Not Coming to a Theater Near You

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Crimes and Misdemeanors / USA / 1989

In the past few weeks, while flipping channels, I’ve caught a few of Allen’s more recent movies, such as Scoop and Match Point. While these “modern” films certainly are more successful than the dreadful stuff he was putting out at the turn of the century (ex. Hollywood Ending), they still feel synthetic in comparison to the stuff he put out in the 70s and 80s. Such experiences with the director’s new films just re-enforce my assumption that Allen may no longer be capable of making a film that feels as authentic and as honest as Crimes and Misdemeanors, wherein the central dilemmas that plague the film’s protagonists actually feel substantial and genuine. I believe part of this is due to the fact that Allen no longer works with actors of the same calibre as Landau and Alda, and instead has to settle for the efforts of Colin Farrell and Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Though I’m not an Allen enthusiast by any means, I’m not sure any artist can achieve the same heights when the materials they are given are of such lesser quality.

by Chiranjit Goswami | Source: MGM DVD
31 May 2008 8:06 PM | Comments (1)

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Yellow Sky / USA / 1948

Watching the early scenes of Yellow Sky you can see why cinematographer Joe MacDonald has such a reputation. These luminous black-and-white images are exquisitely beautiful as they follow the small-town robbery carried out by Gregory Peck’s vicious band of bandits (sidekick Richard Widmark is at his cruel and callous late-forties best), the escape across the desert (which puts Ford’s equivalent scenes in Three Godfathers to shame), and the arrival in an almost-deserted abandoned mining town. Granted there’s a conventionality about Anne Baxter’s teenage tomboy in blue jeans (and especially how the film positions her as just waiting for the right man to “feminise” here), and similarly we wait for the inevitable scene which will “humanise” Peck’s supposedly ruthless gang leader and put him on the side of the angels. But the classic contours of this struggle between right and wrong are very satisfying, Wellman stages some great scenes around the water hole (the men’s lust for this young girl is palpable), and there’s a graceful and elegant restraint to the way the climactic three-way gun duel is staged entirely off-camera.

by Ian Johnston | Source: DVD
27 May 2008 12:23 PM | Submit Comment

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Ridicule / France / 1996

Charles Berling plays an impoverished aristocrat come to pre-Revolution Versailles to plead the case for the draining of the mosquito-infested swamp his estate sits on and improving the life of the local peasantry (a man, anachronistically we suspect, with his heart in the right place). He soon learns that at the court Wit rules — the only way to advance is to get noticed through the exercise of witty repartee, which fortunately our hero excels in. This is all entertaining enough (the great Jean Rochefort has a fine supporting role) but for a film in which razor-sharp wit is at the centre Ridicule is surprisingly soft and sentimental. And the camera’s (director Leconte’s?) fascination with the plunging neckline of the buxom Judith Godreche is in its own way as degrading as the callous Court the film pretends to excoriate.

by Ian Johnston | Source: DVD
27 May 2008 12:20 PM | Submit Comment

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The History of Mr Polly / UK / 1949

Most of the time, this manages to be as charmingly cheery as its eponymous hero. The extended battles around the inn with Uncle Jim that form the kind-of climax of a film that otherwise meanders pleasantly do drag a bit, but their mock-heroic point is well-taken, and John Mills is a perfect fit for the character of Polly, this Edwardian lower middle class hero who simply refuses to try hard and get on. This was Anthony Pelissier’s first film — he wrote the screenplay, too — but you wonder what happened to his career: a string of films to the mid-fifties, and then nothing (he died in 1988).

by Ian Johnston | Source: VHS
27 May 2008 12:18 PM | Submit Comment

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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull / USA / 2008

It’s admittedly been a while since I’ve seen the first three Indiana Jones films, but I don’t remember the fact of the hero being an archaeologist being so foregrounded. My memory is that they make reference to Indy’s day job relatively sparingly, letting him slip into generic adventurer mode when necessary. In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, it’s practically impossible to forget that Jones is an academic: the guy is flashing his credentials in your face practically every minute he’s onscreen, either by discoursing about Mayan civilizations or dispensing sage advice to greaser sidekick Shia Laboeuf.

