Moving right along, there's a new film review of mine at Jewish Week, on the painless little Brit comedy Sixty Six. Space didn't permit me to note that a lot of stuff that I found charming and/or funny in the film will go right past American audiences -- the supporters' rosettes, some of the class indicators, a few very well-disguised inside football jokes, the sight of Bobby Charlton with a full head of, well, a lot more hair than he has now anyway. I can't recall if the film includes the most famous call in British sports broadcasting ("They think it's all over . . . well, it is"), the soccer equivalent of "Havlicek stole the ball!" or Russ Hodges 16 iterations of "the Giants win the pennant" or Al Michaels "Do you believe in miracles." I suppose a London audience would notice immediately but that close to the end of the film I was probably thinking about my deadline.
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I'm not in the habit of recommending books I haven't read. Of course, the wonderful Rev. Sydney Smith said that reading a book before reviewing it was a mistake, because "it prejudices one so." But I am a follower of Scott Kirsner's blog, CinemaTech (you can see the link in my blogroll), which covers the new technologies and how the affect the film industry, so when he announced the other day in his blog that his new book was coming out, my ears pricked up. The book, Inventing the Movies:Hollywood's Epic Battle Between Innovation and the Status Quo, from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs, I was excited. A history of the American film industry as told through its love-hate relationship with new technologies? There couldn't be a better time for such a book than right now, and Kirsner is someone who will have intelligent things to say on the subject. Officially the book isn't available yet -- it's not on Amazon -- but in reality, there's a link from his blog to the distributor, and I've already ordered my copy. (Heck, maybe I'll write about it after I've actually read it.) Anytime you have an opportunity to buy a book from someone other than a large chain store or on-line Goliath, you're doing a good deed for some undercapitalized David.
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John Gianvito's Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, which opened Friday at Anthology Film Archive, is brilliant for about 52 of its 58 minutes. It feels like a more overtly political version of a James Benning landscape film, an odyssey across the United States to show us plaques, memorials, gravesites, etc. of great American radical activists, the kind of people who seldom get memorialized in this country. We see Sojourner Truth's grave and George Jackson's, signs indicating the location of Shay's Rebellion and the Homestead Strike; there must be a hundred of these sites in the film, in roughly chronological historical order. And we hear the faint rustling of the wind in the trees, that element that Jean-Marie Straub said was present in silent film but missing from sound movies. (Straub would undoubtedly enjoy this film.) Most of these memento mori are in various states of disrepair, indicative not only of our neglect of many aspects of American history, but also of the inexorable work of nature on human-made objects. Gianvito underlines this secondary theme with a series of shots at the end of the journey, situating one of the last sites on an overgrown traffic island (if memory serves); through the leafy green trees we can see across the street and there is, lo and behold, the Golden Arches.
If the film ended there, it would be a bitterly funny comment on how far we have come from the colonial period. But Gianvito, understandably and even correctly I think, wants to end on a more affirmative note. He cuts to footage of one of the protests in NYC at the Republican Convention. These people are clearly part of the lineage that produced the nearly forgotten agitators for peace, equality, women's rights, abolition of slavery and other noble causes.
If the film ended there, it would be one of the most powerful and physically beautiful films I've seen this year.
But it doesn't. Instead, we get something like five solid minutes of shaky hand-held footage of protest rallies for many praiseworthy causes, with an almost deafening cacophony on the soundtrack. By ending the film this way, Gianvito turns it from a subtly worked out and highly intelligent political statement into a shrill bumper-sticker. I saw Profit Motive at Tribeca this spring and I must say that I haven't been more depressed by a cinematic lost opportunity all year. By all means, go see the film at Anthology, where it is playing through August 7, but you might want to leave a few minutes before the final credit crawl begins.
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