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Reviews
Love and Diane (2002)
What a heartbreaking story this is, and how beautifully and intimately told.
What a heartbreaking story this is, and how beautifully and intimately told.
Director Jennifer Dworkin is filming right inside the heart of this family's most delicate moments, their worst arguments, their most private discussions, their most personal moments of joy... it is a credit to Diane, to Love, and to all the other characters in this movie that they have allowed so much pain and privacy to be recorded on film so that other people might learn from their story or reflect on its causes and meanings. Everything you read in the reviews of this movie about the director's evident compassion and the careful, clear laying out of this complex story is true. Your emotional response to each moment is vivid, and if my own experience means anything, the conclusion is just as provocative and ideologically open-ended as the rest of the movie. Dworkin's tone of sophisticated, humane lucidity must have been very hard to preserve, both in filming and in editing the picture, but she has produced an invaluable document.
As far as I know, Women Make Movies (headquartered in NYC) is the only organization with video prints available. As fantastic as WMM is, I wish the movie were more widely available, so that it could reach the broader audience it deserves, and even find its way to some powerful people who could make a difference for people in Love and Diane's circumstances. (Check university libraries, too, since some schools have obtained institutional copies of the video.)
If the bond of family, the labor of forgiveness, the plight of the impoverished, the debates between personal responsibility and social determinism, the possibility of hope, or the continued survival of serious documentary film-making mean anything to you, this is a truly indispensable film.
The Audition (1989)
A quirky and ultimately moving short film - invaluable to Campion fans
A quirky and ultimately moving short film that gives fans of Campion an invaluable peek into her own personality and her relationship with her mother, Edith. The audition described in the title is that which Edith performs for a small cameo in Jane's "An Angel at My Table," though willful Jane is actually far more excited to give her mother the part than pessimistic, fretful Edith is to play it. The movie recalls Alan Rickman's "The Winter Guest" in its careful, gentle meditation on a mother and daughter played by a real-life mother and daughter. Kudos to the Campion behind the camera, Jane's sister Anna, for this gem.
Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)
Wild, weird, and totally compelling - a truly fascinating film
A wild, weird, and totally compelling adaptation of what is arguably Tennessee Williams' most luridly affecting play. The center of the play is the gradual revelation of the events of one character's death; he is seen only in flashback, but is the cousin of Taylor and the son of the magnificent Hepburn. His demise incorporates aspects of cannibalism, prostitution, and homosexuality, though 1950s film censorship makes the play's drawn-out suggestion of these elements even more elliptical and haunted than they were on the page or on stage. Hepburn's brilliance and Williams' magic make this film truly fascinating.
Shadows and Fog (1991)
Inchoate and listless - disappointing despite the cast.
Woody Allen sometimes has ideas for parts of his films that excite him so much he neglects that the rest of the film is wilting and untendered. Such was the case with "Mighty Aphrodite," Mira Sorvino excepted, and the same happens even more gravely to "Shadows and Fog," which has no inspiration or liveliness outside of the Woodman's enthusiasm for paying homage to black & white Weimar-style photography. The plot barely exists, the cast is shuttled ungraciously in and out, and worse than all, he makes the almost unheard-of error of going lazy on the ideas. A must-not-see, especially for Allen fans, who will just be disappointed.