This is the time of year when I am inundated with screeners from the public relations department of both major and minor production companies that are meant to help members of New York Film Critics Online select winners in various categories at our annual meeting in December.
Unlike most critics, I am far more interested in “minor” than “major” when it comes to films. As a reminder of why this is the case, I finished watching “Inception” this morning, an onerous task. It simply amazes me that this piece of garbage received 85 percent “fresh” ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. But then again, this is a country that elects George W. Bush and Barack Obama president. My approach will be to report on the films in the order that they presumably interest my readers and me. Those who are regular readers will not be surprised that documentaries go to the head of the pack. Today I will be writing about “Last Train Home”, a movie about migrant workers in China and will get to “Waste Land”, “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe”, and “A Film Unfinished” (about a Nazi film made in a concentration camp) later this week. Those are my kinds of movies, not the twerp Leonard DiCaprio bouncing off the walls in a CGI orchestrated dream. “Last Train Home” is the latest movie that departs from the globalization-is -wonderful ideology of Thomas Friedman, Jagdish Bhagwati, and other prophets of neoliberalism. Some are fictional, such as “Blind Shaft”, a movie about miners forced to work in virtual slavery. Others are documentaries like “Still Life” that depict the loss of livelihood and ties to the land that the Three Gorges Dam posed. Directed by a Canadian Lixin Fan, whose last film “Up the Yangtze” explored the same issues as “Still Life”, “Last Train Home” focuses on a single family whose life has been torn apart by China’s rapid industrialization. Changhua Zhan and his wife Suqin Chen both work on sewing machines in a typical export-oriented factory in the Guangdong province. Each New Year’s holiday, they take a train back to their rural village to see their teenaged daughter Qin Zhang and her younger brother Yang Zhang. This is not as easy as it seems since there are far more people trying to get a ticket than are available. The train station is a sea of humanity with cops and soldiers trying to keep order. Although the film does not comment on why this is the case (it sticks to a cinéma vérité format), it strikes this reviewer as the likely outcome of a society that no longer places much emphasis on public transportation as it once did. (There are signs that this is beginning to change recently, but one doubts that it will have any impact on the poorer migrant workers for a while.) full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/11/28/last-train-home/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
