page index:
joeeux noël • northfork • touch the sound • the last atomic bomb • baraka • tibet: cry of the snow lion • kitchen stories • sir! no sir • waking life • monsieur ibrahim • vera drake • rivers and tides

December 2006

Joyeux Noël

PLOT SUMMARY:

Based on a true story, the film recreates one Christmas night during WWI when enemies were able to lay aside their differences, visit each others trenches and celebrate the holiday.

REVIEWERS' COMMENTS:

• "A poignant and rousing carol for peace." -Carrie Rickey, PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
• "Profound, beautifully made and deeply touching." -Rex Reed, NEW YORK OBSERVER
• "Unexpectedly moving." -Lawrence Toppman, CHARLOTTE OBSERVER

AWARDS, NOMINATIONS:

2006: Nominated for Oscar (Best Foreign Language Film-France) 2006: Nominated for BAFTA Film Award (Best Film not in the English Language) 2006: Nominated for Golden Globe Award (Best Foreign Language Film) 2005 : Won Audience Award, Leeds International Film Festival (Best Feature)

DETAILS:

Rated PG-13 for some war violence and a brief scene of sexuality/nudity. Runtime: 116 min. In English, German, and French. Color. 2005.

TRAILER:

Joyeux Noël

November 2006

northfork

REVIEWERS' COMMENTS:

• "The movie is visionary and elegiac, more a fable than a story" —Roger Ebert, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
• "One of the most hauntingly beautiful films ever made- a classic for all time" -Annlee Ellingson, BOX OFFICE REVIEWS
• "This surreal vision of a place and people on the cusp of extinction weaves reality and fantasy into a totally enveloping, dreamlike state of mind." -Mark Halverson, SACRAMENTO NEWS & REVIEW

AWARDS, NOMINATIONS:

Golden Fleece Award. German Independence Award, City of Athens Award

DETAILS:

PG-13 (brief sexuality). 103 min. 2003. Color. In English.

Trailer:

Northfork

October 2006

Touch the sound

SYNOPSIS:

In RIVERS AND TIDES, German documentarian Thomas Riedelsheimer explored the enchanting and hypnotic "nature" art-installations of Andy Goldsworthy. Now, with TOUCH THE SOUND, he turns his camera on nearly deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who experiences sound as a kind of touching or vibration. Using Glennie's unique musical sensibilities as a jumping-off point, Riedelsheimer introduces the viewer to an amazing sonic realm that we all know but rarely appreciate--a world of tapping, sputtering, clanging, rustling rhythms. The drone of a suitcase's wheels on concrete interrupted by the periodic zing of a zipper, the crackling of an icy pond, the echoic clang of metal scaffolding struck by Glennie's shoe--these sounds become, in Riedelsheimer's skilled hands, moments of revelation. Watching this film, viewers will feel like they are hearing the world for the first time.

Reviewer's comments:

• "Touch the Sound is a completely joyful moviegoing experience and, like the best movies, it takes you to a place you've never been." --Chris Hewitt, St. Paul Pioneer Press
• "You may find your own sense of hearing transformed by this global tour of the senses." --M.E. Russell, Oregonian
• "Exquisitely beautiful for the eyes as for the ears." --David Sterritt, Christian Science Monitor
• "Arrestingly beautiful." --Timothy Knight, Reel.com AWARDS

NOMINATIONS:

Won: German film Award in Gold Won: BAFTA Scotland Award Nominated: European Film Awards--Best documentary

RATINGS, ETC.:

Not rated (suitable for all audiences), 99 min., in English

Trailer:

Touch The Sound

September 2006

The last atomic bomb

REVIEWERS' COMMENTS:

• "In this age of nuclear proliferation and religious fanaticism, (and impetuous world leaders), the cause (of nuclear disarmament) has perhaps never been so urgent. The case for it has rarely been stated as eloquently as it is by Sakue Shimohira, an atomic attack survivor from Nagasaki. Her quest to ensure that her city will be the last target of a nuclear bomb is chronicled in veteran documentarian Robert Richter's new film, THE LAST ATOMIC BOMB." (Marc Mohan, THE OREGONIAN)
• "Of great documentary significance and moral beauty.... an essential gift to every generation of our nuclear age." (Professor Joanna Macy, author and activist)
• "Indelible images...effectively explains the domestic and economic calculations that factored heavily in the decision to drop the bomb." (William D. Hartung, New School University, World Policy Institute)
  NOTE: Robert Richter is the recipient of three duPont awards, three Academy Award nominations, many film festival prizes, plus Emmys and a Peabody prize. He has made nearly fifty films that have aired on all the major networks. Richter received a Global 500 Award from the UN environment Programme--the only independent producer in the world so honored.

