Archive for the 'tiff' Category
TIFF end
So the festival is over, some crappy awards were given, and it’s back to work. I hadn’t seen any of the award winning films, but I still deem the award selection crappy (Death of a President was clearly a bullshit political choice.) If I were to give awards, I would just rank all the movies I’ve seen in order from favourite to least favourite, like this:
- Climates (local link) — the very first movie I saw this year still remains my favourite.
- Volver (local link) — a little too Spanish soap-opera-ish at times, but… Penelope.
- Away From Her (IMDB link) — Sarah Polley’s, the quintessential Canadian actress, directorial debut shows the signs of a long and promising career
- Severance (IMDB link) — not the best of movies, but it was the most fun I’ve had in a theatre in a loooong time, though a lot of that was due to the midnight madness crowd (also the best Q&A I saw this year.)
- The Fountain (local link) — like I said, it’s grown on me.
- Rescue Dawn (local link)
- Seraphim Falls (local link)
- Retrieval (TIFF description) — the TIFF site calls it a
Polish equivalent of Scorsese’s Mean Streets
, which is a bit excessive but also… not. - Exiled (twitch review) — Hong Kong gangster shootout film which works well at times and at others feels a bit hokey
- Winter Journey (local link)
- Alatriste (IMDB link) — who knew that Viggo Mortensen was fluent in Spanish? I was really surprised by how bloody this film is and at times it’s a great swashbuckling yarn, but it tries to cram too much storyline into too little time and it just feels disjoint and unnecessarily jumpy.
- Born and Bred (local link)
- Jade Warrior (local link)
- (this space void to seperate the above movies from the following stinker)
- Un Crime (IMDB link) — horrible script that brings everything else crumbling down.
Unlisted: Paris, Je T’aime (IMDB link, full credits) really fantastic series of twenty short films by a lot of top directors. It was the last movie I saw and it was introduced as a self-contained “mini film festival,” which was very apt. The shorts vary in quality but there are many more good segments than there are bad ones which makes the whole of the film enjoyable. And with the short time each story has, the bad ones don’t overstay their welcome while the lukewarm ones don’t have enough time to get boring. Of the bunch, my favourites were the ones by Wes Craven, the Coen Brothers, Tom Twyker, Oliver Schmitz and Alexander Payne.
TIFF: “Seraphim Falls”
The film festival is over but I’m still catching up. Last Wednesday evening I caught the (world?) premiere of Seraphim Falls, a western starring Pierce Brosnan and Liam Neeson. Though everything else is starting to blur — it feels as though it’s been ages since I saw the film — several scenes from this still stand out prominently. There are some truly memorable moments in Seraphim Falls. Unfortunately, the film as a whole is a lot harder to take. I’m undecided where I stand with it.
It starts off well enough. Brosnan’s character is being chased through the snowy mountains by Neeson’s character and a posse of trackers. You don’t know why he’s chasing him, but you know he means business. The unpleasant kind of business. He’s nearly caught right at the start but manages to escape, the trackers catch up, he kills one of them and escapes again, eventually setting on some ranchers cabin where he stays the night. After taking off with their horse in the morning, the trackers arrive, cause some trouble, and resume the pursuit.
This is when the movie starts to weaken. The further they get away from the mountains and closer to the desert, the more it starts to breakdown as it settles into a repetitive pattern. Brosnan’s character comes upon a situation. The trackers catch up. A little drama happens. Brosnan’s character escapes. Repeat. First it’s a gang of bank robbers. Then some settlers. Then a chain gang. Then missionaries. Then a mystical indian. And then, in the end, I’m not sure what the hell they get into.
The deeper they travel into the desert, the more symbolic the movie becomes, ending with an almost surreal sequence. I don’t have a problem with symbolism or mysticism in a film — even a western, as it worked in High Plains Drifter — it’s just that the slow progression away from the brutal realism that starts the film creeps up on you that by the end it feels almost like a different movie.
There are still those great scenes (the horse part — you’ll know when you see it) and it’s worthy of a viewing, but if you want a good new western, I’d suggest the recent (and more modern) Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada instead.
TIFF: Quick “The Fountain” impressions
It is 10pm and I’m home between movies. I just saw “Retrieval” and I have “Severance” coming up at midnight. Earlier this afternoon I saw The Fountain.
It was an… interesting movie. A lot of people are going to dislike it. I predict that many will interpret the tales too literally, which is partly due to how the movie is being pushed. It is not a story of some immortal-like man living through different times trying to save a woman that also exists through those times (as either the same person or a sort of reincarnation of the same person — sort of like “Jade Warrior“). This is what I thought the movie was going to be like. It’s not.
It’s a contemporary story. A story about a man that can’t come to terms with life and death. The past and the future settings are allegories. This is where I think there will be a failure to understand when this movie gets wide release. It is too easy to think of the past, present and future settings as all part of one linear narrative. The narrative exists in the present. I think that’s all I can say without giving too much away.
Originally, my impression was I think I liked it, but I don’t have a massive boner over it. I’m undecided.
However, the more I let it settle in my mind, the more it agrees with me. I think a second viewing is necessary.
Great use of sound, though. Very nice Clint Mansell score (again) — it’s very much present throughout the movie, giving it an almost ethereal quality. Some of the visuals are stunning, of course, and Hugh Jackman is actually very good in this. Overall a positive. I think.
TIFF: “Rescue Dawn”
Perhaps it’s shocking, but this is the first Werner Herzog film that I’ve seen. Ever. Based on the acclaim and the status that Herzog has, though, Rescue Dawn seems like a bad first introduction. It is a good film — by no means is it bad — but most of the reviews that I’ve seen say that it is a poor Herzog film. Of course, I don’t know that canon so I can only look at it as its own movie.
