logo

Ever since 1989s Roger & Me he's been accused of pushing himself

Posted by admin   ·     ·   Jump to comments

Ever since 1989s Roger & Me, he's been accused of pushing himself into the limelight. In fact, he's the perfect undercover reporter.And then he goes and screws up. Having established that the majority of people running around with guns aren't crazed, inner-city blacks, but rather paranoid, suburban whites, Moore then immerses himself in the case of Kayla Rowland, a little girl killed by a six-year-old black boy, and starts making impassioned pleas for women like the boy's mother not to be forced to work long hours in welfare programmes. In other words, having carefully broken the link between the underprivileged and violence, he re-enforces it. Doh!Moore's final "coup" is a trip to Heston's house, where he demands to know why Americans seem so keen on killing each other. Heston doesn't come out of the interaction well (surprise, surprise, he's a good ol' fashioned racist, and plumb ignorant about world history to boot), but a part of you longs for him to say well, smarty pants, have you got an answer? Moore boxes himself into a corner in the drive to find out what makes America "special". Wanting your country to be uniquely bad is as egocentric as wanting it to be uniquely good.

In trying to fight too many battles (excuse the violent metaphor), this liberal's in danger of losing the war. And George Bush would love that.Chris Marker's Sans Soleil is another film-essay, but this time it is a blast from the past (it was made in 1983), reissued to chime in with a Marker season at the ICA. The template for films such as Patrick Keiller's London and Robinson in Space, it consists of a female narrator (Alexandra Stewart) reading us excerpts from letters sent by a wander-lusting friend, accompanied by images, that don't so much make sense of the words, as float alongside.French-born Marker is a god in many circles For a good part of Sans Soleil, it's not entirely clear why. The musings (mainly on Africa and Japan) are often pretentious, and even when they're interesting, you hardly feel glued to your seat. References to "African women" also grate (who would dare to generalise about "European women"?), as do lofty declarations such as, "...this is why I will never let it be said that youth is wasted on the young...."But what starts as a trickle of surreal gems (a John Kennedy robot, apparently accompanied by The Chipmunks, singing his famous 1961 inaugural address) gradually becomes a flood. All the best stuff is prompted by Tokyo, a city whose amusement arcades alone are a storehouse of trippy tales. Computer "games" are inspired by Sixties street battles with the police, or punishing hierarchies in the work place.

And when Marker's camera wanders over the faces of a carriage of tube dwellers (many of them asleep) you find yourself straining forwards to get closer. You've seen what tickles their waking selves – now you want in on their dreams.The travellers persona, too, becomes more affecting, as he reveals a fondness for owls and cats, and astonishment that some people can "remember" without using film, or photographs.Sans Soleil is about falling in love – with wide-eyed, non-musing animals; and a notion of the "East", as a place that honours "non-being" It may start out as anthropology, it winds up as a story. Trust me, if you can just stay awake till the dreamy tube journey, you'll skip out of the cinema feeling your eyes have been unpeeled.In Big Shot's Funeral, Donald Sutherland plays a burnt-out Hollywood director who, while on location in China, discovers another side of life Via his funeral. What follows takes in romance, the perils of product placement and the need for irreverence when dealing with death.

readers comments

Comments are closed.

NBA

NBA

MLB

MLB

NFL

NFL

NHL

NHL

WWE

WWE

Your sideblock text goes here