Trailer:

The Last Atomic Bomb

August 28, 2006

Baraka

REVIEWS:

• "In this world of wonders there are still places that have not been smoothed over with the shallow surfaces of Western commercialism. The amazing thing is not how widely the McCulture has spread, but how many corners it has missed. It is claimed that the great age of travel is dead - that there are no longer amazing, exotic, beautiful and fearsome places for the traveler to discover. A movie like "Baraka" gives hope. On one level, the film is a 96-minute travelog. On another level, it is a meditation on the planet. The director, Ron Fricke, has taken his 70-mm camera all over the globe to photograph natural and human sights. Some of them are as ordinary as the traffic in Manhattan. Some are as awesome as a solar eclipse.

  Some are as desperate as the tribes of scavengers scuttling like crabs over the garbage dumps of Calcutta.

  Frick was cinematographer and collaborator on "Koyannisquatsi," the 1983 film by Geoffrey Reggio which is a direct ancestor of "Baraka." In that film, Reggio used time-lapse photography to capture clouds racing across the desert, and crowds of people dashing madly about the caverns of big cities. Frick uses the same technique; it's like watching the weather on fast-forward.

  Time-lapse photography can be dismissed as a gimmick, but for me it's something more than that. It's a visual demonstration of how fleeting life is. Of how the decisions that seem momentous on our time scale are flickering instants in the life of the planet, too small to be observed except on the minute scale of human life.

  Somehow the technique makes the earth and its inhabitants seem touchingly fragile.

  Against this fragility, man has raised the bulwark of religion, and Frick's cameras show us man in the act of worship, from the Pope in St. Paul's to rabbis at the Wailing Wall, from monks in ancient temples to an extraordinary tribe of chanters who lean this way and that in time to their prayer, waving their arms like trees tossed in a storm, led by a man who seems immensely pleased to be in the center of such ecstasy.

  The music has been written by Michael Stearns, who plunders the riches of ethnic music and chants and combines those sounds with more Western ideas, so that the score becomes an anthology of the sounds man makes to keep away the dark and make the light s ensible.

  To listen to the sound track by itself, after seeing the movie, would be to evoke the souls of all of these strange places.

  Of course there is a "message" somewhere in "Baraka" - the same message we have heard before, about how man must love and respect the planet. This is a piety to which we all subscribe, so long as it does not mean any inconvenience to us personally. Few people wearing pro-ecology T-shirts, I imagine, ever think of becoming vegetarian so that grains can be used to feed all the mouths on the planet, instead of being converted into meat to feed a few.

  And few people seeing "Baraka" will make any major changes in their lives to respect the planet the movie celebrates. (I include myself among that number.) So the movie has the power of a dream, from which we awaken, instead of a warning, to which we respond". --Roger Ebert, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

• "Nothing in this epic visual poem is less than extraordinary." -- Hal Hinson, WASHINGTON POST
• "Sweeping, jarring and mesmerizing -- not to mention mind-blowing, if I may indulge a '60s phrase." -- Chris Hicks, DESERET NEWS, SALT LAKE CITY

DETAILS:

93 min. NR (suitable for all audiences). Color. 1992.

Trailer:

Baraka

July 2006

Tibet: cry of the snow lion

Ten years in the making, this documentary was filmed during a remarkable nine journeys throughout Tibet, India and Nepal. TIBET: CRY OF THE SNOW LION brings audiences to the long-forbidden "rooftop of the world" with an unprecedented richness of imagery... from rarely-seen rituals in remote monasteries, to horse races with Khamba warriors; from brothels and slums in the holy city of Lhasa, to magnificent Himalayan peaks still traveled by nomadic yak caravans. The dark secrets of Tibet's recent past are powerfully chronicled through riveting personal stories and interviews, and a collection of undercover and archival images never before assembled in one documentary.

