Botto plays Leo, a Spanish lawyer with a wife, child, and healthy masculine disgust at all things homosexual. When his wife dies of a seizure and he can't bring himself to answer his daughter's pleas for a surrogate mom, he gradually begins dressing as the deceased mom to help the child cope.
Stephen Frears's Tamara Drewe is essentially a Restoration sex comedy set in the English countryside.
So The Illusionist himself could be seen as a symbol of the traditional animator seeing his (or her) craft become a lost art.
I was glad that I saw Xavier Beauvois’s Of Gods and Men on the same day of the Toronto International Film Festival in which I saw Miral. The films, perhaps,… Continue reading "Of Gods and Men (Beauvois, 2010)"
I will cop to saying that Ishiguro is on my short list of greatest living writers in English and that Remains of the Day (also based on an Ishiguro novel) is one of my two or three all time favorite novel to film adaptations, so I'm not without baggage of my own in this debate.
I'm a little suspicious, though, about people who make films about their own friendships.
There's not a whole lot about Emilio Estevez's The Way that doesn't ring true. Given the fact that the film tackles some of life's deepest emotions and largest themes--grief, love, faith, community--that's quite a compliment.
A repeated hypothesis of Ferguson and his team was that such chutzpah comes from sustained periods of never being challenged--even as to obvious, verifiable facts--once one has been granted "inside" or "expert" status.
Perhaps it is anathema for me to say, being an academic, but there is something refreshing about reading a film book that eschews theory, that is interested in documenting the production history of a beloved film rather than deconstructing it and is more interested in telling us what the people who made the film said than it is in explaining what they (must have) meant.
If it invites but doesn't quite earn comparisons to Michael Mann's Heat, well, at least it has its sights set in the right direction.
