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Reviews

Sound Of My Voice Movie Review

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My review of Sound Of My Voice

Following in the chilling footsteps of last year’s Martha Marcy May Marlene, Sound of My Voice’s premise is simple enough: couple Peter (Christopher Denham) and Lorna (Nicole Vicius) set out to infiltrate a cult, make a documentary about it, and expose the leader as a fraud. As in Martha Marcy May Marlene, however, reality and truth are eerie, elusive concepts. The process of joining  this cult is a disorienting and de-personalizing experience. To be allowed into the cult, they have to assume the identities of believers and, in the process, relinquish their real ones. Needless to say, Peter and Lorna’s journey quickly becomes an honest-to-god identity crisis. What’s more, the line between wanting to do a documentary on a cult and being in one is as enigmatic as the cult’s enigmatic leader. Who is she? Is she just a manipulative hack, or is she really from the year 2054, sent here to impart knowledge to a select group of “chosen ones?”
Co-writers Brit Marling and Director Zal Batmanglij, both Georgetown graduates, bring a mesmerizing, minimalist ethos to this film. In Marling’s other film Another Earth, Marling’s ethereal, luminous presence embodies her walking-wounded character. Her beautiful otherness is appropriately otherworldly and futuristic. Sci-fi tinge notwithstanding, Another Earthwas grounded in its human element, yet had enough of a flight of fancy to transport the viewer to a different dimension. The existential “anywhere but here” quest that underpinned is present in The Sound Of My Voice as well. Ultimately, there is this escapist search for meaning the viewer keeps hearing about in both.

The Sound Of My Voice is a gripping look down the rabbit hole of joining a cult. It thoroughly explores the psychology of the process. The stage of “preparing on the outside,” [which includes learning the at-first-seemingly-silly but later on important to the plot elaborate hand signals] is followed by Peter and Lorna’s first encounter with Maggie, to whom they are taken blind-folded and thoroughly cleansed [literally]. They are forbidden from asking questions or making any sudden movements—they are told these precautions are necessary because of the “special”/”chosen” status that is about to be bestowed upon them. The thrust of the message is one must have a great deal of faith and that faith comes at the expense of reason—in one of the movie’s most engrossing, stomach-turning scenes, Maggie likens the eating of an apple to the ingestion of reason and logic, which is bitter. Reason must literally be purged from the minds of the cultees [by throwing up the apple] and replaced by blind devotion. She demands that everyone “stop thinking and start feeling.” In that scene, however, the viewer also gets insight into the predatory, abusive, and manipulative nature of the relationship—when Maggie inexorably extracts the story of Peter’s abuse as a child, telling him how he was powerless then but is not now, the crushing reality of one abuser’s supplanting by another is made starkly obvious. The Sound Of My Voice does a phenomenal job of asking the tough question about who joins cults—at the beginning, Peter is convinced that these people “are weak and they are looking for meaning.” Despite Lorna and Peter’s superficial veneer of normalcy and their seemingly being different from the other members, ultimately, they are both brought here by a search for meaning and are no less “damaged” than the others or than anyone else, for that matter.

. Sure, Peter and Lorna’s very hipster/I am so tired of the scene asides add some levity to the matter [ e.g. bemoaning the superficiality of getting drunk at art installations and one’s life playing out like an episode of Entourage], but this search for something substantive and meaningful belies sweeping generalizations about the cult members as “damaged people” doing damning things.