REVIEWERS' COMMENTS:

• "Documentaries can be informative, entertaining and provocative, but rare is the documentary that makes you feel so engaged (and enraged) that it prompts you to action somehow. "Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion" is that kind of film -- at least for anyone who doesn't know much about the brutal history of the Himalayan land.

  Since 1950, when China sent troops to subdue the formerly independent state, Tibetans have lived under the shadow of Beijing, subjugated by a military authority that has banned the Tibetan language in schools, banned photos of the Dalai Lama, arrested and tortured dissident monks, killed thousands and repopulated the region with non-Tibetan Chinese. Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, says in the documentary that "ethnic cleansing has been under way for 20 years" in Tibet.

  Using archival footage and previously unseen still photos, filmmaker Tom Peosay shows some of this violence, including scenes of monks being kicked, hit with rifle butts and forced to wear torture implements. Interviews with monks who fled Tibet for India and other countries give a tearful voice to anguished Tibetans. Their plight was made worse, Peosay reminds us, by their betrayal at the hands of Washington, which financed an army of Tibetan rebels for years (via the CIA) before the Nixon administration pulled the plug in an effort to appease Mao Zedong.

  What gives Tibetans hope is their Buddhist religion (Peosay shows Tibetans praying and doing rituals in shrines that are visually breathtaking), their commitment to a nonviolent solution and their resolve (symbolized by the Dalai Lama, Tibetans' spiritual leader) to keep bringing their cause to the world's attention. Peosay, who spent 10 years making the documentary, includes the comments of Chinese diplomats who castigate the Dalai Lama and defend Beijing's handling of Tibet -- but these diplomats' strained rationalizations are in stark contrast to the powerful pleas of Tibetans who Peosay shows protesting for a "Free Tibet."

  "Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion" features a phalanx of well-known Americans who advocate for Tibet, including Martin Sheen, who narrates the film; Susan Sarandon and Ed Harris, who do some of the voice-overs; and the group R.E.M., which is seen doing a benefit concert.

  As "Tibet" is released around the United States, it will undoubtedly inspire some viewers to join Sheen, Sarandon, Harris and R.E.M. in the Tibet movement. At a minimum, "Tibet" will change its audiences' perception of a state that has been blessed with beauty and majestic peaks and cursed with a strategic location that made it coveted by rulers from Mongolia, Britain, China and other countries. The history of Tibet is both sad and inspiring.

  Advisory: This film contains some strong language and scenes of disturbing violence". -- Jonathan Curiel, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

• "A more concise and affecting summation of the Tibetan crisis would be hard to imagine." -- Dave Kehr, NEW YORK TIMES
• "Makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of a people that the world must never be allowed to forget, no matter how much their oppressors would prefer us to do just that." -- Peter Howell, TORONTO STAR

AWARDS:

Audience award--best documentary--Santa Barbara Internat'l Film Festival 2003 Official Selection--2003 Toronto Internat'l Film Festival

DETAILS:

Not rated. 100 minutes. 2003

Trailer:

Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion

June 2006

Kitchen Stories

REVIEW

• "A hilariously absurd, offbeat Norwegian film applauded for its inventive examination of solitude, friendship, and the bizarreness of human habit. Based on actual experiments conducted in the 1940's, one of the film's two main characters, Folke, is a Swedish "kitchen researcher" sent on a mission to observe the domestic habits of a cantankerous old Norwegian bachelor, in an attempt to design a more efficient kitchen.

  From his ridiculously lofted chair, Folke must record the hermit's every move, all the while following the strict rule of never interacting with or speaking to the man. The film is brimming with ingenious and carefully-timed humor, but the absurdity of the experiment is realized by both of the men involved as they make small moves toward becoming close acquaintances.

