And So It Begins - SIFF 2014
May. 22nd, 2014 02:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tiggymalvern
It's the 40th year of the Seattle International Film Festival, and we're off again. I know, I know, I want to get out and see the world in the sunshine, and I also want to shut myself inside darkened cinemas. It's a contradiction. If only I was one of those people who could dedicate myself to one interest, instead of wanting to do everything.
Monsoon Shootout is an Indian thriller with a Run Lola Run style 'what if?' series of possible endings. A young, idealistic rookie cop chases a gang murder suspect into an alleyway. With the suspect about to leap over a fence, the cop has a split second to make his choice - does he hold fire and risk him escaping, does he shoot to kill, or does he shoot to wound and try to get the case to trial? In a world of corrupt cops and equally corrupt politicians, where anyone could be in league with the gangsters, the outcomes may not be so easy to predict.
The start of the film feels pretty clunky. There's one scene to establish our naive hero, one very heavy-handed scene to establish police corruption, and then we're hurled into the action without the audience having any time to bond with the characters or decide if we even care what happens. But as we live through the first of the possibilites, the characters start to grow on you, their grey areas make them more real, and the film bgins to really involve. There's some good direction, some unpredictable consequences, and I liked the ending. It felt genuine. 7/10
Quod Erat Demonstrandum. In 1980s Romania, a gifted mathematician is out of favour with the Communist Party, and is unable to publish his work. He is desperate to find a way to smuggle his latest theorem out of the country and get it published in the west, but one of his friends has already defected and the security forces are watching.
The decision to shoot the film in black and white works well - it adds to the feelings of claustrophobia and oppression, as the film follows the fates of a small group of academics and the policeman investigating them. It's a well acted, solid film, but it just doesn't really fizz. 7/10 If you want to watch a foreign language film about Cold War oppression and the police state, watch The Lives of Others instead. Hell, even if you think you don't want to watch a foreign language film about Cold War oppression and the police state, you should watch The Lives of Others anyway.
The Little House is the latest film by director Youji Yamada. An elderly Japanese lady dies, leaving behind her autobiography of her time working as a maid in Tokyo in the 1930s and 1940s. The film follows both the story of the past, and the consequences of that past coming to light on the living.
I love Youji Yamada - I loved his samurai trilogy (Twilight Samurai, The Hidden Blade and Love and Honour), and I loved Kabei (translated as Our Mother). This film didn't affect me the same way, and I think part of that is the ongoing use of an outsider's point of view on the story. We learn about the old lady through her younger relatives, and we have the quiet, non-interfering maid's perspective on the lives of the family she works for. It's a subtler film that always kept me at one emotional remove, and it was only at the very end, with some of the consequences for the living relatives, that it really moved me. The Little House covers the same period of Japanese history as Kabei, and it's the first film by this director I have seen that didn't leave me wanting to buy the DVD as soon as I left the cinema. It's still a good film though. 8/10
Today I have the day off from films, so I get to catch up with all the posting!
Monsoon Shootout is an Indian thriller with a Run Lola Run style 'what if?' series of possible endings. A young, idealistic rookie cop chases a gang murder suspect into an alleyway. With the suspect about to leap over a fence, the cop has a split second to make his choice - does he hold fire and risk him escaping, does he shoot to kill, or does he shoot to wound and try to get the case to trial? In a world of corrupt cops and equally corrupt politicians, where anyone could be in league with the gangsters, the outcomes may not be so easy to predict.
The start of the film feels pretty clunky. There's one scene to establish our naive hero, one very heavy-handed scene to establish police corruption, and then we're hurled into the action without the audience having any time to bond with the characters or decide if we even care what happens. But as we live through the first of the possibilites, the characters start to grow on you, their grey areas make them more real, and the film bgins to really involve. There's some good direction, some unpredictable consequences, and I liked the ending. It felt genuine. 7/10
Quod Erat Demonstrandum. In 1980s Romania, a gifted mathematician is out of favour with the Communist Party, and is unable to publish his work. He is desperate to find a way to smuggle his latest theorem out of the country and get it published in the west, but one of his friends has already defected and the security forces are watching.
The decision to shoot the film in black and white works well - it adds to the feelings of claustrophobia and oppression, as the film follows the fates of a small group of academics and the policeman investigating them. It's a well acted, solid film, but it just doesn't really fizz. 7/10 If you want to watch a foreign language film about Cold War oppression and the police state, watch The Lives of Others instead. Hell, even if you think you don't want to watch a foreign language film about Cold War oppression and the police state, you should watch The Lives of Others anyway.
The Little House is the latest film by director Youji Yamada. An elderly Japanese lady dies, leaving behind her autobiography of her time working as a maid in Tokyo in the 1930s and 1940s. The film follows both the story of the past, and the consequences of that past coming to light on the living.
I love Youji Yamada - I loved his samurai trilogy (Twilight Samurai, The Hidden Blade and Love and Honour), and I loved Kabei (translated as Our Mother). This film didn't affect me the same way, and I think part of that is the ongoing use of an outsider's point of view on the story. We learn about the old lady through her younger relatives, and we have the quiet, non-interfering maid's perspective on the lives of the family she works for. It's a subtler film that always kept me at one emotional remove, and it was only at the very end, with some of the consequences for the living relatives, that it really moved me. The Little House covers the same period of Japanese history as Kabei, and it's the first film by this director I have seen that didn't leave me wanting to buy the DVD as soon as I left the cinema. It's still a good film though. 8/10
Today I have the day off from films, so I get to catch up with all the posting!
