Change Your Image
aaronas
Reviews
Combats de femme: Un amour de femme (2001)
"I always order what I don't want"
This is a quiet lesbian romance. A French mother/wife adventures into a world of self-expression, dancing, and lesbianism. The lead is pervaded by a thorough mistrust of her choices and feelings. She is aided in her internal conflict by her friends and husband who attack her with guilt. Will she do the right thing and follow her heart? Or will she succumb to patriarchal, close-minded society?
Also a racial sub-theme as the lead's lover is half black.
I enjoyed this film, but it makes for a quiet night. You never get the sense that the two women could be truly happy, only that they're a little less miserable together.
People Say I'm Crazy (2003)
A break with reality
This is a video documentary. It details the life of a man living with paranoid schizophrenia. He and his family record and analyze the experience of managing this disorder. Reality is _the_ entertainment of the moment and nothing is as watchable in this new order as someone documenting their own break with reality. My significant other became physically ill watching this film, it is that powerful (and that traumatic). Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the movie is that John's paranoias are based in reality, that his real trouble is not that he imagines things, but instead that he doesn't know how to deal with the negative thoughts that are a part of daily living.
Hell's Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films (2003)
The Underbelly of those kitchy educational 1950s films
HH charts the course of the company "Highway Safety Films" and their quest to make America's roads safer at the same time as they turn a profit. This documentary highlights gore of the original movies as well as the fact that this gore did little more than emotionally scar millions of impressionable youth.
HH also explores some of the underbelly of the company including allegations that the company made pornos on the Highway Safety Film Tour Bus. Unfortunately, these tangents are more interesting than the original subject matter and these tangents are left undeveloped.
Freeway (1988)
80s nostalgia kitch
I'm a fan of Crash and Blade Runner and this movie explores some of those highway death and 80s film noir themes that I like to see, so I enjoyed it.
In general though, the essential stupidity of the film noir protagonist is not pulled off well by the female lead and her hero is nearly a neanderthal, hence the kitch warning.