tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-42275543883621677702023-11-15T15:54:59.337+00:00cinema | architectureCinema, architecture, arts, and whatever it comes into my focus.Pablohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15887502533607948733noreply@blogger.comBlogger156125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4227554388362167770.post-71828770539084300542015-09-11T14:40:00.000+01:002015-09-11T14:40:17.549+01:00Stalker<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Tarkovsky's Stalker may have been based on Arkady & Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic, or on part of it. However, it is not a cinematic adaptation of it. </span>Pablohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15887502533607948733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4227554388362167770.post-75208994869971943092015-05-31T13:37:00.001+01:002015-05-31T13:37:20.293+01:00Fellini's Amarcord<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The marionette like blind accordion player, providing the score for the comedy and tragedy of life in a coastal town in pre-war Italy is, perhaps, one of the most enduring images coming out of Fellini's imagination, an image that lingers in the mind, appearing in my conciousness on the most unexpected moments. Re-watching <b>Amarcord</b> brought that character solidly to the front of my mind, again. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Fellini, to my mind, had this uncanny skill to mould real people, actors, into a world created out of his imagination, a world where reality and fiction are just one seamless reality, where reality becomes fiction, and fiction reality. The world he creates, or re-creates (does it matter?), in this film falls clearly into this category. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Even the fascists are portrayed as figures of parody, terrifying, yes, but still parody, like the battle that a fascist uniformed gang had with a gramophone playing the International on the church tower during a visit from a regime dignitary, and the subsequent portrayal of the wheelchair bound fascistic commander, overlooking the comedy like interrogation of the lone socialist in the town. Yet, Fellini's gaze is always humane. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">His films just linger in the mind, even after many years after watching them, the atmospheric scores by Nino Rota being essential ingredients.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Just some thoughts. Many words have been written about his cinema. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>Amarcord</b> at IMDb: <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071129/">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071129/</a></span>Pablohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15887502533607948733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4227554388362167770.post-11512065514108657582015-05-20T12:33:00.004+01:002015-12-16T13:49:56.442+00:00Revisiting David Lynch's TWIN PEAKS<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">One of the rewards of a spring clean up is re-finding old pearls, such as <i>David Lynch's</i> <b>Twin Peaks</b>, a VHS video tape that seems to be a condensed version of Fire Walk With me:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I just love the creamy soft, painting like, nature of not only Lynch film, but also of the medium, such a rest in this age of 4K video. Still very impressed with the dark unsaturated browns of the colour palette, depicting so well the dreams and nightmares underlying those white fences and well equipped kitchens of American suburbia, the exclamations of fascination by urbanite FBI Special Agent Cooper with those forests, with those majestic Douglas fir trees, adding to a feel of a disjointed place. An exploration of so much of Lynch work, with Fellini likes undertones, such as the dwarf dance.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Laura Palmer, a 17 year old Twin Peaks belle, is found murdered, naked, wrapped in a sheet of plastic. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Laura Palmer, straights As in every subject, top of her class, the face of the year, the Homecoming Queen, her father being a trusted lieutenant of the local big wig, hints of a feudal like social structure in here, too. of A picture of achievement in every way.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Laura Palmer. Twelve year old girl writing in her brand new diary the dark feelings populating her subconscious, eventually taking hold of her life.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Laura Palmer. 13 year old cocaine addict, who fucks everybody to pay for her habit, including her father's employer.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Laura Palmer. 13 year old star of orgies held in the midst of those forests that fascinated agent Cooper so much.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Laura and Bobbie. Voted as Best Couple by their High School.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Laura Palmer. HHomecoming Queen.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Laura Palmer. 15 year old prostitute.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Laura Palmer. 16 year old beautiful daughter, pride of her parents.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The film hints at the darkness of her story, at the darkness of this small town near the border with Canada. <b>The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer</b>, <i>As seen by Jennifer Lynch</i>, is much more explicit of her story. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">David Lynch, a worth exponent of American Gothic in cinema.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>Pablohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15887502533607948733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4227554388362167770.post-3169219148194347082015-05-17T13:57:00.002+01:002015-12-16T13:50:22.133+00:00Reflections on John Maloof's FINDING VIVIAN MAIER<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><b>Spy, nanny, photographer</b>. A John Le Carré thriller? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">"Who are you?"</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">"I am a spy", was Vivian Maier response, according to a man, a linguist, who knew her, as reported in John Maloof's cinematic quest of the person behind the myth, behind the urban legend that she has become. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Not long ago, a fellow photographer whom I had not seen for about twenty years, we paced the streets of Hull, sometimes together, during the late 1970s, came to me with</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">"Vivian Maier was like one of us",</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">the implication being that we have still to be discovered. I suspect that he is not the only one thinking that. Perhaps that is one of the factors fuelling her popularity. Yet, was she? This man, now retired, was an outreach and lecturer in photography, while I am an amateur with some local notoriety, with a couple of solo and several group and open exhibitions behind me. On our age there is the web, with that myriad of blogs, sites, dedicated to street photography. My eyebrows were raised. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Maloof's film is as much as about our reactions to her photography as it is about her, the initial scenes with the camera panning from blank face to blank face, people who mostly knew her as a nanny, or a woman who rented her storage space, getting a V Smith when she pressed her for a name.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The linguist did not understand, and looks like that he still cannot understand, why she called herself a spy. Maloof does not elaborate in the subject, perhaps because of his desire to present facts as he managed to uncover, and see, them, letting us to interpret, and judge. Yet she, to my eyes, said as it is. Aren't we, strange creatures trawling the streets day after day with a camera in one hand, a thick skin on the other, spies of our humanity, of our, using that well known expression, human condition?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">"A nanny! What is a nanny doing taking photographs?", was another common response of those interviewed. As if <i>photographers take photographs, nannies take care of children, photographers do not take care of children, nannies do not take photographs</i>, a box like mindset that characterises our increasingly specialized societies. The responses of the cultural establishment approached, such as MoMA and Tate Modern, falls in a similar slot. There is a too mummified view of culture, of the arts, too often. All this continuing debate about is photography an art form, what defines a street photograph, who cares about it? I do not. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Yet, her work has become a favourite of not only so many fellow photographers, but of the public too. Is that because we see her as seeing the world as we do, from down the excitement, the comedy and tragedy, and, sometimes, the dangers, of the pavement, and not from a pedestal, that pedestal promoted by the art galleries? Matthew D'Ancona, on a completely different subject, mentions in an article for The Guardian that we, human beings, are complex creatures with often contradictory, and conflicting, thoughts, feelings, emotions. Does not her photography reveals that complexity, as the work of so many so called street photographers do? I had had comments on a similar vein about my own work. People such as her went out and made an image of the world as she saw it, as she understood it, as she felt about it. Naive she was not, living in Chicago, or New York, access to galleries, to contemporary photography, was always at her reach. Her mother had a camera, too. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">She explored under the skin of the world outside, and around, her. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">One of the photographs that Maloof dug out of her as a child lingers, still, on my mind, a child with inquisitive eyes, unflinching in her directness to the camera, to the person behind it, as if she wanted to be that person. It reminds me of my own initial interest in photography, back in the 1970s, not of my fatigued feel of four decades later, of my desire to penetrate under the skin of a society, of lives, of people, who were alien to me, who are still alien to me, who always will be alien to me, yet I still continue in my quest. Is it not what photography, street and documentary photography, is about? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The picture of Vivian Maier that Maloof paints to us is that of a complex human being, with conflicting emotions, with a compassionate and non judgemental eye, yet with a dark side, a lone person, the daughter of French immigrants (at least, her mother was), who, probably, suffered a traumatic experience in her youth that marked her outlook and mindset, who was not interested in the drapes of success, who looked down on her employers, yet who yearned for some kind of recognition, of acceptance, in spite that she just did not fit in it, as one of her former employers brutally mentioned. A person who had the freedom of an outsider, without the ties and prescribed behavioural, social and cultural moulds of those inside a culture, a society, a person who basked in that position. Her photography has a kind of longing feel, a desire to be in, and out, of what she was photographing. That is what makes it be so endearing for me. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">She was, more or less, of my mother age. The world she portrays has so many similarities with my own family photo albums, to even my own experiences as a kid. </span></div>
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Pablohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15887502533607948733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4227554388362167770.post-62298811692372737632015-02-03T13:05:00.001+00:002015-02-03T13:05:29.865+00:00Why I stopped writing this blog?Two years ago I just stopped writing on this blog. The trigger was Google's decision to put all their services under one roof, the common factor being Google+. The consequence of that was that images I had posted here, with permission from film studios and distributors, in some cases with the specific request that they should be posted only on this blog, and nowhere else, were showing in my Google+ account under Photos. In one swap, Google put me in breach of copyright. Thanks you very much.<br />
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In anger, I just stopped carrying on with the blog.<br />
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However, Google's action was the trigger, not the actual reason, or reasons, to stop writing. Not long before that, I already had stopped posting the weekly <i>what's on</i> in British cinemas, as I had been doing since 2009, when Cinema-Architecture was started. I was just tired of spending a good deal of a day, or so, gathering information about the latest releases, some of the distributors' websites are just hopeless, about films, many of which I had not the slightest interest in them. In a way that heralded the end of the blog as it has been conceived: as a mouthpiece to show case the kind of cinema disregarded by the film studios, distributors, and chains, although in hindsight, it was not in the cards then,<br />
