2009 off 2010 - 26 July

July 26, 2010The Maid (2009) *****Directed by Sebastian SilvaMy tweet:The Maid (2009)- Fascinating oddity. Rich character study based on how the judgments of the viewer can be so wrong. ***** out of 5 Other thoughts:Raquel the Maid is unlike any character I've seen in film, and credit for this ought to go in large part to Catalina Saavedra who gives an amazingly brave and nuanced performance. She's so troubled that any day, she could quite possibly go over the edge into complete insanity and hurt people she genuinely cares about. After years of living with and working for a well-meaning but emotionally distant family, Raquel begins to crumble und! er the physical and emotional pressures of her job. When one maid after another is hired to assist, Raquel passive-aggressively tortures each one since, in her mind, both her territory and her livelihood are threatened. Without this job, which is really her identity, Raquel would be lost. She eventually passes out, presumably due to years of inhaling chemicals from cleaning products, and a replacement named Pilar is hired much to Raquel's irritation. By the time Pilar enters the picture, the viewer has pretty much written off any chance that Raquel can get better. Most would probably assume that she needs hospitalization, or at the very least heavy medication and therapy; however, we learn that it doesn't take much at all for Raquel to truly come into her own, and Pilar is the right person at the right time to allow Raquel to see the fun that can be had. Silva's brilliant character study continuously surprises, and as such, it forces the viewer to question ! why certain erroneous assumptions are made about Raquel's infe! riority as a person. This is a wonderfully joyous movie, but at the same time, it's far from naive. There's no sweet, happily ever after ending--quite the opposite, in fact. The Maid shows life at its most damning, but in its own sly way, it suggests that we not give up on people as quickly as many of us are prone to do. Without a doubt, this is one of the strangest, most uncomfortable and wonderfully surprising movies I've seen.The Song of Sparrows (2009) **Directed by Majid MajidiMy tweet:The Song of Sparrows (2009)- Majidi's storytelling is naive and cheap. He's best with arresting visuals which are lacking here. ** out of 5Other thoughts:! If The Song of Sparrows was made by an American director, I doubt that it would have a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. This movie is shallow and manipulative, which comes as no surprise to me considering how much I truly despised Majidi's 1999 sapfest Children of Heaven. That film sentimentalizes poverty and relies on close-ups of crying faces of children in order to get audiences on board with the stakes at hand. I felt unclean after that movie was over, since I believe it was made for no other reason than to make European and American audiences feel all warm inside at the expense of the harsh realities within a country like Iran. Yes, there's a niche for sappy movies in the marketplace, but Majidi, who has notable skill as a visual filmmaker, clearly has the potential to challenge audiences, much like another Iranian director Abbas Kairostami, instead of pandering to the lowest common denominator. The Color of Paradise, also from! 1999, was a much better film than Children of Heaven, and its! opening sequence at the school for the blind is absolutely amazing. That film told the story of a blind boy who is experiencing a new environment through his other senses, and this allowed Majidi to present gorgeous visuals in the same vein of someone like Terrence Malick or Werner Herzog. Sadly, though, that film similarly got lost in the goo as the plot ultimately became about a father's true love for his son. The Song of Sparrows abandons the visual splendor of The Color of Paradise, though I admit I do love the scenes with the ostriches at the very beginning. Thankfully, this movie isn't quite as offensive as Children of Heaven considering that it doesn't spend the entire movie making us feel sorry for sad children--it only spends about half the film doing that. The other half has us journeying with a sad father, and while an adult in peril isn't as cheap as children in peril, the screenplay and the performances are still fundamentally lazy. Majidi offers an ex! tended sermon about how families should love each other, and as such, this whole story feels like one of Jesus' parables from the Gospels played out on screen. Therein of course lies two huge problems. First of all, this whole mess feels familiar, and second, Jesus was going for simplicity while also challenging his uneducated listeners. Majidi's got the simplicity down pat, but there's nothing surprising or challenging about his message. If this is your kind of thing, that's fine with me. I'll be sure to get you a subscription to Reader's Digest for Christmas.A Town Called Panic (2009) ****Directed by Stephane Aubier & Vincent Patar My tweet:A Town Called Panic (2009)- Plastic barnyard anim! als hold ing a mirror up to humanity's destruction. Hilarious yet brutally cynical. ****/5Other thoughts:It's always nice to know that there are people out there whose minds are as strange as mine, and thankfully, some of them make movies. A Town Called Panic is truly a one of a kind, and I hope more films like it come along. The whole thing plays out like an ADHD child's stream of consciousness play session right after eating copious amounts of sugar snacks. As such, one really should be in the right kind of mood to watch. It might just annoy the hell out of a viewer who is cranky or has a headache. Utilizing classic stop-motion animation and based on a French television series, the three main characters are a father (a plastic horse) and his two whiny sons (a toy Indian and a toy cowboy). At the beginning, the boys forget that it's horse's birthday, and they decide at the last minute to build him a brick barbecue, though they end up ordering over thirty million more bricks than the! y should have. This all leads to mayhem which pretty much destroys the entire town and has the characters chase after thieves all the way to the core of the Earth. The humor is absurd, but everything is completely family-friendly, which is quite an accomplishment. I think of a show I admire like Aqua Teen Hunger Force which has the same type of stream-of-consciousness structure, but that one makes little sense considering that it's marketed to viewers high on any number of substances. There's a place for a show like Family Guy which exists in a medium traditionally marketed to children and takes its off color humor as far as the FCC will allow. A Town Called Panic is totally strange, but it's not at all offensive, and I also believe that it has something to say about humanity's destruction of the environment, though it's possible to enjoy the movie without even acknowledging its cynicism. This is a little treat of a film that I implore you check out, but only when you're up! for it.
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