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domino harvey wrote: Sun Jan 31, 2010 1:23 am Recently saw a great little film while screening DVDs for my class, a quite recent British teleplay called God on Trial. It aired here last year as part of the modern Masterpiece Theatre-series and while it clearly had a budget slightly above that of your local news, the material is first-class all the way. A philosophical argument on the debate of God over his apparent complicity in letting the Holocaust occur, the film presents a barrack of concentration camp residents holding a Jewish court and trying God in absentia while half of the men prepare to die in the morning. The arguments are compelling and peppered with punches on either end of the debate, and Eddie Marsan, so brilliant in Happy Go Lucky, absolutely tears the place down with his small cameo halfway through-- his one line statement after the fact concerning his sons' fate is grandly terrible in its implications. And his is but the first of several great monologues that race the film to its finish in the last half-- contributions arrive from a French scientist and a phony Jew before ending with a captured rabbi's ten minute showstopper that leads the court to its ultimate decision.

Is the film flawless? Lord no, and hoary devices such as the modern-day wraparound and a handful of Holocaust cliches abound. But in the face of such compelling material and the limited budget and time, this is really something special and not likely to leave my mind for a while. It's based on an anecdote from a very similarly-titled Elie Wiesel play but shares nothing else in common. I wish the script were published, I'd love to excerpt from it in the future.

domino harvey wrote: Tue Dec 29, 2015 5:37 am the Yellow Handkerchief (Udayan Prasad 2008) This remake of a Japanese film, unseen by me, follows William Hurt’s release from prison for manslaughter and the trek he makes through post-Katrina Louisiana with two teenagers (Kirsten Stewart and Eddie Redmayne) in tow. Hurt is good, as he often is, as the quiet central figure, and while I initially found the heavy reliance on flashbacks a distraction, they eventually start to hit their mark with surprising effectiveness. I don’t buy the road movie machinations that tether Hurt to his younger co-stars, but they mostly take the backseat to Hurt regardless, so it doesn’t matter too much. Certainly if you needed to see Eddie Redmayne in a road movie, picking this over the godawful Hick would be the right choice, but what a strange thing to need in the first place!