Pepsi Refresh Project from marlowe fawcett on Vimeo.

Here’s an excerpt from the TLS article:

From the US-Mexican border (El Mariachi) and Mexico City (Amores Perros, Y Tu Mama Tambien), to Brazil (Central Station) and Argentina (Nine Queens), Latin American cinema is resurgent. Perhaps we have television to thank for this; during the 1980s, television colonized South America as it had the US in the 1950s and Europe in the 60s. The latest film-maker to graduate from the small screen is Fernando Meirelles, and his film, City of God, is possibly the best Brazilian movie of the past ten years. Walter Salles, director of Central Station (1998), is one of the film’s producers, and his own brand of social realism is everywhere apparent in City of God; but where Salles used his camera as a passive observer, with an almost patrician detachment, Meirelles turns his into a character. The camera and crew, though off-screen, are ever present. Awareness of the camera lends the film a documentary feel and gives it its dynamism and pull.

Based on Paolo Lins’s book of the same name, City of God charts the rise of drug gangs in Rio de Janeiro’s infamous favelas, from the early 1960s to the late 70s. Salles believes that “Brazilian reality has surpassed the majority of attempts to portray it in fiction”, and that “the acceleration of social decomposition has transformed violence into a banality”. But Meirelles, undaunted, has found a way of presenting that reality on film. With co-director, Katia Lund, and Guti Fraga, who founded and runs an acting and theatre school in the hillside favela of Vidigal, he set up a studio at Rio’s Fundicao Progresso to find and train children for the hundred or so roles needed for the film, and named the group, “We From the Movies”, in homage to Fraga’s school, “We From the Hillside”. But, as in Lins’s book, the film’s main character is not a person but a place -one of Rio’s worst favelas, the City of God. The film was shot on location and uses only natural lighting. The actors are mainly non-professional kids from the favelas. The script was used only to guide, not dictate, the dialogue. As a result, the audience is deeply involved in the story: we are participating witnesses to the descent into violence and anarchy.

And you can read the whole article here.

The Other Half – 90min Feature Film from marlowe fawcett on Vimeo.

Michael Moore’s first film, Roger & Me (1989), was a documentary pursuit of Roger Smith, chief executive of General Motors at a time when GM was North America’s largest car manufacturer. In it, Moore chased Smith across the North-Eastern United States, trying in vain to persuade him to visit Flint, Michigan, Moore’s hometown, to apologize to its citizens for having transferred GM’s factories from Flint to Mexico. The attempt was unsuccessful. But Moore’s style -the baseball cap, stubble and slouch, his ill- fitting jeans and hobbled gait -became something for left-wingers to cheer, right-wingers to bemoan. His new film, Bowling for Columbine, is about guns, and has grossed more than $10 million -a lot for a documentary. Has that success anything to do with the fact that the film was released the day the Washington Beltway sniper claimed his eighth victim? The criticism directed at both the film and the author suggests not. Bowling for Columbine was first shown at Cannes, where it won a prize. In the United States, its reception has been mixed: Moore has been described as “dangerous”, “irresponsible” and a “schlub”. Oprah, on the other hand, called Columbine a “must see”.

And here’s the full article.

Movie Poster for Bowling For Columbine

If Sundance has an aristocracy (go figure) then Parker Posey is the Queen of the festival. Sure, there are others, ingenues and waifs, divas and dames, but none commands the elements of raw emotion and sharp comedy in such achingly easy juxtaposition as Posey, and has done so time and time again at a festival that has come to define independent cinema in the US. In a year of few standouts (no “Little Miss Sunshine”, no “Hustle and Flow”) but plenty of seven figure acquisitions, Posey has once again gracefully entered the ballroom with her signature poise and class.

Read the whole article here.

Movie Poster for Broken English

Movie Poster for Fay Grim

I reviewed the film in September 2004 for the Times Literary Supplement. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Biopics are often unwieldy films, swinging from hyperbole to mawkishness and back.

The best ones tends to focus on a particular time in their famous subject’s life – a time that encapsulates both the mythology and the humanity of the person. Walter Salles’s new film The Motorcycle Diaries does this for Ernesto “Che” Guevara, taking its title from Guevara’s own travel memoir, and recreating his transformation from restless adventurer with vague notions of social justice to man of revolutionary conviction. In December 1951, two young Argentines, Alberto Granado and Ernesto Guevara Lynch -one a biochemist, the other a twenty-three-year-old medical student -set off on an eight-month journey across Latin America on a rickety 1939 Norton motorbike. The bike made it, just, across the Andes into Chile before quitting on them half way to Santiago. From there, the two men carried on via boat, plane, train, truck, and by foot, across Chile’s Atacama desert, over Peru’s snow-capped mountains to Cuzco and Machu Picchu, through Lima’s sprawl, and down the Amazon to Colombia, then Venezuela.

Salles is aware of the ecology of Guevara’s journey: that the territory through which the young men travel defines their drama as much as Guevara’s testimony.

You can read the full article here.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

TWO films, both deserving of popular and critical acclaim, stood out at the Telluride film festival earlier this month. “Reconstruction”, which had earlier won a Camera d’Or at Cannes, is a stylish and contemporary exploration of love and trust. Alex (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) and Aimee (Maria Bonnevie), both entertaining doubts about their respective partners, meet for a night of passion. Upon waking, Alex’s world has shifted subtly, yet with menace. The door to his flat is gone; his girlfriend Simone, his father and his friends claim not to know him. Only Aimee remains the same, and Alex must decide what is real. That Aimee and Simone are played by the same actress hints at his dilemma.

