الجديد فى عالم المعرفة

الفيلم الحائز على جائزة الاوسكار كأفضل فيلم أجنبى
Tsotsi (2005)

http://indie.imdb.com/title/tt0468565/

Unforgettable

Tsotsi is gorgeous, riveting, poignant, and thrilling. Not only is it a first-rate piece of storytelling, but it also takes the viewer into a world of South African poverty and crime that he has never seen before. Director/writer Gavin Hood offers us a tale of tragic redemption and uncommon poetry in a subculture of the most abject immorality. Truly unforgettable.

The only work in recent times to which this movie can be compared is City of God. There, too, the viewer is brought into a world of poverty and crime he probably never knew existed. It is a world so bleak that it forces the viewer to examine his own morality and wonder how much of the civility he takes for granted in his life is merely the luxury of the well fed and comfortable. These characters live on the edge and their primary passion is survival.

What makes Tsotsi, in the end, a finer film than City of God is that it offers a more complex sense of hope; it reminds us in an honest and unsentimental way that inside even the hardest cases there is a soul, which is never beyond redemption

فيلم منا أخراج جورج كلونى عن حملة ماكارثى فى الخمسينات
Good Night and Good Luck. (2005)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433383/

Synopsis:
"Good Night, And, Good Luck." takes place during the early days of broadcast journalism in 1950's America. It chronicles the real-life conflict between television newsman Edward R. Murrow and Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. With a desire to report the facts and enlighten the public, Murrow, and his dedicated staff - headed by his producer Fred Friendly and Joe Wershba in the CBS newsroom - defy corporate and sponsorship pressures to examine the lies and scaremongering tactics perpetrated by McCarthy during his communist 'witch-hunts'. A very public feud develops when the Senator responds by accusing the anchor of being a communist. In this climate of fear and reprisal, the CBS crew carries on and their tenacity will prove historic and monumental.




Mind-bending films

Russian Ark (2002)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318034/

Review
In the history of cinema, it is the Russians who are generally credited with elevating film editing to a modern art form. It is ironic, and strangely fitting, therefore, that it should be the Russians who, almost a full century later, have now produced the first full-length feature film ever to be composed of a single unedited shot running uninterrupted from first moment to last (Hitchcock came close with `Rope,' but he did include a few `cuts' in the course of the film). Even Sergei Eisenstein, who, in films like `Potemkin' and `Ten Days That Shook the World' spent his career developing and demonstrating the power of editing, would, I dare say, be impressed by `Russian Ark,' a film every bit as innovative and challenging as those earlier seminal works.

For their bravura, awe-inspiring cinematic tour-de-force, director Alexander Sokurov and cinematographer Tilman Buttner take us into the famed Hermitage Museum and Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, providing us with a grand tour not only of the opulent rooms and famous artwork contained therein, but of 300 years of Russian history as well, as various vignettes involving famous people (from Peter and Catherine the Great to Nicholas and Alexandra) and events are played out within the glorious gilded walls.

`Russian Ark' is a bold and audacious project that is the cinematic equivalent of a breathlessly performed high wire juggling act. We know that one false move on the part of the actors or the cameraman, one missed cue or accident of fate could bring the whole delicately poised enterprise crashing down around them. How often, one wonders, did a perfectionist like Sukorov have to resist the temptation to yell `Cut!' to his actors and crew? It's truly amazing to see just how beautifully planned and flawlessly executed the final product turns out to be, especially the ball sequence at the end which features hundreds of dancers and spectators who are set in beautifully choreographed and constantly whirling motion. What's most remarkable is how much of a participant the camera itself is in the proceedings. Not content to stand idly by and observe the scene like some passive onlooker, the camera moves right into the center of the action, gliding in and out of the crowds with utmost grace and precision. Visually, the film is stunning, with exquisite costumes and furnishings as far as the eye can see. Indeed, `Russian Ark' is, among other things, a veritable feast for the eyes, the likes of which we have rarely seen on film before.

