Nancy Keefe Rhodes covers film, photo and visual arts for the City Eagle. She has written "Make it Snappy" since December 2006, a weekly film column reviewing both current theatrical releases and DVDs recent and enduring. She is a member of the national Women Film Critics Circle. She archives her film reviews at www.MovieCrossRhodes.blogspot.com. Reach her at nancykeeferhodes@gmail.com.
Whether you’re a seasoned world traveler or you’ve never been further than Otisco, there’s something about watching a movie shot right here in Syracuse that can unexpectedly turn an audience into gawking tourists right in our own hometown...
Early in “Guttaperc,” Barbadian filmmaker Andrew Millington’s first feature film, the 10-year-old Eric’s grandfather wordlessly throws down a copy of George Lamming’s classic novel of Black West Indian identity and coming of age, “In the Castle of My Skin” (1953), for the boy to read. Audiences might take the hint too.
A reluctant summer visitor at his grandparents’ drowsy seaside village while his parents vacation in New York, Eric (Richard Weekes) is bored. His grandfather (Clairmont Taite), proprietor of a small cement factory, considers Eric spoiled and despises the Euro-slanted education Eric’s getting, which omits vast stretches of Barbados’ own political and intellectual history. He sets about filling in the gaps for his grandson...
A couple years ago, Redhouse Arts Center screened Akira Kurosawa’s "Rashomon" (1950) as part of a special Master Directors Film Festival, six classics spread over a couple weeks that the daily paper declined to give much coverage because they were “just some old movies.” Attendance was uneven, yet a sizable number of the audience for "Rashomon" said during the talk-back session afterward that while they’d seen the movie before on DVD, they had braved dreadful weather at the last minute for the rare joy of seeing it on a big screen.
This movie gives us the ready shorthand term “Rashomon-like.” It hardly seems possible to imagine our culture’s understanding of point-of-view without this film’s presence, even though many people actually haven’t seen it on any screen...
