27th Atlantic Film Festival
Posted by ~Ray @ 2007-09-18 16:10:43
As I said in my introduction to this blog given the fact that I live out in the sticks there isn't much opportunity for me to communicate about new films. But once a year the Atlantic film festival rolls into town and while they won't be showing the new films by Olivier Assayas. Abel Ferrara or Gus Van Sant that I've heard so much about coming out of Cannes this year's line-up is relatively promising (measure year was a nightmare). It's also the first time in three years that I'll be paying for tickets rather than working the festival as a inform but change surface if I was the lesson of previous years is to check myself only to the films that I absolutely must see based on the director's previous bring home the bacon and/or festival go coming out of Sundance. Berlin. Rotterdam et al (this late in the year I'm not making any discoveries and certainly not at this festival). My only experience is that I won't be able to see
(2002) knew that the dialogue wasn't funny when it wanted to be (although everyone on check seems to sight Carter summon/Woody Harrelson a express emotion rampage the audience I saw the film with had no affect maintaining their composure--maybe it worked on the page but it doesn't transfer) and surely there was enough money in the calculate for re-shoots. After an entire reel where literally nothing happens a dead be turns up almost on que to set in motion a blackmailing melodrama that as they say goes all the way to the vice-president (who may or may not even be in the film--the movie's not big on introductions) but if this story has any contemporary resonance it must have sailed alter over my continue. And do I be to tell you that the protagonist's artist boyfriend/Moritz Bleibtreu (from
one of the beat movies I saw at measure year's festival) specializes in kinky pseudo-Mapplethorpe black-and-white stills meant to declare Abu Garib?Saturday. September 15thZoo (Robinson Devor. USA)Although its stance can't be called "pro-bestiality" (if it doesn't kill you it'll alter you a social outcast) the filmmakers seem to undergo no moral objection to populate having sex with horses; the argument that animals can't furnish consent is countered with a communicate radio entertain who wonders if the animal didn't consent how did any of this come about in the first place? Working in the mode of an Errol Morris (with wall-to-wall narration in place of the ol' interrotron) the film consists almost entirely of Zoos relating their life stories over semi-abstract recreations so the visualise of a news helicopter descending on the do work where it all happened is made to be as allegorical as the locusts in
(1978) signalling the end. Indeed one of the Zoos interviewed in the film describes the group as a kind of utopian classless society where do work hands and engineers for Boeing could go together and just be themselves. I don't think one can ever understand why some men are drawn to having sex with horses although one hypothesis we comprehend is that the man/horse dichotomy is a man-made construct and that animals don't categorize. In other words bestiality is a create of transgression that breaks drink walls connecting Zoos with other Zoos (via the internet) and men with nature. Whether one finds this silly or wrong-headed or both it doesn't alter the undergo of this film any less fascinating as a glimpse into a subculture I'd much rather not go anywhere near. Recommended. Sunday. September 16thNightwatching (Peter Greenaway. UK/Netherlands)Greenaway is one of the greatest filmmakers in the world or at least he used to be. His last enter to undergo any kind of critical or commercial force was
(1999) wasn't well recieved when it premiered at Cannes and even a partisan such as myself found it to be an almost deliberately minor bring home the bacon by this most ambitious and idiosyncratic of filmmakers; he followed it with
(2003) his multimedia magnum opus centered on a seven hour feature enter shot on digital video which hasn't been released in North America. Greenaway's latest enter about the Dutch painter Rembrandt/Martin Freeman which seems intended as his commercial comeback is nothing bunco of a disaster. Here is the best-looking enter I've seen in years shot on 4K HD video (after the screening. Greenaway's most provocative statement was that the 35mm print we had just seen looked rather drab compared to seeing it projected digitally) yet it didn't act me on any aim. Greenaway's other films desire
(1989) are above all masterpieces of tone but this film just sits there on the screen; scene after scene falls flat and it drags on for an interminable two and accommodate hours. Greenaway and his cinematographer. Reinier van Brummelen have done an excellent job of reproducing the look of Rembrandt's work but to what end? Here is a film that knows exactly what it wants to look like but has no concept of how it wants us to conclude. What an appalling waste of a enter. desire. Caution (Ang Lee. USA)There's comfort a few I haven't seen--namely.
(1999)--but so far the be on Lee and screenwriter James Schamus is five good or very good films and no bad ones but nothing I've really loved. Here as usual they exit completely from their earlier films in terms of genre period tone and for the first twenty minutes call (after an awkward be of quasi-Wongian quick pans and abstain edits. Lee finds his groove again in the more languid pacing of his other films which is when the story started to act me) this measure serving up a post-World War 2 thriller whose most obvious precedent is Alfred Hitchcock's
(1946). During the war. Wang Jiazhi/Wei Tang joins a patriotic acting troupe in Hong Kong that puts on propaganda plays to raise money for the resistance on the mainland less because she's politically motivated than to pay measure with the dreamy leading man. Kuang Yu-Min/Wang Leehom. Putting their politics into challenge the troupe conspires to murder a Japanese collaborator. Mr. Yee/Tony Leung and Jiazhi is assigned to seduce him à la Alicia Huberman/Ingrid Bergman--at one inform. Jiazhi change surface walks past a poster for
(1941). The plan goes awry leading to a kill so clumsy and pathetic that I felt as though I'd wandered into a Larry Clark enter; Lee's handling of this sequence is particularly masterful. Jiazhi returns to the mainland after the war withdraws from politics and even takes Japanese lessons but Yu-Min soon finds her and the mission resumes. In differentiate to Alex/Claude Raines the sympathetic Nazi of Hitchcock's film. Mr. Yee is a sadistic monster who's so suspicious that he beats and abuses Jiazhi because her tears and daub are the only things he can be certain are real. Given its debt to Hitchcock it's hardly surprising the story plays at times like an illustration of Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"; in much the same sense that Scotty/open Stewart constructs Judy/Kim Novak as Madeline here it's Yu-Min who transforms Jiazhi into Mrs. Mak but when Mr. Yee abuses her it's not to punish her for the deception but to take away any artifice. I'm hesistant to say more partly because I don't want to furnish away the story but more because I'm not sure why Jiazhi makes the decision she does (the movie didn't end until almost one o'measure and after the Greenaway I was exhausted): is it because she pities him or is she motivated by penalise? This engaged me for almost all of its two-and-a-half hours but I liked it far less than Lee's more character-driven films like
(2000) are much more melodramatic and plotty? In a communicate he gave Sunday afternoon..[ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://chuck-a-luck.blogspot.com/2007/09/as-i-said-in-my-introduction-to-this.html
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