Review: Rachel getting married (follow-up)

I recently wrote a review on the upcoming Anne Hathaway movie, Rachel getting married. My curiosity having been piqued, I couldn’t help but look it up again (and again, and maybe one more time). And now, items about the movie have started dropping into my lap. Amongst others, this is what this week’s Maclean’s magazine has to offer:

Finally, a bridesmaid gets her due

Anne Hathaway emerges as an early Oscar contender with ‘Rachel Getting Married’

BRIAN D. JOHNSON | September 24, 2008 |

A Hollywood discovery typically involves a filmmaker casting a raw talent and transforming an actor into a movie star. But with Rachel Getting Married, the opposite occurred: director Jonathan Demme took a movie star and discovered a raw talent.

Demme first noticed Anne Hathaway as a teen ingenue in The Princess Diaries, which he saw at a drive-in with his kids. The next year, he glimpsed her on the red carpet at the Golden Globes. “She looked really pretty and gorgeous,” he recalled in an interview at Toronto’s film festival earlier this month. “I had that moment — she’s got it! The director in me was like, ‘Make a note of that. Maybe one day I’ll have a script where she can do something completely different.’ “

In Rachel Getting Married, Hathaway does just that, playing against type as a volatile woman who comes home from rehab and wreaks emotional havoc at her sister’s wedding. After being overshadowed by her co-stars in a succession of rather decorative roles — Brokeback Mountain, The Devil Wears Prada, Get Smart — she gives a shattering performance as a sister upstaging the bride. It seems guaranteed to secure an Oscar nomination. And the movie is one of the freshest, most original pictures to come out of Hollywood in a long time.

Which is bizarre, because there’s a lot about Rachel Getting Married that seems familiar. We saw the basic premise — of an outspoken sibling who brings unwanted baggage to her sister’s nuptials — just last year in Margot at the Wedding. Rachel is also reminiscent of Monsoon Wedding, another pageant brimming with joy and music, yet mined with an explosive family secret. And the spontaneous documentary style of Demme’s filmmaking has been borrowed from two memorable Danish movies about family meltdowns, The Celebration (1996) and After the Wedding (2006) — Demme, in fact, showed both of them to his crew in preparing his own shoot.

“Because we were making a movie in America,” he says, “I wanted to remind us what it’s like when fiction is done in an aggressively realistic way. I know dogme is dead, but the idea of dogme is the idea of any documentary — that you don’t manipulate reality. The camera in After the Wedding didn’t look like it had designed shots but was always lucky enough to be in the right place to capture what was going on.”

What’s fresh about Rachel is how it imports European nerve into a sizable American movie. The late Robert Altman did something similar with his own brand of sprawling narrative chaos. But, limited by 35-mm film, Altman still required precise camera choreography. Although Demme is known for dramas like Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, his last four features have been documentaries. Cinematographer Declan Quinn (who shot Monsoon Wedding) worked on all of them, and Demme had him shoot Rachel’s scripted drama as digital vérité. “We never rehearsed anything,” says the director. “We didn’t design shots beforehand. There was no such thing as ‘Anne’s close-up.’ “

That tended to level the playing field among the movie’s wildly eclectic cast, who range from veteran Debra Winger to newcomer Rosemarie DeWitt (TV’s Mad Men). Cast as Rachel, the distraught bride, DeWitt gives a performance that seems to come out of nowhere and is, in its own way, as astounding as Hathaway’s. Tunde Adebimbe, the African-American who plays her groom, is another wild card — the lead singer of a rock band called TV On The Radio. Demme had originally offered the role to filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson (who said “you’ve got to be kidding”), then was intrigued by the notion of making Rachel’s marriage interracial.

The groom is a record producer, and the bride’s father a music executive, so Demme thought it was only natural to include a multicultural horde of talented musicians among the guests and have them play whenever they felt like it as the cameras rolled — creating an organic soundtrack. In one tense scene, they’re so distracting Hathaway’s character tells them to shut up.

Making a movie is not unlike planning a wedding. Both are nerve-racking productions that involve sets, costumes, music and casting. Both try to create magic from a precarious alchemy of the scripted and the spontaneous, bringing on tears of sadness and joy. Rachel Getting Married, which works as a wedding and a movie, does exactly that.

News: Iran’s new school year again excludes Baha’is

Unfortunately, things haven’t started changing (yet)…

NEW YORK, 3 October 2008 (BWNS) – As the new academic year got under way, young Baha’is in Iran again found the door to higher education closed.

Although in its public stance the Iranian government maintains that Baha’is are free to attend university, reports over the past few weeks indicate that the policy of preventing Baha’is from obtaining higher education remains in effect.

