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review to come

Alright, I'm feeling a bit overloaded....

The trimester is about to end in two(?) weeks....I have a documentary to shoot (on Go-Go Boots, no less!)...an acting project to shoot...and personal projects to get together...

Of course, there are the various....uh....things in 'life' I have to take care of....(juggling work and school, finances, etc...)

Still, I feel things are going well....(I JUST NEED A REST!!!!):D

Directors I could emulate?

*Jean-Pierre Jeunet
*Spike Lee
*Peter Jackson
*Kasi Lemmons
*Alex Proyas
*Alfred Hitchcock
*Akira Kurosawa
*Masahiro Shinoda

I want to focus on one or two, and do a study of that individual....sort of like Francois Traffaut and Alfred Hitchcock....

I remember a little goal I had to meet director Masahiro Shinoda and his wife, Shima Iwashita...

(*** 1/2)

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind - George Clooney's first film as a director ahocked the hell out of me with how wonderfully funny, violent and witty it really was. I hadn't expected to like it as much as I did, but I'm sure much of the film's success has to do with the lovely script by Charlie Kaufman. It's a delight to watch, so see it. **** (out of ****) A

Damage - Louis Malle's Damage is one of the most perfect infidelity thrillers ever made. With fantastically realised characters and beautiful direction, Malle' film is a cut above the rest of them. The ending will stop your heart. **** (out of ****) A

Dead Again - Kenneth Branagh and I have never gotten along well enough for me to call the two of us "buds," but he does have some great talent in him. Dead Again, perhaps one of the strangest thrillers I've seen, is smart, acted with originality and care and wonderfully entertaining. I dug it. **** (out of ****) A

Eve's Bayou - Kasi Lemmons' Eve's Bayou is one of the most beautiful film's I've ever seen. The performances are powerful and the script gloriously well-written. See it if you haven't. **** (out of ****) A+

Exotica - Atom Egoyan's films have always bitten me right in the heart. He grabs said part of your insides and tugs at it until your eyes start bleeding and you can't help but be stunned and amazed at what he has created. Exotica is what Showgirls could've been if it didn't suck. It's a great, touching and very well-made film. **** (out of ****) A+

I need to get this DVD I can't find it anywhere! I enjoyed this movie so much back when I first saw it as a child. This movie goes on the list of the very underrated and overlooked. Journey Smolett stole the movie she should have gotten some sort of notice or nomination even if the movie didn't.

Voodoo and Skanks

While the film takes a very firm stance that the Sight is real, I think it is voodoo-neutral. Are the occurrences in the movie which are blamed on voodoo really its result? Possibly. However, they could well be self-fulfilling prophecies. We see a chain of events set into motion late in the film which leads to the climax, and to me, it seems sufficient. There's a combination of jealousy and booze, which is never a good mix, and events unfold in a way that they unfold all over the world all the time. Now, maybe the voodoo had someone drink just a little more over their limit. Maybe it gave one person just a hint more bravado, one just a hint more foolishness. However, that would be all it would take, and the film does not really insist that even that happened. It is also quite firm on the point that you cannot see into a person's true past if they themselves do not know it.

Eve Batiste (Jurnee Smollett) is the descendant of a slave and her master. The Sight is said to run in the family. Her aunt, Mozelle (Debbi Morgan), has it--and three husbands dead under unpleasant circumstances. Her father, Louis (Samuel L. Jackson), does not, but he doesn't seem to lack much from it. He is a charming, handsome, intelligent man, a doctor married to the most beautiful woman in town, Roz (Lynn Whitfield), whom he brought home with him to be his wife and raise Eve and her siblings, Poe (Jake Smollett, Jurnee's real-life brother) and Cisely (Meagan Good). The problem is that Louis has a bit of a wandering eye. And wandering hands. And wandering other bits. At the beginning of the film, Eve sees him with a woman who is not her mother, and it is this which spurs on much of the film. There is also the question of just how fatherly his relationship with Ciesely is.

I have never been in Louisiana in the summer, but it is movies like this which tell me what it must feel like. Everything in the movie implies heat, sweat, laziness, and everything that comes with it. There are probably lots of mosquitos; it's a swamp, after all. The bayou of the title. The place is stiff with history. Eve is drowning in her ancestry, the story of the woman for whom she was named is something in her bones. Elzora (Diahann Carroll), the old voodoo woman, refers at one point to the place where all the Batistes are buried, and she is constantly, I think, reminded of them. It's certainly not as though she ever sees anyone from her other heritage; I don't remember seeing a single white person through the entire movie.

Mostly, in fact, what this movie has is atmosphere. The story only gets really striking in the last third or so. It's hardly as though the story of a philanderer is all that unusual. It's a little more interesting to see it from a different perspective, the confused child instead of the long-suffering wife. Still, what sets this movie apart is its visuals. The flashbacks are clear--we actually see the death of one of Mozelle's husbands, acted out there for us in the living room. The images seen with the Sight are not so clear, fractured negatives searing across the Seer's mind. There are also the fairly subtle--and sometimes not-so-subtle--hints that the Batistes are a little higher-class than their neighbours. They always wear nice clothes, they put on a nice party at the beginning, and, as Roz points out, they can afford to live in a house with four bathrooms. This makes the imagery from outside the family all the more powerful.

Eve tells us at the beginning that she was ten the summer she killed her father. I think she will spend the rest of her life thinking that's how it happened. I think she was raised in such a way that she cannot see what happened any other way. On the other hand, I don't really see it that way myself. It's another one of those movies where, had half the cast acted other than how they did, the movie would have been much shorter. However, in the end, I absolve voodoo for the death. (They give that bit away in the trailer, following Hollywood's code that it's not all that important to keep plot twists from the audience. And then people blame critics for giving them away.) In its place, let us blame short-sightedness, a feeling of invulnerability, and arrogance. Let us blame infidelity first and foremost. It's what really sets us on the path, after all.