`Russian Ark' does have something of a `plot,' involving a narrator whom we never see, a 21st Century filmmaker – we assume it's Sukorov himself - who's found himself inexplicably caught in some type of time warp and magically transported to this strange spectral world. There's also a bizarre European `ghost' figure from the unspecified past who comments - and occasionally attempts to intrude – on the actions taking place around him. But these two characters are of far less interest to the audience than the aural and visual delights of the film itself.

`Russian Ark' is a wonder to behold, for it is much more than just an `exercise,' a `gimmick,' or even an `antithesis' to Eisenstein; it is a vibrant work of art that challenges the limits of its medium and reminds us of just what it is about movies that we love so much.


Timecode

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0220100/

Review

Mike Figgis does a Robert Altman. Except, instead of creating a large narrative of interconnecting plot strands, he puts them all on four split screens. Is this therefore more subversive than Altman? I don't think so - Altman's method is an attack on Hollywood linearity, on conventional methods of 'connection'; his characters exist is the same space but are emotionally etc. miles apart. The characters in 'Short Cuts', like the city of L.A. itself, are a mass without a centre. Figgis, for all the supposed diffusion of his visual strands, actually reunites, glues together Altman's ruptures. In this way it might seem a more optimistic kind of film. It isn't.

'timecode' is being touted as a revolution in cinema, a new way of watching films. Instead of watching one screen and being led by a director, we are given four, and asked to make our choices. I was surprised at how panicked I was at this in the first 20 minutes, darting between scenes, wondering which one I should follow. This forced me out of the film much more disturbingly than anything by Fassbinder or Godard. But this alienation is deceptive. Firstly we are not really bombarded by four narratives - put 'pierrot le fou', 'diary of a country priest', 'vampyr' and 'branded to kill' on four screens, then you'd be confused. Figgis leads you all the way, gives you an illusion of choice, but rarely fulfils it. The focus is on one screen at a time - either the soundtrack is turned up loudest, the plot is more interesting, whatever. For long periods of time, you can safely ignore other scenes because there is nothing going on - for about 20 minutes, for example, Lauren sits in a limousine listening to a bug planted on Rose; this leaves us free to watch another screen and see what she's listening to. Other scenes are merely tedious - eg Emma droning to her shrink (a nod to Godard's 'week end', that famous end of cinema?) - so that you gladly look elsewhere. It is possible to listen to one scene, and flit around at the others to catch up on what's going on.

What I'm saying is, 'timecode' is not a difficult experience - after the initial adjustment, you watch the film as you would any other, especially as all the stories converge and are really only one story. Even at the beginning, the feeling is less one of Brechtian alienation than akin to being a security guard faced with a grid of screens - you rarely think about the physical processes of film or performance, as you would in a Dogme or Godard film.

So if 'timecode' is less revolutionary than it seems, that doesn't mean it isn't a brilliant film, a real purse in a pig's ear of a year (or whatever the expression is). One reason for this is the four-screen structure: I would have to watch it a few more times, but I was very conscious of the orchestration of the screens, the way compositions, or camera movements, or close-ups etc., in one screen were echoed, reflected, distorted in the others - a true understanding of this miraculous formal apparatus would, I think, give us the heart of the film, and bely the improvised nature of the content. Figgis is also a musician - he co-composed the score - and the movement here, its fugues and variations are truly virtuosic, almost worthy of my earlier Altman comparison.

But the content is great fun too. At first I was disappointed at the self-absorbed drabness of the material, the idea that we shouldn't be made to work too hard because we've enough to deal with the four screens. And, it is true, that the stories rarely transcend cliche. But, such is the enthusiasm of the performers (people like Salma Hayek obviously relishing slightly more useful roles than the bilge they're usually stuck in); the precision of the structure; the mixture of comedy and pathos, and the way the style facilitates both, that you're convinced you're watching a masterpiece. Quentin's massaging and Ana's pitch are two of the funniest things I've seen in ages, while Stellan Skarsgard's rich performance stands out all the more for its brittle surroundings