What is all the rage in reviewer land is this film, the Great Debaters, made by Denzel Washington, taken from real life of such notables as james Farmer, that has as its subject a small little known black college in southern U.S.A .that produced debaters on a national debate team par excellant. They went on to compete against the great Harvard University and they won!
It is not the success of these men and woman to rise to the top in an often considered "white realm" of intellectual acumen but that the reviewers are mixed in their applause for this film
Reviewing films is not just a simple act of providing the advertising arm for a multi million dollar industry. it is also the art of informing others of what you see and what you think. And this act of written disclosure is best done with a large dose of personal tidbits about the reviewer so that the reader might judge not just what is said but who is saying what about the film reviewed.
And for whatever reason, this film, the Great Debaters , has elicited a great debate.
Not of overwhelming, earth shattering proportion but a debate that focuses on the reason the film was made, the message the film strives to convey and the right of someone so well known as Denzel Washington to engage in this seemingly simple film about people who might not have mattered at all in the course of american history had it not been for this debating team rising to levels of achievement rarely dreamed of, and certainly not embraced as possible by the participants.
Join the fight. Join the controversy. Join the reviewers debate on whether or not this is a good film, a great film, a film that can and should be recommended by reviewers, family members and all who care about what makes
america potentiously a country where excellence triumph over roots.
Need i say more?
Linda Z
WBAI Women's Collective
Active member
WFCC
AGORA: Dragged from her chariot by a mob of fanatical vigilante Christian monks, the revered astronomer was stripped naked, skinned to her bones with sharp oyster shells, stoned and burned alive as possibly the first executed witch in history. A kind of purge that was apparently big business back then.
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12/14/07
Life Support: Another View
By Nancy Keefe Rhodes
Life Support
Director: Nelson George
Cast: Queen Latifah, Wendell Pierce, Anna Deavere Smith
"I saw that," said one of my friend's daughters almost at once, pausing to smile broadly and nod her head. "It was good!"
A couple Saturday nights before Thanksgiving in a bustling kitchen with the TV on, three grown daughters home at once and reminiscing, a new baby girl, plus a 17-month-old grandson already well in touch with his charisma, and in the midst of this – as I'm telling my friend about Queen Latifah starring in Nelson George's Life Support, about a women's HIV support group in Brooklyn – that daughter looks up quickly, remembering this film from its HBO broadcast way back in early March. Then Life Support came out quietly on DVD in early August – never hitting the Syracuse racks – but now it's getting a second look as year-end awards season and World AIDS Day programs overlap. And my God-daughter's right: it's good.
For the first time in a decade, despite the World Health Organization's recent correction downward of its global estimates of HIV/AIDS numbers, new infections in the US are rising –some 40,000 annually. Among those most at risk are women of color. Of all New York City boroughs, vast Brooklyn, inscrutable to many upstaters – where Life Support occurs – has the highest incidence of HIV infections. But the very complex, human emotions and dilemmas in this film do such an end-run around our denial that chances are you'll be too engaged to object that it can't happen here.
Life Support is based on the actual agency Life Force, a Brooklyn project that provides HIV testing, education and peer support groups. Some paid staff are HIV+ themselves and also support group participants, such as director George's sister, Andrea Williams, upon whom Ana Wallace (Queen Latifah) is based.
A former addict, Ana has been clean for a decade. Besides her passionate involvement in HIV advocacy, she's blossomed as a model mom to pre-teen daughter Kim (Rayelle Parker). Elder daughter Kelly (Rachel Nicks), a high school basketball star raised by her grandmother Lucille (Anna Deavere Smith), still recalls harsher days and struggles – as really everyone in this film does – with what Nelson George calls "the difficulty of forgiveness." She also still resents Ana's husband Slick (Wendell Pierce, Det. Bunk Moreland in HBO's The Wire), whose own addiction led to Ana's infection. That this marriage is solid again owes much to Slick's steadiness and compassion.