Of course part of the reason for this emphasis is Harrison Ford’s advanced age: these days, he’s simply more convincing as a disgruntled midcentury professor than a virile action hero. In this way, he somewhat resembles Steven Spielberg himself. The literary critic Franco Moretti, in his fantastically suggestive essay “Planet Hollywood”, has pointed out the didactic quality of Spielberg’s oeuvre, which he links to the rise of the adult/children’s film genre, a type of movie in which the young and old are simultaneously served. Each film he makes has the air of being the movie on its chosen subject — or at least, the only one that a vast majority of the population are going to see — and that leads him to inject a certain amount of edifying wisdom into each one. This approach of course has its successes (do we need to argue anymore about the greatness of E.T., or Schindler’s List, or the original Indiana Jones films?) but it also its hazards, which have only become clearer as Spielberg’s career has progressed. He seems to be more and more aware that he is speaking to, and for, demographically distinct audiences: the kids who grew up on the original Indiana Joneses, and the kids who will need to go see it now if the film is to be as profitable as its producers hope — all of them proxies for the child Spielberg taking in serial B-movie adventures in the 1950s. As Spielberg’s career has progressed, his sense of responsibility to a variety of audiences — a responsibility that is already double, in that he feels the need to entertain and instruct them — has sometimes made his movies feel weighted down, in spite of their effortless technique, and especially as the old working binary — child/adult — has fragmented into a bewildering array of moviegoing generations, former children, future adults, etc.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull suggests that Spielberg is once again trying to do two incompatible things at once: namely, to instill a desire for intellectual accomplishment, while at the same time undercutting it at every turn (Indy after riding a motorcycle through a college reading room: “If you wanna be a good archaeologist, you’ve gotta get out of the library”). The whole film is shot through with a certain kind of melancholy regret about not having done enough to instruct the younger generation. This adds pathos, but ultimately sinks the film as entertainment, which, of course, it has to be to work as instruction in the first place. Case in point: the extremely lame ending, which suggests a parody of Robert Zemeckis’ Contact with a little bit of Brian DePalma’s Mission to Mars thrown in. As so often in Spielberg’s recent efforts, he seems to panic that the film hasn’t had enough significance, and so pulls some out of thin air (sorry, “the space between spaces”) rather than taking from the perfectly good material he’s already accumulated (the McCarthy era, generation gaps, Cold War weapons races, etc.). It’s like an old teacher suddenly remembering on the last day of class that he was supposed to “inspire” his students.

Still, it’s nice to see Karen Allen again.

by Evan Kindley | Source: 35mm print
25 May 2008 5:28 PM | Comments (9)

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Made in USA / France / 1966

This one must have been really confusing at the time, but now looks like woodshedding and, what’s more, a repository of film styles that wouldn’t be picked up again until the 80s and 90s. One catches premonitions of many future auteurs in here, including Lynch (in the early exchange between Anna Karina and a hollering midget); Greenaway (the atmosphere of inscrutable conspiracy); Jarmusch (the deader-than-deadpan dialogue, in a smorgasbord of accents); the Coens circa Big Lebowski (rough handling of the Chandlerian plotting style); Tarantino (casual gun- and time-frame-play); magnificent Andersons P.T. (the bizarre barroom scene is reprised in Magnolia) and Wes (virtually everything); and Hal Hartley (virtually everything else).

And you know what, it’s still confusing, especially as a farewell to Karina (this was their last full-length film together, made as their marriage was ending). In a touching reversal of the two-timing steps Godard so often made her go through, this time she’s the very model of the faithful wife, out searching for her husband’s murderer. Instead of Godard’s voice on the soundtrack, as per usual, this time Karina narrates. There’s something fitting about the director ceding some control to his star, at least nominally (“UN FILM DE J L G / JOUE PAR AK” the titles state) before they go their separate ways; and ultimately, Made in USA feels like Karina’s film too, in a way that, great as they are, Vivre sa Vie, Bande a part and Pierrot le fou don’t. What he cedes control of, of course, is pretty close to chaos. But love, especially failed love, can be confusing.

by Evan Kindley | Source: DVD Projection
22 May 2008 11:21 PM | Submit Comment

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Faces of Death / Junk / USA/Japan / 1979

Coming back to this film some twenty odd years since I first saw it was an interesting experience. It remains one of the few films that I’ve come across that had a palpable aura surrounding it. I remember feeling as if the very VHS box sitting on the shelf of the video store was somehow fundamentally different than those around it; powerful, menacing. The film itself was forbidden fruit. Sight unseen, Faces of Death had a great deal of influence on my future cinematic tastes: I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, to see what I was not supposed to see.

