Pieces of April is simply the story of a punker living in a New York slum who prepares Thanksgiving dinner for her disfunctional middle-class family who is dreading their visit. It is a small slice of life. One of the script writer’s biggest challenges was to make a punker sympathetic. We had to care about April or else all the emergencies cooking the dinner and all the family feuding would have carried little weight. Without making her cute, the movie does a great job of making us cheer for her. Just one way of doing this was through her lovable black boyfriend—if he was so in love with her, you had to believe that she was some kind of a quality person. Another challenge was how to develop rich characters when April merely cooks a turkey and her family merely drives into the city. April is a disaster in the kitchen. Watching her stuff a turkey and then mash raw potatoes is hilarious. Although she has clearly missed a lot of life skills, her heart is in the right place. We see how her family may well have produced a black sheep, as characters reveal themselves on the journey to New York. One challenge the writers had trouble with was concluding a gritty, realistic movie (the whole thing is shot in digital video) with an upbeat ending. On one hand, the light comedy throughout and the slight but noticably character growth portent a happy ending. On the other hand, so much disfunction makes the mother’s prediction of disaster seem commonsensical. So the ending will work for some and not for others. The movie is a refreshing 80 minutes short. If it does nothing else, it humanizes weird-looking young people for those of us who are no longer quite so weird looking and not quite so young. I remember April fondly.
Schindler starts off as a middle-aged businessman desperate to make a business prosper, but as the German atrocities against the Polish Jews increase, Schindler’s goals slowly and ineluctably shift to trying to save Jews from Auschwitz. The stately, unhurried pace of the film makes this transformation believable and allows us to absorb the escalating horror. The black and white photography gives the whole thing a documentary look, making it seem the horrible truth. How accurate it is historically I don’t know, but it packs a powerful punch. The denouement of the film is a bit much, a bit overdone, but, still, it is thought-provoking to see some of the 1,100 Jews Schindler saved filing by his grave in the present day: They look just like an ordinary variety of old folks, but now you have a vivid idea of what some individuals and the group as a whole went through.
Dirty Pretty Things (2002) is a powerful, gritty movie about the hard life of marginal immigrants in London. Unfortunately, Audrey Tautou is cast as a beautiful Turkish woman seeking refugee status, when she does not look, sound, or act Turkish, and her refugee claim is absurd. This does not matter, largely because the situation is more important than the character; that is, a young, good-looking, single woman is forbidden to work until her refugee aplication has been aproved, yet she must work to eat, and so she is forced into work situations where she encounters the dirty things under the pretty face of London. The movie, however, is carried by her male counterpart, an actor named Chiwetel Ejiofor. He is an illegal immigrant on the run, and he has the quiet dignity and integrity that is both a foil and a magnet for the corruption around him. Stephen Frears does a superb directing job, and Stenen Knight wrote a first-rate script.
Jim Bell
If you want explosions and karate moves, you’ll hate this small film about a reject who moves to small-town, rural New Jersey and meets an artist and a hot dog vender. It grew on me, and I loved it. At the Independent Spirit Awards in California, the movie won the John Cassavetes Award for best feature film made for under $500,000, as well as Best First Screen Play (Thomas McCarthy) and the Producer award. Excellent work.
Matchstick Men—Nicholas Cage bought the screen rights to Matchstick Men before the novel was even publish, and the film is a winner. I never guessed the ending until seconds before it unfolded. Cage does a wonderful job of not overplaying the con man who is beset by obsessive-compulsive behaviors. The chemistry between the con man and his 14-year old daughter is edgy and captivating. (Lohman, who plays the daughter, is actually 23, and does a superb acting job.) All supporting roles are solid. The camera work is appropriately jumpy and extreme at times. And the struggle of a screwed up, middle-aged guy to turn his life around is realistic and interesting.