Movie Review: A Man Named Pearl Shows the Power of Faith

When I first heard the title of this movie, A Man Named Pearl, I thought it was about Daniel Pearl, the American journalist who was killed in Pakistan. Pearl is actually the first name of a sharecropper’s son, Pearl Fryar, who took a negative comment and proved people wrong, in a big but positive way.

Growing up poor, he and his wife saved up to buy a house but he was turned away from a white neighborhood, someone saying that African Americans didn’t keep up their front yards. So Pearl and his wife bought a house and he, in his spare time, built up a garden from unwanted plants the city nursery had thrown away. That garden was a wonderfully imaginative topiary garden that has received national and international attention.

As he tells it, “There’s always gonna be obstacles. The thing is, you don’t let those obstacles determine where you go.”

For the small town of Bishopville, it has also become a source of pride and brings tourists from as far as Japan.

Without any horticultural training, self-taught topiary artist Pearl has done what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it. He very clearly shows, and it is clearly written out in the garden, that you can take a negative comment or attitude and turn it around with love and goodwill.

The documentary, showing at the Laemmle Playhouse 7 until Thursday, 31 July, and then opening at One Colorado on Friday, 1 August, interviews visitors, his neighbors, the mayor, journalists, art historians and art teachers, his pastor and his wife. It’s almost impossible to come away without being inspired to try a little harder to find your one great gift to give the world.

Le fils de L’épicier (The Grocer’s Son)

In this weekend when the blockbuster The Dark Knight opens, you might miss , Eric Guirado’s 2007 gentle drama, Le fils de L’épicier (The Grocer’s Son), about a son, Antoine (Nicolas Cazalé who was nominated for a César for this role), returning to help his mother (Jeanne Goupil) with the family business when his grouchy father (Daniel Duval) is hospitalized by a heart attack. His motives are not exactly pure–he borrows money to help a neighbor, Claire (Clotilde Hesme), whom he is too shy to ask out and invites her to stay. She was married young and now hopes to be accepted to a college in Spain in order to get her life back on track post-divorce.

The business is a small mom-and-pop shop with an old van that makes the rounds through the countryside. Surly like his father, he learns both how to care about his father and brother–beyond old quarrels, as well as how to care about his customers as people.

Do not expect the romanticized country, overly glamorous people and a romance with a happily ever after. Written by Guirado and Florence Vignon, the script’s dialog isn’t particularly snappy or witty, particularly since Antoine is a singularly tongue-tied young man when it comes to his own feelings, but when they do talk, the people are believable.

Currently playing at the Laemmle Playhouse 7 in Pasadena. French with English subtitles.

Asian Film Series in a Quaint Setting: Thursday Nights at the Pacific Asia Museum

Interested in Asia and movies? Do you love being under the stars of a summer night? Thursday nights at the Pacific Asia Museum will introduce you to the familiar, and local and the strange in this summer film series that includes Lilo and Stitch, a 1929 silent movie and anime.

It isn’t free. The cost is $5 for members, $12 for non-members. Or, buy the entire series and save ($25 members/ $65 non-members). Pacific Asia Museum, 46 North Los Robles Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91101. Call (626) 449-2742 ext. 31 to register.

July 17, 8 p.m.
Animated Triple Feature!
The Demon, Dojoji Temple, and The Book of the Dead
by Kihachiro Kawamoto
Introduction and discussion by animation critic Charles Solomon

The Demon
(1970, 8 min., Japanese with English subtitles)

Two brothers are setting traps in the mountains when suddenly a demon’s arm reaches out and grabs the younger brother!

The older brother severs the demon’s arm, to take home. When they look at the arm carefully, it somehow resembles their mother’s arm.

Dojoji Temple
(1976, 19 min., Japanese with English subtitles)

An elderly monk and his young acolyte stop at a lodge where the mistress of the house, a young widow, falls in love with the acolyte. When he lies to her, she is literally transformed by rage and relentless in her pursuit of revenge.

The Book of the Dead
(2005, 93 min., Japanese with English subtitles)

In this ravishing film of mystical beauty, master animator Kawamoto tells the story of a young noblewoman in 8th-century Japan who leaves her home to follow the apparition of an executed prince.

July 24, 8pm
Ugetsu Monogatari by Kenji Mizoguchi
Introduction and discussion by American Cinematheque’s Chris D.

(1954, 94 min., Japanese with English subtitles)

In the civil wars of 16th century Japan, two ambitious peasants want to make their fortunes. Their village is sacked by the marauding armies, and they and their wives head for the city. However, Genjuro soon sends his wife back, promising to return, and Tobei abandons his wife. Meanwhile, a wealthy noblewoman, the Lady Wakasa, shows an interest in Genjuro and invites him to her mansion.

August 7, 8 p.m.
Young, Gifted & Samoan
Introduction and discussion by filmmaker Dionne Fonoti

(2008, 23 min.)

While earning her master’s degree in visual anthropology, Fonoti was challenged to create an ethnographic film. Inspired by concepts of cultural identity and place, she explores the lives of Samoan youth, born and raised in San Francisco.

The film is followed by a tour of the exhibition Pacifika: Young Perspectives on Pacific Island Art

August 21, 8 p.m.
Hawaii by George Roy Hill
Introduction and discussion by 89.3 KPCC’s Off-Ramp host John Rabe

(1966, 189 min.)

Abner Hale, a rigid and humorless New England missionary, marries the beautiful Jerusha Bromley and takes her to the exotic island kingdom of Hawaii, intent on converting the natives. But the clash between the two cultures is too great and instead of understanding there comes tragedy.

