Author name: Blake Williams

The experience of watching this film was actually somewhat painful. The film follows three naive women who are some of the more annoying female protagonists of any film that I have seen. They are giggly, bitchy, superficial, and completely delusional. But, the film has a pretty stellar finale that mostly makes up for almost the entire film that preceded it.

The film has many of the features of the French New Wave, a movement that never really interested me. The film is all shot on location around Paris.

Along with the aforementioned issues I have with the women, the men are almost just as bad. The men flirt with any woman they see, feel them up, harass them in swimming pools, and even bang their heads on tables in restaurants. I despised everyone in this film, which I learned was the point. What happens when young, attractive women are so naive and careless? What happens when men get their way over and over again with the relentlessly submissive women? The last scene of Les Bonnes Femmes happens; and for me, it felt so very good to watch.

1. La Mujer Sin Cabeza (Martel)
2. Wendy and Lucy (Reichardt)
3. Night and Day (Hong)
4. Summer Hours (Assayas)
5. A Light in the Fog (Rezaee)
6. Encounters at the End of the World (Herzog)
7. Melancholia (Diaz)
8. Un Lac (Grandrieux)
9. Soi Cowboy (Clay)
10. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Fincher)

*grey signifies that I have now seen this film.

* This is the first time that I have seen this film in any version, so I cannot comment on its similarities and differences with the original, theatrical cut.

I think this film is a mixed bag. First the good, the film looks amazing. A scene near the end when two characters tear through a brick wall to reveal deep space was breathtaking (especially in Blu-ray!). The film takes place entirely at night, and the film noir style that it goes for in its first half is beautifully photographed. The film is also stuffed with great ideas about the past, memories, and individuality. When The Matrix was pointed out to me after the film, it does become very obvious that it is very influenced by Dark City.

To me, though, the strong ideas that are presented in this film are in the background to a film that really just wants to be an entertaining showcase of CGI and an explosive confrontation between good and evil. Almost all of the good ideas in the film are spelled out in expository dialogue from the often annoying Kiefer Sutherland. I kept wanting them to show me these scenes of Murdoch’s memory being shuffled over and over again. They show this once very briefly and I didn’t know what was happening, but I feel like this film would actually have a very good prequel that is all about all of the memory shuffling that takes place before this film starts off (not that they should actually do this, I can settle with thinking of Dark City as a missed opportunity).

The climax of the film spins out of control with Murdoch destroying the evil empire with his mind. On one hand I can appreciate it for its camp value, but it just goes too far, and felt that Proyas took it more seriously than he should have. He could have either taken it further and turned it into something truly fun and hilarious, or stepped back and let the resolution happen more subtly. Instead it lies somewhere in the middle and I was getting borderline angry that I was having to settle for a Hollywood grand finale instead of something more rewarding for the interesting build-up.

A very exhausting film to watch late at night. On the whole really impressive, Jia Zhang-ke’s The World, like his 24 City, is basically about the modernization of Beijing. My biggest compliment for this film is that it frequently reminded me of my favorite film, Playtime. The real life “World Park” in Beijing is a giant tourist attraction that exhibits most of the world’s great monuments at an advertised 1/3 of their actual sizes. There are women dancing around the park to music from all around the world, with the women appropriately dressed to matched the corresponding origins (one song is recognizable as the influence for M.I.A.’s “Jimmy”). When the film is looking at the wonders and peculiarities of this massive park and how horrifying it is, the film is spectacular. But the park isn’t really Jia’s main concern.

The film closely follows three or four women who are dancers at the park, and their relationships with friends and lovers. While many of the interactions are very interesting and moving, I thought that most of them were meandering, too melodramatic, or boring. The fact that the film runs almost two and a half hours didn’t help. The film feels way too long by at least half an hour, and I thought that the ending was random and kind of angsty. It was completely the wrong note to leave the film on and left a bad taste in my mouth for a film that I actually liked well enough. I would see this again, and there are enough fun moments to make it a rewarding experience, like the 6 or 7 animated sequences involving flying people and cell phone interactions. The music is kitchy but also very good.

