Category
real
‘Burial’ Unearths Small-Town Secrets
Toward the end of Nicholas Racz\’s quirky, quiet, noirish thriller, \”The Burial Society,\” Sheldon Kasner, the film\’s protagonist but certainly not its hero, whines: \”Why can\’t anything ever be easy for me?\” It\’s a line Woody Allen might have used in \”Take the Money and Run,\” but while Sheldon has elements of Allen\’s nebbish-turned-wannabe-thief, he is darker, more complex and far craftier. So is Racz\’s film about death and rebirth, real and metaphoric.
Innocence Lost
Little girls at a San Fernando Valley Jewish preschool report for circle time in midriff tops and lipstick. In Hollywood, a teen-ager acquires a tattoo, a designer backpack and a baby within a year of her arrival here from rural El Salvador. A \”soccer mom\” at a park in Van Nuys chats blithely about buying her 17-year-old daughter breast implants for her birthday. \”This is the real world,\” she says in response to my look of disbelief.