Archive for month: February, 2009

The first hour was relentlessly depressing: Tiivii is told he has TB, is sent from his Arctic home to a big-city sanatorium, where no one speaks his language – and he makes no effort to learn French. Things perk up a bit when they locate an Inuit boy with TB who can translate, but the tugs on the heartstrings are too obviously plotted. Why anyone would want to make a movie on this subject, or spend 90 minutes in a TB sanatorium without communication beats me.
P.S. Hard to believe, as I discovered later, that this beat Amal, my favorite film of last year, for the Canadian “Oscar.”

The unfortunate title aside – there was no “man” in the movie and it was about so much more than loving Yngve – there was nothing I would change in this Norwegian coming-of-age story, a study, much like Juno, of that age when teenage rebellion and angst run up against real-world consequences. There was the dorky friend, the sexy girlfriend, the divorced parents, the loner bandmate, and holding it all together was the redhead Carlje, trying to live with the conflicting emotions that were tearing him up inside. The story revolved around good rock music, a real plus, and the culture was just different enough, yet totally recognizable, to add flair to the familiar story.  Think Catcher in the Rye, Ebony Tower, The Graduate…I smiled from the opening scene to the end – a wonderful SBIFF experience.

I was less than enthralled throughout, partially because I was never comfortable with the premise: a troubled mother abandons her infant in the backseat of a taxi and the genial driver spends two days trying to return or find a home for the baby. Not that this couldn’t happen – although finding such a saintly and handsome driver isn’t likely – just that my mind resisted it. Nothing much happens: the movie seems content to give us an overview of modern Kabul, and the ending is neither dramatically satisfying nor realistic. And I couldn’t help but compare this to two much better films from last year, Amal and The Kite Runner.

It was rather shocking to me to learn that the L.A. Times didn’t seriously  undertake to impartially cover the news until 1960, when 4^th-generation

Otis Chandler became publisher. Until then, it openly touted the Chandlers’ business and political interests, “inventing L.A.” in the process. This documentary was highly polished but lacking in focus: the first half was devoted to the history of L.A.; the second to the story of the Times, and the family feuding that killed the dynasty. As a primer to the L.A. backstory, however, it was a boon to this newcomer.

An engrossing, oh-so-Japanese indirect reflection on the death penalty, told through the story of prison guard Toru Hirai, who volunteers to assist at the execution-by-hanging of prisoner Kaneda the day before his wedding. I was confused by the intercutting of his two worlds: the prison drama unfolded in orderly fashion, but the world outside proceeded at a different pace, jumping ahead of the “present” at a point I couldn’t discern, to a point I couldn’t detect. Still, there were effective touches: keeping us ignorant of the prisoner’s crime, so he remained an abstract concept, allowing us to focus, interestingly, on the guards, not the usual focus of a death-penalty discussion. A solitary ant, representing, I suppose, “life” in the Buddhist cosmology, reappeared on several occasions; and there were directorial touches, like the straphanger nooses on the train, and the parallel drawings of the child and Kaneda, that deepened the experience – and reminded one of how the Japanese esthetic concentrates on a solitary object.