My Hindu Friend is the semi-autobiographical film about fictional film director Diego Fairman (Willem Dafoe), directed and written by Hector Babenco, taking heavy inspiration from his own experiences with being diagnosed with cancer. Whilst living in Brazil, Diego and his girlfriend, Livia (Maria Fernanda Cândido) are told the news that he only has three months to live.
That is unless he moves to America and has a bone marrow transplant. At first Diego is reluctant as he is determined that if he were to die then it would be at home, but given the chances of his survival and all the work he has yet to accomplish, Diego and his girlfriend set off for the United States.
However, first they get married and as the film plays out, it shows the effects that cancer has on Diego, his mental state and his marriage in a stark and honest manner. Diego also becomes friends with a little boy (Rio Adlakha) and together they play and their time together helps with Diego’s cancer treatment. Viewer be warned though, this is not the uplifting, heart-warming story of a man’s road to recovery.
Babenco’s script and direction takes the film to surprising, honest and quite often visually provocative levels which most audiences may not expect. Especially from a director whose story is so personal, audiences may find themselves confronted with a story that is not as conventional as it sets out to be at the start.
Diego is not exactly a nice man but neither is he a monster and thanks to the script and Dafoe’s fantastic performance, Diego is a fleshed out, three-dimensional character that not only pays respect to Babenco’s story, but to the man himself. One minute, Diego is making advances to an actress desperate to work with him, the next he is laying in bed having visions of death and bargaining for his life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzXWD1QVlLs
One minute, Diego is happily playing fantasy games with his Hindu friend, the next he is fighting with his wife over the loss of what made their marriage so special. Diego’s life and personality are complex and real, no doubt like Babenco’s own life and maybe even parts of his own personality are laid bare for the audience to see.
Above all though, My Hindu Friend is a celebration of life, love and art and everything that goes with it – the good and the bad. Throughout the audience will see everything that Diego encounters whether they are real or not, from the vapid lives of the elite in the entertainment industry to the things that Diego and maybe even Babenco held dear to his heart.
Hector Babenco died on July 16th 2016, making My Hindu Friend his last film and a fitting swansong to leave to the world.
Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) is like every other boy his age, he is nervous about the world around him, wants to look the best that he can in front of his peers and although he doesn’t have many friends, he relies on his imaginary best friend to advise him on the more serious things. Jojo also lives in Nazi Germany and his best friend just happens to be Adolph Hitler (Taika Waititi). Jojo is told all the things that little boys and girls were told at the time and Jojo laps it up.
]He’s told that Jews are wicked and not to be trusted and that women are only good for cleaning and making babies and so Jojo wants to do his best to please The Fuhrer who he dreams of meeting for real one day. However, one day Jojo hears noises upstairs and finds a young girl, Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) hiding in the wall. However, despite everything he’s been told about Jews, Jojo starts to warm to Elsa and learns that perhaps the things he’s been told are wrong.
Jojo Rabbit is a heart-warming, hopeful, emotional and tragic film from writer/director Taika Waititi. Nazi Germany is viewed through the eyes of Jojo who is just a child, so although the adults in the film (and the audience) may see the world for what it really is, Jojo doesn’t and it’s all because he has been overwhelmed with propaganda at such a young and impressionable age.
The adults are mostly seen as taking things very casually, even when there is word of an impending attack on Germany and for Jojo, this kind of thing is reassuring to him, especially because of his trust in Germany’s leader. Jojo lives with his mother, Rosie (Scarlett Johansson) and despite their political differences, Jojo and his mother share a special bond that is at the heart of the film and perhaps shows the audience how nurture over nature can help a child to find the right way. There scenes together are touching in a way that brings out the best of both actors and Johansson hasn’t been this good in years.
Jojo’s friendship with Elsa is also something unique that
forms into a brother/sister relationship but is also adorably moulded by Jojo’s
burgeoning feelings of romantic love, even though he doesn’t know how to deal
with them. The chemistry between the two young actors is sweet, often funny and
the carefully crafted script shows how their relationship changes and perhaps
would make the audience think twice before judging a person they’d never met.
Although the audience may see where this story is heading from the start, Jojo Rabbit shows that it’s more about the journey than the destination and the direction that the film takes its audience is through some dark humour, unexpectedly emotional scenes and moments that can help its audience relate to Jojo’s experiences in ways they perhaps weren’t expecting. The cast is filled with cameos from Sam Rockwell, Rebel Wilson and Stephen Merchant, but the warmth and bond between Johansson and Davis is what really pulls at the heart strings in all the right ways.
Although it would be thoughtless to disregard Davis’ performance alone as he carries almost the entire film himself and his second-best friend, Yorki (Archie Yates) has some of the best one-liners in the film.
