benjweil

I had been wanting to see this short film for a long time, and finally got the opportunity. I was expecting it to be good, but did not anticipate how moving it would be! The cast is uniformly excellent--very believable, and great chemistry between everyone, with Sean Dugan as an excellent lead and Joanna Adler convincing as his romantically challenged, heart-of-gold childhood friend. Director Carl Byrd and scriptwriter Peter Macklin made this 19-minute film feel like a fast-moving and compelling 109-minute feature film, in addition to keeping things funny at the right times. I can see why "Dinner at 40" has been sweeping the film festival awards.

I went to see "We Were Here" today at the Cinéma-Village theater in New York. I was afraid it would disappear before I got the chance to see it. This movie was recommended by a friend who is a producer at KQED in San Francisco as being the ultimate resource on San Francisco during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. Along with Randy Shilts's seminal book, "And the Band Played on," he was certainly right.

One great element of "We Were Here" is that it gives several quite different perspectives on what the HIV epidemic in San Francisco was like at that time: Ed, the misfit who found his place in the gay community by volunteering with people with AIDS early in the epidemic; Daniel, the Jewish artist who felt he had found his true family among San Francisco's gay men and then lost them all within a few painful years; Paul, the high-profile political activist; Guy, the big-hearted, philosophical black flower vendor; and Eileen, the lesbian nurse who served at ground zero of the epidemic and stuck with it with grit and compassion to the end.

Like Ed, I didn't fit in well in the "gay community" during my years in San Francisco. So disconnected was I that I did not know a lot of what was happening in the early and mid-1980s, although I remember Guy the florist, who always had a smile for every passerby on the street corner where he worked, and I remember James Harning, a beautiful young man who died a hard death in 1992. "We Were Here" helped me understand much of what was going on all around me in those days. It will do the same for others who weren't "there," for reasons of either age or geography, and it will be a moving, bittersweet reminder for those who did survive those difficult years in San Francisco.

Who would have thought that the film versions of The Chronicles of Narnia could get even worse? Or that the acting could deteriorate still further? Well, I would have, for one. I only watched this because it was showing on my flight.

Ben Barnes was particularly wooden as Caspian while Georgie Whose-It has lost whatever appeal she had in the first film, though to be fair this may well be because her lines are all so predictable, along with much gasping and pointing. And Will Poulter as Eustace is a complete caricature, boring to watch, and not at all believable.

The problem with this film is that is simply goes from one action scene to the next, with little or no character development or meaningful down-time. I couldn't care less what happens to the main characters, nor did the plot make any sense. The fact that the acting in this film makes the young Harry Potter protagonists seem quite adept says a lot. But I don't think that is solely due to the actors; the direction of "Dawn Treader" is excruciatingly formulaic and soulless.

Do yourself a favor and stick to the books.