Kauppakadun elokuvafestivaalit VIII – Elokuva ja todellisuus

My second visit to the titular film festival with the subject matter of documentary (or film and reality) this time around. What a setting of films. Quite a few short ones there and many films that stretch the concept of documentary to its limits. But the breadth of expression used in this format was not known to me prior to this.

San Francisco [1968]

This was originally made as illustration to a Pink Floyd song and that song obviously plays for the duration of the documentary. It is a documentary, as it consists of shots documenting the ordinary life of SF. It does combine those shots with some techniques more common to art film. Still captures the vibe of a city at a certain time.

• Director: Anthony Stern
• Watched on: 11th Aug 2018
• Watched at: private festival
• 3.5/5

Castro Street [1966]

Castro street and its surroundings are these days known as one of the more hip neighborhoods of one of the most hip cities in the world. At the time of shooting this, it was a mix of old industrial buildings and more recent cheap bars and hookers. Again the film combines the basically very documentary shots with art cinema techniques to achieve something that better captures the essence of the place at the time.

• Director: Bruce Baillie
• Watched on: 11th Aug 2018
• Watched at: private festival
• 3.5/5

General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait [1974]

Barbet Schroeder went to Uganda to shoot a documentary of the Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin. He managed to do that, because he sold the idea by making Idi Amin the director and sole controller of the material, in effect relegating his own position to the guy with the equipment. The idea is genius – Barbet Schroeder has very little effect on the material, but even the material he captures by shooting the scenes that Idi Amin has staged for him, he captures the mind of a deranged dictator.

The story did not end there as there were two cuts of the film. The first lasted about 60 minutes and was intended for the Ugandan market, while a 90 minute cut was released in the UK. Amin’s agents were in UK watching the film and sent a full transcript to Amin. Amin responded by demanding cuts to the international release version, which Schroeder denied. Amin reacted by rounding up a few hundred French citizens to a hotel in Uganda and holding them hostage until his demands were met. Schroeder had no choice by to concede the cuts and that is the version we saw. As far as I know, the original international release is no longer in existence.

But regardless, the access Schroeder gained with Amin and the portrait that he paints are absolutely incredible. The portrait is of a deranged psychopath that is clearly off his rails even, when he knows that the cameras are there and has control of everything they are shooting.

• Director: Barbet Schroeder
• Original title: Général Idi Amin Dada: Autoportrait
• Watched on: 11th Aug 2018
• Watched at: private festival
• 5/5

Isole di fuoco [1955]

Shooting the daily life of people on a volcanic island. Shows the spirit of the place much better than any collage of talking heads could. A fine piece of imagery and moods.

• Director: Vittorio De Seta
• Watched on: 11th Aug 2018
• Watched at: private festival
• 3.5/5

Seasons Project [2005]

Geoffrey Jones was a documentary film maker that made a career with commissioned work. That lifeline became scarce, when commissioned documentaries began to vanish during the 80ies. He then started this project. A solo project of beautiful imagery mapped to the music of Vivaldi. The project is similar in scope to the Koyaanisqatsi and its “sequels” by Godfrey Reggio, but where he had financing to spare, Jones worked alone and on his own money. It took a couple of decades for the film to be finished, but the product is a beautiful testament to the single-mindedness of its maker.

• Director: Geoffrey Jones
• Watched on: 11th Aug 2018
• Watched at: private festival
• 3/5

79 primaveras [1969]

As the leader of communist Vietnam, Ho Chí Minh, died, Santiago Álvarez composed this documentary eulogy of him. Obviously it is overtly communist in tones painting the western world as the devil and covering up the excesses of the communist regimes around the world, but the thing that makes this special, is that Àlvarez was not content with a straight up documentary, but combined in tone seeking artistic sequences to great effect.

• Director: Santiago Álvarez
• Watched on: 11th Aug 2018
• Watched at: private festival
• 3.5/5

Four Seasons [1975]

Less traditional Soviet propaganda, but Soviet propaganda nevertheless. The film is shot in a style that suggests that Peleshian just happened to be there to capture these moments of Soviet life ranging from the mundane to quite extraordinary, but always beautiful. Obviously, at least the more extraordinary sequences are set up, but the film is valuable for the non-traditional style of filming.

• Director: Artavazd Peleshian
• Original title: Vremena goda
• Watched on: 11th Aug 2018
• Watched at: private festival
• 3.5/5

Warrendale [1967]

Cinéma vérité is a style of documentary film making, where you take your camera to a place, set it rolling, and let things happen. The idea is that at some point your subjects forget that you are filming, and that results in material that is more real than most documentaries about human subjects can capture. Allan King is a master of the style. Despite being a master of the style, the material that will be caught, is never as sincere as it claims to be.

This time he takes his cameras to a Canadian foster home that shares its name with the resultant film. The material that he captures, is quite shocking. The personnel clearly have good intentions in mind, but their methods are severely misguided. The film eventually resulted in the foster home being closed down, due to the public awareness raised by the film. And that was based on material shot, when the personnel knew they were being filmed.

• Director: Allan King
• Watched on: 11th Aug 2018
• Watched at: private festival
• 4/5

Einheit SDP-KDP [1946]

When the Russian forces rolled over Germany and later occupied Eastern Germany, the propaganda machine was not far behind. The director is German, which is part of the carefully considered message – this is German propaganda, not Russian. The documentary films meetings, where the German democratic socialist party, and the German communist parties have a series of meetings and rallies, where, all too conveniently, they all their differences are solved, and they march together towards a red future. The meetings and rallies are staged and some politicians played their part practically at gun point, but it is interesting to see, how all of that is transformed into an enchanting narrative of unity on film.

• Director: Kurt Maetzig
• Watched on: 11th Aug 2018
• Watched at: private festival
• 4/5

The House Is Black [1963]

The film combines material shot at a leper colony, and poems read out loud. It has the basic aesthetic of the later Iranian auteur film boom nailed down, yet it precedes the main wave by years. It has the themes of unavoidable human destinies and incomparable beauty born out of said situations nailed down. It was very prescient and is a clear influence on the later films.

• Director: Forugh Farrokhzad
• Original title: Khaneh siah ast
• Watched on: 11th Aug 2018
• Watched at: private festival
• 4.5/5

Philips-Radio [1931]

The film was created as an advertisement for Philips-Radio company. It doesn’t utilize art cinema techniques popularized decades later by names like Brakhage and Warhol, but it achieves similar imagery by simply shooting chosen bits of the factory producing the radios of the company and arranging them beautifully. Absolutely captivating work.

• Director: Joris Ivens
• Watched on: 11th Aug 2018
• Watched at: private festival
• 4.5/5

David Holzman’s Diary [1967]

This is one of the films that stretch the definition of documentary, but certainly has a place in the festival. It’s masked as a documentary about David Holzman, a man, who has recently lost his job and is maybe about to be drafted to fight in the Vietnam war. He starts the mockumentary by telling to the camera that he is operating by himself, that he will try to figure out his life by making a video diary of himself. I don’t exactly know, when gonzo documentaries became a thing, but this is certainly one of the early examples. Holzman proceeds to discuss various topics that are of interest to him, piss of his girlfriend and make her break up with him, futilely attempt to win her back, have a friend blast the documentary as boring, be accosted by a woman on the street, whom he was filming etc. The film ends with David’s equipment being stolen, and him recording the final episode in a recording booth that prints your voice to a vinyl record there and then, combined with photos taken with a cheap disposable camera. Cut to black. Wait for ten seconds. Get end titles revealing that there is no David Holzman, but an actor playing him, and that this is, in fact, a fiction film. Some of the material is scripted, some is not. The film contains most of the gonzo documentary tropes, so it was prescient in that way too.

• Director: Jim McBride
• Watched on: 11th Aug 2018
• Watched at: private festival
• 4/5

Window Water Baby Moving [1959]

Stan Brakhage is by far the most well known art cinema auteur. Warhol, his contemporary, is better known to big audiences, but when it comes to art cinema, Brakhage is the man. He has nearly 400 directing credits in IMDb alone, and I’m sure they are missing quite a few. This and the next entry are probably his best known pieces.

Brakhage’s films often consist of basically home videos that he shot on 8mm. He just wasn’t content with your regular home videos, but experimented all the time with filming and editing techniques.

This is the film that he produced out of his wife giving birth. You have to go into educational material, to find film, that has so exact shots about the process of a fetus exiting the uterus, but the film is more than that. It has tones and moods that must’ve accompanied Brakhage at the time of the actual event. It is not for the faint of heart, but certainly interesting.

• Director: Stan Brakhage
• Watched on: 11th Aug 2018
• Watched at: private festival
• 3.5/5

The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes [1971]

If Window Water Baby Moving is not for the faint of heart, this is not even for the rest of us. I couldn’t watch all the way through this. The funny thing is, where with Window Water Baby Moving, you’ll have to dig into educational films to find better imagery of an actual birth in progress, this was commissioned as an educational film, for depicting the work being done at morgues.

It takes a moment to realize, that these bodies opened from chest to groin and spread out on tables for the camera to film, are not fakes built for a film. Brakhage took his camera to the morgue and kept shooting material of actual cadavers and actual doctors working on them. You get to see fresh bodies being opened up, and already examined bodies being closed down. You get to see bodies already opened up waiting on a side table waiting for a doctor to have time for them.

It’s weird that the film scarcely contains an image, that I already haven’t seen in a fictional film, but this time it is so much more difficult to look at it. This is one way to stretch the concept of imagery on film and a very effective one at that.

• Director: Stan Brakhage
• Watched on: 11th Aug 2018
• Watched at: private festival
• 4/5

Please Vote for Me [2007]

Perhaps the most traditional documentary of the festival, this has no special techniques, no style of film making, no foresight that has to be admired, no artistry that should be noticed. Weijun Chen just manages to capture material in a Chinese primary school, that can not function as an allegory to the rest of the society.

The film follows a class, that is holding an election for the student that is going to function as the speaker for the class. That position brings certain privileges, so there are several aspirants. All of their campaigns are twisted and corrupt mockeries of democracy, that simply beautifully mirrors what is going on in the less (and these days even in the more) functional democracies of the world. Very much worth seeing.

• Director: Weijun Chen
• Watched on: 11th Aug 2018
• Watched at: private festival
• 4.5/5

Random Films at the Cinema

I wrote a post collecting a bunch of films I’ve seen on TV, and now the counterpart – films seen in a cinema. A very mixed bunch indeed.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri [2017]

The film festival darling of 2018, I had to go see it. It tells the story of Mildred (Frances McDormand), a divorced woman, who is grieving over her raped and murdered daughter. The major counterpart to her is police chief Willoughby. Mildred is angry over police inaction and rents the three titular billboards to send a message to the police chief. Willoughby is on his part trying to do the best he can, while also fighting cancer.

The film is a combination of the Coen brothers and the generic American indie film. From the Coens you get the single-mindedness and surprising moments of humor at things you shouldn’t really be laughing at. From the indies you get the human heart. The film manages to combine these sides by muting both of them down a little from their worst excesses. Copying the Coens wouldn’t be a bad thing, but toning it down allows the film to stand on its own feet. Copying the indies would obviously bad, but here the characters mostly act in a Coen film, but there are occasional moments, when the roles of the grieving mother and the police chief are dropped, and they are human.

Where this film misses is that despite the genuine tragedy, the film seems like a modern version of the pastel colored suburbs of the 50ies that are these days mostly too perfect fantasies. Here, we have a small town, where everything seems to be just so. We aren’t seeing it through nostalgia, so it’s not without problems, but there’s always checks and balances that makes everything work without too much trauma, despite some people acting quite badly under stress.

A very good film altogether.

• Director: Martin McDonagh
• Watched on: 7th Jul 2018
• Watched at: Kinopalatsi 10
• 4/5

Isle of Dogs [2018]

I’m a fan of Wes Anderson. When he keeps his trickery to sane levels, he is absolutely wonderful. This one is a stop motion animation, telling the story of dogs being exiled to an island that used to be a weird combination of industrial area and amusement park, and now is a dump. The exile is due to dogs spreading diseases among humans. Our story begins as Atari, the son of the mayor, who orders the exile, elopes to the island in search of his beloved dog, Spots. Atari and a group of dogs embark on a grand voyage across the dump to find Spots and help the dogs in general.

As mentioned, I’m a fan of Anderson, when he keeps his trickery in check. With stop motion animation, he can throw all thoughts of that to the wind, and he does. Now, not just the delivery of the actors, but absolutely everything, is bent to his will. The result is not without charms, but the excesses eat into those quite a lot.

• Director: Wes Anderson
• Watched on: 11th Jul 2018
• Watched at: Kinopalatsi 8
• 2.5/5

The Shape of Water [2017]

Guillermo del Toro has risen from an art house darling to a Hollywood household name. At the same time he has turned his B horror sensibilities into something secretly agreeable to even conservatives. He hasn’t discarded the horror tropes or even B film settings, but somehow turned them into a secret fantasy that we can all swoon over at the cinema, and condemn as harmless fantasy, when we get out.

And harmless this is. A story of a cleaning lady, Elisa (Sally Hawkins), who is working at a secret military testing facility, where they have sort of an alien life form in captivity. Elisa falls for the life form and it falls back and they have an impropable romantic relationship. And that’s about it. I don’t really know, what this is supposed to be.

• Director: Guillermo del Toro
• Watched on: 11th Jul 2018
• Watched at: Tennispalatsi 5
• 1.5/5

What? [1972]

This was my first visit to the WHS cinema in Helsinki. It has since become my favorite cinema both in programming and in that they present all the films they show. The presentation gives much depth the experience especially, since the films are otherwise quite obscure.

Like this one – everyone’s heard about Roman Polanski and most even about one of the films stars, Marcello Mastroianni. Despite the scandals of Polanski’s life finally coming to light, even our most conservative TV channels are still playing his films regularly, but not this.

The film tells of an American girl, Nancy (Sydne Rome) coming for a vacation into a hotel in an Italian coastal town. The other residents of the hotel are all sorts of weird and especially the hotel’s proprietor. About the first thing that happens to Nancy is that someone steals her pants (and later her blouse) and she doesn’t seem to have any other clothing. She engages in a weird relationship with an old pimp, Alex (Marcello Mastroianni), who wants to dress up as a tiger, when they are having sex.

The film doesn’t make much sense, but it has a weird post modern charm to it. The camera work and everything keep things interesting as well.

• Director: Roman Polanski
• Original Title: Che?
• Watched on: 3rd Aug 2018
• Watched at: WHS
• 3/5

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again [2018]

Had a rare date night with my wife. I wanted to take her to the cinema Riviera Kallio and she wanted to see this, so we were set.

The film… Not much to say. It’s basically more of everything compared to the first one, but done slightly less well and with considerably less heart. There is not an interesting shot or piece of dialogue or setup in the film, but it’s good brainless fun for a date night.

• Director: Ol Parker
• Watched on: 13th Aug 2018
• Watched at: Riviera
• 2/5

Knife+Heart [2018]

The film is set in gay porn world of 70ies France. Anne Pareze (Vanessa Paradis) is the producer in her own company. Her ex-girlfriend edits the company’s films – Anne isn’t over it and is (rather badly) attempting win her back over all the time. Her actors are her friends, but there’s a serious issue – a serial killer is picking off Anne’s actors.

The setup is very deeply grounded in the more innocent porn of the 70ies and also in B films. The aesthetic is copied from both, but instead of going for the gags common in porn that time, the film asks us to take the B film tropes seriously. There’s a bird expert with a claw for a hand, and the serial killer has a blade snapping out of his dildo.

This sounds like a premise for failure, but it is not. The aesthetic is spot on, the dread from the killer is real, the slightly over the top gay porn actors are a nice counter-balance. It just works. There’s just a hint of extra fat that could’ve been left on the editing room floor to fix the couple of spots, where the film gives too much slack, but otherwise a great genre exercise.

• Director: Yann Gonzalez
• Original Title: Un couteau dans le coeur
• Watched on: 1st Feb 2019
• Watched at: WHS
• 4.5/5

The Favourite [2018]

Yorgos Lanthimos is another auteur in the style of Wes Anderson – someone with an immediately recognizable style, and who can be a bit too gimmicky given enough freedom. I enjoyed his two previous efforts though, so off I went.

Here the setting is the court of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman). Her favorite adviser and lover, Lady Sarah, the Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz), has been running the state in practice. This has pissed of the Queen, since her favorite lover is absent quite a bit and enjoying herself too much. Enter Abigail, Baroness Masham (Emma Stone), a down on her luck noble, who manages to get a job from her cousin, Lady Sarah, and quickly finds her way into the Queen’s favor and bed.

Unlike his previous films, this one doesn’t tackle any major social issues, except perhaps to show in some honesty the reality of our past. This gives him too much freedom and the film is set for failure with Lanthimos’ signature slightly too frank dialogue and macabre scenes given free reign.

But the film doesn’t fail. That is purely thanks to the formidable trio of ladies in the leading roles. They make you buy the whole thing hook, line and sinker. The combination turned out to be a magnificent film.

• Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
• Watched on: 20th Mar 2019
• Watched at: Tennispalatsi 5
• 4.5/5

David Lynch

David Lynch is one of those directors, who are slightly frightening. I’ve read a lot about him and everything I’ve read tells me that I will love his films… But what if I don’t? I’ve seen Twin Peaks and the associated film, but that’s all. The Finnish film archive had a program for Lynch films last summer, so I finally managed to catch a couple of his films. At the same we were watching the Twin Peaks series at home with my wife, so I’m going to bunch those in here as well.

I should’ve reviewed the films right after seeing them, since by now, I’ve forgotten a lot and with Lynch’s films that’s fatal. The films are all mixed up in my head, so I’m going to just jot down a few notes about each and try to figure out, which one was which by reading plot synopsis, and giving a grade.

First a couple of notes on Lynch’s style though. I honestly believe, that Lynch makes his films for himself. I would assume that his mind is filled with artistic ideas and this is just a way of getting them out. Some critics point to the films being nonsensical, that you can’t figure out, what is actually happening there, and tell us that they are tricks designed to shock and confound. I would assume that they just are Lynch’s mental world mapped onto film.

It’s true that the films don’t make sense in the end. Usually, with similarly complicated films, you are able to connect the dots somehow – there is a sense to be found and hints that pop out on second viewing. I’m still lacking that second viewing on all of these films, but I would expect nothing to pop out in the way that would make the narrative a coherent whole. With Lynch’s films, I haven’t been able to connect the dots. I remember, that when these were fresher in my mind, I would attempt to figure them out and start to grasp at possibilities, before the construct in my mind falling to pieces. I’m a person driven to find logic in everything, but I’m also a person, who realizes that and is capable of letting go. That’s essential with the films. There are tons of things that could be interpreted as hints to a solution of the film and trying to grasp that solution occasionally gives you hints at interpretations of the film as a whole, so it’s not a wasted effort, but in the end, you just have to let go and enjoy the ride.

Lost Highway [1997]

This is the darkest of the trio in tone. I immensely enjoy the loneliness of the Los Angeles and the empty roads in the film. The film sets up mystery after mystery and gets to points, where those should be resolved, but the lines point to wrong dots and more mystery is brought instead.

• Director: David Lynch
• Watched on: 16th Jun 2018
• Watched at: Orion
• 4.5/5

Mulholland Drive [2001]

This film is perhaps the most comprehensible of the trio. It follows the lives of Rita and Betty for a good while, before things start to fracture and reassemble into different shapes. To me, it loses a tiny bit of Lynch magic, to many others, it’s his best film.

• Director: David Lynch
• Watched on: 4th Jul 2018
• Watched at: Orion
• 4/5

Inland Empire [2006]

This film starts again, by making sense for a long time, but the fractures and shifting realities are worse here than in Mulholland Drive. The setting of the film is slightly less interesting than the lonely Los Angeles / Hollywood of the previous two (this is also set in Hollywood).

• Director: David Lynch
• Watched on: 17th Jul 2018
• Watched at: Orion
• 4/5

Twin Peaks s01

If I would have to point out one season of TV that was the best ever, this is it. If you take this as a full series (I still haven’t seen the third season, but considering just the two old seasons), there would be competition, as during the second season the production company pushed Lynch to the side (he was present pretty much only in title sequence texts) and pushed for more excitement and mystery.

Twin Peaks was intended as a parody of small town America soap operas. Those usually have wholesome people doing wholesome things and any problems usually come from outside or are trivial. Here everyone is wholesome only on the surface. Outsiders are rarely seen (with the exception of special agent Dale Cooper, Kyle MacLachlan, who is an FBI agent and something that could be called the lead character in the series), and all tension is built between inhabitants of the town. The parody shines a light to the reality of small town America – the wholesome people really are wholesome only on the surface. Scratch it a little and all sorts of problems are revealed. Here they are brought front and center. That’s not all of it though, as Lynch is one of the show runners – his signature weirdness and mysteries abound as well.

As a parody of small town America series, it was the intention of the production duo (David Lynch and Mark Frost), to not have much anything happening in the series. It starts with a mystery, who killed Laura Palmer, that brings agent Cooper to town, but that’s quickly pushed to the sides and occasionally nearly forgotten as the series is more interested in just watching its twisted characters live their quiet lives.

The descriptions above don’t really justify the grade below. I can’t really explain it. This just is the best 8 episodes of TV ever produced.

• Finished on: 12th Jun 2018
• 6/5

Twin Peaks s02

As already mentioned above, the production company behind the series, didn’t like Lynch and Frost’s vision anymore. They ended up pushing Lynch completely out of the production and made Frost concentrate on the mysteries and the crimes.

While that did not ruin the second season completely, it takes a lot out of the atmosphere, when the hidden feeling of doom is now front and center. Instead of quiet moments of pie and coffee, the series has more gunshots, more chases, more crime, more everything… that makes it less of everything.

This is still a very good piece of TV and definitely worth the watch.

• Finished on: 14th Aug 2018
• 4/5

A Couple of Nolans

In the early summer of 2018, I managed to watch a couple of Christopher Nolan films. Christopher Nolan entered my knowledge as the director of Memento, which was a quirky dexterity exercise of a story about a man suffering from short term memory loss. That was followed by Insomnia, which was another highly atmospheric piece of work with a complex plot. The complexity has become his signature and his capability of navigating through the complexity in such a manner that the viewer never gets lost, or at least gets the full reveal at the end of the film. He has ascended to become one of the most valued directors in Hollywood, but at the same time, I feel that he has lost a lot of his personality as a director.

Dunkirk [2017]

War films are difficult. They often end up being war porn and national pride in events that are major disasters regardless of loss or victory can be dangerous. This one seemed different though – I skipped the initial release, but kept hearing good things about it, so when Bio Rex was reopening after renovations and they announced a sneak peek weekend with a 70mm copy of Dunkirk playing, I went.

The film opens with a soldier trying to escape towards the beach. We barely see the enemy, our soldier even drops his rifle – he’s just trying to escape. The beach is a nightmare scene of no cover against shelling and enemy bombers, and an endless excruciating wait for the boats coming to evacuate the soldiers.

Another bit of story we are given to follow is Farrier, a fighter pilot, who desperately attempts to buy time for the boats to arrive, risking his life and plane and staying a bit more to drive away one more enemy plane. The final one is that of Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance), who takes his boat to join the people’s flotilla in the evacuation effort.

The film is not a usual war film. It avoids war porn almost completely, but it does deliver a dose of national pride – it’s directed at soldiers being saved from the infamous beach, so that, for once, is something to be proud about.

The film quality is impeccable. From film stock to framing, shots, pacing, acting – it’s all well beyond the already high Hollywood standards. Nothing surprising there – Nolan has recently been known for exactly this.

The quality is without question, but is there anything new here? There are two things, that make the film rise above your usual Hollywood fare. The aforementioned coup of war film tropes is one. The film is more a disaster film than a war film. The second is the sound track. It’s more a low droning soundscape than a usual soundtrack. It never let’s you forget the impending doom. A wonderful piece of work by Hans Zimmer.

• Director: Christopher Nolan
• Watched on: 20th May 2018
• Watched at: Bio Rex
• 5/5

Interstellar [2014]

I watched this in two parts. First part on TV one night, but I was too tired to finish it, so I continued the next evening with a Youtube film rental.

