Word: film
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...action choreography that has a low plausibility factor, I'd guess that Taken means to be a critique of a man as fascinated by his daughter's endangered purity as her predators are - and, by extension, of the thriller genre's obsessive hero. Back in the '70s, a cop film mined the similarities between the man with the badge and the criminal he hunted. That was The French Connection, whose wary sympathy for, and exposé of, the cop played by Gene Hackman won the movie an Oscar for Best Picture. But this actual French movie has nothing more...
...Everything about the film is predictable, except for our growing discomfort with Zellweger. It is rare, and awful, to watch an Oscar winner valiantly attempt to convince us, against all evidence to the contrary, that it makes sense for her to be playing girlish and cute in a negligible comedy. She's about to turn 40, which absolutely does not mean she's no longer allowed to fall in love onscreen. But Zellweger has undeniably changed since her Bridget Jones's Diary days, and her fitness to continue in the same romantic-comedy vein as Bridget is very much...
...hell to evade the junta's thugs. In a dictatorship, even the simple task of interviewing a subject is potentially perilous. How can you tell if your subject is an informer? How do you convince them that you're not one? When one of Joshua's colleagues tries to film an early protest march, a monk shoos him away, perhaps suspecting he's a spy. With its haunting score and slick editing, Burma VJ not only captures the fear, paranoia and exhilaration of the undercover reporter, but also gives a bruising idea of how precarious life is for millions...
...central event of Burma VJ is the 2007 uprising. "Film them! Film them all! So many! So, so many!" cries one protester into a DVB camera, which then pans upward from the crowded streets to show rooftops and balconies packed with more cheering Burmese. It's moving to watch, not least because we know how it all ended. Within days, perhaps a hundred or more people were killed by the junta and thousands arrested. Those carrying cameras were singled out. (See pictures of Burma's aftermath...
...there's a but. Burma VJ is pitched as a documentary, when it is actually a docudrama relying heavily on dramatic re-enactments. It begins with a disclaimer: "This film is [composed largely of] material shot by undercover reporters in Burma. Some elements of the film have been reconstructed in close co-operation with the actual persons involved." Mixing documentary footage with dramatic reconstructions is said to be a hallmark of ?stergaard's films. With Burma VJ, that hallmark is a handicap, undermining the film's credibility and dishonoring the very profession its subjects risk their lives to pursue...