  Delightfully full of subtle ethnic humor, "Kitchen Stories" is also a commentary on the scientific perspective's faulty tendency to ignore the uniquely human side of things". ---Amethyst

• "Uniquely eccentric" ---Jules Brenner, filmcritic.com
• "A small gem of a film"---Laura Clifford, Reeling Reviews
• "It's rare for a movie to come along that is so original it seems to be showing you something completely new"---Chris Hewitt, St. Paul Pioneer Press

AWARDS

• Flanders International Film Festival: Best Screenplay
• Copenhagen International Film Festival: Golden Swan
• Tromso International Film Festival: FIPRESCI prize
• Sao Paulo International Film Festival: International Jury Award for best director
• Valladolid International Film Festival: Best director of photography
• Lubeck Nordic Film Days: Baltic Film Prize

RATING, DETAILS:

Rated PG for mild language. 95 Min. Color. 2003

Trailer:

Kitchen Stories

May 2006

Sir! no sir

REVIEW:

..."John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign revived public discussion about the phenomenon of thousands of U.S. troops openly opposing the war they were being sent to (or, more often, returning from), and while Zeiger's film clearly benefits from this re-opening of the controversial topic, it's also notable that Kerry's name is never mentioned. Instead, other lesser-known stars of the vets' antiwar movement, such as Donald Duncan and Dr. Howard Levy (the latter a subject of a much-publicized court martial), start off the saga.

According to some of the more than two dozen onscreen participants, soldiers generally backed the Vietnam war until North Vietnam's 1968 Tet Offensive exposed the U.S. mission as fatally flawed. This coincided with a further rise in the already well-developed antiwar movement at home, as well as a wave of domestic and racial unrest and political assassinations.
What "Sir! No Sir!" crucially restores are many specifics of the troops' resistance, even as it dispels myths regarding rifts between vets and civilian protestors. AWOL vets chaining themselves alongside priests and civilians in a San Francisco church, and subsequent acts of civil disobedience and rioting in the Presidio stockade, underline how serious the antiwar mood had become.

The picture partly depends on the recollections of individuals, among them Louis Font (the first West Point grad to ever refuse service), Terry Whitmore (with his much-publicized Swedish exile) and Bill Short (whose tearful recounting of tallying "body counts" is extremely emotional).

Still, it's group actions that best capture the period's collective spirit -- a loose network of vet-published underground antiwar newspapers or accounts of open defiance of authority in the field.

Clips from the "Winter Soldier" hearings organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War (and employing footage from the stunning and long unseen docu of the same name) provide only a glimpse into the hearings' accounts of savagery that far surpass the worst atrocities at Abu Ghraib.

And while the picture tends to jump around from subject to subject without ever exploring any one aspect in depth, such sidetrips can provide a service, such as author Jerry Lembcke quashing the myth of returning Viet vets being spat upon by antiwar activists at airports.

Fonda's memories of performing the lead in the "FTA Show" in 1971 (an anti-Bob Hope open-air show whose initials were adopted to mean "Fuck the Army") insert a giddiness into the picture that clues viewers in to the counterculture excitement of the era. Fonda is in rare form both in the present-day interview and in a generous range of clips that counter the dour Hanoi Jane stereotype." --Robert Koehler, Variety

AWARDS, NOMINATIONS:

• Los Angeles Film Festival Audience Award (Best Documentary Feature)
• Hamptons International Film Festival Award (Best Documentary)
• Nominated, Independent Spirit Award (Best Documentary)
• Nominated, Gotham Award (Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You)
• Nominated, Independent Spirit Award (Best Documentary)

RATING

85 min. Rated "R" (adult language and situations). In color and B&W.

TRAILER

Sir! No Sir

April 2006

Waking Life

REVIEW:

"("Waking Life") is like a cold shower of bracing, clarifying ideas. We feel cleansed of boredom, indifference, futility and the deadening tyranny of the mundane. The characters walk around passionately discussing ideas, theories, ultimate purposes--just as we've started doing again since the complacent routine of our society was shaken. When we were students we often spoke like this, but in adult life, it is hard to find intelligent conversation. "What is my purpose?" is replaced by "What did the market do today?" The movie is as exhilarating in its style and visuals as in its ideas--indeed, the two are interlocked. Richard Linklater and his collaborators have filmed a series of conversations, debates, rants, monologues and speculations, and then animated their film using a new process which creates a shimmering, pulsating life on the screen: This movie seems alive, seems vibrating with urgency and excitement.

The animation is curiously realistic. A still from the film would look to you like a drawing. But go to www.wakinglifemovie.com and click on the clips to see how the sound and movement have an effect that is eerily lifelike. The most difficult thing for an animator may be to capture an unplanned, spontaneous movement that expresses personality. By filming real people and then animating them, "Waking Life" captures little moments of real life: A musician putting down her cigarette, a double-take, someone listening while eager to start talking again, a guy smiling as if to say, "I'm not really smiling." And the dialogue has the true ring of everyday life, perhaps because most of the actors helped create their own words: The movie doesn't sound like a script but like eavesdropping.

