Posts Tagged ‘AFI Fest 2010’

  • 25 Nov

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    AFI Fest 2010: Boy

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    (4/5)

    A rollicking Kiwi film focusing on the joys and struggles of a young boy who idolizes his incarcerated father and Michael Jackson in roughly equal measures (the year is 1984), Boy won the AFI Fest’s Audience Award in the World Cinema category, and that doesn’t surprise me a bit. If there’s ever a film that fit the definition “crowd-pleaser,” this is it. And though I normally consider that epithet a bit of a jab, Boy actually earns the pleasure it brings and isn’t afraid to complicate that pleasure and eschew standard narrative closure for something ultimately far more satisfying.

    Boy is an eleven-year-old Maori youth who describes his life in glowing terms for the school project that opens the film, talking about his amazing hero of a father, his little brother Rocky who has superpowers, and Michael Jackson. In reality, his father Alamein (played by writer/directer Taika Waititi) is an irresponsible petty thief, and his brother pretends he has superpowers as a way of coping with his guilt over believing he caused their mother’s death in childbirth,. When Alamein returns home, Boy is ecstatic at the chance to spend time with him and learn to be more like him, but though Alamein puts up a front of happiness at being home and spending time with his boys, all he really wants is the money he buried before he went to prison.

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  • 25 Nov

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    AFI Fest 2010: The Myth of the American Sleepover

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    (4.5/5)

    The myth of the American sleepover is a bit of an elusive concept, somehow tying in one character’s suggestion that there’s a mythic quality to teenagerhood itself – a mistaken belief that there’s something amazing and exciting about being a teenager that causes us to grow up too quickly, not appreciating the wonders of childhood before they’re lost to us forever – along with the paradox that sleepovers are something associated with childhood and yet also, in the context of the film, provide opportunities for unsupervised teenage shenanigans (many characters mock sleepovers a little even as they prepare to attend one). There are three sleepovers all together in the film, all taking place on the last night before school (the film takes place in one 24-hour period) – four if you include the much more organized and chaperoned on-campus college freshman sleepover – providing a modicum of structure to the young people who drift around in them, between them, or on the edges of them.

    This ensemble cast is almost all made up of nonprofessional 15 to 19-year-olds, which sounds like a recipe for disaster, but in writer/director David Robert Mitchell’s hands, it turns out much better than you’d ever dream. Each major character has their own little plot going on – Rob wants to find a girl he saw in the supermarket and can’t forget, Maggie feels she wasted her summer in terms of finding romance and wants to rectify that before school starts the next day, Scott is drifting a bit after dropping out of college and wonders if finding a set of twins he’d crushed on in high school would help, Claudia’s new in town and tries both to find her place and assert her lack of care about fitting in, and other characters wind in and out of these plots much as people in small communities do.

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  • 16 Nov

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    AFI Fest 2010: Heartbeats

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    (4/5)

    Ever since Xavier Dolan’s debut film I Killed My Mother was my favorite of the AFI Fest last year, I’ve been eagerly anticipating his followup. And though Heartbeats (Les amours imaginaires, which is really a better title – translates to “Imaginary Loves”) is a very different film and perhaps doesn’t pack quite the emotional punch of Dolan’s previous film, it remained a wholly delightful experience and one that quite pleased me.

    The ever-so-slight but charming story concerns friends Marie (Monie Chokri) and Francis (Xavier Dolan), who both become infatuated with Adonis-like Nicholas (Niels Schneider), but Nicholas is maddeningly ambiguous both with his sexuality in general and with his affections for these two specifically. Much of the movie is merely a succession of episodes as Marie and Francis try to subtly one-up each other and claim Nicholas for themselves as Nicholas glides blithely through their lives, unaware of the battle of the wills going on around him.

