Arcade Fire: The Reflektor Tapes
With The Reflektor Tapes, director Kahlil Joseph successfully shattered the clichés of band-concert documentaries. The Reflektor Tapes is a collage of images and sounds from Arcade Fire’s world tour and the making of the album Reflektor, coupled with the voices of band members reflecting on their music and lyrics. Recording some of the most interesting rock songs this century, Arcade Fire could be described as Kierkegaard’s post-new wave band. In the words of one member, they “make universes in which stories happen.”
Dancer
Ballet was Sergei Polunin’s ticket out of Ukrainian poverty. Accepted by London’s Royal Ballet School at age 13, he became the company’s youngest principal male dancer in 2009. Despite the grueling regimen, he found time for partying. Cocaine, he claimed, eased the pain. Stocked with home video and candid interviews with Polunin, family and friends, Dancer follows the star as he chucks London for Moscow. Unhappiness with being “a prisoner to my urge to dance” continued.
Sabotage
A worker at an airplane factory is falsely accused of sabotage in Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942). Director Harold Young aired the idea three years earlier in Sabotage. Sabotage is set in the Andy Hardy-like town of Midland, a place of white picket fences and supportive multi-generational families. The movie is historically interesting for registering unease over the coming world war. The U.S. was still at peace, but arming just in case, when Sabotage was released.
