The Forgiveness of Blood

Movies to See This Week

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DETACHMENT

Yes, it’s Despair Week at the Movie Gourmet, where you can experience the hopeless human experience with my three top picks.  First, the gripping drama Detachment features a top-rate performance by Adrien Brody as a teacher in a hellish school system that decays teachers’ souls.  In a sizzling performance, Woody Harrelson plays a corrupt and brutal LA cop trying to stay alive and out of jail in Rampart.  The searing and brilliantly constructed Iranian drama A Separation won the Best Foreign Language Oscar.

Joshua Marston, writer-director of the brilliant Maria, Full of Grace, has made a fine drama set in Albania, The Forgiveness of Blood.  It’s slightly less depressing than my top three this week.

Safe House is a fine paranoid action spy thriller with Denzel Washington and the director’s pedal jammed to the floor. Thin Ice is a Fargo Lite diversion.

The Best Picture Oscar-winning The Artist is still playing in theaters.

I have also commented on the biopics My Week with Marilyn (thumbs up) and The Iron Lady (thumbs down).

I haven’t yet seen Footnote and The Kid with the Bike, which open this week.  You can read descriptions and view trailers of these and other upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My DVD pick this week is Take Shelter, #2 on my list of Best Movies of 2011 and probably the single most overlooked film of last year.

Movies to See This Week

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It's not going well for Adrien Brody in DETACHMENT

The gripping new drama Detachment features a top-rate performance by Adrien Brody as a teacher in a hellish school system that decays teachers’ souls.

In a sizzling performance, Woody Harrelson plays a corrupt and brutal LA cop trying to stay alive and out of jail in Rampart.

The searing and brilliantly constructed Iranian drama A Separation won the Best Foreign Language Oscar.

Joshua Marston, writer-director of the brilliant Maria, Full of Grace has made a fine drama set in Albania, The Forgiveness of Blood.

Safe House is a fine paranoid action spy thriller with Denzel Washington and the director’s pedal jammed to the floor. Thin Ice is a Fargo Lite diversion.

The Best Picture Oscar-winning The Artist is still playing in theaters.

I have also commented on  the biopics My Week with Marilyn (thumbs up) and The Iron Lady (thumbs down).

You can read descriptions and view trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My DVD pick of St. Patrick’s week is the Irish comedy Waking Ned Devine.

Movies to See This Week

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Writer-director Asghar Farhadi's real life daughter Samina plays the daughter at the center of A SEPARATION

In a sizzling performance, Woody Harrelson plays a corrupt and brutal LA cop trying to stay alive and out of jail in Rampart.

The searing and brilliantly constructed Iranian drama A Separation won the Best Foreign Language Oscar.

Joshua Marston, writer-director of the brilliant Maria, Full of Grace has made a fine drama set in Albania, The Forgiveness of Blood, which opens this weekend.

Safe House is a fine paranoid action spy thriller with Denzel Washington and the director’s pedal jammed to the floor. Thin Ice is a Fargo Lite diversion.

If you still need to catch up on the Oscar winners, you can see the Best Picture Oscar winning The Artist and the rockem sockem thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,

I have also commented on Steven Spielberg’s War Horse, the sex addiction drama Shame, the biopic The Iron Lady, the feminist action thriller Haywire and Ralph Fiennes’ contemporary adaption of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.

You can read descriptions and view trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My DVD pick of (last) week is the fine political drama The Ides of March with Ryan Gosling, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti and George Clooney.

The Forgiveness of Blood: modern teens trapped by ancient idiocy

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The new film by Joshua Marston, writer-director of the brilliant Maria, Full of Grace, is about a bizarre custom that has survived in modern Albania.  When a person is killed, a blood feud begins, and the relatives of the killer cannot leave their homes until released by the family of the victim.  Families can and do spend years – even a decade – in self-imposed house arrest enforced by the wronged family upon pain of death.  This is the way of the ancient Albanian oral tradition, the Kanun.  The most bizarre aspect of the house arrest is that it still exists in an otherwise modern world, among people using cell phones and text messaging.

But it is a mistake to look on The Forgiveness of Blood as “the Albanian blood feud movie” because Marston focuses on the teenagers in the family.  What can it be like for a teen to be isolated in his house indefinitely?  Teens have no greater craving than to be with their peers.  American kids can get bored while surrounded by games, Internet access and 400 TV channels.  You can imagine sitting in rural Albania with four walls and Albanian TV.  Teens are also so dramatic and impulsive, the mere threat of death isn’t always enough to prevent a rash act.  And then there are the hormones…

This is the omnipresent tension in The Forgiveness of Blood – what happens when the kids just can’t stand it any longer?   The adults all accept a cultural logic, but the kids can see that this custom doesn’t make any sense.

The movie, as befits rural Albania, has a leisurely pace, but there is a throbbing tension underneath.  That ever present tension, and the look into a strange aspect of another culture, make me recommend The Forgiveness of Blood.

Here’s the teaser (which I like more) and then the trailer.