Art with Strangers: Olafur Eliasson
May 9th, 2008
Take your time: Olafur Eliasson is currently at MOMA and P.S.1. More Art with Strangers.
And Along Come Tourists
November 3rd, 2007
Like Weltschmerz and Fahrvergnügen, Vergangenheitsbewältigung is one of those German words that don’t quite have an equivalent in other languages: “working-off-the-past” has been a national project for the last sixty-odd years; it stands to reason that no other country has a history quite as heavy with guilt and horror to cope with. To be sure, the Holocaust has been the topic of countless films, but precious few address the legacy of the most efficient genocide in history as it confronts us today. With And Along Come Tourists, writer-director Robert Thalheim has made an understated film about a particularly sensitive place where past and present collide with unforgotten atrocities: the present-day town of Oswiecim, Poland, site of the Auschwitz extermination camp.
Read the rest of my review of And Along Come Tourists on About.com. At the reception following the MoMA screening, I had the distinct pleasure of being mistaken for the director several times. MoMA is screening the film, which doesn’t have U.S. distribution yet, as part of its Kino! 2007 program. You can catch it tomorrow at 2pm. Related: Yella and Q*Bert at the Holocaust Memorial.
Am Ende Kommen Touristen. Robert Thalheim, 2006. ****
The German trailer:
Away From Her
March 15th, 2007
Sarah Polley’s first feature, an adaptation of an Alice Munro short story about a couple dealing with Alzheimer’s, is getting a lot of praise on the festival circuit, and she was appropriately celebrated at the premiere for MoMA’s Canadian Front program last night.
Julie Christie plays a woman in her sixties who finds herself putting pans into the freezer, and before you know it, her husband of 44 years (Gordon Pinsent) has to drive her to a home — where she soon forgets all about him and begins a touching/infuriating relationship with another patient instead. It’s well acted, of course, but the dialogue is a tad too “literary” for my taste, and Polley’s direction left me somewhat confused in the end. Still, it’s a story that rarely gets told–when was a last time you saw a tour of a nursing home as act-ending set piece? It’s goes without saying that it’s all terribly sad, even though there are a few flashes of humor. In a way, this is a movie not quite unlike Severance: Away From Her can be just as hard to take, and you really have to be in the mood for it. At the Q&A with Polley and Olympia Dukakis, it was nice to see that Polley can, in fact, smile.
Away from Her. Sarah Polley, 2006. ***
- Official site with trailer
- Wikipedia
- Away from Her on Rotten Tomatoes
- Away from Her on GreenCine: Sundance
- The Reeler has photos and quotes from last night’s screening
- Reverse Shot loved it
- YouTube Bonus:
