Archive | Film Matters
‘White God’ Bites Back
“White God” may be about the adventures of a dog and a young girl but it’s about as far from a Disney tooth-decayer as Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage” is from the meet-cute Hollywood romance. Set against the austere backdrop of post-Soviet Budapest, this Hungarian import is all about interstices – between childhood and adulthood, between victimhood and villainy, between haves and have-nots, between humankind and animals, and between tweens and the rest of the world. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Allegories can be extracted left and right but it’s also a red-blooded revenge thriller that puts humans in the hot seat. No wonder the title is a wordplay on Sam Fuller’s nature-versus-nurture masterpiece, “White Dog.” Continue Reading →
The Power of ‘Going Clear’
The expression “jaw-dropping” is used to describe movies all the time. But it wasn’t until “Going Clear” that I saw an entire audience – mostly comprised of jaundiced critics and industry insiders – with actual dropped jaws. It’s not that this HBO documentary delivers earth-shattering revelations about scientology, science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard’s billion-dollar prank-cum-self-help religion; in fact, it lacks some of the righteous heft of Lawrence Wright’s 2013 eponymous book, a 503-page, meticulously researched compendium of the church’s history, wrongdoings, and bizarre tenets. What it offers instead is the shock of footage amassed, especially of the Hitler-Goes-to-Hollywood conferences that are Scientology’s crowning glory. To see is to believe – or at least to believe that these believers exist. Continue Reading →