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The Fever (2004)
Director Carlo Gabriel Nero brings actor/playwright Wallace Shawn's controversial study of the growing chasm between the first and third world from stage to screen with this tale of a privileged woman whose reality suddenly suffers a profound shift. A bourgeois woman awakens suffering from a particularly intense fever and trapped in an unidentified third-world country. Later, upon venturing out into her war-torn surroundings, the once-wealthy woman is forced to contend with such unfamiliar issues as luxury, culpability, and revolution.
Cast: Vanessa Redgrave, Michael Moore, Angelina Jolie, Joely Richardson, Rade Serbedzija in a drama that employs animation and thought-provoking first-person monologues to explore the concept of bourgeois privilege.
Runoff
Runoff is set in an unnamed rural American town where wide-open, beatific skies stand in stark contrast to the poisoned ground, a consequence of the agrochemicals distributed by a large-scale farm company called GIGAS. The corporate monolith is also putting the squeeze on Betty (Joanne Kelly) and Frank's (Neal Huff) farm-supply business. Rather than reflexively laying blame for the family's hardship at the feet of big business, however, writer-director Kimberly Levin's film acutely conveys the characters' complicity in their own undoing. A recurring image of an anguished Betty watching a crop-dusting plane quietly connects the idea that the pesticides her husband peddles to local farmers cause biological harm for the entire town even as they simultaneously keep their family out of the red....
Saw the 17th Animation Show of Shows (trailer) (description). Generally when I see a film of short animations, I expect to be quite impressed by at least one of them, bored by a few, and sorta impressed by the rest. This one actually had no duds. All were okay. But, as always, there were two that stood out to me. One, called "We Can't Live Without Cosmos" (trailer), was about two cosmonauts who are good friends. Fabulous. The other, called, "World of Tomorrow" (trailer), was about this little girl and her future clone. Also fabulous.
..awesome film
Timbuktu
Toward the end of Abderrahmane Sissako's 2006 film Bamako, an elderly man breaks into rebellious, heartbroken song in the fictitious court where the World Bank's push for globalization is put on trial. The man's unshakeable wails and calling out to the ether speak more powerfully than the tirades of factual evidence and outrage that the prosecutors muster in the film's final minutes. For Sissako, music is a language of furious hope and peace, and in his remarkable fourth feature, Timbuktu, musicians are both songbirds of peace and targets of the religious rigor that Muslim jihadists use to punish, enslave, and murder several members of the titular North African city....
Sounds good. I'll have to check it out. Speaking of films involving old men and courts, the Indian film Court was good.
How about Michael Moore's new movie. The blood and guts and big guns will be real and not just Ninjas jumping over their foes' heads in fake combat with cooool swords, yeahhhh. But the bad guys will still be dying in droves and the good guys won't hardly get a scratch!
I liked Roger and Me. What's his new film called?
Michael Moore's, Where to Invade Next.
If Bernie's supporters want a movie for the times then that's it. It will be very well done as is usual with his movies. But Bernie has to get some guts if he wants to go big on foreign policy.
It could be catchy and help change the American people from being very prowar, just as Canadians are so far.
Rented a couple of films from the public library. Shaun the Sheep movie -- great stuff. Highly recommended. And Looper -- a futuristic action thriller about time travelling killers who want to change destiny by coming back in time to kill some little kid who's destined to grow up and cause trouble with the future killers (and thus the kid is evil, which, frankly, makes no sense). So, it's kinda like Terminator, only without Arnie, and without anything interesting about it at all. Avoid.
..outstanding movie!
Room
Like the novel on which its screenplay is based, Lenny Abrahamson's Room is a fictional high-wire act. Filtered through the viewpoint of an intelligent five-year-old boy, a story that might easily have been sensationalized or made saccharine—the imprisonment of a kidnapped, sexually enslaved young woman and the son she bore and is raising in captivity—becomes a tough but tender tribute to the creative power of maternal love.
The vivid metaphors that dot Jack's (Jacob Tremblay) voiceovers (“I zoomed down out of Heaven into Room,” he says, recounting the origin story his mother created for him) make a fairy tale of mother and son's captivity, while his habit of anthropomorphizing the objects in the storage shed where he's spent his entire life imbues even small things with great power. The camera adopts his point of view, making the little space feel cozy and warm though glamorous close-ups and by lingering on the routines, games, and stories Jack's mother, Joy (Brie Larson), invents to keep him happily occupied....
http://lifehacklane.com/browse/?id=678&r=outbrain678dt1a&utm_source=outb...
Has anyone seen this?
Free State of Jones (2016)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1124037/
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/awards-and-festivals/tiff/nate-parke...
On a whim I rented Cafe De Flore from the library. It's very good. French-Canadian film that's part romance, part surreal, and part suspense. Highly recommended.
HyperNormalisation, by Adam Curtis: https://archive.org/details/HyperNormalisation
The link contains options to watch the video streamed or to download it. It's a BBC documentary about how current trends in western political systems came about (it focusses mostly on British and American politics). It touches on the middle east (primarily Syria and Libya), the banks, the internet and computers, the Occupy movement, and various other issues. Its main theme is how the focus moved more to managing economies rather than having visions for improvement. Recommended. As a plus, Curtis also frequently uses the music of Brian Eno in his films (this one included), so if you're an Eno fan, it's another reason to watch the movie.
Trapped in a Human Zoo
This is the story of the incredible journey of eight Inuit who came from Labrador in 1880 to Europe lured by promises of adventures and wealth, only to realize they had been trapped in a world that time has today forgotten; the world of human zoos. Thirty-five thousand indigenous people from around the world were recruited for these zoos.
In this world, men, women and children were exhibited like animals. An era of scientific racism was ushered in. And if not for one small diary found after being lost for over one hundred years, written by a man named Abraham, their tragic story would have been forgotten forever....
A Canadian film about pass laws would be a great addition as well.
Long ago on babble I had a ferociously nasty argument with Jeff XYZ, who left babble shortly after that, a lawyer by trade I think, who claimed that Canada had no such laws [or practices, which was the point] and whose attacks could have taken the paint off a car at twenty paces.
Recently watched again (for the I'm not sure-how-manyth time),
The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus.
Heath Ledger's last film. In fact he died as the film was being made, so things had to be done in order to complete the movie. Fortunately the movie itself allowed those things to be done.
Written by Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown, and directed by Terry Gilliam.
Cast includes Heath Ledger, Christopher Plummer, Verne Troyer, Lily Cole, Andrew Garfield and Tom Waits. Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law played portions of the movie that would have been done by Ledger.
Visually excellent, as Gilliam's work is, with a story line that has an overarching theme. What happens when someone makes a deal with the devil.
I have watched this movie several times, and find something in it each time. My sister watched it (at my insistence) but grew bored with it, so I guess it can be taken or left. But if someone asked me for a beautiful movie to watch, this one would be near the top of the list.
Gilliam has made many movies, among which I would place "The Fisher King" as number one. The 'Imaginarium' would be second.
If you're looking for something out of the usual, this is the movie. If you don't like it, well, you can blame me, but it won't change my feelings about it. In fact, just wrting about it makes me want to watch it again. Off I go...