Film & DVD

Lebanon 0

Cert: 15
Dir: Samuel Maoz
Israel: 93 min • Ariel Films • In Theatres
…………………………………………………………………………………………………

The irony of Lebanon, Israeli director Samuel Maoz’s account of his experiences on the first day of the 1982 ‘Operation Peace for Galilee’, is that it has almost nothing to do with Lebanon per se. The story, insofar as there is one, could be set in any country, any tank, any war. As it is, Lebanon is a film in which nothing happens and the characters make no discernible journey.

The film opens onto a field of sunflowers swaying gently in a summer breeze. If this stunning image remains so allusive, I thought, maybe Maoz actually deserves the Golden Lion he just won at Venice. An hour and a half later, however, the film returns to that opening shot, except this time – groan – a tank drives straight through it. Thankfully, by then I’d been thrashed into weary submission and reminded anew that if war is hell then so are didactic war movies.

Categories: Film & DVD

Tagged: lebanon, samuel maoz

Published:: April 28, 2010 – 15:15
Author:: By Akkas Al-Ali

Beautiful Darling 0

Cert: U
Dir: James Rasin
US: 82 min • JJay Prods. in association with Sundance Channel • In Theatres
…………………………………………………………………………………………………

Being immortalised in song is surely a great honour. Candy Darling had that honour twice, thanks to Lou Reed, in ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ and ‘Candy Says’. The former painted her as an oral sex virtuoso. The latter as a sad-eyed creature taking stock of her perceived failures as a ‘woman’.

Being the subject of those songs has kept her luminescent flame alive in the pop-cultural imagination, but such portraiture threatens to reduce her to a cock-sucking desperado and tragic stereotype. James Rasin’s documentary sees that threat off ably and offers up as interviewees a veritable Who’s Who of NYC’s in-outsider crowd of the late sixties and early seventies (Holly Woodlawn, Gerard Malanga, Paul Morrissey, Fran Lebowitz, Jayne County, Pat Hackett), and archival audio interviewees including Candy’s mother and Valerie Solanis. The key figure though, is Jeremiah Newton, Candy’s best friend and inheritor of her volumes of diaries. These, along with previously unseen grainy footage and audio interviews, form the backbone of the film which seeks to piece together the glittery fragments of Candy’s tragically short life: the mid-1960s flight from stultifying Long Island suburban teen hell to the misfit’s Mecca of Manhattan, the development of her persona, the fleeting moment as the shimmering icon of Warhol’s Factory (before the be-wigged pseud got tired of her) and her sad decline and early death. With cruel irony, it was a trajectory fit for a star of Hollywood’s Golden Era, which Candy worshipped but was born too late for.

Categories: Film & DVD

Tagged: andy warhol, beautiful darling, candy darling, edie sedgwick, james rasin, jane county, jeremiah newton, lou reed