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I tried to make Cinema-Architecture to be as inclusive as possible in the world of arthouse and world cinema, yet I was receiving little support from many of the independent distributors whom, for understandable reasons, were more interested in well established media and blogs. That was the conundrum. I did not even get the support of the still existing Hull Short Film Festival. I was also involved in a support group for Hull Screen, then this city only independent cinema showing non-mainstream films. In spite of our efforts, audiences continued to dwindle. Talking to people, they seemed to have quite a narrow view of arthouse cinema, not daring to go out of their comfort zone. I also had the bitter experience of my views being disregarded (not so much by the support group committee, I hastily add) too often by members of the audience on post performance conversations, the unsaid feel of their belief as myself being quite ignorant, as I am not British.<br />
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I was also becoming disillusioned with the kind of films I was supposed to review, mostly Asian comedies and blockbusters, ie, Hollywood mainstream cinema being replaced by Asian ones. One of the Asian distributors stopped sending review DVDs, wanting me to increase my costs by incurring in a heavy use of my broadband connection.<br />
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In short, I did not gain enough support from non mainstream film makers and distributors, and plain disillusionment of their output.Pablohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15887502533607948733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4227554388362167770.post-90775863078006631082015-01-11T12:10:00.000+00:002015-01-30T19:52:38.120+00:00I confess that...<span style="font-family: inherit;">I have been out of cinema for nearly two years. As I am closing my hosting space in a couple of months, or so, meaning that the http://framecinema.org.uk/ will disappear (I never really did any new work on it), I decided to revive this blog. Yesterday I spent many hours reformatting and cleaning it out.</span><br />
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However, its nature will change. I no longer intend to conduct regular reviews of new films, either on the silver screen, or DVD format, but I will write about what I gain, what I get out, of a film. I will be revisiting many arthouse and world classic movies, to my eyes. I shortly will be writing some notes on Kieślowski's <b>Ten Commandments</b>, filmed for Polish television in the late 1980s.</span><br />
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I will no longer be posting announcements for the screening of films, either here in Hull, or elsewhere, as I used to do with the old version of it.</span><br />
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<br />Pablohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15887502533607948733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4227554388362167770.post-62805660006133343822012-10-19T18:01:00.002+01:002015-01-30T19:55:46.494+00:00Petty Romance reviewed<br />
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Kim Jeong-hoon's debut feauture, Petty Romance, is said to be one of South Korea's box office smash hits, and I can understand why this was the case, as it does not only warms the heart, but also increases paper handkerchiefs manufacturers' profits.<br />
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The film is a light comedy, its rather mundane story line of boy meets girl, they pretend they do not like each other, when they do, with the expected tear jerking closure, is raised by the quality of its acting, and the integration of Seok Jeong-hyeon's adult Korean comic book style illustrations, used to express the inner thoughts and feelings of the protagonists. Jung-bae (Lee Sun-Kyun), a talented but rather unsuccessful cartoonist, a brilliant illustrator, but not so good at story telling, hires Da-rim (Choi Kang-hee), a cirpy sex columnist who have just been fired from her magazine, to see if he can have a chance of winning a multinational adult cartoon contest. Da-rim's exuberant imagination makes up for her total lack of experience on sex and love, a galore of comical scenes follows, and hinting at the role laying we do every day to get on in life.<br />
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The story goes through the usual “will they?”, with the expected highs and lows of their relationship, contained jealously of their lives outside the times they spend together. However, this mundanity is raised by the illustrations interlaced into the plot, produced, and imagined, by both of them, as the comic book gets written.<br />
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A heart warming and enjoyable comedy that lays open to our prying eyes the process of producing an adult Manwha, a Korean comic book.<br />
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Petty Romance DVD is out for sale in Britain under the Terracotta Distribution label.<br />
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<b>A SEX COLUMNIST AND A COMIC BOOK ARTIST TEAM UP TO CREATE THE ULTIMATE FEMALE ACTION MANGA HERO.</b><br />
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Starring: Lee Sun-kyun (Oki's Movie, Paju, Night and Day, Coffee Prince), Choi Kang-hee (My Scary Girl, Whispering Corridors), Oh Jung-se, Ryu Hyun-kyung<br />
Korea / 2010 / 118 Mins / In Korean with English subtitles<br />
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One of South Korea’s biggest box office smashes, first-time director Kim Joung-hoon’s PETTY ROMANCE comes to UK on DVD 8th October 2012<br />
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Spectacular action and sizzling love scenes from the couple’s imagination were given life through the hand of award winning illustrator Seok Jeong-hyeon.<br />
The movie captures the process of adult animation production and director Kim Jeong-hoon uses a great technique of mixing feature film and adult Manwha (Korean comic books) for erotic & fighting segments when the couple’s inner thoughts come alive into action.<br />
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Synopsis<br />
An adult cartoon contest is announced offering a $100,000 prize. Talented cartoonist Jung-bae (Lee Sun-Kyun) is constantly turned down by publishing companies because of his poor story lines. To raise his chances of winning, he hires a sex advice columnist, Da-rim (Choi Kang-hee), a self-claimed expert on relationship and love-making with big imagination and zero experience. For the cartoon competition, Da-rim comes up with the idea of a female assassin, Ma Mi-so, who keeps her male victims captive for erotic kicks.<br />
The two, who seemed perfectly matched, team up for the lucrative prize, bringing out their respective wildest fantasies. Trouble is set to brew: will they be able to complete the task and win the competition?…<br />
Live action interspersed with erotic and action manga scenes. <br />
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DVD Special Features <br />
Making of<br />
Interview of lead actor and actress<br />
Korean Teaser Trailer<br />
Stills Gallery<br />
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Comedy, 2010<br />
Certificate 15<br />
Country: South Korea.<br />
Language: Korean with English subtitles.<br />
Running time: 118 min Pablohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15887502533607948733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4227554388362167770.post-48024999393288384122012-10-19T17:18:00.000+01:002015-01-31T16:48:17.409+00:00Tetsuo: The Iron Man, and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, reviewed<br />
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What
I remembered of Shinya Tsukamoto's <b>Tetsuo: The Iron Man</b>, when I
first saw it in the big screen sometime during the 1980s, was the
frenzied and high contrast imagery, rather than the story itself,
rather minimalist: a man, a lowly pawn in the economic and social
order in post-war Japan, becomes an iron cyborg, the voyeuristic
camera gazing at his despair as the transformation of his body takes
place. A kind of alchemist transmutation of lowly, rusting, and
discarded iron, into something else, into a kind of cyber cyclop, a
process being guided by an iron fetishist he ran over when going
out for a ride with his girlfriend, on what was termed, at the time,
cyber-punk.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Undoubtedly,
the anarchist anti-establishment ethos of the film, reflected on the
visual craziness, is akin to punk in its frenzied imagery, dislocated
juxtapositions of extremely short abstract takes piled one of top of
the previous one, merging into each other at other times, a frenetic
clash of human flesh and scrap metal, the opening scene being
dramatically brutal, scenes populated by cyber zombies, a recurrent
image of transmuting iron worms acting as a kind of leitmotif across
both films being particularly effective in portraying the sensual
nature of decaying scrap metal, made alive by this process of
transformation. The soundtrack is also rather memorable, adding to
this feeling of brutaleroticism with its torrent of industrial
sequence of sounds, punctuating the torrent of images invading our
eyes.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
fact that it was shot on black and white 16 mm film stock on a low
budget, as an afterthought , following the success of an underground
theatrical performance, also written and directed by Shinya
Tsukamoto, adds to the aura of transgression surrounding it, which
made Tetsuo: The Iron Man a cult film residing in the outer regions
of cinema, hence this release on DVD and Blu-ray formats under the
<b>third window films</b>
label, together with Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (which is not, really,
its sequel, but a different treatment of the subject), a digitization
process done under the careful eyes of Shinya Tsukamoto. While on
the interview contained in this release, Tsukamoto does not confronts
the political undertones of Tetsuo, implicit in the label of punk, he
does, indirectly, refers to it, as he repeatedly mentions of his work
at the time in an ads agency, and the nature of the first appearance
of Tetsuo as an underground play.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What
most impressed me of both films, but particularly on The Iron Man, is
the beast-like baroque sensuality and eroticism imbued in this
aesthetic of scrap metal and raw flesh, allusions to rusting iron
hinting at not only the hardness of a male industrial fetishism, a
kind of cyber-porn rather than cyber-punk, the scene of the drilling
iron penis sported by the “salaried” man, aimed at his spooked
girlfriend, is probably one of the most memorable sequences in cinema
in its horrendously erotic bestial beauty, a metaphor for the inner
brutality of a certain kind of male psyche; but also to the
industrial decay of abandoned warehouses and factories, dark, scary
underpasses, the harsh environments of urban railways, and roof tops
of faceless skyscrapers (in Body Hammer) that store the countless
pawns that make a contemporary industrial society tick.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">By
acts of obsessed will, on both films, the scrap iron littering this
decaying landscape is slowly transformed into cybernetic cyclops,
encompassing and absorbing several individuals (particularly in Body
Hammer), massive and near pornographic cyborgs in their aggressive
maleness, bent on taking on the world, cyborgs of apocalypse
unleashed onto the quiet streets of suburbia, and onto the greyness
of industry.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Women's
roles on both films are subservient to the brutal aggressive and
predatory maleness of their partners, of which they are not aware
until it is too late to step back, a situation savagely alluded in
the scene of the exploding child on a roof top in Body Hammer. In
this sense, women prove to be incapable of arresting this
transformation of their partners, fuelled by a visceral will of
destruction and revenge.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;">This
will is the trait that unify both films. It does not matter if they
succeed, what is important is that process of transmuting the
materials that litter the edges of a contemporary industrial society,
either rusting iron, or lowly cannon fodder, men and women that no
one sees, into a powerful force that challenges that society, that
established order. </span>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
bestial beauty of destruction...</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And,
perhaps, of creation...</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Both
Tetsuo films are part of a tradition of horror/science fiction
genre, although with a rather raw DIY quality, acquiring a kind of
visceral realism, which differs from the more polished mainstream
cinema offerings. I found The Iron Man, the original Tetsuo film, to
