Word: dancers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...digital revolution is not being televised; it is being projected in the movie theaters, and the figurehead of this movement is the controversial and enigmatic Lars von Trier. With the release of Dancer in the Dark, von Trier has taken center stage as cinema's most hated yet challenging directors of the new millennium. As founder of Dogma 95, the filmic manifesto equal parts mocking and serious, he created a mission statement to scale down cinema and bring an honesty, directness,and more personal style that was previously found in filmmaking giants such as Bresson, Dreyer and Ozu. This decree...
...Dancer premiered in May and won the Palme D'or at Cannes; it unsurprisingly was met with considerable boos and has critics and viewers alike divided on its status as groundbreaking art or inane melodrama. The movie centers around Selma (Bjork), a Czech factory and single mother who is gradually going blind. She endures ordeal after ordeal in an attempt to pay for her son Gene's operation, who we are told will develop the same eye disease as Selma. In order to escape the agony and torment of her own worsening condition, she finds relief in musicals. She goes...
...place Dancer in a genre, one might have to create a new category. A melange of melodrama, pastiche, and musical, the film tries one's patience and pushes viewers to a breaking point, much like Selma. But if we hold on under this mounting tension, then the rewards are almost transcendental. Many people have complained about the shaky shooting of handheld video, the nervous pans and haphazard frames. Also the jump cutting and discontinuity in time also make for an unsettling feeling. But this adds to the experience, the fragility and excitement, as if the film might fall apart...
...DANCER IN THE DARK...
...hindsight we scorn the whites who loved minstrel shows and pity the blacks who had to play in them. But there are shades of culpability. Astaire, donning blackface for his Bojangles of Harlem number, probably thought (from ignorance, not malice) that he was paying sincere tribute to the great dancer Bill Robinson. As for Mantan Moreland, the black comic whose bug-eyed mugging in Charlie Chan films earns Lee's particular ire, he also was the star of films made for, and presumably appreciated by, the black audience. Perhaps we all have 20/20 vision of the past...