war dance Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Beyond the pregnant teen comedy and the one about a guy who loves a blow-up doll, what else is on the DVD shelves for indie film fans this week?

Can you really go wrong when your movie features two naked Academy Award-winners having sex? Fortunately, Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead goes far beyond surface pleasures. Jeffrey M. Anderson thought it was one of the year's best American films and Erik Davis felt it would was "sure to go down as one of Lumet's best in years." (For a contrary opinion, check out Ryan Stewart's review.) Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke and Marisa Tomei star. ThinkFilm's DVD includes an audio commentary with Lumet and his lead actors and a "making of" feature.

War/Dance follows a group of children living in a refugee camp in Uganda who have been invited to participate in a national music and dance competition. "I can't imagine anyone could watch War/Dance," wrote Kim Voynar when she saw it AFI Dallas last year, "without feeling heart-wrenched over these kids' stories and being touched by their heart and courage ... This is what documentary filmmaking is all about." ThinkFilm's DVD includes deleted and extended scenes, the theatrical trailer and a trailer gallery.

Also of interest: highly-acclaimed political drama Bamako (New Yorker); documentary Here is What Is (Suma), which goes behind the scenes with music producer Daniel Lanois, and Jeff Garlin's comedy/romance I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With (IFC).

Here's a dirty little secret: sometimes film critics don't want to see movies. It's true. When we start out, ambitious and full of energy, we'll sit through any old thing, but after a while, when the formulas begin to wear on you, you can smell a turkey from watching the trailer. Sometimes you can smell a stinkbomb just from the title alone. I thought, for fun, I'd go over some titles I haven't seen and give you an idea of what might go through a critic's head. Of course, some of this is self-justification for not being able to see every single movie that comes through town. Frankly, it's impossible for one person to do, and so we resort to a porcupine-like defense, just in case anyone asks us about a movie we haven't seen: "It looked terrible."

Here's one: How to Cook Your Life (1 screen). What is that? Without even looking, it sounds like a bunch of actresses on a single set with too much dialogue, probably a lot of violin music and tears. And what could it mean? Why would I want to cook my life? It sounds painful, doesn't it? (It's really a film by the German director Dorris Dorrie about trying to equate cooking with Zen philosophy.) Then we have Hitman (9 screens), which irritated critics to no end, but seems to have pleased a fair number of moviegoers. Question: how many hitman movies have you seen in the past five or ten years? Is there an actor working today who hasn't played a hitman? What kind of brass cojones must it have taken to actually use the title "Hitman" on a middling, forgettable piece of work like this one?

Last year, it was pretty easy to nail down a Top Ten list. I knew pretty much what was going to be in there after Toronto, and while there was a little shuffling, it didn't change all that much. This year was another story entirely ... so many good films from which to choose, so many films I loved for different reasons. Culling that down to ten films was hard this year, and I agonized over my endlessly shifting list, trying out different films in my top ten like a woman hunting for the perfect little black dress for New Year's Eve. I finally managed to get it molded into a Top Ten which, if I wasn't ever going to be completely satisfied with, I could at least live with. So, here they are, the ten films. There are some excellent films from the fest circuit that could have just as easily ended up there, had I been in a different mood or had one more (or one less) cup of coffee while I was writing this. I'll be talking about them in my last Film Clips column of the year.

The Top Ten

1. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly -- The top two films on my list shifted back and forth at least a dozen times before I finally settled on Julian Schnabel's moving piece about a vibrant man paralyzed by a stroke. The film is based on the true story of Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who suffered a massive stroke at the age of 42 that left him completely incapacitated by "locked-in syndrome." Bauby dictated a book about his experience one letter at a time by blinking his left eyelid to assistants. There are no car chases or gunshots, no serial killers or abortions in this film, but it is so full of heart and the redemptive power of the human spirit, and so beautifully made, that it deserves to be in the top slot of my list.

2. Juno -- As far as comedies go, Juno was executed to almost perfection from its sharply written script by newcomer Diablo Cody to the tight direction by Jason Reitman. It's harder than most people realize to make smart comedy, and Reitman does comedy very, very well. From his earlier short films (especially Consent) to his first feature Thank You for Smoking, Reitman has set out to prove that good comedy can also be good filmmaking, and with Juno he exceeds his freshman effort and ups the ante for what comedic films should be. In a year heavy with serious dramas and an abundance of depressing Iraq war flicks, Juno was the leaven that lightened it all up a bit, and it's one of the few films this year that I can watch repeatedly and never tire of.

The rest of the Ten, after the jump ...

Most of us who have grown up in America have a difficult time wrapping our minds around what it's like to live in a place where every day is a struggle between life and death, with death coming out on the winning side more often than not. If we lose power for a few days, or even a week or more, as happened in my neighborhood last year when a massive windstorm hit Seattle, we panic if the store runs out of firelogs and flashlights, and start to get testy after a few days without a hot shower.

For the children of the Acholi tribe living in Patonga Refugee Camp in war-torn northern Uganda, life as we know it is simply incomprensible. Most of them have never seen electricity, or running water, much less things like television and fast food, and have seen more death in their short lifetimes than we can imagine. Most of the kids of Patonga Camp have lost one or both parents to the violence that's been wreaked upon the Acholi by the rebel Lord's Resistance Army, which has slaughtered, mutilated, raped and abducted the Acholi since its inception in 1987. Since 1996, tens of thousands of Acholi have been forced by the government to abandon their ancestral lands and live in "protected villages" – overcrowded, unsanitary refugee camps which, in spite of the protection of armed government forces, are still routinely attacked by the LRA.

War/Dance, directed by Sean Fine and Andrea Nix-Fine (who won a well-deserved directing award at Sundance for this film) take us into Patonga Camp, the most remote and desolate of the protected villages, to show us the story of a group of children living in the camp who have been invited to participate in the national music and dance competition at Kampala, the nation's capitol. This is the first time Patonga Grammar school has ever won the regional competition and been invited to Kampala -- an invitation that is considered a high honor. To win at Kampala is to bring pride and recognition to your tribe, something the Acholi people desperately need after two decades of war and terrorism.