list http://www.spout.com/ Recent community activity around We're Going To The Zoo 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/We_re_Going_To_The_Zoo/329150/default.aspx Title: We're Going To The Zoo
Year: 2007
Director: Josh Safdie
Plot: A sister and brother en route to the zoo find their trip taking an unexpected turn after picking up a strange hitchhiker. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
Number of blog posts: 1
]]>Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:01:08 GMTWe're Going To The Zoo2007Josh SafdieA sister and brother en route to the zoo find their trip taking an unexpected turn after picking up a strange hitchhiker. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide1http://www.spout.com/images/no_image.jpghttp://www.spout.com/films/We_re_Going_To_The_Zoo/329150/default.aspxFilm http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2008/10/3/35863.aspxPost By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 10/3/2008 12:01:08 PM
Body: This review originally ran during the SXSW Film Festival. The Pleasure of Being Robbed opens in NY today and is available on IFC Video on Demand. What a lark this film is, what a caustic joy! As with his shorts, Josh Safdie’s first feature film, The Pleasure Of Being Robbed, is too articulate a work to describe as whimsical, turning into a pejorative what would seem to be the best adjective with which to describe it. I could describe it as entirely unique, but then I couldn’t discuss its cinematic precedents, which are probably myriad but which I’d narrow down to the one that keeps springing to mind: Bresson. It’s like nothing Bresson has ever made, but the entire film, with its heightened naturalism and precise spontaneity, seems possessed by Bresson’s notion of cinematography - not the lighting and photography, but the art of cinematography with which he delineated between those films that elevate the medium and those that are restrained by the trappings of the theater. I guess means that the best compliment I can pay Safdie is that his work makes film better. And it’s here that I feel the need to quote his own synopsis of the film, which ends with this quizzical postulation: “It’s a comedy?” Indeed it is, although its cheerful properties mask a certain foreboding fatalistic sensibility. This is the story of Eleonore (played by Eleonore Hendricks, who also co-wrote the film with Safdie), a young woman with an acute case of philanthropic kleptomania. We meet her as she simultaneously imparts a hug and lifts a purse, and later watch as she steals DVDs, cars and a basket of kittens. She never offers a reason for her behavior, nor does she seem to acknowledge anything wrong with it. It’s simply what she does. She and her friend Josh (Josh Safdie, natch) steal a Volvo from the streets of Manhattan so that she can give him a ride home, never mind the fact that she’s never driven an automobile in her life. “Where do you live now?” she asks him as she veers awkwardly through traffic. “Boston,” he replies. That’s the kind of comedy this is. It’s also the kind of comedy that can set up an extended physical gag with a mens’ room cologne dispenser worthy of Jacques Tati, and take off on a romp with a fake polar bear that somehow ends up being very sad. All of this is captured on super16mm, which shouldn’t mean anything but somehow does; its grain and color saturation, in concert with the fact that Hendricks seems plucked straight from the streets of 1960s Paris, impart a marvelous sense of antiquity while never belying any actual time period or cinematic movement. Like Safdie’s acclaimed short We’re Going To The Zoo (which gets a reference here that delivers one of the biggest laughs for folks in the know), the film is both extremely tactile and remarkably fleeting; Safdie’s a very precise stylist, but he hides it all beneath a thick layer of seeming innocuousness; the entire film feels happened-upon, which is why it’s almost a surprise that it ends up feeling so moody and repressed. There’s something seriously wrong with Eleonore, and while, in the narrative sense, the film exalts in her behavior, its very form acknowledges otherwise. The Pleasure Of Being Robbed has no statement to make, no morals to impart, which is precisely why it’s so legitimately meaningful and melancholy. It’s pure cinema, and as such it’s one of the best films I’ve seen this year. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:01:08 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com10/3/2008 12:01:08 PMThis review originally ran during the SXSW Film Festival. The Pleasure of Being Robbed opens in NY today and is available on IFC Video on Demand. What a lark this film is, what a caustic joy! As with his shorts, Josh Safdie’s first feature film, The Pleasure Of Being Robbed, is too articulate a work to describe as whimsical, turning into a pejorative what would seem to be the best adjective with which to describe it. I could describe it as entirely unique, but then I couldn’t discuss its cinematic precedents, which are probably myriad but which I’d narrow down to the one that keeps springing to mind: Bresson. It’s like nothing Bresson has ever made, but the entire film, with its heightened naturalism and precise spontaneity, seems possessed by Bresson’s notion of cinematography - not the lighting and photography, but the art of cinematography with which he delineated between those films that elevate the medium and those that are restrained by the trappings of the theater. I guess means that the best compliment I can pay Safdie is that his work makes film better. And it’s here that I feel the need to quote his own synopsis of the film, which ends with this quizzical postulation: “It’s a comedy?” Indeed it is, although its cheerful properties mask a certain foreboding fatalistic sensibility. This is the story of Eleonore (played by Eleonore Hendricks, who also co-wrote the film with Safdie), a young woman with an acute case of philanthropic kleptomania. We meet her as she simultaneously imparts a hug and lifts a purse, and later watch as she steals DVDs, cars and a basket of kittens. She never offers a reason for her behavior, nor does she seem to acknowledge anything wrong with it. It’s simply what she does. She and her friend Josh (Josh Safdie, natch) steal a Volvo from the streets of Manhattan so that she can give him a ride home, never mind the fact that she’s never driven an automobile in her life. “Where do you live now?” she asks him as she veers awkwardly through traffic. “Boston,” he replies. That’s the kind of comedy this is. It’s also the kind of comedy that can set up an extended physical gag with a mens’ room cologne dispenser worthy of Jacques Tati, and take off on a romp with a fake polar bear that somehow ends up being very sad. All of this is captured on super16mm, which shouldn’t mean anything but somehow does; its grain and color saturation, in concert with the fact that Hendricks seems plucked straight from the streets of 1960s Paris, impart a marvelous sense of antiquity while never belying any actual time period or cinematic movement. Like Safdie’s acclaimed short We’re Going To The Zoo (which gets a reference here that delivers one of the biggest laughs for folks in the know), the film is both extremely tactile and remarkably fleeting; Safdie’s a very precise stylist, but he hides it all beneath a thick layer of seeming innocuousness; the entire film feels happened-upon, which is why it’s almost a surprise that it ends up feeling so moody and repressed. There’s something seriously wrong with Eleonore, and while, in the narrative sense, the film exalts in her behavior, its very form acknowledges otherwise. The Pleasure Of Being Robbed has no statement to make, no morals to impart, which is precisely why it’s so legitimately meaningful and melancholy. It’s pure cinema, and as such it’s one of the best films I’ve seen this year. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog