Change Your Image
lisa_thatcher
Film critic and reviewer, I tend to write analysis rather than straight reviews. I write for my own site, and occasionally for other on line zines and blogs. I prefer foreign and art house genres, though I have been known to go overboard on cultural analysis of popcorn movies, romance and comedy genres.
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Reviews
Interstellar (2014)
Interstellar - It's much better than you think
(Longer review on my blog)
Interstellar is a film divided into three primary acts, the third of which rescues the previous two, gives depth to the 'hokey' dialog and expands the notions of time-free exterior space in alignment with time- bound interior space, which is undoubtedly one of the primary themes of Interstellar. Problematically the multiple treatment of the themes of time/interior/exterior/love/loss all within the shadow of the expanse around us dissipates in the initial reaction sci-fi tropes (of which Nolan takes full advantage) command. Interstellar expects us to elongate and magnify our relationship to the genre, teaching us something about ourselves in its method rather than in its narrative flow. It's a film we will appreciate more in ten years time, but Nolan is fully aware of this, and has taken the risks necessary eschewing the inevitable knee jerk reactionary position in favor of crafting a specifically long-term commentary on our relationship to sci-fi, space movies and scientific research inside and outside of film. For example when Nolan suggests in the future NASA will be a virtually illegal underground organization starved of funds which have been channeled into agriculture because the dying planet earth is starving, one is immediately reminded of the funding withdrawal of U.S. to the Large Hadron Collider project, whose multi-million dollar experimentation couldn't properly defend itself against contemporary economic demands for explanations. This is more than a 'hokey' play at the audience's heart-strings by displaying the 'American farming heartland', it is a commentary on a culture that refuses education to the qualifying poor in preference of them becoming work drones to continuously feed a dying system on a dying planet. Despite the cries that Nolan bludgeons his audience with rank sentimentality, this very accusation arises because he assumes a great deal of intelligence from his audience and doesn't labor any of his points, rather using certain tropes against themselves. This leads to our initial problem of missing his point. However his many points are so well executed, we will be drawn to re- watch Interstellar and we will slowly stretch ourselves into Nolan's rock solid perspective.
Much has been made of the spectacular imagery, the most accessible and easy aspect of the film for us to recognize, and I won't go into its beauty here, suffice to say as I did in the first paragraph, its worth seeing Interstellar for that alone – and over again for the other, deeper themes that have been delivered with some complexity. It is ambitious in scope using its access to Kip Thorne not only to 'get the physics right' but also to make a play for an alteration in the way we experience cinema, 'creating a wormhole of his own'thought his intricate awareness of all that cinema is capable of, not just as viewed object but in its ability to draw us out of that passivity. The multiple dimensions of space-time are not simply revealed to us through dialog and mise-en-scene, but also through the structure of the film itself, its narrative flow constantly turning back on its own objective. Thus, narrative (including dialog), structure and mise-en- scene work together to play out the tension between intimate and exterior space-time, and then in the final third of the film, work in unison to rectify the seeming discrepancies inherent in the films earlier two acts. So, if you have an experience of frustration at what you imagine to be 'hokey dialog' (a term being brandied about in commentary on this film) in either of the first two acts, Nolan planted it there, and expects you to remain with him to resolve it – which he fully and completely does – in the third (and ultimately splendid) third act. (See my review on my site for sources for this)
In the first of these three acts, Nolan portrays a 'future' where an exhausted earth is slowly killing its inhabitants with depleted soils and toxic, rolling dust storms that instill respiratory disease and cancer in the humans who still survive. The divide between Cooper (Mathew McConaughey) and his young daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy and then Jessica Chastain) when Cooper is recruited by NASA to go into space and explore alternate possibilities of inhabitable planets becomes the impetus by which resolution is possible, in a unique and brilliant observation about the importance of the interior world and how it impacts in very material ways on the external. Without any spoilers, this important plot line is fully resolved through the extension of the love we have for our children extended to a love for all children, as exemplified in the Murph's desperate search for a unified theory of quantum gravity. The final third of the film resolves this not by theory but through experience and the resolution of fundamental animosities between Einstein's geometrical description of the relative structure of space-time and quantum physics' mathematical description of the particle- and wave-like behavior of both subatomic and macroscopic physical matter. However, these 'human' narrative threads – another is Amelia Brand's (Anne Hathaway) exposition on the importance of pursuing her lover to his outpost despite the 'superior' data of team leader Dr. Mann (Matt Damon) ) are not merely additions tossed in to provide an emotional connection, rather the intimate and the planetary narrative threads are interwoven and crucial to each other, so that the resolution of both father/daughter divide occurs simultaneously with the practical resolution of interstellar space travel.
