tiggymalvern (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tiggymalvern) wrote2010-06-10 06:29 pm
tiggymalvern) wrote2010-06-10 06:29 pm
SIFF the Last (well, until next year anyway)
Four more films to finish off SIFF 2010 for me - I'm out of town for the last few days, so I'll miss some goodies :-( This time up, Swiss sci-fi, a Belgian film I really can't summarise, a documentary about the cold war battle for information, and a Czech WWII drama.
ETA Now with fresh new paragraphs!
Cargo. In the 23rd century, earth has been abandoned as uninhabitable, and the population live in massive orbital cities. The alternative, for those who can afford it, is to travel to the newly colonised planet of Rhea, several light years away. Dr Laura Portmann is determined to scrape the money together, and takes a job as medic on a deep space freighter. Towards the end of the flight, she begins to suspect that there is a stowaway in the cargo hold, and as investigations begin, the crew discover that the cargo is not what they believed.
First off, the cinematography in this film is *fantastic.* The look of it, the lighting, it's all incredibly professional and achieved on a low budget. The film uses lighting and sets beautifully to create an
incredible feeling of tension early on. The soundtrack accentuates this, with minimal score and lots of silence and mechanical noise. The plot contains nothing particularly original, they're all ideas seen before in sci-fi remixed, and I guessed most of the truth and who was in on it less than half way through. But I didn't care about that, because the quality of execution was so good, and the differing reactions of the crew to the truth exposed are interesting. There is one plot point in particular that lacks an explanation, but still a good film despite a few flaws. 4/5
Altiplano is a Belgian film set mainly in Peru. The inhabitants of a small rural town begin to fall ill. The symptoms attract the attention of a team of cataract surgeons performing charity work nearby, but the native Peruvians have little trust for outsiders.
And now I've done the obligatory, I have to say that describing this film based on its plot is utterly superfluous. This is the most visually arresting film I have ever seen that is shot entirely 'real world', no particular gimmicks, just an incredibly visual director and the stark, dangerous beauty of the Peruvian high desert. The cinematography is staggering, particularly in the long, panning shots, in which every detail has been so carefully planned. The film also has enough plot for about 45 minutes, and it's almost two hours long. Bizarrely for a film with that complaint, it actually becomes at its most compelling once it's got the annoying necessities of plot and most of the dialogue out of the way and the visuals are left to speak for themselves. Or maybe its not so surprising, because one of the points of the film is about the power of images, and wow, it certainly packs in the images. It's also about death, and grief and hope, and when it finished I was left completely gobsmacked. When I started the car and the radio came on, it felt like sacrilege.
Scoring this film left me with a horrible dilemma. At the end of the film I wanted to score it 4/5, but I couldn't forget that for the first hour I'd been restless, all the pretty in the world not making up for the fact that the plot moved with the speed of a Peruvian glacier. I decided to be harsh, and gave it 3/5, but honestly I'd like the 7/10 option. Despite the drawbacks, this is still one I'd consider buying on DVD, but I'm left wondering if it would weave the same spell in my living room as it did in a darkened cinema.
From Altiplano, I went on to lighter fair, with the Estonian documentary Disco and Atomic War. In 1971, the Finns built a particularly large TV tower on the south coast near Helsinki. Along the northern coast of Estonia, notably in the capital Tallinn, a forest of tall TV aerials sprang up, and electronics engineers made most of their income converting Soviet TVs to receive Finnish signals. Over the next 15 years, Soviet officials made various efforts to stop people watching the offending stations, matched by the innovations of the Estonian populace, determined to retain their access to the western capitalist excesses of Dallas.
This documentary is delightfully entertaining, told in a deliberately whimsical way, primarily by people who were children at the time of the shiny new TV programs. The audience laughed and giggled their way through it. Fun fluff, delightful to watch once, uplifting in the resilience of people under oppression, but hardly earth-shattering. 7/10
Protektor. In 1939 Prague, a radio journalist agrees to broadcast Nazi propaganda in order to protect his Jewish wife. But she is a glamorous and independent actress who copes poorly with the increasing restrictions forced upon her, and as his fame grows while her own career is abruptly killed, the strain on their marriage increases exponentially.
This is a great drama on both large and small scale, and it's beautifully filmed, with clever use of colour reflecting mood. It examines the roles and motives of collaborators and protesters without giving pat answers, because there aren't any. 4/5
So that's 21 SIFF films this year (in 19 days!), and I didn't give a single 5/5. Maybe I was being unreasonably harsh - there were a couple that were ideally 9/10 which I downgraded to 4/5 because I felt the flaws were too 'there' to score them perfect. Hmmm. OTOH, I only scored one film 2 or less as well, so I must be getting better at selecting! Or maybe I'm playing it too safe? By not taking risks, am I missing out on the 5s? Things to ponder....
