Viewing Habit: Fish Tank = Highly Recommended
Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 1:33 am
Fish Tank = highly recommended
Of the many, many films I saw during the days (Weeks? Months?) of extreme snow here in D.C., Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank was most striking. I went into the film not knowing much about where the film would take me. It turns out this is exactly the situation Arnold threw her actors into: no pages of the script beyond the currently-filming scene were made available. The resulting meandering film about sixteen-year-old Mia’s life in an English housing project with her non-parenting mother has been aptly compared to The 400 Blows.
- The White Ribbon is also about poverty and parenting. German pre-WWI feudal poverty and deeply conservative parenting. Highly recommended.
- The Cove is going to win this year’s Oscar for best documentary since it is an informative, engaging, advocacy doc about cute animals in danger. Nonetheless, I consider it recommended
- Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 = Fine
- Inglorious Bastards = Recommended
- Niloofar = Recommended (finally caught part of the Iranian film series at the Freer-Sackler).
- The Hurt Locker = Highly recommended. I feared this would just be a series of classic MacGuyver bomb-defusing scenes. Instead it paints a fairly nuanced portrait of the modern soldier technologically (and otherwise) insulated from war.
Tags: andrea arnold, film, francois truffaut, kevin rafferty, louie psihoyos, macguyver, michael haneke, quentin tarantino, sabine el gemayel
February 18th, 2010 at 5:27 pm
I remember really wanting to see Harvard Beats Yale … thanks for the reminder, just added to my queue.
February 18th, 2010 at 11:14 pm
It felt a lot like watching ESPN Classics. I thought there would be less football and more discussion of why this particular game was the essential moment when all culture intersected, Meryl Streep’s Oscars were foretold, and Bush v. Gore was decided.