Posted by barb on Apr 30, 2005 in
Movies 1/5 stars
While Andrew disagreed, this movie had the feeling of a SciFi Channel horror flick.
The general story is that a guy wakes up from a 28-day coma and finds that everyone in the city is gone. Well, not everyone — the people that he finds are insane — infected with something, and out to kill anyone who is not infected.
The quality of the film itself was better than a SciFi Channel movie, the filming, pacing, and situations felt much like the formulaic flicks on SciFi. The music was distracting at times, often not at all in-line with the happenings of the film (or the overall tone of the film). And, basically, I was bored (yet too tired to actually move away from the TV…sigh, that’s pathetic).
Tags: reviews
Posted by barb on Apr 3, 2005 in
Movies 4/5 stars
San Francisco is home to a flock of wild parrots and Mark Bittner, an out-of-work musician, has befriended them. He is careful to point out that he does not “take care of them” — they are wild, and can care for themselves — but he does feed them, and takes in any of the sick members long enough for them to heal.
While Bittner does not describe himself as an eccentric, all the trappings are there — he has no visible means of support, and yet he has a constant influx of seed for the flock, a computer to record a diary of the flock, and a camera to photograph their comings-and-goings. He has sworn not to cut his hair until he has a girlfriend (not the best strategy, if you ask me). He doesn’t pay rent, though the “landlords” hesitate to call him a squatter.
Throughout the film, we get a picture of the flock and the members, all of whom Bittner has named and can distinguish by small markings. No one knows how the flock started, but certainly it was a pair of pet parrots who either escaped or were released. Many new members of the flock were also captive at one time, but there have also been many new babies born into the flock. At the time of the filming, there were about 45 parrots in the flock.
One of the most striking things for me were the shots of the parrots flying together as a flock. The picture that I usually have of parrots is that of a lone parrot in a cage or in a house. But parrots really are social animals, and seeing them fly together was breath-taking.
Tags: reviews
Posted by barb on Mar 26, 2005 in
Movies 4/5 stars
Born Into Brothels is a documentary about the children living in the red-light district in Calcutta. Zana Briski lived in the red-light district on and off for several years, getting herself into a position to photograph some of the goings-on in the lives of the prostitutes. But the first thing that struck her, when she first arrived, was all the children. These children have few prospects for rising above their mothers’ stations, particularly the girls.
Briski decided to teach some of the children photography. As she got to know the children, she worked to get some of them out of the brothels and into boarding schools (to get them out of the red-light district altogether). But it was exceedingly difficult — most of the boarding schools would not take children whose parents were criminals. To help pay for the schooling, Briski helped to arrange an auction of the kids’ photographs.
The film is not nearly as depressing as I had expected it to be. Much of the film focuses on the children and their photography. What really struck me was that there were fathers in some of the children’s lives. Fathers. In the red-light district. They were useless, for the most part, but the fact that they were there at all surprised me.
Definately recommended. Also check out Kids with Cameras — the organizatio aimed at teaching kids around the world the art of photography.
Tags: reviews
Posted by barb on Mar 12, 2005 in
Movies The Cinema Arts Theatre near us started showing the Oscar Nominated short movies yesterday, so we decided to check them out instead of trekking downtown for more of the DC Independent Film Festival.
The animated shorts were varied, running from silly to powerful to just plain weird.
- “Gopher Broke” was cute, in the spirit of shorts you might see before a Pixar flick.
- “Birthday Boy” was a wartime story following a little boy for an afternoon out playing, then waiting for Mom at home. It doesn’t sound like much, but it packed a great punch in the few minutes it had. This was perhaps my favorite of the animated shorts.
- “Ryan”, the Oscar winner, was just plain weird. It was about Ryan Larkin, a once prominent animator, now homeless due to addiction (though I knew none of this before or during my viewing of the film). The animation was so densely metaphorical that one would need hip-boots to really wade through it all. I’m sure the Academy loved it because it seemed so avant-garde, but frankly I was bored.
The theme for three of the four live-action shorts seemed to be kids in bad situations.
- “Two Cars, One Night” was set in a bar’s parking lot. Two cars hold children of the bar’s patrons, and the kids connect. I felt a bit like the dialog was what adults picture kids saying to one another, rather than what kids would actually say to one another. This was also one of those English-language films where subtitles would have been helpful, because the children where Maori, with very heavy accents.
- “Little Terrorist” is about a little boy who accidentally crosses the heavily guarded (and mined) border between India and Pakistan. He finds his way back with the help of a schoolmaster. The filmmakers from last weekend’s shorts that we saw at the DCIFF could take a lesson from this film. It had a “point”, but moreover, it had a good story and interesting characters. There was no need to hammer the point into the viewer’s heads — we got it all on our own.
- “Wasp”, the Oscar winner, was about a single mother trying to get back a bit of freedom with four children ranging from a year old to about 8 (?). This was a depressing “slice of life” kind of piece with the children waiting in a pub’s parking lot while Mom has a date inside.
- The best live-action short was “7:35 in the Morning”. It had no children, just a very weary crowd at a coffee shop. (I can’t say much more without giving away the twist — very good, though.)
