This Weekend at the Movies

Hello! There’s a bunch of stuff in the film section this week:

At the Varsity, you can watch the Oscar nominated short films (animated and live action) on the big screen. Some are interesting, some are cute, some not:

New Boy is about a boy who moves to Ireland from mystical Africa. And the other kids bully him, and he has daydreams about his dusty African classroom and one of those generic men with a machine gun who’s always menacing people in movies that are sort of lazily about Africa, and the Irish teacher is all “Jaaay-sis Mehrry ‘n’ Jhoooooseph!” and then the end.

Paul Constant luuuuuuurves Coraline:

Neil Gaiman’s young-adult novel Coraline is a fun, creepy read. A girl named Coraline, feeling neglected by her busy parents, goes through a hidden door in her new home and meets her adoring Other Mother, who soon proves to be a malevolent force. It’s the kind of book that feels as though it taps into the weird place in the collective unconscious where fairy tales originate. The animated film version of Coraline does the unthinkable: It surpasses the book in almost every way.

He also has high praise for Chocolate, which plays tonight (YOUR ONLY CHANCE!) at the Egyptian midnight movie:

Certainly someone, somewhere, must be offended by the premise of Chocolate. An autistic girl learns karate by watching kung-fu movies on television and then, after learning that her mother doesn’t have the money for chemotherapy, she goes on a rampage to collect from debtors. Surely this autism-fu is insensitive—the American trailer says, “From the people who brought you Ong-Bak, comes a special-needs girl with a special need to kick some ass”—but it’s also the premise for one of the best kung-fu movies to be released in America in recent memory.

Jen Graves’s mind is blown by the women of Liberia in Pray the Devil Back to Hell:

Want something done? Call the women of Liberia. In the documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, every few minutes brings a new chapter in their inspiring fight to end the civil war that ruined their lives for years: daughters raped, husbands’ heads gradually sawed off before their eyes, children nearly starved every day of their lives. In 2002 the women join together, Muslims and Christians, and lobby their respective religious leaders against President Charles Taylor’s regime and the equally abusive opposing faction of rebel warlords. When the peace talks—held in Ghana—languish and war at home escalates, the women rise up in Ghana. They join arms around the site to lock in the negotiators and threaten to strip naked (it is a curse to see your mother naked in Liberia)—and then, with the whole world watching, the men accept the women’s two-week deadline. Taylor goes into exile. In 2005, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is elected president of Liberia. She is the first woman to be elected head of state in Africa. The women of Liberia have rocked their entire continent.

Charles Mudede recommends I, Pierre Rivière and Back to Normandy at the Northwest Film Forum:

The best way to go about this is to first read Michel Foucault book, Moi, Pierre Rivière, which concerns a terrible document of a terrible crime that happened at the moment, 1835, that modern psychiatry, criminology, and psychology were born in France. In the murders committed by Pierre Rivière (he killed three members of his family), his almost rational confession/explanation of the crime, and the state’s response to his brutal case—in all of this Foucault, the philosopher of “ruptures,” saw a breaking point: a point at which our current world of crime and punishment broke with the old one. After reading the book, one should watch René Allio’s movie, I, Pierre Rivière, which was made in 1976 and dramatizes the rural murders. Lastly, there is Back to Normandy, a documentary about the making of I, Pierre Rivière. Here Foucault’s book, Allio’s movie, and a real farming community that participated in the film add dark layers to Pierre Rivière document.

And I like the slow, geeky Antarctica documentary Ice People at the Grand Illusion:

Is anything weirder, more interesting, and fraught with potential than places where humans never go? In Ice People, Antarctic geologists—tiny people in big landscapes—dig holes, sip coffee, watch the clock, weather windstorms, pour urine into a urine funnel, climb huge mountains you’ve never heard of, and try to uncover the mysteries of Antarctica’s Dry Valleys. “You have to take yourself out of your human world and put yourself in the geology world,” says one scientist, quietly (everything is quiet). “And now I’m just rocks and tills and glaciers.”

Things to disregard: Push (“a travelogue of the most beautiful hotels, markets, and restaurants of Hong Kong—with a bunch of actors running around, waving their hands in ridiculous ways, and mucking up the shot”); The Uninvited (“a mélange of lameness, some kind of bad-movie casserole”); Fan Boys (“an awful movie on so many levels that it’s difficult to choose one facet of awfulness to begin with”).

And in Concessions, I attended a fancy SIFF/Gucci party:

I cornered SIFF Cinema’s publicist to get to the bottom of things. He told me that Gucci is one of SIFF’s major sponsors this year, and then he said something about a foundation that had something to do with Martin Scorsese, and then he said he didn’t know how to pronounce “Scorsese” even though he had done it correctly only moments before.

This is getting ridiculously long, so for all your other Limited Runs and Movie Times needs, check our film page here. It’s a good weekend for the movies. Hop to it.