Most important of all, back then at least, was the fact that Faces of Death was the “real deal.” It wasn’t a movie; people really did die on camera. While watching it—through my fingers mostly—I honestly believed that the film was everything I had been promised. The schoolyard tales I had heard about the film were largely false, however. The scenes of men being ripped apart by bears and cannibals devouring whole families were nowhere to be seen, despite the third and forth hand reports I had been given. Everything else certainly lived up to what I had been expecting.

Watching it again on a lark this weekend I am impressed at how powerful the atmosphere of the film is even today. Even amongst the glut of violence and death readily available at ones’ fingertips via reality television and the Internet, Faces of Death still has the ability to make each scene matter to the audience. Mondo purists loathe the film, but Faces of Death excellently uses Jacopetti and Prosperi’s aesthetics and montage techniques in a way that surpasses all but a handful of the Mondo cannon and this first entry is miles ahead of those that followed.

I am also keenly aware at the falsity of it all. Discounting the slaughterhouse/hunting footage, practically none of the film is authentic. I’m not disappointed in the film for lying to me, however; I’m disappointed that I’m able to recognize it now. Knowing that the magician doesn’t really saw the woman in half takes the “magic” out of the magic trick. Macabre as it sounds, I liked it better when it was magic, when it was real.

by David Carter | Source: Google Video
22 May 2008 12:54 AM | Submit Comment

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Le Gai Savoir / France / 1969

…or “The Joyful Knowledge” — presumably some kind of knowing distortion of Nietzsche’s La Gaya Scienza. And yes, it’s all about knowledge — of current events, of theory, of languages, of one another — and it’s also all about joy — the basic pleasures of cinema: sound, image, text, clear plastic umbrellas, like that. This film, originally made for French television but (understandably) not shown, is at once Godard at his most didactic and least directed: he wants you to go away thinking, but I don’t think he wants you go away thinking anything in particular. (Anyone who would consider this propaganda doesn’t know what it would mean to be convinced of something.)

It mostly consists of dialogues between Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Bertot on a black soundstage: two young people negotiating their relationship against the background of revolutionary aspiration. It can thus be seen as a kind of update and abstraction of La Chinoise, bearing the same sort of relationship to that film as Bergman’s After the Rehearsal does to Fanny and Alexander. Interspersed with this are still images, often defaced pages from magazines or philosophy texts, and layered over with many different sound sources. It’s funny how so many of the authors Godard leapfrogs across in this film — Derrida, Debord, Barthes, etc. — remain staples of American progressive higher education (though, naturally, virtually invisible and unavailable elsewhere). That particular, exhilarating post-‘68 mix of dissolution, disappointment and discovery is, in many ways, still the lingua franca of the American scholar, suggesting that the moment the film records — a moment of starting again from zero, as Bertot and Léaud endlessly put it — has not yet past. We still want that joyful knowledge, and we still know, more or less, how to get it; we’re still not sure just what, if anything, to do with it.

by Evan Kindley | Source: 35mm print
21 May 2008 12:08 PM | Submit Comment

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Easy Rider / USA / 1969

I know, I know. It’s a classic road movie and in many ways practically invented the genre – so, as a lover of road trip movies, I should love Easy Rider. But, fresh off a month-long Southern road trip of my own, where I encountered some of the warmest hospitality I’ve come across anywhere in the world, I had trouble getting past the movie’s utterly one-sided, cartoonish portrayal of the people there. It’s only one aspect of the film – and there were lots of others that I enjoyed – but it’s the one that has stuck with me.