If Dunkirk is Nolan at his most Hollywood, Interstellar has some of the old Nolan quirks shining through brightly. The film could be considered a twin of Inception, but where that faltered on excessive mistrust of the viewer, this falters on entirely different things.

The film tells the story of Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a former NASA astronaut, who has ended up as a farmer. Crops are failing all over the world, so most of the populace has been put to tending crops in order to avoid famines. The dream of space remains though. There’s a couple of inexplicable events that lead Cooper towards a secret facility that hosts a project to save humanity by sending it to new planets discovered on the other side of a stable worm hole. Cooper ends up being one of the 3 people sent on a second mission mission through the worm hole. The first mission charted out 12 potential planets and now the purpose is to check out the 3 best candidates and take 5000 humans there frozen in cryo sleep. Obviously, charting out the 3 candidates doesn’t go as planned, but see the rest for yourself.

The now trademark Nolan quality is evident everywhere. Shots are heavy and they have a powerful effect. Soundtrack supports everything and pacing is nice.

The problems stand with the plot – the other Nolan trademark. This one is contrived. The plot is maybe even more complex than that of Inception, but this manages to tell it without spending endless time on exposition and making sure that the viewer is apace of everything happening on screen (seriously, Inception dialogue feels like a thinly masked manual to the film). The plot is even more complex than that of Inception, and this time, instead of holding the hand of the viewer through all of it, there are more events that gain a meaning only later. The problem is, you end up spending most of your time with the film thinking that there’s a few too many convenient coincidences going around, before the twist at the end explains them away. The explanation just isn’t satisfactory and it doesn’t really compensate for the feeling of contrivances. The premise of the humanity standing at the brink of extinction does not help.

Despite it’s problems, I’m a sucker for sci-fi, especially sci-fi, that even tries to be smart.

• Director: Christopher Nolan
• Watched on: 2nd Jun 2018
• Watched at: Youtube
• 4/5

What Is Cinema?

I have never spent as much effort on getting my hands on a book. This is a collection of essays from the French film theory and criticism prodigy André Bazin. The essays were originally published here and there, and they were collected into several volumes named Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? It would be wrong to say, that this is a translation of those volumes, as this contains a tiny subset of the essays published in the original French collections.

This is a new translation of some of those essays, and the reason this is important, is that much of Bazin has been very badly translated into English prior to this edition. Some of the most central concepts of the theoretical and critical framework he built, have been translated to even the completely opposite meaning of that Bazin had in mind, so it was essential to get my hands on this edition. The reason it was so hard to get my hands on this, was that the copyright of the older translations is still in force in most of the western world and apparently that kind of things are tracked these days. Most Canadian and international web stores that carry this book, refused to ship it to Finland. Finally, I managed to find one, but I had already I Canadian friend lined up to go buy the book himself and mail it to me.

The new translator, Timothy Barnard, has added extensive footnotes to discuss the earlier errors in translations and the reasons behind his choice of the more important words in his translation. He spends pages in explaining the more difficult concepts in Bazin’s framework. All of this is in itself very interesting and enlightening to read, but for some reason, Barnard builds contradictions into Bazin’s framework, where there seems to be none. His arguments in describing said contradictions seem vague and off target. Regardless, to my understanding, his actual translations here are impeccable.

And, boy, was it worth the effort. As mentioned, Bazin was a prodigy of film theory and criticism. He died at the age of 40, but already he left behind a corpus of writings of film probably still unsurpassed in importance at least by any single person. This edition contains 13 essays, ranging from absolutely essential pieces to understanding his critical and theoretical frameworks, to in depth critiques of single films. Some essays are obviously more essential and others seem even a bit marginal 60 years after Bazin’s death, but altogether, the essay collection stands as the single most important bit of reading on film that I have done.

Reading through the collection of essays was just pure learning happiness for me. I immediately ordered the second volume of Bazin essays translated by Timothy Barnard and published by Caboose. Unfortunately the web store seems to be out-of-stock and they still have not managed to send me the volume three months later. I’m just hoping beyond hope, that I’ll get my hands on that one as well.

• Title: What Is Cinema?
• Author: André Bazin
• Translated by: Timothy Barnard
• Year of this edition: 2009
• Finished in: 14th Apr 2019
• 6/5

Helsinki Cine Asia 2018

Helsinki Cine Asia is a smallish festival concentrating on (surprise) Asian cinema. I’ve often seen one or two films here. This time I chose to attend for one full day and 4 films.

Missing Johnny [2017]

The film is a mood piece set among three lonely people in Taipei. It tells of the estrangement that people can experience and the importance of human connection and love. At times the film proceeds a bit too slowly, even for the mood it is looking for, but the film remains strong in its love for the protagonists and their struggles. A slow and seemingly simple film that elegantly pieces together a touching story without anything big going on.

• Director: Xi Huang
• Watched on: 18th Mar 2018
• Watched at: Korjaamo Kino
• 3.5/5

A Taxi Driver [2017]

South Korea is considered a successful state, but after the Korean war ended, it’s future was far from certain. There was a progression of military dictatorships before democracy finally took root. In 1980 the current dictator, Chun Doo-hwan, had just risen to power through a military coup and the consolidation of his power was still ongoing. The students in the city of Gwangju rose up in protest against the martial laws enacted. Initially the protests were peaceful, but when the government troops started to violently suppress the protests, weapons stores were raided and the protesters turned violent as well. An estimated 600 people were killed with the vast majority being protesters. The uprising weakened the already precarious position of Chun and became a rallying point for further protests against him eventually leading to his regime’s collapse.

Internationally the events of Gwangju were known, because there was one German journalist, Jürgen Hinzpeter (Thomas Kretschmann), who managed to enter the area, shoot pictures and video of the events, and escape with the negatives. The reason he managed to do this was his taxi driver, Kim (Song Kang-ho), who despite encountering road blocks, took it upon himself to get the journalist to Gwangju and then out.

This is the story the film tells – there’s a short setup with Peter finding hints about the events unraveling and with Kim being a down on his luck taxi driver. Then they go to Gwangju, participate in the events, get hunted by the government troops and escape through back roads and road blocks. Kim is the protagonist of the film – he starts out as pro-government not believing that they would do anything bad and preferring to stay out of other people’s business in any case, but once he witnesses the events in Gwangju, he turns around and through professional bride, greed (he won’t get any money from Jürgen, if Jürgen dies) and an awakening moral compass, he finishes his work with enthusiasm.

This is certainly an interesting piece of history to tell. Some scenes seem like they could be pretty close to the actual events, but others are dramatized to the point of ridiculousness. The tone changes wildly between touching moments and real anguish, before going to slapstick and ridiculous car chases. The result is a film that you can’t really trust for one moment.

• Director: Hun Jang
• Original Title: Taeksi woonjunsa
• Watched on: 18th Mar 2018
• Watched at: Korjaamo Kino
• 2/5

Angels Wear White [2017]

The film tells the story of two children being molested by a government official, Liu, in a resort town hotel during the off season. After the initial events, the film follows the two victims and one young employee of the hotel trying to survive with the corrupt system and with the precarious position that both women and children occupy in China.

The hotel employee, Mia, is probably underage and doesn’t have a government ID, so she is basically without any protection. She shoots evidence of the situation with her cell phone. Her boss threatens to fire her and due to her illegitimate position, she has no protection against that, so instead of going to the authorities with the evidence, she plans to blackmail Liu and buy a fake ID with the money.

One of the victims, Wen, is blamed by her parents for the events. Xin, the second victim, on the other hand is pressured into silence by her parents, because Liu is her godfather and the parents figure that they can extort money from Liu to help the family. Nobody seems to trust the authorities and nobody seems to care for the children. Everyone is looking to find an angle to profit themselves.

The film is realized with elegance and a touching sympathy towards the under-aged girls. It raises an important social issue about the problems of corruption, inequality and children’s rights in China.