be the strongest one of the two, precisely because its story line is
bare, having been reduced to its essential core. Body Hammer makes
too many nods to mainstream cinema in its plot, such as the mad
scientist, the criminal underground organization, the gangster-like
characters, and the flashbacks to childhood traumas. Déjà vu. I
presume the introduction of these elements was to make Tetsuo II a
better box office proposition.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Cyber
-punk, or cyber-porn, transgressive, and ultimately subversive, both
Tetsuo became cult films, yet neutralized by mainstream culture by
the act of pushing them into that box.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b><span style="color: orange;">Tetsuo:
Thee Iron Man / Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, are out in a 2 disc DVD and
Blu-ray sets in Britain, under the </span>third window films<span style="color: orange;"> label.</span></b></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b><span style="color: orange;"><br /></span></b></span></div>
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<h4 class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">TETSUO:
THE IRON MAN<br />TETSUO II: BODY HAMMER<br />(cert 18)</span></span></h4>
<h3 class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">A
film by Shinya Tsukamoto (</span><em><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Kotoko,
Snake of June, Vital</span></span></em><span style="color: black;">)<br /> </span></span></h3>
Two of the most talked-about Japanese cult films of all time makes their way onto a double-disc blu-ray set for the first time in the world with a brand new high definition transfer supervised by Shinya Tsukamoto!<br />
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This 2 disc blu-ray and DVD set will include a brand new exclusive interview with Shinya Tsukamoto as well as the first English-subtitled release in the world of his 45 minute pre-Tetsuo student film ‘The Adventures of Electric Rod Boy’ which has also been remastered<br />
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The release will feature both a slipcase as well as a reversible sleeve so fans can choose whether they’d rather have an image from Tetsuo I or II on the front of their box.<br />
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Tetsuo: The Iron Man - Japan / 1989 / 67 Mins / In Japanese with English subtitles / B&W / 16mm<br />
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Tetsuo II: Body Hammer – Japan / 1992 / 83 minutes / In Japanese with English subtitles / Colour / 16mm<br />
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DVD/BLU-RAY Special Features:<br />
<br />
New High Definition Transfer supervised by Shinya Tsukamoto<br />
Exclusive interview with Shinya Tsukamoto<br />
'The Adventures of Electric Rod Boy' - Shinya Tsukamoto's early film<br />
New UK Trailer<br />
Japanese Theatrical Trailers for both Tetsuo I & IIPablohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15887502533607948733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4227554388362167770.post-91592402264284580662012-09-06T04:30:00.000+01:002015-01-10T18:33:30.350+00:00CORPO CELESTE reviewed<br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Such a
pleasure to watch the intelligent, inquisitive, yet restless, Marta,
as her gaze takes in the sights, the sounds, the smells, of her new
city, her new reality, and attempts not only to comprehend it, but
also, more importantly, to carve her own space within it, to sculpt
her own identity by doing so.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;">Marta
(Yle Vianello, such a beautiful name), a 13 year old who has grown up
in Switzerland, has recently moved to deeply Catholic and
conservative Southern Italy (the film was shot in Reggio di Calabria)
with her mother and older sister, Rosa. Alice Rohrwacher, director
and writer, in this stunning debut feature film, casts a non
judgemental eye, and her lens, not only on a young girl's desire to
mould herself within this new reality, within this new community, she
feels like an outsider, and is constantly reminder of it by Santa,
the priest's assistant, who runs the catechism classes she has to
assist in order to undergo the Catholic ceremony of the confirmation;
but also on her curiosity on her own growing body, as we see her
contemplating in a mirror her burgeoning breasts, then for her to
appropriate, and wear, her older sister's bra. </span>
</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
moment where she finds out that she had had her first period, in a
restaurant up the mountains having a snack with the priest, Don Mario
(Salvatore Cantalupo), is set by Alice Rohrwacher as a matter-of-fact
attitude by Marta, part of her process of growing up, of
understanding of her reality, of her being. Her subsequent meeting
with the old priest in a disused church located in a deserted village
up the Calabrian mountains, paradoxically, by unsettling the view of
Catholic doctrine as is being imparted on her, leads her to the
independent path she is to follow to carve her identity.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
scene where she asks the meaning of the ritual words she has to
repeat during the Confirmation ceremony in the catechism class, just
to be sharply rebutted by Santa, resonated deeply in me, as it
reminded of a experience I had some 40 years ago, in a completely
different context, I had when I asked my Mathematics teacher ( I
still remember his name) about the meaning of an equation. His
rebuttal led me to completely abandon Maths at school, in spite of
having been quite good at it. Somewhat, watching this scene, I
understood Marta starting to recoil from her Catholicism, or, rather,
from this deeply conservative vision of it that her community has,
and tries to make her to sign to. Alice Rohrwacher's camera
constantly reminds us of this traditional attitude, as when Marta
watches from a rooftop a group of old women singing a religious song
in a courtyard, or the initial scene, shot in the night, contrasting
a pilgrimage against the secular background of passing trains, and
the greyness of that no-man land found in our cities between railway
lines, motorways, as dawn breaks-in.</span></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
sad episode of the kittens does not only contributes to her
increasing independence of her own self, but also exposes the
unwitting double standards, perhaps even hypocrisy, of the
Catholicism of the local community, when Marta, and her fellow
classmates, enjoy themselves with the kittens they found in the store
room of the church, just to be sharply rebutted, yet again, by a
disgusted Santa, who gets the janitor to “take care” of the
kittens. Marta, in despair, follows him, and watches as he beats the
plastic bag where the tiny creatures are on the road, before throwing
it into the river. After her attempts to save them fails, Marta is
found wandering on the autostrada by Don Mario, the priest, who takes
her to a political meeting. to which she wanders in, when she was not
suppose to do, before climbing the mountains in search of a crucifix
in that abandoned church, a crucifix he needs to make the
Confirmation ceremony special, in an attempt to arrest the continuous
decline of his church, perhaps giving him enough kudos to get a
transfer by the bishop to a bigger parish. As Don Mario tells Marta,
being a priest is also a job, what you do can make, or break, your
career path.</span></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;">The
Italy of Corpo Celeste is not that of postcards, or the tourist
office advertising boards, what Alice Rohrwacher constantly shows us
is a ravaged landscape which has been altered, used, abused, and even
abandoned, as Marta's and Don Mario's personal pilgrimage to that
abandoned village in the mountains shows, and leading to epiphany for
both of them. </span>
</span></div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I have
read elsewhere users comments, where the tone is: “Who cares about
the state of the Catholic Church?” Perhaps it may be so,
particularly for British, or American audiences. However, I feel that
Alice Rohrwacher may have not made Corpo Celeste for those audiences,
in spite of having been distributed both in Britain and in the Sates.
Hollywood studio cinema, to which we are getting more and more used
due to their relentless marketing campaigns, is, mostly, designed as
commercial products to satisfy the craving for entertainment of
global audiences. Corpo Celeste belongs to another kind of cinema, a
cinema that looks into the dynamic of small communities, of small
lives, into their humanity.</span></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Corpo
Celeste is not only about the tribulations of a girl growing up, or
about the state of the Catholic Church as seen in the context of a
small community, but, fundamentally, casts an eye on a sense of
identity in a world which is constantly evolving.</span></div>
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #e69138; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>Corpo
Celeste is released by Artificial Eye in the UK on DVD & Blu-ray on 10
September 2012.</b></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/pIKxnk9-qOk?rel=0" width="640"></iframe>
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<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Set
deep in the south of Italy, <b>Corpo
Celeste</b> is the story of
13 year old Marta who is struggling to resettle after ten years
growing up in Switzerland. Bright-eyed and restless, she observes the
sights, sounds and smells of the city but feels very much an
outsider.</i></span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 0; text-align: left; widows: 0;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><br />
</i></span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 0; text-align: left; widows: 0;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Marta
is about to undergo the rite of confirmation. In the convention of
the Catholic Church she takes catechism but confronts the morality of
the local Catholic community. A series of subtle moments trace her
journey as she connects and conflicts with her mother, sister and the
Sunday school teacher Santa. From experiencing her period to making a
bold decision to cut her hair, Marta begins to shape her own life for
the first time since moving back to Italy.</i></span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-right: -1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><br />
</i></span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-right: -1.27cm; text-align: left;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><b>Corpo
Celeste</b> heralds the
arrival of a young and distinctive voice. Alice Rohrwacher’s
writing and directing debut is a sensitive unveiling of the moral and
religious layers that can smother adolescence.</i></span></div>
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>EXTRA
FEATURES:</b></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Interview
with the director Alice Rohrwacher</b></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<br /></div>
Pablohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15887502533607948733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4227554388362167770.post-5734969643171833292012-08-20T14:10:00.000+01:002015-01-10T18:33:40.944+00:00The Monk reviewed<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Dominick
Moll's <b>The Monk</b> follows the rise and downfall of Father Ambrosio
(Vincent Cassel), a Capucin friar who was raised, and have lived all
his life, within the walls of a monastery located just outside 17</span><sup style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">th</sup><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
Century Madrid.</span></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
film begins with a voice over a dark night scene, describing how
Ambrosio came to the monastery, a baby dumped on its main doors after
the servant carrying the tiny bundle that stormy night refused to
dump him into the river, as evidently his instructions were, when
lighting revealed a figure of the Virgin Mary, as if she was watching
him, a kind of ancient Big Sister, or so he felt. Remember, what we
are talking about here is deep Catholic Spain, centuries ago.</span></div>
</div>
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</span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As
the years pass away, Ambrosio's fame as a passionate, fiery and
uncompromising preacher grows, the church overflowing with
parishioners during his sermons, to the point that at least one of
them, a young woman, Antonia (Joséphine Japy), faints the first time
she heard him preaching. Obviously, this is the 17<sup>th</sup>
century equivalent of a modern day rock star, all that adulation...</span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But
the monk is a preacher who lacks the compassion of those who have
lived.</span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A
key scene is when Ambrosio heards the confession of an inveterate
sinner, and now pedophile (Sergi López), who describes the
debauchery of his niece in great detail, whom he felt as if she were
her own daughter, a confession which almost felt as if he was
taunting the priest, perhaps trying to tempt him to go astray too.