Interstellar is enormously complex,intricately laced and does depend on some broad, if not understanding, then at least acceptance, of physics and the specific hypothesis of Kip Thorne. It's a new way to 'watch' a film, and a rare and precious call to our flaccid intellect in a time when to desire an intelligent film is pretentious and to enjoy pushing the mind to its outer quarter is a financial waste of time.
Zodiac (2007)
David Fincher's Masterpiece
Zodiac is, without doubt David Fincher's masterpiece and unbeknownst to everyone at the time, it will become the benchmark for all future Fincher films. It is the perfectly realized balance of a fine script, brilliant performances, technical acumen and above all an implacable restraint that is made all the more potent for the films one hundred and sixty-two minute length. All the problems with Se7en (still a great film) are obliterated in Zodiac, a far more difficult film to "enjoy" mostly because of the enormous cerebral pressure it places on the thinking viewer. The themes here are large: American obsession with serial killers, media interference in police procedure, pulp fictions obsession with true crime, the attention to detail of the obsessive, the reflexive nature of societies imaginations, the costs of obsession, the effects of time and memory on history, etc. If Fincher refused to turn the camera on his audience in Se7en, he does so with a cool calculated gaze in Zodiac, a film that rarely wavers into Fincher's characteristic flounces, such as helicopter shots or ambient police torch-light. Much of Fincher's integrity comes from a clear intention to tell the truth of the story, possibly because it is the first "true story" film Fincher will make, and his intention to avoid glamorizing the serial killer as he did in Se7en. By keeping so close to the facts of the story, by retaining a self consciousness about the end product, the meticulous perfectionism that characterizes Fincher's directing style becomes the perfect vehicle for a long drawn out film about obsession on details.
Zodiac's opening scene is a fine example of the films merits. With Three Dog Night's lilting cover of 'Easy To Be Hard' wafting, the scene is of Vallejo, California on the fourth of July, fireworks bursting over the city. Darlene Ferrin (Ciara Hughes) is on her way to pick up Mike Mageau (Lee Norris), but the camera examines the houses celebrating fourth of July from her eye as she drives. When she drives Mike to a secluded lovers lane, another car approaches and although Mike wants to leave, Darlene claims everything is alright and doesn't make a move to drive away. Donovan's haunting 'Hurdy Gurdy Man' comes over the radio and increases as The Zodiac steps out of his car and shoots the pair. It's the scene that will become the defining murder leading to a suspect by Robert Greysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), the cartoonist at The San Francisco Chronicle who becomes obsessed with solving The Zodiac's puzzles and then the murder itself. Opening the film with the murder that causes the films denouement is not only clever writing, it also speaks to the fascination of the Zodiac obsessives. Fincher makes a film that the obsessives will love, even as he casts a shadow over the costs of that obsession. Greysmith, the writer of the two books the film is based on, is an obsessive, and James Vanderbuilt's decision to base the story on the fanboy who writes the books rather than the story of the killer is all the more powerful because it includes the detectives working the case as complicit in that obsession. If Greysmith becomes preoccupied because he loves puzzles and can't prevent himself from falling down the rabbit hole, then even more chilling is the fate of detective Dave Toshci (a soft- spoken Mark Ruffalo) who becomes haunted by association. Both men are reflected in characters who represent an alternate choice, Paul Avery (Robert Downey Junior) who sinks into depression and substance abuse against Greysmith's vigilance, and William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) who voluntarily gives up detective work altogether because of the impact on his family against Toshci's being demoted and barred from the case for sending his own Zodiac letters. All four men will be ruined by their obsession with Armstrong as the only one who escapes. Fincher inserts wonderfully understated images to reflect this obsession, such as Greysmith, alone in his apartment filled with files about the Zodiac case after his family have left him, flicking through his newspaper clippings chillingly preserved in a family photo album.