• Director: Vivian Qu
• Original Title: Jia nian hua
• Watched on: 18th Mar 2018
• Watched at: Korjaamo Kino
• 4/5

The Third Murder [2017]

Misumi (Kôji Yakusho) has apparently killed a factory manager and has confessed to the act. He is a repeat offender with a previous double murder conviction from 30 years ago, which would put him down for the death penalty, if convicted from this crime. He seems to calmly accept this faith. Shigemori (Masaharu Fukuyama) is the attorney, who jumps on the case and questions the confession from the beginning. So a court drama with mysteries about a crime or even two and the nature of the confessed criminal. I won’t go into the revelations, but they are nothing too exceptional.

The film is pretty much a nifty genre exercise and nothing more. The parts are played well, the decoupage is decent, the pacing gives space for the characters to develop, but it never rises above being a nifty genre exercise.

• Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda
• Original Title: Sandome no satsujin
• Watched on: 18th Mar 2018
• Watched at: Korjaamo Kino
• 3/5

Random Films on TV

The Bourne Ultimatum [2007]

I would assume that most people know what these are about… It’s about agents and plots and secrets and cinematic agent work. There’s chases, gun fights, explosions and lots of anonymous locations. There’s people who know what’s going on, people being used and people trying to find out. It’s basically modernized James Bond – the agents work the real world instead of an alternate reality, where everything is glamorous, and the villains are cogs in bigger machines that are probably just maintaining the power of the wealthy elite instead of evil geniuses trying to bring down the whole world with an implausible plot or a super weapon. As such, they are by default better than the Bond films.

Now what to say about this film – it’s a Bourne film. Production values are impeccable. Acting is mostly irrelevant, since you see these for the action. The action is good. Imaginative enough to be entertaining, but not too imaginative to be completely unbelievable. A solid film where you get exactly what you would expect.

• Director: Paul Greengrass
• Watched on: 17th Mar 2018
• Watched at: TV5
• 3/5

Annihilation [2018]

Just a couple of notes on the weird publicity that the film gained. Apparently most major studios rejected the films as “too smart”, so Alex Garland ended up going to Netflix with it to get it funded. Yes, it’s smart – I’m tempted to say Inception smart, but it’s smarter than that. It doesn’t explain everything, which is apparently enough to be smart. I guess the all female (some males in some inconsequential roles) played into that appraisal. And a quick note on that too. It’s important to have films like these with female leads. It adds to the value of the film although not to the artistic value of the film, and it does not detract from said artistic value one bit.

There’s a zone and people going in there usually disappear or at least they return different, but it needs to be investigated, so in they go. The Stalker loans are obvious, but that’s not a problem – we don’t have too many films like this and there’s enough differences as well. The weird in the zone manifests in alien mutations of the biosphere. The deeper they go, the weirder it gets. I like this weird. The plot isn’t too strong – the weird claims some of the team and others go crazy, but the remaining people push on ahead to finally encounter something even weirder in the center of it all. It is well told though – the film doesn’t exhaust the weirdness by explaining it, things are revealed slow enough, the pacing works throughout. The very final shots of the film were a bit of a let down in its predictability.

The film doesn’t exactly shine in anything it does, but it does everything well enough and gains bonus points for an attempt at smartness and the all female cast.

• Director: Alex Garland
• Watched on: 19th Mar 2018
• Watched at: Netflix
• 4/5

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three [1974]

I’ve seen the 2009 remake headlined by John Travolta and Denzel Washington, so comparisons are inevitable. This one is realistic, low-key, plausible, while the 2009 iteration is melodramatic, over-the-top, made to entertain. This one is better paced and holds suspense better. There, done. This one wins the comparison by far.

It’s a story of a crew of mostly unlikely criminals hijacking a New York subway car and holding it and the passengers for ransom. This sounds like an implausible setup for a heist film, but the plan is solid and they almost pull it off. What makes the film fly, though, is the slow pacing of the film. The characters are allowed to grow and they become individuals instead of stereotypes that you often see in heist films. New York and it’s people provide some excellent atmosphere as well.

• Director: Joseph Sargent
• Watched on: 29th Mar 2018
• Watched at: Yle Teema
• 3.5/5

Fading Gigolo [2013]

Now I know it says John Turturro on the tin, but this could easily be directed by Woody Allen. Not surprisingly, those two are the leads of the film. Fioravante (Turturro) is a down on his luck florist, who becomes an escort for the rich women of Manhattan with the support and prodding of his publisher friend Murray (Allen).

Let’s start with the redeeming quality – the film has the Allen humanist touch. It’s just about people, who want to cope and wouldn’t hurt anyone. That’s it.

The rest is tired gags mostly based on old men talking about sexuality, which is supposed to be funny, because old men shouldn’t be open about their feelings or talk about sex frankly. There’s miles and miles of the usual Allen bantering with the familiar New York slur, which is entertaining for a while, but sadly Allen’s dialogue hasn’t been interesting in forever. Obviously the whole premise is ridiculous enough to actually detract from the film. Finally, the decoupage is non-existent – I guess it aims for an almost cinéma vérité quality in not bothering to set up anything interesting anywhere, but the result is just boring to watch.

• Director: John Turturro
• Watched on: 25th May 2018
• Watched at: Yle Teema
• 1.5/5

Jurassic World [2015]

I had to go to Wikipedia, to find out, how many Jurassic something films there are by now. This is apparently the 4th and it starts a new Jurassic World trilogy. I didn’t expect anything other than a play-by-the-numbers sequel with everything bigger and badder than before and I was still disappointed.

The film was originally conceived during the shooting of Jurassic Park III, but then entered production hell. Several revisions and 14 years later, the hell was finally over and we got a new film to the franchise. Obviously, it’s not supposed to be an Oscar film, but this is sub par on almost every level. The overall production quality is what you’d expect from a Hollywood film with a budget like this and there’s a couple of nice set pieces featuring dinosaurs, but that’s about it.

There’s a new dino park built on top of the old one now with genetically engineered bigger and badder killer dinosaurs and unsurprisingly they get loose and the human characters attempt to survive and contain or escape the situation. This could be a sufficient premise for an interesting summer blockbuster, but the characters are paper thin and you could not care less about anything happening to them. The only value in the film is in seeing dinosaurs, which is always cool.

• Director: Colin Trevorrow
• Watched on: 26th May 2018
• Watched at: TV5
• 1/5

The Martian [2015]

The film is an adaptation of a novel of the same name by Andy Weir. The premise of the novel was to build a plausible scenario of travel to Mars with currently available technology. The only thing to overcome would be a ton of engineering needed to actually build the things and get them to Mars. As far as I understand, that side of the novel works well – I’ve heard it mentioned that the only implausible thing is the storm that leaves Mark Watney (Matt Damon) stranded alone on the red planet. That brings us nicely to the rest of the novel – Weir needed to device a scenario that made for entertaining reading instead of just describing, how we could reach Mars. I haven’t read the novel, but at least in the film, that side also works.

The realist approach of the novel is carried over into the film – it doesn’t try to use the camera or anything in the setting to build any kind of interesting imagery, instead presenting everything in a very straightforward manner. Obviously, analytical editing is utilized, since that’s what the big audiences are used to, and they don’t see any problems with the departure from reality caused by that style. So you get what you expect – a big budget representation of how a man stranded on Mars might go about surviving there until he can be rescued presented without any surprises.

The plot continues on the unsurprising side of things. The first crisis is quickly overcome and Watney uses his wits to build something that could almost be described as a nice life on Mars. Obviously there are further crisis and further overcoming of those, but they build up and it starts to look bad until a bold rescue mission is enacted and all ends well.

Matt Damon occupies the screen for the majority of the film and since most of the stuff happening on Mars is realistic, it is mostly low-key, and thus he actually needs to carry the film, which he does. He is charming, he is desperate, his increasingly tired and desperate wittiness is amusing and touching.

Altogether, the film delivers what it promises in a perhaps unsurprising, but on all levels highly professional manner.

• Director: Ridley Scott
• Watched on: 25th Aug 2018
• Watched at: Sub
• 4/5

Mad Max: Fury Road [2015]

Holy fuck! This is my second time seeing the film. This time I saw it on our home’s 40″ TV screen, which is very sub-optimal for this specific film (find the biggest screen with the best sound possible, if you haven’t seen this before), and still the only possible reaction after this film is: holy fuck!