Reviews

Book Review: East Of The West by Miroslav Penkov

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My review of East Of The West
Not only are we the only people to reverse the head signals for yes and no, but we Bulgarians also hold the dubitable honor of being really sad people. To some readers, Miroslav Penkov’s East Of The West: A Country In Stories may not seem to dispel the idea much. There is a profound difference between sad and melancholic and a large chasm between lugubrious and stoically wistful. Penkov’s book is about Bulgaria and a very Bulgarian ethos informs it, but ultimately, it is a thoroughly moving, beautifully-written collection of short stories about love, blood, ideals, and borders. Its stories are the product of exile–literal and metaphorical, yet this homelessness is also the story of a journey–at times a very Odyssian journey to a place that only exists in one’s mind and resides in our blood.
Language plays an integral role in East Of The West–like a lot of writers for whom English is a second language, Penkov’s love affair with it is palpable and he engages the readers’ senses with its richness. He is “lexicon drunk.” With great ingenuity, Penkov wryly inserts Bulgarianisms throughout the book [Sinko, for example, refers to a “young son,” and is not just a proper name] or yad is defined as “what lines the inside of every Bulgarian soul. Yad is like spite, rage, anger, but more elegant, more complicated. It’s like a pity for someone, regret for something you did or did not do, for chance you missed, for an opportunity you squandered.”
East Of The West is also an eerily accurate yet non-didactic primer on Bulgarian history–it manages to cover almost all pivotal points such as the Ottoman Empire [or Turkish yoke, as it is commonly referred to], komiti, gorilla fighters living in dugouts, the advent of communism, the Macedonia-Bulgarian separation, the fall of communism. To read it is to inhale and grasp some important milestones in the shaping of the Bulgarian spirit, if you will. At times the “centuries-old wrath of the slave,” moves mountains, literally, at other times, these ideals ring hollow and only reaffirm their own meaninglessness as in the story of “East Of The West” where a young couple dies just because they live on the opposite sides of a river separating Bulgaria from Macedonia. As the protagonist’s seemingly-communist-for-life Grandfather in “Buying Lenin,” says “What kind of a world is this where people and goats die in dugouts for nothing at all? And so I lived as though ideals really mattered.” Ideals are simultaneously metaphoric and metamorphic.
One of these ideals is the struggle for freedom/liberation and here the very Bulgarian theme of the mountain really towers. The mountain is where all the freedom fighters hide, where people live in hideouts, but more than its geographical advantage, the mountain is literally the mother that holds anyone in need in her bosom and protects those who call for her help. People move mountains and the mountain is moved by them/moves for them. In “Devshirmeh,” the girl beset by the sultan’s army begs, “Planino, please hide us in your bosom.” The song, “I got no father, I got no mother. Father to scorn me. Mother to mourn me. My father – the mountain. My mother – the shotgun,” really underscores its mythical, moving power.
Penkov also uses incredibly evocative metaphors to underscore the pull of that blood–not in a literal genetic sense but in the sense of some ancestral knowledge or visceral call that cannot be erased by distance or time. In “Buying Lenin,” he poignantly describes the intense loneliness and longing for [a] home he feels as a student here in the US; he has mastered the language but this knowledge is at times pointless and even worse…poisonous in further removing him from home: “My ears rang, my tongue swelled up. I went on for months, until one day I understood that nothing I said mattered to those around me. No one knew where I was from, or cared to know. I had nothing to say to this world…I cradled the receiver, fondled the thin umbilical cord of the phone that stretched ten thousand miles across the sea.” He desperately wants to make anyone hear, or at least feel, what he is experiencing in this exile, but ultimately, he can only reassure himself that “blood is thicker than the ocean.” And even though he had rebelled against his Grandpa’s seemingly laughable veneration of Lenin, he comes to realize that he and Lenin are alike in some small but human sense –“Like me he had spent his youth abroad, in exile. He sounded permanently hungry and cold.” In “Devshirmeh,” blood literally speaks, underscoring the pride in one’s heritage that is so integral to the Bulgarian ethos: “It is your blood you spill. My blood runs in her veins and hers in mine. Blood will make us see.”
The life in exile is a thread that runs through many of the stories and is a trenchant commentary on the immigrant limbo. One of the characters yearns to just sit with his Grandfather under the black grapes of the trellised vine. They are all looking back, nostalgic and wistful, to a place that really only lives in their minds, but looking back is dangerously heavy and weighs one down–“you either turn to a pillar of stone or lose your beloved into Hades.”
East Of The West’s heroes are not heroic in the traditional sense–in an incredibly creative way, the book lauds the “un”heroic cowards, if you will, because “cowardice” is reality and living alone takes courage. In “Makedonjia,” a husband bravely reads to his ailing wife letters she had received from her first love–“their love was foolish, childish, sugar-sweet, the kind of love that, if you are lucky to lose it, flares up like a thatched roof but burns as long as you live. I am just her husband and she is my wife.” The story is a melancholic but beautiful rumination on aging and love and love’s aging as well. “Isn’t it good to be so young that you can lose a tooth and not even notice?” it asks. The line “a man ought to be able to undress his wife from all the years until she lies before him naked in youth again” illustrates Penkov’s brilliant gift of prose and profound skill at character studies. East Of The West is not a sad book–it is existential yet thoroughly in touch with magical that lives in everything seemingly pedestrian. Ultimately, it is a truly penetrating yet drolly mirthful look into the “deep dark Slavic soul.”

