![]() ![]() The first time we see Frank Tassone, the beloved public-school administrator Hugh Jackman plays in Bad Education, he’s striding onto the stage of an auditorium to a roar of applause. The radical turns in Ali’s second half are abrupt and disconcerting, yet they operate on the unshakable logic that no one can be fully extricated from the world around them even goodhearted folks like Salem and Mira wind up perpetuating the conditions that exploit them. But just when the two seem cast off as victims, Fassbinder flips the entire premise on its head, showing how their bond relies on (and feeds off of) the same cruel machinations used to pry them apart. Their relationship starts on a dare, but it grows on their shared loneliness and need for companionship, leading to a shotgun marriage that enrages Mira’s grown children and alienates her from her neighbors and coworkers. Ducking into a bar on a rainy night, Mira is shunned by the blonde bartender (Barbara Valentin) and the mostly Arab clientele, but Salem reaches out to her, in a gesture based less on attraction than defiance. In the opening scene, director Rainer Werner Fassbinder introduces a pair of absurdly mismatched dance partners: El Hedi ben Salem, a handsome Moroccan laborer in his 40s, and Brigitte Mira, a dowdy German housecleaner more than 20 years his senior. Made only two years after the calamitous 1972 Olympics in Munich, where Israeli athletes were taken hostage and later killed by Palestinian terrorists after a botched rescue attempt by German authorities, Ali: Fear Eats The Soul openly examines the racial tension between natives and Arab immigrants. 4 Little Girls is an important act of historical preservation, a focused and effective film that brings back a dark, important moment in history with startling clarity. As emotional as most of them get, they also find a way to convey their still-strong dedication to the principles for which the four girls served as unfortunate martyrs. Bombing it was meant to strike a critical blow to the protesters, and part of the reason it didn’t can be found in the resilience evident in interviews with the victims’ families and other survivors. Martin Luther King called Birmingham “the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States,” and within it, the 16th Street Baptist Church played a key role in the mounting protests of the early ’60s. 4 Little Girls tells the story in full, with emphasis on the volatile environment leading up to the bombing. That’s all a lot of people know of the event, other than that it served as a turning point in the civil-rights movement, and Lee’s film attempts to correct that oversight. ![]() Ĥ Little Girls, Spike Lee’s documentary about the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, opens with Joan Baez’s recording of “Birmingham Sunday” and the gravesites bearing the names of the four girls killed in that bombing. ![]() Infused with elements of screwball romantic comedy, it uses a tightly written spy story to explore issues of trust with maturity and cool sophistication. ![]() Robert Donat’s dash across the Scottish highlands may anticipate the large-scale pleasures of Cary Grant fleeing crop-dusters and scaling the face of Mount Rushmore, but the film has distinction beyond a mere warm-up. Early efforts like the 1927 silent thriller The Lodger had asserted a visual style in line with the German Expressionists, and his 1938 follow-up The Lady Vanishes affirmed his gift for dry, drawing-room wit, but The 39 Steps represents the ultimate distillation of Hitchcock’s strengths. All the classic elements of an Alfred Hitchcock movie are perfectly articulated in 1935’s The 39 Steps, which stands as both the culmination of his career to date in the UK and the genetic material for future masterpieces like Notorious and North By Northwest. An everyman hero who’s at once the pursuer and the pursued. ![]()
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