Haiti’s most celebrated big band, the 20-member Septentrional has been making music — a fusion of brassy Cuban big band and funkier Haitian voodoo beats — for more than six decades. Directed by Whitney Dow, this graceful and touching documentary charts the history of the country through its relationship with song, from its independence from French colonialism all the way up to and including 2010’s devastating earthquake, which took almost 300,000 lives.
The artistic is always a reflection of the external political realities of its surrounding times, of course, even in the best and most mindlessly carefree eras. In the case of Haiti, however, crushing foreign debt and a 15-year American occupation that ushered in the brutal dictatorship of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier has meant plenty of poverty and hard times. That fact is reflected in the music herein, which is hopeful but still almost always laced with ribbons of despair. Interweaving performance footage with interviews and extant material, When the Drum Is Beating is historical non-fiction for those who like their liveliness mixed in, and not on the side.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, When the Drum Is Beating comes to DVD presented in a solid 1.78:1 widescreen transfer, with a Creole language option with English subtitles. The disc’s sole bonus feature of note is an interview with director Dow; it’s nice, but some extra musical content would surely have been a welcome inclusion as well, and not too difficult to round up from the editing room floor. Previews for other First Run Features titles are also included. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) C+ (Disc)
Daily Archives: May 11, 2012
Nesting
The challenges of a young marriage without kids is an infrequent subject in movies, but that’s the sweet spot of examination in writer-director John Chuldenko’s bittersweet, fitfully engaging Nesting, which benefits from a pair of appealing leads and this sort of original focus, but ultimately doesn’t showcase enough psychological perspicacity or elicit a deep enough audience identification to rise quite above the sea level of bohemian curio. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (PMK*BNC/Dangertain Films, unrated, 93 minutes)
Devon Sawa Talks MMA, Parking Tickets, Unplayed Pranks
At first, Devon Sawa is a bit frazzled. The 33-year-old actor has just returned to find a parking ticket on his car. Still, shaking off the disappointment (“If it’s the worst thing that happens to me all day, I’m OK with that”), Sawa is enthusiastic when it comes to the subject of his latest movie, Philly Kid. Releasing this week in theaters and on VOD from After Dark Films, the movie co-stars Sawa as the pal of a former NCAA champion wrestler (Wes Chatham), recently paroled from prison, whose unsavory connections lead said friend into a series of brutal cage fights. I had a chance to speak one-on-one to Sawa by phone recently, about his movie, his affinity for MMA, great pranks unplayed, and what he made of that twist in the latest Final Destination movie. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.
Where Do We Go Now?
Lebanon’s official Best Foreign Language Film selection for the 84th Academy Awards, Where Do We Go Now? juggles comic fantasy and politicized drama in telling a story of religious strife held at bay by the better angels of women’s nature. Its commingled tonalities don’t always quite mesh, but if one sticks with it there is some off-kilter delight herein that cuts against erroneous notions of foreign films tackling such big social issues as necessarily staid and stuffy affairs.
Directed by Caramel multi-hyphenate Nadine Labaki (above), Where Do We Go Now?‘s insistent message of tolerance and coexistence should make it a strong arthouse performer for especially the older urban demographic, though any wider breakout is unlikely.
Set in an indeterminate time, Labaki’s movie unfolds in a remote Lebanese village, virtually sealed off from its surroundings and accessible only via a thin bridge in severe disrepair. There, church and mosque stand side by side, and the women, whose friendships more naturally transcend the religious fault lines of their community, act as a collective leavening influence, managing and rerouting the testosterone-fueled energy and impulses of the men in their village.
Widowed Christian café owner Amal (Labaki) and Muslim handyman Rabih (Julian Farhat) nurse a bit of a mutual crush, but news of religious violence from the outside world darkens the town’s mood. A series of accidents and misunderstandings ensue, and when a terrible accident befalls one of the children who serve as an errand boy, the village is pushed closer to getting caught up in a sectarian bloodbath. The mayor’s headstrong wife, Yvonne (Yvonne Maalouf), feigns a miracle connection and chat with God, and the women turn to increasingly fanciful ploys, eventually landing upon distracting belly dancing and pot-infused pastries, the former by way of a busload of mock-stranded Ukrainian strippers the women pay to vacation in their town.
While it doesn’t deal in abstractions, Where Do We Go Now? works best if one accepts it as the working draft of a kind of cinematic treatise, or a flavored, chewable children’s vitamin. A sort of cheeky moralizing is its aim, so it takes a while to get into, and additionally lags some in the middle, suffering from ill-conceived scenes that pull viewers away from the crux of the story.
While it cycles through plenty of entertaining schemes of distraction hatched by the women, Labaki and her screenwriting collaborators aren’t interested in digging much down into the lasting consequences of these acts. So the film takes on the feeling of a cutesy serial, punctuated by some serious rage. The ideas and effort often trump Ladaki’s big picture execution, in other words. Likewise, the movie’s gender politics is necessarily broad, in order to support the conceit, which puts a twist on the classic comedy Lysistrata.
The film mixes in non-professionals alongside working actors, with mixed results that, when they do work, give Where Do We Go Now? a charged sense of spontaneity and energy. Labaki and Baz Moussawbaa are particularly engaging, and exude a nice chemistry together. As its title indicates, the film ends on a note of cautious optimism. (Sony Pictures Classics, PG-13, 100 minutes)