Filmwell Icons: #2. Samantha
Samantha (Cécile De France) is a hairdresser; she works with her hands, and she knows the art of gentleness. Hairdressers also tend to become listeners… even counselors and confessors. All of these skills will come into play as she finds herself seized by a broken-hearted boy. The central character of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s film The Kid with a Bike is Cyril, a child who has lost his mother and been abandoned by his father. For some reason, he takes hold of Samantha as if he is drowning and she is his life preserver. She has no obligation to help him. And if she does, she is likely to break her boyfriend’s fragile patience. But she does respond, at great cost to herself, becoming the boy’s sole evidence for grace and hope in a world full of dangers and betrayals. Her grace is so bold that some film critics found her to be unbelievable, impossible. What a sad state of affairs, that such love should be hard to believe in.
Read MoreThou Shalt Have No Other God But Captain America’s
Or at least, I think that is what he may say if pushed. We don’t quite have the opportunity to press Captain America on his theological background, given that reference to divinity in The Avengers is pretty spare. (This is okay. The primary purpose of the film is to be awesome, and it certainly accomplishes that.) But even if spare, the few references to divinity and godhood in the film crackle with an interesting spark. In the first set of... Read More
They Who See God’s Hand: The Tree of Life as an “Upbuilding Discourse”
[Ed. note: A very, very welcome guest post from Nicholas Olson] The very moment everything was taken away from Job, he knew it was the Lord who’d taken it away. He turned from the passing shows of time. He sought that which is eternal. Does he alone see God’s hand who sees that He gives? Or does not also the one see God’s hand who sees that He takes away? Or does he alone see God who sees God turn His face towards him? Does not also he see God... Read More
Filmwell’s Book of Filmmaker Wisdom, Excerpt 13: Robert Altman
On directing actors: “I want to see them do the work. All I’m trying to do is make it easy on the actor, because once you start to shoot, the actor is the artist. I don’t say, ‘Here’s the way I want it done,’ because I want to see something I’ve never seen before. How can I say what that is? I’ve got to let them know that if they stretch and they do something that’s bad, I’m not even going to show it in dailies. The... Read More
The Avengers (Whedon, 2012)
Caution: The following review was written by a moviegoer who has been suffering from superhero-movie fatigue since X-Men 3 back in 2006. You have been warned. Don’t worry — I get it. My review of The Avengers won’t make a dollar’s difference in the box office results. The best stunt you’ll see now that the film has opened is its rocket-blast rush toward breaking all records and busting all blocks. It’s faster than Iron Man... Read More
Last Fast Ride: The Life, Love, and Death of a Punk Goddess (Ayers, 2011)
Since becoming a parent, I’ve become acutely aware of movies that deal with the impact that parents, and particularly fathers, have on their children’s lives, for better or worse. Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s Still Walking fascinated me so because of that theme. Malick’s The Tree of Life left me shaking and undone because of it. It explains why, as much as I want to see The Dardennes’ The Kid with a Bike, I’m not sure... Read More
Taylor-Made: Why You’re Missing Out If You Don’t Go See Blue Like Jazz
Blue Like Jazz, the new film by director Steve Taylor, is based on Donald Miller’s New York Times-bestselling memoir. It’s the biggest filmmaking success story in the history of the Kickstarter program, earning $345,000 in donations to help cover its costs. Were their investments rewarded? If you skim through the reviews, you might be inclined to say, “Apparently not.” But I think reviewers are responding with some knee-jerk judgments and... Read More
Guest Contributor Stephen Lamb: A Short Defense of Melancholia and “Images from a Closed Ward”
[This post comes to us from guest writer Stephen Lamb.] At the premier last Friday of Michael Hersch’s “Images from a Closed Ward,” performed by Nashville’s Blair String Quartet, the program notes included some thoughts from Michael Mazur, the artist whose etchings bearing the same name had inspired the new work. “These compositions are filled sometimes with frightening sounds,” Mazur wrote for the liner notes of the first recordings... Read More
A Monster in Paris (Bergeron, 2012)
A Monster in Paris is a film meticulously designed for international success. The poster might as well be advertising another Dreamworks movie: bright, angular, with the usual satisfied smirks — it even proudly proclaims “from the director of Shark Tale.” The film is actually from the French production company Europa, but you’d hardly know it. There’s little evidence of Monster‘s French origins onscreen. The animation... Read More
The Absent Clue: Summary and Expectations
Before continuing with my exploration of detective film (leaving, at last, Sherlock Holmes and moving on to more contemporaneous examples), I want to take a moment and re-iterate something that has been implicit in my posts here, but which might get lost in the shuffle when we narrow our focus to individual films. This post, then, is meant to tie together some general themes that are (I think) evident in the movies I’ve discussed so far; hopefully,... Read More