So there were two more movies left in my decathlon.
Dead Snow
A Norwegian movies about Nazi zombies. There's little more that needs to be said. If you're someone who enjoys a concept as ridiculous as this, then you're going to like this movie. It's played pretty much exactly the way it should be - for laughs, with scarcely believable gore, and great comic timing, and visceral sight gags. The nods to movies such as Braindead along the way are a good indication that the makers know and are a part of their intended audience. Rollicking good fun, without any good taste in sight.
Morphia
I was a little unsure what to make of this movie. It was the last one on my list, and on a Friday night after a couple of drinks, I wasn't sure I was wanting to sit through a Russian film about a morphine addict in the late 1910s. It sounded dreary, and likely to put me to sleep. I grabbed a seat near an aisle, should I need to make an early exit.
The movie, based on actual memoirs of a Russian doctor in a remote country town (Mikhail Bulgakov), traces his addiction to morphine rather laconically. Through a series of anecdotal episodes - cutely titled like a period silent film - we see his addiction grow, but this plot almost seems to be merely the thread which links the stories together. We are made privy to the doctor's inexperience in his work, and various scenes which paint the backdrop of the impending Russian revolution, when he deals with the local aristocracy.
This movie doesn't make a huge impression. It tells a story, and seems not to invite judgement; which for a topic such as addiction, is actually refreshing. There are humourous moments, and also some gruesome ones - the amputation scene is pretty confronting - but all in all, the movie just seems to roll along. Don't go expecting some profound intellectual Russian arthouse exposition about the nature of humanity, but expect to be entertained for a couple of hours.
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Thursday, August 13, 2009
MIFF 2009 - part 3
... so after the fact, I know.
Mother
From the director of The Host, this Korean murder mystery follows a devoted mother as she investigates death of a local girl whom her son, who is a little 'slow', is accused of murdering.
There are many movies which alternate between tragic and comedic from scene to scene. Somehow, Mother manages to combine humour and poignancy into singular moments, which verge on bizarre, but are utterly believable. Brilliantly staged and acted, you can't help but become engaged with the mother's almost frenzied search for the truth. Hard to say much more without giving anything away, so I'll just say this was my favourite movie of the festival for the year.
Eden Log
The blurb said 'post-apocalyptic' and it was a French production. Immediately, I thought of movies such as Avalon, Tetsuo, and the Matrix. And in a sense, I was right. In that it was as monochromatically boring as Avalon, as incomprehensile as Tetsuo, and as much of a let down as the latter two Matrix films.
Basically, the film follows a man who pulls himself out of a primordial mud, and from there he works his way through some sort of abandoned industrial plant, heading up to the surface of the planet. The concept underlying this film is rather contrived - yet another Hero with a Thousand Faces archetypal myth, so derivative you can pretty much sum it up by saying, "Resident Evil meet the Matrix", and I can't help but wonder if it would have been more engaging in French - because the scripting in English was appalling.
It seems every year I choose a dog of a movie at MIFF, and Eden Log was the dog of 2009. Avoid at all costs.
Breathless
This was on my shortlist originally this year, but scheduling meant I took it out at the last cut. Then, quite foruitously, I had to cancel one of my sessions, and a friend highly recommended Breathless after seeing an earlier screening. I'm glad I missed Sauna, which in hindsight was probably going to be another ill-advised choice, to see this fine film instead.
Written up as a gritty Korean gangster movie, I was expecting brash punks in black suits, with guns and fast cars. The write-up should have said petty thugs, however, not gangsters. But don't let that stop you from seeing this movie. It's brilliant, as long as you don't mind the violence.
Sang-hoon is a petty thug for hire, mostly collecting debts for loan sharks, but also breaking up the occasional student protest. He's anti-social and has a strange relationship with his family. He
accidentally spits on a teenage girl, Yeon-hee, walking in the street one day. After an altercation, the two strike up a strange friendship, which isn't so strange once you see what their lives consist of otherwise.
The characters in this film may seem a little cliche, but are still excellently rended, and well acted. Their circumstances are depressing, but they themselves are charming. It sounds like something of a Ken Loach film, I know, but it's much more engaging, I promise. As the tale unravels, it's clear that Ik-Jun Yang (director, writer, and lead actor) has created a movie which deals with male violence, as it exists both in public Korean society, and more domestically within the family home. Various cycles of violence are drawn, some more deeply etched than others, but each revealing its own consequences.
Not for the faint-hearted, but definitely worth seeing - don't let the fact it's over two hours long put you off. It doesn't feel slow in the least.
Mother
From the director of The Host, this Korean murder mystery follows a devoted mother as she investigates death of a local girl whom her son, who is a little 'slow', is accused of murdering.
