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Showing posts with label LFF2016. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LFF2016. Show all posts
Thursday, October 20, 2016
Thursday, October 20, 2016
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"When four attractive teenagers go camping in the woods on the exact spot where four attractive teenagers were brutally murdered forty years ago, what the hell do they expect to happen? Lake Bodom, by Taneili Mustonon, shows us that the answer is… well, pretty much what you’d expect.
Setting it apart from the pack is that this backstory is ripped from reality. The Lake Bodom murders are one of Finland’s great unsolved mysteries: four teenagers sleeping soundly in their tents really were brutally murdered in 1960.
The killer introduced himself to his victims by plunging a knife through their canvas tent. Two hours later, three of the teenagers were mutilated beyond recognition and the sole survivor was staggering away with a concussion, a broken jaw and facial fractures. In a creepy detail the survivor reported glowing red eyes pursuing him as he ran through the dark forest. The killer promptly vanished, and he/she/it was never caught…"
★★
"Psychonauts, the Forgotten Children is a weird, brutal and lyrical Spanish animated film (with no connection to the Double Fine game of the same name) that feels like the mutant lovechild of Hayao Miyazaki and John Kricfalusi. Alberto Vazquez, adapting his own graphic novel with co-director Pedro Rivero, spins us a tale of cute child animals desperate to escape their nightmare island.
Any suspicions that this is for children vanish pretty quickly in the opening narration, which explains how Cute Animal Island industrialized itself and subsequently suffered a catastrophic nuclear meltdown. In an apocalypse scene reminiscent of Barefoot Gen, the mice workers are scorched into ashen skeletons by a wall of radioactive fire."
★★★
Thursday, October 13, 2016
Thursday, October 13, 2016
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"50 years ago a gunshot rang out across the University of Texas campus. Claire Wilson, a pregnant student, was hit in the belly, instantly killing her unborn child. Her fiance, Thomas Eckman turned to her and asked “What’s wrong?” A second shot ensured he would never hear the answer.
For the next hour and a half, death came to the campus. A sniper had taken up position in the central tower, firing indiscriminately at anyone he could get a bead on. By the time he was killed by police he had murdered 11 people and wounded 32.
Reaction at the time was frightened bewilderment. Why would a person take out their frustrations on random strangers in such violent fashion? Little did they know that these shootings were merely the opening act of a continuing trend, one, encompassing names that have become synonymous with tragedy: Columbine, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook and Pulse.
Keith Maitland’s documentary, Tower is a shot by shot recounting of the events of August 1st 1966, telling the tale through the survivor’s experiences. Their memories are interwoven with archive footage of the event and rotoscoped animation that allows us to see what the cameras didn’t capture."
★★★★
"Marco Bellocchio is superhumanly prolific; a member of a very small group of directors who turn out a film about every year. Granted, they range in quality, but he’s undergoing a personal renaissance, with his most highly regarded work coming in the last decade and a half. Those film, Good Morning Night, Vincere and Dormant Beauty, are loaded with a rock-solid sense of time and place, coupled with an emotional heft that largely avoids sentimentality.
His latest is Sweet Dreams, an adaptation of journalist Massimo Gramellini’s autobiographical novel Sweet dreams, little one. The book and film are an extensive meditation on grief, loss and mourning – following the life of Massimo from childhood to middle age as he struggles with his mother’s suicide."
★★★
"In December 2013 the rains began. The residents of the Somerset Levels looked on anxiously as the ground became waterlogged and rivers swelled into torrents. Soon a huge swathe of land was submerged, with catastrophic consequences for those who live and work upon it. Anger soon flared up, directed at a government that had cut funding for flood defences and at insurers dragging their heels on paying out.
This is the landscape of The Levelling, a grim little first feature by Hope Dickson Leach that uses the floods as a backdrop for exploring themes of guilt, grief, family and a person’s connection to the land they walk upon."