The film works within the obsession, becomes the obsession if you like, making itself another media representation of what it is seeking to expose. The Zodiac killer played with the media, using it to enhance his notoriety. From the badges Paul Avery has made that everyone wears that say "I'm not Paul Avery" through the comment William Armstrong makes to David Toshci when Avery supposedly discovers the Zodiac's first victim, "It's very real. You know how I know? I saw it on TV," to the incredible collection images used in the montage of media lettering and zodiac puzzles sliding and moving over the top of the detectives trying to do their job. This obsession with representation through the lens makes the Zodiac a different serial killer, a modern serial killer, and this becomes Fincher's second film that points to a problematic relationship with the camera. The Zodiac is never caught, which is interesting seeing as he calls famous people regularly, sent letters to the press, and forged personal relationships with the people obsessed with catching him. In Panic Room, David Fincher told us video surveillance becomes a self-cogitating nightmare, the lens always pointed back at us. In Zodiac he uses the media and film in the same way, revealing a relationship with technology that uses us more than we make a use of it.
Gone Girl (2014)
Gone Girl is Fincher reaching out then pulling back.
David Fincher is no stranger to bringing a beloved pop/pulp novel to the screen while it is only just sliding off the top of the best seller lists, so there is a disarming confidence at play before we even get to the film, that it will be good, faithful to the novel (despite adverbait suggestions that the much loathed ending has changed) and able to satisfy both readership fans and newbies alike. This is a tougher ask than The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, because the film is a very different creature if you have read the book, the category I fall into. It's a book famous for its twists, and there are many, so Fincher had his job cut out for him when pinning down the reasons for making the film in the first place, which are not entirely answered – which turns out to be the greatest problem with Gone Girl, even if shying away from making a statement has become something that we who love Fincher automatically know to associate with all his films. In my previous Fincher reviews, I've called this struggle the adman versus the creative – perhaps auteur is a better word there. The very choice of Gone Girl as a subject piece for Fincher tells us he has placed the auteur on the back-burner and he's out to make one of those Fincher films that seems to be saying something meaningful at its surface, but in reality is doing nothing more than adhere to a zeitgeist. He's done this with his last three films, including Gone Girl, a thing we critics fumblingly call "style over substance" but is more the thinking adman's ability to zero in on what we want to watch on our big screens (and subsequently small ones – both of which are comfy Fincher territory) even if its tricky to know exactly what it is that he is selling.
If a music video is the perfect post modern combination of both the advertisement and the product, then Gone Girl might fall into that category, being nothing more than a process of convincing you the film is worth your time, attention and above all money. There is none of the camera turning Fincher achieved in his masterpiece Zodiac, no statement about "society" or "humanity" or even (hugely disappointingly for this Fincher fan) "marriage" which the novel is pregnant with and never properly gives birth to. In this way, the source material more like the Zodiac books than The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo which is a fully realized airport novel with its message sledgehammered throughout, and exhibits the same frustrations that plague Se7en – that the story is begging to make a statement Fincher is too timid to evoke. Gillian Flynn touched on many exciting subjects, only going deeper into a couple of them, and a Fincher film that chose to turn his clever cameras eye on marriage, interspersed with Flynn's (very poorly made) commentary about the media provided similar fertile ground to Graysmith's Zodiac, a serial killer story Fincher brilliantly turned into a film about our obsession with serial killers and how that plays itself out in the media. But Fincher does none of this, instead opting for a very beautiful, very well performed retelling of the story in toto (with only very few small changes) which does beg the question, why make the film, especially while we're all still talking about the novel and it is so fresh for so many of us? It gives the film the hovering problem of that ghost written novel that comes out after the successful film that exists solely for the purpose of extracting more cash from fans. An understandable goal, but surely a little beneath a film maker like Fincher?
However, given Fincher's talent for societal-pulse-finger-placement, Gone Girl has more to say about the pointlessness of contemporary film making than any of Fincher's previous works (except perhaps for The Social Network) and the passion we have for watching meticulously made, meaningless entertainment. We talk of the sophistication of the contemporary viewer, but that reaches only so far as to impact on disembodied pieces of the entertainment product perfected in spite of the meaningless of the whole. Gone Girl is competing with television here, and perhaps the YouTube-esque phenomenon of on-line video, in the same way Panic Room did, but was too clunky (and perhaps we were a little too discerning back then) and didn't have the script Flynn has come up with here. Fincher is combining a great script (very important to him), impeccable performances, a ripping yarn, and his flair for emotive design to create a showcase of talent in which the parts are greater than the sum of the whole. If he's selling the talent of his team – there's suddenly a point to Gone Girl. In Gone Girl the viewer, who is now making their own films, music and novels at home, is watching for craft as much as they are switching off to enjoy a story. The fact that over six million of the viewers will have read the book hardly matters in that case, and they are certainly not interested in having a director presume to point the camera back at them and make insightful statements about "Marriage" or "The Media" – conclusions they will draw on their own based on their own insights.
