Comments on: VIFF Review Roundoup #3

By: Andrew James

Andrew James — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 00:36:42 +0000

Paris je’Taimie is on Sundance Channel tonight at midnight and again tomorrow morning. Then it plays a couple of more times per week.

By: Andrew James

Andrew James — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 22:36:32 +0000

Hey Marina, if you liked Tokyo! (which I can’t wait to see!), you should definitely check out Paris je’Taime. I’m quite certain you’ll love it (there’s a vampire sequence in there). Much like Tokyo, it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with it’a city (Paris) directly, they all just take place there. More importantly, it’s about relationships there. Some of the shorts are artful, almost abstract pieces, some are comedy and some are just good drama. A couple of them, even with only 6 or 7 minutes have twists to the story. One of the shorts features Steve Buscemi as the main character and he never utters a word. Making my top ten last year, I REALLY need to see it again. I think I may even love it more now.

By: Andrew James

Andrew James — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 22:30:02 +0000

Just finished “The Class.” Terrific film, though when plot takes over from the previous “seemingly unscripted” emotional and educational output in the final 30 minutes or so, I kind of felt like it lost a lot of its momentum.

I can see some people complaining that there is no plot for most of the film, which would be accurate. But I argue that the “no plot” (a term I use very loosely) approach works so much better at getting across what the film wants to say. As soon as all the melodrama starts, I began to lose interest. Still, solid 4, maybe 4.5/5 star film.

By: Marina Antunes

Marina Antunes — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:47:11 +0000

I admit I have a soft spot for the director because he’s a bit of a black sheep when it comes to Portuguese film making and he’s really on the edges of the industry (which is, in and of itself, very internalized). Outside of Oliveira, few Portuguese filmmakers get any attention outside of the country.

Youth is on the long side but it does show more than a few shocking images of these people’s lives and I remember going home and talking to my mom about some of the film’s visuals and questioning how people living in Lisbon could live in such squalor (worse than many a shanty town). Depressing.

By: rot

rot — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:36:28 +0000

Costa introduced Colossal Youth at the showing I saw… and it was about as boring as the film.

By: Marina Antunes

Marina Antunes — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:33:15 +0000

Actually, on the contrary, I love Pedro Costa’s films and Colossal Youth, though hard to watch, it a film I quite like. I liked it so much that I signed up for Cinema Scope for their DVD offer of the film free with a subscription. Turns out it’s a great magazine too but the DVD was the real seller for me.

I do wish I’d seen Killer of Sheep before Colossal Youth. Costa was on hand after the screening and I would have loved to hear him talk about Burnett’s film and how it’s inspired him (something which I read about earlier this year).

By: rot

rot — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 15:59:29 +0000

So I take it, Marina, you did not like Colossal Youth? That is the one film in recent memory that I genuinely fell sleep watching, and I would periodically wak eup and it would be the same bit of dialogue, same camera shot… all that film does is repeat itself to death.

By: Marina Antunes

Marina Antunes — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 15:46:26 +0000

The Class is NO American Teen. It’s a really brilliant film and if I didn’t know going in, I would have thought it was a fascinating documentary – altough one that’s a bit contrived.

Eat, For This Is My Body was my Colossal Youth of this year’s festival. The theater started emptying out 30 minutes in and continued to do so with each passing minute. I think there were 12 of us left at the end.

By: Kurt Halfyard

Kurt Halfyard — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 15:15:43 +0000

I very much liked EAT FOR THIS IS MY BODY, a hard film to process (in fact I never managed to get my thoughts to paper/keyboard on it, I kinda wanted to write it up for TWITCH at one point).

I did really dig the look of the film, the opening helicopter shot is stunning, as is the ‘cake scene’ and several others…

By: rot

rot — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 12:28:33 +0000

Loved Hunger, definately one of the best things I have seen this year, and I am disappointed that the Class never made it to the Toronto Fest, being the grand prix winner at Cannes, that is kinda strange. Give me cinema verite any day over the trite storytelling of American Teen.