exit through the gift shop

Trailer BANKSY- EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP from alamode film on Vimeo.

Fascinatingwildride

Milk

Doesn't really look like Sean Penn or Harvey Milk. Maybe it lands somewhere between them both.

The film is a great recreation of a person and a moment. Both remain wholly relevant in excruciating ways. The documentary footage was moving - from the opening scenes of gay men clandestinely gathering in bars and hang outs in the '50s and '60s through to news footage from the '70s. As a whole, it was a very specific celebration of being alive, present, and someone doing something with their life after forty. At the end of the film there were images of the actors and then the people they played - young, idealistic and alive. Excepting one instance, this was profoundly joyous and celebratory.

A. O. Scott, describing one scene in the NYT:
Everything is happening here — votes are tallied, hearts broken, lives risked and saved, tactical decisions made, emotions expressed and suppressed — but only one thing is happening. What makes all of this cohere is art, and history. This is how change happens. This is what it looks like.
This is exactly right, and ties this film to the one I wrote about yesterday.

subtle heroes

Are all Parisian films love letters to the city? For a lot of Flight of the Red Balloon the camera follows Simon and his nanny, Song, around Paris. The streets become familiar. Simon's mother, Suzanne, has some problems but, for the most part, she keeps them from touching Simon. The characters live ordinary lives. Throughout a lot of the film a red balloon hovers, like an all-seeing eye.
The balloon is featured in a film that Song is making. Outside of her film it also seems to stand for the way that art (or spirituality?) affects the ways that we see things. In giving extraordinary attention to the moments that make up the characters' lives the filmaker, Hou Hsiao Hsien, elevates them and makes them subtle heroes to one another. In the midst of her own stresses, Suzanne jokes with Simon as she asks him about his school day. Song freely gives her film and language skills to a needy Suzanne. People sharing their lives.