This is one of the more minimal and contemplative films that I have seen come out of the labeled “Contemplative Cinema” genre (or movement?). The film is very formally interesting, lasting barely over an hour, and having no dialogue until the 30 minute mark. The film follows a young man as he cuts down trees to sell to a pole maker and his way of life as he lives alone in a forest. I am assuming that he is a young man, but I had trouble determining his age, as his physique and worn face suggests a man in maybe his mid-thirties, but his clothes, voice, and phone call to alert his mother of his status convinced me that he is probably a teenager.

When I saw Liverpool in TIFF, Alonso was present for a Q & A and let the audience in on a bit of his process. Up to this point, his method of working consists of finding a location first, and then he develops characters and a story that he believes are evoked by that location. This is a very interesting way of working in the sense that the characters feel like they are just as important as the background and the sounds of their surroundings. When I see Liverpool again, I am sure that I will enjoy it much more with this bit of knowledge, as watching Los Muertos and now La Libertad with this in mind making the viewing experience much richer. Aided by the pacing, I am able to imagine what sort of story I would make if I had chosen the same location, and in comparing what I would do to what Alonso has crafted, I can understand him as a filmmaker more than I can many other filmmakers. Filmmakers like Alonso, David Lynch, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who sort of wear their thought processes on their sleeves are easily my favorite to watch.

I watched this Swedish vampire film with a sold out crowd in one of Toronto’s largest movie theatres, Bloor Cinema. The film has been building up a huge momentum, winning top prizes from Austin, Texas’ Fantastic Fest and New York’s Tribeca. After being disappointed that it wasn’t playing in TIFF08, I was relieved to see that it was going to be playing in late October in the closest theatre to my house.

The film is very well paced and set to a pensive and pretty, though a bit repetitive, piano score that gave the film an emotional boost that was pretty moving in a couple of different scenes. The two leads were very convincing, nothing spectacular, but better than good. The photography is a standout, if not the standout. A couple of times I felt that a scene reminded me of a Gregory Crewdson photograph; not as sci-fi, but the color and composition.

The film’s stance on vampires is pretty straightforward. No big reveals or surprises, everything is handled in a very humble, passive way. All of the standard vampire traits are present though: no sunlight, must be invited into a house, flying, blood drinking, etc. The female adoescent vampire asks her to-be boyfriend if he will still like her even if she were not a girl. His reply was a nonchalant “yes I suppose.” In this way, I felt that there was a gay tint to the film. For the boy, the only other option at this point, if this girl were to be something other than a girl, is for her to be a boy, and he doesn’t even care. Later on, when he still doesn’t know that she is a vampire, she crawls into bed with him, naked, and tells him that she is not a girl when he asks if the two of them can “go steady.” He responds that he would still like to go steady with her, even though, again, the only thing that she could be other than a girl is a boy.

The film feels a little bit long, but I was enjoying its length and wanted it to go on for longer. I found that I really enjoyed the two leads, and was reminded of childhood friends and crushes that I had when I was around 10-12 years old.

Spoilers

I saw this on a recommendation from a friend that I went to high school with. There is a lot to like about the film, it is a near perfect thriller. The only flaws I found were in a couple of slight plot contrivances, such as the guards not noticing that Fontaine, the protagonist, kept his dinner spoon, or that when he needed a second spoon, he miraculously just found one on a window ledge outside. Also, that he was fortunate enough to have the three men pacing outside who helped him so much in the beginning, and that there were frequent trains to drown out the sounds of his footsteps as he was escaping. But all of these little nitpicks stand out to me because everything else about the film is so well done.

I liked the idea of sacrifice in the film, that someone else must fail in order for someone else to succeed. Fontaine’s neighbor, Orsini, across the hall, who was at one point to be an accomplice in Fontaine’s escape, made an escape attempt on his own instead. In failing to escape and reporting to Fontaine about what went wrong, Orsini helped Fontaine to tweak his plan in order to make it successful. As Orsini’s escape attempt led to his prompt execution, Fontaine’s escape, and life after prison, is indebted to Orsini, whose initially selfish act revealed itself to be quite selfless.