Reviews

Book Review: Another Bullshit Night In Suck City by Nick Flynn

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My book review

Another Bullshit Night In Suck City [on which the film Being Flynn is based] is Nick Flynn’s autobiographical memoir, yet it is as much his story as it is his father’s story, especially apropos because his father’s “literary masterpiece,” will not see the light of day save through his son’s pen. It’s as though through the chain of words, like a literary trail of crumbs, he is attempting to both know and locate his absentee father. The book simultaneously constructs a father out of letters and words, and masterfully documents Nick’s bifurcated take on him—equal parts fascination with this man who or may not be the literary genius he proclaims himself to be and equal parts dread that he may be “like his father.”

Another Bullshit Night In Suck City is set in and around Boston, where Nick grows up with his brother, raised by his far-too-overworked Mom, after his father leaves when he is 4. After a stint in jail and a series of alcohol-induced screw ups, Jonathan resurfaces when he comes to the homeless shelter where Nick works. His limited sense of his father up to that point comes from the bravado-laden letters to Nick, filled with Jonathan’s self-avowals about his earned spot in the pantheon of great American writers and his always upcoming but never really materializing masterpiece of a novel. While Jonathan manifests as an absence in his son’s life, his non-presence couldn’t be more momentous to Nick, not the least of which because Nick is a writer. That very absence is ample kindle for the “who am I and what is my blood” fire and the mythos of him can only grow by virtue of his larger-than-life persona. At its most fundamental level, the source of the tension of their father-son relationship is not wanting to be like his “deadbeat Dad” while wondering how much like him he really is, especially if he really is the undiscovered writing genius he says he is. Discovering the family history is, thus, a road to a more complete sense of personhood yet it is littered with emotional potholes and craters.

Nick Flynn is a talented poet and it shines in his prose, which often flows like a Zen koan. For one, the story is not told chronologically and relies on some really interesting devices—there is a play in one of the chapters, a poem in another, extended allegories in several other spots, like the ones about Noah and Dostoevsky. His language is phenomenally rich and vibrant and beats with a life of its own. And more importantly, while the subject matter is sad, it is not lugubrious or self-pitying, nor is it matter-of-fact. A beautifully-written, instantly gripping story, refreshingly devoid of hero-villain dichotomies, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City’s title rings especially true–this story could take place in any city, on any night. One gets the sense that this is some kind of archetypal tragi-comic play that has been and will be acted out eternally: “Each man has a role—one will be the lunatic king, one will be the fool. One will offer dire warnings, one will plot against us, one will try to help.” And the role of the son will, inevitably, be played by Nick or someone else. The parts of the book that narrate Nick’s time at the Pine Street Inn offer a rare glimpse into the lives of the nameless and the faceless. Nick steers clear of moralistic asides, instead opting to offer us a glimpse of the daily but not the pedestrian. “Nothing in this shelter makes more sense, makes me understand my purpose more, than to kill bugs on a homeless man’s flesh, to dress him well in donated, cast-off clothes, to see him the next day laughing besides a burning barrel.”

Another Bullshit Night In Suck City is, essentially, about homelessness—literally and in the sense of being permanently lost and adrift in the sea of life. Nick Flynn’s metaphor of standing in one place, if you are lost, so you may be found is especially poignant when he adds, “but they never tell you what to do if both of you are lost, and you both end up in the same place, waiting.” Later on, he continues, “I see no end to being lost. It isn’t a station you reach but just the general state of going down.” The novel is haunted by the specter of the ever-presence yet utter invisibility of being lost, especially palpable and trenchant when personified by the ghosts of the homeless who are seemingly all around us, yet entirely invisible to us. The vent that his father sleeps on in the winter is no less a prison because it has no walls: “The blower is a room of heat with no walls. My father stands in this room, an invisible man in an invisible room in an invisible city.” He has “plenty of places to go, but no place to be.”

Reviews

Jiro Dreams Of Sushi Review

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My review of Jiro Dreams Of Sushi

The Confucian saying goes, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” Jiro Ono, the 85-year-old sushi chef behind the counter of a world-renowned 10-seat sushi restaurant in Tokyo, takes this ethos to another level. In his 75 years of work, he has never taken a day off except to attend funerals and, by his own mirthful admission, detests all holidays. Jiro Dreams Of Sushi is a love song to the ethereally exquisite world of sushi, but ultimately, it’s about dedicating your life to mastering a skill and working at it with unwavering dedication. In some sense, it is not about falling in love with *your* work, but more so about falling in love with work. Perfectionism, fanatical dedication, and humility are all we really need to know about Jiro.

