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Capturing the Friedmans

I watched this today, sort of marking the end of the Latin ordeal that the past six weeks has been. I've been meaning to watch this for some time -- it played during a Film Fest back home one year but I didn't get tickets for it. It was a most thought provoking film, exposing thoroughly, the weaknesses of law enforcement procedures, both at the level of detective work and in the whole plea-bargaining process. But more deeply, it showed how mixed up and gray humans are.
Briefly, Arnold Friedman, his wife and three sons life a middle-class American life. This life starts to unravel when Arnold Friedman gets caught with possession of child pornography, then gets accused of sexually abusing young boys (his students). The whole affair, while happened in the late 1980s, is considered by some as symptomatic of the witch-hunt by homophobic conservatives. As the film demonstrates, there were serious problems with the police work and the way the detectives badgered the young boys into making accusations. But making the film even more intriguing is the fact that the Friedmans were real home video buffs and so the documentary is supplemented with lots of footage from their own personal home videos. They even have material from AFTER the arrests, from the night before their father is going to be put away for life. Some amazing stuff. One really needs to watch this.


And a great Village Voice article on the film and whole affair

xv

The Apostle -- Robert Duvall

Watched this on the IFC today on a whim. Was genuinely moved by it. Lots of people have many things to say about it on the Amazon website -- and a lot of them are spot on. I found myself singing along with it -- those old time gospel hymns of my youth -- and responding in at a most emotional level to it. So -- a wonderful film about how flawed, but how magnificent too, we all are and can be.

xiv

After meaning to for a long while I finally watched 2046. I found it pretty awesome, with delicious allusions to all the man's previous films. Some people told me it was painfully slow and hard to sit through. I found it gorgeous and thought it should have gone on at least an hour more. Then again, I watch it in strange circumstances, in the midst of unconjugated Latin verbs and poorly cooked lamb chops, without Ms Tan around, strange circumstances.

I found the film extremely coherent with all the female leads stunning (especially Gong Li -- oh for an hour more of that story ... and Faye Wong ... I remember Quentin Tarantino speaking at light speed about how he can't get her out of his head everytime he hears that Cranberries' song** after watching her performance in Chungking Express and saying WHO WOULDN'T have a crush on her...) Loved the interiors and watching through doorways and listening through, sometimes even passing the materiality of words through, cardboard walls.

**Just been alerted to the fact that the song should be "California Dreaming" Faye Wong sings a cantonese version of a Cranberries' song (a separate fact mentioned by Tarantino, I believe)