Jojo Rabbit is a story about how the world is ever changing and along with the world, people can change too. If you feel that the state of the world you live in right now is more than you can bare, Jojo Rabbit is a reassuring story that firmly believes that nothing stays the same forever. In another pair of hands, Jojo Rabbit would have been another deadly serious and harrowing Oscar contender merely because it tells the audience the Nazis are bad.
I think we get the message by now so Jojo Rabbit feels like a breath of fresh air and a more approachable story that will entertain and maybe even educate people of all ages.
November 1st is a short film that takes the form of a road trip with a mother, Bonnie (Lindsay Duncan) and her daughter, Caroline (Sophia Myles) as they travel to witness the execution of the man that murdered Bonnie’s son.
Obviously, tensions are fraught, Bonnie isn’t exactly easy to get along with and Caroline is feeling the onslaught of verbal abuse from her mother. Although, the audience gets the feeling that despite their destination, this is just another day. Duncan transforms into yet another unrecognisable role and Bonnie’s characterisation feels very real along with a script that never holds back, and direction that makes the audience feel like they are on the road trip with them.
Whether they want to be there or not. Myles also plays the part of the put upon and unappreciated daughter well, with the unspoken frustration clear on her face as she endures her mother’s vitriolic personality and plays well off of Duncan making their relationship all the more believable.
Watching these close family members on what is quite possibly the hardest day of their lives is clearly a very uncomfortable thing to witness, and as the heat comes to a boiling point the audience perhaps can relate to their own family members with whom they have left things unsaid.
However, the audience knows that things may never be resolved, so despite the feelings of relief as Bonnie and Caroline air their grievances, the short film only ever feels like a slice of their lives that the audience are witnessing. No matter how much the audience may want them to resolve their issues.
Despite all the friction between mother and daughter, it’s thanks to the script and Duncan’s performance that Bonnie is able to come across as a sympathetic character at all, but Duncan manages to peel back a few layers which may explain years of a hardening soul. The fact that the story is never really given a satisfactory conclusion may frustrate some audience members, but it only adds to the realism of the situation, reminding the audience that not everything gets wrapped up in a neat little bow.
Because for Bonnie and Caroline, despite the closure that November 1st may bring, it will stay with them for the rest of their lives.
5 Worst Visually Impaired Characters In Cinema. The new year has inspired me somewhat. There’s something about the year 2020 that has given me an idea on how to celebrate the new year and to talk about cinema. So, ignoring all the sight relating puns you were probably expecting from such an article, here are the 5 worst visually impaired characters in cinema history.
AT FIRST SIGHT (1999)
Based on a medical paper by Oliver Sacks M. D., At First Sight tells the story of two people who fall in love and one of them just happens to be blind. Virgil Adamson (Val Kilmer) is a massage therapist who lives with his sister, Jennie (Kelly McGillis). Amy Benic (Mira Sorvino) is a stressed businesswoman who has just broken up with her boyfriend. So, when the two meet they quickly fall in love. That is until Amy emotionally blackmails Virgil into getting an operation to restore his sight.
However, when Virgil’s sight does indeed come back, Amy
starts to realise that she’s getting bored with all the experiences that Virgil
is having for the first time. Before Virgil regains his sight, the clichés come
thick and fast (Virgil wears big, dark glasses, uses a white cane, touches
Amy’s face so that he knows what she looks like), but even after he regains his
sight, it is clear that despite experiencing clear vision for the first time,
Virgil is a moron.
There are many incidents throughout the film that suggest
Virgil may not have the required intelligence to get by in life. He sees
himself in the mirror and rather than realising it’s his reflection, Virgil
walks towards the mirror and bangs his head suggesting that his level of
intelligence is akin to a dog that barks at its own reflection. Later in the
film a therapist, Phil Webster (Nathan Lane) shows Virgil an apple and a
picture of an apple telling him that they are different. Despite being blind
all his life I’d be pretty sure that Virgil would know the difference between a
three-dimensional physical object and something that was drawn on paper, even
if he couldn’t see it, but the film assumes that blind people have to be guided
like children to understand the world around them. Then there’s my favourite
part where Virgil stands in oncoming traffic in order to get a better
understanding of visual perspective. Virgil is a moron.
DAREDEVIL (2003)
Jennifer Garner (left) and Ben Affleck (right) from 2003. Jennifer Garner wears red clothes, a tight fitting vest top with her midriff showing and red trousers. Her hair is very long and goes down to her waist. Part of her hair is tied at the back of her head. Ben Affleck wears a blue shirt and dark glasses. He is holding a cane with a chrome top in his left hand and has his right hand touching Garner’s face. They are both facing each other and presumably lit by moonlight as it is a night scene. The background is a blurred cityscape with a couple of buildings behind them.