Director David Gelb’s cinematography lends itself especially well to the subject matter. Close-up shots of the sushi feel like a dance performance, a time-lapse series of intense, gleaming beauty. The nigiri flutters like a bird as it gracefully settles after being shaped by the mind-blowingly deft handiwork of the chefs.

Jiro’s restaurant is the perfect balance between tradition and creativity. Rigorous routine notwithstanding – Jiro even rides the subway in the same position every morning – he is a rebel. He explains that even after 75 years of doing this, he is always looking ahead and improving his skills. Every element of every ingredient’s preparation is dissected to the minutest of details. For example, octopus has to be hand-massaged for 45 minutes before it can be prepared. The kind of meticulous, exacting standards that he holds himself up to apply to his entire staff, and with even more strictness to his two sons, Yoshikazu and Takashi. One of his apprentices shares the story of how it took him 200 tries over the span of 4 months to make the grilled egg “cake” for the egg sushi—when he finally got it right, he cried with pride. The training takes ten years of sunrise-to-sunset work and few chefs can endure it, but Jiro offers the knowledge for free.

His approach is a far cry from the despotic, sadistic Gordon Ramsey star chef prototype. Obsessive dedication is demanded for its own sake and value—Jiro would serve this kind of food even if he had one customer. His mantra, repeated throughout the movie, is that this is not about money but building a skill and only showcasing the best. Anything less than perfect is unacceptable. The vendors he works with in Tokyo’s famous Tsukuji fish market are equally skilled and “anti-establishment” themselves. Some of them only work with Jiro and will purchase one fish a day. The film offers a glimpse into this underground world of connoisseurship that exceeds all imagination; in an indicative scene, one monger can predict what a fish will taste like on instinct alone. Most of them have been working for decades, almost as long as Jiro himself, carrying on traditions and refusing to modernize for the sake of profit. The rice vendor tells a story of how he refused to sell his rice to a major hotel chain because they “would simply not be able to cook it right.”

Jiro Dreams Of Sushi is a fascinating look into Japanese culture and traditions. It is also the story of a place where, by work being done for its own sake, beauty through simplicity also follows.

Reviews

Slow Machete: Killing You Softly with the Otherworldly Sounds of Haiti

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My interview and feature on Slow Machete for The Vinyl District

Rolling Stone once described Sigur Ros as “the sound of God weeping tears of gold in heaven.” Slow Machete, a musical collaboration of local artist Joe Shaffer and Haitian sound-makers, is no less otherworldly and intensely moving.
The vibe in certain parts is musically reminiscent of the spirituals written by enslaved African peoples in America; this is ethnomusicology at its finest, devoid of arty, slapped-on electronica stylings to make it palatable for Western consumption.
Even though this was recorded during Shaffer’s many volunteer trips to Haiti, this album is not polemical in its message (and refreshingly free of overbearing Bono-esque humanitarian asides). It is an album that is truly a tribute to Haiti’s spirit, raw and uninhibited and unbridledly beautiful. The harmonium [similar to a reed organ]‘s sound is lushly organic and, mixed with the vocal and other samples, creates a sonic tapestry of something akin to peaking behind the curtain of a really cool place. Slow Machete’s Evening Dust Choir officially releases today free on Bandcamp.

Tell me a little bit about how this project came about. What is its significance to you and how does it relate to the work you do in Haiti?
I’d been going to Haiti for a few years with different NGOs and medical teams, assisting clinics, working in an orphanage, clean water initiatives, and so on. Through these networks, I’d begun making some very close friends who are singers or musicians in Haiti. I recorded an album for them, and that sort of began the relationships that I would later record for this project.
I made this album as a soundtrack for experiences. This is a music group or a collective in a way, and I’m tying these sounds together and writing lyrics that sort of just move the plot along without trying to take the spotlight. Haiti is a wonderful place, music everywhere, honesty and directness in people that’s incredibly refreshing. I can’t ignore the difficult situations people are facing like how horrible cholera is right now, but I think my objective is to give an honest representation of how I perceive the culture, and that culture is incredibly beautiful.
The sound of the album is extremely unique in its strong ethnomusical vibe. Could you talk a little about the special instruments and samples you used?
The recordings are split between a few places: DC, a tunnel in Pittsburgh, Costa Rica, Montevideo, and Cap Haitien, Haiti. I’d record hours and hours of everything and anything then spend the evenings trying to piece things together with field samples, movie samples, and drums that are mostly native percussion with pitched down sounds of machetes (hence the band name).
Two sounds that are prevalent throughout the album—an Indian harmonium and “the 913”—I soldered a few bass pickups and alligator clips in a cigar box that I use a lot for drones and bass sounds. I play that with tuning forks most often.

