Tag: films

La Misma Luna

Monday, March 10th, 2008 | All Things, Film

Our film tonight was Patricia Riggen’s feature debut, Under the Same Moon (La Misma Luna)… it’s unclear to me why the English title adds the preposition. The press materials prominently note that the film premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival where it received a standing ovation. On the strength of that audience buzz, Fox Searchlight and The Weinstein Company purchased the rights for $5 million, making it the second largest sale at the festival that year.

Under the Same Moon is the story of a young boy (Adrian Alonso) making a perilous journey across the U.S./Mexico border to be reunited with his mother (Kate del Castillo), who is working as a maid in Los Angeles. The film also features brief cameos by America Ferrara of ABC’s Ugly Betty and Grammy Award-winning Mexican band Los Tigres del Norte.

I was reminded of another film set against the thorny backdrop of illegal immigration: Gregory Nava’s excellent El Norte, which I first watched in Sra. Slavin’s sophomore Spanish class. There, it was a brother and sister fleeing war-torn Guatemala for a “better” life in California (“Take me! I’m a strong pair of arms!”); Under the Same Moon broadcasts similar messages about the plight of undocumented Mexican workers struggling to survive in the United States.

The main focus, though, is about the love between mother and son. Despite an all-too-predictable trajectory and deliberately heart-tugging melodrama, this film managed a few surprisingly effective emotional moments, thanks in large part to Alonso’s performance as Carlitos. The 14-year old Mexico City-born actor (who plays a 9-year old, believably) is familiar to American movie goers for his role as Antonio Banderas’ precocious son in 2005’s The Legend of Zorro.

Reviews have been mixed: The New York Times dismissed the film for its mawkishness and lazy caricatures (“It has bad white people, hard-working brown people and morally ambivalent people of mixed race.“); The Washington Post praised the film for its “affecting story, indelible characters, urgent topical relevance and superbly calibrated sentimentality.”

TH Film Series

The post-screening discussion was with William Wolf (left, in the photo above), author and former film critic for Canada’s Cue Magazine, New York magazine, Gannet newspapers and the New York Observer, and current member of New York Film Critics Online, an organization of 26 Internet film critics based in New York City. Wolf was charmed by Under the Same Moon… and though I’m probably one of those he describes who “rebel against manipulation,” darned if I didn’t get a little misty-eyed at the ending, too.

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More pencils, more books

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 | All Things, Books, Film, Music

My visit uptown coincided with the first day of Spring semester classes at Columbia. Remember how exciting that used to be?

Columbia University

I was last on campus in late October for the talk with New Yorker music critic Alex Ross. Since then, his cultural history of music since 1900, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has landed on several “Best of 2007” lists including those of The New York Times, New York magazine and Slate. Earlier this month, the book was selected as a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

Gothamist posted an interview with Ross today, in which he names Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood‘s score to Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood as his current soundtrack to the city. Disappointingly, the 33-minute piece (which has received raves all around) was disqualified from Oscar contention as it recycled parts of Greenwood’s 2005 BBC-commissioned suite “Popcorn Superhet Receiver.”

Ah, we still love you, Jonny.

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“I saw it. It’s alive. It’s huge.”

Monday, January 21st, 2008 | All Things, Film

Yes, I bought into the hype. Last summer’s viral marketing campaign surrounding fanboyfavorite J.J. Abrams‘s new project, the nameless trailer, the cryptic film website www.1-18-08.com (Cloverfield‘s release date), the flurry of possibly affiliated websites… it all proved irresistible to my inner — and outer — geek.

The conceit: a videotape retrieved from the area “formerly known as Central Park” after an apocalyptic incident code-named “Cloverfield.” Described as Godzilla meets The Blair Witch Project (sprinkled with 9/11 anxieties), the entire film is shot with a handheld camera, so those sensitive to motion sickness should consider themselves forewarned. (With a running time of 84 minutes, the shaky camera work is intense, yet mercifully brief.) The movie begins at a downtown loft party, populated by a certain type of insufferable New Yorker, on a night when Manhattan comes under attack by an enormous, briefly-glimpsed monster. What is the morbid fascination movie-goers have with watching New York City get destroyed?

Cloverfield has a lo-fi look, but impressive special effects, which allegedly cost a little over $30 million. To put it in perspective, that’s just $10 million more than Will Smith’s salary for I Am Legend, the other NYC-based apocalyptic film in theaters now.

Here, the single camera POV works well in conveying the chaos and mass confusion. The disorientation and visceral panic of being down in the streets in the midst of the destruction kept the tension high throughout. As typical for this type of film, my emotional investment in the characters was minimal — let’s face it, they’re not a particularly sympathetic group — but the alternating glimpses of original tape footage, showing one of the telegenic couples during recent, happier times does work effectively in jarring juxtaposition. (It is in those sweetly intimate snippets that we see hints of director Matt Reeves‘s previous work with Abrams on the WB’s “Felicity.”)

Columbus Circle

The Times‘s Manohla Dargis appreciated Cloverfield quite a bit less (“Rarely have I rooted for a monster with such enthusiasm“), but other critics responded more positively. More importantly, from the studio’s perspective, so did audiences, who flocked to theaters opening weekend to the tune of $41+ million in ticket sales, surpassing the January record of $35.9 million set by the Star Wars special edition re-release in 1997.

By the way: a gigantic reptilian beast laying waste to Manhattan, dropping vicious crab/spider creatures along the way — sure… could happen. Cell phones working during the siege — hmm, seems unlikely, but… well, okay. But reaching Bloomingdale’s from Spring Street on foot via subway tunnel in a few, albeit action-packed, real-time minutes? The audience at our afternoon screening audibly scoffed. C’mon… it’s clear that writer Drew Goddard, director Reeves and producer Abrams all hail from L.A. because as any New Yorker could tell you: that just makes no sense whatsoever.

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