The film's hero, not given a name, is played by Wiley Wiggins as a young man who has returned to the town where once, years ago, a playmate's folding paper toy (we used to call them "cootie catchers") unfolded to show him the words, "dream is destiny." He seems to be in a dream, and complains that although he knows it's a dream, he can't awaken. He wanders from one person and place to another (something like the camera did in Linklater's first film, "Slacker"). He encounters theories, beliefs, sanity, nuttiness. People try to explain what they believe, but he is overwhelmed until finally he is able to see that the answer is--curiosity itself. To not have the answers is expected. To not ask questions is a crime against your own mind.

If I have made the movie sound somber and contemplative, I have been unfair to it. Few movies are more cheerful and alive. The people encountered by the dreamer in his journey are intoxicated by their ideas--deliriously verbal. We recognize some of them: Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, from Linklater's "Before Sunrise," continue their conversation. Speed Levitch, the manic tour guide from the documentary "Cruise," is still on his guided tour of life. Other characters are long known to Linklater, including Robert C. Solomon, a philosopher at the University of Texas, who comes onscreen to say something Linklater remembers him saying in a lecture years ago, that existentialism offers more hope than predestination, because it gives us a reason to try to change things.

I have seen "Waking Life" three times now. I want to see it again--not to master it, or even to remember it better (I would not want to read the screenplay), but simply to experience all of these ideas, all of this passion, the very act of trying to figure things out.

It must be depressing to believe that you have been supplied with all the answers, that you must believe them and to question them is disloyal, or a sin. Were we given minds in order to fear their questions?" --Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

OTHER REVIEWERS' COMMENTS:

• "Anyone who finds value in wondering who we are or why we're here, what's real and what's not, should be overjoyed to find a theatrical release with the same sense of curiosity." -- Chris Vognar, DALLAS MORNING NEWS
• "It's thoughtful, provocative, liberating and fun." -- Desson Thomson, WASHINGTON POST
• "Truly special, truly different -- a wondrous talky roundelay about and for people who love life." -- Michael Wilmington, CHICAGO TRIBUNE

AWARDS, NOMINATIONS:

National Society of Film Critics Award (Best Experimental Film) New York Film Critics Circle Award (Best Animated Film) Ottawa International Animation Festival Award: Best Animated Feature Film Venice Film Festival 'CinemAvvenire' Award (Best Film) --Nominated, Golden Lion

Trailer:

Waking Life

March 2006

Monsieur Ibrahim

REVIEW

"Love appears in many forms, both in life and the movies. One of the most touching film incarnations on view recently comes in director Francois Dupeyron's "Monsieur Ibrahim," a gentle, sensuous French film about a Jewish boy's rite of passage and an old Muslim man's last journey.

The movie is adapted, with great heart and sympathy, from a semi-autobiographical book and play, "Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran," by Eric Emmanuel Schmitt. It's set mostly in 1960s Paris in the real-life Rue Bleue, a funky little residential-commercial district frequented by prostitutes.

The central character, Schmitt's obvious surrogate, is French-Jewish teenager Momo (winningly played by teenage newcomer Pierre Boulanger), a kid who loves American rock 'n' roll and lives with his gloomy father (Gilbert Melki) above the streets.

Part of "Ibrahim" is about Momo's severe family problems - he has a deeply depressed father and an absent mother (Isabelle Renauld). Part shows us Momo's sexual awakening at the hands of breezy local hooker Sylvie (Anne Suarez) and others, and his romance with the neurotic girl next door, Myriam (Lola Naynmark).

But the film's heart and soul lie elsewhere, in the unlikely friendship that springs up between Momo and elderly Turkish Muslim grocery store owner Monsieur Ibrahim. In a casting masterstroke, Ibrahim is played by legendary Egyptian movie heartthrob Omar Sharif, now 71. It's one of the two or three finest performances of his entire career and one of the Sharif roles, along with those in "Doctor Zhivago" and "Lawrence of Arabia," that we'll most remember and treasure.