You sampled a machete chopping?
Correct. I have a machete, and I’d record hitting / chopping / swinging that against a variety of things in my apartment in Costa Rica, then pitch those samples down several half steps.
What do you think of the music scene in DC?
I originally came to DC excited about the experimental/noise scene that’s great here. I love what’s going on with house shows and art house venues, anything that makes people connect more intimately with the music.
Could you talk a little about your musical influences?
I love movie soundtracks. The King’s Speech by Alexandre Desplat—I’ve been in love with recently. The Sneakers soundtrack and Jurassic Park soundtrack were my favorites growing up. Some other faves are Juan Luis Guerra , Compay Segundo, and Rage Against the Machine.
How do you want to move this project forward? Do you plan on releasing this album on vinyl?
I hope so—if there is an interest in it. I would like to play shows, and make videos that match the aesthetic.

Reviews

Being Flynn Review

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My review of Being Flynn:

Ernest Hemingway once said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit at a typewriter and bleed.” In Being Flynn, Jonathan Flynn says, “Life is gathering material.” There lies the absurdity of prose: it is both prosaic and profound, complex in its very simplicity. Being Flynn is a film about bleeding and writing, stumbling and surviving. Based on author-poet Nick Flynn’s memoir “Another Bullshit Night in Suck City,” it recounts Nick’s (Paul Dano) relationship with his estranged father Jonathan (Robert De Niro).
Nick grows up a latchkey kid, raised by a loving but terribly over-worked mother (Julianne Moore). His only sense of his father comes from the bombastic letters he receives from prison; they are filled with Jonathan’s proclamations that he should have a place in the pantheon of great American writers. While Jonathan manifests as an absence in his son’s life, his non-presence couldn’t be more momentous to Nick, not the least of which because Nick writes just as well. Such is the basic tension of their father-son relationship: he declares “I am *not* like my deadbeat Dad” while wondering “How much like my father am I really?” Jonathan’s absence has built up the mythos of him, yet their approach to writing couldn’t be more different. Jonathan is full of swagger, in contrast to Nick’s meek “I write, but I am not a writer.” And surely enough, it’s through this fraught relationship and struggle that Nick will come into his own.

Being Flynn is also a film about homelessness, literally and metaphorically. Director Paul Weitz uses his lens to show the brutal Bostonian winter landscape with a gut-wrenching intensity and poignancy. Long after Jonathon leaves prison and descends into alcoholism, Nick meets him at a homeless shelter. Snippets of Nick’s writing provide a literary backdrop to the film. His description of his father’s going to sleep on a Metro grate as “an invisible man in an invisible room in an invisible city,” is a trenchant metaphor for the blind eye toward homelessness. The shelter is a microcosm of the struggles of the outside world and a testament to how hard it is to stay changed. The way up is long but the way down quick and always lurking around the corner. When Nick takes on the job in the shelter, maybe subconsciously he’s hoping to see his father. As Nick says, “if both of you are lost, you both end up in the same place, waiting.”
Through their push-and-pull interaction, Nick and his father tumultuously find a way to reach other. Paul Dano plays Nick with a quiet vulnerability and just enough of the inherited-self-nihilism required. DeNiro plays Jonathan with borderline-insane megalomania, a seething intensity, and a tragi-comic flair (he calls his masterpiece The Memoirs of a Moron). He doesn’t want our pity; he insists he is a survivor. And so is Nick, who finds his own voice.
You can’t kill someone with words, Jonathan Flynn says, but it doesn’t mean the words are not heavy as stones.

Reviews

Women Hold Up Half The Sky Filmfest

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National Geographic’s Women Hold Up Half The Sky is an annual film festival featuring films by women about women.