The side-plot driving the crisis is Kelly's dilemma over how to best assist her childhood friend Amare (Evan Ross) – himself addicted, quite ill with AIDS, and missing on the streets after a blow-up with his older, closeted boyfriend. Amare's sister Tanya (Tracee Ellis Ross, his real sister – both have inherited mother Diana's looks and magnetism), tangles with Ana as Ana searches for Amare.
Nelson George, besides directing excellent performances from this cast, also wrote the film. He uses periodic support group sessions to structure advances in the plot. Ana reports upon developments, sharing the evolution of her feelings, perspective and ability to cope. Much as such groups do in real life, this device both allows for and contains emotional meltdowns in a safe place. After each such scene, Ana goes forth again to her life, embodying the axiom of incremental "progress, not perfection."
The support group on-screen and the real one at Life Force are the same, with Andrea Williams appearing on-screen as an unnamed group member. We learn this as the film concludes and final credits roll, including an affecting montage of individual Life Force women who turn their open, level gazes directly into the camera with a subtle but startling effect of leaping through the screen into the room with us, momentarily dissolving that membrane between fiction and the lives it mirrors. But this merely culminates what the film's been doing all along.
Most movie versions of therapy and support groups veer from naïve to preachy to satiric, but George clearly paid attention when he followed his sister around pre-production. Besides embracing Ana, these non-"actorly" women function as witnesses and chorus for the film's entire project, and evoke a kind of ratifying call and response between Latifah's performance and their congregation-like circle. That Nelson George wisely dramatizes his sister's story instead of presenting it straight as documentary biography adds resonance and power; we actively imagine along with the filmmaker rather than simply spectate. The DVD extras deepen this in various ways. Besides some unusually accessible interviews, in one sequence George points at a large street map of Brooklyn's neighborhoods on his office wall and then visits a string of named filming locations, telescoping and animating that map's world – with great economy, suddenly Brooklyn seems neither so vast nor so inscrutable.
At this stage, the name selling Life Support on the DVD cover is Latifah's. Life-long Brooklyn resident Nelson George has not yet made many films. But he's had years of TV and music producing, plus writing some of the most astute, compulsively readable commentary on arts and culture around – besides his columns and novels, fifteen books ranging from Motown to Hip-Hop to basketball to film. I put his Blackface: Reflections on African Americans and the Movies (1994, revised 2002) in the Genuine Find category. There, he maintains that Black women's stories and novels are the "mother lode" future of Black cinema. With Life Support, he walks the talk. And he's good.
*******
This review appears in the 11/29/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where "Make it Snappy" is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that didn't open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth. This film is available to rent locally at Emerald City Video, 3208 Erie Blvd. West.
--
Posted By Nancy Keefe Rhodes to Movie Cross Rhodes at 11/27/2007
--
Nancy Keefe Rhodes
www.MovieCrossRhodes.blogspot.com
Covering film, photo & visual arts.
"A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species homo sapiens - second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter." - Reynolds Price
"A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species homo sapiens - second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter." - Reynolds Price
Life Support
Director: Nelson George
Cast: Queen Latifah, Wendell Pierce, Anna Deavere Smith
"I saw that," said one of my friend's daughters almost at once, pausing to smile broadly and nod her head. "It was good!"
A couple Saturday nights before Thanksgiving in a bustling kitchen with the TV on, three grown daughters home at once and reminiscing, a new baby girl, plus a 17-month-old grandson already well in touch with his charisma, and in the midst of this – as I'm telling my friend about Queen Latifah starring in Nelson George's Life Support, about a women's HIV support group in Brooklyn – that daughter looks up quickly, remembering this film from its HBO broadcast way back in early March. Then Life Support came out quietly on DVD in early August – never hitting the Syracuse racks – but now it's getting a second look as year-end awards season and World AIDS Day programs overlap. And my God-daughter's right: it's good.