It tells the true story of an American pilot shot down in Laos before the Vietnam War. A story that Herzog previously told in his documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly. This is the fictionalized version of that.
Rescue Dawn is essentially split into three sections: the crash, escape and capture; the prison camp; the prison camp escape. The middle section is the weakest as it’s drawn out for far too long. I can understand why, but as a contrast to the jungle escapes it just feels dull. Those scenes, when the thick (Thai) Jungle is a character of its own, are by far the better parts. There’s more tension. There’s more to look at. They are better paced. And they seem to suit Christian Bale best.
Bale’s performance can be described as being very Christian Bale-like, and when he’s alone in the jungle it works well. When he’s in the camp, though, he’s second fiddle to Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies, whose portrayals of long-time (well, longer than Bale) prisoners are tremendous. Steve Zahn is especially good. In their presence, Bale doesn’t feel as convincing.
The story is about how Dieter, Bale’s character, survived through the whole ordeal, but by the end of it I was far more interested in the fates of Zahn’s and Davies’ characters. In this sense, the main focus of the movie fails somewhat.
TIFF: “Volver” and “Winter Journey”
I was never a fan of Penelope Cruz. The few roles that I had seen her in didn’t convince me and I was unsure of where the superlatives describing her came from. After seeing “Volver” I think I’m having a change of heart. Cruz is outstanding, really gorgeous, and superlative-worthy. Her character is the movie. Everything else seems secondary.
As great as the movie was, the unfortunate thing about the screening was that we (my sister and I) were stuck beside a pair of PLAITs. People Laughing at Inopportune Times. It was so distracting. They laughed at a funeral procession. They laughed during a shocking plot point. And they laughed at a bowl of soup. Seriously. It was a transition shot between two scenes. The whole of the screen was an overhead view of an empty bowl. Soup was poured into it. They laughed. I would not like to eat dinner with these people.
“Winter Journey“, as the director put it, is about a very German topic, depression.
It is also the first film that I know of to feature a 419 Scam as a key plot point. When the contents of the letter were being read out loud for the first time on screen, I chuckled a little (quietly and to myself. I’m not like those people!) as the image of one of the scammers with a loaf of bread on his head (419 eaters) came to my mind. My mind sometimes operates like this. Unfortunately, there was nothing like this in the movie.
In the movie, the depressive, manic and bitter old man — acted intensely and believably over-the-top by Josef Bierbichler — is scammed. As a last act, he travels to Africa with his interpreter in search of his money. The one thing that stood out in this film is how the camera was used as a complement to Bierbichler’s acting. When the character was going through a manic session, the camera was frenetically editted shaky cam, moving out of focus and off-frame. When the character was lucid, the camera was fixed with intermittent wide shots of the frigid German terrain and the hot African landscape interrupting the scenes. It was almost a little too self-concious.
As a side note, Winter Journey co-starred the great and charming Sibel Kekilli, who had her (er, non-porn) start in the oft-mentioned and the-inbetween favourite Gegen die Wand.
TIFF: “Born and Bred” and “Jade Warrior”
Friday had two world premieres, the Argentine “Born and Bred” and the Sino-Finnish (?) “Jade Warrior“.
Jade Warrior is an interesting amalgam. A romantic epic wuxia film taking place in both modern Finland and ancient China, connected through a mythology that takes its roots from ancient tales from both cultures and the (slight) links between them. It’s ambitious and it has its moments, like the fine finale, but everything leading up to that felt too forced for my tastes. The script was weak. The action merely decent. And the chemistry was lacking. In a movie about an eternal love story (sort of), that is one thing that you’d at least expect to be there. I didn’t feel it. The love emanated from the script and not the actors.
The whole production was a labour of love for the director, so I almost feel bad being down on it (that’s the thing with such premieres, the people that devoted years of their lives to seeing the production through are right there.) Jade Warrior was alright, showing a lot of potential, and I would expect it to profit (a mere 2.4 million euro budget) enough to maybe allow for another attempt, but for now I’ll just say that it was a worthy first attempt
(Twitch liked it a lot more than I did).
If it wasn’t for the Spanish, Born and Bred could easily be confused with a Canadian film. I mean that as a compliment. Primarily set in very rural and frigid southern Argentina, it’s the story of a man escaping his past life after a tragedy. The photography is nice, the characters are flawed but likeable, the situation believable, and the ending had a nice touch. Nothing overly spectacular, but a decent film and one worth recommending.
TIFF: “Climates” (”Iklimer”)
After just two movies, Nuri Bilge Ceylan is quickly becoming one of my favourite new directors and he (along with the film Gegen Die Wand) is making me want to take a good long look at Turkish cinema.
Climates (trailer), much like his previous film Distant, is a very sparse movie. Dialogue is minimal and in its place there are many slow, long shots of characters in deep thought. These moments work because of the acting and the direction. They might require a minimal level of empathy from the audience, which might scare some movie goers away, but with that you get a strong sense for the characters and their motivations.
Ceylan conveys awkwardness very well (which I can… uh… attest to. It’s all about the silent… gaps and external interruptions and… quiet sitting) and that’s pretty much the prevalent theme. The uncomfortable moments in a dieing relationship, the loneliness, the failures to communicate and act on emotions. It certainly makes for a film with a narrow appeal, but I find it enjoyable. It helps that it’s also complemented by gorgeous scenery and beautiful (if quiet) moments.