ETA Now with fresh new paragraphs!
Cargo. In the 23rd century, earth has been abandoned as uninhabitable, and the population live in massive orbital cities. The alternative, for those who can afford it, is to travel to the newly colonised planet of Rhea, several light years away. Dr Laura Portmann is determined to scrape the money together, and takes a job as medic on a deep space freighter. Towards the end of the flight, she begins to suspect that there is a stowaway in the cargo hold, and as investigations begin, the crew discover that the cargo is not what they believed.
First off, the cinematography in this film is *fantastic.* The look of it, the lighting, it's all incredibly professional and achieved on a low budget. The film uses lighting and sets beautifully to create an
incredible feeling of tension early on. The soundtrack accentuates this, with minimal score and lots of silence and mechanical noise. The plot contains nothing particularly original, they're all ideas seen before in sci-fi remixed, and I guessed most of the truth and who was in on it less than half way through. But I didn't care about that, because the quality of execution was so good, and the differing reactions of the crew to the truth exposed are interesting. There is one plot point in particular that lacks an explanation, but still a good film despite a few flaws. 4/5
Altiplano is a Belgian film set mainly in Peru. The inhabitants of a small rural town begin to fall ill. The symptoms attract the attention of a team of cataract surgeons performing charity work nearby, but the native Peruvians have little trust for outsiders.
And now I've done the obligatory, I have to say that describing this film based on its plot is utterly superfluous. This is the most visually arresting film I have ever seen that is shot entirely 'real world', no particular gimmicks, just an incredibly visual director and the stark, dangerous beauty of the Peruvian high desert. The cinematography is staggering, particularly in the long, panning shots, in which every detail has been so carefully planned. The film also has enough plot for about 45 minutes, and it's almost two hours long. Bizarrely for a film with that complaint, it actually becomes at its most compelling once it's got the annoying necessities of plot and most of the dialogue out of the way and the visuals are left to speak for themselves. Or maybe its not so surprising, because one of the points of the film is about the power of images, and wow, it certainly packs in the images. It's also about death, and grief and hope, and when it finished I was left completely gobsmacked. When I started the car and the radio came on, it felt like sacrilege.
Scoring this film left me with a horrible dilemma. At the end of the film I wanted to score it 4/5, but I couldn't forget that for the first hour I'd been restless, all the pretty in the world not making up for the fact that the plot moved with the speed of a Peruvian glacier. I decided to be harsh, and gave it 3/5, but honestly I'd like the 7/10 option. Despite the drawbacks, this is still one I'd consider buying on DVD, but I'm left wondering if it would weave the same spell in my living room as it did in a darkened cinema.
From Altiplano, I went on to lighter fair, with the Estonian documentary Disco and Atomic War. In 1971, the Finns built a particularly large TV tower on the south coast near Helsinki. Along the northern coast of Estonia, notably in the capital Tallinn, a forest of tall TV aerials sprang up, and electronics engineers made most of their income converting Soviet TVs to receive Finnish signals. Over the next 15 years, Soviet officials made various efforts to stop people watching the offending stations, matched by the innovations of the Estonian populace, determined to retain their access to the western capitalist excesses of Dallas.
This documentary is delightfully entertaining, told in a deliberately whimsical way, primarily by people who were children at the time of the shiny new TV programs. The audience laughed and giggled their way through it. Fun fluff, delightful to watch once, uplifting in the resilience of people under oppression, but hardly earth-shattering. 7/10
Protektor. In 1939 Prague, a radio journalist agrees to broadcast Nazi propaganda in order to protect his Jewish wife. But she is a glamorous and independent actress who copes poorly with the increasing restrictions forced upon her, and as his fame grows while her own career is abruptly killed, the strain on their marriage increases exponentially.
This is a great drama on both large and small scale, and it's beautifully filmed, with clever use of colour reflecting mood. It examines the roles and motives of collaborators and protesters without giving pat answers, because there aren't any. 4/5
So that's 21 SIFF films this year (in 19 days!), and I didn't give a single 5/5. Maybe I was being unreasonably harsh - there were a couple that were ideally 9/10 which I downgraded to 4/5 because I felt the flaws were too 'there' to score them perfect. Hmmm. OTOH, I only scored one film 2 or less as well, so I must be getting better at selecting! Or maybe I'm playing it too safe? By not taking risks, am I missing out on the 5s? Things to ponder....