by Eva Holland | Source: Columbia TriStar DVD
20 May 2008 11:51 PM | Comments (2)

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Y Tu Mama Tambien / Mexico / 2001

I loved the Mexico being traveled through, but I did not love Y Tu Mama’s characters as they did so. Tenoch and Julio were childishly cruel and immature (though perhaps that was the point, right?) but Luisa was equally off-putting, getting angry at the boys for being unable to behave like adults when the reality was that they were children. I suppose you could say that Luisa was the necessary catalyst for Tenoch and Julio’s change and growth, and that might be true. But it doesn’t mean I enjoyed watching them lose their innocence. I respected this one for a lot of things, but it didn’t make me feel good.

by Eva Holland | Source: MGM Home Entertainment DVD
20 May 2008 11:46 PM | Comments (4)

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When The Levees Broke: A Requiem In Four Acts / USA / 2006

Maybe the best thing about this documentary – out of a long list of very good things – is the time it takes to show the love and pride that the residents of New Orleans have for their city, its unique cultural heritage, its traditions, its music, its food… Director Spike Lee doesn’t flinch from showing the worst of Katrina and its aftermath, but he is committed to showing the best of the city and its people, too. I never thought a four-hour detailing of an enormous tragedy repeatedly compounded by incompetence and apparent indifference, with its consequences ongoing to this day, could manage to be uplifting. Somehow, in between its many heartbreaking moments, When The Levees Broke does just that.

by Eva Holland | Source: HBO DVD
20 May 2008 11:37 PM | Submit Comment

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North Country / USA / 2005

You know how sometimes, a ‘dream team’ will be put together for a major international sporting event? And even though the squad looks fantastic on paper, and should by all rights crush the competition, they never quite gel? That’s sort of how I felt about North Country, whose cast and crew have a heap of Oscars and Oscar nominations between them. They were obviously shooting for the hard-hitting, historical award-winning drama here, but it didn’t quite come together that way.

That being said, the grit and grimness of the mine came through strongly, as did the bleakness of northern Minnesota in winter. I thought Woody Harrelson’s vaguely troubled, insecure lawyer/hockey star was well done. And the accents – gotta love ‘em.

by Eva Holland | Source: Warner Brothers DVD
20 May 2008 11:33 PM | Submit Comment

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Half Nelson / USA / 2006

When something that’s not on the main ‘Oscar-buzz’ radar gets a lone acting nomination, I tend to assume – rightly or wrongly – that I’ll be seeing an ultimately flawed film featuring one outstanding performance. That’s emphatically not the case with Half Nelson, which I thought was brilliantly written, filmed, and acted all around. It was a complete movie.

The well-meaning-teacher-of-troubled-inner-city-kids premise has been so overused (Take the Lead anyone?) and has so frequently meant story lines where ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are clear for all to see – it is only a matter of the characters making the correct choice. So it was refreshing to see Ryan Fleck and co. take a shot at the messiness and the complications of the real world – even if they can’t resist at least hinting at a feel-good ending.

by Eva Holland | Source: DVD
20 May 2008 11:27 PM | Submit Comment

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Made of Honor / USA / 2008

Look! He can say ‘I Love You’ to dogs, but not to humans! He’s emotionally stilted, get it?

by Eva Holland | Source:
20 May 2008 11:18 PM | Submit Comment

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Unbreakable / USA / 2000

In retrospect, it’s not hard to see why everyone found Shyamalan’s (essentially) sophomore effort — all waterlogged dreariness and millennial malaise — so disappointing. It’s slow and a little sappy, with Samuel L. Jackson’s trademark intensity and Bruce Willis doing his best “blue steel.” It also lacks the pyrotechnics, however subdued, of Shyamalan’s previous film, preferring marital strife and father-son time to the expected “Biff”s and “Ka-Pow”s of a superhero movie.

