by ·Comments Off on Dry Season (2006, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun)

First movie I’ve seen from Chad. Simple story with few characters told in chronological order and classically shot: so obviously not similar to anything else that’s out right now.

Atim and his grandpa hear on the radio that the civil war criminals have all been pardoned, so grandpa gives Atim the family pistol, and he very simply sets out on a quest across the country to the city, to find and kill the man who shot Atim’s father. Hits town and immediately meets Moussa, an overly friendly kid who gives Atim clothes (I think) and food and a place to stay. Soon finds killer Nassara and fidgets with his gun a lot when no one’s looking. Idly stalks Nassara outside his bakery for a while, refuses free bread, finally agrees to work for him. Why? To get closer to him, to understand how he lives, to get closer to his family and kill them too? More likely, Atim seems like a nice kid and Nassara is a wonderful father figure, so the attraction was mutual.

Atim works the bakery for a while and learns some lessons along the way. Don’t get too familiar with Nassara’s new wife: he’ll beat her. Don’t hang out with Moussa anymore: he’s a thief. Listen to Nassara: he’s been around and knows what’s what… but he also gets hurt, gets drunk, and has his business wrecked by wily competitors. Only human, then.

Atim gets too close, ends up bringing N. home “to get Atim’s family’s permission for N. to adopt him” and sets up the execution in front of his blind grandpa. Pushes N. down and shoots into the air. Really the only way it could end without us hating somebody.

Should we hate somebody? Are we all good at heart? Is revenge a fool’s game? The writer/director’s obviously big into forgiveness, but I can’t tell if he agrees with the post-war amnesty completely. Anyway, it brings up some complicated feelings and ideas, and very well shot and acted. A completely worthy movie. I think I liked it even more than Katy, who initiated our round-trip drive to Nashville to see it.

More: Atim has been beaten by some nasty cops when Moussa first meets him, and later Atim gets his chance and beats one of the same cops down in the street. Justice is served. Another cop walks by slowly, missing a leg, slowly over a bridge, Atim aims his gun, fires. At the cop? Don’t know, it was offscreen. Katy thinks he was aiming away and I think he was aiming for the cop (even though aiming away makes more sense for his generally moral character). Also Katy thinks Atim’s rejection of Moussa on the basis of M’s being a petty thief is ridiculous, since everyone in the city steals to get by, but A. is from a small, very rural town, where he might have been taught otherwise.

Waited too long between seeing and writing, so I’ve lost some textual details. There was a little music, some interesting shots, I think a pretty great film overall.

Oh, we saw a short beforehand, Namibia, Brazil, which had no real point (except to show how pretty Rio can be), but the credits say it’s an excerpt from a longer film so maybe that’s why.

by ·Comments Off on After The Wedding (2006, Susanne Bier)

Kind of a good movie. Directed by a Danish woman from the Dogma movement who is about to make a movie based on a Low album.

Our man Jacob (I like to call him Mads) was a wreck, cheating on his girlfriend and leaving her in India then dedicating the rest of his life to helping orphans (so: a Good Man). All his ventures fail so he needs funding. Enter rich, dying Jorgen, married to Mads’s ex, who has three kids. Eldest is actually Mads’s and the twins are Jorgen’s. Jorgen, also a Good Man, wants someone to take over for him after he dies, love his wife and kids for him, so he tricks Mads into coming to Denmark by funding his Indian thing. Mads stays, leaving his Indian kids behind, a happy ending for all.

Of course all of this is gradually revealed, not laid out neatly in order, but as soon as Mads shows up at the eldest daughter’s wedding and shares a look with Jorgen’s wife, we (I?) know the daughter is his.

Shot grainy and handheld. Good story, acting, etc… nothing wrong here. Most interesting how movie stays tense with no “bad guy”, all buncha decent people. I guess the daughter’s new husband turns out to be a shit… that details after the Indian intro brought back The Namesake a little.

IMDB reviewer says “I haven’t been this moved since I saw I Am Sam and that’s saying something!”

by ·Comments Off on Princess (2006, Anders Morgenthaler)

Completely unhinged Danish animated movie… yes, two Danish movies premiering in one week, something like 15% of all the Danish movies I’ve ever seen. Very calm intro, lead guy walking around the neighborhood, slow and simple, than roooar into the opening credits. Love it. Rest of the movie sticks mostly to the roar side of things, with some truly audacious scenes.

August moves in with sister Christina, but boyfriend Charlie spends a lot of time there too. After an eviction threat, they plot to blackmail the landlord to let them stay, so August, always with his video camera, tapes his underage sister having sex with the landlord, and voila. This might be what leads August to piss off and become a missionary priest for a few years.

Comes back, sister has just died, her little daughter Mia is staying at a whorehouse, and Charlie runs a media empire selling Christina’s body on video and magazines. Only bloody revenge can ensue! August blasts his way to the top with Mia in tow. Weird ending though… go to a huge party at C’s house, but C doesn’t even seem to be home. A has hidden a bomb in M’s doll, M runs inside with it, A runs after her, boom.

by ·Comments Off on Mutual Appreciation (2005, Andrew Bujalski)

Oops, I thought this Bujalski dude was our indie cinema saviour or the new Wes Anderson or something. Nothing more than a grainy portrait of a few young white people in new york, one of ’em trying to be an indie rocker, and mutually attracted to his best bud’s girl [best bud is played by the director]. Manages not to be annoyingly quirky, situations seem pretty real and characters have a non-fakey awkwardness about them, but also not much to recommend the movie and doesn’t feel very memorable.