Ibrahim has known Momo since his childhood, and the store Ibrahim owns - called in Parisian slang an "Arab" because of its operating hours - is dark and crammed with foods, wines and pates. A widower who barely stirs from his seat at the cash register, Ibrahim seems to have only two consolations: regular readings from his Koran and his friendship with Momo, who both buys and shoplifts (as Ibrahim well knows) from the store.

For Momo, Ibrahim represents the paternalistic kindness he never knew. For Ibrahim, Momo represents youth and renewal. The two finally embark on a car journey back to Ibrahim's village - a voyage that might seem dangerously sentimental, except for the empathetic, evocative storytelling and the brilliance of the actors. The impish Boulanger is a terrific discovery. His performance as Momo won the best actor Hugo at the last Chicago Film Festival. But I thought the prize should have been shared by Sharif, who wrings magnificence from a seemingly commonplace character. Ibrahim (a name with both Jewish and Muslim connotations) is a different sort of role for the elegantly seductive Sharif: shaggy, plumpish and haggard. But Sharif is still a great romantic actor, and that famous, dark-eyed liquid gaze works its alchemy once again. He evokes perfectly an old man whose hard life and long journey from his Turkish village and homeland have helped win him spiritual riches few suspect.
That may sound sentimental - and the story too similar to Moshe Mizrahi's likable 1977 French hit "Madame Rosa," with Simone Signoret as an old Jewish prostitute who befriends a young Arab boy. But, as in the best of "Rosa," "Ibrahim" has characters who really live on screen. And thanks to Dupeyron, so does both the Rue Bleue, with its garish bustle, and the more muted Turkish countryside.

There's a joyous, sometimes bittersweet quality to this film. The sex is handled in the wry, realistic and non-sniggering way we expect from the better French films: sensuality without Puritan guilt or lasciviousness. The atmosphere is rich, the visuals vibrant, the period '50s-'60s rock score (Chuck Berry to Bruce Channel) a hoot, and the characters truly and richly drawn.

Most movingly, "Monsieur Ibrahim" takes a provocative subject - friendship and love between a Jew and a Muslim - and makes it seem natural and wondrous. Too many movies, however entertainingly, drive people apart. Here is a little gem that opens up a page of flowers, speaking to us convincingly and inspiringly of amity and peace." —By Michael Wilmington. Chicago Tribune Movie Critic

OTHER REVIEWERS' COMMENTS

• "Wry, supple, endearing." -- David Elliott, SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE
• "Unusual in its ambition to pose deep spiritual questions, but its enticing surfaces ... are the best thing about it." -- Leslie Camhi, VILLAGE VOICE
• "A joyful ode to life." -- Charles Ealy, DALLAS MORNING NEWS

AWARDS

• Venice Film Festival: Audience Award (best actor)--Omar Sharif
• Chicago International Film Festival: Silver Hugo (best male performance)--Pierre Boulanger
• Cesar Award, France: Best Actor--Omar Sharif

Trailer:

Monsieur Ibrahim

February 2006

vera drake

In early 1950's London, a very unassuming and extremely kindly middle-aged woman takes it upon herself to help out gals with unwanted pregnancies by performing abortions, unbeknownst to her husband and children. When she is exposed, the reactions of her family and of the legal authorities are carefully portrayed without editorial skewing, artfully laying out the emotional stakes in this issue.

AWARDS:

Academy Awards—

• Nominated: Best Director: Mike Leigh
• Nominated: Best Original Screenplay: Mike Leigh
• Nominated: Best Actress: Imelda Staunton

Golden Globe Awards—

Nominated: Best Actress, Drama: Imelda Staunton

BAFTA Awards—

• WINNER: David Lean Award for Direction: Mike Leigh
• WINNER: Best Performance by an Actress is a Leading
• Role: Imelda Staunton
• WINNER: Best Costume Design: Jacqueline Durran
• Nominated: Best Film
• Nominated: Best Performance by an Actor in a
• Supporting Role: Philip Davis
• Nominated: Best Performance by an Actress in a
• Supporting Role: Heather Craney
• Nominated: Best Screenplay (Original): Mike Leigh
• Nominated: Best Editing: Jim Clark
• Nominated: Best Make Up / Hair: Christine Blundell
• Nominated: Best Production Design: Eve Stewart
• Nominated: Alexander Korda Award for Best British
• Film: Simon Channing-Willians, Alain Sarde, Mike Leigh

REVIEW:

"Vera Drake is a melodious plum pudding of a woman who is always humming or singing to herself. She is happy because she is useful, and likes to be useful. She works as a cleaning woman in a rich family's house, where she burnishes the bronze as if it were her own, and then returns home to a crowded flat to cook, clean and mend for her husband, son and daughter, and cheer them up when they seem out of sorts. She makes daily calls on invalids to plump up their pillows and make them a nice cup of tea, and once or twice a week she performs an abortion.

