The Missing Picture (***)

No documentary has ever been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, but awards for 2013 saw this movie receiving only the second such nomination in the foreign-language category. The other one was the animated Waltz with Bashir; it’s perhaps not entirely a coincidence that both films use non-traditional techniques to tell personal stories of war. Both films can be seen as visual memoirs, but Cambodian-born Rithy Panh’s story is less linear and more impressionistic. The narration (read by Christophe Bataille in French) is like a long, poetic essay about the longing for a lost childhood.

According to the film, Panh last saw his home on April 17, 1975, the day before his eleventh birthday and the day Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces overran the capital of Pnom Penh. The film well decribes the effects of the relocation, forced labor, agrarian “reform” and other policies inspired by the Chinese communists, but with the focus on the personal rather than the historical forces at work. To supplement the mostly black-and-white footage that exists from the period, and to tell the more personal aspects of the story, Panh uses clay figures and small-scale re-creations of many historical scenes. This is more effective than I might have thought.

For me, The Killing Fields remains the most indelible film about the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime. My taste would have preferred either a more historical film or a more detailed personal one, perhaps telling us of how Panh escaped to Thailand and became a filmmaker. It’s not a long movie, but perhaps is a bit long for the sort of gauzy remembrance it is. Where it did impact me was in importing the power of ideology. Greed and lust for power are enormous forces, but ideology was the motivating force that created the most murderous movements of the 20th century, from the totalitarian communism to the Holocaust to the Rwandan genocide.

IMDb link

viewed 4/10/14 7:15 at Ritz Bourse and posted 4/10/14

I Am Legend (**3/4)

What does Will Smith have in common with Vincent Price and Charlton Heston? They’ve all played Dr. Robert Neville in adaptations of a novel Richard Matheson published in 1954. The Price version, 1964’s The Last Man on Earth, has the most plot-descriptive title. (The Heston version is 1971’s The Omega Man.) Here, we find Smith’s Neville having set up house in a barricaded brownstone in Manhattan. He’s possibly the only person immune to the viral plague that’s killed off most of humanity and turned the rest into aggressive zombies like in 28 Days Later, hence the need for the barricades.

Coincidentally, I guess, Dr. Neville is not only a survivor but a virologist who has been studying a cure. He’s a lot more purely heroic than the earlier Dr. Nevilles, singlehandedly trying to save the world while fighting off computer-generated zombies and still finding time to pump iron every day. Yet he’s not really an action hero, and only in part can this be classified as a thriller. Neville also spends his time chatting with his dog and listening to Bob Marley, whose best-known album title—Legend—and early death from cancer may have inspired the screenwriters, along with his message of peace.

Compared to earlier versions of the story, this is less horror, more science fiction, with the emphasis on what it’s like to be truly alone. Director Francis Lawrence (Constantine) makes good use of quietness and the eerily placid urban spaces. The screenplay is co-written by Akiva Goldsman, an Oscar winner for A Beautiful Mind. It reminded me of Cast Away, the Tom Hanks movie, only with the dog as the conversational volleyball substitute. And yet somehow I found that film more powerful, especially the ending, whose ambiguity this would have done well to emulate. There’s a good deal of flashback about Smith’s missing, presumably dead, wife and daughter that feels too perfunctory to be affecting, yet adds little to the plot. It’s a game effort at a thinking-person’s sci-fi, but one I can only recommend with reservations.

IMDB link

reviewed 12/26/07