Appearances to the contrary, pullquote has not become a mouthpiece for the film criticism of Ed Koch to the exclusion of all other content. However, Hizzoner has been much better than the cinetrix about getting to movies this summer. Until this past weekend, that is.
On Friday night, I lured the 'Fesser along to the HOP, where Mahatmet-Saleh Haroun was receiving the Dartmouth Film Award, and his 2006 film Daratt was being shown. Like the director of the HOP film department, Bill Pence, I'd been fortunate enough to see Haroun's movie last summer at the Flaherty Seminar. Bill confirmed that screening was directly responsible for the Chadian director's presence in New Hampshire that evening.
The tale unfolds at a stately pace.
After a general amnesty for civil war criminals is announced, an old man sends his grandson to avenge the murder of his father. The boy, Atim, travels to the city in search of the killer. He finds Nassara, now a baker with a pregnant young bride, but cannot bring himself to shoot the man right away. Instead, he begins to work in the bakery alongside his father's murderer as he awaits the right moment to take revenge.
The world shrinks to the bakery and the yard outside as the silences between the furious, fatherless boy and Nassara grow larger. Over time, Atim develops an unlikely relationship with the baker, who shocks the boy by asking to adopt him. He insists on traveling home with Atim "to ask his father's permission." What happens next is shocking and should be seen, not spoiled. Let's just say that it haunted me for a year and led me back to the theatre to see it again.
Daratt (Dry Season) tells us a story that is distinct to Chad and yet, sadly, timeless and universal. Haroun never lets the viewer forget the danger that casts a constant shadow over this landscape, sunbaked, sere, but shot through with bolts of turquoise and chartreuse. Among any people scarred by civil conflict, violence erupts suddenly, and justice is a state with ever-shifting boundaries.
Saturday the cinetrix shifted herself, setting off for a week-long house-sitting stint in Somerville. Sunday, after an afternoon spent sailing on a choppy Charles, I did what moviegoers across the nation did: I went to see Hellboy 2: The Golden Army.
Somehow I skipped the first Hellboy, and I was a little leery of the lurid imagination of director Guillermo del Toro after Pan's Labyrinth, but my fanboy pals assured me it'd be fine. Indeed. What a fuckin' foolish delight.
When I last saw Ron Perlman, he was sparring with some God-complexed grad students in belief-straining indie The Last Supper. [I don't doubt Cameron Diaz would excel at the dope-smoking aspects of post-graduate work, but the rest not so much.] Red--and "Red"--suits him much better. He battles demons, bickers with his incendiary lady friend Liz, and swills Tecate. He also chases publicity and vexes Jeffrey Tambor. There's a riff on Woo's Hard Boiled and a giant, angry plant. What's not to love?
Oh, okay, the evil elf prince and his twin sister could look a little less like gelflings. And the CGI Hellboy-as-a-boy opening may have delighted origin-story superfans, but his visible lack of heft I found distracting. But these are quibbles. It'd been so long since I went into a big movie completely blind and came out grinning like a fool that I forgive Hellboy 2 all its lovable flaws.
Would that I could say the same of Indy 4, a "movie" I was planning on boycotting it altogether until I got the call from the sister-in-law--en route with the new nephew to a mommy screening--and the IM from the brother announcing he was leaving work midday to join them. How could the cinetrix skip a child's second-ever trip to a movie theatre?
Have you ever been to a baby-friendly screening? The house lights are kept a bit up and the volume is turned low. And there are tons of babies. Not necessarily the conditions under which I'd opt to see every movie, but they were a mitzvah when it came to watching Messers Lucas, Spielberg, and Ford's tired cinematic equivalent of the old guy in the club. Plus, it's never to early to teach the youth about knee-jerk national stereotypes and celluloid colonialism!
A few questions, aside from the obvious "why bother?" one. Do you think somewhere Elina Lowensohn is bitter about Cate Blanchett biting her shtick? Could the editing have been any sloppier? I'm not sure if there's a nice name for "sort-of match-on-action" shots and a seeming indifference to continuity--mit out montage?--but given the vaunted technical chops of the parties involved, it felt as grating as listening to a Steely Dan song covered by a garage band. And could we lose the constant, cutesy winks to other flicks in the corpus, fellas? Yeah, it was fun to see the E.T. delegation in that Jar-Jar abomination, but do we need to see the Ark housed in Area 51 and the nuclear annihilation of a Spielberg suburb and mugging prairie dogs? Homey, please.
There were a few things I did like. Namely, Karen Allen's body and Karen Allen's face. That someone in the prop department was charged with making a painting and a statue of Denholm Elliott. The shout out to the U of C. Yeah, that about covers it.
Don't know about you, but after watching this flick I miss those days when it actually took Indy a moment or two to puzzle out ancient maps and cryptic riddles. In Kingdom, there's no mystery, only movement. He--and we--can see the next plot point coming from a mile away.
