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Reviews
Melancholia (2011)
Metaphors Galore in Melacholia
If you love parsing out metaphors in films, you'll love this one. Current cultural phenomena are reduced to the interactions of just a few people on an isolated estate, and the metaphors are interwoven, interconnected, apt and rich, which is why I enjoyed "Melancholia".
I also loved the 1951 film "When Worlds Collide". Compare that to "Melancholia" and you'll wonder at how the world has changed.
Compare it also to "The Road" which attempted a realistic vision of humanity faced with the end times but left room for hope.
Von Trier has no hope, but the audience craves it, which is why "Melancholia" will not be a popular success.
Catfish (2010)
What do Movies Do, Anyway?
Even if Ariel made a preproduction agreement with all the characters and made the whole thing up, the way the suspense was built and worked on my mind was worth the price of admission.
Anyone who "spotted this as a fake from the first" should be checked for lack of imagination and generosity of spirit. Give the filmmaker a chance to get you to suspend belief, and give him credit for what he accomplished.
If you have any experience on the internet, you run into people who have been sidetracked in life and seize the opportunity the technology provides to take the road they didn't travel, even if the experience is less than having actually traveled it. And on the other end, there are people who are open to a relationship that doesn't include physical proximity, but is purely of the mind. What would happen if these two have the opportunity to meet for real?
That's the question the movie proposes, and it provides it's own unique and quite plausible, and even gratifying answer.
The Help (2011)
Bring Your Hankie
Pure Spielberg, and that's not a bad thing. You couldn't have had better acting, except maybe Bryce Dallas Howard, who overdid it, or was directed to overdo it. I believe she was chosen for her resemblance to Michelle Bachman.
It is possible to be the villain without being so obviously a villain with no redeeming behavior, and have virtually every other character in the movie beat you like a pinata.
The people of the Southern US in those days didn't think anything was wrong. That is what was so seductive about that culture. Being spiteful and asserting your dominance was bad form, particularly if you were upper crust. Only the white trash abused the blacks (the movie does it the other way around).
Blacks and whites simply did things the way they had always been done and got along. Change was imposed from outside, if one remembers the events of the civil rights movement. People came to town and marched and sat where they weren't supposed to and said things polite southerners weren't supposed to say.
Our American movies from big studios seem to need to have un-ambiguous conflicts to be marketable. And, as our education system focuses more on marketable skills, we will probably get less subtle and sophisticated and truthful movies than even this one. This is, for example, no "Driving Miss Daisy".
The portrayal of Skeeter's mother is probably the closest in the movie to true southern behavior, except I believe it would have been totally unacceptable to throw your longtime maid out onto the street in her senescence.
A movie that gets to the heart of Southern society at that time would show how very few people tried to exceed society's expectations. The people who got out, seemed to have the best chance. And that, at the very end, is what the movie portrays.
The Door in the Floor (2004)
Exploitation Alert
This film is an example of the Hollywood business types directing a project. Here's the idea: a prime audience demographic is teen-aged boys, get their hard-earned summer job money in return for help with those self- stimulation sessions. Get their ticket money with: a character to identify with: Eddie; a really beautiful woman (Kim Basinger) who gets naked for Eddie and does him 60 times over a summer at the beach. Three other somewhat less pretty, but attractive nonetheless, women who throw themselves at him (Mimi Rogers--full nudity front and back--and Amanda Posner, and Bijou Phillips). No parental guidance here. The (unaccountably wealthy) adults are irresponsible playpeople. chchchchchchiiiiinnnnngggg!
La fille de Keltoum (2001)
The Story Is Perfect Even if the Details Aren't
BENT KELTOUM is movie storytelling at its most powerful. It overcame many flaws. There were unexplained irrational elements, the characters may not have spoken in regionally accurate dialect, and some of the violent and sexist action may have been overdone; however, the actors fully disappeared into their roles and relationships, and the plot moved forward blending incidents into a coherent and satisfying narrative. The characters Nejma and the Repudiated Woman were particularly interesting. The visuals authentically supported the narrative and illuminated the characters. Shooting this film on location can't have been easy, but the result is rewarding.