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  • 16 Nov

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    AFI Fest 2010: Julia’s Eyes

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    (4.5/5)

    When introducing this entry in his producing career, Guillermo Del Toro mentioned a sequence that he had told first-time director Guillem Morales during the scripting process that he simply couldn’t, or shouldn’t, do on film – a twenty-minute sequence where the camera never shows anyone’s face. But Morales held firm and Del Toro trusted him to make it work, and make it work he did. Julia’s Eyes is a conscious throwback to early Italian giallos, the work of early Bava or Argento that walk the line between suspense and horror.

    Julia suffers from a genetic disorder that causes blindness, exacerbated by stress, which can accelerate the loss of sight exponentially. Her sister had the same disorder, and her death opens the film – a death that was quickly ruled suicide by the authorities, but which Julia suspects but cannot prove was murder. As Julia investigates on her own, her sight deteriorates quickly, soon putting her in the same situations that led to her sister’s death, situations that spiral into ever-more disturbing physical and psychological places.

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  • 10 Nov

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    AFI Fest 2010: Outrage

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    (4/5)

    Here’s my thing with Yakuza films, or really any mafia-style gangster films: I can never, ever manage to keep track of who everybody is, what side they’re on, or why they do what they do to the people they do it to (I mean why specifically in each case; the why generally is fairly obvious). I know that’s partially the point, as loyalties shift and everyone usually has multiple agendas and power plays going on, but I still usually find myself just having to go with it and enjoy it for each moment, at least for the first time viewing. My usual state of mind is something like “okay, I’m not sure who these guys are, but they’re going to rough up that guy, not sure why, but there must be a reason, and OH YEAH VIOLENCE.” Takeshi Kitano’s latest Yakuza film Outrage is pretty much the same, but with even more outrageous kill scenes and bodily injury than I’ve seen before, so I quite enjoyed seeing what new and shocking ways he’d come up each time, even if I was unclear on the details of the shifting familial alliances.

    I won’t even bother trying to synopsize the story, even if I could, because really, that’s not the draw here. It’s a bunch of aging Yakuza bosses getting into petty squabbles that escalate over and over until basically, everybody’s dead. Not a spoiler, because what else would you expect to happen? But even though the film is largely men in suits talking or yelling at each other punctuated by bursts of flamboyant and stylishly shot ultraviolence, I found myself quite engaged and entertained throughout. And by the end, the basics of the families’ relationships to each other was starting to become clearer and with a second viewing, I think I would be able to keep everything straight (especially knowing who’s left standing at the end).

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  • 10 Nov

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    AFI Fest 2010: David Lynch Introduction

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    I‘ve already managed to get behind on writing AFI Fest reviews, but I couldn’t resist taking a moment to share this video intro that has been playing before every film at the festival. David Lynch is the artistic director of the festival (this is the first year there’s even been one of those, I think), and his sensibility is definitely in play for all the posters and promotional materials. And then there’s this little tribute to AFI where David Lynch is awesome pretty much just by talking. Over the past few days, the reaction to this clip has gone from “WTF was that” to outright love and people joining him on the final “I love AFI.”

  • 10 Nov

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    AFI Fest 2010: HaHaHa

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    (4.5/5)

    Someday I’m going to see a South Korean film that isn’t good. That day hasn’t come yet, and it certainly doesn’t come with HaHaHa, a superbly crafted and warmly engaging drama from director Hong Sang-soo, which happened to win the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes this year. A pair of friends meet for drinks and take the opportunity to reminisce about a city they both spent time at recently, taking turns sharing memories. However, the two men, Moon-kyeong and Joong-sik, don’t realize that they had been frequenting the same places and interacting with the same people. This premise provides an intricate structure upon which Hong interweaves the stories of five or six people as they move in and out of each others’ lives.

    At first, these connections seem incidental – Joong-sik and his poet friend eat at a noodle shop that we know is owned by Moon-kyeong’s mother. Moon-kyeong meets a woman who we later learn is dating the poet (who appears in nearly all of Joong-sik’s memories). This woman, Seong-ok, soon becomes something of the solid thread between the two set of stories, as Moon-kyeong begins falling in love with her even while she continues to see the poet in Joong-sik’s memories. Sometimes the stories get quite close together, as when Moon-kyeong talks with his mother in the kitchen while Joong-sik is passed out drunk in the front room (there is a LOT of drinking in the movie, which got incredibly amusing at times). But throughout most of the movie, they don’t realize what we know all along – that their lives in this town and the stories they are telling are inextricably intertwined.