There are many movies which alternate between tragic and comedic from scene to scene. Somehow, Mother manages to combine humour and poignancy into singular moments, which verge on bizarre, but are utterly believable. Brilliantly staged and acted, you can't help but become engaged with the mother's almost frenzied search for the truth. Hard to say much more without giving anything away, so I'll just say this was my favourite movie of the festival for the year.
Eden Log
The blurb said 'post-apocalyptic' and it was a French production. Immediately, I thought of movies such as Avalon, Tetsuo, and the Matrix. And in a sense, I was right. In that it was as monochromatically boring as Avalon, as incomprehensile as Tetsuo, and as much of a let down as the latter two Matrix films.
Basically, the film follows a man who pulls himself out of a primordial mud, and from there he works his way through some sort of abandoned industrial plant, heading up to the surface of the planet. The concept underlying this film is rather contrived - yet another Hero with a Thousand Faces archetypal myth, so derivative you can pretty much sum it up by saying, "Resident Evil meet the Matrix", and I can't help but wonder if it would have been more engaging in French - because the scripting in English was appalling.
It seems every year I choose a dog of a movie at MIFF, and Eden Log was the dog of 2009. Avoid at all costs.
Breathless
This was on my shortlist originally this year, but scheduling meant I took it out at the last cut. Then, quite foruitously, I had to cancel one of my sessions, and a friend highly recommended Breathless after seeing an earlier screening. I'm glad I missed Sauna, which in hindsight was probably going to be another ill-advised choice, to see this fine film instead.
Written up as a gritty Korean gangster movie, I was expecting brash punks in black suits, with guns and fast cars. The write-up should have said petty thugs, however, not gangsters. But don't let that stop you from seeing this movie. It's brilliant, as long as you don't mind the violence.
Sang-hoon is a petty thug for hire, mostly collecting debts for loan sharks, but also breaking up the occasional student protest. He's anti-social and has a strange relationship with his family. He
accidentally spits on a teenage girl, Yeon-hee, walking in the street one day. After an altercation, the two strike up a strange friendship, which isn't so strange once you see what their lives consist of otherwise.
The characters in this film may seem a little cliche, but are still excellently rended, and well acted. Their circumstances are depressing, but they themselves are charming. It sounds like something of a Ken Loach film, I know, but it's much more engaging, I promise. As the tale unravels, it's clear that Ik-Jun Yang (director, writer, and lead actor) has created a movie which deals with male violence, as it exists both in public Korean society, and more domestically within the family home. Various cycles of violence are drawn, some more deeply etched than others, but each revealing its own consequences.
Not for the faint-hearted, but definitely worth seeing - don't let the fact it's over two hours long put you off. It doesn't feel slow in the least.
Thursday, August 06, 2009
MIFF 2009 - Part 2
The Hurt Locker
The Hurt Locker follows a small team of bomb defusers through the last month of their tour of duty in Iraq. As a character study of the soldiers, it's pretty interesting, contrasting the lead specialist, who appears rather reckless, but actually has something more which makes him tick, with his team mates, who seem to just want to ge the job done and get back home to the US.
This film left me a little dazed. I liked it, but I'm a little unsure about why. The film doesn't really lay down an argument about war. It's not glorifying it, nor is it denouncing it. Instead, it takes a more personal point of view, highlighting the alienation and disconnect from the everyday, that most soldiers thrust into such a situaion would inevitably feel.
I would recommend the film, but don't go into it expecting anything particularly Hollywood. Apart from the stunning opening sequences.
Hansel and Gretel
A Korean take on the fairy tale, protagonist Eun-soo finds himself lost in a forest after a car accident, on his way to visit his sick mother. He passes out, and wakes to find an angelic little girl with a lantern, who leads him back to her house, deep in the middle of the forest. He meets her picture-perfect family, but it soon becomes evident that something's not quite right there. Eun-Soo tries repeatedly to leave the forest and get back to the road, but always ends up back at the house, and slowly (a little too slowly?) secrets are revealed.
Like a lot of Korean films which float between fantasy and horror, Hansel and Gretel oozes style. The art direction and set design is consummate, right down to the disturbing and eerie rabbit-motifed artwork throughout the house. For this alone, the film is worht seeing. Equally, the acting is great, especially the performances of the three children, who are unsettlingly precocious. Where the film gets let down is in the pacing. What starts off with great promise, gets bogged down in overlong flashbacks, and a drawn out climax and denouement. Some more judicious editing would have made this film really great, but as it is, it's still one of the stand out films I've seen this year in the festival.