For the first time in a decade, despite the World Health Organization's recent correction downward of its global estimates of HIV/AIDS numbers, new infections in the US are rising –some 40,000 annually. Among those most at risk are women of color. Of all New York City boroughs, vast Brooklyn, inscrutable to many upstaters – where Life Support occurs – has the highest incidence of HIV infections. But the very complex, human emotions and dilemmas in this film do such an end-run around our denial that chances are you'll be too engaged to object that it can't happen here.
Life Support is based on the actual agency Life Force, a Brooklyn project that provides HIV testing, education and peer support groups. Some paid staff are HIV+ themselves and also support group participants, such as director George's sister, Andrea Williams, upon whom Ana Wallace (Queen Latifah) is based.
A former addict, Ana has been clean for a decade. Besides her passionate involvement in HIV advocacy, she's blossomed as a model mom to pre-teen daughter Kim (Rayelle Parker). Elder daughter Kelly (Rachel Nicks), a high school basketball star raised by her grandmother Lucille (Anna Deavere Smith), still recalls harsher days and struggles – as really everyone in this film does – with what Nelson George calls "the difficulty of forgiveness." She also still resents Ana's husband Slick (Wendell Pierce, Det. Bunk Moreland in HBO's The Wire), whose own addiction led to Ana's infection. That this marriage is solid again owes much to Slick's steadiness and compassion.
The side-plot driving the crisis is Kelly's dilemma over how to best assist her childhood friend Amare (Evan Ross) – himself addicted, quite ill with AIDS, and missing on the streets after a blow-up with his older, closeted boyfriend. Amare's sister Tanya (Tracee Ellis Ross, his real sister – both have inherited mother Diana's looks and magnetism), tangles with Ana as Ana searches for Amare.
Nelson George, besides directing excellent performances from this cast, also wrote the film. He uses periodic support group sessions to structure advances in the plot. Ana reports upon developments, sharing the evolution of her feelings, perspective and ability to cope. Much as such groups do in real life, this device both allows for and contains emotional meltdowns in a safe place. After each such scene, Ana goes forth again to her life, embodying the axiom of incremental "progress, not perfection."
The support group on-screen and the real one at Life Force are the same, with Andrea Williams appearing on-screen as an unnamed group member. We learn this as the film concludes and final credits roll, including an affecting montage of individual Life Force women who turn their open, level gazes directly into the camera with a subtle but startling effect of leaping through the screen into the room with us, momentarily dissolving that membrane between fiction and the lives it mirrors. But this merely culminates what the film's been doing all along.
Most movie versions of therapy and support groups veer from naïve to preachy to satiric, but George clearly paid attention when he followed his sister around pre-production. Besides embracing Ana, these non-"actorly" women function as witnesses and chorus for the film's entire project, and evoke a kind of ratifying call and response between Latifah's performance and their congregation-like circle. That Nelson George wisely dramatizes his sister's story instead of presenting it straight as documentary biography adds resonance and power; we actively imagine along with the filmmaker rather than simply spectate. The DVD extras deepen this in various ways. Besides some unusually accessible interviews, in one sequence George points at a large street map of Brooklyn's neighborhoods on his office wall and then visits a string of named filming locations, telescoping and animating that map's world – with great economy, suddenly Brooklyn seems neither so vast nor so inscrutable.
At this stage, the name selling Life Support on the DVD cover is Latifah's. Life-long Brooklyn resident Nelson George has not yet made many films. But he's had years of TV and music producing, plus writing some of the most astute, compulsively readable commentary on arts and culture around – besides his columns and novels, fifteen books ranging from Motown to Hip-Hop to basketball to film. I put his Blackface: Reflections on African Americans and the Movies (1994, revised 2002) in the Genuine Find category. There, he maintains that Black women's stories and novels are the "mother lode" future of Black cinema. With Life Support, he walks the talk. And he's good.