Here I Am, the feature debut of documentary director Beck Cole, follows Karen, a young Aboriginal woman who has just been released from prison and her journey to find a place outside. Beck’s decision to cast non-professional actors pays off well here, especially in Shai Pittman’s wonderfully subdued yet profoundly eloquent portrayal of Karen. Cole explained that she intentionally picked the women in the film because it not only “added to the film’s honesty, but it also gave them a chance to be humorous and very real.” The story takes places in the Port Adelaide women’s shelter that Karen lives in and, indeed, despite the very difficult circumstances its residents face, the dynamic is vibrant and the environment surprising nurturing. Cole spent time visiting these homes and described how they are often “regular houses on suburban streets.”

Here I Am is unique not only in that it features modern Aboriginal women on screen, but also in that those women are the key characters. While it shows the discrimination and bleak reality Aborigines face, it is also a testament to the strength of the characters who have overcome it—for example, Karen’s social worker and parole officer are both Aboriginal women. The film also portrays the marginalization that Aborigines have to contend with—in several instances, we see the thread of “do not be the way they assume you to be” and the need to get the “white man’s certificate”[and by implication, approval] to find one’s way in the rather divided environment. There is the pervasive sense that the shelter is of life-saving significance to these women who are doubly ostracized for being ex-convicts and for being Aboriginal.

The evocative cinematography is a beautiful milieu for Shai Pittman’s engrossing performance as Karen, who is equally vulnerable and tough. The role’s minimal dialogue allows for Pittman to play up the character’s quiet resolve and indomitable spirit. Devoid of self-pity and platitudes, Karen’s single-minded determination to find her way back to her 2 year-old daughter and her estranged, tough Mother is fervent and intense, without relying on fanciful plot twists and calamitous events or melodrama. Cole said that “it is important, as a film-maker, that your work be inward-looking. I wanted to take a different approach than ‘pointing the finger.’” Her focus on the characters themselves makes for a beautiful paean to getting a second chance.

My Wedding And Other Secrets, based on director Roseanne Liang’s autobiographical documentary “Banana In A Nutshell,” riffs on the all-too-familiar cross-cultural rom com theme. Sure, Chinese-New Zealand-born Emily Chu’s nerd-heavy romance with fellow geek James is cute and endearing, but it is also incredibly contrived and barely elicits a chuckle in the first half of the movie—how many groan-inducing Klingon and Dungeons & Dragons and never-been-kissed jokes can one make!? It would not an exaggeration to call it a geek-romance-by-the-numbers, replete with self-referential “aren’t we just too cute!?” overbearing and cringe-inducing “humor.” It’s only when Emily’s parents’ disapproval of the relationship comes into play that the film hits a stride and sparks some interest. In one particularly meaningful scene, when people applaud Emily for “sticking it to her parents,” by marrying James does the struggle of loyalty to one’s family become palpable. Then, the conundrum of choosing between selfishness-to-a-fault as a signal of “independence” Western-esque bend and the concern for her parents comes to life. The parents’ characters are especially nuanced and not easily dismissed as two-dimensional “narrow-minded”/racist. When Emily plaintively wonders why she “can’t have both,” there is a lot of depth behind this seemingly childish and simplistic sentiment.

Reviews

A Separation Review

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My brief Oscar preview of A Separation:

A Separation is a taut and enthralling film, compelling in its very realism. Although there is a complexity of narratives, including a court drama and an “everything is a version of something else”/who is telling the truth element, it is ultimately a film about a broken home. How stereotype-shattering that a divorce film be Iranian—all the more because the prevailing Western notion of divorce in a Muslim country is either as something as easily levied against women as a male declaring “I divorce you” three times or as something so verboten as to never take place. A Separation’s Iran is a modern, complex [and contradictory] place—a cosmopolitan landscape of traffic jams and women-initiated divorces. Yet, it is also a place of profound class fissures, economic strife, and a religiosity that, as we see in the film, may not be as top-down and imposed as the prevailing notion. Razieh, the woman Nadir hires to take care of his Alzheimer’s-ailing father, is so devout, she calls the mullah to inquire whether her nursing duties, which include changing a man, are a sin. One gets the sense that swearing on a Quran has an incomprehensible onus and gravity—even when she could desperately use the blood money for her family, her spiritual concerns trump all others.

