Years ago, in high school, I had to sit through a creaky, dim and dirty, silent black and white documentary about some Eskimo. I remember nothing of the film except that I didn't like it. Today, I had the opportunity to see a recently restored and nicely scored re-release of that film: Nanook of the North. After all the National Geographic, Nova, PBS and Discovery Channel documentaries I have seen over the years chronicling the lives of aboriginal bands of people, (aboriginal people often wearing Coca-Cola T-shirts and baseball caps), this classic 1922 epic is the best I've ever seen showing a happy people working desperately to survive in an incomprehensibly harsh environment. It is quite a compliment to the film and its subject that it retains so much power almost 80 years after it was created. The film simply documents a small group of Inuit and their children in northeast Canada as they struggle to live from day to day. That these people survive at all, let alone remain a seemingly happy, life-loving team in such a place is mind-boggling. So many of the brutally realistic scenes in this wonderful film remind me of how sterilized many contemporary documentaries have become. We see the necessary brutality of finding, stalking and killing your food. Then slicing up your kill right there on the ice and eating it where it died. We witness Nanook harpooning and then `reeling in' a walrus, catching fish with no hook and no real bait and somehow knowing where to dig a tiny hole in the ice. Then, through that tiny hole, he spears and battles to bring in a seal. And he succeeds. But more than the environment and more than the struggle, what keeps us watching this film is character. Nanook is the chief of the small tribe and the father in the main family that is followed. He is smart, curious, inventive, determined and, at the core, a happy, gregarious character that we learn to laugh with, root for and celebrate with as he keeps his family fed. His children are an absolute delight, playful and endearing, seemingly oblivious to the awful world in which they live. The film seems to have no artifice at all and everything seems to be a regular part of their life with little attention paid to the camera. If you are a lover of the documentary form, you cannot miss this re-release. It appears to have been struck from a near pristine negative and restored to its original length of somewhere over 65 minutes. The pleasant score is not too obtrusive and sounds as though it may be a reconstruction of the score composed for the theatrical re-release of the film in 1939, but the credits aren't completely clear on that. See this film.
Reviews
4 Reviews
Maze
(2000)
A quiet, pleasant surprising little film.
28 February 2002
When I come across a movie that is directed by and stars a former TV actor who has only done sporadic film work, I worry that it is a vanity piece and not worth the price of the popcorn accompaniment.
I am always happy when I turn out to be wrong.
Maze is a very nice little film. Not great. Not staggering. It is just quite good. It concerns the flowering relationship between an afflicted artist and the girlfriend of one of his buddies: how and why it happens, the inner turmoil that results and the logical conclusion to the relationship of the three main characters. It doesn't stray from the focus on the main characters and in the course of the film we see and understand how they came to be where they are. To be honest, I have always considered Laura Linney and Rob Morrow to be only adequate actors. They are pleasant enough to watch, but I have never expected much from either. Even with Linney's recent critical acclaim, I didn't expect much from her in this film. Again I was wrong about both actors. Morrow does quite a good job giving us a character afflicted with Tourette's without it either being soooo distracting as to be annoying or looking like a histrionic excorcism. I felt that he was able to show a character that was crippled by his place in society but still letting us see that underneath was a basically good person. And letting us see that good person makes it believable that Laura Linney's character would love him, despite his disease's symptoms. Linney as well gave a performance of growing depth and understanding. We see her character move from genuinely liking Morrow as a comfortable friend to loving him as the true partner she wanted all along. We see it in her eyes when she looks at him, when they work and read together and in the very simple act of taking his hand and quietly calming him while sitting in an audience at a recital.
If you enjoy simple, focused, character movies, I would suggest checking Maze out at your local video store.
I am always happy when I turn out to be wrong.