London in the 1950s. Wartime rationing is still in effect. A pair of nylons is bartered for eight packs of Players. Vera (Imelda Staunton) buys sugar on the black market from Lily (Ruth Sheen), who also slips her the name and address of women in need of "help." Lily is as hard and cynical as Vera is kind and trusting. Vera would never think of accepting money for "helping out" young girls when "they got no one to turn to," but Lily charges 2 pounds and 2 shillings, which she doesn't tell Vera about.

In a film of pitch-perfect, seemingly effortless performances, Imelda Staunton is the key player, and her success at creating Vera Drake allows the story to fall into place and belong there. We must believe she's naive to be taken advantage of by Lily, but we do believe it. We must believe she has a simple, pragmatic morality to justify abortions, which were a crime in England until 1967, but we do believe it.

Some of the women who come to her have piteous stories; they were raped, they are still almost children, they will kill themselves if their parents find out, or in one case there are seven mouths to feed and the mother lacks the will to carry on. But Vera is not a social worker who provides counseling; she is simply being helpful by doing something she believes she can do safely. Her age-old method involves lye soap, disinfectant and, of course, lots of hot water, and another abortionist describes her method as "safe as houses."

The movie has been written and directed by Mike Leigh, the most interesting director now at work in England, whose "Topsy Turvy," "High Hopes," "All or Nothing" and "Naked" join this film in being partly "devised" by the actors themselves. His method is to gather a cast for weeks or months of improvisation in which they create and explore their characters. I don't think the technique has ever worked better than here; the family life in those cramped little rooms is so palpably real that as the others wait around the dining table while Vera speaks to a policeman behind the kitchen door, I felt as if I were waiting there with them. It's not that we "identify" so much as that the film quietly and firmly includes us.

The movie is not about abortion so much as about families. The Drakes are close and loving. Vera's husband Stan (Phil Davis), who works with his brother in an auto repair shop, considers his wife a treasure. Their son Sid (Daniel Mays) works as a tailor, has a line of patter, is popular in pubs, but lives at home because of the postwar housing crisis. Their daughter Ethel (Alex Kelly) is painfully shy, and there is a sweet, tactful subplot in which Vera invites a lonely, tongue-tied bachelor named Reg (Eddie Marson) over for tea and essentially arranges a marriage.

"Vera Drake" tells a parallel story about a rich girl named Susan (Sally Hawkins), the daughter of the family Vera cleans for. Sally is raped by her boyfriend, becomes pregnant and goes to a psychiatrist who can refer her to a private clinic for a legal abortion. Like everyone in the movie, Sally is excruciatingly shy about discussing sex, and ignorant. "Did he force himself upon you?" the psychiatrist asks, and Sally is not sure how to answer. Leigh's point is that those with 100 pounds could legally obtain an abortion in England in 1950, and those with two pounds had to depend on Vera Drake, or on women not nearly as nice as Vera Drake.

Vera's world falls apart when the police become involved in an abortion that almost leads to death, and the tightly knit little family changes when the police knock on the door. The Detective Inspector (Peter Wight), is a considerable man, large, imposing, and not without sympathy. He believes in the law and enforces the law, but he quickly understands that Vera was not working for profit, and is not ungentle with her. In a courtroom scene, on the other hand, it is clear that the law makes no room for nuance or circumstance.

Some of the film's best scenes involve the family sitting around the table, shell-shocked (after Vera whispers into her husband's ear, telling him what he had never suspected). There are moments when Leigh uses his technique of allowing a reticent character to stir into conviction. At Vera's final Christmas dinner, Reg, now engaged to Ethel, makes what for him is a long speech: "This is the best Christmas I've had in a long time. Thank you very much, Vera. Smashing!" He knows telling Vera she has prepared a perfect meal means more to her than any speech about rights and wrongs, although later he blurts out: "It's all right if you're rich, but if you can't feed 'em, you can't love 'em."