This character reappears at the end of the film, in different
circumstances and guise, closing the story. About this time, Ambrosio
tells Father Miguel (Jordi Dauder), his mentor and the friar who
picked him up as a baby from the threshold of the monastery all those
years ago, of a recurrent dream he has been having, a dream in which
he sees a young woman clad in a red cloak, praying in front of the
church, a woman whom he doesn't see her face, and whom he cannot
touch.</span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Another
key scene is where Ambrosio confesses a young novice, Sister Agnès
(Roxana Duran), a confession that led to her death in the most
horrendous circumstances at the hand of the Mother Superior
(Geraldine Chaplin makes an appearance here). The same Mother
Superior whom we see sternly humping the ground as she marches at
the head of her covered novices during a procession of the Virgin
Mary, a procession used by Ambrosio as cover to commit the deed that
leads to his downfall, and punishment at the hands of the
Inquisition, presumably. A deed like the one he himself sent Sister
Agnès to her death.</span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
monk's fame also attracts a mysterious novice, Valerio (Déborah
François), to the monastery. A novice who turns to be someone other
than what he pretended to be, becoming the tool that led to his
downfall, paradoxically after saving his life. Did Valerio do what he
did unwittingly?
</span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Meanwhile,
Ambrosio grows increasingly obsessed with Antonia, the nature of
their real relationship, and the horror that follows, not revealed
until the very end, in an scene that ties together all the loose
strings.</span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
Monk brilliantly conveys not only the febrile religiosity of a deeply
flawed friar high on rhetoric, and short on compassion, but also the
contradictions between an oppressive Catholic Church and the zest for
life of the population in 17<sup>th</sup> Century Spain.</span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However,
I felt that The Monk hovered indecisively between being a horror
film, and one exploring the nature, and the excesses, of extreme
religious fervour, as the episode with the myrtle branch, itself an
ancient emblem of love, indicates.</span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #e69138; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>The
Monk is released in the UK by Metrodome Distribution on 20</b><sup><b>th</b></sup><b> August
2012</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Certificate
15 / 101 Minutes</b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/1-16fPfYwvA?rel=0" width="640"></iframe>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><span style="color: #222222;">Directed
by Dominik Moll (</span><span style="color: #222222;">Lemming
/ Harry He’s Here To Help</span><span style="color: #222222;">), </span><span style="color: #222222;"><b>THE
MONK</b></span><span style="color: #222222;"> is
a sumptuous adaptation of the eponymous cult classic Gothic novel
which follows the rise and fall of a Capuchin Monk in 17th
century Madrid.</span></i></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Abandoned
as a baby on the steps of a monastery and raised in strict Capuchin
fashion, Ambrosio has become the most famous preacher in the country.</i></span></span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i><br /></i></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>While
large crowds from all over the country come to hear his mesmerizing
sermons, he’s also bitterly envied for his success by certain
fellow monks.</i></span></span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i><br /></i></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Convinced
of his virtue and righteousness, Brother Ambrosio thinks he is immune
to temptation until obscure events start terrorizing the monastery.</i></span></span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i><br /></i></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Could
they be connected to the unexpected arrival of Valerio, an apprentice
monk who has the miraculous gift to relieve Ambrosio’s splitting
headaches and hides his disfigured face under a wax mask?</i></span></span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i><br /></i></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Starring
Vincent Cassel ( Eastern Promises, Mesrine & Black Swan) Déborah
François ( L’Enfant, The Page Turner) Sergi López ( Pan’s
Labyrinth, Harry He’s Here to Help & Dirty Pretty Things) and
Geraldine Chaplin ( Talk to Her, Doctor Zhivago & The Orphanage)</i></span></span></div>
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
Pablohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15887502533607948733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4227554388362167770.post-15467902282520110382012-08-16T21:30:00.002+01:002015-01-10T18:33:50.514+00:00Silent Souls, a meditation on tradition and modernity<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: justify;">The burial of Tanya (Yuliya Aug), the
beloved wife of Miron (Yuriy Tsurilo), according to the ancient
traditions of the Merya people, gave director Aleksei Fedorchenko,
and writer Denis Osokin, the vehicle to produce this visually
stunning film, a cinematic poem not only about life and death, but
also about the asphyxiating space left for the traditions, rites,
ways of life of minorities, such as the Merya people, to culturally
survive in the increasingly corporate and globalized space of
contemporary life.</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Miron, the manager of a rather
dilapidated paper mill on post Soviet Union Russia, and Aist (Igor
Sergeev), a forty something bachelor, who works as a photographer in
the mill, embark on a long road journey for the cremation of Tanya's
body, and the burial of her ashes, on the flowing waters of the
river, according to their tradition. At one moment, during their
travels, we see them wandering through the “stacked to the roof”
aisles of a large supermarket in a provincial town, marvelling, to
some extent, at the wide variety of goods, toying with some plastic
toys. I could not stop having a feeling of nostalgia when I was
watching this scene. I decry the increasingly cultural homogeneity
and conformity resulting from the advance of modern capitalism.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Silent Souls is more than just a road
film, it is a journey as much through a cultural landscape, through a
landscape of the mind, as through a physical space. Miron finds out,
as he “smokes”, in this road trip with Aist, much more about
Tanya than he knew at first. “Smoking” is being defined in the
film as a practice of the Merya, where they narrates intimate details
of their conjugal relations after the spouse has died, if their
interlocutor agrees. I am not sure if “smoking” is the right
translation of the Merya word.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Visually, the stunning footage of the
camera focussing on Aist's bicycle as he pedals home with the two
birds he had just bought, tells us from the very beginning the nature
of Silent Souls, not only a journey through the interstices of
contemporary Russia, but a cinematic ode to the desire to escape from
that confinement, from our confinement, in fact. Indeed, from this
point of view, the sexual encounter between Miron and Aist with the
two women after the burial is not only a song to life, but also a
song to freedom, to be away from the sadness of death, from the ties
of life. On this sense, the escape of the two buntings that Aist
bought from a rather taciturn street seller, at the beginning of
their journey, become inexorably linked to the escape of both Miron
and Aist at the end of their road trip, as they return to the river.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What initially began as a journey
initiated by Miron to honour his wife in death, as he did in life,
through his “smoking” it also becomes Aist's journey, as it
became clear that he was not only in love with Tanya, too, but he
also brings up his own remembrances of his parents, the ridicule that
his father, a poet in the Merya language, suffered. A scene comes up
of Aist, as a child, helping his father to bury a typewriter in the
river. Then, their encounter with the two women becomes an act of
liberation for both of them, as it was their final act, when they
return to the river, where a typewriter is waiting for Aist, while
Tanya awaits Miron.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/aABLmtX56Xs?rel=0" width="640"></iframe>
Pablohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15887502533607948733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4227554388362167770.post-84606666159453359092012-08-13T21:35:00.000+01:002015-01-10T18:34:01.262+00:00Orlando reviewed<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Tilda Swinton's performance,
in its nuanced directness, was central for Sally Potter to realize
her vision, her interpretation, of Virginia Woolf's novel into
cinema.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In this masterly classic of
British cinema, Tilda Swinton plays the four hundred year old, or so,
Orlando. By the end of the story, she has become free of all the
encumbrances of gender, class, property, history, particularly
depicted in that scene when she returns, with her young daughter,
riding a motorcycle with a sidecar, to their ancestral stately home,
a rather palatial residence by the Thames, serenely mingling, and
watching, the usual throng of tourists, no-one commenting, or even
seeing, the uncanny resemblance of the woman standing beside them
with the portrait of her as young Orlando on the wall, a painting of
her when she was still a young man in the 17<sup>th</sup> century. As
the character says, talking to us, the viewers: “Same person,
different sex. That's all”.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">By returning to the nest
where her (his) career began, she is now free to fly out of that
nest, which is, ultimately, a nest of vipers. Illuminating is the
scene where, having recently become a woman, she endures the disdain
of a gathering of enlightened 18<sup>th</sup> century poets,
including Alexander Pope, who all conclude that a woman needs the
guiding hand of a father, or a husband, all questioning her presence
in the salon on her own.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In Sally Potter's
interpretation of the central character of the novel, the film opens
with young Orlando reading, and writing poetry under an oak tree,
preparing himself to the forthcoming visit of the old Queen Elizabeth
I (sublimely portrayed by Quentin Crisp). After, briefly, becoming
her lover, the Queen grants Orlando the deeds of the ancestral
stately home, on one condition: that he shall not grow old. This is
how we get to see him, now a woman, on the same field in the closing
scene, daydreaming under that same oak tree, her daughter running
around, a video camera replacing the quill that the younger Orlando
used to write his poem The Oak Tree, all those centuries past, and
recently accepted by a rather obnoxious publisher (upon rewriting it,
of course), whilst an angel (Jimmy Sommerville) appears floating
above the trees (we see, in the features section of the Blu-ray disc,
how this was achieved), falsetto singing, the future shining for them
as a tear slowly runs down her face.
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She no longer looks directly
at the camera, confiding in us, the audience, as she did in the
opening scene. There no longer need for that.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The episode where Orlando
fells madly in love with Princess Sasha (Charlotte Valandrey), the
daughter of the Russian Ambassador (Viktor Stepanov), during the
great frost of the beginning of the 18<sup>th</sup> century (these
scenes were filmed in Russia), much to the chagrin of the
aristocratic young lady to whom he is betrothed. This scene sets the
pace and the mood for the rest of the story, as we see over and over
Orlando defying the social conventions of the time as she follows her
own path, her own heart.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The other scene that Sally
Potter sets up to show Orlando's nature is when we see him worrying
for the fate of a rebel attacking the city in Central Asia, where he
has been posted as an ambassador by the king (while in the novel this
city is indicated as being Constantinople, in the film the actual
location is not specified), taking no notice when he is told that it
does not matter, that the fallen soldier is not a man, but the enemy.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Further adventures follow,
where, Orlando, becoming a woman after a long sleep, returns to
England, taking hold of her ancestral home, and its delights, until
it is finally taken away from her as she is legally dead, and, on top
of that, by being a woman, she can no longer hold the deeds of the
property.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Upon meeting the loquacious
and idealist Shelmerdine (Billy Zane), she has a daughter, and but
she refuses to go with him to America, where the future lies, by
simply asking him “when this future is going to come”.By doing
so, she liberates herself, and her daughter, from all the ties
entrapping her to the zeitgeist.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>“Same person, different
sex. That is all”.</b></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This Blu-ray release
contains a series of documentaries on how the film was made, plus an
interview to Sally Potter, which would be of interest to cinephiles.
