mike-3406 Reviews

ABC Africa (2001)

a blueprint for documentary making

[5 March 2008]

This is a documentary shot at the request of a group of Ugandan women to publicise their mission to educate the AIDS and war orphans that would otherwise become a lost generation. The crew went to Uganda to shoot pilot footage using the smallest JVC mini-dv cameras intending to return with film cameras later, but the footage they took and the film that emerged from it is so unique that they felt the moment could never be recaptured. All Kiarostami's usual concerns with film form are put to the service of an enquiry into the relationship between film maker and subject without ducking uncomfortable questions about power and meeting of cultures. Released the same year as Black Hawk Down this film not only shows a side of Africa completely erased by Hollywood, it is a blueprint for a completely new approach to documentary. The comment that the best thing about the film is the format massively misses the importance and uniqueness of this film.

The Core (2003)

Jules Verne meets Alfred Rosenberg

[1/10 · 13 May 2007]

The Core is a boy meets girl journey to the centre of the earth in which the all American couple emerge triumphant from the bowels of the planet to continue the WASP gene pool – Jules Verne meets Alfred Rosenberg. Along the way other male rivals are summarily dispatched which is a common theme in blockbusters but not often as blatantly racist as in The Core. The mad bad and dangerous to know scientist in the form of Stan Tucci at his camp best has stopped the earth's core rotating against the advice of his younger square jawed bumbling acolyte to whom the task of restarting it befalls. Fortunately they discover another scientist who has not only discovered a way of boring through solid rock but created molecules that can withstand even the most immense pressures and temperatures - work that would normally take years, huge teams and mega-budgets but which he has managed in a few years in a remote desert hanger funded by a few credit cards no doubt. His Rotating Rabbit type machine provides the phallic metaphor that will penetrate mother earth so the seduction and the sexual act are combined and interlinked in this film. The mission to save the world from catastrophe and the rivals in the mating game are a motley crew of fractious individuals whose personal agendas keep getting in the way of The Bigger Picture. The subterranean machine is driven by a female Space Shuttle pilot whose qualifications for "terranaut" other than being able to fly in outer space is to have crashed the shuttle on the wrong side of the continent and provide a much needed comedy moment as she pulls up short of a worker on some scaffolding who has hitherto been oblivious to the tons of screeching high technology hurtling towards him down the Los Angeles river. She is uber-woman and she drives her own phallus which pretty soon in the film she is guiding unerringly towards the hot molten yet stilled core. The drama, if we can forget the overall narrative of saving the world, which most of the cast have done anyway, involves which suitor will finally mate with Captain Childs – yes, the child-woman. We already know that the square jawed guy is the one, but we first have to enact the symbolic ethnic and oedipal conflict where genius and race are excised from the equation. First to go is the father figure and I did enjoy the poetic way his mind was broken by a shard of crystal and his fall back to eternal rest in a stygian sea of glowing magma saved by his heat suit or a shortfall in the special effects budget from vanishing in a flash of vaporized flesh. The European, the African American and the camp, literate, intellectual would all follow before the final consummation. The climax of the mission is a series of carefully timed orgasms represented in CGI by spreading balls of light that privileges orgasm over impregnation. The diminished phallus rests on the seabed before being recovered….. there is a thesis of subtext in this film that I have barely scratched the surface of – scuse the pun - that doesn't diminish the central prominence of a nasty racist narrative that is the real core - surprising from a filmmaker like Jon Amiel. The producers managed to resist the kind of James Bond moment where he is discovered necking the co-star after saving the world. Did the world move for me? Not a jolt.