There also seemed to be a lot of divine intervention. Sometimes it came across as contrived, but other times, such as the introduction of Fontaine’s cellmate Jost, it is presented as a gift not from the script, but from some sort of greater plan. Fontaine must decide whether to bring Jost with him on his escape, or to kill him and escape on his own as he had always intended. As is revealed in the final sequence of the film, Jost was not only able to escape with Fontaine, but was essential for either to do so successfully.

The title of the film adds an interesting tension to the film in a way I haven’t seen before. In proclaiming that A Man Escaped, the audience is constantly aware that the film will document a man escaping from the prison. For most of the former half of the film, it is pretty clear that Fontaine will be that man, but certain characters, such as Orsini and Jost, make who that “man” is something pretty suspenseful. When Orsini takes off on his escape, I actually found myself wanting him not to succeed, for if he was successful, it could mean that he is the “man” that escaped, and that Fontaine’s attempt is in vain. Similarly, when Jost is introduced and finally revealed to be an accomplice to the escape, there is the thought that only one of these men may escape, and it could be Jost.

All in all, a very good, very tight film that I would recommend to most people.

This was a very interesting film for about an hour, and then an uninteresting film for about half an hour, and then an embarrassing film for the final 5 minutes. I don’t like melodrama, and I do not like characters who show that they are angry by screaming, especailly if they aren’t screaming words, but just AHH!!! over and over again (see: the ending of The Mist (2007)).

The film starts off very well though. The opening scene genuinely unnerved me. Old people standing in a field at night staring into a light and crying is unnerving for me. People are introduced into unappealing situations and seem completely out of it, and not knowing the cause was much more interesting to me than when I spent more time with the characters and found that there was nothing so interesting about what was happening. There is a scene towards the end that tried to disturb me again, with a filter that inverted the scene and had people moving like wild animals. I get that as a theme for Grandieux, but this particular scene came across as a bit too art school video filter to me for it to genuinely creep me out. The many sex scenes are consistently dire.

Low lighting in nearly every scene made me feel very dirty. I felt like I was stuck in a nasty underworld of crime, prostitution, terror, and torture that most reminds me of how I felt while watching Irreversible (Noé, 2002). This was my first Grandrieux film, I have read that his Sombre (1998) and newest Un Lac are better films than this one, so I am definitely going to try and see them as soon as I can.

I’m not going to spend too much time on this one because it doesn’t deserve much. All around poorly made film. I feel like it is inexplicable that I haven’t seen the Godfather films, nor Apocalypse Now, but I find it more inexplicable that such classics were made by the director of this film, which is a bad student film with a budget. I’ve never been a huge fan of Tim Roth, and this film tells me that he shouldn’t be leading. I did watch this on Blu-Ray, so at least I was enjoying the resolution and sound design.

This is one that I will have to mull over for a few days, coming back to this post and editing it again and again as I discover new things about it (especially after I, hopefully one day, and soon, see it projected instead of a camcorder recording of the film). One thing I did know as soon as it ended though (probably before it ended) is that it is spectacular, and I am jealous of Michael Snow for creating it. Watching the “version” of it that I did, I cannot tell what aspects of it are part of the film or part of the bad presentation. I did not know certain “plot points” until I read a synopsis after it was finished, and even now I am unsure of how these elements of a story fit into the structural elements of the film.

Also, when I was trying to locate a bootlegged copy of Wavelength, I found out that he released a DVD of it a few years ago, but it is only 1/3 of its 45 minute length (he similarly truncated the title to WVLNT (Wavelength For Those Who Don’t Have The Time)) and I can’t help but ask myself Why? Unless he is making fun of the people who would buy such a thing, I can’t see any reason for putting labor into abbreviating a work like Wavelength. Another thing is, I think that anyone who would take the time to watch 15 minutes of a slow zoom into a photograph would be willing to go for the whole nine yards and watch the whole thing. One time I watched the Jupiter And Beyond The Infinite section of 2001: A Space Odyssey with a friend out of context (just put the DVD in and skipped to that part of the film and watched it until the film ended) and I haven’t enjoyed it nearly as much as I used to since. I’m sure that a similar thing would happen for me if I ever watch WVLNT (Thinking about it, Wavelength does sort of remind me of Jupiter And Beyond The Infinite, (both were made between 1966 and 68, a coincidence?)). So I will not watch it, and don’t think anyone else should, either.