Panic Room (2002)
David Fincher misses the mark.
Panic Room is the first time we see a genuinely intellectually bereft David Fincher, but it won't be the last, and it probably is no coincidence that it exists hot on the heels of one of Fincher's least successful films, which ironically will become one of his most popular. Sandwiched between Fight Club and Zodiac, two of Fincher's best, if not his best, it has the feel of an exhausted director and a conflicted film maker who wants (needs) to invite a larger audience. In Panic Room, Fincher is still attracted to strong themes. The house is a transitional space for Meg (Jodi Foster) and Sarah (Kristen Stewart), over large and painted as a threatening space, just as Fincher did with The Game. In The Game the family home is a threat to Nicholas because it is the scene of his fathers suicide which laid a trajectory Nicholas inevitably follows. In Panic Room, the enormous house is a threat because Meg has left the safety of her marriage and is venturing out of the family home into a house she will need to defend with her androgynous daughter Sarah. Meg is in a feminist transition, Sarah is a new generation of self sufficient female. And yet, Fincher strangely keeps the force of his directorial presence at the surface, resting only on the house as impregnated fortress and the panic room as both a source of safety and vulnerability. Panic Room is a new set of problems for Fincher, different to what had with Alien³, which was the only film that could be counted as a failure prior to Panic Room being made - at least the only one Fincher really considered a failure. It could be that Fight Club just took too much out of him, because we don't see the surfacing here of a need for commercial appeal, but rather a failed attempt in the stylistic approach that leaves the film soulless.
Panic Room comes out in 2002, right at the start of a new century and it becomes one of several films at the time to use video surveillance as a vehicle for a citizens big brother style of visual oppression over each other. The cameras are static, while Fincher's camera is the only entity that can move through the house with giant sweeping motions that imply an all-seeing eye. The fixed video surveillance is always seen through the presence of the character watching, and it immediately provokes reaction. It is only when Meg destroys the cameras that she is able to defeat the intruders, and provoke the comment "Why didn't we think of that". Yet none of this scope is portrayed with the substance that, for example, the Ikea catalog house is portrayed in Fight Club. Fincher is able to give the aesthetic sense of all of us living in an Ikea catalog in Fight Club, cross referencing the square cleanliness of the apartment and the office against the ruinous warmth of Tyler Durdens mansion. While Panic Room stands on its high themes, Fincher never properly establishes a connection between the human creatures who are both trapped and liberated by their video equipment. Meg is distrustful of the equipment immediately, from her claustrophobia (which bizarrely disappears) through to her struggling to program the electronics of the panic room, and subsequently not hooking up the phone line. We never get a sense of an immersion, a connection with the equipment, therefore we never get a sense of it betraying her, as we do with the Ikea houses. Fincher overlaps her "scared housewife" persona with an ineptitude that, although overcome toward the end in triumph, still keeps her at a distance from what could have been the most powerful theme of the film, if Fincher hadn't shied away from it. Think of Sex Lies and Videotape (made thirteen years earlier) and the way Soderbergh was able to establish a connection between the anxiety surrounding human interaction and the relief of distance created through the surveillance properties of video. Fincher is never able to convince us of a two-edged sword connection between the advantages Meg clearly has because she can see her intruders, and the problems this causes for her.
