After another hiatus, our weekly endorsement column is back. Here’s what we’ve been enjoying over the past few weeks.
Tom
Sarah Polley’s made two fantastic features to date. Away from Her (2007) and Take This Waltz (2011) both revolve around the dissolution of romantic relationships: the former chronicles the effects of Alzheimer’s on a geriatric couple’s marriage, the latter depicts how a young wife handles falling in love with another man. Together, they are two of the most emotionally honest and beautiful films I’ve seen about letting go. But her latest film (a documentary, no less) may be her best yet.
In Stories We Tell, she turns the camera inward and explores a deep-seeded family secret. I won’t say too much more about the plot because one of the pleasures of the film is how it handles revealing information (and there are a number of pretty great reveals). But I will say that it shares a number of commonalities with her two features and is an amazing film on a number of levels. First and foremost, it’s a riveting story told by a confident storyteller at the top of her game. It somehow manages to be both intensely emotional – I teared up during several scenes – and incredibly reflexive, often stepping back and asking larger questions about subjectivity and the nature of storytelling. If you’re at all interested in narrative, the ways in which we tell our own family histories, or if you like a good story, I urge you to check it out when it’s released later this month.
Keith
Despite its negative reviews I’m going to recommend The Company You Keep, Robert Redford’s new film, which came out two weeks ago. It’s about a group of aging radicals, all of whom were once members of Students For A Democratic Society and some of whom were in SDS’s militant and violent spin-off, the Weather Underground. There’s a manhunt, and several arrests, and a young reporter who’s trying to figure it all out, but that’s all incidental to the main point of the movie, which is to revisit the subject of political violence and extremism and the way their practitioners change their views – or don’t – over the course of a lifetime.
The Company You Keep seems to have touched some nerves among reviewers because it deals with violent political movements and the baby boomers, two fraught topics in the contemporary United States. I take a back seat to no one in my disdain for endless boomer nostalgia and self-importance, and that’s why I was surprised at how much I like this film. It’s didactic and occasionally heavy-handed, but what makes it interesting is that each of the five or six activists that appear have markedly different perspectives on what they all did. It presents a complicated and textured discussion of radical and violent acts all the way up until the disappointing Hollywood finish. In this case the movie is far more subtle and nuanced than its sermonizing, moralizing critics, who seem to think that A.) There should be no more movies about the 1960s and B.) Any movie that treats terrorism as a serious subject of discussion rather than condemning it outright has no moral center.
The cast alone is worth your ten bucks. Redford is in the lead, along with Chris Cooper, Julie Christie, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci, Terence Howard, Brit Marling, Anna Kendrick, and also Shia LaBoeuf if you like that sort of thing. Nick Nolte and Sam Elliott compete for who can deliver his lines with the most gravelly voice (Nolte wins).
Dave
Really loving Ceramic Dog’s sophomore release, Your Turn, this week. Marc Ribot might be best known for his guitar work with Tom Waits and Elvis Costello, but he’s a great bandleader who’s always putting together killer bands and oddball collections of tunes. Ceramic Dog is Ribot’s “rock trio,” and there are lots of guitar solos and jazz jam. What’s new, though, are the vocals. Ribot’s never been a good singer, but he’s sung on previous records here and there, usually with a wink, grin, or intentionally-awful spanish. But this record sports vocal overdubs and a bit more intention, if only to clearly emphasize the political nature of much of the record–he covers the Progressive-era feminist labor tune, “Bread and Roses” alongside his own “Masters of the Internet” and “Ain’t Gonna Let Them Turn Us Around.” Plus, “We Are the Professionals” sounds like early hip-hop and his “Take 5″ rocks–what more can you ask?
