Close-Up
J. Hoberman
Tuesday, January 22nd 2008 at 05:04am
Most Popular
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The Harrowing Adventures of President Obama Looking back on his first term
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Louis Owens and John Steinbeck's Ghosts A mystery solved with the help of a professor and a mobster's musician
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An Interview With Woody Allen Woody Allen is back from his European vacation. Next, he directs Larry David in NYC and Puccini for L.A. Opera
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The Crown Heights Lubavitchers Ecstatic Jews, a messiah proclaimed, and the consequential divisions
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You Can't Escape the Canvasser's Pitch 'Got a minute?' The young bleeding-heart carnivores who hunt you down on your lunch hour
Bride Kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan, which opens the annual Margaret Mead Film Festival, is itself a real grabber. Examining the Central Asian practice of marriage by abduction, Hungarian academic Petr Lom presents a half-dozen cases. A few bride-nappings are foiled; some are successful (however that is defined); one ends in death. Telecast by Frontline last year, Bride Kidnapping is a model ethno-doc. The filmmaking is lucidly functional, in the detached, attentive style pioneered in the '70s by David and Judith MacDougall. Lom takes an exotic tradition and makes its cultural function apparent. The individuals speak for themselves; the camera (which more than once tags along on an abduction) is never "invisible."
The Margaret Mead, as always, offers a skein of tangled themes: new Russian docs, a tribute to New Orleans, and a retro of ancient educational TV shows. Bride Kidnapping is only one of several films devoted to the travails of family formation. These include the latest by Dennis O'Rourke, the Afghanistan-set Land Mines: A Love Story; the Israeli Sentenced to Marriage, in which Orthodox women struggle to get their gets (religious divorces); Children of the Decree, on the criminalization of abortion in Ceausescu's Romania; and Sisters in Law, in which lawyers take on domestic violence in Cameroon, scheduled to open next year at Film Forum.
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More by J. Hoberman
The 39 Steps and Shoot the Piano Player Blow Up Conventions of the Comic Thriller
Hitchcock and Truffaut's men on the run, twenty years apart
A Dreyer Duo—Day of Wrath at the IFC and Vampyr on DVD
The visionary, restored
Manny Farber 1917-2008
Remembering the painter, professor, and underground model for scores of American film critics
Childhood In Momma's Man; Struggles With Daddy Issues In Hamlet 2
Azazel Jacobs and Andrew Fleming set parent traps
Manny Farber 1917-2008
Remembering the painter, professor, and underground model for scores of American film critics
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