|
Blogs I likeNothing worth mentioning at the moment.
|
Mišo Suchý’s "Giving Voice"
Posted by nrhodes | 03/18/09
You’d need a heart of stone not to love this movie on the night it premiered at Art Rage in late January. Consider the event itself a kind of triple whammy. First the packed, enthusiastic crowd itself, which included many members and friends of the Community Choir. The audience lining the walls easily doubled those in the folded chairs filling the center of the room. The Community Choir’s 20th anniversary concert three years ago is the subject of “Giving Voice,” Mišo Suchý’s half-hour documentary.
Then, the gallery walls themselves held the exhibition “Voices of Diversity,” more than 100 of Lida Suchý’s black-and-white photos of Choir members. These are arresting and powerful, some large format single shots and some arranged in grids of up to twelve images...
CATEGORY: Movies
TAGS: Syracuse Community Choir, Karen Mihalyi, Miso Suchy, Lida Suchy, Giving Voice, Voices of Diversity, Nancy Keefe Rhodes
"Brick Lane" screens Saturday at CFAC
Posted by nrhodes | 03/12/09
“Why do you like me?” asks Nazneen (Bengali actress Tannishtha Chatterjee) one day of her younger lover, the hip, hunky, London-reared Karim (Christopher Simpson).
“Who says I like you?” he answers, suddenly shy. But when pressed into emotional territory Nazneen has never entered with her older husband, Karim says she’s unlike the modern girls with their mini-skirts or the religious girls, always arguing. He says she’s “the real thing” – a girl from a village in their homeland of Bangladesh.
It’s this exchange that a friend of mine recalled most vividly from Monica Ali’s 2003 novel, "Brick Lane," an exchange that made it into director Sarah Gavron’s 2007 film version of the same title...
CATEGORY: Movies
TAGS: Brick Lane, Sarah Gavron, Monica Ali, Bangladesh, London, 9/11, Nancy Keefe Rhodes
"Wendy and Lucy" at Manlius Cinema
Posted by nrhodes | 03/04/09
Not too far into Kelly Reichardt’s latest road trip film, Wendy Carroll (Michelle Williams), the slight, dark-haired drifter in cut-offs and hoodie, has been dragged into the manager’s office at Jack’s Market for stealing a roll and a can of I AM’s dog food.
You can tell the manager would like to let this go.
“Well,” he says with a sigh to his zealous clerk, “what are we talking here?”
But Andy (John Robinson), the blond teen-ager who’s “watched the whole thing,” his face red and blotchy with indignation, the gold cross at his throat flashing, insists it’s not the money, it’s about setting an example.
“I’m not from around here,” says Wendy quickly, sensing an opening that diffident apologies had not provided. “I can’t be an example...
CATEGORY: Movies
TAGS: Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt, Jon Raymond, Nancy Keefe Rhodes, Michelle Williams
Hunger
Posted by nrhodes | 02/11/09
Hunger
Midway through this film about Bobby Sands, the first of ten Irish nationalist prisoners to die in the 1981 hunger strike in the North of Ireland in a bid to reclaim P.O.W. status from their British jailers, Sands (Michael Fassbender) tells a priest about a trip he took as a boy.
Sands was a cross-country runner in school – Father Moran (Liam Cunningham) says this explains a lot – and at 12 crossed the border to lush, green Donegal, a chance to run against boys from the Irish Republic “and Protestants too.” Immersed in countryside unlike industrialized Belfast – listening, you feel this was his first naked contact with his own land – he’d gone for a warm-up jog in nearby woods along a stream...
CATEGORY: Movies
TAGS: Nancy Keefe Rhodes, Make it Snappy, Steve McQueen's Hunger, Bobby Sands, Jim MacKillop, Irish politics
The Wind That Shakes the Barley
Posted by nrhodes | 01/26/09
[The CNY chapter of the Irish-American Cultural Institute screens Ken Loach's award-winning film on Feb. 10th at 7:00 PM at the Pebble Hill Presbyterian Church on Jamesville Road in DeWitt as the second film in this year's Irish film festival. This review originally appeared in Stylusmagazine.com on 3/2/07, the date of the film's limited release in the U.S.]
Director Ken Loach’s film about Ireland’s convulsions in the early 1920s arrives on US shores nearly a year after winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes. ”The Wind That Shakes the Barley” depicts one stage in the birth of the modern Irish state, including the island’s partition by the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, through the lives of fictional brothers Damien and Teddy O’Donovan (Cillian Murphy and Pádraic Delaney)...
CATEGORY: Movies
TAGS: Ken Loach, Cilian Murphy, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Irish politics
The Wackness
Posted by nrhodes | 01/15/09
You might remember Robert De Niro as the drill instructor in "Men of Honor," bellowing that line, willing Cuba Gooding, Jr. to his feet, “Stand up, Navy diver!”
George Tilman, Jr., hasn’t directed a film since 2000, when his Men of Honor portrayed the struggles of Carl Brashear, the first African American to successfully enter the ranks of deep sea Navy divers. So there’s plenty of anticipation now that his new film is about to open in wide release this Friday. That film is another biopic, "Notorious," which relates the saga of Christopher Wallace – better known as The Notorious B.I.G. – and promises to vividly reanimate some aspects of the mid-90s Hip-Hop era. Notorious B.I.G...
CATEGORY: Culture
TAGS: The Wackness, Ben Kingsley, Notorious B.I.G.
Gran Torino
Posted by nrhodes | 01/10/09
It’s not what you expect after the trailer, which ran all through the holidays at Carousel Mall Regal Cinemas and on TV too, promising “vintage” Clint Eastwood, with him cocking his thumb Dirty Harry-style and, later, ordering gangbangers off his lawn with an M-1 rifle. No, at the end of Gran Torino, I found myself thinking that this sometimes violent movie is about the ways men still find to be tender with each another. And just then, as if answering my girly thoughts, the credits roll and with them the soft jazz title song by Eastwood’s son Kyle, who did the score, that starts out, “So tenderly the story …...
CATEGORY: General Society
TAGS: Clint Eastwood, Gran Torino movie, Hmong
|
Make it SnappyNancy Keefe Rhodes covers film, photo and visual arts for the City Eagle. She has written "Make it Snappy" since December 2006, a weekly film column reviewing both current theatrical releases and DVDs recent and enduring. She is a member of the national Women Film Critics Circle. She archives her film reviews at www.MovieCrossRhodes.blogspot.com. Reach her at [email protected].
Email
Archives
|
