Friday, October 15
The Center
“Say whiskey,” a photographer tells dour Jacobo (Andres Pazos) and dowdy Marta (Mirella Pascual) as they pose for a lovers’ portrait in this deadpan comedy from Uruguay. They aren’t really in love: Jacobo, the Jewish owner of a small sock factory, has enlisted Marta, his long-suffering floor manager, to pose as his wife so he can look established and one-up his visiting brother (Jorge Bolani). The witty title aside, this is a miserably dull exercise in stingy-Jew humor and post-Jarmusch nonreaction: when I saw it at the Toronto film festival the crowd seemed to find it pretty funny; I thought it was like a hangover without the drunk. Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll directed. In Spanish with subtitles. 95 min. (JJ) aLandmark, 4:30 PM
Campfire
R “Terrorism brought me out of the house–the war on terror sent me back inside,” muses Robyn (Lisa Jarnot), the introspective, severely agoraphobic heroine of Jennifer Todd Reeves’s debut feature. Suffused with subdued political outrage, it movingly evokes the daily paranoia that continues to plague post-9/11 New York. Robyn hopes to insulate herself from the dreary political climate by holing up in her Brooklyn apartment and working on a novel, but she can’t escape her own neuroses or her neighbors’ despondency. Reeves’s film is distinguished by its formal rigor–she makes beautiful use of an array of avant-garde techniques, including overexposed footage and an elliptical voice-over–and by its acute sensitivity to the way we live now in Bush’s America. 94 min. (RMP) aLandmark, 6:45 PM
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R Add this engrossing and informative documentary by director Stephen Marshall to the growing list of films that reveal more about the war in Iraq than anything in the mainstream American news media. Marshall, acting as his own cameraman, spent three weeks in Iraq toward the end of last year. Beginning with Frank, an exile returning home for the first time in 13 years, he talks to a number of people from disparate backgrounds, among them a former reporter for Al Jazeera who describes the U.S. military’s attack on the Palestine Hotel, where she and more than 100 members of the press were staying, and a U.S. army corporal who asserts that there is no grassroots insurgency in Iraq–a claim not even the Bush administration can proffer at this point. In English and subtitled Arabic. 82 min. (JK) aRiver East, 8:45 PM
