items tagged with Sam Weisman

WHALE RIDER

Among its many, many virtues, what I loved most about Niki Caro’s Whale Rider is its toughness. In the past year, we’ve seen so many variants on the ethnic-female-overcoming-her-family’s-prejudices theme – My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Real Women Have Curves, Bend It Like Beckham – that the idea of sitting through another one, even one set on a staggeringly gorgeous New Zealand seaside, filled me with more ennui than expectation.

MOULIN ROUGE

I loved Baz Luhrmann’s musical Moulin Rouge, but what I adore even more than the film itself are works like it – artistically divisive movies that give you no choice but to love or hate them.