Now where do I start? Let’s go with the humanism and feminism. It’s a struggle to survive and in the end that happens by overthrowing the old harsh regime in order to free the masses. That’s the humanism – then the feminism. The titular character, Mad Max (Tom Hardy), is not the star of the film. That role is given to the second titular character, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron). The regime that is overthrown is male and the role it assigns to the women is literally as breeding machines meant to bring forth healthy male children, and that’s the women it appreciates the most. When the new female regime is settling in and the previously enslaved masses are freed, Max leaves – it’s a women’s world now. The early parts of the film feature Max heavily, but it doesn’t take long for Furiosa to take over as the baddest ass in the wholly bad-ass film – there’s scene that makes this very much literal.

The plot of the film is that Imperator Furiosa is tired of Immortan Joe’s regime, hijacks the priced breeding machines and escapes towards a fabled green land behind the desert. There’s a bunch of action at 60mph, but the green land is gone. They then decide to go back to free the water reserves from Immortan Joe’s fortress. More action follows and finally a triumphant return. Now obviously that isn’t much of a plot, but wait until you hear about the action.

Most of the things you see on screen are actually there. The cars are there, the explosions, the stunts, the desert and the speed. CGI has been used to improve the backgrounds, recolor things, make the explosions bigger, and for a couple of the more extreme stunts, stitch the scenes together. And it shows in a big way. Everything is gut wrenching and visceral, everything has a feeling of danger to it, that has been missing from many high-octane films since the CGI takeover.

And the action itself – there’s at best dozens of vehicles racing across the desert with people jumping from car to car, explosions, fighting on top of the cars, inside the cockpits, there’s people on top of long poles that swing from side to side strung to cars racing through the desert, and there’s a what can only be described as chaotic noise demon, who is strung in front of a set of speakers that would make any stadium concert envious playing his guitar accompanied by endless pyrotechnics.

Finally, what makes all of this work, is the impossibly smooth editing. The film employs analytical editing – obviously, despite the mad skills evident in pretty much every frame of the film, the skills are not enough to present the events we see with long shots – but it takes that art to an extreme. Despite the endless and mostly non-stop chaos on screen, the film is easy and relaxing to watch due to the extreme rigor employed in framing and editing the shots – every cut in the film strings shots together so that your eyes are already focused on the bit of screen, where the important things happen in the next shot. This is an insane achievement from a film that employs this much chaos and doesn’t do it with CGI. This is an incredible evolution of the analytical editing style. This would’ve been an extremely welcome and simple to achieve evolution in the multitude of CGI action films produced in recent years, but the evolutionary step was taken in this film, where all of the action is live, where you have to design the shot progressions of chaotic live shooting at 60mph for extremely complex action scenes.

I did not think I could be this enthusiastic about an action film ever again, but holy fuck!

• Director: George Miller
• Watched on: 24th Feb 2019
• Watched at: Youtube film rental
• 6/5

Arrival [2016]

Another sci-fi attempting to be smart in a somewhat similar vein to Annihilation. Here the sci-fi is more straightforward and less weird and the smart is less mysterious and more scientific. A story of first contact, where a bunch of alien ships land. The film follows one of the crews (mostly a linguist Louise Adams played by Amy Adams and a theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly played by Jeremy Renner) attempting to communicate or otherwise unravel the mystery presented by the ships. Increasing tensions at other landing sites and with other nations handling the crisis provide a deadline for solving the puzzle peacefully.

The smart sort of flops here. Whereas Annihilation provides the smart through a genuinely alien and weird mystery that doesn’t even pretend to be solvable by our logic with science providing only attempts to guess at the meaning of everything, here Amy and Ian rigorously apply what plays at being valid science to solve a riddle that has a definite answer. This approach falls a bit flat, since the science isn’t applied scientifically and since the answer to the riddle (as pretty much always) is much less interesting than the riddle.

The film bears a resemblance to The Martian as well, as a lot of screen time is dedicated to the solving of a puzzle – The Martian has many puzzles, they are varied and they are approachable (how to cultivate potatoes, how to find drinking water), whereas here there is only one puzzle and it feels distant, since it is not tangible to most viewers. Solving the puzzle is mostly not interesting to watch.

The second problem with the film is the paper thin characters. The film is interested in them only as far as it needs to provide a second layer to the riddle – the flashbacks of Amy that are revealed to be… well, let’s not go there, that’s an actually interesting and surprising revelation.

The third problem is that the film is not cinematic in the least. We have one nice set piece in the alien vessel. Entering that for the first time, seeing the aliens for the first time and seeing their language for the first time, all are interesting moments that are worth seeing. The problem is that otherwise the film mostly consists of staring at computer screens and revisiting the vessel and the aliens. This makes for boring watching.

Despite the problems of the cinematography, the characters and the first mystery, the film is not a failure. The aforementioned second mystery genuinely managed to surprise me and its allusion to certain theories of language is interesting. Denis also manages to build an atmosphere of a calm rush that manages to compensate for much of the otherwise boring middle part of the film. The resulting film is worth seeing, but just barely.

• Director: Denis Villeneuve
• Watched on: 2nd Mar 2019
• Watched at: Netflix
• 2.5/5

 

Kauppakadun elokuvafestivaalit VII – Kauhujen yö

This was my first invitation to a semi-regular privately held one day film festival in Jyväskylä. The subject matter was horror.

The Iron Rose [1973]

The festival started of with this cult classic by Jean Rollin. A boy and a girl meet, spend time, go to a cemetery, end up making love in an open mausoleum and find themselves locked in the cemetery.

The plot is largely inconsequential. Mostly the film is about mood. The cinematography is absolutely beautiful outside the cemetery and especially inside it. Originally the girl is afraid, but at some point the roles start to turn around as it seems the girl is starting to be overcome by something residing in the cemetery.

There is some campy elements, but quite low level – a creepy clown and a dracula make an appearance just to disappear again and the girl’s shirt becomes more and more torn as the film progresses making sure to reveal bouncy breasts.

Not a masterpiece of cinema, but worth it for the beauty and atmosphere alone.

• Director: Jean Rollin
• Original Title: La rose de fer
• Watched on: 24th Feb 2018
• Watched at: private festival
• 3.5/5

The Old Dark House [1932]

This is probably the prototype for all later creepy house horror films. It’s a part of the Universal Studios pre-Hays code era horror films.

There’s a couple arriving at a house seeking shelter from a storm. The door is opened by a wolfish butler and the rest of the family is equally peculiar. There’s another couple that end up seeking shelter as well. Initially all seems well regardless of the hosts, but obviously things slowly degrade.

The acting is quite melodramatic, but otherwise the piece has aged well and proves to be truly prophetical in creating the tropes of the genre.

• Director: James Whale
• Watched on: 24th Feb 2018
• Watched at: private festival
• 4/5

The Fall of the House of Usher [1928]

The first of two films from 1928 based on Edgar Allan Poe’s poem of the same name. Epstein’s film is the more realistic of the two, although still quite far from realistic film. The poem tells the story of the house of Usher, that seems to be cursed. There’s a man obsessively painting a picture of a woman, who is slowly wasting away and the house itself seems haunted by the death that is coming.

The film loans heavily from the German expressionist film making tradition and Epstein’s surrealist tendencies are clearly visible. The settings are built for atmosphere and shadows are almost as important a part of the mise-en-scene as are the sparse objects in the great hall of the manor. There is an obsession in the inhabitants of the manor, and the outsider invited there is barely a co-witness of the events with the audience.

The atmosphere and pull of the film are amazingly strong and the barely hour long film flew by despite having no sound or music.

• Director: Jean Epstein
• Original Title: La chute de la maison Usher
• Watched on: 24th Feb 2018
• Watched at: private festival
• 4.5/5

The Fall of the House of Usher [1928]

The second film adaptation of the same poem from 1928. Apparently James Sibley Watson made just a couple of films in his life and they were more of a hobby than a profession for him… which is sad, since the I can only imagine at the results, if he’d put more of himself into the profession of film making based on this result.

The film is strongly surrealist and experimental. I probably would’ve had great difficulty in following the events, if I had not just seen a more tangible rendering of the same poem on film. The famous experimental film makers were still decades away and Sibley produced this as a hobby – truly amazing.

