Old friends Stone (Abdi Waithe) and Charlie (Muhammad Muwakil) are on different paths in GOD LOVES THE FIGHTER
GOD LOVES THE FIGHTER (Damian Marcano, 2013)
Available on DVD and VOD July 7
www.godlovesthefighter.com
If you missed Damian Marcano’s gripping God Loves the Fighter when it played the Urbanworld Film Festival last September and BAMcinématek’s Caribbean Film Series in April, you can now catch this realistic, unflinching portrait of street life in the capital of Trinidad & Tobago on DVD and VOD. Following in the tradition of such classic tales as Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come, Fernando Meirelles’s City of God, and Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi, God Loves the Fighter is set in Port of Spain, which angry narrator King Curtis (Freetown Collective’s Lou Lyons) calls “blood city” and “gun town” and where Charlie Ward (Freetown Collective’s Muhammad Muwakil) is trying to make a better life for himself despite being dealt a bad hand. Desperate for money, Charlie hooks up with childhood friend Daniel (Abdi Waithe), now known as Stone, a powerful local gangster doing the dirty work for drug-dealing pimp Putao Singh (Darren Cheewah), a vicious, heavily tattooed man who walks around in nothing but flip-flops and ridiculously tight black Jockey shorts. Charlie seeks advice from his mentor and father figure, Mr. Odrick (Albert Laveau), a wise old man who has lost four sons to the violence on the streets. Meanwhile, smart young kid Chicken (Zion Henry) represents the future of the city, but he is brutalized by his mother (Penelope Spencer), who demands that he does whatever is necessary to bring home food for her, forgoing an education and instead meeting up with the wrong people. The multiple story lines all come together when Dinah (Jamie Lee Phillips), one of Putao’s prostitutes, decides that she’s not going to let what happened to her happen to his newest recruit, the young Nina (Tyker Phillips).
Characters dream of finding a way out in GOD LOVES THE FIGHTER
God Loves the Fighter is alive with the rhythms of Port of Spain, the sounds and colors, beautifully shot and edited by Marcano, who incorporates slow motion, jump cuts, and sometimes dizzying handheld camerawork to capture the dark mood on the streets, the lack of hope that is pervasive in this society. Marcano also cowrote the screenplay with executive producer Alexa Bailey, but most of the dialogue is improvised based on the script; the subtitles don’t always match what the characters are actually saying, which is far more poetic and natural. The evocative soundtrack, which is a character unto itself, consists of music by Freetown Collective and Q Major that furthers the emotional power and overarching moods. The title of the film, which has been a hit at festivals around the world but has not had a U.S. theatrical release, comes from a quote by Muwakil: “I believe that as much as God loves the prayerful penitent so too must he love the persistent, up against all odds death coming endlessly in waves but never go under, God loves the fighter.” Those words embody the provocative spirit of Marcano’s feature debut, a compelling work about his hometown, a place that leads King Curtis to ask, “So what’s in a name when a name is worthless? I sleep on the streets, but I’m still a king.”
Writer-director Brad Bird won Oscars for his animated features The Incredibles (2004) and Ratatatouille (2007), but the Simpsons veteran first made his mark with the charming 1999 sci-fi cartoon The Iron Giant. Based on the 1968 book The Iron Man by Ted Hughes, the animated film is set during the Cold War, with the general populace and the military fearful of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. So when rumors that a fifty-foot-tall iron giant (voiced by Vin Diesel) has fallen from the sky, the government wants to destroy it, but it is being hidden by young Hogarth Hughes (Eli Marienthal), who has saved its life. Hogarth keeps his new best friend a secret from his mother (Jennifer Aniston) and federal agent Kent Mansley (Christopher McDonald) with the help of the town beatnik, Dean McCoppin (Harry Connick Jr.), who takes a liking to Hogarth’s mom. The screenplay, written by Tim McCanlies (Secondhand Lions), plays with various genre clichés just enough to avoid being clichéd itself, instead making The Iron Giant a delightful, nearly flawless twist on the E.T. mythos, mixed in with a little Androcles & the Lion, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and even Frankenstein and King Kong. The film, which also features the voices of Cloris Leachman (Mrs. Tensedge), John Mahoney (General Rogard), and M. Emmet Walsh (Earl Stutz), is a treat for children and adults. Bird, meanwhile, has graduated to live action; his next movies were Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, starring Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, and Simon Pegg, and Tomorrowland, with George Clooney and Hugh Laurie. The Iron Giant is screening for free on July 7 at dusk as part of the Movie Nights in the Rockaways series in O’Donohue Park, which continues August 4 with Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future 2. (For a day-by-day list of free summer movies throughout New York City, go 
