At the start of In America, Sarah and Johnny Sullivan arrive at the US-Canadian border in a swaybacked station wagon with their two daughters in the back seat. They are from Ireland, and they are coming to the US illegally so Johnny can find work as an actor and they can start over after the death of their young son, Frankie.
With the help of their surviving children, the chirpy Ariel and the watchful, reserved Christy, they manage to charm their way past a suspicious immigration agent, who decides to believe that they are carefree vacationers rather than desperate migrants.
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This modest, touching film accomplishes a similar sleight of hand. The family drives wide-eyed through Times Square and alights in a cavernous, battered walk-up apartment that is quickly spruced up with colorful paint and scavenged furniture. The neighbors are a mostly harmless collection of addicts, hustlers and ordinary poor folk, as well as a reclusive painter named Mateo (Djimon Hounsou), who seems to be dying of AIDS and whom the girls befriend one Halloween.
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Many of the elements in this film -- the picturesque poverty; the angelic, doomed man; the dead child; the hard-working, sorrow-afflicted parents; the cute, precocious daughters; the risky pregnancy toward the end -- seem to promise a sticky bath of shameless sentimentality. But instead, thanks to Jim Sheridan's graceful, scrupulously sincere direction and the dry intelligence of his cast, In America is likely to pierce the defenses of all but the most dogmatically cynical viewers.
Sheridan has accomplished this trick before, turning stories that might have otherwise foundered in maudlin excess into sharp, engrossing character studies. My Left Foot, about the disabled artist Christy Brown, might have easily been a hectoring, smiley-faced treatise on the plight of the handicapped, just as In the Name of the Father might have been a lecture on the plight of Irish political prisoners and The Field a soapbox harangue on the plight of small landowners.
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But Sheridan is more interested in particular people than in general plights, and what lingers in the mind after you have seen his movies is the rough, radiant individuality of his characters.
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It helps that Paddy Considine and Samantha Morton, who play Johnny and Sarah, are not well-known movie stars, and that neither is much inclined toward ostentation.
Morton, her hair cropped short and her enormous eyes stung with grief, seems to haunt the edges of the frame until you realize that the blunt, inarticulate force of her feeling is at the center of the developing drama.
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Considine, with his gaunt, droopy features and darting eyes, guards Johnny's privacy behind a facade of genial good spirits.
PHOTO COURTESY OF FOX
That the two of them remain somewhat mysterious is fitting, because the movie, which Sheridan wrote with two of his daughters, perceives them largely through the eyes of their children.
The family survives through an unspoken pact of mutual protection that becomes plain to us only as it starts to unravel. The girls, played by real-life sisters, Emma and Sarah Bolger, agree not to notice how much their parents are suffering and to distract them from it as best they can.
In America is Sheridan's most personal movie so far -- just how personal will become clear when you see the dedication at the end -- and he is too modest to turn his family's experiences into a parable of anything larger.
The title of the movie sounds a little grandiose, but it is meant to evoke a postcard, or a child's diary (like the one Christy composes with her video camera): not "this is what it means to be in America" but "this is what we saw when we were there."
This movie, from moment to moment, feels small, almost anecdotal. It is only afterward that, like Sheridan's other films, it starts to grow into something at once unassuming and in its own way grand.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
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Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located