Particularly enlightening is the section that narrates the ins and
outs of filming in Russia, just before the collapse of the Soviet
Union.</span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b><span style="color: #cc0000;">Orlando</span><span style="color: #e69138;"> Blu-ray disc is already
on sale in Britain, courtesy of Artificial Eye.</span></b></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Sally
Potter’s dazzling adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s classic novel is
the tale of the apparently immortal Orlando, who begins an epic quest
for love and freedom in the court of Elizabeth I as a man and
completes the search 400 years later as a woman. This journey takes
Orlando from the frozen river Thames and central Asia, where he
changes sex, through to romantic love and loss in the Victorian age,
motherhood and war in the twentieth Century, until finally arriving
in the present moment. Tilda Swinton leads an outstanding
international cast in this enchanting, witty, visually stunning and
brilliantly original story of self-discovery, romance and adventure.</i></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #17365d; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Special
Features</b></span></div>
<ul>
<li><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Documentaries
‘Orlando Goes to Russia’, ‘Orlando in Uzbekistan’
</span></div>
</li>
<li><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and
‘Jimmy Was An Angel’</span></div>
</li>
<li><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Selected
scene commentary by Sally Potter</span></div>
</li>
<li><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Interview
with Sally Potter</span></div>
</li>
<li><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Venice
Film Festival press conference</span></div>
</li>
<li><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Theatrical
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Stills
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Pablohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15887502533607948733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4227554388362167770.post-1796785711097580672012-08-12T19:30:00.000+01:002015-01-10T18:34:12.559+00:00Himizu reviewed<br />
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</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">An intense and
claustrophobic drama, ultimately cathartic, played against the
desolate and hellish landscape of Fukushima, post tsunami, where the
violence of human relationships resonate in the violence inflicted
upon the landscape, and its people, by nature.</span></div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yet, that intense focus is
constantly relieved through the film by the often hilarious antics of
a group of survivors camped in tents on the land where Yuichi
Sumida's family runs a boat hire business, imparting a kind of
normality to the destructive lashes of the tsunami, and the seismic
nature of the relationships between Sumida (Shôta Sometani) with
his family, and then with a young girl, a classmate, Keiko (Fumi
Nikaidô), also fifteen.</span></div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When I said Sumida's
family, that was an overstatement, when you consider that his mother
comes every night with a different man, and his father, who is
usually drunk, keeps beating him up, and telling that he wants him
dead, as he then can claim for the insurance money he thinks he has.
On the opening scene, we see the boy walking on this grey and utterly
devastated landscape, the photography becoming darker, we then see
one of the survivors, an older man who usually behaves like the
proverbial buffoon with a heart of gold, still wearing a white shirt,
his business having been wiped out. A rather muddy lake near the boat
house, with an incongruently and precariously located shed in the
middle, acts as a visual leitmotiv which constantly reminds us of the
closed and muddy prospects awaiting all of them, a metaphor which I
have seen in many recent Japanese films, although more in the context
of the brutal economic conditions. In this sense, the boundaries
between dreams and reality are eroded, a dream scene opening Himizu
resolves the development of the story on a different direction at the
end, that initial dream scene having thrown us off the story line,
somehow.</span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sumida wants only one
thing in life, not to have a dream as his teacher keeps
indoctrinating the kids at school, but just to be ordinary, like a
<b>himizu</b>, a mole. Not a strange request, considering his dysfunctional
family. Keiko, a classmate, falls in love with him, much to his
embarrassment at the beginning of their relationship. But she
persists, particularly when we see her mother lovingly building a
gallows for the girl to kill herself, as life would be so much better
if Keiko was not around. A gallows painted red.
</span></div>
</div>
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</span></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Keiko does not only falls
in love with Sumida, although he is constantly feel annoyed by her,
but she sees in him a project to develop, too. A project where she
can also develop herself. When the boy's mother finally leaves him
for not to come back, Keiko, and the group of survivors, try to help
Sumida to run the boat hire business, his only way of being able to
subsist, in spite of his rejections. Yet, any attempt by him to try
to run just an ordinary life, his dream, gets constantly scuppered by
the constant apparitions of his drunken father, demanding money and
psychologically torturing him. One night, after suffering another
brutal beating by him, one beating too many, something breaks inside
Sumida, and in a moment of absolute rage and impotence, he attacks
and murders him, to be almost instantly horrified by his action. In
despair, he stalks the streets of the nearby town, attempting to get
rid of all those violent people, like his father, who also roam those
streets.
</span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A tale of two brutalized
teenagers not only by the devastating power of nature, but also by
their selfish and destructive families, a tale of a journey through
hell and, ultimately, redemption, against the backdrop of the
hellish landscape of Fukushima (this is the second Japanese film
which has been filmed there that I have reviewed), and the darkness
offered by their future: emptiness, and the gallows.</span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I found particularly
attractive the manner that director Sono Sion has structured Himizu
as a counterpoint between the central tale of Sumida and Keiko
searching for their morrow, and a chorus, like those of a Greek
tragedy, formed by that group of survivors, who finally leave with
the coming of the redemption of the two teenagers, the closing
luminous scene alluding to the dark dream like opening scene.</span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b><span style="color: #e69138;">Sono Sion's </span><span style="color: #cc0000;">Himizu</span><span style="color: #e69138;"> is out
on selected British cinemas from today, June 1</span><sup style="color: #e69138;">st</sup><span style="color: #e69138;">, 2012,
courtesy of Third Window Films.</span></b></span></div>
</div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<br />
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Dir: </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sion Sono
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Writer: </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Minoru Furuya (manga),
Sion Sono (screenplay)
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Cast: </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0.5cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Shota Sometani, Fumi
Nikaido, Tetsu Watanabe, Mitsuru Fukikoshihi, Megumi Kagurazaka,
DenDen
</span></div>
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Set after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, all
14-year-old Yuichi Sumida (Shota Sometani) wants to become is a
regular boy and live a decent life. His environment though repeatedly
drags him into the mud. He runs his parent's rental boat business,
which is located next to a nondescript lake. His mother frequently
comes home with different men and soon she leaves him entirely. His
father only comes around looking for money. Whenever Yuichi's father
is drunk he tells Yuichi "I wish you were dead."</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Keiko Chazawa (Fumi Nikaido) is a classmate of Yuichi
Sumida. She harbors a severe crush on Yuichi. Keiko's home life isn't
much better than Yuichi's. Her mother builds a gallows with a noose
in place for Keiko to take her own life. Her mother believes her life
would be better off without Keiko.</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Under these circumstances, Keiko pays a visit to
Yuichi's home. A group of people are lingering nearyby who live in
make shift tents on the property. Keiko tries to befriend Yuichi, but
she is berated and even physically assaulted. She doesn't get
deterred though and sticks around.</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>One day, the yakuza come by Yuichi's home. They look
for Yuichi's father who is nowhere to be found. The men then tell
Yuichi that he has to come up with 6 million Yen by tomorrow to pay
off his father's debt. Yuichi already heartbroken by his mother's
abandonment and abuse from his father nears a tipping point. A string
of incidents then occurs that brings Yuichi's world to a screeching
halt. Is there light at the end of the tunnel for Yuichi?</i></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Date of Domestic Cinema
Release: </b></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">June 1st, 2012
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Events: </b></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://thirdwindowfilms.com/events/2012/04/19/himizu-at-the-ica-cinema-in-london">'Himizu'
at the ICA Cinema in London</a>
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://thirdwindowfilms.com/events/2012/04/19/himizu-at-the-prince-charles-cinema-in-london">'Himizu'
at the Prince Charles Cinema in London</a>
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://thirdwindowfilms.com/events/2012/04/25/himizu-at-the-renoir-cinema-in-london">'Himizu'
at the Renoir Cinema in London</a>
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://thirdwindowfilms.com/events/2012/04/19/himizu-at-the-aberystwyth-arts-centre">'Himizu'
at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre</a>
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://thirdwindowfilms.com/events/2012/05/26/himizu-at-the-irish-film-institute">'Himizu'
at the Irish Film Institute </a>
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://thirdwindowfilms.com/events/2012/05/04/himizu-at-the-duke-of-yorks-in-brighton">'Himizu'
at the Duke of Yorks in Brighton</a>
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://thirdwindowfilms.com/events/2012/04/25/himizu-at-the-riverside-studios-in-london">'Himizu'
at the Riverside Studios in London</a>
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://thirdwindowfilms.com/events/2012/06/01/himizu-at-the-glasgow-film-theatre">'Himizu'
at the Glasgow Film Theatre</a>
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://thirdwindowfilms.com/events/2012/05/26/himizu-at-the-eden-court-cinema-in-inverness">'Himizu'
at the Eden Court Cinema in Inverness</a>
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Awards: </b></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">68th Venice Film Festival
- Marcello Mastroianni Award, 14th Deauville Asian Film Festival -
Critics Prize, 4th Terracotta Film Festival - Audience Award, 30th
Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival - Orbit Prize
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Festivals: </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">68th Venice Film Festival,
36th Toronto International Film Festival, 16th Busan International
Film Festival, 44th SITGES International Film Festival, 14th
Deauville Asian Film Festival, 8th Hong Kong Asian Film Festival,
21st Oslo International Film Festival, 26th Mar Del Plata
International Film Festival, 30th Brussels International Fantastic
Film Festival </span>
</div>
Pablohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15887502533607948733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4227554388362167770.post-25492187211674433872012-08-12T12:52:00.000+01:002015-01-10T18:35:08.451+00:00Avé reviewed<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Avé</b>
depicts a journey through the roads of Bulgaria as Kamen (Ovanes
Torosian), a rather taciturn art student, hitch-hikes from Sofia to a
village, Ruse. To begin with, we do not know why, we only know
something extraordinary may have happened, as the previous scene
showed a member of staff at the art school wanting to talk to him.
