Monday, August 14, 2006 05:59:12 AM
DVD PICKS
CSA, Sorry, Haters and Manderlay
CSA: Confederate States of America
What if the South had won the Civil War? Well, this uproarious
faux documentary by the British Broadcasting Service delves into such an eventuality.
In this world you can procure servants on the Slave Shopping Network, available throughout the country,
despite the government's preoccupation with its arch-enemy Canada. African American writer/drector
Kevin Wilmott actually got the idea for this satire from watching Ken Burns's The Civil War on PBS.
The film intersperses the historical perspectives of noted academics,
a white American and an African-Canadian woman, along with various words
from their sponsors, such as Confederated Life Insurance ("For over 100 years
-- serving a people.") and the National Endowment for American Culture
("Serving a way of life.") Although it uses the Civil War as its starting
point, the film is foremost a parody of the America in which we live today.
Sorry, Haters
Shades of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities are replayed
in Sorry, Haters, only the names and races have been changed.
The fears and suspicions still remain; indeed they are magnified by
events in the past few years. A Muslim taxi driver (Abdellatif Kechiche)
having finished his daily prayers picks up a business woman (Robin Wright Penn)
who asks him to take her Uptown. She then changes her mind and decides
she wants to head to New Jersey.
What follows is a journey into the worlds of everyday people and a penetration of the barriers that
separate us, particularly in a space like metropolitan New York. Though the paths of individuals
might routinely cross each other, there is all too frequently a gulf between us.
In this case, a cab driver, who also happens to be Phd, and a female televison executive
find their world's on a collision course in in this thriller that explores the great post-9/11 divide that still exists between Muslims and non-Muslims.
Manderlay
Manderlay, the second film in director Lars von Trier's trilogy that began with Dogville.
The scene is set in 1933 after Grace and her father leave the town of Dogville and wind up in search
of a better location. They wind up in Alabama, at the gates of a plantation named Manderlay.
A girl beckons Grace to pass through the gates. Despite her father's admonitions, she does and
enters a world in which slavery has not been abolished, a full 70 years after it was supposed to have been.
Grace then feels it incumbent upon herself to make amends for injustices that her people have
inflicted on blacks. She decides to free Manderlay. Her skeptical father leaves her there
with four of his cronies and a lawyer, believing Grace's goal can never be achieved.
Director von Trier assembles a brilliant cast that includes
Bryce Dallas Howard, Willem Dafoe, Danny Glover and Lauren
Bacall.
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