Christoffer Boe, the director, co-wrote the script with Mogens Rukov, his former teacher at that hotbed of contemporary Danish cinema, the National Film School of Denmark. But this is no Dogma film. Echoes of an Elizabethan fascination with the illusory lurk beneath the surface as David, Aimee’s novelist husband, Prospero-like, writes Alex’s and Aimee’s story as it happens. Mr Boe cites Raymond Queneau’s “Exercises in Style” as inspiration, so it is no surprise that the film has turned out to be a cool looping pastiche of cinematographic style that just manages to hold its disparate parts together.

And you can read the full article here.

Movie Poster for "My Life Without Me"

Movie Poster for "Reconstruction"

IT’S probably not what you expected, but three new films—two Danish, one American—show beyond doubt that Dogma 95, the austere production manifesto that emanated from Copenhagen, is still inspiring fresh, arresting work eight years on. “Open Hearts”, the latest film to be made under Dogma 95’s vow of chastity—no artificial lighting, no make-up, no added music, no genre stories—carries its credentials well. Directed by Susanne Bier (openly credited though the rules disallow it), the film is a fine example of where the manifesto works, and where it is best to junk it.

The plot is somewhat surreal (Mike Leigh meets Pedro Almodóvar). Cecilie and Niels fall in love after Niels’s wife runs over Cecilie’s fiancé with her car. But the closeness that the Dogma style allows between the actors and the audience maintains the emotion of a moving and poignant love story. The actors, freed from the dictates of lighting, circle and confront one another with the electricity of a documentary. Mads Mikkelsen is outstanding as the confused, reticent Niels.

Like Mark Twain with the truth, Ms Bier sticks to the rules but stretches them a little. We hear Cecilie’s Walkman as clearly as if we wore the headphones ourselves, while a greying of the film’s tone and a whirring sound reminiscent of Super-8 (though the film was shot in digital) reveal the character’s internal thoughts: for example, Cecilie imagining her fiancé, in reality paralysed from the neck down, reaching out to touch her face. The result is a string of moments forming a sharply drawn narrative arc that remains true to the spirit of Dogma, even as it indicates where to cross some of the manifesto’s boundaries.

For the whole article click here.

Movie Poster for "Open Hearts"

Movie Poster for "Pieces of April"

Movie Poster for "It's All About Love"

Here’s an excerpt from the piece:

THE golden age of Mexican cinema, through the 1940s and 1950s, established an aesthetic that was as varied as it was distinctly Mexican. Emilio “El Indio” Fernandez, Alejandro Galindo and Gabriel Figueroa are some of the great names of the era. Three new movies from Mexico, “De La Calle” (Streeters), “Amores Perros” (Love’s a Bitch) and “Y Tu Mama Tambien” (And Your Mama Too), draw on this heritage and redefine it. Part of Mexico’s recent cinematic renaissance, these films embrace experimentation without leaving viewers behind. All three are humanist in outlook and use contemporary Mexico as both a psychological and a physical backdrop for their stories.

In “De La Calle” Gerardo Tort tells the story of two teenagers living on the streets of Mexico city. Using a film-developing process known as silver-retain, which heightens the contrast between light and dark, he creates a world in which the lines between objects are blurred. Daylight is harsh and bleached, so that the brightness of a butcher’s apron stands out against the viscera on his chopping block, while the butcher himself blends into the white-tiled wall. Stealing a ride on a ferris wheel, the two kids talk of escaping from the streets, their forms silhouetted against the electric blue of a pre-dawn sky. This is a kind of realism, albeit one that has more to do with the way Mr Tort captures the essence of a moment or an experience than with his presentation of the visible world. But as such it is an effective way to evoke the harshness of the streets.

“Amores Perros”, directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu, shares the richly textured feel of “De La Calle”. Handheld cameras and Steadicams bring us into its characters’ worlds. In one tense scene the camera pans quickly back and forth between two people, without cuts, focusing on their faces, effectively turning the viewer into a participant.

For the whole article click here.

Amores Perros film poster

ABOUT half way through “September Tapes”, a fictional documentary set in post-Taliban Afghanistan and one of the more interesting films screened at this month’s Sundance film festival, the protagonists get involved in a gun battle with Taliban fighters. No surprises here: as civilian westerners near the Pakistani border they are easy targets. What does come as a shock, though, is the unmistakable sound of live ammunition. To borrow Michael Herr’s words, the elephant is right there, sitting on your chest.

Part “Blair Witch Project”, part “Apocalypse Now”, “September Tapes” tells the story of three people searching for an elusive truth, in this case the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden in the middle of Afghanistan at war. George Calil makes a superb job of playing Don Larson, a gung-ho American journalist deeply affected by the September 11th terrorist attacks. Driven on by a hidden resolve, he drags his cameraman, Sonny, and their American-Afghan translator/guide, Wali (Wali Razaqi) deeper and deeper into the heart of the war between the Northern Alliance and the remnants of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Read the rest of the article here.

Trailer for September Tapes