Amidst endless New York Film Festival screenings, I managed to review a few first-run titles along the way. The good news is that they're all very much worth seeing, whether it's Rian Johnson's scarily accomplished time-travel drama Looper, Eugene Jarecki's scathing takedown of the war on drugs The House I Live In or the delightfully tongue-in-cheek Anna Kendrick Glee-style vehicle, Pitch Perfect.Looper (Village Voice)
The House I Live In (Slant)
Pitch Perfect (Slant)
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A call to national conscience, the activist documentary “The House I Live In” is persuasively urgent. Directed with heart by Eugene Jarecki, the movie is an insistently personal and political look at the war on drugs and its thousands of casualties, including those serving hard time for minor offenses. It is, Mr. Jarecki asserts — as he sifts through the data, weighs the evidence and checks in with those on both sides of the law — a war that has led to mass incarcerations characterized by profound racial disparities and that has created another front in the civil rights movement. The title of the documentary isn’t purely metaphoric. “The House I Live In” is, for starters, the name of a song written by Lewis Allan and the blacklisted Earl Robinson (“All races and religions/That’s America to me”), that became a part of the Paul Robeson songbook. Frank Sinatra sang it in a 1945 short film of the same title that is a plea for tolerance written by Albert Maltz, one of the Hollywood 10. Mr. Jarecki uses the Robeson version over the final credits of the documentary, a nod to that singer’s long history of civil rights activism. medico online doctor online dermatologo online Touchingly, the song also serves as Mr. Jarecki’s plaintive acknowledgment that his documentary was directly inspired by his lifelong relationship with an African-American woman who worked for his family, Nannie Jeter (her real name).
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