The Cleveland Free Times :: Music :: Local Dirt :: Shaun f The Dead
The News Review:
- The Cleveland Free Times :: Music :: Local Dirt :: Shaun f The Dead
- Dir: Paulo Morelli Brazil 106mins
- Film Reviews & Movie Showtimes | ‘Reservation Road’
The Cleveland Free Times :: Music :: Local Dirt :: Shaun f The Dead
Cleveland Free Times – Oct 24, 2007
He and partner Eric Andexler have formed Skin and Bone Productions for mask and prop design. Presumably they'll put their designs to use in another project of Vanek's the Haunted Yard (5800 Rousseau Dr. Parma) which was started 20 years ago by Andexler's brother Joel. It's free but they'll be taking donations for the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation… Wednesday ctober 31. It'll feature music by local DJs Mike Filly Goodlife Mike and Misterbradleyp – and you dancing in costume. That costume gets you in free – but make it good. – APWheeler's Theremin dysseyIts electronic tremolo has been heard on numerous vintage sci-fi soundtracks and utilized by Beach Boy Brian Wilson. The theremin was created in the early 20th century by Soviet scientist Leon Theremin before he was shanghaied into a USSR Batcave to become Stalin's mad genius assigned to invent secret death rays and force fields (true story; see the documentary Theremin: An Electronic dyssey). But what of his best-known achievement? Designed to be played without being touched the musician waving arms between its diverging antennae the theremin has been mastered by few.
Dir: Paulo Morelli Brazil 106mins
Screendaily.com – Screendaily.com (subscription) – Oct 24, 2007
Conducted by kids who can barely handle their automatic weapons the fighting is swift clumsy confusing and deadly. But the focus is arguably more on the innocent victims than it was in City of God (whose portrait of is various hoodlum anti-heroes was at queasy close-quarters). A telling scene follows the residents of Dead End Hill scurrying under metal shop shutter swiftly brought down as the gun-fighting starts and this concern for those caught in the crossfire is evident throughout. In one scene Ace and a shopkeeper overhear the sound gunfire having just learnt that Midnight has sentenced one of his crew to death. "ne less" Wallace says flatly a nice deadpan moment that underscores the way the community have become inured to violent death. Focussed on Wallace’s relationship with his father and on Ace’s with his kid the film examines the issue of paternity among young men in the favela a concern that echoes Boyz N the Hood (a distant forerunner to Cities of God and Men). With so many absent fathers kids inevitably look up to inappropriate role models like Midnight; and in one of the film’s best scenes Midnight takes a paternal almost kindly interest in Ace to conscript him to his gang handing over a gun as if it were a family heirloom… But with Heraldo proving as bad a real-life influence on Wallace the film ultimately applauds taking responsibility for one’s own actions and the more concrete bonds of friendship (with Ace and Wallace’s strained by the gang warfare) over unreliable father figures real and surrogate. More linear than the dazzlingly fragmented City of God City of Men also unfurls at a less frenetic pace. This allows for some beautifully played moments – there is a sweet scene between Wallace and his girlfriend Camila as they listen to music sharing MP3 headphones – but the crackling energy of Meirelles’s movie is sometimes missed. Cinematography by Adriano Goldman is superb capturing the Dead End Hill in all its distressed run-down squalor. This documentary feel is enlivened by some artful touches – such as the desaturated palette of the flashbacks to Ace and Wallace’s youth and the occasional lens flare from the white-hot sun that beats down unforgivingly on unfortunate residents of Dead End Hill. Production Companies2 FilmesGlobo FilmsFox FilmInternational SalesLumina Films US UK and English-speaking territoriesMiramax ProducersAndrea Barata RibeiroBel BerlinckFernando MeirellesPaulo Morelli ScreenplayElena So?z Story byPaolo MorelliElena So?z CinematographyAdriano Goldman EditorDaniel Ronconi MusicAntonio Pinto CastDouglas SilvaDarlan CunhaJonathan HaagensenRodrigo dos SantosCamila Monteiro.
Film Reviews & Movie Showtimes | ‘Reservation Road’
Silicon Valley's Metro – Oct 24, 2007
Terry George’s monotonous Reservation Road based on a novel by John Burnham Schwartz tries to twist that idea into knots. Never has there been a movie more in need of a haunted pet cemetery that brings back the dead. Ethan Learner (Joaquin Phoenix) is returning from an outing where his children were performing classical music; young son Josh (Sean Curley) had gathered fireflies in a jar and left the family car to release the bugs when they all stop for gas. Unfortunately one Dwight Arno (Mark Ruffalo) speeding home from a Red Sox game that went into extra innings is juggling his cell phone as he drives. He wants to return his son Luke to his ex-wife (Mira Sorvino) since she’s a stickler for promptness. Thus Dwight doesn’t see Sean on the road until it’s too late. Dwight speeds off hiding his car in the garage suffering the tortures of Raskolnikov as the police comb the area for evidence in the hit-and-run death… When Ethan asks the policeman just exactly how many of these hit-and-run crimes get solved he replies without hesitation or patronization: “I don’t know but I can find out for you. ” That may seem like a bland line in print but it’s unusual in the kind of melodrama where the cops are generally understood to be unfeeling do-nothings. In Ethan’s one classroom scene George tries to rattle the metal skeleton of the World Trade Center. A someplace-east-of-Suez student claims that America has gone soft because it doesn’t know how to suffer. Cut to Phoenix’s suffering eyes as the mouthy student apologizes. Later Ethan mistakenly believes that it was an Arab diplomat’s car that ran over his son. For that kind of current-events underpinning Reservation Road will be called “searing” in reviews.
Written by admin on October 24th, 2007 with
no comments.
Read more articles on News.