In This Corner of the World
The award-winning 2016 animated feature begins with idyllic memories of prewar Japan as experienced by the child protagonist, Suzu. Married at 18 as the war begins, she notices the conflict gradually impinging on life in her hometown near Hiroshima. Visual contrast is added through images on the girl’s sketchpad. Suzu is an artist. The pale colors and eggshell blue sky form a deceptively pleasant backdrop to a revealing story of everyday life in wartime.
Portrait of Jennie
Does time move forward in a straight line or curve around us? Portrait of Jenny (1948) wondered about this as a hard-up artist (Joseph Cotton) befriends a young girl (Jennifer Jones) in Central Park. The eerie musical motif hints that she’s a ghost flitting in and out of time. Cotton often moves through a painted world, adding visual magic to a story that could have come straight from Rod Serling in a moment of whimsy.
Take the Money and Run
Woody Allen’s directorial debut, Take the Money and Run (1969), is a mock social-problem documentary complete with stentorian narration and the requisite interviews with parents, parole officers and associates. Allen plays a ne’er-do-well criminal raised “amidst the violence and poverty of the slums.” The film looks forward to mockumentaries such as This Is Spinal Tap and gazes back toward Chaplinesque slapstick. Snatches of puerile writing nudge against some hilarious visual gags.
In His Own Home
Summoned by screaming, police descended on a University of Florida student’s apartment. He was having a paranoid breakdown, and by the end of the altercation, the student, Kofi Adu-Brempong, was shot. The 2010 incident was one of many recent police shootings with a racial complexion. The documentary includes startling cellphone footage as well as interviews with colleagues and cops. Along with race, mental illness was a factor, as was the militarization of police tactics.