A Separation is also a film about family. There are no one-dimensional “bad guys” to be found and the characters are compelling and universal. Nader’s devotion to his father and his daughter paints him as a man struggling, and at times failing, to keep his family together, a far cry from the patriarchal despot archetype. It is through Termeh, the 11-year-old daughter’s eyes, that the pain of the rift is most palpable as she stoically struggles with the ever-shifting tides and waves that buffet what were once their very normal lives. The theme of fighting vs. running away from things is at the core of the conflict of the film. Without resorting to fantastically left-field or implausible plot twists, A Separation is an absolutely mesmerizing portrayal of playing along with an increasingly upped ante of emotional tolls that life can realistically be.

Reviews

Rampart Review

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My review of Rampart:
In the pantheon of crooked cop movies like Training Day and Bad Lieutenant, Rampart shines as a unique character study, relying more heavily on the psychological element rather than the thrills that are hallmarks of the film noir genre. Woody Harrelson’s Dave Brown is not the typical one-dimensional thug or the sociopathic power-abuser with simple motivations of greed and control. His performance is intense, roiling with an undercurrent of claustrophobia and threat; he’s a man on the brink of a complete unraveling.
Co-written by crime novelist extraordinaire [The Black Dahlia, L.A. Confidential] James Ellroy, Rampart is partly inspired by the real-life story of the scandal that rocked the Rampart District of the LAPD in the 1990s, where nearly 70 of the department’s force were accused of egregious misconduct and, essentially, running a gang of their own.
The movie, set in 1999, riffs on the tensions that the Rodney King case stirred up. The action unfolds with Dave getting caught on video beating a suspect. The film has some vaguely X-Files-ish overtones: there is the ear-whispering Smoking Man played by a reptilian Ned Beatty. Dave Brown seems to have no problem digging his own grave, but there is no shortage of people handing him shovels either. When he is wryly advised that he “could just stop beating people up,” Dave acerbically retorts, “I don’t stop to see if there’s a camera in my way when I do the people’s dirty work.” No doubt he can’t really be “framed” for something he did anyway, but there is also the sense that Dave will be the poster child for the department’s crackdown on malfeasance. The shifting tide seems destined to sweep Dave with it and his refusal to change (or maybe inability) now has deleterious consequences.
This is some of what makes his character so interesting and different from the macho caricatures of Training Day and Bad Lieutenant. After 24 years on the force, he is equal parts placated by rationalizations yet crippled with guilt. He is not so far gone beyond the moral boundaries to be unaware of them and his coping mechanisms seem to be a result of his view of the world as an antagonistic place, not too different from a jungle. When he tells a wide-eyed rookie, “Everything you learned at the Academy is bullshit. This is a military occupation,” we see that he probably believes that, or at least that this is a suitable enough cover that lets him sleep at night.
Director Oren Moverman‘s cinematography is perfect for setting the tense atmosphere of the film. Extremely close shots convey the feeling of claustrophobia and paranoia. No one is what they seem to be and answers are hard to come by. Brown is a complex and conflicting study of a man—he may act like a thug, but he is extremely eloquent and clearly very smart. He is not the compulsive womanizer of the cop movie past; if anything, he tries to be a good father and a husband (of sorts) to his two ex-wives. He is not nihilistic or self-destructive for the mere sake of it. At his core, Brown is characterized by cynicism and misanthropy: “I am not a racist. I hate all people.” Ultimately, he wants to fix the mess he is in, yet his incorrigibility plunges him into quicksand.
Rampart is a taut and mesmerizing portrait of a man “falling down.” It steers clear of reductionist explanations and breathes a new life into tired genre.

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Another Earth Blurb For BYT’s Best Movies Of 2011

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My blurb on Another Earth from the best of list:

Following in the other-worldly footsteps of Moon, Another Earth is another bright star in the thinking-man’s sci-fi constellation. It is metaphysical, minimalist sci-fi that combines a “high-concept” plot device [there is literally another Earth in the sky] with human drama. After all, isn’t science fiction’s purpose to reveal something to us about ourselves? Didn’t you learn that in your high-school English class? The movie’s concept of a parallel universe is a trenchant inquiry into the idea of self and the implications of rewriting history. Georgetown University graduate Brit Marling’s ethereal, luminous presence breathes dignity and a quiet resolve into what could otherwise have been a plaintive and downright emo character. There is a romantic longing thread throughout the movie, and the old adage about the greener grass is elevated to an existential quest for a better place: somewhere, anywhere away from what is the now, whether it’s in outer space or in another person’s arms. Another Earth is grounded in its human element, yet has enough of a flight of fancy to transport us to a different place.