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Cinema-Scene.com
Volume 5, Number 49
This Week's Reviews: Elephant, The Last Samurai, The Station Agent, The Human Stain.
This Week's Omissions: Honey, Mambo Italiano, Party Monster.
Director: Starring: Release: 24 Oct. 03
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Elephant BY: DAVID PERRY
Such a discourse helps Gus Van Sant title his latest film,
Elephant, as he struggles to articulate the giant impediment in society’s
living room. Like Michael Moore with Bowling for Columbine, the catalyst is
the violence inhabiting our lifestyles even if we are unwilling to open our
doors to it. This elephant is already inside, and, if we continue our
longstanding finger-pointing to justify it, we are doing little more than
hoping ignorance will make it disappear. |
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©2003, David Perry, Cinema-Scene.com, 5 December 2003 |
Director: Starring: Release: 5 Dec. 03
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The Last Samurai BY: DAVID PERRY
Where Arthur Penn made revisionist history part of a
political upheaval in Little Big Man (his fourth and final masterpiece, oh
how the great have fallen), Edward Zwick is more likely to retrograde in his
politics. Nothing monumental in one’s understanding of a culture,
civilization, history, or politick can be found in The Last Samurai. When
one ushers away the film’s glaring filler, all that’s left is Tom Cruise
desperately asking for an Oscar, and Zwick desperately asking to make
another Glory. The latter is certainly never comes to fruition, and, if
there’s any sense of decency in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences, neither will the former. |
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©2003, David Perry, Cinema-Scene.com, 5 December 2003 |
Director: Starring: Release: 3 Oct. 03
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The Station Agent BY: DAVID PERRY
Despite all the attention it gets every year, the Sundance
Film Festival has become more of a diversion than an event. Occasionally
there will be a nugget hidden among the plethora of pretentious and goofy
films in competition, but there hasn’t been a festival that truly changed
independent cinema since the early 1990s when Quentin Tarantino, Sally
Potter, Greg Araki, Tom Kalin, among others, were festival fixtures. |
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©2003, David Perry, Cinema-Scene.com, 5 December 2003 |
Director: Starring: Release: 31 Oct. 03
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The Human Stain BY: DAVID PERRY
American entertainment has long been pained with the racist
history that mars it’s Vaudeville, radio, and early television years.
Minstrel shows, Amos and Andy, and nearly everything in between came with
the satisfaction that the inadequacies of blacks were funny, but just as
long as no blacks played themselves. |
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©2003, David Perry, Cinema-Scene.com, 5 December 2003 |
Reviews by:
David Perry
©2003, Cinema-Scene.com
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