siff day 20, 21, 22
Jun. 13th, 2008 11:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ironymaidenday 20
Trouble the Water
Hurricane Katrina doc. screening was a zoo, totally full due to the subject matter and i assume the producer appearance of Danny Glover. (i headed for the next venue before he arrived.)
meh. a grand failure. they had this great eyewitness video and the people in it to follow - a clever sassy woman and her husband from the lower ninth ward - and then they wallowed around. the damn thing felt meandering and eternal when it could have been brutal and short. this would be a great rental so that you could see the footage of the rising water and ferrying people out with a punching bag while fast-forwarding through our heroine rapping forever (and not, alas, her better piece that ran over the credits). could be a brilliant film with a real editor.
Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame
wasn't originally on my list, but the passholder buzz on this was very positive...
this film was not for me. the Buddha referenced is one of the ones destroyed by the Taliban, and our tiny heroine (five or so) lives in one of the caves nearby and decides one day she would like to learn to read like the neighbor boy. so then she needs a notebook and a pen, and she has to find the school. of course, getting money and shopping and walking places for a very little girl is epic.
there's an elaborate metaphor here about the treatment of women in Afghanistan, but i was distracted the minute she left her tinier sibling (who she is supposed to be watching while mum carries water) alone in the house. nasty boys play Taliban incessantly and destroy clothing/property that should have brought an angry parent out to break them up, etc etc. (i refuse to believe that Afghani culture is so different that parents don't notice kids digging a giant hole in the road or a son covered head to toe in mud when there's no naturally occurring mud in the environment.) because of the elaborate metaphor thing, i found the behavior of the adults in the film more and more improbable and frustrating until i just left and got C to come get me.
(a later conversation with someone who saw the end revealed that while i thought the baby was a gun on the wall, the film seems to forget that the baby exists. if i had stayed, there probably would have been shouting.)
day 21
Frozen River
awesome. filmed entirely in upstate NY. two women get into smuggling (from Canada to the US through the Mohawk reservation that straddles the border) in order to finance their ordinary dreams. will they get caught? how long will they keep going? will the river ice hold the car? is someone going to get hurt?
perfect depiction of being working poor in the northeast, totally tense and suspenseful. (it wasn't quite my family, but it was more than one of my friends'.) this will be released in August.
Leroy
awesome in a different way. lovely absurd German teen comedy about an African-German boy who falls for a white girl with five skinhead brothers. Leroy is a biracial kid with an afro, a cello, and a bust of Goethe. his girlfriend's family's attitude forces him to start thinking and talking about race with his parents and the people around him. great coming of age story, made more interesting by the cultural remove - and it still manages to keep the laughs coming. good discussion with the director afterward ("we chose irony for the ending because there really is no answer"). the screening attendance was sparse and i hope more people get to see it when it shows again Saturday afternoon.
day 22
all Cinerama, all the time
The Unknown Woman
afterward, i went to Ralph's for soup and chocolate. if i had been thinking i might have hit a bar for a quick scotch.
the film was excellent, but brutal. i stayed tense for a good hour afterward.
a Ukranian immigrant in Italy seeks a certain job in a certain building, and she'll do anything to make it happen. she has her reasons. what exactly is she trying to do? how far will she go? why?
this has an excellent Ennio Morricone soundtrack and chilling cuts between past and present. the past is all PTSD for our heroine. there's a great deal of violence against women. it's not used gratuitously, and only to forward the story, but oh oh oh gods...still recommended if you can take it.
Triangle
my third Johnnie To film. i call it a glorious mess, but it's a mess, with three directors tag teaming and five or six writers. when it works it really works - a story about three guys who are trying to pull off a caper to pay off their debts, and of course it all goes improbably wrong. it's not as good as Mad Detective or Sparrow, but is delightfully (and often confusingly) twisty. a rental.
Female Agents
hey, it's another French WWII film with nazis. but this one has Sophie Marceau as a sniper. i have some issues with the script, but there are several tense scenes and a lot of women kicking ass (rigging bombs, running resistance safehouses, etc etc). as far as i can tell the characters and events are all composites, which takes things into the Braveheart/Gladiator made up history continuum, but the film does its intended job of bringing the work of female SOE agents to light in popular culture. cool for what it is.
Trouble the Water
Hurricane Katrina doc. screening was a zoo, totally full due to the subject matter and i assume the producer appearance of Danny Glover. (i headed for the next venue before he arrived.)
meh. a grand failure. they had this great eyewitness video and the people in it to follow - a clever sassy woman and her husband from the lower ninth ward - and then they wallowed around. the damn thing felt meandering and eternal when it could have been brutal and short. this would be a great rental so that you could see the footage of the rising water and ferrying people out with a punching bag while fast-forwarding through our heroine rapping forever (and not, alas, her better piece that ran over the credits). could be a brilliant film with a real editor.
Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame
wasn't originally on my list, but the passholder buzz on this was very positive...
this film was not for me. the Buddha referenced is one of the ones destroyed by the Taliban, and our tiny heroine (five or so) lives in one of the caves nearby and decides one day she would like to learn to read like the neighbor boy. so then she needs a notebook and a pen, and she has to find the school. of course, getting money and shopping and walking places for a very little girl is epic.
there's an elaborate metaphor here about the treatment of women in Afghanistan, but i was distracted the minute she left her tinier sibling (who she is supposed to be watching while mum carries water) alone in the house. nasty boys play Taliban incessantly and destroy clothing/property that should have brought an angry parent out to break them up, etc etc. (i refuse to believe that Afghani culture is so different that parents don't notice kids digging a giant hole in the road or a son covered head to toe in mud when there's no naturally occurring mud in the environment.) because of the elaborate metaphor thing, i found the behavior of the adults in the film more and more improbable and frustrating until i just left and got C to come get me.
(a later conversation with someone who saw the end revealed that while i thought the baby was a gun on the wall, the film seems to forget that the baby exists. if i had stayed, there probably would have been shouting.)
day 21
Frozen River
awesome. filmed entirely in upstate NY. two women get into smuggling (from Canada to the US through the Mohawk reservation that straddles the border) in order to finance their ordinary dreams. will they get caught? how long will they keep going? will the river ice hold the car? is someone going to get hurt?
perfect depiction of being working poor in the northeast, totally tense and suspenseful. (it wasn't quite my family, but it was more than one of my friends'.) this will be released in August.
Leroy
awesome in a different way. lovely absurd German teen comedy about an African-German boy who falls for a white girl with five skinhead brothers. Leroy is a biracial kid with an afro, a cello, and a bust of Goethe. his girlfriend's family's attitude forces him to start thinking and talking about race with his parents and the people around him. great coming of age story, made more interesting by the cultural remove - and it still manages to keep the laughs coming. good discussion with the director afterward ("we chose irony for the ending because there really is no answer"). the screening attendance was sparse and i hope more people get to see it when it shows again Saturday afternoon.
day 22
all Cinerama, all the time
The Unknown Woman
afterward, i went to Ralph's for soup and chocolate. if i had been thinking i might have hit a bar for a quick scotch.
the film was excellent, but brutal. i stayed tense for a good hour afterward.
a Ukranian immigrant in Italy seeks a certain job in a certain building, and she'll do anything to make it happen. she has her reasons. what exactly is she trying to do? how far will she go? why?
this has an excellent Ennio Morricone soundtrack and chilling cuts between past and present. the past is all PTSD for our heroine. there's a great deal of violence against women. it's not used gratuitously, and only to forward the story, but oh oh oh gods...still recommended if you can take it.
Triangle
my third Johnnie To film. i call it a glorious mess, but it's a mess, with three directors tag teaming and five or six writers. when it works it really works - a story about three guys who are trying to pull off a caper to pay off their debts, and of course it all goes improbably wrong. it's not as good as Mad Detective or Sparrow, but is delightfully (and often confusingly) twisty. a rental.
Female Agents
hey, it's another French WWII film with nazis. but this one has Sophie Marceau as a sniper. i have some issues with the script, but there are several tense scenes and a lot of women kicking ass (rigging bombs, running resistance safehouses, etc etc). as far as i can tell the characters and events are all composites, which takes things into the Braveheart/Gladiator made up history continuum, but the film does its intended job of bringing the work of female SOE agents to light in popular culture. cool for what it is.
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no subject
Date: 2008-06-14 12:40 pm (UTC)Apologies for being part of the buzz that led you to Trouble the Water and Buddha Collapsed out of Shame. I liked Trouble in spite of the lame editing, because the rapper woman's video was so intense. I liked Buddha in spite of the baby thing and the Lord of the Flies boys, I suppose because I felt the allegory without even thinking about it.
At least I didn't lead you astray with the praise for Frozen River. It was also one of my favorites of the festival.
The worst thing about Female Agents was the choice of English-language title. It's no Army of Shadows, but it sure was solid entertainment. I like the Braveheart and Gladiator analogy. In the realm of very, very loosely historical films, it's better than the mess that was Gladiator, but I'm not sure it was as good as Braveheart.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-14 05:24 pm (UTC)i think now i'm supposed to talk about how this was great work for an 18-year-old and oh boy she'll be awesome someday. it would have been better if she was not a member of a famous film-making family and had to work on her script until people took her seriously on her own merits instead of making a film now that just shows promise.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-14 04:57 pm (UTC)My problem was with the weak audio at the beginning when she was showing us her neighborhood. Subtitling that early footage would have drawn me in faster. I wondered if part of keeping it so raw was to avoid duplicating what Spike Lee did.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-14 05:31 pm (UTC)i thought there also could have been a few more interstitial title cards to help us along. or maybe labeling the relationships/names of all the neighborhood people before and after the storm so that we can spend less juice on which ones they were in the shaky stuff at the beginning. or resolutions - when did they get their money? (sure we know that Brian didn't, but we go to FEMA and then never see them get their check?) usually i'm against hand-holding the audience, but it think documentaries need this more than narrative films.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-14 07:47 pm (UTC)On the rap, there was this very brief comment that a cousin had saved her demo and here it was, but there were other things going on in the frame and I could see the confusion if you missed that.