Northern Light
Superstar
A thread to celebrate and support great film and great television that might otherwise get too little attention.
To start, the film "Leave no Trace"
Its not for everyone...
But its moral ambiguity, its empathy for its principal characters, at once aligned and divergent was wonderful for me.
I think culture at its best allows one to see the world through someone else eyes. It helps us understand that our perspective is not the only one.........that ours need not be wrong, for someone else's to be true.
This film did that for me.
Review from Now:
https://nowtoronto.com/movies/reviews/leave-no-trace-debra-granik/
Showtimes for the week of July 27- Aug 2 are here.
http://movies.nowtoronto.com/#/movie/Leave No Trace/31373/showtimes
Synopsis from Now Toronto:
Leave No Traceopens in a vast forest, where Will (Ben Foster) and his teen daughter, Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie), live alone and undisturbed, foraging for food and water and practicing concealment drills. In short order, writer/director Granik clarifies her story's time and place - present-day Oregon - as Will and Tom find themselves forcibly restored to society, an adjustment Tom handles far better than her father. In her first dramatic feature since 2010's Winter's Bone, Granik continues to be fascinated by families in extreme environments, but the tone here is considerably less fraught; Leave No Trace simply exists alongside its characters, observing the story as it happens to them and letting us take note of the small moments that might explain Will's permanent state of paranoia, and the ways in which Tom is slowly but unmistakably forming an independent self. Foster flattens out his usual mannerisms to play a man so tightly wound that he's almost vibrating, while the Kiwi actor McKenzie is utterly convincing as an American teenager who's painfully aware of what she's missing in the world from which her father has retreated. Granik and co-writer Anne Rosellini, working from a novel by Peter Rock, make sure we're aware of that world as well, and all the other lost souls moving through it.
To start, the film "Leave no Trace"
Its not for everyone...
But its moral ambiguity, its empathy for its principal characters, at once aligned and divergent was wonderful for me.
I think culture at its best allows one to see the world through someone else eyes. It helps us understand that our perspective is not the only one.........that ours need not be wrong, for someone else's to be true.
This film did that for me.
Review from Now:
https://nowtoronto.com/movies/reviews/leave-no-trace-debra-granik/
Showtimes for the week of July 27- Aug 2 are here.
http://movies.nowtoronto.com/#/movie/Leave No Trace/31373/showtimes
Synopsis from Now Toronto:
Leave No Traceopens in a vast forest, where Will (Ben Foster) and his teen daughter, Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie), live alone and undisturbed, foraging for food and water and practicing concealment drills. In short order, writer/director Granik clarifies her story's time and place - present-day Oregon - as Will and Tom find themselves forcibly restored to society, an adjustment Tom handles far better than her father. In her first dramatic feature since 2010's Winter's Bone, Granik continues to be fascinated by families in extreme environments, but the tone here is considerably less fraught; Leave No Trace simply exists alongside its characters, observing the story as it happens to them and letting us take note of the small moments that might explain Will's permanent state of paranoia, and the ways in which Tom is slowly but unmistakably forming an independent self. Foster flattens out his usual mannerisms to play a man so tightly wound that he's almost vibrating, while the Kiwi actor McKenzie is utterly convincing as an American teenager who's painfully aware of what she's missing in the world from which her father has retreated. Granik and co-writer Anne Rosellini, working from a novel by Peter Rock, make sure we're aware of that world as well, and all the other lost souls moving through it.