AV Club said it first: “All this intrigue sets up a romantic encounter between Rice and Clift, and a serious rupture in their relationship with Bujalski, but nothing in Mutual Appreciation goes according to the usual script. The scene in which Rice and Clift finally vocalize their feelings for each other is the perfect example of what Bujalski does so well: Any other romantic melodrama would have them bubbling over with passion, but these characters are painfully tentative and believably so, given that they’re both betraying someone they care about. What ends up happening between them is completely unexpected, yet entirely true to who they are and to how most caring people would act. But such things rarely happen onscreen, and Bujalski’s willingness to follow through makes him a singular talent.”

I guess after reading the AV Club bit and some Indiewire articles I can appreciate the thing more. Still don’t know whether it’s an authentic new york indie rock scene document, or a comedy/mockery of that scene. Given the levels of irony involved in the “scene”, is there a difference?

by ·Comments Off on Breaking News (2004, Johnny To)

What this movie has in common with Children of Men:
– nice monster long-shot opening the movie
– cool shootouts and motorcycle chases with no edits

What this movie has in common with Infernal Affairs:
– a cellphone chase between hero and villain
– actress Kelly Chen (the psychiatrist in IA), who I didn’t like in this one with her one facial expression, the “I’m in control” impassive look with the head-down eyes-up intensity.

Pretty good action hostage flick, ridiculous in parts, a fine waste of time. Not one but TWO fat comic-relief characters… and one farts a lot, so he’s the funniest. No cops die, all the baddies die (despite their inexhaustible supply of grenades). Most of the movie is set is a huge ugly apartment building. Oh and the title refers to the media manipulation going on by both sides. The media turns out to be very easily manipulated, and come out as the big losers in the end… by me, at least… that’s not a point the movie makes.

Good enough intro to Johnny To’s world. Still have to check out Election sometime.

by ·Comments Off on Last King of Scotland (2006, Kevin Macdonald)

The director is not to be confused with Kevin McDonald of Kids in the Hall, unfortunately. Maybe McDonald could’ve added some humor to the whole thing.

Not a laughing matter, the movie is an untrue story about a loser doctor (young scot James McAvoy) who moves to Uganda so that he won’t have to work at his dad’s practice. After unsuccessfully trying to seduce older doctor Gillian Anderson out in the country, James meets General Idi Amin Dada, new ruler of Uganda, aka a completely badass Forest Whitaker. James is offered a position as Idi Amin’s private physician, and accepts… gets to see how quirky and odd Amin can be, sometimes very likeable, sometimes killing lots of people in horrible ways. James falls for Amin’s third wife Kay (Kerry Washington of Fantastic Four) and has some sex with her before Amin has her killed. Our man barely barely escapes with his life, escaping on a plane when he’s supposed/about to be killed as well.

Story is pretty straightforward, told from James’s eyes with some drifting short-attention-span camera work. A pretty okay movie with a single towering performance, then, just as the Oscars would have you believe.

by ·Comments Off on The Descent (2005, Neil Marshall)

Very very dark – hard to get screen caps. Had some thrills and some scares, worth a look, but not the saviour of horror cinema that it’s been made out to be. Just a fun movie. Or is fun the word, since it starts out grim and just gets less hopeful towards the end, up until the Brazil fake ending.

Sarah and Juno and their friends are extreme-sports enthusiasts. One day Sarah’s husband and kid die in a car crash and she is sad. Later the friends go on a new adventure together. This time they will explore a cave. But Juno wants to make things real extreme so she picks a cave that nobody has explored before and doesn’t bring the map. Oopsie there are blind cave dwellers within who will kill and eat them all. Most people die from cave dwellers but Juno accidentally kills one friend, and Sarah finds out, so she sort of kills Juno. Sarah escapes and is relieved, but oh she dreamt that and she really lays dying in the cave. It’s a motherfucker.

Better than Dog Soldiers.

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by ·Comments Off on Rabbits (2002, David Lynch)

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Rabbits! Eight episodes of rabbity nonsense, with Laura “Rita” Harring, Naomi “Betty” Watts, Scott “scenes deleted” Coffey, and Rebekah “Del” Rio.

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The rabbits seem to be having an actual conversation, but all the lines are out of order. So if you try to remember the dialogue in an episode, at the end you can piece it together, sort of. Or it probably doesn’t matter. And thrice there’s an episode where there’s just one person singing.

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And sometimes this happens.

by ·Comments Off on Hard Candy (2005, David Slade)

Music video director Slade does a fine job here. He should be One To Look Out For in the future. Actually-18-yr-old Ellen Page (Kitty Pryde in X-men 3!) stars with Patrick Wilson (in his second movie featuring pedophilia and castration in a single year, jeez louise), and Sandra Oh has a single scene as a nosy neighbor.

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Great looking movie, candy-bright and colorful, lots of close-ups and private-ryan framing. About a predatory 14-yr-old girl who lets herself get picked up by an obvious pedophile online only to turn the tables, tie him up, torture him, and lead him to kill himself. The spoiler twist is that she’s done this before, and that he and another guy once kidnapped and killed another girl, who may have been our heroine’s friend.

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That’s pretty much the whole thing. A great first half gives way to a not-as-great second half. The ending doesn’t exactly kill the whole movie, but it comes close. I’ll blame the writer. Straightforward. She always seems to be in control, there’s never any question that he’s a pedophile, and he is never sympathetic. The girl calling his ex-girlfriend and pretending to be a cop is the only part that doesn’t quite fit – she’s a little too thorough in her psychological profiling for a 14-yr-old.

Next up for this director, writer and cinematographer: a Josh Hartnett vampire movie set in Alaska! Can’t wait.

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