Word: directors
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Mehta, an Indian-born Canadian director, has yet again challenged India's political conservatives. Unlike Fire, which directly criticizes India's societal hypocrisy, Earth shifts a fair amount of the blame onto the ignorance of the paternalistic British imperialists, who ended up causing one of the 20th century's bloodiest ethnic wars in their attempt to control the fate of the Indian people and their government. Before the partition takes place, Lenny, despite being forced by polio to wear a leg brace, enjoys a happy childhood playing under the care of her nanny Shanta (Nandita Das). Shanta is a beautiful...
...This surrealistic feat, finally, is what the film comes to explore. Malkovich's is the performance of a brave oddball genius; he plays himself as an effete, monstrous perv, the perfect centerpiece for a film about the insanity of pretension. First-time director Spike Jonze, a longtime music video artiste, has filmed it with collaborator Lance Acord to underplay the fantastic elements of the storyline and accentuate the dirty realness of the images; the plot is deeply surreal, but the setting is today's world, crazy as it actually...
...those familiar with director David Lynch's work (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Lost Highway), this storyline, which is based on the actual journey made by 73-year-old Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth), seems right up Lynch's alley---quirky and Midwestern, with a lawnmower thrown in for good measure. Interestingly enough, Lynch was initially opposed to directing The Straight Story. But after reading the screenplay written by Mary Sweeney and John Roach, Lynch was won over: "[I] wasn't interested in it. I never thought I would make this story, but the screenplay turned me around. I loved...
...most impressive aspect of Lynch's adaptation is the absence of any canonizing or aggrandizing tendencies. Although both David Lynch and Freddie Francis, the director of photographer, pay homage to Straight's perseverance, The Straight Story is by no means a documentary. The wheels on Straight's lawnmower blend with the turning of tractor wheels. Bicyclists, cars, trucks whiz right by. Never for a moment are you made to forget that Straight is riding a 1966 John Deere. And for those of us willing to trot along at five miles-per-hour, the story is unexpectedly rewarding...
...Loeb Mainstage is a cavernous space made for epics and musicals. But in Simpatico, the first student mainstage production of the '99-'00 season, director Jesse Kellerman '01 tries to make it as quiet as whispered secrets and as intimate as a lonely bedroom late at night. The result--a production as touching as it is unsettling, as intimate as it is far-reaching--is not flawless, but it is tremendous nonetheless...