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3 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Lake of Fire to
Many viewers will remember Kaye as the Brit who made and then disavowed American History X following disagreements with New Line and star Edward Norton, and the new film shares something of that now-cult favorite’s combination of passion, curiosity, and commitment.
British filmmaker Tony Kaye, who made the jolting racism drama American History X , once against turns an outsider’s eye on a peculiarly American neurosis: the controversy over abortion.
For 16 years he assembled footage from news reports, PSAs, newly-shot interviews, all paid out of his own pocket, all while slowly turning into an eccentric pariah, a shift highlighted by his notorious and embarrassing fight with New Line and Edward Norton over the final cut of his 1998 film American History X .
Lake of Fire, the much-anticipated abortion documentary from British director Tony Kaye (his first film since 1998's searing American History X), has been touted as the "definitive" film about abortion.
Big question: Did the 15 years of work that director Tony Kaye (“American History X”) put into “Lake of Fire” result in the quintessential document of the abortion issue?
Kaye, who engaged in a bitter struggle with New Line over the final cut of American History X, has since mended fences in Hollywood, and is in production in New Orleans on Black Water Transit.
The sex, drugs, and assorted violence throughout the film are pervasive, and near the end there is an abortion scene that is as graphic as anything seen in a major motion picture since the documentary, Lake of Fire .
Ultimately, “Detachment” suffers from the same problems that inflicted Kaye’s previous work, “Lake of Fire,” which dealt with the controversial issue of abortion, as cinematically effective drama.
His next film, the excellent 2 ½ hour abortion documentary “Lake Of Fire,” would go virtually unseen though it seemed like things were back on track when Kaye was hired to direct the New Orleans set thriller, “Black Water Transit” with Lawrence Fishburne, Karl Urban and Brittany Snow.
Kaye, the self-immolating auteur of American History X and Lake Of Fire , opens the film with a quote from Albert Camus, and in spite of the film’s gritty veneer, he’s less interested in the practical aspects of classroom-wrangling than in the existential clash between being and nothingness, within Brody’s character and without.