But from this vantage point, after the dozen or so comic book movies that have since followed (and Heroes, which I’ve never watched), not to mention the subsequently diminishing returns of Shyamalan’s career, Unbreakable seems a far more plausible movie now than it did eight years ago. The idea of the film — that Willis’s David Dunn is an unbreakable superhero, but never realized it — is drawn out with uncommon subtlety by Shyamalan, and the film is shot with his particular grey, Philadelphian beauty. Some scenes fall a little flat, but others — the astonishing trainwreck and its aftermath, a weirdly touching weightlifting scene — keep the film quietly suspenseful, right up to its climactic/anti-climactic action sequence.

Shyamalan’s effort — and it’s no easy one — is to credibly weave comic books into a Hollywood-realist melodrama, a task which other, more recent comic book movies (Batman Begins flaps to mind) take up and drop without much consistency. Shyamalan at least holds to his intentions, and the result is that the film usually functions better in its family drama mode than its superhero movie mode. But as his films are always about the different narratives that compete for control over the characters’ and the audience’s minds, this push-and-pull of genres actually works in the film’s favor. And the acting follows suit: Robin Wright (erstwhile) Penn is characteristically serious and great, Jackson is cartoonish and effortlessly watchable, and Willis (whose performance is — no kidding — among his best) is a mix of both. Even if Shyamalan all but blows it with the final scene — not so much because of the “surprise” ending (which is quite clever, but not that surprising), but because of Sam Jackson’s outfit and the useless titlecards — I, for one, mostly buy it. Whatever its faults, it’s nonetheless undeserving of its status as a film maudit.

by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Buena Vista Home Entertainment DVD
15 May 2008 12:59 PM | Comments (1)

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Iron Man / USA / 2008

Maybe it’s because they were working with a second-tier superhero, but Marvel’s certainly taken some interesting risks with this movie, starting with hiring director Jon Favreau, best known for snappy dialogue comedies. Iron Man is remarkable in that it pushes the superhero-movie genre in two seemingly incompatible directions: toward contemporary political allegory on the one hand and mid-90s indie nonchalance on the other. This should result in a pretty schizophrenic movie, but Favreau’s film brilliantly avoids generic dissonance by achieving in cinema what it fantasizes about in the political realm: namely, violence with heart, or weaponization with a human face. The plot turns on Tony Stark, a leading military arms supplier, having a crisis of conscience and deciding he’s been complicit in terror and murder, all of which is somehow resolved by his invention of suits that can fly and shoot missiles. (“How about a pilot without the plane?” is the way he puts it.) The theme is the image of America abroad, whether we’re to be regarded as peacekeepers or “merchants of death,” even whether one necessarily entails the other.

Lest this political subtext get too depressing, though, Favreau slathers on the charm, with Robert Downey Jr. undercutting every possible moment of solemnity and Gwyneth Paltrow somehow managing to make a character named “Pepper Potts” relatively believable. Thus we get a film which is about 40% snappy dialogue-comedy, 60% CGI robots and explosions, with each pleasure balancing out and guaranteeing the other: we don’t feel so irresponsible enjoying the carnage knowing that it’s being supervised by a morally conscious and moreover unpretentious US citizen, one who can distinguish terrorists from civilians and kill only the latter at the touch of a button. Stark, in other words, is the kind of arms manufacturer you’d like to have a beer with, and the archetype Downey inaugurates here — the witty, socially responsible, cheeseburger-loving engineering genius — is as good a summation of how Americans now wish to think of themselves as we’re likely to get this decade.

by Evan Kindley | Source: 35mm print
14 May 2008 10:36 PM | Submit Comment

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Flight of the Red Balloon / Le Voyage du ballon rouge / The Red Balloon / France / 2007

Had the opening scene—of the titular red balloon following Simon through the streets of Paris—been the entire film, all 117 minutes, I probably would have left the theatre a little teary-eyed. The magic in film that evokes the innocence and wonderment of childhood is very rare today—perhaps the rarest of cinematic species. Studios try to replicate that feeling—mass-produce it with characters they think we’ll love—but never succeed, because it never feels like anything other than desperation. For money, for notoriety, for awards, for the number-one spot on the Box Office Top 10. I clearly remember watching The Wizard of Oz as a child and being enamored by every aspect, a feeling I later felt when I watched other films like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Disney’s The Sword in the Stone. The Flight of the Red Balloon, while not perfect—and after those opening seven or eight minutes, nothing director Hou Hsiao-hsien could do would ever be—revived, at least for a while, those feelings of astonishment I very rarely feel for movies today. (Feelings, I should note, I had felt only days before, when Suzie Templeton’s Peter and the Wolf was broadcast on PBS.)