This is especially highlighted in the first time Meg sees the panic room, and makes a reference to Edgar Allen Poe. This has some significance when later we realize the burglars want to infiltrate the house in order to get to the panic room which sits like a proclamation of what is to come, think of The Raven, but loses power when compared with The Tell Tale Heart, which is obviously the story being referenced. The old man's "evil eye" is the video surveillance, and the young man's murder represented in the relationship between Junior (Jarod Leto) and the old man who lived in the house previously (who built the Panic Room) as well as Meg's emerging feminist. Unlike the Tell Tale Heart, money is the motive, but the image of the vulture like all-seeing eye, coupled with Fincher's brilliant feel for paranoia, becomes a great idea so poorly represented that the garishness of the conspiracy thriller takes over, and flattens all plotting nuances except for the clichés we revive through the viewer. Much of this is the problem of an uncharacteristically ordinary script by David Koepp who brings poorly conceived, clichéd antagonists into the house. The value of the invaders is left to quality of performance, and Jared Leto is a horribly shrill, hysterical Junior, Dwight Yoakim is an unconvincing symbol of chaotic evil (that flails even too much for chaos) and only Forest Whitaker becomes an interesting foe, and that is mostly because he wisely downplays his heart-of-gold-victim-of- circumstance Burnham rescuing us from that hopeless cliché. Even Jodi Fosters great performance as Meg and Kristen Stewart's confidently portrayed Sarah can't save the film from its self-inflicted wounds.
Se7en (1995)
David Fincher's timidity prevents a truly great film.
Please note: This review contains spoilers. To be read after watching the film.
Se7en is the second time David Fincher has insisted on a weirdo number title that doesn't make much sense other than to look cool, but fortunately it is the last. The story goes New Line had refused Andrew Kevin Walker's script because of the now (in)famous head in a box ending, preferring it rewritten as a detective noir, but when they sent the script to Fincher offering him the project, they accidentally sent the original script and Fincher took the project based on the original end, and strangely, because he saw the film about a meditation on the evil within us all, rather than a police detective thriller. If Se7en is a meditation on the evil within, then god help us, because as Mills (Brad Pitt) says to Somerset (Morgan Freeman) several times through the story, John Doe (Kevin Spacey) is mad, and no matter how much you want to dress him up in the admiration we all have for a passionate dedication to our individual projects, what gets us in with Se7en is the graphic imagery, not the important statement on psychological depth. Se7en never once turns the camera on the fascinated viewer, it merely tells a story very well, and its subject choice reveals a talent Fincher has for tapping into a cultural zeitgeist that can sell a product or a story, but leaves the creative thinker at the margins of the goings on, and never the subject of it. Fincher never once makes us ask ourselves why we want to see images of a man who has eaten himself to death, he just gives them to us, standing by our side, pointing outward at the evil we "get" and "chose" not to "be". It's a horrible waste, because the film screams for the point to be made, through Somerset's self-reflection and Tracy Mills' (Gwyneth Paltro) external observations (as the film stands she is barely more than a head in a box) and painted precisely as it is with just slight variances to both those characters lines, the film could have been a masterpiece of societal observation instead of a glamorous cop flick that becomes all about its gruesomeness. As we will see, Fincher is completely capable of this level of observation, because he goes there in his best film Zodiac, but he pulls away from it in Se7en, speaking to his overall problem of subject versus object - holding a mirror up to the people (art) or giving them what they want (advertising).
If there is a running theme of intellectual constraint in Fincher's films, there is a compensatory splendor in his equal parts subtle and intensified aesthetic pallet, that sees much of the impact of atmosphere he tried to evoke in Alien³ fully realized. The world of Se7en is made unrelentingly bleak, all the unlit rooms and preoccupation with torch-light notwithstanding. It almost always rains in this unnamed burg where no one switches a light on, nothing really works and people inspecting apartments never think to stay in them to look around for longer than five minutes. Fincher used bleach bypass to retain the silver in the film stock, washing everything in a tinted gray that gives flesh both living and dead a pasty quality. Nothing, even Paltrow's face and hair, is luminous. Blood is always a dark, liquid earth brown.
Those who fought for the ending, Fincher and Pitt specifically, knew to do so because it is the punchline that gives Se7ven its heart, the rest of the script being too clichéd (the retiring cop and the rookie newbie, the last-minute superior serial killer, the visits to the library to sink into his "mind", the black cop white cop Lethal Weapon thing) to amount to much, particularly when stripped of the only punch that would have given it teeth that I articulated in the first paragraph.
