Film: April 2008 Archives
A few minutes of film can capture the imaginations of people from all walks of life. If you skate, you’ll know about this already. If you don’t, then fall in love with the intro to Lakai’s new film, Fully Flared. The risks they took to shoot it were pretty substantial - using napalm to blow things up will always incur some kind of risk - but the results speak for themselves. It's beautiful.
(1 comments)
“You can’t handle the truth!”... “I’ll never let go, Jack.”... “I love you honey bunny.”... “Say hello to my little friend!”... “I’m... kind of a big deal”... “Do the chickens have large talons?”
You could never quote from, say, an Italian Neorealist film of the 1940’s (unless in the right crowd) because it would transport you to Ubergeek status. Quoting films is about shared experience. ‘We both saw that film, we both liked that bit, and now we are connected by something.’
Sometimes though, a little soundbite won’t cut it, and not even the most talented impressionist can do justice to the quote, especially when it is intrinsically linked with the film’s music, cinematography and narrative. Lengthy monologues must be a really exciting and probably quite daunting thing for an actor to see when first reading the script; a chance to really impress himself on the character. A chance, even, to define the film.
A quote becomes a speech when it can only fully exist in its lengthy entirety. The one I’m thinking of has been borrowed by a second-rate football team (Plymouth Argyle, I think) when they were managerless for a short period, and they won every game using it as motivation. Undoubtedly thousands of over-excited American high school kids have embraced it as part of their sporting ritual, and there are those of us who just love it for what it is: The perfect speech at the perfect moment in a very good (as far as sports stories go) film.
Without further ado and with a healthy disregard for whether you like the film or not, this is a speech that those involved should be very proud of. Take a bow, Oliver Stone and of course, Al Pacino.
(1 comments)
Alex Gibney’s father was a U.S. naval interrogator with experiences of Japanese prisoners during World War II. He and his fellow men learned that torture was an ineffective means of withdrawing information from enemy prisoners. Before his death, he begged his son to make a film about the U.S.’s use of torture on untried prisoners and, by definition, its disregard for the rules of democracy in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. So Alex Gibney made that film, and this year, after his last project Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room was nominated for an Academy Award in 2005, the film won Best Documentary at The Oscars.
Taxi To The Darkside is a film about the systematic attempts made by the Bush administration to sidestep the laws laid down in the Geneva Convention to safeguard against the maltreatment of war prisoners. At its most essential, it’s an exposé of their hypocrisy in the loosely defined war on terror. What exactly is terror, though? Many things, of course, among them the demolition of commercial buildings in a foreign country, but equally the imprisonment of an innocent civilian, removed from the taxi he worked hard to acquire and thrust into a hostile prison complex where he is beaten, abused, stripped naked, deprived of sleep, chained to the ceiling and generally tortured until his body can take no more and he dies. That someone was a young Afghan civilian named Diliwar, and it’s his story that provides the framework for Gibney’s work.
From the Bagram facility in Afghanistan where young Diliwar was held through the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad from where those famous leaked photos of prisoners abused emerged, to Guantanamo and Washington D.C., it’s a deeply disturbing look into the military's use of torture on prisoners of war, sanctioned, the film reveals, by those at the very top: Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush. A ‘few bad apples’ was the somewhat flippant explanation they gave for the atrocities in Abu Ghraib, but that doesn’t stand up once you’ve seen the film. And you should, if only to fully understand quite what's been going on.
I shan’t go into the politics of it right here because the film takes care of all that and more. Suffice to say I left the first Film Knights event last night feeling like I finally understood the sheer gravity of it all. We wanted Gibney to introduce the film, but he proved impossible to track down. He must have quite a story. What does it take to create a film like this exactly? Courage, surely, but also faith, and lots of it:
“All I had was faith. You have to go in with a sense of faith that you’ll find something, and you keep digging and digging and digging until you get it.”
No doubt his father would be proud.
Taxi To The Dark Side is officially released in the UK on May 30th, 2008.
(0 comments)
LWLies and SUSO are proud to announce the first in our series of Film Knights, a new monthly event created to tell the tales and celebrate the stories of the courageous individuals, both sung and unsung, behind the best and the brave in cinema. In honour of imagination, creativity and determination in film, we kick things off with a screening of Taxi To The Darkside, preceded by a brief introduction from a representative from Reprieve, at 6.45pm on Tuesday April 8th at Curzon Soho.
And it’s free. All you need to pay is attention.
The event is guest-listed on a first come first served basis. RSVP to filmknights@littlewhitelies.co.uk
(1 comments)
What if you took a bunch of famous films, condensed them down into thirty seconds, and reenacted them with animated bunnies? Why, you’d get ANGRY ALIEN PRODUCTIONS.
Prepare to waste the rest of today. Favourites include The Exorcist, Titanic, Brokeback Mountain, Jaws, March of the Penguins - all of them dammit.
(3 comments)