I realize my thoughts on Hou’s film are bumbling and overly sentimental, and I’ve spent the last month trying to write something better—more broad, more analytical. But I couldn’t, probably because my friends and I watched this film in a theatre that is slowly but visibly showing its age: Chipped walls, scuffed and soiled floors, broken chairs, a stage curtain held together by duct tape. Never a more apt metaphor for the sad state of magical films.

by Adam Balz | Source: 35MM Theatrical Print
06 May 2008 12:37 PM | Comments (1)

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Raw Force / Kung-Fu Cannibals / USA / 1982

An encyclopedia of exploitation clichés that manages to remain coherent enough to be one of the most insanely entertaining films I’ve ever seen. The Burbank Karate Club takes a booze-cruise to Warrior’s Island, a place where the dead martial artists allegedly rise from their graves to do the bidding of the island’s cannibalistic monks. Attempting to stop their arrival is Hitler look-alike Thomas Speer, who is afraid that his nude-girls-for-jade exchange program with the monks will be upset if outsiders are allowed on the island.

Raw Force has a frenetic pace, hitting its exploitive marks with unbelievable frequency. There are no lulls in the steady stream of kung-fu, nudity, and zombies. Fans of cine-excess should find a copy as soon as possible. Look for Camille Keaton in a rare post-I Spit on Your Grave role as a drunk girl in a bathroom.

by David Carter | Source: Fortune 5 DVD
04 May 2008 5:23 PM | Comments (1)

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Savage Man, Savage Beast / Ultime grida dalla savana / Italy / 1975

Savage Man, Savage Beast could alternately be viewed as the zenith and nadir of the Mondo cycle. Climati was Jacopetti & Prosperi’s cinematographer and the photography and use of montage on display here perhaps eclipses that of their works. A greater emphasis is given to placing the events of the film within a context, and the film more wholly espouses a critique of “modern” society than its predecessors. Though similar in style, Savage Man, Savage Beast has little in common with the lighthearted travelogue of curiosities that typified Mondo Cane I & II. The film’s sole concern is death; animal deaths primarily, but human death is used to extend the metaphor on occasion. It is for this reason that SMSB’s influence is possibly even more important Mondo Cane’s. This film is the bridge between Mondo and shockumentary—Faces of Death and the like that replaced Mondo in the late-seventies. Post-hardcore pornography, death was the only taboo on which Mondo and exploitation held a monopoly and Savage Man, Savage Beast is the first step towards the macabre monomania of later entries.

Savage Man, Savage Beast’s influence stretches beyond the Mondo/shock genre. Two “authentic” sequences in the film are key influences on Cannibal Holocaust’s film-within-a-film technique. Each is depicted as separate from the main film itself, with intertitles informing the audience of their origins and authenticity. The mauling of a tourist by a lion is captured both by his own camera and those by of onlookers. The sequence is by all accounts false, yet the amateurish quality, the “factual” context given by the narrator, and the point-of-view footage all make it difficult to readily dismiss upon a first viewing and it is still believed to be real by some. It would reappear in several films, either reimagined with different animals (Faces of Death) or as the same footage (Traces of Death). The alleged victim Pit Dernitz even has his own IMDB.com listing. Less convincing—but more important to Deodato’s film—is a later segment showing the murder, scalping, and castration of indigenous people by mercenaries from the “civilized world.” This portion was visually and thematically incorporated whole-cloth into a host of Italian cannibal cinema as it used in this context to establish the savagery of the modern man against nature and his fellow man.