The Hurt Locker follows a small team of bomb defusers through the last month of their tour of duty in Iraq. As a character study of the soldiers, it's pretty interesting, contrasting the lead specialist, who appears rather reckless, but actually has something more which makes him tick, with his team mates, who seem to just want to ge the job done and get back home to the US.
This film left me a little dazed. I liked it, but I'm a little unsure about why. The film doesn't really lay down an argument about war. It's not glorifying it, nor is it denouncing it. Instead, it takes a more personal point of view, highlighting the alienation and disconnect from the everyday, that most soldiers thrust into such a situaion would inevitably feel.
I would recommend the film, but don't go into it expecting anything particularly Hollywood. Apart from the stunning opening sequences.
Hansel and Gretel
A Korean take on the fairy tale, protagonist Eun-soo finds himself lost in a forest after a car accident, on his way to visit his sick mother. He passes out, and wakes to find an angelic little girl with a lantern, who leads him back to her house, deep in the middle of the forest. He meets her picture-perfect family, but it soon becomes evident that something's not quite right there. Eun-Soo tries repeatedly to leave the forest and get back to the road, but always ends up back at the house, and slowly (a little too slowly?) secrets are revealed.
Like a lot of Korean films which float between fantasy and horror, Hansel and Gretel oozes style. The art direction and set design is consummate, right down to the disturbing and eerie rabbit-motifed artwork throughout the house. For this alone, the film is worht seeing. Equally, the acting is great, especially the performances of the three children, who are unsettlingly precocious. Where the film gets let down is in the pacing. What starts off with great promise, gets bogged down in overlong flashbacks, and a drawn out climax and denouement. Some more judicious editing would have made this film really great, but as it is, it's still one of the stand out films I've seen this year in the festival.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
MIFF 2009 : Part 1
One of the redeeming things about being in Melbourne during winter - I say redeeming ecause I'm not one of those strange people who like cold weather, short days, etc. - is the annual Melbourne International Film Festival. Having missed it last year, I was looking forward to it even more this year, and I again bought the mini-pass, meaning I'll be watching 10 films in the festival in a matter of about 14 days. Some short reviews of the films I've seen so far...
Thirst
A Korean vampire film, directed by Park Chan-wook (Old Boy, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance). A priest is inexplicably infected with vampire blood, after volunteering to be a subject for experiments for a vaccine trials. He dies, rises again, and returns to Korea with something of a religious cult following. As he discovers his thirst for blood, he leaves the monastery and becomes entangled in a tryst with a down-trodden married woman.
As in his other films, Park creates a strangely quiet other world, which resembles our own, but has an eerie feeling of being a stage. Thirst felt a little overworked, being part schlocky, humourous vampire flick, and part morality tale. Not your average vampire film, and worth seeing if you're a fan of his other work.
Martyrs
Described as French 'torture-porn', I was a little apprehensive to see this film. I'm not squeamish, but I'm not a huge fan of pointless inflction of pain. Lucie, a girl who inexplicably escapes from an abusive childhood, is both physically and mentally scarred from her experience. She finds some comfort in her friendship with Anna when she's placed in an orphanage, though she is still plagued by nightmarish visions. Cut to fifteen years later, when Lucie tracks down her childhood tormentors, and exacts her revenge. Then the real action ensues.
The problem I had with this film was not exactly the inability to suspend disbelief, but it something close to that. While the explanations that unfold as the film progresses weren't preposterous, I found them a little flimsy. And it seems to me that the film had to have been created around the original premise, which for me seemed a rather weak excuse for the extreme violence which would likely be the prime motivator for much of the film's audience to go and see it.
That being said, the acting was was great, and the cinematography and editing superb. Thrilling, a little chilling, if you can forgive the denouement.
Humpday
Two college friends Ben and Andrew are reunited in something of an indie take on a bromance. Ben is now married and planning to have children, and Andrew has spent his years since college travelling the world. Over the course of a drunken and drug-buffered night, the two talk themselves into making an 'art film' to enter into the local alternative paper's 'Humpfest' amateur porn competition. Leading up to the big event, the two engage in what are often painfully frustrating conversations trying to be 'more open-minded' than one another, while Ben also deals with breaking the news to his wife Anna.
While there wasn't any particular thing wrong with the film, it ultimately didn't work for me, because neither of the two male leads were particularly likeable or engaging. The conversations they shared trying to explore the notions of their masculinity ended up making them both look like a couple of douches who like to think they're self-aware and in touch with their sexuality. I don't know, was that the point? Much like Sideways, there will be people out there who will ejnoy this. I wasn't one of them. Parts of the movie were funny, but mostly I just found it rather dull.
