Since I'm used to watching an optimum of one film a day, rattling
through four in 10 hours is beginning to be a little enervating.
Although there's a certain charm in being forced to make snappy
dogmatic judgments before a film's pleasures or otherwise are swiftly
erased to make way for another, it sure would be nice to let something
settle for a few hours. All this mental headache has been compounded
by the incessant rain and snow that's neatly coincided with a big gash
appearing in the sole of my right shoe, which is turning what would be
a quick trip between theatres into a drawn out muggy nightmare. But
so it goes, and on to the movies!
'Independencia': The producer of Raya Martin's film spoke before its
screening in the 'After Victories' strand of the festival about how
the absence of a substantial Philippine film archive provided the
impetus for reimagining a lost history, to create a picture that
fantasizes how a 1940s melodrama might have appeared. The result is a fable set during the American occupation of the Philippines shot in
lush black and white, with plainly fake backdrops, theatrical emoting
by the actors, and even an insertion of a fake newsreel that abruptly
splinters the narrative, which follows three generations of a family
as they hide out in a forest hut. Soundtracked by an insistent
melancholic score, the bulk of the screen time is devoted to observing
the flora and fauna of the beautiful landscape the set designers have
created, yet this pictorial obsession with artifice smothers the
political urgency the title promises, save for the tragic final shot
of a young boy who at least makes some small step towards
independence.
'Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans': Nicolas Cage provides a
towering performance in 'Bad Lieutenant', playing a ludicrously
depraved, drug addicted police officer who transforms a run of the
mill detective case from shit into gold, erupting in bodily tics and
verbal mania as he shuffles through the streets of New Orleans with a
chronic back problem. The joys of this wilfully perverse film are
generated from the perpetual displacement of meaning through reversals of signification, top and tailing the signifiers of the crime genre to render everything askew. This is a sequel to Abel Ferrara's original
that Werner Herzog claims not to have seen and a film set in New
Orleans after Hurricane Katrina that could pretty much have been
located anywhere. Cage's cop continues to rise through the ranks as
his activities become increasingly nefarious, joining forces with the
people he's supposed to prosecute, busting the public so he can score
a fix of heroin, threatening to cut off oxygen to an innocent old
lady, investing every scene with wild, hypnotic rhythms. Shot through
with successive jolts of kinetic energy, this film thrillingly nails
the experiential alienation of moving through an alien world.
'The Ape': This burst of sharp materialism from Jesper Ganslandt has
little aspiration and suffers from a severe paucity of ideas. The
handheld camera remains fastened to the protagonist's face throughout
every scene as he wakes up extremely agitated and covered in blood,
but nonetheless tries to get on with an ordinary day, even though it's
palpable that something incredibly bad has happened. Taking a cue
from Mike Leigh's methods of filmmaking, lead actor Olle Sarri was
unaware of how the plot would develop day to day, placing him in the
same state of confusion as the audience. There's no doubt it provides
his performance with some vitality, but the procession of events are
so dramatically thin and Ganslandt's obsession with the slow reveal so
one-note that this comes off as a distinctly sub Dardennesian bore,
morally and psychologically inert.
through four in 10 hours is beginning to be a little enervating.
Although there's a certain charm in being forced to make snappy
dogmatic judgments before a film's pleasures or otherwise are swiftly
erased to make way for another, it sure would be nice to let something
settle for a few hours. All this mental headache has been compounded
by the incessant rain and snow that's neatly coincided with a big gash
appearing in the sole of my right shoe, which is turning what would be
a quick trip between theatres into a drawn out muggy nightmare. But
so it goes, and on to the movies!
'Independencia': The producer of Raya Martin's film spoke before its
screening in the 'After Victories' strand of the festival about how
the absence of a substantial Philippine film archive provided the
impetus for reimagining a lost history, to create a picture that
fantasizes how a 1940s melodrama might have appeared. The result is a fable set during the American occupation of the Philippines shot in
lush black and white, with plainly fake backdrops, theatrical emoting
by the actors, and even an insertion of a fake newsreel that abruptly
splinters the narrative, which follows three generations of a family
as they hide out in a forest hut. Soundtracked by an insistent
melancholic score, the bulk of the screen time is devoted to observing
the flora and fauna of the beautiful landscape the set designers have
created, yet this pictorial obsession with artifice smothers the
political urgency the title promises, save for the tragic final shot
of a young boy who at least makes some small step towards
independence.
'Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans': Nicolas Cage provides a
towering performance in 'Bad Lieutenant', playing a ludicrously
depraved, drug addicted police officer who transforms a run of the
mill detective case from shit into gold, erupting in bodily tics and
verbal mania as he shuffles through the streets of New Orleans with a
chronic back problem. The joys of this wilfully perverse film are
generated from the perpetual displacement of meaning through reversals of signification, top and tailing the signifiers of the crime genre to render everything askew. This is a sequel to Abel Ferrara's original
that Werner Herzog claims not to have seen and a film set in New
Orleans after Hurricane Katrina that could pretty much have been
located anywhere. Cage's cop continues to rise through the ranks as
his activities become increasingly nefarious, joining forces with the
people he's supposed to prosecute, busting the public so he can score
a fix of heroin, threatening to cut off oxygen to an innocent old
lady, investing every scene with wild, hypnotic rhythms. Shot through
with successive jolts of kinetic energy, this film thrillingly nails
the experiential alienation of moving through an alien world.
'The Ape': This burst of sharp materialism from Jesper Ganslandt has
little aspiration and suffers from a severe paucity of ideas. The
handheld camera remains fastened to the protagonist's face throughout
every scene as he wakes up extremely agitated and covered in blood,
but nonetheless tries to get on with an ordinary day, even though it's
palpable that something incredibly bad has happened. Taking a cue
from Mike Leigh's methods of filmmaking, lead actor Olle Sarri was
unaware of how the plot would develop day to day, placing him in the
same state of confusion as the audience. There's no doubt it provides
his performance with some vitality, but the procession of events are
so dramatically thin and Ganslandt's obsession with the slow reveal so
one-note that this comes off as a distinctly sub Dardennesian bore,
morally and psychologically inert.
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