Reviews

In Calender, Egoyan succeeds in capturing how recollection and enlightenment meet in order to have an understanding of personal memory and collective consciousness, it goes on to show our inherent inclination towards struggling against the erasure of personal and cultural traumatic human history. The collapse of bonds with Armenia, this national umbilical cord can be seen as a reproduction of essential element of trauma of the Armenian people which is their violent separation from their homeland and their families at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Language is a very important element of this film, Egoyan cleverly refuses subordinating other languages to the global hegemony of English by not using subtitles and leaving other languages untranslated, doing so he is also able to preserve the otherness of languages and cultures and give them a voice when they might otherwise be silenced. More importantly, Egoyan having lived as an immigrant in Canada, reproduces in the viewer who does not understand them a feeling of alienation and disorientation. This sensation is a crucial part of the Egoyan aesthetic, it allows him to create a crisis of meaningfulness from which new meanings, and new ethical orientations can be generated. The film's otherness is also in its accented nature, his film's language is not that of a native speaker, it comes from certain looks, styles and music as well as themes of absence, loss, love, abandonment, alienation, obsession and seduction. Egoyan has said that" one of the advantages of working with the Armenian language or Armenian culture is that it is for most people, not something that can easily be identified, and that allows me the luxury of being able to treat it almost on a metaphorical level".

For the photographer in Calender whatever he does is bound with economy, he is constantly insisting on the presence of capital in numerous occasions. To Him the pagan temple looks like a bank, he thinks the guide is talking about the history of the place just to ask for more money in the end, he even asks one of the escorts how much her children cost her and tells the other who is an exotic dancer about his experience of putting money in dancer's dresses.

Throughout the film there are repeating scenes of the photographer having dinner with different women, the narrative of these scenes always remains the same. For Egoyan repetition does not function monolithically as a mechanical and numbing recuperation of sameness. Rather, repetition may depict a sense of poetic indifference that discloses in an accumulative way, to indicate the least apparent yet most determining drives of the subject.

"The Idiots" is an absolutely interesting film to watch, not because of its obedience of the so called Dogme 95 manifesto but because it raises a lot of questions and challenges us with its not so much hidden political agenda to rethink the authenticity of our predefined social and moral codes. This is a study of how we choose to explore our inner idiots and external social tensions that follow these choices.

The film follows a group of young people living together and impersonating people with mental illnesses as an attempt to find their inner idiots and thus achieving true happiness, they do so in public places and when they're home and around each other and there are moments that they do actually seem genuinely happy but new circumstances appear that confronts them and us as viewers to serious questions about the morality of their acts and weather they deserve happiness under these terms or not. "The Idiots" is really about something. It introduces characters that we get to know and it has them ask bold questions and make an effort to find out the answers, even if there turns out to be none.

What Von Trier does not only in "The idiots" but in some of his other films as well is to create these well thought, harmonious sets in the first half of the film only to dismantle and fall them apart in the second half where reality shows up and hidden brutal layers of their respective worlds can't help to leak in.

The movie starts as what we think is a satire of bourgeoisie and middle class values by a group of bohemians but it goes on to being a satire of both groups, although it shows more compassion towards the latter, no matter how unconventional their methods are to reach some sort of peace and happiness. Everything falls apart only when they try to apply to their group the same despicable middle class principles that they were escaping from in the first place, by trying to assign winners and losers, who is a good spasser and who is not, who is more serious about this and who isn't, basically by asking all the wrong questions. On the other hand, this is only Stoffer's and maybe partly Axel's part of the story and his point of view and his take on this experience, he is the one hating the bourgeoisie, we don't really hear about the other's motivations until nearly the end of the film. The artist is there because he thinks it will help him become a better artist, the doctor is there to experiment, Josephine is using as a substitute to her medications, other's might be just playing around and Karen as it turns out by hiding out in the idiots world is trying to cope with the harsh reality of her life, the loss of her child. I think this lack of consensus is crucial towards understanding this film and characters and their final separation. The film can also be viewed as a social critic on the society's hypocratic behavior towards the mentally retarded, well maybe not in a traditional sense. The idiots are always taken care of and never disrespected by the people. Denmark is a state that takes care of everyone and this is visible through the entire movie but there's one thing that is hard to ignore and that is this sense of awkwardness and discomfort and embarrassment that they cause for the normal society anywhere they go, even there are is someone coming and offering them money to move to somewhere else, the couple who come to buy the house is obviously distraught and wants to get out of the situation as fast as possible, so is everybody else, the only person that they encounter and shows them love and compassion and not just pity is Karen who goes with them and joins them.

This is a film made in a Neorealistic manner both in form and context addressing the difficulties of a Black urban L.A. community, Burnett's choice of how to depict this situation in the 70s doesn't have anything to do with the main stream cinema where everything has to somehow portray the American dream, this is in another words anti-American dream.

Killer of sheep is the narrator of false hopes, of lives that in despite of all the efforts made go nowhere, of a promising change that never comes, what makes this film so interesting and different with its other Neorealistic peers is the director's approach towards his characters, this is not a pitiful look on their lives but an understanding and at times a praising one that acknowledges how valuable and beautiful these lives are, of course not to a point of romanticizing them and this is I think a very important achievement for Burnett.

To see this point it is crucial to pay close attention to the music and how brilliantly it has been used, these blues songs are saying everything that the characters can't say out loud or can't put to words themselves, that's why they gain this liberating quality in the film, particularly the song "This bitter earth" by Dinah Washington which can be heard in the ending credits and during the scene where Stan is dancing with his wife who is suffering from her husband's frustration and is doing everything she can to help him, only way she knows how but fails every time and it adds up to her own frustration. It is necessary to point out that these people aren't portrayed as depressed or suicidal, there is a very fine line between being depressed and being frustrated.

The film focuses often on the children, their presence is essential to how the film is constructed. Their games, their behavior towards each other and towards their parents answers many questions about the whole community itself. These are smart kids that spend most of their time in the streets and learn how to defend and take care of themselves, both girls and boys, but due to lack of opportunities can't go anywhere and don't seem to have a brighter future than their parents. Here is why the film serves as a social critique towards the power structures that aren't assisting these communities in anyway, they are all seem to be left alone in this post-apocalyptic zone to survive on their own. After watching this film I couldn't help but to think about everything that has been happening recently in the United States, the 2014 Ferguson unrest and then the death of Eric Garner and how apparently not much has been fundamentally changed.

The film cleverly and truthfully chooses to stays away from reproducing the image of black community that media has been feeding people every day, I think this might be one of the very few times in the history of American cinema that black people are not in any way associated with drugs or crime or police which is what makes the film so refreshing and eye opening to watch.