Ray Pride

(The Stranger from Afar) Chicago Mayor-for-Life Richard Daley likes to watch. Snug behind his cocoons and cul-de-sacs of security and seclusion, he's announced in the past week that he'd like to make the Second City first in surveillance, eradicating any notion of privacy in public space. For whatever rationale, which likely will never been fully articulated, the swaddled, ever-watched politician finds no folly in the same fate being handed down to us all. One of the most vital recent blips of horror at the idea of the unblinking eye is Takashi Shimizu's 2004 "Marebito: The Stranger from Afar," shot by the director of all the "Grudge" movies (and a protégé of Kiyoshi Kurosawa) in eight days with consumer-level video equipment. A cameraman who lives in a nest of wires and video equipment, obsessed with fear, records a suicide in Tokyo's subway system, with a bleak, ghastly succession of secrets to be revealed. It's creepy bosh, for the most part, but Shimizu remains more clever than most people obsessed with the act of staring at one's fellow (wo)man. "Tetsuo" director Shinya Tsukamoto stars as the haunted cameraman. 94m. 35mm.

"Marebito" opens Friday for a week at Facets.

(2006-02-07)

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My America
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Tip of the Week
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Master Shot
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Sketchbook Sentiments
(2006-01-03)

Del toro
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Up "Wolf's Creek"
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