Miramax | USA | 100 mins
Love is impossible to calculate, or solve. It comes about and lasts, or fades away, rather inexplicably. In one, short, sloppy but completely true sentence is explained John Madden’s Proof, a small little gem full of performances that ache in the aftermath of a first viewing. Gwyneth Paltrow plays Catherine, the tortured genius daughter of a tortured genius father, who’s played by Anthony Hopkins. Her father has just passed away, but Catherine continues to speak to him, hallucinating his presence throughout the film.
David Auburn, who adapted the film from his play, handles this father-daughter interaction nicely, relying solely on the conversation between the two people and ignoring the mortal aspects Catherine’s hallucinations ignore as well. This is not a film about special effects, after all, but rather about the oddity of human relationships.
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Desperate Pictures | US | 99 mins
Mysterious Skin is a film that will leave viewers in a state of disgust and confusion. While it is shocking and disturbing, which is probably an understatement, peeling back the layers of shock that saturate every frame will reveal one of the most poignant and brutally honest accounts of the lifelong effects of sexual abuse on children. A film so raw and intense that you’ll begin to feel uneasy and think of yourself more a voyeur on someone’s insanely twisted life than tucked safely in your average home with your seemingly uneventful life. Reality will blur to the point you won’t be able to tell if you’re incredibly disgusted or incredibly interested and you will just be still — still to the raw story telling of Gregg Araki and locked into the haunting performance of Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Read the full story
Anchor Bay Entertainment | USA | 100 minutes
(The following review contains minor spoilers)
When you hear the name Fred Durst usually an image of Limp Bizkit on TRL in 2000 comes to mind. You think stereotypical hard rock ass. What you probably don’t think is film director and especially not dramatic film director, but that is exactly what is seen in Durst’s directorial debut The Education of Charlie Banks. The film had a limited release after receiving the “Made in NY Narrative Award” at the Tribeca Film Festival. It was then released on DVD at the end of June 2009. The film stars Jessie Eisenberg (Adventureland) and Jason Ritter (W.).
The title of the film is very true as it is dealing with the title character Charlie Banks (Eisenberg) learning how to cope with his “boogeyman.” A child hood bully named Mick whom he shares a mutual friend with. Charlie and Mick first meet at a party when Mick ends up getting into a fight with and brutally beating two guys who decided to get rough with him. This is where we first get a glimpse of the brutality that Mick is capable of. Finally wanting to put closure to his fear of Mick, Charlie goes to the cops and gives a statement that would have the potential to put Mick away for good, but after having a talk with the mutual friend — never revealing that he was the one who went to the cops — decides to withdraw his statement. This is the last we hear or see of Mick for a while.
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There’s a very good chance that even if you’re reading a site like this you’ve never heard of The War Zone. A title like that one would assume leads to a movie about death and destruction between two nations on a battlefield. But in fact it’s a movie that deals with something that is arguably more personal than seeing someone die in battle from a war of a fading generation. The War Zone deals with something much more taboo and something that most people will thankfully never experience in any real shape or form, and that is incest.
The War Zone was released in 1999 to critical praise, but due to it’s subject matter it received an expectedly small release of major cities and really nowhere else. One of the most surprising things you’ll learn about the movie is that it was directed by actor Tim Roth (Pulp Fiction, The Incredible Hulk). It’s the only film he had directed before or has directed since, and I get the idea he directed only that film because the story was something that resonated in him, and he felt the need to direct it. Roth discussed this in an interview with Charlie Rose that seems to have dissapeared from YouTube, but he said something to the extent of that he “hates the fact that this movie exists” because “it shows that these things are still occuring right now, going unstopped”. The movie was also written by Alexander Stuart, based on his own novel, that was inspired by the death of his son in 1989.
The basic plot of the movie is structured around Tom (Freddie Cunliffe), a boy of about sixteen or seventeen who is upset due to the fact that his family has recently moved from the city of London to the English county of Devon, where he doesn’t know anyone and misses his friends. By setting the story in this rainy, bleak looking countryside, Roth sets up the tone of the movie in the first few scenes. He has a father (Ray Winstone), who in the movie is only known as “Dad”, a sister of about eighteen named Jessie (Lara Belmont), and a mother (Tilda Swinton), only known as “Mom”, who is in the late stages of pregnancy with a third child. The movie sets up the family dynamic very easily. We get to know everyone’s relationships with each other through simple physical actions and words; the father is somewhat strict but is raising his kids to be respectful, and as such treats them that way. Tom and Jessie are very comfortable with each other and share a brother-sister dynamic that doesn’t feel like it was rehearsed before the cameras started rolling. The mother is taken good care of by the whole family due to her pregnancy and is treated in a fragile way. The family here is also very comfortable with themselves, because when they never find the need to put clothes that were otherwise not on at the present moment (the father in one scene walks around nude, as does the mother, and during a pivotal scene Jessie is fully nude during the waist up whilst talking to Tom). Taking time to set them up and their relationships ultimately makes the rest of what follows all the more harrowing.
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Editor’s Note: This is the first post in what will become a regular column here on The Film Stage titled Off Stage. The intent of Off Stage is to expose the average movie-goer to films that were otherwise unheard-of or only made a small splash in the mainstream. There are many incredible films produced all the time that for various reasons only get a very limited domestic release if any release at all. Unlike your loyal film-geeks here at The Film Stage, not everyone is able to follow everything put to celluloid and we want you to enjoy all the films we do. Stay tuned to The Film Stage for coverage and reviews on all the great films you didn’t hear about.
“Once, not long ago, a small Egyptian police band arrived in Israel. Not many remember this. It was not that important.”
The Alexandria Police Ceremonial Orchestra arrives in Israel at the request of the Arab Cultural Center in Peta Tikva to play at their grand opening. With the potential disbanding of the Orchestra, the stoic leader and conductor Colonel Tawfiq Zacharya (Sasson Gabai) is determined to make the trip a success and bring honor to the Orchestra. Despite his best efforts the band runs into problems immediately upon arrival. The band is stranded in a foreign land unable to reach anyone who could help them. Attempting to find transportation on their own, the Arabic/Hebrew language barrier mistakenly sends them to a small empty town in the Israeli desert called Betah Tikva and not the Petah Tikva that invited them to play. With no more buses until morning and no hotels in the town the band finds themselves marooned for the night dependent on the kindness of strangers. A group of Arab men stuck in an Israeli town provokes thoughts of conflict and turmoil. However we are shown that even in the midst of a problem as large as Israeli/Arabic conflict that we are all cut from the same cloth and the emotions and personalities that make us who we are transcend political and religious boundaries.
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