:19 GMT477Tag