*******
This review appears in the 11/29/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where "Make it Snappy" is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that didn't open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth. This film is available to rent locally at Emerald City Video, 3208 Erie Blvd. West.
--
Posted By Nancy Keefe Rhodes to Movie Cross Rhodes at 11/27/2007
--
Nancy Keefe Rhodes
www.MovieCrossRhodes.blogspot.com
Covering film, photo & visual arts.
"A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species homo sapiens - second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter." - Reynolds Price
"A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species homo sapiens - second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter." - Reynolds Price
12/11/07
Silent Light: The work of a genius
SILENT LIGHT
: Carlos Reygadas
PLOT SUMMARY: Into a long forgotten way of Mexican life, the Mennonite northern Mexico self contained community, there appear many signs of change: environmental and in the community's way of life.
Can Light be Silent?
CAST: Mennonite non-actors
FILM COMMENTARY
This is a masterpiece film filled with intense scenes of engaging natural events. the sunset, the watering hole. At the beginning of the film one wonders if the four very young children sitting silently at the breakfast table, their eyes closed as they await their father's pronouncement of Amen, are real or Mannequins. They seem so quiet, so emotionally disconnected. They seem clothed in a wealth of tradition that informs on every action and interaction to the detriment of outward expression of inner feelings.
Until the moment when....the family's Patriarchal head, the father is left alone in the kitchen while his wife and children go off to start their day.
He stands up and adjusts something on the wall. At this point we see only his lower torso. We do not know that what he has adjusted as he stands on the kitchen chair is the ticking clock above the door.
This film is about time and change. We see the ravages of this change after breakfast as the father sits alone, and is silent. There is a seemingly interminable series of moments as he sits and says nothing and we go from looking at him, to looking at the white stove that shares equal visual stage with the blue shirted father. This is an example of how the film maker is thinking about the viewer, not about how technically correct the picture frame is but how he can convey with no words the theme of the film, As the father sits and thinks, so must we.
At this point we know we are seeing the genius of a true craftsman. Because the human eye can not stay away from the stove.
As much as i wanted to look to the man, to see with eager anticipation what he is doing or about to do, my eye and mind seemed to function with rules of their own.
My conscious mind losses the battle.
I kept going back to the white stove. I counted the handles on the stove, the burners. I absorbed the green tea kettle on the stove and envisioned the food baking or being broiled.. This is a stove i know well, very well even though there is nothing else about this man or his life or his family that is familiar.
And that is the magnificent beauty of Silent Light. The old, the traditional shattered by the new:, The comparatively small tea kettle on a relatively modern stove in an old fashioned kitchen/farm house. . The dirt roads now paved with asphalt, maxi trucks pass by, the tractor to turn the field and the cows milked not by hand but by machines.
Silent Light is a tragedy, propelled by the ravishes of time that we can't "turn back" It is driven by the father's passion, his love, his need for love embodied in a woman who is not his "good" wife.
Although he knows his inability to desist from seeing the "other woman"; will shatter the life he leads as it does his children's he can not stop seeing her.
His battle is not with God but with time and time wins out.
While his wife has that intimacy of maternal love to satisfy her emotional strivings he desperately needs a woman to quench his human appetite.
In every scene and every moment of this film we are met with the old and the new and in the end, the pain of loss is so palpable that I cried and I didn't stop crying until the lights came on and i was standing outside trying to remember my next appointment, my next activity in my all too busy life.
RECOMMENDATION
See it! It isn't in the theaters but try to get a DVD. It will be well worth your effort.
LindaZ
: Carlos Reygadas
PLOT SUMMARY: Into a long forgotten way of Mexican life, the Mennonite northern Mexico self contained community, there appear many signs of change: environmental and in the community's way of life.
Can Light be Silent?