Maze is a very nice little film. Not great. Not staggering. It is just quite good. It concerns the flowering relationship between an afflicted artist and the girlfriend of one of his buddies: how and why it happens, the inner turmoil that results and the logical conclusion to the relationship of the three main characters. It doesn't stray from the focus on the main characters and in the course of the film we see and understand how they came to be where they are. To be honest, I have always considered Laura Linney and Rob Morrow to be only adequate actors. They are pleasant enough to watch, but I have never expected much from either. Even with Linney's recent critical acclaim, I didn't expect much from her in this film. Again I was wrong about both actors. Morrow does quite a good job giving us a character afflicted with Tourette's without it either being soooo distracting as to be annoying or looking like a histrionic excorcism. I felt that he was able to show a character that was crippled by his place in society but still letting us see that underneath was a basically good person. And letting us see that good person makes it believable that Laura Linney's character would love him, despite his disease's symptoms. Linney as well gave a performance of growing depth and understanding. We see her character move from genuinely liking Morrow as a comfortable friend to loving him as the true partner she wanted all along. We see it in her eyes when she looks at him, when they work and read together and in the very simple act of taking his hand and quietly calming him while sitting in an audience at a recital.
If you enjoy simple, focused, character movies, I would suggest checking Maze out at your local video store.
Third String Disney Team Effort
18 February 2002
Disney animation, through its good and bad times, appears as though it has a team of first, second and third string players. The first string team usually produces the classy feature work, the second string does the TV work and the straight-to-video stuff - though once in a while those efforts are good enough for a short feature run - and the third string seems to be Disney's Canadian, French and English subsidiaries that are normally just employed for "tweening" and TV makeup work for which the better players don't have time.
I'm afraid "Return to Neverland" feels as if it was done by this latter team. Though they brought in a few of good people to help out in the voice direction and in minor voice parts, this film lacks the quality of character animation, the sense of humor and the reasonably tight story construction (where is Joe Ranft!?!) that has aided the last few Disney films.
The core of the plot, a slightly disenchanted girl discovering ". . .faith, trust and pixie dust", is a good idea that is never properly plotted out or executed. Her conversion to a believer occurs too quickly and without dramatic action in the course of one short song and thus lacks emotional punch. If only her conversion had been properly plotted to better coincide with Tinkerbell coming back to life and her defeat of Captain Hook!
Though the movie is probably pleasant enough for most kids, none in the audience with me were in any way enraptured by this minor effort, and parents will miss the adult humor and insight that has sparked many animated films since Aladdin. The computer animation was the most poorly integrated CGI Disney has done since The Rescuers Down Under and the character animation was on a par with Disney's lesser Saturday morning work. On the positive side, though, it has one pretty song, a couple humorous moments and is hopefully a great educational effort by young Disney animators who will soon move up to second and maybe even first string on the Disney Team.
I'm afraid "Return to Neverland" feels as if it was done by this latter team. Though they brought in a few of good people to help out in the voice direction and in minor voice parts, this film lacks the quality of character animation, the sense of humor and the reasonably tight story construction (where is Joe Ranft!?!) that has aided the last few Disney films.
The core of the plot, a slightly disenchanted girl discovering ". . .faith, trust and pixie dust", is a good idea that is never properly plotted out or executed. Her conversion to a believer occurs too quickly and without dramatic action in the course of one short song and thus lacks emotional punch. If only her conversion had been properly plotted to better coincide with Tinkerbell coming back to life and her defeat of Captain Hook!
Though the movie is probably pleasant enough for most kids, none in the audience with me were in any way enraptured by this minor effort, and parents will miss the adult humor and insight that has sparked many animated films since Aladdin. The computer animation was the most poorly integrated CGI Disney has done since The Rescuers Down Under and the character animation was on a par with Disney's lesser Saturday morning work. On the positive side, though, it has one pretty song, a couple humorous moments and is hopefully a great educational effort by young Disney animators who will soon move up to second and maybe even first string on the Disney Team.
Sahara
(I) (1943)
A tightly plotted, simple, exciting and undervalued movie
3 January 2002
Coming across a small gem of a movie that you had heard almost nothing of is like finding a tennis ball size gold nugget in the middle of the street: you want to jump up and down and tell everyone in the area about it. That was my feeling after seeing Sahara. This movie is a very simple, straight forward film throwing a disparate group of soldiers together in a fight for survival in harsh conditions against an overwhelming enemy army. And though they have many conflicts within their group and though they are vastly outnumbered, they emerge plausibly victorious. The plot is so simple and yet so strong, it has been used in many other movies, even a Western (Last of the Cammanches). As usual with Warner Brothers films of the early forties, this one is packed with al the good solid Warner character actors and supporting leads you'd expect.
If you are mining for rare movie gems, consider digging this one up.
If you are mining for rare movie gems, consider digging this one up.
Tell Your Friends