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  • 08 Nov

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    AFI Fest 2010: Brief Thoughts – Cargo

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    (3.5/5)

    This is not really a review, because by the time AFI’s first entry into the new Midnight section hit, I was beginning to fade a little bit and I don’t feel competent in my grasp of Cargo‘s details to give a full and well-informed review. However, I didn’t want the film to go by without a mention, because it does deserve attention.

    Cargo is the first science fiction film from Switzerland, and also the first feature from its writer/director Ivan Engler. Those two facts make me a little more lenient toward the film, because there is a lot of cool stuff going on here, especially for a national industry and director who don’t have experience with sci-fi. The story concerns a future world where Earth’s resources are depleted and everyone lives on overcrowded space stations, hoping to get enough money to move to Rhea, advertised as a paradise. Our heroine Laura takes a job on a cargo ship – eight years of travel (most of it in cryosleep, but with an eight month on-duty shift to make sure everything’s going fine with the ship) in order to afford to join her sister on Rhea. Predictably, stuff goes wrong, startling truths are uncovered, and dangerous missions are undertaken.

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  • 19 Oct

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    AFI Fest Releases Full Line-Up

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    The AFI Film Festival is hitting Los Angeles the first week of November, and I’m pretty stoked. It’s kind of a “best-of” festival in that it’s late in festival season and tends to pull a lot of the more well-received films from Sundance, Cannes, Venice, TIFF, etc. So there may not be a lot of big premieres (though red carpet galas at Grauman’s Chinese are nothing to scoff at, even if the films have played other fests), but for those of us who can’t always make it out of town it’s a great way to catch up with the buzz-worthy films. Thanks to sponsor Audi (the official name of the fest is AFI Fest 2010 Presented by Audi…I know, I know), the fest will be offering free tickets to all screenings, just ilke they did last year. So if you’re in LA, be sure to check out ticket availability because these are going to be some of the best films of the year, and you could see them FOR FREE. (Also, don’t be discouraged if you can’t get tickets immediately to something you wanted to see – last year they released more tickets for almost everything throughout the week, and even people who just went without pre-reserving tickets and just stood in the rush lines had a fair chance of getting in.) Festival passes are on sale now; individual tickets will be available on October 28th, following the release of the full schedule on October 25th. Not much time to plan!

    So, what’s actually going to be playing? The gala screenings include Edward Zwick’s Love & Other Drugs with Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal, TIFF Audience Award winner The King’s Speech with Colin Firth as King George VI, Barney’s Version with Paul Giamatti, Diego Luna’s directorial debut Abel, Casino Jack with Kevin Spacey, The Company Men with Ben Affleck, and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan. Special Screenings are John Sayles’ newest Amigo, John Cameron Mitchell’s Rabbit Hole with Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart, Made in Dagenham with Sally Hawkins, and Werner Herzog’s 3D foray Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

    But it’s not only big prestige movies that AFI’s got on display – the Young Americans and New Auteurs sections feature indepedent filmmakers making their first or second films, including Xavier Dolan with Heartbeats (his first feature I Killed My Mother was my favorite from this fest last year) and a bunch of really moodily poetic-looking films that are going to be tough for me to choose between, even though I haven’t heard of most of them.

    Then in World Cinema we get Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, Im Sang-soo’s The Housemaid (as well as a screening of the 1960 version), Kim Jee-woon’s I Saw the Devil, Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, Cannes winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber (which I cannot wait to check out), and Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme (which I sort of want to see but am a bit afraid of by this point). A new Midnight section is appallingly small with only three films, but one of them is Guillermo Del Toro-produced Julia’s Eyes, so I’m happy about that.

    Check out the full listing of screenings from the press releases after the jump. They may still add more, but this is likely the majority.

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