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DVD : George Washington - Criterion Collection |
List Price: $39.95Amazon.com's Price: $35.99 You Save: $3.96 (10%)Prices subject to change.
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Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Audience Rating: Unrated
Binding: DVD
EAN: 9780780025035
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Widescreen, NTSC
ISBN: 0780025032
Label: Criterion
Manufacturer: Criterion
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Criterion
Region Code: 1
Release Date: March 12, 2002
Running Time: 90 minutes
Sales Rank: 33353
Studio: Criterion
Theatrical Release Date: 2000
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Editorial Review:
Description:
Over the course of one hot summer, a group of children in the rural south are forced to confront a tangle of difficult choices in a decaying world. An ambitiously constructed, sensuously photographed meditation on adolescence, the first feature film by director David Gordon Green features breakout performances from an award-winning ensemble cast.
Amazon.com:
George Washington is surely one of the most visually arresting debuts in recent American cinema. Loitering among the dilapidated machinery and detritus littering a small town in North Carolina, 24-year-old director David Gordon Green and cinematographer Tim Orr transform the listless confines of growing up poor into breathtaking beauty. Green has referenced Terence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978) as an overriding influence, and the languorous grace of his portrait of childhood lives up to the comparison.
Tracing the interwoven stories of a group of kids, black and white, over a few pivotal days and one accidental death, Green elicits nuanced performances from a mostly nonprofessional cast and captures an understated poetry through clearly improvised dialogue. Where Harmony Korine's depiction of childhood outcasts in Gummo goes astray in its insistence upon depravity and shrill eccentricity, George Washington maintains a perfect balance between oddity, loosely configured realism, and the sublime. --Fionn Meade
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
George Washington was the first feature film ever made by indy wunderkind director David Gordon Green. It was released in 2000, to generally favorable reviews, and it truly deserved them. It has been recently released on an invaluable Criterion Collection DVD which I recently purchased. Most critics erred and went in for a facile comparison to filmmaker Terrence Malick, but this film has several things that Malick's films do not have. Yes, like Malick, Green is fond of lingering poetic shots of seemingly everyday things, but Green's film is far more concerned with individuals than any of Malick's four feature films are. Malick's 1978 Days Of Heaven does have its reach, though, as the black and white still photographs at the end of George Washington homage the black and white stills of that film, just as a young girl's narration echoes the young female character's in Days Of Heaven. But, the characters in George Washington are mostly poor North Carolina preteens of an eternal present, not historic artifacts, and they convey a sense of self that is absent in Malick's films, which mostly deal with issues, not people.
That said, this film is not really a narrative, more of a simple series of linked vignettes that trace a several week period over a summer, which opens with a dreamy panoramic and poetic monologue spoken by a young girl named Nasia (Candace Evanofski), that weaves poetry out of the banal snippets that drift in and out of even the most prosaic minds, such as, ... Read More
Rating:  -
firstly; this movie is unashamedly derivative of terrence malick. structure-wise, down to the narrative techniques, it's a repositioning of 'badlands', but all i can say about that is, malick and green now work together. if malick doesn't care, you probably shouldn't either.
to hold to the malick theme and 'badlands' and address people's issues with the dialogue, all i can say is 'i found a toaster' (just one of many laughable, stupid lines of dialogue from 'badlands').
it is also very similar to 'gummo', less sensational, but both movies are remarkably important it their visually poetic displays of how we are letting this country rot and how the rusted and wrecked places the out of control, locomotive progression of our country/culture (ie: capitalism) leaves behind are still teaming with life like a desert. seemingly pointless and ugly life. both films leave this image sitting there almost as a question, how will we rectify this complex and very real situation? such things are so necessary that both films should be complimented and revered for putting them in our faces (see also: the entirity of 'the wire').
where the disconnect begins, i think, is in terms of the subject matter. this movie is about expieriencing death in the developmental stages of childhood. the pain, the guilt, the confusion, the struggle of little kids to say something or think something or do something that is as equally profound as death. being forced to ponder what life is ... Read More
Rating: -
The children of this film speak of matters and in a manner that suggests a maturity beyond their years. They have to, since they have only peers to serve as moral guides. The adults in their life are preoccupied with other matters -- making a living by recycling the materials left behind from another age. While set in an unnamed small town in deep South, the film feels timeless -- the characters seem drawn from a Faulkner novel, the young woman who gives her voice to the film is not so much narrating as establishing a poetic space within which to assess the story, a story of innocence lost and of how to establish hope and meaning in a situation that appears to give so little opportunity for transcendence. It is in that context that a new George Washington, a young dreamer, with hopes for a brighter future appears -- the narrowness of the world experience available to these children is indicated by how they envision their potential: the narrator thinks that maybe George Washington, who she admires, could head up some kind of parade ... he decides to dress up as superman. There is something touching and profound and telling about the way that the children in the film respond to the tragedies both minor (jealousy, rivalry) and profound (accidental death, suicide) -- something about the fragility of the communities we build up, that suggests (without being bluntly allegorical) the difficulty of community in general and of American community in particular. How do we experience ... Read More
Rating:  -
On paper, I should love this film. It has many thing I admire in films. It's beautifully shot in scope, it has a leisurely pace to it, and it's very understated at times. But it's also muddled, sloppily edited, incoherent, and the dialogue leaves something to be desired. The film has a real disjointed feel to it, and I don't think this is deliberate. David Gordon Green's follow up to this, All the Real Girls, had the same sloppy craftmanship that this film does, except that film has better performances. Some might say Green is attempting an expressionistic type of film, but he doesn't really pull it off. Directors who do make expressionistic films like this one was trying to be (Tarkovsky, Tarr, Sokurov, Kieslowski) do pull it off, and their films feel remarkably coherent, despite the ambiguity that exists in them. Here it doesn't work. Green gets points for making an independent film that really isn't like Hollywood at all (many indie films have an eye towards the mainstream), but it doesn't fully work.
Rating: -
I loved this film - I love the episodic story, which unfolds at a languid, lifelike pace - this subtlety captures the feel of life in a Southern city - GEORGE WASHINGTON was set in, and mostly filmed in Winston-Salem, NC (part of a metro area of over 1,000,000 people, though one wouldn't exactly see this in the film), one of the older and more industrial cities in the state, with a cast of locals.
You also don't see a trace of the mint julieps-and-kudzu (or hamfisted BLUE VELVET/DELIVERANCE freakfests) version of the South still favored by filmmakers who set stories in the region. The sort of STEEL MAGNOLIA faux-drawwwwliness that has crept out of the quaintest and cutsiest Southern lit is completely banished from GEORGE WASHINGTON; a move I'd advise just about anyone wishing to set (or shoot) a film in this part of the country follow. In another wise decision, Green sidesteps the reflexive quirk and posturing that infects too much American indie film.
I also love - finally - seeing a film with a fascinating story, enacted through a predominantly African-American cast that dodges the clichés and stereotypes seen in 'black film.' A rather depressingly common filmmaker complaint is the utter impossibility in getting more literary or intellectually intricate African-American stories off the ground in Hollywood (witness the essential disappearance of Charles Burnett's KILLER OF SHEEP, a slice of DeSica-style African-American neo-realism unseen now for ... Read More
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