More Apichatpong

Courtesy of David Bordwell's blog report on the Vancouver Film Festival, two t-shirts featuring Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. I'm proud to say I own one of the black shirts pictured on the right.

And here's a wonderful picture of Joe at Cannes happily displaying his Palme d'Or.

NYFF 2010 - Mysteries of Lisbon and Festival Wrap

Raul Ruiz's Mysteries of Lisbon, the final film I saw at this year's New York Film Festival, is also one of my top three films from the festival, right behind Uncle Boonmee and Certified Copy. (I'm seeing Carlos this weekend outside the festival so that ranking may change.) Runners-up were Poetry, The Strange Case of Angelica, Oki's Movie, Film Socialisme, Tuesday, After Christmas and Another Year. Special mention goes to James Benning's Ruhr, of which I only saw the first half. Benning follows up the great RR with another beautiful film about the power of looking closely at seemingly ordinary landscapes.

For now I'll just say that Mysteries of Lisbon, aptly described by David Bordwell as a "rich, high thread-count" film, is the kind of dizzying, all-enveloping experience to make one swoon over the beauties that cinema is capable of.

Parabens! by João Pedro Rodrigues

Here is João Pedro Rodrigues's delightful early short Parabens! (Happy Birthday!) which screened Wednesday at BAM along with his great first feature, O Fantasma. The short film stars João Rui Guerra da Mata, Rodrigues's art director and partner, who joined Rodrigues and Dennis Lim in a post-screening Q&A.


Gay Themed Short - Parabéns! (Joao Pedro Rodrigues 1997 )
Uploaded by esta2. - Classic TV and last night's shows, online.

NYFF 2010 - Day 10

Manoel de Oliveira's The Strange Case of Angelica was a hauntingly (in every sense) beautiful film from the ageless Portuguese master, a supernatural ghost story grounded in everyday reality. Its classic formal elegance and defiantly old-fashioned nature are qualities which are quickly vanishing from cinema, so this is a film to be treasured.

There was a lot of skepticism about Abbas Kiarostami making a traditional Euro-art film after a decade of experimental work in Iran. However, Certified Copy is unmistakably a Kiarostami film. With the help of two superb performances, by Juliette Binoche and William Shimell, Kiarostami explores how our perceptions of art and marriage alter the nature of those institutions. When a woman observing Binoche and Shimell mistakes them for a married couple, they begin to act out those roles, but are they just pretending or are they really in a turbulent 15-year marriage? The ambiguity contributes to the richness of detail in this great film.

NYFF 2010 - Oki's Movie

Hong Sang-Soo's Oki's Movie is one of his best films as it plays with multiple narrative structures in a way reminiscent of his rarely-seen A Tale of Cinema. It consists of four segments, each introduced by the same crude credit sequence on a blue background as Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance is repeated, supplying a short pause for reflection between the separate episodes. The four seemingly autonomous tales (as in Rohmer's Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle) actually build upon each other as the focus subtly shifts from the two male characters' point of view to that of Oki, the woman who narrates the final episode and comes to control events through her voiceover analysis of her simultaneous relationships with the two men, an older film professor and a younger film student. Hong continues to work variations on the same basic themes in all his films but has yet to exhaust the possibilities. Not to mention that his Q&A was hilarious and worthy of an appearance in one of his films.

NYFF 2010 - Day 5

Radu Muntean's brilliantly acted tale of adultery, Tuesday, After Christmas, was shot in only 30 long takes whose form doesn't call attention to itself because the naturalistic drama is so compelling. The film begins almost in mid-story with a post-coital scene between the husband and his mistress, and sets up the approaching revelation and its aftermath with a precise, behaviorally convincing logic which is a tribute to Muntean's writing and extensive rehearsal with his actors. The remarkable Romanian New Wave seems to show no sign of flagging any time soon.

Alexsei Fedorchenko's Silent Souls is a poetic miniature full of indelible images of northern Russia and the rituals of grief, eroticism, childhood memories and the longing for both a deceased wife and a vanishing culture and way of life. Some images brought to mind the tableau style of Paradjanov, and the overall mood struck me as one of serene melancholy.

NYFF 2010 - Day 6

Day 6 was dominated by Jean-Luc Godard's dazzlingly beautiful meditation/collage/puzzle, Film Socialisme. All I can do at the moment is echo the title card that ends what will possibly be Godard's last film, No Comment.

Wednesday also offered Benjamin Heisenberg's The Robber, an Austrian film about a champion marathon runner who doubles as a bank robber, constantly running to escape capture. It's an absorbing genre film in which the character's motivation remains ambiguous.