Oh, where do I start with Daredevil? Daredevil was created by Stan Lee and Bill Everett in the mid Sixties. Blinded during a chemical accident, the chemicals gave him extraordinary powers so that despite his sight loss, mild mannered attorney at law, Matt Murdoch (Ben Affleck) could do incredible things. Thus, the super crip is born. Super crip referring to disabled characters that have superpowers as a way to ‘make up for’ their disability (think Professor X and more recently Freddie Freeman who becomes Captain Marvel Jr. in Shazam). Their superpowers usually revolve around their disability or are the complete opposite to compensate for what the hero has lost and Daredevil is no different.
Don’t get me wrong, Daredevil is not a bad character and the representation in Marvel/Netflix’s TV series is much better, but the infamous superhero movie from the early 2000’s is bad for more reasons than Daredevil himself. The script is terrible, the characters are cartoonish (even for a film based on a comic book) and there are scenes such as the infamous see-saw fight scene and the laugh out loud funny scene where Matt uses the rain and his echolocation powers to see what Elektra looks like – despite having to run his fingers across a wall in his own apartment in another scene. The whole thing is extremely corny and completely at odds with any superhero films released around the same time. Daredevil is a great visually impaired character in the right hands but the first attempt to bring him to the silver screen is a laughable disaster.
BLIND (2017)
Alec Baldwin (left) wears a dark blue suit jacket, a white shirt and dark glasses. He holds a cane in his right hand and his left hand is tucked under Demi Moore’s arm. Demi Moore (right) wears a grey jacket and large fashionable dark glasses. They are both smiling. The background is a public park at daytime with a flight of steps leading up on the left and a tree behind them. They are both standing on a concrete pathway
Director Michael Mailer, when asked in an interview about
casting Alec Baldwin in the role of a blind character which could have gone to
a blind actor responded with accusations of cultural fascism and argued that it
discredits any actors who have won awards for playing disabled characters. It’s
a good thing then that under Mailer’s direction, Baldwin was never in any
danger of winning any awards.
After her husband is sent to jail after being indicted,
Suzanne Dutchman (Demi Moore) is forced to do community service. There she
meets Bill Oakland (Alec Baldwin) a partially sighted literary professor who
needs somebody to read his student’s work to him so that it can be properly
assessed – because apparently text to speech devices don’t exist… So, after a
while Suzanne and Bill get to know each other and inevitably fall in love. It’s
not exactly the most original plot but it’s the ridiculous portrayal of Bill’s
sight loss that is so funny. There is of course the cliché of the big, dark
glasses and the white stick, but thanks to the script and the direction, Bill’s
visual impairment is inconsistent and at times on a superhuman level.
For example, Bill and Suzanne are arguing about opening a
window and when Bill wins, Suzanne decides to take off her blouse because she
is too hot and Bill can’t see her anyway. However, Bill immediately senses that
Suzanne has done something unexpected, not because he heard her taking off her
blouse, but because he can smell the difference in the air. This plays on the
common misconception that when a person loses one sense then their other senses
are heightened.
This misconception probably comes from when a seeing person
sees a visually impaired person do something that they wouldn’t think they
could do they put it down to some extra sensory power. In reality these things
come with practice. Just as any person learns to put one foot in front of the
other and not trip over their feet (some do better than others), visually
impaired people learn to do things to navigate the world that feels as natural
as sighted people find reading or watching TV. Visually impaired people do not
become bloodhounds when they lose their sight.
SCENT OF A WOMAN (1992)
A young Al Pacino from 1992 sits on a couch that has a stripy pattern going from top to bottom with a wooden frame going along the top with a floral pattern carved into it on the left. He wears an army dress uniform which is an unbuttoned black jacket with many coloured square badges and gold pins in different shapes on both sides of it. On the left side of the jacket (his right, our left) there is a black name badge with white writing that says SLADE in block capitals. He wears a white shirt with a black tie underneath his jacket and they look dishevelled. He has his eyebrows raised and an expression that suggests sadness but also contentment. Behind him is a blurred background with a green curtain on the left and a white telephone on the right.
Charlie Simms (Chris O’ Donnell) is a prep student who after a little trouble at his university needs money to pay for a trip to go home for Christmas and after some digging, he finds a job looking after a blind war veteran Lt. Col. Frank Slade. Frank is difficult to get on with, erratic and irrational, but as they get to know each other, Charlie and Frank start to realise that there’s more to life than what they’ve been given.
After seven nominations, it seems The Academy thought it was about time that Al Pacino finally received the most coveted award. It’s just a shame that it was for Pacino’s worst performance. Frank is loud, brash and not an easy man to get along with and Al Pacino turns up the obnoxiousness of his visually impaired character to cartoonish levels, coupled with his constant expression of ‘hoo-wah!’ it soon became one of the most parodied performances in film history.