Thirst
A Korean vampire film, directed by Park Chan-wook (Old Boy, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance). A priest is inexplicably infected with vampire blood, after volunteering to be a subject for experiments for a vaccine trials. He dies, rises again, and returns to Korea with something of a religious cult following. As he discovers his thirst for blood, he leaves the monastery and becomes entangled in a tryst with a down-trodden married woman.
As in his other films, Park creates a strangely quiet other world, which resembles our own, but has an eerie feeling of being a stage. Thirst felt a little overworked, being part schlocky, humourous vampire flick, and part morality tale. Not your average vampire film, and worth seeing if you're a fan of his other work.
Martyrs
Described as French 'torture-porn', I was a little apprehensive to see this film. I'm not squeamish, but I'm not a huge fan of pointless inflction of pain. Lucie, a girl who inexplicably escapes from an abusive childhood, is both physically and mentally scarred from her experience. She finds some comfort in her friendship with Anna when she's placed in an orphanage, though she is still plagued by nightmarish visions. Cut to fifteen years later, when Lucie tracks down her childhood tormentors, and exacts her revenge. Then the real action ensues.
The problem I had with this film was not exactly the inability to suspend disbelief, but it something close to that. While the explanations that unfold as the film progresses weren't preposterous, I found them a little flimsy. And it seems to me that the film had to have been created around the original premise, which for me seemed a rather weak excuse for the extreme violence which would likely be the prime motivator for much of the film's audience to go and see it.
That being said, the acting was was great, and the cinematography and editing superb. Thrilling, a little chilling, if you can forgive the denouement.
Humpday
Two college friends Ben and Andrew are reunited in something of an indie take on a bromance. Ben is now married and planning to have children, and Andrew has spent his years since college travelling the world. Over the course of a drunken and drug-buffered night, the two talk themselves into making an 'art film' to enter into the local alternative paper's 'Humpfest' amateur porn competition. Leading up to the big event, the two engage in what are often painfully frustrating conversations trying to be 'more open-minded' than one another, while Ben also deals with breaking the news to his wife Anna.
While there wasn't any particular thing wrong with the film, it ultimately didn't work for me, because neither of the two male leads were particularly likeable or engaging. The conversations they shared trying to explore the notions of their masculinity ended up making them both look like a couple of douches who like to think they're self-aware and in touch with their sexuality. I don't know, was that the point? Much like Sideways, there will be people out there who will ejnoy this. I wasn't one of them. Parts of the movie were funny, but mostly I just found it rather dull.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
boysfornoise
So apparently I'm a podcaster now.
Evol Kween and I have been toying around with the idea of making a podcast, because we both listen to podcasts regularly, and damnit, we've got something to say! Well, not really, but we like to talk about stuff, and figured we should have a go at it, seeing as we're both tech/media nerds.
So go have a listen - http://boysfornoise.com/
Feedback welcome!
Evol Kween and I have been toying around with the idea of making a podcast, because we both listen to podcasts regularly, and damnit, we've got something to say! Well, not really, but we like to talk about stuff, and figured we should have a go at it, seeing as we're both tech/media nerds.
So go have a listen - http://boysfornoise.com/
Feedback welcome!
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Slumdog Millionaire
I don't think Danny Boyle's ever made a movie I didn't like. Yes, i did fall asleep while watching 'Millions', but that doesn't mean I didn't like it. I also fell asleep during 'A Mighty Heart', and I llike just about everything Fat-lips Jolie is in.
The first thing I thought when watching Slumdog Millionaire was 'oh, this is neat!'. The plot is driven by the sequence of questions asked of the 'slumdog chai wallah' Jamal on the Indian version of 'Who wants to be a millionaire'. The questions are used as a neat device to tell Jamal's life story. As each story unfolds, we learn how he knows the answer to the question - seemingly against all odds.
There's not really much to fault with this movie - and you can kind of understand the four golden globes it just won - everything is deftly handled, and it's hard not to be drawn in by the vibrant cityscapes in which the action takes place. The score (punctuated by M.I.A. tracks) does well to set the tone, too.
I give it a 4.5 out of 5.
The first thing I thought when watching Slumdog Millionaire was 'oh, this is neat!'. The plot is driven by the sequence of questions asked of the 'slumdog chai wallah' Jamal on the Indian version of 'Who wants to be a millionaire'. The questions are used as a neat device to tell Jamal's life story. As each story unfolds, we learn how he knows the answer to the question - seemingly against all odds.
There's not really much to fault with this movie - and you can kind of understand the four golden globes it just won - everything is deftly handled, and it's hard not to be drawn in by the vibrant cityscapes in which the action takes place. The score (punctuated by M.I.A. tracks) does well to set the tone, too.
I give it a 4.5 out of 5.
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