It should be noted that print of the film on the Fortune 5 DVD excises the castration scene, stopping as the Indio’s legs are spread apart by the mercenaries. Uncut, that scene reveals its falsity soon after and this truncated print actually makes the segment seem more real; allowing the viewer to imagine an outcome rather than sit through Climati & Morra’s ludicrously excessive conclusion.

by David Carter | Source: Fortune 5 DVD
04 May 2008 5:19 PM | Submit Comment

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Safari / USA / 2008

IFFB: This film could be called moving still-lifes, or non-human dance. Small animals (insects, amphibians, reptiles) are shot in plant-filled but artificially lit setups that allow the camera to pick up stunning color, texture, movement, and expressiveness. A lovely film that combines the best features of video art and nature films.

by Katherine Follett | Source:
01 May 2008 4:24 PM | Submit Comment

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Doxology / USA / 2008

IFFB: Not so much a short film as a series of vignettes advertising the director’s talents as an animator, and he has many. The animation could be described as full-size stop-motion: instead of using clay, he uses human actors. There are one-man tennis games, dances with sedans, and Shiva’s morning hygiene. Give this guy a story and the results could be great.

by Katherine Follett | Source:
01 May 2008 4:23 PM | Submit Comment

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I Love Sarah Jane / Australia / 2008

IFFB: This may seriously have been the best film I saw at the IFF Boston. Very simply, a preteen boy tries to chat up his crush in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. The zombies were terrifying, the kids were both touchingly and violently real, the situation was funny and scary and yet normal, and the emotion was palpable. Beautifully shot (35 mm… sigh…) and impeccably acted. I can’t wait for this guy to start making features.

by Katherine Follett | Source: 35 mm print
01 May 2008 4:20 PM | Submit Comment

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Spider / Australia / 2008

IFFB: When that guy bought the fake spider along with the flowers and the card I was totally like, “The spider’s going to scare his girlfriend and she’s going to get into an accident and die,” and then that was exactly what happened and I was all like “weak!” and then the EMT saw the fake spider and he totally jammed that huge fucking needle into the guy’s eye and IT TOTALLY FUCKING GOT ME, MAN!

by Katherine Follett | Source:
01 May 2008 4:18 PM | Submit Comment

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Reorder / Canada / 2008

IFFB: This short is beautifully acted and inventively shot; the images are striking and original. The weak point is the writing and the plot. The fiancé’s confession is predictable, the protagonist’s reaction is way out of proportion (even if striking), and the supposedly cathartic ending rang false, especially after what felt like a warm and genuine reconciliation. In indie shorts, they tack on crappy unhappy endings.

by Katherine Follett | Source:
01 May 2008 4:16 PM | Submit Comment

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A Catalog of Anticipations / USA / 2008

IFFB: Another sequence of stills, these much more deliberately composed and carefully framed, with the result that this film—as opposed to The Drift— feels like a beautiful narrative photo essay rather than simply a slideshow. The sound design and understated acting make the events chilling once the dead objects in the stills suddenly begin to come to life through stop-motion animation.

by Katherine Follett | Source:
01 May 2008 4:13 PM | Submit Comment

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Primitive Technology / USA / 2008

IFFB: This odd, quick-moving, and very funny short follows a group of steam-punkish inventors who recruit a new member by smashing his laptop and encouraging him to build things from junk. When he creates a telescope that can see into the future, a round of increasingly ridiculous petty jealousies takes over. The film is bouncy, witty, whimsical, and homemade in a low-budget, thrown-together way that perfectly complements its subject.

by Katherine Follett | Source:
01 May 2008 4:12 PM | Submit Comment

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The Pull / USA / 2008

IFFB: A slight but well done meditation on a relationship with an agreed-upon expiration date. The director manages to use spilt-screen without feeling frenetic, and in fact makes it evocative. But in general, the settings and the situation feel mundane.

by Katherine Follett | Source:
01 May 2008 4:10 PM | Submit Comment

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The Drift / U.S.A. / 2008

IFFB: Less a short film than a collection of still images with some minor animation and a voiceover. Some of the stills are composed, while others are stock footage. The monotony of the voiceover, the lack of movement, and the semi-abstract, hard-to-follow concept make this somewhat of a yawn.

by Katherine Follett | Source:
01 May 2008 4:08 PM | Submit Comment

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