stevegeo-08916 Reviews

White Shadow (2013)

Be patient! Past the bad opening lies a great film.

[10/10 · 7 January 2024]

The first 30 minutes of this extraordinary film are almost unwatchable. It's full of dark scenes: not just nighttime scenes, they are nighttime scenes poorly lit and poorly photographed. But I'm sure glad I let it play. White Shadow is a great film.

White Shadow is a portal into a world where witches wield real power-a world of poverty and brutality-in the southern hemisphere, on the southeast coast of Africa, in a village in Tanzania.

The film script and dialog are superb. White Shadow also has some beautiful cinematography. Some of the intimate scenes between the children are tender and stunning. The documentary-style handheld camera is powerful.

Love on the Run (1979)

Notes on the Truffaut quintet

[10/10 · 4 March 2021]

I finally saw the final installation of Truffaut's film quintet about Antoine Doinel. Love on the Run is the fifth and final edition. It's a kick and a nice note to end on. The films of the Doinel quintet are: The 400 Blows Antoine and Colette (Love at 20) Stolen Kisses Bed and Board Love on the Run

Looking back over the series, it seems Jean-Pierre Léaud developed the more comedic side of Doinel as Léaud matured with the role. But throughout the series, the humor of Léaud's Doinel both emanates from and covers difficult internal struggles, not the least of which are struggles over identity, personal responsibility, and authentic romantic relationships.

60s-reference alert! In a scene in a Parisian bookstore a lady barrister tracking Doinel picks up books randomly and pretends to read them. One of the books she picks up is R.D. Laing's Do You Love Me? An Entertainment in Conversation and Verse (Est-ce que tu m'aimes? On Truffaut's screen.) Remember the Knotty R.D. Laing?

In The Divided Self (1960), Laing contrasted the experience of the "ontologically secure" person with that of a person who "cannot take the realness, aliveness, autonomy and identity of himself and others for granted" and who consequently contrives strategies to avoid "losing his self." (From the Wikipedia article about R.D. Laing)

Wikipedia taught me also that Laing's idea of schizophrenia was based, at least partly, on Gregory Bateson's double-bind hypothesis. The cameo appearance of Laing's Do You Love Me in Love on the Run provides almost a bibliographical footnote to Doinel's life story.

R.D. Laing and Gregory Bateson: that's a couple of names marking an era. I gotta pick up some R.D. Laing.

Love on the Run contains flashbacks spanning the whole series of films. These serve to remind us of key moments that shaped Doinel, all the way back to his youth as a self-made hoodlum in The 400 Blows. But now those flashed-back memories are re-contextualized from the point of view of the older Doinel at the end of the series. Love on the Run takes full advantage of its hindsight to show us how a woman who catches up with Doinel in his later life reacts to the autobiographical book Doinel had published by the end of the third film about his earlier life. Very meta. Love on the Run is Inception-y without all the snow.

Boardwalk Empire (2010–2014)

Boardwalk Empire is great

[9/10 · 16 February 2021]

One of the very best mob-busting detective series'.

1984 (1984)

Excellent film based on Orwell's masterpiece

[10/10 · 16 February 2021]

Michael Radford's 1984 has far greater fidelity to the nuances in Orwell's novel than Michael Anderson's 1958 film version had. Radford keeps the focus on the battlefield of Winston Smith's mind as O'Brien breaks him and remakes him as a compliant State-owned serf.

To Catch a Thief (1955)

Intriguing and beautiful

[8/10 · 7 February 2021]

Intriguing plot, banter-y flirtatious script, gorgeous locations.