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Reviews
Aaru mbédd (2012)
The beat of Dakar. (TIFF 2012 Screening)
A very captivating film. It captured culture, art, and philosophy of a time and place although remote from the Canadian body, is still close to the human mind and condition.
The film contains spirit. It may be the spirit of the people of Dakar as they have been captured on film.
These directors need more funding so that they can create more films. I viewed The Walls of Dakar at the Toronto International Film Festival where the director, Abdoul Aziz Cissé was on-hand for a post-screening interview and Q & A with the audience. It was informative, although having Mr. Cissé present for the screening made it more memorable.
The film screening itself was meta-fictional in that I was able to experience, experiencing.
Waste Land (2010)
An inspiring and energetic work of art
"Waste Land" is a film that I picked up with interest. While the cover-art of the documentary caught my attention, the film itself proved to be much more complex, engaging, and fascinating, than I had originally imagined. A great documentary that captures: a time, place, and the ideology of a social group, working in the background of the ever present, cultural ideology.
Lower class lives are explored in a manner which not only illuminates the struggles that these individuals must go through, on a day to day basis, but also makes it clear that the cultural environment ; or landscape in Brazil, is changing.
Naked (1993)
Naked was heavily clothed.
While this film featured a cast of characters played excellently by the actors, it's plot was much too flat for me to fully enjoy. I absorbed both Nietzsche's theory of eternal recurrence through as explored by the film's character, Johny, as well as themes and motifs explored by the modernist writer, Samuel Beckett. Eerily enough, throughout watching this 1993 British film, I constantly had the feeling that I had already viewed this film.
To end, Samuel Beckett's quote: 'I can't go on, I must go on' - while being a quote that may very well be overused by my subconscious - came to mind throughout viewing this film.
The Rum Diary (2011)
'The Rum Diary' was a wild ride
This Bruce Robinson film - who has directed three films previous to this adaptation of the classic Hunter S. Thompson novel - hits the mark with an arrow soaked in gasoline. The cinematography is beautiful, the characters are rich and diverse, and the plot allows for an intricate interplay of various subplots that mesh together to create portrait of Puerto Rico during the late '50s.
Many fans of Thompson who have grown to know of him through the adaptation of 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' may be surprised to find that drug use is minimal in this narrative, -besides the LSD? which does not appear in the novel. Nonetheless there's enough intoxication and calamity in this film to please most Thompson die-hards.