Nuit et Brouillard
19 October, 2008
You cannot film this. Not a recreation of it, not a representation of it, nothing. It can only be spoken of, hushed, and shown through first-hand documentation. You cannot film this horror in a way that does not demean or belittle it. You cannot and you must not. There are some things the camera cannot and should not do.
Mat i syn
12 October, 2008
In time all things pass. In time the moth, too, will die with the mother. The end comes with a scream and a sigh, lasts for a moment suspended forever. To remember her you forget yourself and you have been lost.
everything will be ok
11 October, 2008
You don’t understand, do you? Everything could go to hell and it still would be ok. Horrible is ok. Everything is ok.
The Proposition
4 October, 2008
Australia is a strange hell- an orange and green, oversaturated, overexposed, blinding-hot hell filled with demons of all breeds and in all shapes. Or so Nick Cave would have you believe.
The Western is never dead, though many proclaim it to be so. It simply requires re-imagining every so often.
Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies
4 October, 2008
Untie the strings. Pull the ends and unravel the world.
Barry Lyndon
4 October, 2008
This is Kubrick at his most incredibly overindulgent. Lighting indoor scenes with candles, moving at a pace so deliberate and so very achingly tense as to make each scene almost an exercise in eroticized vision, borrowing lenses from NASA- the entire production is over the top. And the end product is so delicate, so easily disrupted, that a single scene in which the lighting is not exactly perfect is so distracting it takes several scenes to recover from it.
I love this film, absolutely and completely, because it is so overwhelmingly beautiful. That kind of beauty is precisely what is necessary when the brain reaches a certain point of tension.
The Animation Show (Vol. One)
13 September, 2008
This is my favorite of the animation shows thus far, partly because of the intro, intermission, and closing animated by none other than Don Hertzfeldt. The work in this collection is, it seems to me, far more sophisticated and far more interesting than most of what has come later. The presence of work by Georges Schwizgebel and Adam Elliot lends the thing an air of true artistry, which isn’t necessarily lacking in later shows as much as it is harder to find, unless there is a Hertzfeldt piece playing. I do love, very much, the simpler pieces in this volume as well- Fifty Percent Grey and Das Rad will always hold special places in my heart.
While there are misses in this portion of the festival, of course- Cathedral being one of them- the hits seem to be much more powerful than the misses ever will.
Children of Men
6 September, 2008
The editing and cinematography is astounding, even now, even on a small screen. It kicks me in the gut. The disinterest… the apathy. It isn’t a wandering camera, like in Neorealism, it is a dispassionate camera that is slowly drawn in. A camera that is slowly captured by the story-line, that follows the arc of Owen’s character’s development from pathetic waste to savior. Absolutely brilliant.
Marie Antoinette
6 September, 2008
I cannot figure out why I like this film so much. It’s pretty, yes. It’s filmed luxuriously and is incredibly well-costumed. The art direction is spectacular and the acting is superb. The editing is quite good, the music and the sound are all exceptional. But it lacks depth. I think. Maybe it only appears to be superficial. I can’t decide. The glossy sheen on it is deliberate, right? I am so confused. Sophia Coppola is either a genius, or a very spoiled girl who gets to play with very expensive toys.
It is the ending, really, that leaves me wondering whether what I just watched was what it seemed. So smart, so abrupt, so very very unexpected. But of course, Sophia knows how to end a film. We know this, from her earlier work. I think she starts from the ending and works back, to be honest. She has an image, something she knows will catch and stick, and builds backwards from it.