Yet Fincher could see a script that lent itself to potent mise-en- scene and in many ways, this will define him as a director from this film forward, which is partially why Se7en is usually thought of as his first film. Fincher the adman knew to sell John Doe as a concept right from the beginning. The opening credits (something Fincher will become more and more famous for) are devoted to the serial killer, the part of us Fincher falsely imagines Se7en is highlighting. Actually, Fincher plays it safe offering John Doe to us packaged (Brown box delivered if you like) in sleazy funk, indulging us ah-la-music video. The opening title becomes it's own narrative concept and it's not till later in the film we realize we were watching John Doe, as Fincher would say, "working on some really evil s$%^." The choice of (another) bad script and the focus on the serial killer is where Fincher creatively sells out, because it's not until Zodiac that he realizes just knowing what we want and giving it to us doesn't make him deep or even clever. He needs to focus on us rather than feed us, instead adopting the central conceit of advertising that assumes because it knows what will motivate us, that it is smarter than us. Se7en is a beautifully crafted film, and Fincher draws solid performances from his talented cast, but his own timidity prevents it from being a truly great film.
52 Tuesdays (2013)
Sophie Hyde and a fresh take on coming of age
The strength of 52 Tuesdays lies not in its documented revelations of a woman named Jane undergoing a transition over a 12 month period to be recognized as the man James, nor in the carefully examined complications of Billie and her coming of age story, but in the profound respect and dignity afforded the question of gender, the nuanced and detailed research and the delicacy and lightness of touch afforded subject matter that probes each one of us so deeply. The question of "gender assignment" is one that affects us all, because we engage in it habitually, thoughtlessly, on a continual basis. When you glance at any person and even most animals, your first response is without question to assign gender. Your decision about this will then determine how you communicate, how you judge, what you expect.
52 Tuesdays is a much-needed addition to the coming of age story, that turns the tables on the traditional idea of teen transformation, to look at transitioning that occurs between a mother and a daughter through the course of one year. Director Sophie Hyde filmed consecutively, the actors and crew met on Tuesdays to film, Matthew Cormack's script is written over the course of the year, usually each "Tuesday" is completed a couple of Tuesdays ahead of schedule, yet within an overall narrative framework. The film opens with Billie, (a 16 year old Tilda Cobham-Hervey) who is informed by her mother, Jane (Del Herbert-Jane) that she is to go and live with her dad, Beau Travis Williams for a year, because over the next twelve months Jane will be in transition from being identified as Jane to being identified as James. Billie and Jane decide to meet every Tuesday from four in the afternoon (after school) till ten at night to stay connected and to talk about the transitional process – if they feel like it. As Jane is working through her transition, Billie experiences one of her own in the company of two older students, Jasmine, (Imogen Archer) and Josh, (Sam Althuizen) with whom she begins to explore her own sexuality and ideas of how that is manifest in her life. As Jane experiences complications, Billie experiences her mothers transition as a rejection of motherhood, and acts out in her own ways.
Part of what makes 52 Tuesdays so fascinating is the use of film itself. As James transitions, he films himself weekly then shows this to Billie so that they can communicate about the changes occurring. But Billie is changing too, and she too decides to film herself experimenting sexually with her friends, clinging to the films she makes as a solid way of grounding her experience – and connecting with James. However, a sixteen year old filming herself and her friends having sex is not the same as the documented body image transformation James is experiencing. and trouble arises when Billie is confused by her families relationship to appearances. When her tapes are found by all concerned adults, they keep saying "what if this got out?" "What would people think?" and Billie responds with "How is this any different from the films you make?" Billie needs to learn societies judgments can be severe and can ruin people's lives, something she has only seen fought through the courage of her trans parent. Therefore, each Tuesday, we see the film being made, James' transition images and Billie's transition images, until the filming of change becomes its own form of oppression.
Outside of its unusual subject matter, 52 Tuesdays is a beautifully made film, with the difficulties of relating to the people we love coupled with our acceptance of who they are within themselves as they express themselves openly. The actors are nonprofessionals with Tilda Cobham-Hervey putting in a wonderful performance as Billie and Del Herbert-Jane superb as James. Del began working on the film as a gender diversity consultant and eventually was invited to work as an actor on the film. Del identifies as a non gender conforming individual who believes that a binary male / female system is outmoded, and they're commitment to the flawless articulation of this position informs the entire film and makes it a repeat watching experience. Unlike so many films made these days, when you watch 52 Tuesdays, you are immersed in an experience of integrity that gives appropriate informed respect to its subject treatment and uses language in an engaged and open way. 52 Tuesdays is a wonderful film, definitely one as many people as possible should see and one that contributes in a very main stream approachable way the enormously important subject matter it treats.