★★★★
Monday, October 10, 2016
Monday, October 10, 2016
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Roughly halfway through Damien Chazelle's La La Land, Emma Stone's would-be actor Mia is fretting about her upcoming one woman show. "It just feels really nostalgic to me." "That's the point." Ryan Gosling's jazz pianist boyfriend Sebastian replies. "Are people going to like it?" she responds. He turns to her with that cooler-than-cool Gosling gaze and replies "Fuck 'em".
"Fuck 'em" indeed. It's a naked bit of self-examination from writer/director Damien Chazelle, who's perhaps understandably worried that the reason the big budget tap-dancing trad-musicals have all but disappeared from our screens is because nobody wants to see them. Sure, you get the odd (generally iffy) Broadway adaption here and there, but we're a long way from the days of Singin' in the Rain, West Side Story and My Fair Lady.
He needn't worry, La La Land is one of the most sure-fire critical and commercial darlings I've seen in a very, very long time. It's got two of the most bankable, adored stars in Hollywood being very funny, very sweet and dancing their socks off. It's got gorgeous faux Technicolor palette and full Cinemascope photography. It's got a script that, despite the sugar-coated trappings of the genre, manages to feel vividly real. It's got musical numbers so dazzling that, in an auditorium full of jaded film critics at the London Film Festival, the opening sequence received a spontaneous round of rapturous applause.
Set in what feels like a dream of contemporary Los Angeles, La La Land is the story of Mia and Sebastian's relationship over one perma-summery year. They first meet when cutting each other up on the freeway, Sebastian honking his horn and giving Mia the finger as he pulls past her. "What an asshole..." she mutters. But soon all too soon - despite their protestations that they despise one another and there's absolutely no chemistry between them - they're falling in love.
What follows is admittedly cut from some pretty familiar cloth: their relationship grows, encounters problems and the two engage in some soul-searching about just what they mean to each other. But despite the familiar template this still surprises, serving up a romance that's simultaneously personal and universal, and one that concludes with an astonishingly effective emotional crescendo.
The ghosts of the golden age of Hollywood haunt these characters, looming in the background of scenes throughout, and at one point Chazelle stylishly and memorably mirrors an establishing shot from Rebel Without a Cause. But the film avoids outright fetishising old Hollywood, instead subjecting it to a mild critical examination via its most extroverted manifestation - the all singin' all dancin' musical. Though Gosling and Stone might tapdance their way down the streets like Astaire and Rogers, they're rooted firmly in 2016 - one of my favourite character touches is that the screen of Mia's iPhone 4S is cracked, an incidental detail that speaks volumes about her life.
Though crammed full of surface retro-stylings, the film consistently argues for innovation rather than slavish copying. The main vehicle for this is Gosling's Sebastian, who's initially obsessed with jazz dinosaurs and has an idea of musical purity lodged sometime in the 30s. It's only when he begins to experiment with form and removes the muso stick from up his own ass that he begins to loosen up and enjoy his art rather than merely appreciate it. Stone's Mia goes through a similar process, evolving from someone craving the approval of others to defining success in their own terms.
To convey all that while singing and dancing isn't going to be a picnic, but Chazelle simply couldn't have cast two better leads. Gosling in particular exudes a timeless style and poise, staring out from the screen with a hangdog yet confident expression that, appropriately enough, has more than a tinge of James Dean to it. He is every inch the moviestar, approaching every scene with grace and jaw-dropping cool. As a graduate of The Mickey Mouse Club it's no surprise that he can sing and dance, but few about these days could slide into a musical number so sleekly and naturally. Stone is also wonderful - the duo fizzing with refreshingly old-school chemistry.
I'd come to think that films like La La Land just couldn't get made anymore. These are insincere times, and this is a painfully sincere movie about two fools drifting in and out of love. It presents a gently loping, largely tension-free story without an atom of irony and resists the urge to insert vestigial elements like comedy best-friends and bitchy villains. It just is, functioning as a contemporary ideal of what the Hollywood studio machine once could (and amazingly, apparently still can) do best.
Damien Chazelle was already sniffing at the big leagues with Whiplash. After La La Land he's going to be white-hot. I can't wait to see what he does next.
