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Over there

Hizzoner reduces his carbon footprint with a little armchair travel overseas.

Elsa & Fred

A gem of a picture about two elderly people who live in Spain.

Seventy-eight-year-old Fred (Manuel Alexandre) moves into an apartment building after the death of his wife, where he meets Elsa (China Zorrilla), who is about the same age. Each has a family concerned about their well being. Fred's family consists of his bossy and argumentative daughter, her husband, and their 12-year-old son. Elsa has two sons. One is a successful businessman who takes care of her needs, and the other is an artist to whom Elsa gives money to help him along.

Fred is a quite and reserved man while Elsa is very exuberant. She sometimes exaggerates about her life, and she continues to drive her car despite being involved in numerous auto accidents. Elsa wants to go to Rome and repeat the scene in La Dolce Vita when Anita Ekberg walks into the Fontana di Trevi and her lover, Marcello Mastroianni, wades in after her, a scene replayed several times by Elsa for Fred.

The escapades between Elsa and Fred are wonderful to behold as their relationship warms to that of lovers. Some of those scenes are simply cute while others are over the top. I won't reveal any of them to you, which are all a joy to behold, so that you will have the pleasure of watching them unfold on the screen. If you are about the age of Elsa & Fred watching them interact will undoubtedly cause you to reflect on your own life and relive past moments as well. Don't miss this beautiful, modest film which is currently playing at both The Paris Theater and the Angelika Film Center in Manhattan. (In Spanish, with English subtitles)

Brick Lane

The story is about a 17-year-old Bangladesh woman, Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee), whose parents arrange for her to marry Chanu (Satish Kaushik), who is 20 years her senior. Formerly from Bangladesh, Chanu now lives in London.

When we see the couple in their London home 20 years later, it is clear that their marriage is a loveless one. Chanu is a foolish man and somewhat of a bully to his own family which now includes two teenage daughters. Nazneen takes up sewing in her home to help support the family and also to save funds for a visit to Bangladesh. She meets and has an affair with Karim (Christopher Simpson), the handsome son of a clothing manufacturer. Karim is a leader in the Muslim community who advocates militancy. The balance of the story deals with how the affair is resolved and the impact it has on the entire family.

The acting in Brick Lane is fine, but I was never enthralled with the story. It's a good but not a great film.

Science!

What an example of interdisciplinary scholarship: Film Content, Editing, and Directing Style Affect Brain Activity, NYU Neuroscientists Show. Ferreals! It's pretty cool. [OK, also creepy.] Here's a longish excerpt.

Using advanced functional imaging methods, New York University neuroscientists have found that certain motion pictures can exert considerable control over brain activity. Moreover, the impact of films varies according to movie content, editing, and directing style. Because the study, which appears in Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, offers a quantitative neuroscientific assessment of the impact of different styles of filmmaking on viewers' brains, it may serve as a valuable method for the film industry to better assess its products and offer a new method for exploring how the brain works.

[snip]

"In cinema, some films lead most viewers through a similar sequence of perceptual, emotional, and cognitive states," the researchers wrote. "Such a tight grip on viewers' minds will be reflected in the similarity of the brain activity-or high ISC-across most viewers. By contrast, other films exert--either intentionally or unintentionally--less control over viewers’ responses during movie watching. In such cases we expect that there will be less control over viewers' brain activity, resulting in low ISC.

"To stimulate subjects' brain activity, the researchers showed them three motion picture clips: thirty minutes of Sergio Leone's "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"; an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents "Bang! You're Dead"; and an episode of Larry David's "Curb Your Enthusiasm." To establish a baseline, subjects viewed a clip of unstructured reality: a 10-minute, unedited, one-shot video filmed during a concert in New York City's Washington Square Park.