However, we soon learn that he is going to a funeral of a close
friend, another art student, Victor, who has killed himself. The
reasons for this act are never explicitly said, although we may infer
those, as the story develops. Kamen is obviously disturbed, and
brooding, by the death of his friend. However, what is interesting
is that we learn about this fact through Avé (a wonderful Angela
Nedialkova), a runaway 17 year old girl who kind of joins him on his
journey on a road going out of Sofia.
</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She has a penchant to fabricate,
and tell, stories, herself, and Kamen soon becomes part of this
spider web coming out of her imagination, these stories she
constructs from the flimsiest treads she finds in every situation
that she, and now, Kamen, find themselves embroiled, sometimes
potentially violent, with some of those drivers who have picked them
up, including a pedophile lorry driver ( Martin Brambach), although I
thought that the depiction of this particular character was a bit
clichéd. She, having probably spent a longer time hitch-hiking , has
become much more street-wise than Kamen, her stories are, in part, a
construction of a imaginary character for her to have some street
credibility, and protection.
</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However, I have to stress the
words in part, as the narrative progresses, a much darker story
emerges. Whilst the film is, apparently, a story about this uneasy
couple, Kamen being very hostile to her to begin with, and told,
mostly, from his point of view, as the camera is more often than not
focussed on him, the girl is, in reality, its centre. Avé is a
exploration into her psyche, as one of the stories she tells Kamen,
in private, turns to be true, a tread which links her past, her
recent journey, and her morrow, a scene that ends the film not with
an answer, a closure, but leaves the door open for the mind to
further delve into what is to come.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is the beauty of <b>Avé</b>, the
fact that behind what seems to be, on first sight, a simple road
movie set in Bulgaria rather than on the wide plains of North
America, there are glimpses of a complex and troubled psyche, and the
transformation of both characters, his initial hostility to her
becoming love. There is a significative scene, near the end of the
film, where we see Kamen, now on his own on board of a train,
repeating to a stranger those stories he first heard from her lips, a
device he not only uses to give him a cover for his actions without
exposing his inner feelings to the outside world, but as a way to
remember her, to live her own story within himself.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Bruno S., whom we know from
Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, and Stroszek, plays a part as
the grandfather of the dead boy, Victor. An interesting casting, as
I consider both films to be road movies, literally in the case of
Stroszek, and figuratively in the case of The Enigma of Kaspar
Hauser.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Konstantin Bojanov's film is an
assured and striking debut feature, exploring not only the
complexities and development of both main characters, but also a kind
of survey of contemporary Bulgarian society as we see, through their
eyes, those people who have picked them up, the places where they
have stayed, all those highways, those road side cafés, those bus
and railway stations.</span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b><i><span style="color: #e69138;">Network is pleased to announce
the DVD release of this road trip with a twist- </span><span style="color: #cc0000;">AVE</span><span style="color: #e69138;"> (15) is available
to buy on DVD on 28th May 2012.</span></i></b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>KONSTANTIN BOJANOV DIRECTS THE
STARTLING TALE OF TWO TEENAGERS ON A ROADTRIP ACROSS BULGARIA. ONE IS
A COMPULSIVE LIAR, THE OTHER IS HAUNTED BY THE TRUTH.</i></span></div>
<i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: justify;"><br /></i>
<i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: justify;">Recalling classic road movies
such as The Passenger, Five Easy Pieces and La Vie Revée des Anges,
and inspired by haunting real-life events and encounters, Konstantin
Bojanov’s debut feature is as spontaneous and freewheeling as the
characters’ adventures. Portraying the unfolding of two personal
dramas with levity and humour, this remarkable, triple-award winning
film explores exceptional moments when time feels suspended, and
one’s responsibility is only to the beat of one’s own heart.</i><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>While hitchhiking from Sofia to
Ruse, Kamen, an alienated art student, meets Avé, a 17-year-old
runaway. With each ride they hitch, Avé invents new identities for
both of them, her compulsive lies dragging Kamen deeper and deeper
into trouble, drawing him into a confusing adventure and ultimately
forcing them to confront both death and love in a cathartic and
life-changing experience.</i></span></div>
Pablohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15887502533607948733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4227554388362167770.post-31205580506922898272012-05-22T12:12:00.000+01:002015-01-10T18:35:33.231+00:00Crime or Punishment reviewed<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">An
alarm clock goes off. A hand stops it. The camera focuses on the
daily routine of a office worker in Tokyo. On his way to work, he
stops in his usual shop, to get a smile from a beautiful assistant,
who gives him his usual purchases, just they are somebody else's
purchases, as she mistook him. Then, this invisible man, people keeps
banging, and looking down, on him, witnesses a murder, when a woman's
body fell in front of him. He cannot find his mobile, so he crosses
the street to a public phone, and gets run down by a fancily decorated
truck. When the truck departs, a young woman is there, standing,
watching, almost unbelieving what her eyes are seeing.</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Meet
Ayame Enjoji (Riko Narumi), a rather unknown, and shy, model who has
been getting printed out upside down in a fashion/softcore magazine
for men for which she models. A flashback reveals that she had come
out of the magazine office, disgruntled because not only no one
wanted to know about her complaints, but they laughed at her, being
nicknamed as “the upside down” model. Her school friend, Momo
(Sakura Andô), has become the cover girl, and laughs at her too.
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ayame
steals a copy of the magazine from the shop, the same one we saw at
the beginning, where a man wearing a uniform was sketching the floor
layout. Of course, shy Ayame gets arrested and, as a PR stunt, her
agency arranges for her to be the police chief for one day. On her
first speech as such, high on a podium, in front of a bunch of press
photographers, the wind lifts her skirt, and all the camera start
clicking. This rather innocuous scene, I thought, is quite a key one
in the film, as it points out at the flesh merchandise value
attributed to young women (one of the furtive actions of the office
worker we saw at the beginning was to grope young women in the
underground), adding to their sense of unsecurity, a theme which has
been treated a number of times in recent Japanese cinema.
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As
the police chief for a day, she is taken seriously by the force, and the officers wait for her commands in her rather surreal office. Commands that, at
the beginning, she finds to be incapable of issuing. Ayame also meets
her former boyfriend, now a detective, from whom she split five years
before, a dark secret being the reason. There is a link here to the
beginning of <b>Crime or Punishment</b>. However, near the end of her
tenancy of her post, and resolving a hold up on that shop, she finds
her feet, and becomes a self confident young woman, now sure in
her path.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>A
riotous comedy, a parable on contemporary urban life in Japanese
society, <span style="color: #cc0000;">Crime or Punishment</span> grew out of a scene in a play staged by
Nylon 100°C, the theatrical company founded by Keralino Sandorovich,
who also directed the film. In fact, this quality permeates through
its scenes, many which were shot in enclosed spaces. The final
scenes, in particular, had the hallmark of a theatrical comedy.</b></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
DVD also contains excellent features, one of them being a short film
of a scene from the play. Many of the actors from the play also acted
in the film.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #e69138; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>Crime
or Punishment DVD is now on sale in Britain, brought to you by third
window films.</b></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/xhzOUeBfY5w?rel=0" width="640"></iframe>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Have
you ever experienced a day when you are carrying on as usual just
like the day before but strange things keep happening one after
another on that particular day? This is a slapstick comedy, like
Kafka’s novel, filled with incongruous nightmares and nonsensical
laughter.</i></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Ayame
(Riko Narumi) is an unsuccessful girl celebrity, who happens to take
on the PR role of a “police chief for a day”. The job of a
campaign girl is to smile and act as a police chief for one day. It
should have been a simple job, however, the police station staff
treat her like the real police chief and look to her for
instructions, which makes Ayame feel perplexed. In addition, she runs
into her ex-boyfriend, Haruki (Kento Nagayama), who is now a
detective at the station, which means her ex is her subordinate for
the day.</i></span></span></div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Furthermore,
Haruki holds a dreadful secret which was the cause for the couple’s
separation. To make matters worse, a major event takes place on that
particular day, and the situation takes an unexpected turn. Would
Ayame be able to solve the case, and what is Haruki’s secret?</i></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><b>Director
- Keralino Sandorovich Profile</b></i></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><span lang="en-GB">Born
in 1963 in Tokyo. In 1982 he formed a new wave band, Uchoten. In
1985 with Inuko Inuyama and Minosuke he also established a theatre
company, Gekidan Kenko, where he commenced theatrical works. After
the company’s dissolution in 1992, the following year, he formed
Nylon 100</span>℃<span lang="en-GB">. He won the 43rd Kishida
Kunio Drama Award for his “Frozen Beach” in 1999. In the
theatre, in addition to productions by his theatre company, he headed
up and participated in other troupes as well as participating in many
external productions. His recent works include an award winning
</span>“<span lang="en-GB">Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?” by
SIS Company Inc.(Directed), “Okasankana” by Cube</span><span lang="ja-JP">(</span><span lang="en-GB">Written
and Directed</span><span lang="ja-JP">)</span><span lang="en-GB">,
and “The Lower Depths” by Theatre Cocoon on Repertoire 2008
(Directed). In films, he directed “1980” (2003), “A Delicious
Way to Kill” (2006) and “Gumi Chocolate Pine” (2007) as
well as this film. As for TV dramas, he wrote the script and produced
“Jikokeisatsu” (TV Asahi, eighth episode) and “Kaettekita Jiko
Keisatsu” (fourth episode).</span></i></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><b>CAST
& CREW</b></i></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Written
& Directed by Keralino Sandorovich</i></span></span></div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Riko
Narumi, Kento Nagayama</i></span></span></div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Yasunori
Danta, Inuko Inuyama, Hajime Yamazaki, Megumi Okina, Koji Okura,
Sakura Ando</i></span></span></div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Yui
Ichikawa, Yu Tokui, Eriko Sato, Seiji Rokkaku, Minosuke, Yasuto Hida,
Hitomi Takahashi ,</i></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><span style="color: black;"><span lang="en-GB">Akira
Otaka, Kumiko Aso, Takuya Ishii, Masato Irie </span></span><span style="color: black;">★ </span><span style="color: black;"><span lang="en-GB">Kazuyoshi
Kushida</span></span></i></span></span></div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Producers:
Joohoon Lee Mato Obata Hiroyuki Kitamaki Chikako Nakabayashi</i></span></span></div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Planning:
Norio Enomoto</i></span></span></div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Cinematography:
Shinji Kugimiya Lighting: Hiroshi Tanabe</i></span></span></div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Recording:
Satoshi Ozaki</i></span></span></div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Production
Design: Kei Itutsuji</i></span></span></div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Props:
Tetsuji Tatsuta</i></span></span></div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Editing:
Koichi Takahashi</i></span></span></div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Costume:
Atsuyuki Okada Make-up: Mariko Honda</i></span></span></div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Scripter:
Kaoru Yamauchi</i></span></span></div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>VFX:
Norio Ishii</i></span></span></div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Production
Manager: Ryuta Hashimoto</i></span></span></div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Music:
Fumio Yasuda</i></span></span></div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Production
Companies: Shipyard Company, Booster Project</i></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><span style="color: black;"><span lang="en-GB">Ending
Theme: (DefSTAR RECORDS) Song by Sowelu Produced by </span></span><span style="color: black;">☆</span><span style="color: black;"><span lang="en-GB">Taku
Takahashi</span></span></i></span></span></div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>©
“Crime or Punishment !?” Production Committee</i></span></span></div>
Pablohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15887502533607948733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4227554388362167770.post-43116986007498470752012-05-10T17:30:00.000+01:002015-01-10T18:35:57.290+00:00Mitsuko Delivers: a review<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>There
is a place in Tokyo which escaped unscathed the intense American
bombing during the Second World War. Yet, the urban myth is that an
unexploded bomb lies underneath the floor boards, after all those
years. Will it explode? Or, rather, when?</b></span></div>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This
place, a narrow working class tenement residential alley, remained
locked in a time capsule whilst the rest of the city was
re-developed, has become the last refuge of those fleeing the
exploding time bomb of the economic crisis affecting Japan for the
past couple of decades, or so.
