I work with someone from Guinea, a country that has just been taken over by its military. The NYT referred to the new government as a "junta" and Alpha - that's just his cool nickname as, like me, he doesn't want to deal with people mispronouncing his real name all the time - asked me, just last week, what a junta is. I realized that everything I know about juntas - militarized governments - I know from "Z".
"Z" was one of the "must-see" movies of the 60's: you had to see it to be "educated". Otherwise you were ignorant. Even though the movie is about Greece, we all saw it the same way, as a cautionary tale: "it could happen here."
Like "Battle of Algiers", "Z" owed quite a bit to Italian Neo-Realism and it had a sense of immediacy about it because (I think) the Greek junta was still in power.
Costa-Gavras became one of the symbols of 60's High Seriousness, which unfairly pigeon-holed him, but he's a living link to those too-too serious artists of the 50's and 60's that Fellini made fun of in "8-1/2". The fact that Americans never saw any other movies by him probably says more about our movie distribution system than it does about Costa-Gavras as a film maker.
My bet is that he's now a very interesting speaker, funny and relaxed, and worth the trip.
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hey dad - i saw paranormal activity this weekend, and i think you should see it too. not the scariest or best movie, but worth seeing considering how successful it is with such a small budget -- i think it does what the blair witch project was trying to do in a pretty clever way.
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