Monthly Archives: July 2007

Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern’s blistering war cry of a film, The Devil Came on Horseback, is about as good an introduction to the Darfur situation as one could hope for. It’s told in the admirably tough voice of Brian Stiedle, a former U.S. Marine captain who served a six-month duty as an unarmed observer in Darfur with the African Union peacekeeping force during 2004, after the cease-fire that supposedly ended the 20-year civil war that had been ripping the region apart. With impressionistic verve and harrowing attention to detail, Sundberg and Stern’s film relates what Stiedle witnessed in that sun-baked and blood-stained land. His narration as powerless observer is mixed in with the graphic, lividly colored photographs he took of the burnt-out villages and massacred children; the resulting narrative is as dramatic as it is highly moral, in the best sense.

The full review ran in filmcritic.com. Link

Julie Delpy’s 2 Days in Paris, which she not only wrote, directed and stars in, but edited and wrote some music for, treats the idea of homecoming like a wound–just as with a scab one can’t quite help picking at, the conflicted woman Delpy plays can’t help coming back to Paris, the place where she falls into all of her old habits, no matter how destructive. It’s a conundrum familiar to any who have left and returned to hometowns which now give rise to decidedly mixed emotions, and one that should endear the film to a number of viewers, though whether that number will be any greater than those who will be turned off by Delpy’s antagonism toward romantic Paris clichés is anybody’s guess.

Screened at the 2007 Berlinale Film Festival. The full review ran in Film Journal International. Link

There are many who would say that silent horror went out with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and they’d be right. Wordless horror comics have even less of a lineage. A singular exception to this rule is Josh Simmons’s malefic and wordless House, just out from Fantagraphics. In this black-and-white work, a trio of teenagers meet to explore a massive, crumbling old mansion. The building’s best days are behind it, the forest is creeping in to take over and long corridors and dusty ballrooms stretch into the distance. The house is no mere ruined building; instead, it contains multitudes of worlds within itself, vast and deep lakes and a staircase running down into the unknown where dangers may lurk for the careless adolescents.

I interviewed Simmons for PW Comics Week. Link

It might be safe to say that the Yorkshire district in England would be a difficult place for a working-class kid to have much hope at any point in recent history. But in 1983, the setting of Shane Meadows’ wonderful tale of disaffected skinhead youth,This Is England, it would have been even harder than usual. As a brilliantly edited opening montage of news footage relates, the country was in crisis, with civil mayhem and general unrest everywhere, Margaret Thatcher bearing down with an iron hand, and the Falklands War sputtering on half a world away. Yorkshire itself is a fairly bleak landscape of council flats where London is treated as such a fantastic and faraway place that a shoe-store clerk tries to impress a pair on an unwilling child by repeating the mantra, “They’re from London.”

Screened at the 2007 Berlinale Film Festival. The full review ran in Film Journal International. Link

A story of Iraq told in tones both wondrous and horrible, Iraq in Fragments is a stunning portrait of a country trying to pull itself back together after the system shock of the American invasion — sometimes succeeding, often not. A compilation of three stories dealing with, respectively, the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds, James Longley’s unique vision benefits from its multiplicity of viewpoints, ruminating on its characters’ lives instead of encapsulating them into some larger thesis. Although as informative as the best non-fiction film, this is less a documentary than a ravishingly photographed visual poem, one in which helicopters eternally buzz overhead and there is always a column of smoke climbing into the sky from some point in the distance.

It came out last week on DVD. The full review is at filmcritic.com. Link

The reality television metaphors come flying at you fast and thick in Spanish filmmaker Marcelo Piñeyro’s The Method, which provides for a lot of easy audience identification — hey, I’ve seen Survivor — but makes it just a bit too recognizable for comfort, at least until the end, when its existential modus operandi becomes terrifyingly clear. There are plenty of other comparisons to be drawn from this exercise in business-world gamesmanship, from Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross to LaBute’s In the Company of Men, though Piñeyro’s has a more gender-neutral agenda: in short, women are just as exceptional bastards as men.

The full review was published in filmcritic.com. Link