</span></div>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This
place is where 9 month pregnant Mitsuko (Riisa Naka) drifts into
after following the cloud which has guided her since she was a child,
in a taxi she could not pay, leaving an astonished driver behind, who
never knew that such a place could exist in Tokyo after 20 years
driving a taxi. A dejected Mitsuko who just says “<i>Okay</i>” and takes
a nap until the wind goes her way. A rejected Mitsuko, not even her
new neighbour in her last home wants to talk to her, abandoned in
California by her American GI boyfriend, who finds her way back to
Japan with his still unborn child.
</span></div>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A
Mitsuko who refuses to surrender to the bad winds.
</span></div>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A
Mitsuko who goes back to the woman she calls Granny, the elderly lady
who owns and leads this alley tenement with an iron fist that masks a
compassionate soul, whom she knew as a child when her parents fled
their imploded parlour business to this very place. A place which is
now even more run down as it was fifteen years ago, as most of the
tenants have already left, with Granny the land lady now confined to
her bed. Here she also meets a grown up Yoichi (Aoi Nakamura), whom,
as a child, promised he would marry her when Mitsuko and her parents
left the tenement back to “civilization”. Now, the restaurant his
uncle and now him runs is also reflecting the bad times, the takings
are poor, customers are scarce. All being so “<i>uncool</i>”.</span></div>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What
does Mitsuko do? She just says “<i>Okay</i>”, takes a nap, then fills
the tenement with life as old and new tenants comes in, fills the
restaurant with new and returning customers, gets Yoichi's uncle Jiro
(Ryo Ishibashi) to declare his love for the woman who runs the café,
establishing a second love axis to the film over her own with Yoichi.
“<i>Okay</i>” and “<i>cool</i>” are her two favourite words. Perhaps a
reflection of not only her own relationship with that American
soldier who eventually abandoned her, but also the legacy left by the
American occupation of Japan after the end of the war?</span></div>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Meanwhile,
whilst organizing the trip of the café woman to, of all places,
Fukushima, to see her infirm mother, she comes face to face with her
parents, who still believe she was in California. However, Mitsuko
refuses to explain herself to them, as to do that is “<i>uncool</i>”, is
not “<i>okay</i>”. Finally, they all manage to go in the trip to
Fukushima, with Mitsuko driving, although, so close to the birth of
her child, she can hardly walk, even less drive. Yet she does it
because she wants to, because she does not want to stay still,
because to do so is “uncool”.</span></div>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When
in Fukushima, her baby finally arrives, the birth being as normal as
it could be in the midst of a field and the cacophony of voices,
gestures, movements of her parents and friends, including Granny, who
has recovered the use of her legs, as no one knew what to do; in
spite of the warning by her doctor that it would be a difficult
birth.</span></div>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Mitsuko
Delivers, a Japanese style comedy with a sting, a metaphor of
contemporary life for all of us, and which I truly enjoyed. Yûya
Ishii's camera caresses as much as the faces of heart throbs Riisa
Naka and Aoi Nakamura as it does with the details of life in this
alley, the back pack of Mitsuko as a child, the flower that Jiro
brings not only to the café woman, but also to Granny, whom he and
Yoichi takes turn to care for until Mitsuko appeared in the scene.</b></span></div>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Did
the unexploded bomb under the floor boards go off?
</span></div>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Come
and see the film, and you will know.</span></div>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #e69138; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>Mitsuko
Delivers will be shown on selected British cinemas from Friday 11 of
May, 2012, courtesy of Third Window Films.</b></span></div>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/yUFAvcii3yA?rel=0" width="640"></iframe></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mitsuko
is in her ninth month of pregnancy. Her parents (serial failed
entrepreneurs) think that she's in California with the baby's GI
father, and she's happy to leave them in ignorance. But she's
actually back in Tokyo, broke and friendless. So she has her flat
cleared, gets into a taxi she can't pay for, and follows a cloud back
to the little working-class alley where she grew up. The place is
pretty run-down and depressed these days, but Mitsuko's can-do,
bull-in-a-china-shop attitude soon shakes everyone up. There's much
to be done. The little diner needs more customers, the alley's
elderly woman owner needs carers, the tongue-tied man who could never
propose to the widow in the coffee-shop needs a push... So much to
do, so little time before Mitsuko goes into labour. Yuya Ishii
follows Sawako Decides with another breathless comic drama about a
girl asserting herself when all around her are floundering.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>INTRODUCTION</b></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
acclaimed filmmaker x the new muse of Japanese film</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Director
Yuya Ishii x Riisa Naka – two young talents join forces!</span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
28-year-old film director, Yuya Ishii, has now burst on the world
scene with his brilliant filmmaking. Ishii’s film ‘Mitsuko
Delivers’ was featured in the 37 th Rotterdam International Film
Festival and the 32 nd Hong Kong International Film Festival – an
exceptional honour for a fledgling director. At the Hong Kong Asia
Film Awards, Ishii was again recognized and awarded the inaugural
“Edward Yang New Talent Award.”</span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Back
home in Japan, Ishii won the Pia Film Festival Grand Prix in 2007 for
“Mukidashi Nippon” (Bare-Assed Japan) and followed up with the
mega-hit “Sawako Decides” (2010) for which he won the Best
Director at the Blue Ribbon Awards and the Best New Director Award at
the Yokohama Film Festival. His next film “A Man with Style” was
again, highly acclaimed. The entire world has been enthralled with
the originality of Ishii’s world that eludes categorization in any
single genre.</span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
actress chosen to star in director Ishii’s newest venture is Riisa
Naka, winner of this year’s Japan Academy Award for Best New
Actress. Her film credits include “Toki wo Kakeru Shojo” (The
Girl Who Leapt Through Time) and “Zebraman ~ Zebra City no
Gyakushuu” (Zebraman: Vengeful Zebra City) as well as a number of
TV commercials. Naka meets director Ishii’s world view head on,
with a boldness that belies her sweet image. Evolving as the newest
muse of Japanese film, “Hara Ga Kore Nande(Mitsuko
Delivers)
is
destined to be one of Naka’s showcase films.</span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Cast</b></span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Riisa
Naka / Aoi Nakamura / Ryo Ishibashi</span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Miyoko
Inagawa / Shiro Namiki / Miyako Takeuchi / Momoka Ohno / Yoshimasa
Kondo / Yukijiro Hotaru / Risho Takigawa / Shigeyuki Totsugi / Ryu
Morioka / Keiko Saito</span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Staff</b></span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Written
and directed by: Yuya Ishii</span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Theme
Song: “Ai Nante” – GOING UNDER GROUND (Pony Canyon)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Produced
by: Pony Canyon Inc., PARCO Co., SHOWGATE Inc., dub Co., Toei
Channel, PIA Co., Yahoo Japan Co., TOKYO FM Broadcasting Co., smoke
Co., Nippon Planning Center Inc.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Planning:
PARCO Co., Pony Canyon Inc.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Production:
smoke Co., dub Co.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Distribution:
SHOWGATE Inc.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ⓒ2011
“MITSUKO DELIVERS” Film Partners</span></div>
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</span></div>
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<br /></div>
Pablohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15887502533607948733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4227554388362167770.post-33797280065939675292012-05-10T16:31:00.003+01:002015-01-10T18:36:10.233+00:00War of the Arrows reviewed<br />
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</div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A Korean
re-interpretation of the superhero who sacrifices his life to save
that of a loved one, his sister in this case, fighting against all
odds a superior force of Manchurian 17<sup>th</sup> century
equivalent of special forces.</span></div>
</div>
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</span></div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The theme has been
treated in a number of films, particularly in Hollywood studios
productions. However, director Kim Han min has set this saga in 17<sup>th</sup>
century Korea, or Joseon as it was called then, when the Munchurian
invaded from the North, taking a number of prisoners with them. Only
a few of those managed to get back to the land of their birth.</span></div>
</div>
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</span></div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the <b>War of the
Arrows</b>, Nam Yi (Hae-il Park), the son of a so-called traitor, has
become an accomplished hunter, whilst his sister, Ja-in (Chae-won
Moon) is set to marry the son of their protector, a military officer
in a garrison in the North. Yet, when the Manchu invaders raided
their compound, taking his sister to slavery together with the
surviving population, Nam Yi sets to rescue her.</span></div>
</div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Some spectacular
archery feasts follow to his attempt.</span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Entertaining story,
although somewhat jaded.</b></span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b><span style="color: #cc0000;">War of the Arrows </span>is
already on sale in Britain on Blu-ray, DVD and VOD formats, courtesy
of Cine Asia.</b></span></div>
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</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/GRHzzbZOzCk?rel=0" width="640"></iframe>
</div>
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</span></div>
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<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Orphaned as a child,
Nam Yi overcame tragic loss to become the most accomplished hunter
and archer of his generation. When his beloved Korea comes under
attack from Chinese imperial forces, he returns from </i></span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">the forest to discover
that his sister, and only living relative, has been taken into
slavery by Manchu invaders. Now faced with the most daunting
challenge of his life, he must fight to re-unite his family and prove