Even in saying that I am bringing more ideology into "Vera Drake" than it probably requires. The strength of Leigh's film is that it is not a message picture, but a deep and true portrait of these lives. Vera is kind and innocent, but Lily, who procures the abortions, is hard, dishonest and heartless. The movie shows the law as unyielding, but puts a human face on the police. And the enduring strength of the film is the way it shows the Drake family rising to the occasion with loyalty and love." --Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Running time: 125 minutes. Rated R (for depiction of strong thematic material).

Trailer:

Vera Drake

January 30, 2006

rivers and tides

AWARDS

• 2001 Documentary, German Camera Award
• 2002 Best Documentary, San Francisco Film Critics Circle
• 2002 Golden Gate Award for Film & Video – the Arts, San Francisco International Film Festival
• 2003 Best Documentary, German Film Critics Association

REVIEW

"Whether you think Andy Goldsworthy is a genius or just a grown man lucky enough to have found a way to earn a living playing the kids’ game of Pooh sticks in his local river, “River and Tides” is a truly beautiful, insightful movie that captures the nature of this artist who forms art out of nature. Rare is the documentary that provides the opportunity to watch and absorb the wonders onscreen in a way that allows your own thought processes to meld with the content without feeling bullied or trapped by a contrived viewpoint.

Director, cinematographer and editor Thomas Riedelsheimer has transferred Goldsworthy, his environs, his work process, his thoughts and feelings, his marvelously structured but fragile, temporal, temporary creations onto the screen, completely free of impediment. We feel right there all the time, watching Goldsworthy’s often bleeding hands craft magical constructions from sticks and stones, bark and bracken, ice, crushed rocks, wildflowers and leaves from field, stream, hedgerow and wayside, matching and mating them to ever-flowing waters of sea, river, tide pool, damp ground, sleet, snow and rain on the wind.

Goldsworthy, a British artist based in Scotland, is filmed both at home and on location in Canada, the U.S. and France as he works both on commissions that will stand up for a while to public gaze and, more often, on work balanced for just a fleeting speck of time before returning to the land or water from which it came, only living on via photography. The sun shines, infusing but also melting the loops of ice curled onto a rock on a deserted shore; swirls of sticks or flowers, layered and draped at tide line or in tidepools, soon drift away; even the sturdier stone walls and conical sculptures, crafted into balance from the debris of the landscape, contain their own ruin; the tapestry of black-rooted bracken, pulled from the earth shifts and scatters with the seasons.

But oh, how wonderful these forms are for the moments they live--just like all in nature.

Goldsworthy doesn’t plunder nature, or exploit it. He merely honors it. Riedelsheimer has achieved the same--he allows Goldsworthy, diffident in speech but chock full with feeling, to reveal the wellspring of this talent. Doing so has created a film that is true to--and truly--art".
Bridget Byrne, Box Office Magazine

OTHER REVIEWS

• "Fascinating" -- Edward Guthmann, SF Chronicle
"Ravishingly beautiful " -- Stephen Holden, NY Times "A surprisingly magical experience...Intoxicating and meditative by turns, helped by Fred Frith's minimalist score, this film opens a portal into a singular creative mind" —Kenneth Turan, LA Times
• "TWO THUMBS UP!". --Ebert & Roeper
• "Pure and sublime... Andy Goldsworthy's art borders on the religious.... It puts you into a profound conversation with the glorious, uncompromising and mesmerizing flow of nature. It is the artistic equivalent of ancient ritual offerings to the gods." —Desson Howe, Washington Post
• "Ravishing from start to finish... a work of art in its own right." —David Sterritt, Christian Science Monitor"
• "Some images verge on Kubrick territory" —Ed Halter, The Village Voice
• "It's a truly balmy experience that puts you in a better place." —William Arnold, Seattle Post-Intelliegnecer
• "It moves at a very leisurely and calm pace, washing over its audience and soothing its viewers with its lush photography and mellow score by Fred Frith. I've seen the film about three times now, mostly because it's a great stress reliever, as well as a wonderful portrait of a very unique artist." —Film Threat

Trailer:

Rivers and Tides

We encourage suggestions for future showings from our audience.