The results showed that ISC of responses in subjects' neocortex--the portion of the brain responsible for perception and cognition--differed across the four movies:

-The Hitchcock episode evoked similar responses across all viewers in over 65 percent of the neocortex, indicating a high level of control on viewers' minds;
-High ISC was also extensive (45 percent) for "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly";
-Lower ISC was recorded for "Curb Your Enthusiasm" (18 percent) and for the Washington Square Park, or unstructured reality, clip (less than 5 percent)

"Our data suggest that achieving a tight control over viewers' brains during a movie requires, in most cases, intentional construction of the film’s sequence through aesthetic means," the researchers wrote. "The fact that Hitchcock was able to orchestrate the responses of so many different brain regions, turning them on and off at the same time across all viewers, may provide neuroscientific evidence for his notoriously famous ability to master and manipulate viewers' minds. Hitchcock often liked to tell interviewers that for him 'creation is based on an exact science of audience reactions.' "

Frickin' Hitchcock.

Information about the original study may be found here. Now the cinetrix is wondering how she can use this power for awesome in the classroom....

Ghobadi at MoMA

Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi is depressed. He's been waiting two years for permission from the Iranian government to begin work on his next film, and the U.S. gov't goons denied his recent application for a visa.

Yet! Via Skype and the agile translation skills of his girlfriend, freelance reporter [and former Miss North Dakota] Roxana Saberi, Ghobadi managed to address the participants at the Flaherty Seminar not once but twice last week. What a lovely fellow.

If you're in New York, hie thee to MoMA to see his films, running now through July 7. From the program:

Bahman Ghobadi was born in 1969 in Baneh, a city near the Iran-Iraq border in the province of Iranian Kurdistan. When he was twelve, civil disputes forced his entire family to immigrate to the provincial capital of Sanandaj. Ghobadi studied industrial photography and film directing at the Iranian Broadcasting College, but he honed his filmmaking skills shooting short documentaries on 8mm film as he traveled and collected stories among the Kurdish people. By the mid-1990s, Ghobadi's short films had begun to receive recognition in Iran and abroad. His short film Life in Fog—the true story of a fourteen-year-old boy who provides for his siblings after the death of their parents on the Iran/Iraq border—was a landmark in Iranian documentary cinema and formed the basis for his full-length narrative feature A Time for Drunken Horses (1999). The first Kurdish feature film in the history of Iranian cinema, Drunken Horses brought Ghobadi recognition as the country's foremost Kurdish director. Ghobadi's dramatic and documentary films explore the resilience and culture of the Kurdish people who live in the border areas of Iran and Iraq. Filled with scenes of beautiful yet extreme and harsh landscapes, the films tell poetic stories of people facing life and hardship with courage and joy.

Flaherty at MoMA: The Films of Bahman Ghobadi takes place on the occasion of the fifty-fourth Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, "The Age of Migration." The annual Flaherty Seminar focuses on the art of nonfiction film, and each year MoMA presents a selection of the titles discussed. All films written and directed by Ghobadi, made in Iran, and in Farsi with English subtitles.

Flaherty followup

Now where was I? Ah, yes. Tuesday. A week ago. Whatever.

Tuesday night: My America... or Honk If You Love Buddha (1997), Renee Tajima-Pena

Wednesday morning: A Time for Drunken Horses (2000), Bahman Ghobadi

Wednesday afternoon: In Vanda's Room (2000), Pedro Costa

Wednesday evening: Squiggle (2005), Oliver Husain; Dan Carter (2006), Alison Kobayashi; Monument of Sugar: How to Use Artistic Means to Elude Trade Barriers (2007), Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan

Thursday morning: False Friends (2007), Sylvia Schedelbauer; A Short Film for Laos (2006), Allan Sekula; On That Day (2008), Babak Amini; The Piggy Bank That I Found (2008), Arsham Naghshbandi; War Is Over! (2003), Bahman Ghobadi

Thursday afternoon: Contained Mobility (2004), Ursula Biemann; This Shall Be A Sign (2007), James T. Hong; Border (2004), Laura Waddington

Thursday night: Green Dolphin (2008), Oliver Husain; Calavera Highway (2008), Renee Tajima-Pena

Friday morning: Casa de Lava (1994), Pedro Costa