• Director: James Sibley Watson, Melville Webber
• Watched on: 24th Feb 2018
• Watched at: private festival
• 4.5/5

Pulse [2001]

One of the first films of the Japanese horror film boom of the early millennium predating films like Ring. Instead of going for plain scares, the film builds an atmosphere of loneliness. Whatever is affecting the victims of the ghost in the Internet, or whatever it is, seems to actually be releasing them from their loneliness and leaving people left behind even more alone. The Tokyo rendered in the film is not your usual Tokyo – there’s no endless crowds and cramped spaces, but instead there’s almost no people anywhere and the whole place seems to be slowly decaying. The film alternates between great scenes and the almost aimlessly progressing plot.

• Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
• Original Title: Kairo
• Watched on: 24th Feb 2018
• Watched at: private festival
• 3/5

Dead of Night – The Ventriloquist’s Dummy [1945]

Dead of Night is an anthology film containing several short film segments and a framing setup that binds the individual segments together. We watched only the segment called The Ventriloquist’s Dummy by Alberto Cavalcanti. This seems to be yet another prototypical piece of horror film making. The dummies of ventriloquists have since become a horror staple, but this was the first one. I have to believe our host’s word on it, but apparently the other pieces of the anthology are quite unoriginal and bad. On his word about this piece being very much worth the time, I agree.

• Director: Alberto Cavalcanti
• Watched on: 24th Feb 2018
• Watched at: private festival
• 3.5/5

Viy [1967]

Yet another film worth seeing if for nothing else, then for its unique place in film history. The film is said to be the only horror film to come out of the Soviet Union. The film was produced and, it is commonly believed, also directed by Aleksandr Ptushko, who was famous for his special effects already before this. The film is based on Nikolai Gogol’s short story of the same name.

The plot follows a couple of seminarians. A witch tries to kill one of them and ends up being killed instead. The seminarian is afterwards forced to say prayers next to the dead witch (now turned into a beautiful woman) inside a locked up barn for three nights. Not much to the story and the film itself is not too scary, but the effects are quite amazing. They’ve been described as infantile and clumsy elsewhere, but I would rank them higher than anything the western world was producing at the time.

Not the strongest film of the festival but surely the biggest jaw dropper.

• Director: Konstantin Ershov, Georgiy Kropachyov
• Original Title: La rose de fer
• Watched on: 24th Feb 2018
• Watched at: private festival
• 4/5

The House That Screamed [1969]

And finally the festival closes with another cult classic. The film tells the story of a girl’s boarding school in early 20th century Spain. The setting has obvious camp potential, but it is kept in check. Instead, the film goes for suffocating repression in everything. The sexual tension is there as is the seeds of rebellion and some voyeurs, but nothing seems to ever resolve into a traditional payoff… except that the girls do keep dying. A masterful exercise. It’s said to have had a big influence on Dario Argento’s Suspiria and I can readily buy into that, but whereas Suspiria holds nothing back, this reels everything in.

• Director: Narciso Ibáñez Serrador
• Original Title: La residencia
• Watched on: 24th Feb 2018
• Watched at: private festival
• 3.5/5

DocPoint 2018

The 2018 edition of DocPoint. I haven’t visited the festival that often. This time around I planned on one day of attendance, but ended up seeing two extra films on two extra days due to unplanned extra time. My understanding of the documentary film is so weak that it is difficult to pick films from a festival catalog and that’s reflected in the overall average quality of the films I ended up seeing.

The Goddesses of Food [2016]

A documentary about female top chefs and the reasons, why they are underappreciated compared to their male colleagues. The documentary does not have any ambitions as to artistic vision. Even as a strictly informative documentary, it is lacking – the information provided seems quite random. It does convey the single fact that there are females working on the highest level of the profession and it does convey some mouth watering images of food, but that’s unfortunately about it.

• Director: Vérane Frédiani
• Original Title: Á la recherche des femmes chefs
• Watched on: 31st Jan 2018
• Watched at: Andorra
• 2.5/5

Let There Be Light [2017]

A documentary about the building of the ITER fusion reactor in France and several other projects to research and build fusion reactors. Besides a few wonderful images about the reactors, the film is a series of talking heads or cameras placed in conference rooms and labs.

The documentary side is a bit here and there. There’s quite a bit of information about the building of ITER and about the competing designs being built with smaller funding around the world. What the film lacks is information about, why ITER hasn’t progressed as expected and why fusion reactors have been 50 years away for almost the past 50 years. The film also steers into questionable science territory with a couple of the alternative fusion projects without questioning that alternative science one bit. Then again, at least one of those alternative projects is obviously ridiculous to anyone with a bit of scientific understanding, but that project receives quite a bit of questionable screen time. The film did fill me with a hope for a technocratic wet dream of fusion energy, which would solve the current energy and climate crisis.

• Director: Mila Aung-Thwin, Van Royko
• Watched on: 1st Feb 2018
• Watched at: Andorra
• 3/5

Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made [1994]

A documentary about a film that Samuel Fuller was planning to film in the Brazilian rain forests among the Karajá indians. The production had acquired John Wayne, Ava Gardner and Tyrone Power for the main roles, but was finally scrapped due to prohibitively high insurance costs for the stars.

The documentary is not really a traditional documentary and more a dream like road trip into memories. Jim Jarmusch joins Fuller for their return to the jungle and to the Karajás 40 years after Fuller’s first trip. The stars and the crew spent 7 days in the jungle interviewing the Karajás and each other, and following the life of the Karajás.

On one level of the documentary, is the failed film production. It provides an interesting glimpse into the golden era of Hollywood albeit through an unreliable conduit in Fuller – he has always been a bit too much in love with himself for me to trust the stories that put him in a prettier light than anyone else appearing in those stories. They are entertaining though.

On one level there’s the change that the Karajás have seen around them. Modernity has reached the tribe and their traditional living space is diminishing by the year. This is sad, but it’s a miracle that the village and some of their traditions have survived at all, as Fuller astutely notes.

On a final level, there’s Jarmusch and Fuller talking about film making, Jarmusch mostly asking questions and Fuller rambling on. At this point Fuller is an old man, who has pretty much given up on everything and doesn’t bother trying to make sense most of the time and his ramblings turn incomprehensible a bit too often. It is, however, a very interesting look into Fuller during his final years. A couple of years later he was dead. Here he got what might’ve been his last shot at openly and without anyone questioning his choices, to paint a picture of himself. As mentioned, he is a bit too much in love with himself. Besides that, there’s bitterness in the industry and the audiences not recognizing his genius. As a final note, regardless of these problems, he is a big humanist and a kind person, when he is not railing against the film industry.

The documentary as a whole is far from a series of talking heads. The film takes on a dream like quality and seems like a road trip into memories and into concrete changes in the world. As such, it is an interesting piece of film making as a film as well, and not just as a documentary.

• Director: Mika Kaurismäki
• Watched on: 1st Feb 2018
• Watched at: Andorra
• 4/5

The Final Year [2017]

A documentary about the final year of presidency of Barrack Obama. The director, Greg Barker, followed Obama almost everywhere during Obama’s last year as the POTUS. This is an obviously interesting premise, but the result is problematic. Barker wasn’t allowed access everywhere, but the final cut of the film glosses over this completely – we have no idea, when the access was limited and what was left out. Also, despite the film’s focus being on Obama’s foreign policy and his foreign policy team, the film doesn’t cover the difficult questions. We get a few bits of Obama feeling sorry for himself for misjudging the audacity of his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, and we get a couple of sound bites about Iran, but that’s pretty much it. Nothing about the increase in assassinations and drone use under Obama. Nothing about the failures of the Arab spring that happened under Obama’s watch. Also, the film is lacking all artistic ambitions, so we get a series of talking heads that do shine a light on an interesting thing, but completely fail to inform us, what the light is avoiding or where it is blocked.

