Letters to the Editor
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I'm looking forward to this
I'd see any films by this director based on how much I loved the Station Agent. I had no idea that the director was Scott Templeton.
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Just Saw This
I caught a free show in Austin that was sponsored by the ACLU. A really great film. The beginning bordered on being slow, but it paid off as the film went on because Walter was such a well-developed character. I thought Tarek may have been a tad uncomplicated but he was definitely likable.
It's a film that shows how enriching it can be for boring white Americans to learn about other cultures, and definitely, how important connection is. Walter was the saddest character in the film because he was so disconnected. A great film. It made me wish I lived in New York, too. There is no other place like it.
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Terrific review!
What a marvelous review that was by Stephanie Zacharek! I do not often watch movies, but now, after this review, I shall certainly be waiting for "The Visitor" to be released in India!
-- GSC
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Let's all go to the lobby
Thanks so much for this recommendation. This is exactly what reviewers should be doing, in my humble opinion: alerting us to the films they like, rather than badmouthing the ones they don't. It's so much more difficult to capture the essence of a good film in a review than to come up with something nasty to say about a bad one. Keep up the good work.
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Oh yay!
I'm so happy about this review, I saw two previews for this on the IFC channel the other night and it just looked amazing. Even better that its the same dude who made "The Station Agent" which I stop and watch *every single time* I click past it on cable.
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Dead-on Review!
Ms. Zacharek has done all film goers a huge service, for which we should all express our gratitude! I caught "The Visitor" as part of an arts festival at Florida State University a few months back. She has captured its essence. While sometimes seemingly slow moving, it is, nevertheless commanding as a reflection on so many levels of today's society.
Find this picture - enjoy this picture - let everyone know about this picture!
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It Was the Drumming
I don't think it's just the generosity of the movie that allows Walter to join the drum circle - it's the drum circle. I have yet to attend one that wasn't completely welcoming of everyone. Hope this movie inspires more people to pick up a drum - it IS lifechanging. I know it's more than the drumming that changes Walter - but the energy of the drum is what fed the change.
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Yes, small is an expansive space
The Landlord? Yes, a million years ago there was poverty and race and class conflict. This director realises that the key chorus in his symphony must escape the dissonance of a New York gentrified and racially apartheid zeitgeist... to explore rhythms of simple human connection.
I doubt that his main character ever finds himself. We doubt that we ever will too. But placement in a zone of connection ensures the movie a resonating, pleasant, mild tonal quality that focuses us on character study, displacing plot-conflict.
If directors and writers feel the need to arrest development so, they would be wise to apply such an artifice - the main character's existential angst (with clearly-sympathetic loss), supporting and oppositional forces that compel a look inside via character interplay and subdued subject dialogue (silence) to embue the whole ensemble with clicheed eloquence.
In so constructing this world, the director took little risk about human nature except to placate an audience expecting the mildest of humiliation and character/society despair.
D+ for lack of guts, highjacking: Proof of life uncertain.
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Sigh...
I admit that I haven't seen this film, but the review -- while nicely written -- suggests to me that this is yet another film about white people reclaiming their humanity through their interactions with "earthy" and "natural" people of color. The likely backstory is that the professor (or his parents) moved to a CT suburb in the first place to get away from people of color. Now he finds his life barren and meaningless. Through a desperate need for real human interaction that he doubtless cannot find on his sterile college campus, he commits an act of generosity by allowing the immigrants to stay in his Manhattan apartment. The story then unfolds to show the economics professor's withering life resuscitated by the nurturing embrace of the African drum circle - a trope for all that is good and natural in the world. I have no doubt that the filmmaker truly cares about this project and has told the story in a lovely way. But, frankly, I'm bored with stories that focus on the humanity of upper-middle-class white people. It is precisely this group that has largely contributed to the inhumanity of the world. Of course they are in desperate need of humanity, but when there are food riots breaking out all over the world and Haitians subsisting on "dirt cookies," the needs of the upper-middle-class should and must take a backseat.
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What's up with all the Caucasian (self-)loathing??
Jeez, you "boring white people" need to cut yourself some slack.
Take it from a minority who emigrated to the US a while ago: while foreign cultures/people are by default "exotic" in their newness to and differences from the stereotypical WASP American experience, they really aren't that fascinating once you become acclimatized to them.
And FWIW, from my experiences the "boring" American culture which you natives excoriate can actually be quite fascinating -on levels both explicit and subtle - to a curious outsider.
Finally: self/self-culture-loathing really does not make you a better person or progressive.
Open-mindedness and fairness to everyone - eeeevil, tyrannical middle-class WASP Yanks included - does. That's just my 2 cents.
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"It made me wish I lived in New York, too. There is no other place like it."
That is an utterly groan inducing statement. lots of places are like it, and I am no stranger to New York City.
Frankly, as soon as I saw the image I was pretty sure this would be another 'New York story.' Almost all of these are awful and infused with the writer/director's illusion the he or she has seen something in themselves that only New York can provide.
For the love of god, moviemakers... stop making so many films 'about' New York... frankly, it also reeks of laziness, intellectual and otherwise.