CAST: Mennonite non-actors
FILM COMMENTARY
This is a masterpiece film filled with intense scenes of engaging natural events. the sunset, the watering hole. At the beginning of the film one wonders if the four very young children sitting silently at the breakfast table, their eyes closed as they await their father's pronouncement of Amen, are real or Mannequins. They seem so quiet, so emotionally disconnected. They seem clothed in a wealth of tradition that informs on every action and interaction to the detriment of outward expression of inner feelings.
Until the moment when....the family's Patriarchal head, the father is left alone in the kitchen while his wife and children go off to start their day.
He stands up and adjusts something on the wall. At this point we see only his lower torso. We do not know that what he has adjusted as he stands on the kitchen chair is the ticking clock above the door.
This film is about time and change. We see the ravages of this change after breakfast as the father sits alone, and is silent. There is a seemingly interminable series of moments as he sits and says nothing and we go from looking at him, to looking at the white stove that shares equal visual stage with the blue shirted father. This is an example of how the film maker is thinking about the viewer, not about how technically correct the picture frame is but how he can convey with no words the theme of the film, As the father sits and thinks, so must we.
At this point we know we are seeing the genius of a true craftsman. Because the human eye can not stay away from the stove.
As much as i wanted to look to the man, to see with eager anticipation what he is doing or about to do, my eye and mind seemed to function with rules of their own.
My conscious mind losses the battle.
I kept going back to the white stove. I counted the handles on the stove, the burners. I absorbed the green tea kettle on the stove and envisioned the food baking or being broiled.. This is a stove i know well, very well even though there is nothing else about this man or his life or his family that is familiar.
And that is the magnificent beauty of Silent Light. The old, the traditional shattered by the new:, The comparatively small tea kettle on a relatively modern stove in an old fashioned kitchen/farm house. . The dirt roads now paved with asphalt, maxi trucks pass by, the tractor to turn the field and the cows milked not by hand but by machines.
Silent Light is a tragedy, propelled by the ravishes of time that we can't "turn back" It is driven by the father's passion, his love, his need for love embodied in a woman who is not his "good" wife.
Although he knows his inability to desist from seeing the "other woman"; will shatter the life he leads as it does his children's he can not stop seeing her.
His battle is not with God but with time and time wins out.
While his wife has that intimacy of maternal love to satisfy her emotional strivings he desperately needs a woman to quench his human appetite.
In every scene and every moment of this film we are met with the old and the new and in the end, the pain of loss is so palpable that I cried and I didn't stop crying until the lights came on and i was standing outside trying to remember my next appointment, my next activity in my all too busy life.
RECOMMENDATION
See it! It isn't in the theaters but try to get a DVD. It will be well worth your effort.
LindaZ
12/5/07
CANVAS
Canvas
written and directed by
Joseph Greco
What a great example of why critical women is such an important blog.
Canvas is a feel good film about a woman( Marcia Gay Harden) who becomes mentally ill and has to be hospitalized: her struggle to get well and how her family, husband (award winning actor Joe Pantoliano )and young son(Devon Gearhart) mobilize to help her while continuing to live their seemingly normal lives
This is a film in which the problem people, the objectionable people, the ones who cause such trouble in this world seem to be the woman. This family loves her, they wish her well, they wish she were more in this world than on display as the crazy woman but why? Why must the woman be the 'bad" guy.
It is a film about male bonding. about a son and his father getting on in this troubled environment. It is a film which never really addresses why the mother/wife/woman is ill, what they have done to contribute to her malady. She is just sick, like out of the clear blue sky she starts to hear voices and will go to seemingly any length to curtail the voices she hears that no one else can discern.
Oh my. And these voices are? And her illness can or can not be cured with medicine? or worse, therapy, talking, discovering who she is and what she is about is nonexistant. What happened to an idea that mental illness is more than just a chemical alteration. That it is a function of being human, of trying to fit into a world where the patient feels alienated, and/or threatened.
This film is an embarrassment for woman, for the mentally ill and yet, even I felt compelled to see it to the end, engrossed in its content. I cringed my way through the agony of the narrow mindedness but I didn't turn away from it. That is the point. I am so Hollywood trained that my ability to enjoy this film seems solid and yet the film is alien to all I know and want to see.
