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sdavidsongreen
Reviews
Nineteen Summers (2019)
Filmmaker with vision
Emonjay Brown gives a very authentic performance as DeAndre in this very real coming-of-age film. The pacing of this film and structure interested me, drawing the viewer into the entanglements of the so-called justice system with the lead character so you feel you're experiencing your own one life stopped, powerless against forces on both sides of the law, yet striving none the less to make one's own life. The ending leaves much to think about, with a hauntingly beautiful final sequence fleeing toward a foregone conclusion. The chapter breaks are poetically named and evoke an auteur's sensibility about his story.
Sweet Sunshine (2020)
Leaves a glow in the mind's eye
His passion to create drives this country music Orpheus to tragic loss, to fame and fortune, and ultimately back home to redemption. The lead actors bring big hearts, charm and earnestness to their roles. The original country music soundtrack takes the audience along for a great ride. Evoking Walk the Line, A Star Is Born, Crazy Heart, and other classic movies based on the love stories behind the country music, it plucks the heart strings. Cinematography lives up to the title, leaving a glow in the mind's eye.
After We Leave (2019)
A thinking Cinephile's Sci Fi for post-covid times
I saw this film and liked it when it premiered but was drawn back to it again since we started social isolating. Something about the world Hossain envisioned feels uncannily prescient now. The future has arrived, not with a nuclear Hollywood SFX bang - fitting, now that Hollywood has been put out of business by a virus - but in the form of a society locked in paralysis by its own dysfunction. The degraded remains of our way of life prey on our worst fears. Relationship wreckage from neglect and distraction has sheered the social fabric beyond repair. Policy solutions have failed. The destruction of the planet looks more like, well, what we see out our windows. People not working. People vaguely afraid of each other at all times. The only way out is up, a lottery rigged with familiar bias and injustice. Hossain poses a simple contingency for Jack (Brian Silverman) that motivates his story, a requirement that he reconcile with his ex-wife to use his ticket. More character drama art film than Sci-Fi that resists easy adrenaline and escapist "wow" factor, a film this self-disciplined took guts. It compels us to stare uncomfortably at the drab wreckage of our own lives, much like we are in this moment, and ask where we went wrong. It reveals a new auteur's vision that landed (just) ahead of its time. Now that time has come.