• Director: Greg Barker
• Watched on: 1st Feb 2018
• Watched at: Kinopalatsi 2
• 3/5

Dreaming Murakami [2017]

A documentary about Mette Holm, the Danish translator of Haruki Murakami’s novels. I went to see the film, since I am a fan of Murakami. The documentary follows Holm pondering about words, the feelings of sentences and how those are difficult to carry over, the vague interpretations possible in the original text and impossible to carry over into the translated text. I’m not enough of a language nerd to fully appreciate this, but it does provide an interesting glimpse into a world that I was mostly unaware of before the film. The film aims for a decidedly Murakamian pacing and atmosphere and achieves that pretty nicely, which is probably the film’s biggest merit. I’m not sure, how I feel about the giant frog that has been inserted probably in order to point towards the fantastic elements of Murakami’s novels – I get the reference and that alone provides some strength to the element, but it feels more distracting and out of place than anything else.

• Director: Nitesh Anjaan
• Watched on: 4th Feb 2018
• Watched at: Korjaamo Kino
• 3/5

 

 

Multimodality

I’ve been consuming surprisingly many pieces work in the original and an adapted format recently. Here’s the reviews.

Lucifer – the Comic

The comic picks up the character of Lucifer from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics and tells his story. The story plots his course rebelling against God in modern times. It starts by Lucifer leaving hell, since he doesn’t care about being his father’s puppet anymore.

I picked up the comic, because of Neil Gaiman and Sandman. There are definitely influences here, but Lucifer never flies in the same league. The ideas are not as surprising, the plots are not as devious, the characters are not as juicy.

The one point, where Lucifer can stand tall next to Sandman, is the art. Sandman suffered from slightly lackluster art for the first few trade paperback collection, but Lucifer has high quality on that front from the start.

This is a nice comic regardless. Again the flaws seem prominent only, because the point of comparison is so high. If you are interested in plays on the pop culture Christian mythology, this one certainly offers something new.

• Title: Lucifer
• Author: Mike Carey
• Year: 2000-2006
• Finished in: 25th Dec 2017
• 3/5

Lucifer seasons 1 & 2 – the Series

I picked up on the series, because some people, who were high on the comic, kept recommending it to me. It is supposedly based on the comic, the premise is certainly the same – Lucifer is done with being God’s puppet and leaves hell to strike out on his own in Los Angeles. There the similarities end. In the series we follow Lucifer through a path of self discovery as he fights crime as a consultant for the police. The fighting against God bit is restricted to occasional outbursts against his controlling dad.

The series could be interesting from this starting point, but execution lacks. Lucifer is a narcissistic and egoistic caricature built for cheap gags and nothing more. The individual episodes never offer anything interesting and the overall story arcs are inane and boring.

I should’ve quit after a couple of episodes, but it took me a couple of episodes into season 3, before I finally gave up. It’s like Buffy without the charisma and serious topics – what you have left is the case of the week.

• Finished on: 17th Feb 2019
• 1/5

Gone Girl [2014]  – the Film

The story of Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike). They are a seemingly perfect couple – stylish, witty, beautiful, smart – but that is only a carefully constructed surface. Nick is out of a job and living on Amy’s trust fund money and he is having an affair, and Amy has just gone missing. The film follows the investigation into Amy’s disappearance. The story slowly reveals various secrets – the marriage hasn’t been happy in a long time, Nick is having an affair, Amy staged her own disappearance to look like Nick murdered her, she did it as revenge for the affair…

David Fincher is not at his best, but this is still guaranteed Fincher quality. The film is, if nothing else, rigorous. It reveals everything bit by bit, always grabbing the viewer’s interest back just, when it looks like the plot is not going anywhere. There are two major twists – one was revealed above, that Amy is still alive and hasn’t actually been kidnapped, and a second one in the end. Neither is being hidden too much and especially the latter one is clear long before it actually happens, but the interesting bit with the twists is not themselves, but the reasons behind them and what happens next.

There’s nothing wrong here, but there is nothing exceptionally right either. Fincher goes into Michael Haneke territory here, with the calculated control, but he lags far behind with the uninteresting mise-en-scéne. He used to be one of the more interesting directors coming out of the US, but it seems that Hollywood has gotten to him and although parts of his style is still visible, his ideas have been replaced by Hollywood design by committee scripts.

• Director: David Fincher
• Watched on: 8th Sep 2018
• Watched at: Home (Sub)
• 2.5/5

Gone Girl – the Novel

The film seemed like there was unrealized potential just below the surface, so I picked up the novel to see, if that potential was lost in translation. Long story short: it wasn’t.

The novel reads like a film script from the start, and it reads like a script written for David Fincher. Maybe the goal was Michael Haneke, but it falls short. Nevertheless, reading the novel or seeing the film is enough, no need to do both, since the film is an almost exact replica of the novel. Towards the ends a few details have been moved around and changed a bit, but anything essential is neither lost nor gained. My rating for the novel is slightly less than for the film, since the novel attempts to be a film script and loses something of the possibilities of the novel format due to that.

• Title: Gone Girl
• Author: Gillian Flynn
• Year: 2012
• Finished in: 19th Oct 2018
• 2/5

Under the Skin – the Novel

The film was one of the most pleasant and surprising experiences I’ve ever had with films. I knew practically nothing about it going to the screening, and it completely blew me away. Definitely one of the best films of the millennium, maybe even the best. It horrified me to no end, without being a horror film, and it told of something essential in the human nature, that I hadn’t realized or experienced in quite this way ever before.

I didn’t realize, at the time, that it was a novel adaptation. When I did, I had to pick up the novel to see, if I could find another similar experience. Nope, nothing of the sort found here. The film takes only the premise from the novel, but heavily adapts pretty much everything. Not sure, if from necessity, since the budget was practically non-existent, or if it just sparked some ideas that were better than what the novel contains.

In the novel, we follow some… thing, that appears close to human at first. She goes around in her near broken down car picking up hitchhiking men for some sinister purpose. This is as far as the similarities between the film and the novel go. I’m not going to reveal more about the film, since it is an exceptional piece of work that heavily relies on not knowing anything about it beforehand. The novel goes on to slowly reveal, that the protagonist is not actually human and that the men she picks up, end up as fodder for the aliens. The aliens are a species that lives mostly underground, but the elite of that species have developed a taste for human meat, so some of the species have to go above-ground and hunt for this valuable food stuff. The protagonist has gone through extensive surgical procedures to appear more human. The novel proceed to delve into this alien culture and the ethical justification for the hunting of humans.

Unfortunately after the first third of the novel, it loses any tension. Too much is revealed and the alien culture and the characters drawing from it are just not interesting. Their differences are too big that the presumable tense ethical dilemmas seem like badly drawn caricatures and fail to touch on the reader’s emotions.

• Title: Under the Skin
• Author: Michel Faber
• Year: 2000
• Finished in: 16th Sep 2018
• 1.5/5

Altered Carbon season 1 – the Series

There’s never too much high quality cyberpunk / post human sci-fi in the world. This is a pretty run of the mill neo noir story of a detective going after a complicated case. We get all the trappings of both noir detective stories and cyberpunk sci-fi – it is the execution, where this excels.

Sci-fi these days tends to be self indulgent presentation of mind-tickling ideas, but no emotional connection – a tour of “hey, look how neat the future could be” moments, where the characters and story are just an excuse to go on the tour. That’s interesting in itself, but without interesting characters and plot, the whole falls quite flat.

Film noir on the other hand, has always been about strong characters and sort of fantasy – the viewer needs to buy into the characters acting the way they do, but after that one required step taken by the audience, the fantasy pretty much automatically provides emotionally gripping stories.

The combination seems like a match made in heaven. This is by far not the first time the combination has been made, so no points for originality. This also does not rise above the combination to produce singularly spectacular art, so no points for that either. It is just a really well executed version of this with good characters, good plot, nice ideas, and good enough production team to execute all of it well down to the last detail. The result is an excellent piece of entertainment.

• Finished on: 24th Aug 2018
• 3.5/5

Altered Carbon – the Novel

Similarly to the Gone Girl novel and film, the novel and adapted TV series are very close to each other. Differently from the Gone Girl case, the novel doesn’t attempt to be a script, and here both the novel and series are actually entertaining in themselves instead of being slightly interesting film school exercises in plot control.

Not much new to say, except that Morgan has a way with words that pulls you in, like a good novel should. Despite having seen the series before reading the novel, the novel evokes new images and atmospheres. Not high art, but very good execution.

• Title: Altered Carbon
• Author: Richard K. Morgan
• Year: 2002
• Finished in: 17th Mar 2019
• 3.5/5