Pacino also falls into the trap the so many actors do when
playing a blind person, they stare into the middle distance, not so much to
convince the audience that they were blind, but to convince themselves that if
they don’t focus on anything in particular then it will enhance their
performance – it doesn’t. This led to a famous scene where Pacino is in the
middle of the street and falls over a trash can. However, when Pacino fell over
it meant that it was because he relies on his sight to make sure things like
that don’t happen, visually impaired people rely on other things so therefore
when this happens it just highlights an able bodied person playing a disabled
character. Pacino’s Oscar win was definitely won because ‘it was about time’
and not necessarily because he deserved it.
SEE NO EVIL (1971)
A young Mia Farrow from 1971 holds her arms out in front of her, her face looks teary and she looks scared and disorientated. She wears a blue jumper with a pale coloured shirt underneath that can only be seen by the collar. Behind her on her left is a white door with a brass door knob and a brass pattern above the door knob. Directly behind her is another white door which has parts illuminated by sunlight. On her right there is a wall with some architectural decoration, it looks like a white pillar with black stripes going down it but the background is not in focus.
Finally, we come to the most common use of a blind character
in cinema – the victim. Sarah (Mia Farrow) lost her sight during a horse-riding
accident and while staying at her extended family’s house in the country, she
soon realises that her entire family have been murdered by a ruthless killer – and
she’s next. See No Evil follows Sarah as she stumbles about, mostly with her
arms stretched out in front of her, as she desperately tries to escape death.
Unfortunately, this pursuit goes on for so long that the audience is given very
little time to empathise with Sarah. As her situation gets worse and worse,
those with a darker sense of humour (like me) may even find Sarah’s increasing
peril unintentionally funny, to the point where the audience stops caring for
her, wishing that the killer would finish her off.
Presumably a visually impaired victim is the easiest because it gives the audience an instant fear of what would happen to them if they were blind. This enforces the idea that not only blind people, but all disabled people are vulnerable, naïve and trusting. Sarah’s revelation that her family have died is quite ridiculous as well because it plays on the audience’s assumption that just because a blind person cannot see then they are not aware of their surroundings. Surely if anything the smell would have given her a hint, let alone the eerily quiet house.
Time and time again, cinema has made out that visually
impaired people are vulnerable, gullible, superhuman or occasionally evil. The
fear of the unknown is what makes filmmakers put blind characters in these
roles and so what people see in cinema is how they think they are reflected in
real life. Maybe in future filmmakers will have a clearer vision as how to
portray visually impaired characters properly. I knew I’d get a pun in there
somewhere.
Tennessee Gothic is a horror comedy and feature debut from writer/director Jeff Wedding, based on the short story American Gothic by horror writer, Ray Russell. Caleb (William Ryan Watson) and his dad, Paw (Victor Hollingsworth) are a couple of good ol’ boys living on a farm in Tennessee when one day they find Sylvia (Jackie Kelly) a beautiful young woman who says that she has been attacked and hiding from a bad man.
Instantly taking to her charm, the two men take her in, feed her, clothe her and give her a place to stay. Soon Sylvia is just like one of the family, that is until Caleb gives in to his carnal urges and soon Sylvia and Caleb are doing the one thing that any young couple do most often.
However, there’s something a little strange about Sylvia and soon both the men on the farm give in to their temptations whilst around Sylvia. Even when the local preacher, Reverend Simms (Wynn Reichert) arrives to take Sylvia to an orphanage, she manages to use her ‘charms’ to persuade him to change his mind.
The film is described as a horror comedy, but for those expecting the script to be full of funny one-liners or hilarious gross out scenes then they may be left a little disappointed as Tennessee Gothic’s takes its comedic inspirations from a time well gone past. There may be a smile here and there but the tone of the film doesn’t really deliver as a comedy simply because – there aren’t enough jokes.
The problem is that Tennessee Gothic wants to recreate a type of comedy from a long time ago and forgets that its modern audience may not be as interested. Putting it plainly, Tennessee Gothic sets the tone as more of a Seventies sex comedy rather than a modern look at how men can be so easily lead by their loins and it makes most of the film feel tedious and outdated.
As the film reaches its final act the tone changes completely and as a full-blown horror, this segment succeeds but is too little too late as there is barely any of this in the rest of the film so the sudden shift feels jarring.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQKv2UrQwrQ
Audiences who may have not experienced the kinds of sex comedies that Tennessee Gothic evokes may even be a little bored by this point, so to suddenly give them what they were hoping for so late in the game may be off putting.
Saying all that though, there are moments to enjoy and the
soundtrack is great with some songs that really set the mood. It just would be
a little better if there was a bit more horror to fill the gaps where there are
supposed to be jokes.
