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Film and the Arts
Mighty Movie Podcast: Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel on Louder Than a Bomb
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Interviews
- Published on Friday, 20 May 2011 20:49
- Written by Daniel Persons
I'm basically down with anything that celebrates language, but Louder Than a Bomb is something special. Based around the 2008 Louder Than a Bomb youth poetry slam that took place in Chicago, the film focuses on four high school teams as they face the difficulties of prepping and competing in the event. In the midst of that, we get a look at the wide diversity of teens courting the muse of poetry, from a Jewish prep school student who brings an incendiary attack to his material, to a young man brought up in a household ravaged by drugs and a young woman confronting her responsibilities in helping to raise an autistic brother. Similar to The Arbor, which we covered previously, the film explores both the opportunities and limits of art to help shape a life. Unlike The Arbor, there's more than a little hope in the outcome.
Click the player to hear my interview with directors Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel.
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British Director Justin Chadwick Gets the Gold Star for "The First Grader"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Interviews
- Published on Friday, 20 May 2011 13:21
- Written by Brad Balfour
On the surface, The First Grader tells a basic heartfelt story about an old man, the 
84-year-old Kimani N'gan'ga Maruge, finally fulfilling a long-unresolved dream -- to learn to read. Against much prejudice and bureaucratic nonsense, he enrolls in a primary school out in the countryside with first graders to take advantage of a new law that makes primary school free and available to everyone.
Of course, there are many more wrinkles to the story than just that premise. This all takes place in Kenya, a country fraught with many tribes, conservative customs and a resistance to things that rock society -- which is why the Mau Mau rebellion that eventually drove out the British in the late '50s/early '60s took a long time to happen. Maruge had been one of those rebels and had suffered dearly for it.
Mighty Movie Podcast: Clio Barnard on The Arbor
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Interviews
- Published on Friday, 29 April 2011 21:59
- Written by Daniel Persons
Director Clio Barnard uses what was originally a theatrical technique in her hybrid documentary/drama The Arbor: She interviewed the friends, family, and acquaintances of the late playwright Andrea Dunbar and her troubled daughter Lorraine, then brought in actors to lip-synch to the resulting soundtrack. The process, shot partly in the working-class housing project that Dunbar both grew up in and chronicled in such plays as The Arbor and Rita Sue and Bob Too, surprisingly results in a singularly filmic experience — intimate, intense, thoughtful, and at times disturbing. That the lives of these two women contain no shortage of drama — despite her success, Andrea never moved out of her neighborhood and, after having born three children out of wedlock and lapsed into alcoholism, died at 29 of a brain hemorrhage, while Lorraine eventually became a heroin addict and prostitute before bearing three children herself — only helps to make The Arbor a stunningly unique look into the both the potential and limits of art to redeem a life.
Click on the player to hear my interview with Barnard.
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Mighty Movie Podcast: Bertrand Tavernier on The Princess of Montpensier
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Interviews
- Published on Friday, 15 April 2011 02:00
- Written by Daniel Persons
Supposedly, when Madame de Lafayette wrote her 17th century novella, The Princess of Montpensier, she was chronicling the romantic intrigues of her own time. Propriety, however, prevented her from making the parallels between her fictional characters and their real-life counterparts too obvious, so she displaced the drama some sixty years earlier, when France was torn apart by a civil war between Catholics and Protestants.
Come the twenty-first century, and director Bertrand Tavernier is able to bring some modern insight — plus a love for John Ford’s way of weaving strong character with historical action — to his lush, stylish adaptation of the tale. With Mélanie Thierry as the young princess trapped between duty to her family and a growing realization of her own identity, Lambert Wilson as the guardian who instills the spark of autonomy in her, and Gaspard Ulliel and Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet as the men who fall in love with her almost in spite of themselves, The Princess of Montpensier is an ambitious melding of history and romantic drama.
Click on the player to hear my interview with Tavernier.
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