Tags: reviews
Posted by barb on Mar 11, 2005 in
Movies 3/5 stars
We mainly added this to the queue because it was directed by Jonathan Frakes. It’s a cute movie with not-so-great science and a few cheesy what-would-you-do-if-you-were-a-teenager-who-could-stop-time kind of scenes.
Tags: reviews
Posted by barb on Mar 9, 2005 in
Movies 2.5/5 stars
This seems to be my theme lately — not bad, not great, mostly eye candy. Owen Wilson plays a Navy navigator who’s plane is downed behind enemy lines. This is not a war-time film, but present-day-ish.
Tags: reviews
Posted by barb on Mar 5, 2005 in
Around DC,
Movies The DC Independent Film Festival kicked off last week, so Andrew and I decided to catch a couple sessions today. We caught two shorts fests: “Politics, Conflict, and Controversy” and “Cinematic Love & Death”.
I suppose I should have been prepared, during the first session (politics, conflict and controversy), for films with a message. I wasn’t. I’ve been a writer for a long time (not paid, not published, but a writer, none-the-less), and I know that a good story comes from, well, a good story. It needs strong characters with real problems and conflicts. If there’s a “message” to the story, it will come through the problems and conflicts that the characters encounter. There’s no need to hit the reader over the head with the message. Most of these filmmakers have not learned this lesson yet. Nearly all of them had a message and felt that they needed to shout their message at us stupid viewers.
Having said that, there were a couple noteworthy pieces during the first session:
- Convictions: Prisoners of Conscience was a documentary about protestors at Fort Benning Georgia who are regularly arrested and face federal prison time for their peaceful protests.
In some ways I felt that the actually content of the protest was missing — I got a general idea of what they were protesting (the School of the Americas), but there wasn’t enough “evidence” to make me support the protestors. On the other hand, the documentary was really about the protestors, not the subject of their protests, at least that’s what I gathered. In that sense, it was well-done with an underlying arch that brought the film from beginning to end and told the story of the protestors without shoving anything down our throats.
- Daughters of Abraham was a documentary about two girls in Iraq — one a suicide bomber, the other her victim, both looking so similar that they could have been sisters.
This one was also more powerful than the “fiction” shorts that had a message to convey. Here, there was a message of sorts, but the filmmaker did not take sides. Rather we got to see both girls’ parents talking about their girls. We get the sense that the parents of the bomber, while sad that they lost their daughter, were supportive (not necessarily proud) of their daughter and her convictions. On the other side, we see the grieving parents and classmates of the victim.
This one was not as well crafted as Convictions: Prisoners of Conscience, because at times it seemed that some material was just thrown between scenes of the parents without a real plan for connecting events.
The second session was much more enjoyable than the first, though two of the pieces were almost indecipherable. Particularly enjoyable:
- Handshake — an animated short about two people who get entangled due to a simple handshake.
- Samuel de Mango — Samuel grew up eating only mangoes. His mother grew mangoes. He hated mangoes. When he finds that he’s interested in the married woman next door, he decides that his only escape is suicide. Unfortunately, all those mangoes in his system make suicide difficult.
All in all, a fun afternoon. We’ll probably be back for another session or two next weekend.
Tags: life in the city, reviews
Posted by barb on Feb 25, 2005 in
Movies 2.5/5 stars
I’ll confess that I added this to our Netflix queue because it starred Sting. No, he’s not the best actor, but he’s pretty to look at. I didn’t really know much about the story except that it was vaguely related to Frankenstein and involved his creation of a female companion for his “monster”.
In the end it was a “not bad, not great” retelling of the story of Dr. Frankenstein. In this version, Frankenstein constructs a bride for his monster, but she scares the monster away and becomes a ward of Frankenstein. He decides to mold her into an independent woman, contrary to the standards for women of the day. But when she becomes too independent, Dr. Frankenstein resents her.
I probably wouldn’t watch it again, but was a decent distraction for an evening.
Tags: reviews
Posted by barb on Feb 14, 2005 in
Movies 3.5 stars
Not bad, not great. A writer, played by Diane Lane, frustrated after a messy divorce, takes a vacation in Tuscany, and ends up buying a house. We follow her struggle to make the house livable while trying to rekindle both her love life and her writing in the process. A fun diversion.
Tags: reviews
Posted by barb on Feb 13, 2005 in
Books by Philip Pullman
In this second book of the Sally Lockhart trilogy, where we pick up with Sally a few years after The Ruby in the Smoke. She has built herself a small financial consulting business, no small feat for a woman in 1878, and has helped her friends from the first book build a respectable photography business.
This novel starts with two seemingly unrelated minor mysteries — one involves the sinking of a ship, losing one of Sally’s customers all of her retirement savings that she had put into that ship on Sally’s advice; the other involves an enigmatic performer at the theater where Sally’s friend Jim (and also employee at the photography studio) works backstage. These mysteries come together when an elusive company, North Star, pops into both the mystery of the ship, and the mystery of the marked performer.
Pullman’s style is easy and fun to read; though I tend to get lost during fight scenes, so I just skim ahead and see who’s standing at the end. I like that he doesn’t treat any of his characters as sacred, though I was a bit startled and upset by a death near the end of the novel.
I look forward to finding and reading the last book in the series.
Tags: reviews