roachboy

until when... Dahna Abourahme

an excellent documentary about palestine that focuses on the situations of a sequence of families who live in refugee camps around bethlehem and hebron, who have been there since 1948. it does what a documentary can do well: blasting apart omissions in the dominant information streams simply by showing something of what is omitted.

marie antoinette: sofia coppola

any film about the middle 18th century that opens with a gang of four song playing is ok by me. like gang of four, the film provided entertainment. sofia coppola does baz luhrman on a smaller scale and in a less adventerous way.

to my surprise, i enjoyed the film. kirsten dunst is good in it. the costumes and sets are amazing. the music is interesting.

in the end, i almost didnt mind (a) the politics behind the antonia fraser book it's based on, which are kinda creepy in a royalist sorta way and (b) that the film tried to cover too much chronological ground and so ended up with sequences that seemed just tacked on. like the whole of the french revolution. but this was made up for by the film's portrayal of lous 16 and marie as something of what they are reputed to be: not terribly bright, not at all ready to be king and queen of france....interesting.

like most "making of..." docs, the one that is on this dvd made me want to drive tacks into my head. i watch them anyway. i do not know why.



hunger: Henning Carlsen (1966)

now this is an excellent film, shot in glorious black and white, about a writer who is starving to death.
just see it.
dont argue----just go out, find it and watch it.
it's great. .

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite