- Actors: Candace Evanofski, Donald Holden, Damian Jewan Lee, Curtis Cotton III, Rachael Handy
- Directors: David Gordon Green
- Writers: David Gordon Green
- Producers: David Gordon Green, Craig Zobel, Darius Shahmir, Erin Aldridge Orr, Lisa Muskat
- Classification: 12
- Studio: Bfi
- VHS Release Date: 22 April 2002
- Run Time: 89 minutes
- Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- ASIN: B000063KMT
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 46,002 in Video (See Top 100 in Video)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
For a first feature from a 24-year-old director, George Washington is an amazingly assured piece of work. The title’s misleading: this is no biopic of America’s first President, but a poetic, richly atmospheric rhapsody set in a rundown industrial town in the American South. Given this backdrop, and a predominantly black cast, you might expect an angry study of social deprivation and racial tension, but Green has no such agenda. Instead, he derives a shimmering, heat-hazed beauty from his images of rusting machinery, junkyards and derelict buildings, and if the overall tone is tinged with sadness, it’s mainly from a sense of universal human loss.
The action, such as it is, moves at its own slow Southern pace, following a group of youngsters, black and white, over a few high-summer days. Things do happen--a couple decide to elope, one boy’s saved from drowning, another gets killed--but they’re presented in an oblique, understated fashion that owes nothing to conventional Hollywood notions of narrative. With one exception, the cast are all non-professionals, mainly youngsters who director-writer David Gordon Green found in and around the town where the film was made, Winston-Salem in North Carolina. Shooting in a semi-improvised fashion, Green draws from his young cast remarkably spontaneous performances and dialogue (often their own) full of unselfconscious poetry.
Drawing on a wide range of influences--among other things he cites Sesame Street, documentaries and such 70s classics as Deliverance, Walkabout and especially Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven--Green has fashioned a film that’s fresh, tender and utterly individual. And it looks just gorgeous: belying the tiny budget, Tim Orr’s widescreen photography lavishes mellow softness on images of dereliction and small-town decay. Never has dead-end poverty been made to look so attractive.
On the DVD: George Washington comes on a disc generously loaded with extras. Besides the obvious theatrical trailer we get two of Green’s early short films, Physical Pinball and Pleasant Grove (both clearly dry runs for the main feature), an 18-minute featurette about the film’s reception at the Berlin Film Fest and a deleted scene of a community meeting. This scene, the short Pleasant Grove and the movie itself also offer a director’s commentary--or rather a director’s dialogue, as Green shares the honours with one of his lead actors, Paul Schneider. Their laconic, unpretentious comments enhance the whole experience enormously. The film has been transferred in its full scope ratio (2.35:1) and looks great. --Philip Kemp
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:VHS Tape
The film follows a group of friends in a small community in Carolina, and how the accidental death of Buddy, caused by George ,a member of the group affects them all.
They decide to hide Buddys' body and he is found later when George has tenderly washed him in the river and left him to be found.
We see their hopes for the future and their dissappointments , for some their desire to escape from the town. In this film the local young men who are repairing the railroad engine are just as aimless as the children, but are shown to be a friendly and supportive influence .
It's beautifully filmed, evocative of childhood concerns and natural acting from the cast. You,ll be thinking about it a long time after.
They decide to hide Buddys' body and he is found later when George has tenderly washed him in the river and left him to be found.
We see their hopes for the future and their dissappointments , for some their desire to escape from the town. In this film the local young men who are repairing the railroad engine are just as aimless as the children, but are shown to be a friendly and supportive influence .
It's beautifully filmed, evocative of childhood concerns and natural acting from the cast. You,ll be thinking about it a long time after.
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
This is a lovely film which I saw when it was first released. Warm, quirky - real departure from the main stream. Its never been a cheap Dvd.
So what's the problem? Well the aspect ratio is supposed to be 2.35:1 which is fine but what they appear to have done here is not have bands along the top and bottom but also the sides as well! So a very small image centered in the middle of the screen. Also if you put it in your pc it tries to install software which I never find endearing
So what's the problem? Well the aspect ratio is supposed to be 2.35:1 which is fine but what they appear to have done here is not have bands along the top and bottom but also the sides as well! So a very small image centered in the middle of the screen. Also if you put it in your pc it tries to install software which I never find endearing
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
28 reviews
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
amazing debut film
2 July 2001
David Gordon Green has created a lush, vibrant film showing not just immense potential, but genuine talent. Set in the deep south during the recession of the 1980's, GW captures the melancholy of childhood in a rarely (if never before) seen light. While obviously influenced by the great talent of Terrence Malick, Green's choice of cinematographer and talent demonstrate a fundamental understanding of film as a visual and sensory medium, and not a dumping ground for rehashed dialogue and filler about bad relationships with witty quips. Green throws aside the usual bad dialogue and poor camera work of most first time film makers, and finds language in imagery and visuals in dialogue. The exploration of heroism and simple responsibility are given appropriate weight, but with no small sense of the absurd (perhaps appropriate when dealing with the perspective of children). This is an excellent film, and should stoke the drive of all wannabe or potential first-time film-makers. The bar need not be set low just because of a constrained budget. Films can be made that are meaningful and well-shot without a $100K budget.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
A poignant landscape of a dusty, delapidated South
9 Sep 2001
I saw this film at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 2000, and thought it one of the most original and haunting films I have seen in years. It is a very subjective, impressionistic and almost transcendental movie about a group of kids, and how they follow their own particular code of honour in the face of misfortune. Kind of like Harmony Korine but at an easier pace, and with more unity of vision.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Hypnotic
16 Feb 2003
Format:DVD
In one of the opening scenes of George Washington, a boy and a girl break up. There is not much else to this scene, which makes it like most breaks ups. It makes it like many of our experiences is childhood: they just happen. The movie George Washington, however, mixes such everyday happenings in a poor, rural/industrial landscape with a level of complexity that is suprising and revealing. The characters experience love, loss, friendship, joy, forgiveness, boredom, and a longing for something more. The characters like each other. Some are white, and most of them are black, but they are all friends. Every summer, kids all over the country experience the kinds of events that many kids experience, yet there is a tragedy that occurs in this movie that renders this story unique. Tragedy aside, George Washington is simply a beautiful and quiet film about one hot summer in the south and it's children.
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