I do not recommend this film. It is too sever in its narrow depiction of women and the mentally ill. Perhaps it will be remade, same theme different focus. let's hope so
Linda Z
DVD 2006
written and directed by
Joseph Greco
What a great example of why critical women is such an important blog.
Canvas is a feel good film about a woman( Marcia Gay Harden) who becomes mentally ill and has to be hospitalized: her struggle to get well and how her family, husband (award winning actor Joe Pantoliano )and young son(Devon Gearhart) mobilize to help her while continuing to live their seemingly normal lives
This is a film in which the problem people, the objectionable people, the ones who cause such trouble in this world seem to be the woman. This family loves her, they wish her well, they wish she were more in this world than on display as the crazy woman but why? Why must the woman be the 'bad" guy.
It is a film about male bonding. about a son and his father getting on in this troubled environment. It is a film which never really addresses why the mother/wife/woman is ill, what they have done to contribute to her malady. She is just sick, like out of the clear blue sky she starts to hear voices and will go to seemingly any length to curtail the voices she hears that no one else can discern.
Oh my. And these voices are? And her illness can or can not be cured with medicine? or worse, therapy, talking, discovering who she is and what she is about is nonexistant. What happened to an idea that mental illness is more than just a chemical alteration. That it is a function of being human, of trying to fit into a world where the patient feels alienated, and/or threatened.
This film is an embarrassment for woman, for the mentally ill and yet, even I felt compelled to see it to the end, engrossed in its content. I cringed my way through the agony of the narrow mindedness but I didn't turn away from it. That is the point. I am so Hollywood trained that my ability to enjoy this film seems solid and yet the film is alien to all I know and want to see.
I do not recommend this film. It is too sever in its narrow depiction of women and the mentally ill. Perhaps it will be remade, same theme different focus. let's hope so
Linda Z
DVD 2006
12/3/07
Margot At the Wedding
Margot at the Wedding
Noah Baumbach
There was something so real about this film, something about the dialogue that made me feel like, yes, that could have been me, yes, I understand what they are saying and why and yet...................
I don't think i understood what this film is about. Something to do with relationships, with women, sisters, (Jennifer Jason Leigh and Nicole Kldman) and why women act the way they do and women's relationship to children and marriage and life and all of that good stuff which never is all that good.
and yet
Why are they the way they are. Where did these two sisters, now grown women come from and where are they going, if anywhere. I don't even know which sister is older and which is the younger one. Does that matter? I think so because it is indicative of how little background the film provides on the characters. Depth is not the strong point of this film.
But the dialogue was great. The characters interaction was well worth viewing. and Jack Black was just terrific. There seemed to be real chemistry between Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jack Black, the couple who were about to be married. i just wish i could have understood the plot, the subplot, the where and what for.
But maybe you will understand more than I did. Give it a try.
LindaZ
Scott Rudin Productions
Noah Baumbach
There was something so real about this film, something about the dialogue that made me feel like, yes, that could have been me, yes, I understand what they are saying and why and yet...................
I don't think i understood what this film is about. Something to do with relationships, with women, sisters, (Jennifer Jason Leigh and Nicole Kldman) and why women act the way they do and women's relationship to children and marriage and life and all of that good stuff which never is all that good.
and yet
Why are they the way they are. Where did these two sisters, now grown women come from and where are they going, if anywhere. I don't even know which sister is older and which is the younger one. Does that matter? I think so because it is indicative of how little background the film provides on the characters. Depth is not the strong point of this film.
But the dialogue was great. The characters interaction was well worth viewing. and Jack Black was just terrific. There seemed to be real chemistry between Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jack Black, the couple who were about to be married. i just wish i could have understood the plot, the subplot, the where and what for.
But maybe you will understand more than I did. Give it a try.
LindaZ
Scott Rudin Productions
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