Thursday, September 14 3:00 PM AL GREEN THEATRE
Before going to this movie I was half-jokingly hoping that there would be subtitles. English subtitles for a movie in English. I was pleasantly surprised that there are! There are many sections of the film where I wouldn't have known what was being said without them. Having them allowed me to hear what they were saying though, so after the halfway point I almost didn't need them anymore. If anything, I wish there had been some more subtitling. Obviously it's not needed for anything simple like "yeah" (and never used for such, an excellent decision) but for any long and involved dialogue it's almost necessary.
This was the first Jamaican movie and is responsible for moving Jamaican music and culture into the global mainstream. Suffice to say, the music is "kicking" and apparently one of the best soundtracks ever.
There's no "cinematography" here to speak of, no special camera shots or angles, it's all just native Jamaica. All the technical skills in this movie are at the "sufficient" level and not significantly higher. So what makes it a good movie, as it most definitely is?
One of the things the director mentioned is that the "church sermon" scene is all natural. He found an actual Jamaican church, asked the actual preacher to do a sermon on Love, and filmed the actual proceedings. And the whole movie is like that. It's just so raw, so "real", so "down-to-earth" and "in-your-face-bare-survival" that it's striking. If there were any special effects in the movie at all, it could shatter that effect, so instead the "bare-bones" filming technique enhances the reality of the movie. The actors in the movie do a great job perhaps not just because they're good actors but likely also because the movie maintains a "true to life" feel throughout for them as well.