It’s rather hard to tell how much Japanese auteur Nagisa Ôshima is monkeying around with his very strange 1986 movie, Max, Mon Amour, a love story between an intelligent, beautiful woman and a chimpanzee. The director of such powerful films as Cruel Story of Youth; Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence; Taboo; and In the Realm of the Senses seems to have lost his own senses with this surprisingly straightforward, tame tale of bestiality, a collaboration with master cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who shot seminal works by Truffaut and Godard; screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, who has written or cowritten nearly ninety films by such directors as Pierre Étaix (who plays the detective in Max), Luis Buñuel, Volker Schlöndorff, Philippe Garrel, and Miloš Forman; and special effects and makeup artist extraordinaire Rick Baker, the mastermind behind the 1976 King Kong, the Michael Jackson video Thriller, Ratboy, Hellboy, and An American Werewolf in London, among many others. Evoking Bedtime for Bonzo and Ed more than Planet of the Apes and Gorillas in the Mist, Max, Mon Amour is about a well-to-do English family living in Paris whose lives undergo a rather radical change when husband Peter Jones (Anthony Higgins) catches his elegant wife, Margaret (Charlotte Rampling), in bed with a chimp. Margaret insists that she and the chimp, Max, are madly in love and somehow convinces Peter to let her bring the sensitive yet dangerous beast home, which confuses their son, Nelson (Christopher Hovik), and causes their maid, Maria (Victoria Abril), to break out in ugly rashes. Peter, a diplomat, works for the queen of England, so as he prepares for a royal visit to Paris, he also has to deal with this new addition to his ever-more-dysfunctional family.
If you’re in the mood for something very different at the fourteenth annual New York Asian Film Festival, look no further than Khavn de la Cruz’s Ruined Heart: Another Love Story Between a Criminal & a Whore. Expanding his fifteen-minute 2012 short, Khavn has created a visually arresting film that weaves its way through the gritty streets of an almost postapocalyptic Manila slum bursting with flashes of red, yellow, blue, and green. Using virtually no dialogue — the only words are from occasional poetry and several songs, and the very few times that characters speak, no translation is offered — Khavn tells the story of a Criminal (Japanese star Tadanobu Asano) on the run with a Whore (Mexican actress Nathalia Acevedo), attempting to get away from the Godfather (Filipino poet and playwright Vim Nadera). The multinational cast also includes the Friend (Andrew Puertollano) and the Lover (Russian-born actress Elena Kazan, who grew up in Berlin and now lives in Mumbai), but the real stars are Khavn’s mesmerizing score, Frances Grace Mortel’s art direction, Frances Soeder’s production design, Carlo Francisco Manatad’s frantic editing, and Christopher Doyle’s dizzying cinematography, which at times has Asano doing the camerawork himself as he runs through small passageways and back alleys.
Yasujirō Ozu’s Late Spring marked a late spring of sorts in the Japanese auteur’s career as he moved into a new, post-WWII phase of his long exploration of Japanese family life and the middle class. Based on Kazuo Hirotsu’s novel Father and Daughter, the black-and-white film, written by Ozu with longtime collaborator Kogo Noda, tells the story of twenty-seven-year-old Noriko (Setsuko Hara), who lives at home with her widower father, Shukichi Somiya (Chishu Ryu), a university professor who has carved out a very simple existence for himself. Her aunt, Masa (Haruko Sugimura), thinks Noriko should get married, but she prefers caring for her father, who she believes would be lost without her. But when Somiya starts dropping hints that he might remarry, like his friend and colleague Jo Onodera (Masao Mishima) did — a deed that Noriko finds unbecoming and “filthy” — Noriko has to take another look at her future. Late Spring is a masterpiece of simplicity and economy while also being a complex, multilayered tale whose every moment offers unlimited rewards. From the placement and minimal movement of the camera to the design of the set to the carefully choreographed acting, Ozu infuses the work with meaning, examining not only the on-screen relationship between father and daughter but the intimate relationship between the film and the viewer. Ozu, who never married, has a firm grasp on the state of the Japanese family as some of the characters try to hold on to old-fashioned culture and tradition while recovering from the war’s devastation and facing the modernism that is taking over.