Product Details

• Actors: Candace Evanofski, Donald Holden, Damian Jewan Lee, Curtis Cotton III, Rachael Handy
• Format: Color, Letterboxed, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: English
• Rated: Unrated
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Homevision
• VHS Release Date: September 21, 2001
• Run Time: 89 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B00005O5JO
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #332,852 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

George Washington is surely one of the most visually arresting debuts in recent American cinema. Loitering among the dilapidated machinery and detritus littering a small town in North Carolina, 24-year-old director David Gordon Green and cinematographer Tim Orr transform the listless confines of growing up poor into breathtaking beauty. Green has referenced Terence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978) as an overriding influence, and the languorous grace of his portrait of childhood lives up to the comparison.

Tracing the interwoven stories of a group of kids, black and white, over a few pivotal days and one accidental death, Green elicits nuanced performances from a mostly nonprofessional cast and captures an understated poetry through clearly improvised dialogue. Where Harmony Korine's depiction of childhood outcasts in Gummo goes astray in its insistence upon depravity and shrill eccentricity, George Washington maintains a perfect balance between oddity, loosely configured realism, and the sublime. --Fionn Meade

Product Description

This award-winning debut feature from David Gordon Green captures a tone and pace akin to Faulkner and the lolling sweet humidity of the Deep South. Told in a series of vignettes, an inter-racial group of adolescents (played by non-professional actors) are bound by their mutual yearning for love, self-expression and the actions they are forced to take in a world of adults who have done no better. From the tragic accident that claims the life of one young boy, to an act of heroism that saves the life on another, the camera follows them in and out of spaces that are at once desolate and mystical. Awe inspiring Cinemascope photography by Tim Orr frames this monumental coming of age story against a romantic landscape of junk, and abandoned steel mills strewn among the lush greenery of a small southern town.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars amazing debut film, July 2, 2001

By A Customer

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:

4.0 out of 5 stars A poignant landscape of a dusty, delapidated South, September 9, 2001

By 

"gummo_marx" - See all my reviews

This review is from: George Washington [VHS] (VHS Tape)

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.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hypnotic, February 15, 2003

By 

M. Boonstra - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: George Washington (The Criterion Collection) (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.