★★★★★
What follows is admittedly cut from some pretty familiar cloth: their relationship grows, encounters problems and the two engage in some soul-searching about just what they mean to each other. But despite the familiar template this still surprises, serving up a romance that's simultaneously personal and universal, and one that concludes with an astonishingly effective emotional crescendo.
The ghosts of the golden age of Hollywood haunt these characters, looming in the background of scenes throughout, and at one point Chazelle stylishly and memorably mirrors an establishing shot from Rebel Without a Cause. But the film avoids outright fetishising old Hollywood, instead subjecting it to a mild critical examination via its most extroverted manifestation - the all singin' all dancin' musical. Though Gosling and Stone might tapdance their way down the streets like Astaire and Rogers, they're rooted firmly in 2016 - one of my favourite character touches is that the screen of Mia's iPhone 4S is cracked, an incidental detail that speaks volumes about her life.
Though crammed full of surface retro-stylings, the film consistently argues for innovation rather than slavish copying. The main vehicle for this is Gosling's Sebastian, who's initially obsessed with jazz dinosaurs and has an idea of musical purity lodged sometime in the 30s. It's only when he begins to experiment with form and removes the muso stick from up his own ass that he begins to loosen up and enjoy his art rather than merely appreciate it. Stone's Mia goes through a similar process, evolving from someone craving the approval of others to defining success in their own terms.
To convey all that while singing and dancing isn't going to be a picnic, but Chazelle simply couldn't have cast two better leads. Gosling in particular exudes a timeless style and poise, staring out from the screen with a hangdog yet confident expression that, appropriately enough, has more than a tinge of James Dean to it. He is every inch the moviestar, approaching every scene with grace and jaw-dropping cool. As a graduate of The Mickey Mouse Club it's no surprise that he can sing and dance, but few about these days could slide into a musical number so sleekly and naturally. Stone is also wonderful - the duo fizzing with refreshingly old-school chemistry.
I'd come to think that films like La La Land just couldn't get made anymore. These are insincere times, and this is a painfully sincere movie about two fools drifting in and out of love. It presents a gently loping, largely tension-free story without an atom of irony and resists the urge to insert vestigial elements like comedy best-friends and bitchy villains. It just is, functioning as a contemporary ideal of what the Hollywood studio machine once could (and amazingly, apparently still can) do best.
Damien Chazelle was already sniffing at the big leagues with Whiplash. After La La Land he's going to be white-hot. I can't wait to see what he does next.
★★★★★
Sunday, October 9, 2016
Sunday, October 9, 2016
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"Fictionalising a real-life suicide is an tricky job, primarily because the person whose tale you’re telling isn’t around to give their side of the story. On top of that, you’re making a drama with an unavoidable downer ending, you have to deal with understandably suspicious family members and friends of the deceased and, well, you’re being a bit of a vulture.
Antonio Campos’ Christine gracefully sidesteps these obstacles, presenting us with a sensitive, compelling and fantastically performed drama about a woman pushed over the edge. That woman is Christine Chubbuck, who killed herself while delivering a live news report. While her name might not be immediately familiar, the legend of the news reporter who committed suicide on air certainly is."
★★★★
Friday, October 7, 2016
Friday, October 7, 2016
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"Dasy and Viola are teenage siblings who’re joined at the hip. And no, that’s not a metaphor. From Stuck on You all the way back to Todd Browning’s classic Freaks, conjoined twins have long proved fertile ground for cinema. Edoardo De Angelis’ Indivisible joins them, taking us on a subtly surreal tour of Italy’s grimy industrial south: a grimy land of burning trash and abandoned warehouses, populated by a gallery of grotesques eager to get their claws into Dasy and Viola (Angela and Marianna Fontana).
Blessed with both beauty and perfect harmony, the twins are breadwinners for their extended family – available to hire for children’s parties, weddings, baptisms and so on. Scumbag father Peppe (Massimiliano Rossi) is their Svengali, providing them with a songbook full of treacly pop songs, most of which are about the importance of unity and/or female submission."
★★★
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