Sa’ah is a Native American student documentary/essay by Sarah Del Seronde. Although about serious matter, it is light, unpretentious, loose-appearing although in reality unemphatically associative, focused and deftly coherent. Del Seronde’s mother is Navajo (Diné); her father, French. Del Seronde’s voiceover speaks the internalized words of others: a Diné medicine man; her maternal grandmother. She […]
Daily Archives: April 22, 2009
Whereas Shohei Imamura’s Narayama bushiko (1983) is more anthropological, Keisuke Kinoshita’s earlier version of the ancient legends and Shichirô Fukazawa’s twentieth-century stories primarily reflects on Japanese traits, such as traditionalism and submissive obedience, that led to the Second World War and the world’s—or at least the U.S.’s—atomic rebuke. Kinoshita’s film took three Kinema Junpo awards: […]
Born in Tel Aviv to Iraqi refugees, Duki Dror—the family changed their Arabic name Darwish to Dror, meaning freedom—makes films about ambiguous, conflicted cultural identity. His lovely, aching The Journey of Vaan Nguyen, from Israel, is in Vietnamese, Hebrew and English. The film’s eloquent pace is set to the tranquil hum of the moped that […]
Raunchy, cruel, soap operatic, sickeningly violent, Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler is a worse, even more ridiculous comeback-film than Sidney Lumet’s The Verdict (1982). It suggests that I was right to stay away from Aronofsky’s films following his dismal debut, Π (1997); Aronofsky is too uninterested in the human condition to be any sort of artist. […]
Dennis Grunes 