Baha’i students attempting to gain admittance to universities and other institutions this fall found that their entrance examination results were frozen and their files listed as “incomplete” on the Web site of the national testing organization.

Baha’is who had successfully enrolled in universities in previous years continue to be expelled.

And those who have sought redress through the courts have been disappointed, their cases rejected.

“As has been the case for the last four years, the Iranian government continues to use a series of devious ploys to prevent young Iranian Baha’is from receiving higher education,” said Bani Dugal, the principal representative of the Baha’i International Community to the United Nations.

“The effect of the government’s policies is to close the doors of universities to Baha’is, despite Iran’s supposed commitment to international laws upholding the right to education.

“Our plea to the international community, and especially to professors, administrators and students everywhere, is that they raise their voices on behalf of Iranian Baha’i students,” said Ms. Dugal.

According to reports from Iran, the principal method this year by which authorities are preventing Baha’is from enrolling in university is by blocking their examination results and declaring their files “incomplete.”

The tactic was used last year, too, but this year it became evident that many of the Baha’i students had been identified earlier in the application process. When they tried to log on to the national university examination Web site, rather than seeing their exam results, they got a Web page with the words “Error – incomplete file.”

The Web page to which they were automatically directed had a URL (Internet address) ending with the words “error_bah” – an apparent reference to the fact that their files were declared in “error” because they were Baha’is. (The complete address was http://82.99.202.139/karsarasari/87/index.php?msg=error_bah)

The error message is displayed despite the fact that Baha’i students had dutifully filled out all required information and successfully sat for the examination.

Last year, for the 2007-2008 academic year, of the more than 1,000 Baha’i students who sat for and satisfactorily completed the entrance examination, nearly 800 were excluded because of “incomplete files.”

Without complete files, enrollment in all public and most private universities in Iran is impossible.

Students who have contested the fact that their files were improperly listed as incomplete have so far met a deaf ear in Iranian courts.

In a ruling last April in Branch 1 of the Court of Administrative Justice, a Baha’i student who filed a grievance against the national Education Measurement and Evaluation Organization (EMEO) had his case dismissed.

“In light of the fact that the (EMEO) does not recognize the plaintiff as having fulfilled the requirements, the plaintiff’s case has no merit and is thus dismissed,” the court ruled.

The same court rejected the claim of another Baha’i university student who had been expelled because of his religious belief and had approached the court seeking readmission.

In rejecting that case, the court made a reference to the 1991 Golgaypani memorandum which outlines a broad plan to block the “progress and development” of the entire Iranian Baha’i community, including by expelling Baha’i university students.

The court wrote, “Considering that the plaintiff meets the criteria as defined by the (1991 Golpaygani memorandum) ratified by the Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution and is thus considered to have failed and has no valid argument to prove that there has been a violation of the guidelines in order to justify his claim, his grievance is not recognized.”

Recent reports also indicate that Baha’is who are enrolled in universities – and there are now very few such Baha’is – continue to be expelled as their religious beliefs become known.

In August, for example, a student at Fazilat University was just three weeks from graduation when she was brought before authorities; when she refused to recant her faith, she was dismissed from the university.

Despite a record of deceitful dealings by the government, there is increasing evidence of support for Baha’i students by many Iranians, both inside and outside of Iran.

Notable among them was an article by Ahmad Batebi, a prominent human rights activist now in exile. That article, “The Baha’is and Higher Education in Iran,” published 2 September 2008 in Rooz Online, protests the denial to Baha’is of access to higher education and the persecution of the Baha’is of Iran generally.

(For support documents and Internet links, see BWNS Web site.)

Who said men can’t be nurturing?

While it might seem that the world is falling apart around us, the signs that humanity has yet given up on itself abound. Various organizations are created all the time and all seem to be working very hard on making the world a better place.

Some of them seem to lean more towards the publicity and marketing rather than on real change, but then again, one doesn’t necessarily exclude the other. And from what I have read up to now, it seems that The Gentlemen’s Fund is doing just that – helping the world in style while providing massive publicity to the many brands and corporations involved.

They also had a search going on for an ‘agent of change striving for the betterment of society through charitable work, volunteerism and/or community involvement – someone who is working hard to make this a better world. The “Better Men Better World Search” finished on July 31st 2008, and a winner has yet to be announced.

Then again… If superstars like Timbaland and Usher, backed by global corporations using less than ethical means to increase their profit margins, limit their involvement in bettering the world to contributing money to these causes while continuing a lifestyle so many would like to emulate, are they really contributing to make the world a better place, or are they just being marketed in a way to make themselves feel better?

Or, in other words, can an artist who is promoting the inequality of men and women by portraying women as objects in their music and videos, or is promoting a lifestyle based on excess and the fulfillment of materialistic needs and wants really change the world – for the better?