Mooi opZuid

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Another view into a dysfunctional family from director Noah Baumbach. In my memory The Squid and the Whale was a better movie than this one. I like these movies which have this kind of uncomfortable feeling, but here there doesn’t seem to be much more. No real plot, one (anticipated) dramatic event [spoiler]: the wedding is off. Almost all characters are flawed or unsympathetic in some way, but funny enough I didn’t hate them, they just annoyed me every now and then. Maybe that’s what is good about this movie; it mirrors one’s own experiences in dealing with family at weddings. Didn’t get those neighbours, what was the purpose of them in this story?

Cool set of images uncovering unknown and secret worlds of mainly industry and research facilities. The effect is surprisingly vulnerable and beautifull. Taryn Simon is one of the two winners of the Paul Huf Award 2007.

Interview with Taryn Simon in the Morning News

Strong series of photographs showing the offices of the Stasi, the secret police in the former DDR. They look staged, like movie sets, but incredible these rooms are exactly the same as they were 20 years ago. They air a serene mood, but you can feel the weighing history.

I got to see this documentary last night, marking the five-year point of American involvement in Iraq. It deals with the (lack of) planning of what to do after military operations would finish. I was surprised to see that, although they started late, there was a great deal of planning, but throughout the film it becomes evident that all good intentions got overruled by the inner circle around the president. In this documentary there are a lot of interviews with the people involved with this planning and they are all left with the question why all advice from the experts was neglected. This documentary doesn’t have an answer, either, mainly because none of the decision makers in Washington wanted to cooperate with the makers of this film. A couple of key decisions are important: first of all Bush signing over full control over post-war Iraq to the Pentagon. And secondly, the actions of Paul Bremer; the firing of all Baath party members and the disbandment of the Iraqi army, leaving hundreds of thousand able men with no future or income and rendering the country into total chaos. The question remains; was this all part of some alternate (evil) strategy by Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, or was it just plain stupidity and enormous arrogance.

Go…See.

Incredible to see a young Sidney Lumet already so accomplished. The extreme bare setting of almost only a jury room is never boring throughout the entire length of the movie. Although the story is a bit too perfectly constructed for my taste, this movie is involving until the last minute. Never mind that all I got to see for ninety minutes were 12 sweaty middle aged men discussing a murder case!

So, another exploration by Van Sant in youth culture, this time the setting is the skate scene in Portland, Oregon. Alex has all the typical problems a sixteen year old can have; divorcing parents, girl trouble…but a nightly visit to Paranoid Park, the local skate park, start events of a much more serious caliber. The movie is beautifully shot by Christopher Doyle, the blank face of Alex always in the center, the grown-ups around him mostly vague, in a distance. The storyline is cut, jumps back and forth, like an incoherent told story, which is the way Alex is writing the letter in which he describes what happened. The dead guy in the night fades to a distant memory, no repercussions, just an episode in this kid’s life. This story is based on a novel by Blake Nelson.

A wonderful film based on the true story of Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby confined to the interior of his own body after a stroke, unable to move or speak. It’s almost scary how close this movie gets to you, let’s you feel through Jean-Do’s eyes the isolation and the struggle to regain his memory of what happened. We see fragments of unfinished events / encounters from before his stroke; his family, his girlfriend, his father. He has no way of communicating until he, through the help of a therapist, learns to ’speak’ by blinking his one functioning eye. This way he dictates the whole novel on which this movie is based. Beautiful and personal movie.