September 11, 8 p.m.
Hollywood Chinese
Introduction by Director Arthur Dong

(2008, not rated, 90 min.)

‘What’s amazing about Arthur Dong’s ‘Hollywood Chinese,’ a chronicle of Chinese Americans in Hollywood beginning in the silent era and culminating in today’s success stories, is how much fun it is. Loaded with film clips, celebrity interviews and without an ax to grind, it’s a film not just for Chinese Americans but for film lovers in general.’
-C. Allen Johnson, San Francisco Chronicler

September 25, 8 p.m.
Red Heroine
With a Live Concert by Devil Music Ensemble

(1929, 94 min., silent)

Episode six of RED KNIGHT-ERRANT a.k.a. RED HEROINE, the only surviving episode of the 13-part Chinese serial, is one of the few complete and earliest extant silent martial arts films. A band of outlaws raids a village and kidnaps a maiden, causing the death of her grandmother. The captive maiden is rescued by a mysterious Daoist hermit and reemerges three years later as a full-fledged warrior, flying to the sky to revenge her grandmother’s death.

Critically acclaimed Devil Music Ensemble will bring this classic silent film to new life with a live performance of their all-new score.

Devil Music Ensemble is Brendon Wood Jonah Rapino and Tim Nylander.

Since 2002 Devil Music Ensemble (DME) has striven to present new, original, diverse works with performances in Boston, the rest of the U.S., and now the world. Presenting live soundtrack performances to ‘Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde’ on their first European tour, their experimentation with silent film and music has grown to include classics such as ‘Nosferatu,’ ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ the western ‘Big Stakes’ and now ‘Red Heroine.’ The attempt to pigeonhole Devil Music’s sound has been frustrating audiences and critics since its incarnation, and will continue as such as long as the love of experimentation stays with the group.

Make an evening of it! Come early and visit the galleries. Bring your own picnic and enjoy dinner in the courtyard garden. Or, you can purchase refreshments at the concessions stand.

All galleries open until programs start. All programs begin at 8pm.

Programs are subject to change.

Movie Review: Live and Become @ One Colorado

What would you do to survive?

In director Radu Mihaileanu’s 2005 provocative though sentimental movie Va, Vis et Deviens, an Ethiopian Christian mother (Meskie Shibru Sivan) orders her son to pretend he is Jewish in order to be rescued by a covert Israeli-sponsored mission called Operation Moses. They are in a Sudanese refugee camp in 1984, surrounded by death and dust. They had to walk miles to get there, leaving everything behind. He is replacing a boy who has just died, adopted by the grief-stricken Jewish mother, Hana (Mimi Abonesh Kebede).

Called Live and Become in English, this movie deals with the gray areas personal integrity–of personal identity and love. The boy who becomes Shlomo (played by Moshe Agazai, Moshe Abebe and lastly by Sirak M. Sabahat) is taught his new history and told to forget his own. He’s too young to fathom why his real mother ordered him to leave and too soon, his adoptive mother also dies. Losing two mothers, he becomes a problem child.

Yet he’s not the only orphan and eventually, he’s adopted by a socially responsible French Israeli couple, Yael (Yael Abecassis) and Yoram (Roschdy Zem), who already have two children.

Being Jewish in Israel shouldn’t be a problem yet Shlomo is very black. His color and the color of real Falasha, Ethiopian Jews, becomes a social issue and one that his adoptive mother and father bravely confront while he more passively endures.

Secretly, he finds a way to send letters to his real mother, asking an Ethiopian rabbi Qes Amhra (Yitzhak Edgar) to write letters in Amharic, his native language.

As a teenager, he falls in love with Sarah (Roni Hadar) whose father disapproves of the match so much that no one in Sarah’s family attends the wedding. Shlomo’s fear of being discovered and his desire to reveal the truth and yet keep this new family and this safety guaranteed by his false heritage provide the suspense and moral core of this movie.

Written by Mihaileanu with Alain-Michel Blanc, this imperfect movie tries to be both a formulaic movie fairy tale with a happy ending and a social message movie. It doesn’t always work, but the characters are so engaging and the themes so universal you want it to work. Who hasn’t been tempted to pretend one is something one is not to get though an uneasy situation?

Remy Chevin’s cinematography doesn’t always light the darker face of the actor playing Shlomo when juxtaposed to a lighter face and this aspect doesn’t seem to have a message there. Moreover, almost too much territory is covered in Shlomo’s adult life, making for a choppiness that is at odds with the more solemn pace of the first half.

Hadar glows with a rush of enthusiasm and boundless energy in contrast to Sabahat’s portrayal of the adult Shlomo as an outsider, often watching and observing himself because his secret is so great it threatens to destroy everything in his world.

The ending is, perhaps, too sentimental, but forgivable. This movie has touched the hearts of many. It won Cesar Awards in 2006 for Best Original Screenplay, an Audience Award at the 1005 Vancouver International Film Festival, a 2006 World Audience Award at the Lumiere Awards in France and 2005 Label Europa Cinemas, Panorama Audience Award and Prise of the Ecumenical Jury Award at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Sometimes one does go to a movie to see a fate happier than reality and yet when a movie can do that and make you care about its characters while learning about a bit of history and social injustice, isn’t it a little gem, no matter how rough, that should be considered precious?

In Amharic, Hebrew and French.

Reprinted from Blogcritics.org