This is film is slow and quiet with a wry sense of humor. I loved it.
5/5
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The Campbell Review |
Rams is an Icelandic film about two estranged brothers, who come together when a deadly and contagious disease threatens their herds of sheep. This is film is slow and quiet with a wry sense of humor. I loved it. 5/5
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I was very fortunate to see the Premiere of He Named Me Malala introduced by Malala's father, Ziauddin Yousafzai. The love, total awe, and admiration that he expressed that he has for his daughter was extremely moving. This is a documentary film about Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani girl who was shot by the Taliban for speaking out for girls' and womens' right to education. After the failed murder attempt, Malala was not silenced. Rather, she became, and is now, a leading advocate for children's rights and she recently was named the youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. This is an inspirational documentary. If you have kids, check it out with them. 5/5 Beasts of No Nation is a new feature from Cary Fukunaga (True Detective), starring the always stellar Idris Elba. Beasts is an adaptation of a book by the same name by Uzodinma Iweala. Beasts follows an orphaned child soldier fighting with guerilla soldiers in an unnamed African country. This film was acquired by Netflix and was released this October simultaneously in theaters and on Netflix. Beasts premiered at the Venice Film Festival and the Telluride Film Festival. You can stream it on Netflix now! Make no mistake, Beasts is a brutal film. I highly recommend it, but it's no picnic. If you can, see it on the big screen. It's absolutely worth it. 5/5 The Mother and the Whore is Jean Eustache's 3 1/2 hour unlikely masterpiece about a love triangle during the summer of 1972, in Paris. This film is comprised of a lot of talking. Talking, talking, and more talking, and yet somehow, I was completely rapt at 9am the last day of the Telluride Film Festival this year. Like Cocksucker Blues, it took me many years to see The Mother and The Whore and it was so completely worth every second. This film transcends everything I ever thought about cinema and will remain one of the most profound movie going experiences of my life. Trust me. If you ever have the chance to catch this one, do not pass it up! 5/5 t took me 8 years to see Cocksucker Blues and it was definitely worth it. Crappy versions do exist and one might even live on Youtube, but I was fortunate enough to see it at the Telluride Film Festival this summer. Guest Director Rachel Kushner chose the rare documentary. It wasn't on film, but it was on the big screen--and it was LOUD. Cocksucker Blues is Robert Frank's rarely screened, long-suppressed, unstructured and experimental documentary on The Rolling Stones. Essentially, Frank allowed anyone to pick up the camera and film. The film combines incredible on stage footage--using the 16mm sound as it was filmed--with behind the scenes debauchery including some pretty rapey content, all filmed during the 1972 Exile on Main Street tour. This is a noisy, clunky, jarring film and I'm so glad I finally got to see it! 4/5 This is one of the best films I have ever seen. No, seriously. It is for real one of the best films I have ever seen. Mes Petits Amoureuses is a French coming-of-age film from the early 1970s. Young Daniel lives with his grandmother, until his mother and her new boyfriend come to visit and he goes to live with them for a year. His mother doesn't want to pay for school books, so she sends Daniel to work instead. He dabbles at a bike repair shop, but mostly he wanders around, smoking cigarettes on park benches, and watching people make out--I don't know if that sells the film at all, but it was astonishingly perfect. Mostly Daniel is fascinated by and driven to understand the mystery of girls. Jean Eustache only made two feature films in his brief career. The Mother and the Whore is widely considered his masterpiece, and while I give both 5/5 I'm more inclined to re-watch and re-watch Mes Petits...again and again... 5/5 Anomalisa is hands down, the best stop-motion animation film I have ever seen. This is an R-rated Charlie Kaufman film--Kaufman gave us Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Adaptation, so take that in mind and add stop-motion. And then, Anomalisa gets even weirder! I'd love to see an Oscar nod here, it would be the first R animated feature ever nominated. Anomalisa is based one a three person play, and so the film also includes only 3 voices, David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Tom Noonan. The film takes place in a hotel in Cincinnati the night before a regional customer service convention. David Thewlis (whom I LOVE!) is Michael Stone, a public speaker and author/expert on customer service; Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Lisa, a conventioneer; and Tom Noonan is the voice of every other character: man, woman, child. This is an absolute must-see, laugh-out-loud hilarious, utterly kooky film. Do it. 5/5 Here's a curious little film. This Must Be the Place is about a Robert Smith style, Goth/Emo, retired American rock star living in Ireland. He's married but pretty depressed and needs a distraction so he sets out on a sprawling mission to find his deceased father's Nazi torturer. This film is very quiet and peculiar. Sean Penn is solid as an almost timid, carefully patient retiree. Penn adopts a very slow cadence, but in the end I think if you can get past the speech and the hair/make up it's worth it. It felt pretty slow to me, so it will undoubtedly crawl for the average viewer. I do like quiet and slow, and this was weird enough to keep my attention. 3/5 Grandma is a very enjoyable road trip movie starring Lily Tomlin as Elle, a take-no-shit, tough-as-nails, widowed, lesbian, feminist, poet. Tomlin is a tour-de-force. I was quite taken by this film. Grandma deals with abortion in a frank, timely, and accurate manner. That is no small feat. There is nothing preachy about this very feminist American indie film. Grandma approaches abortion at the intersection of GLBTQ civil rights, second wave sexual liberation, and women's reproductive rights. Grandma passes the Bechdel test in the first 5 minutes. Its cast consists mainly of women, many of whom I was delighted to see such as Laverne Cox, Elizabeth Pena, and Marcia Gay Harden. Honestly, there were so few male characters in Grandma, I found it rather bold. So, I was very curious when I noticed the film was written and directed by Paul Weitz, who has had your typically uneven and varied Hollywood run-- from About a Boy to American Pie. I was pleasantly surprised. Julia Garner is terrific as Elle's pregnant, teenage, estranged, granddaughter, Sage. Sam Elliot's brief but profound performance is the stuff of Best Supporting Oscars. 4/5 Son of Saul is a Hungarian film that won the Grand Prix at Cannes this year. It is absolutely incredible. First of all this is a Holocaust film about 36 hours in the life of a Sonderkmmando at Auschwitz working in the gas chambers, and disposing of the dead. Yes, it's completely brutal. That said, it was not the most gruelling 100 minutes. This is achieved primarily in terms of its technical brilliance. This is a very quiet film, with little dialogue so you really are just watching this man go through this one particular day and you can't look away. The film stays with Saul the whole film, and makes ample use of moving camera with very long takes. The audience only sees and hears what Saul sees and hears. He is held in a medium close-up for the majority of the film. There are very few reverse shots, accomplished simply by falling behind Saul keeping both him and what he is seeing both in the same frame without cutting away. Likewise, the film lacks establishing shots. The effect is disorienting and claustrophobic. Son of Saul is simply not your typical Holocaust film. I tend to cringe when a new one comes out, not because the subject matter but because of my personal assumptions about Holocaust films being often exceptionally long and very brutal. While everyone should see at least a few, and I can certainly recommend some really excellent ones, it's a pretty vast sub-genre of the War Genre. I guess I'm trying to say that I am certainly not opposed to War or Holocaust films, I have to be in a certain mood and frame of mind before committing to something that I know will be so emotionally gruelling. When I walked into the projection booth and saw 6 absolutely pristine, perfect, brand new reels, it ceased to matter what kind of film it was. I was over the moon that the Telluride Film Festival was once again able to bring in a few prints to screen--most of the festival program is now digital, and most festivals are now strictly digital. Géza Röhrig (Saul) is riveting. He's not an actor actually, he's a poet and musician. He's VERY interesting, I recommend that you look him up on Wikipedia. 5/5 |
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