his courage against the greatest archers history has ever know</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">n.</span></div>
Pablohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15887502533607948733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4227554388362167770.post-83100111672969177172012-04-10T20:09:00.003+01:002015-01-10T18:36:20.128+00:00MADE IN ARGENTINA reviewed<br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b><span style="color: #cc0000;">Absent</span>
and <span style="color: #cc0000;">Plan B</span></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Marco
Berger's two films, his debut feature<b> Plan B</b> (2009), followed by<b> Absent</b>
(Ausente), are being released this week by Network Releasing as part
of their excellent Made In... series.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In
<b>Absent</b>, his most recent feature (2011), a drama depicting the complex
relationship formed between Martín, a 16 year old boy in Buenos
Aires (Javier de Pietro), and Sebastián (Carlos Echevarría, a well
known Argentinian actor), his sport male teacher, in an out of school
swimming club, Marco Berger explores the teenager's sexuality,
expressed in his crush for the sport coach, and the developing and
complex feelings that Sebastián has for the boy, which goes from
questioning and brow raising at the beginning, as he is followed
everywhere by his eyes, to anger, as he realized that the injury to
the eye that Martín claimed to have suffered while being in the
pool, which led to a trip to the eye clinic, was no more than a ruse
to get closer to him, to test his reactions, as was the subsequent
inability to get back to his home, after a series of excuses. As a
result of them, Sebastián lodges the boy for one night in his
apartment, as he is not prepared to leave him in the street, although
he feels uneasy about it because of the impact it could have in his
career, in his relationship with his girlfriend Mariana (Antonella
Costa, who has been defined by Marco Berger as the “actress of her
generation”), and his reputation in the neighbourhood where he
lives.</span></div>
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</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">During
his stay at Sebastián home, and unknown to him as he sleeps, Martín
sensually caresses him, expressing his own feelings by this act. On
his part, Sebastián is not entirely sure how to handle the young
boy, and the reactions he is getting from his neighbours and the
gardener, as they both leave the apartment block in the following
morning. Once in the school, in the gossips of the rest room, he
learns that the police had been making enquiries, as a student did
not go home the previous night, his parents being in utter despair.
Sebastián, realizing that the student is Martín, feels extremely
uneasy, and keeps his head down. However, when he later on finds the
boy lurking around his car, confronts him and expresses his anger,
accusing him of lying, and culminating in a slap to his face. We are
here into Mamet's territory, as the power relationship between
student and teacher switches in favour of the former.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Meanwhile,
Martín, with his obsession for Sebastián, does not realize that he
is, in turn, the object of affection from Analía (Rocío Pavón), a
girl of his own age with whom he has been a friend since both of them
were little kids. She, not being aware of the course that the
development of Martín's sexuality is taking, insists in hanging on
with him. We are now in the territory of complex, ambiguous and
forming feelings and identities that the youngsters are developing.
Marco Berger certainly has that magic touch of celebrating the
complexity, and beauty, of these feelings in just a few frames.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
relationship between Sebastián and Mariana progressively gets more
distant and fragile as he struggles with his own feelings towards
Martín as time flows, culminating in the final scene where he
finally declares his love for the boy, who, at that point, is no
longer able to reciprocate.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">During
the shooting of Absent, Carlos Echevarría (Sebastián) found
difficult to film scenes which were apparently easy, while in others,
which were supposed to be more difficult, such as the final one, when
he meets Martín for the last time, in his imagination, after he
breaks into the swimming pool, he just sailed through. Javier De
Pietro, a young performer just out of Acting School, is very
convincing as Martín, while Antonella Costa (Mariana) adds that bit
of glamour.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Absent
is certainly a more mature, and ambiguous, work than Berger's debut
feature, <b>Plan B</b>, a comedy of sexual manners, a ménage à trois,
where the path that the two male protagonists, Bruno (Manuel Vignau)
and Pablo (Lucas Ferraro) is marked from the very beginning, the
question is not being when the pair are going to get together rather
than if, ditching on the way the third participant of this
arrangement, Laura (Mercedes Quinteros). In Absent, Berger's
treatment of the subject, of the development of male sexuality, is
more subtle, almost every scene ending in a cliff edge, myself not
being entirely sure what was going to happen next. <b>Plan B</b> is much
more straightforward: Laura has ditched Bruno, as she thinks he is,
frankly, an idiot, in favour of a photographer, Pablo, whom she
considers to be more serious. Yet, she still occasionally sleeps with
Bruno.
</span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Oh
the life of this young Buenos Aires people!</span></div>
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</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Bruno,
then, with the advice of his friend Victor (Damián Canduci), decides
to put plan B into action, which consists in befriending Pablo, in
making him fall for him, abandoning Laura, so that he can reclaim
her. However, plan B fails, as most of them do anyway, as he also
falls for Pablo, after being taunted in parties by a free spirit
girl, Ana (Ana Lucía Antony). The result of all this is that Laura
get ditched by both men, who end up as a couple. Mercedes Quinteros'
performance as Laura conveys the idea of a strong and free spirited
woman who can take these actions in the chin, as Mercedes says in an
excellent interview contained in the extra features of the DVD, she
is not the one who we can pity her with the words. Oh poor girl she
is not.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
score for <b>Absent</b> is just brilliant, almost being a complete work by
itself, embodying the complex emotions that are visually expressed in
the film, being created by the young Argentinian composer Pedro
Irusta, whom Berger met at University. Irusta also composed the score
for one of Berger's shorts, Reloj (Clock).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Both
films are well paced, particularly in <b>Plan B</b> Berger uses shots of
buildings, or fragments of buildings, to let the comedy “breathe”
between key scenes, and also conveying the background of the urban
life of a metropolis such as Buenos Aires, which is essential for
these stories of urbanites, and their life styles.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Both
<b>Absent </b>and <b>Plan B</b> explore the theme of the development of male
sexuality towards other males, they are not gay films as such, but
works that convey how heterosexual men can become entangled in
homosexual relationships. Because of this approach, Berger has
refused to submit them to Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals, as he does
not think them as Gay films. They are not, certainly, militant works.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Marco
Berger represents, perhaps, a new generation of Argentinian film
makers, as he writes, directs and edits his own films, the three
fundamental pillars of auteur cinema. Overall, he keeps to the
scripts he had written, with very few changes made during shooting,
mostly minor, if at all. He is currently in the preproduction stages
for his third film, the first one where he will have a female
protagonist. I would not say that he is actually enjoying to be mixed
up with the Argentinian arts bureaucracy, a novel experience for him,
but, certainly, coping with it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>With
thanks to Marco Berger for agreeing to be interviewed.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #e69138; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>Made
In Argentina: Absent and Plan B DVD set, is on sale in Britain
courtesy of Network Releasing.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/VMj8KEqjlXw?rel=0" width="640"></iframe>
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</span></div>
<div class="western" lang="en-US" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>ABSENT
</b>(AUSENTE)</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>The
second feature by Argentinean director Marco Berger, is a
psychological thriller. A provocative twist on a familiar scenario –
it explores the complex relationship between a teenage boy’s
obsession for his sports teacher - played out in an
atmosphere of escalating sexual tension and menace. When Martin hurts
his eye during a swimming class, his instructor, Sebastian, takes him
to hospital. On leaving, Sebastian offers Martin a lift home but, as
Martin had arranged to spend the night at a friend’s house, there
will be no-one expecting him. He insists it would be better to spend
the night with Sebastian. As Sebastian takes charge of the student,
he is dangerouslyunaware of the boy’s true intentions: that Martin
has engineered the entire situation in order to stay at his
instructor’s home…</i></span></span></div>
<div class="western" lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>CAST:
Carlos Echevarria and Javier de Pietro</i></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Special
Features on MADE IN ARGENTINA – TWO FILMS BY
MARCO BERGER:</b></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br />
<ul>
<li><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
making of PLAN B</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">English
interviews</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Una
Ultima Voluntad (A Last Wish) – short film</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Deleted
Scenes</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Image
Gallery</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
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</div>
<div class="western" lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This
film is included in MADE IN ARGENTINA - TWO
FILMS BY MARCO BERGER and available separately.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div class="western" lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>PLAN
B</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Bruno
is dumped by his girlfriend. Behind a calm, indifferent exterior, his
mind plots a cold, sweet vengeance. She, a modern girl, continues to
see him once in a while, but has another boyfriend –
Pablo. Bruno becomes Pablo’s friend, with the idea of eroding the
couple, perhaps introducing him to another woman. But, along the way,
the possibility of a Plan B arises. It may be a more effective one –
and it is also one which will put his own sexuality into question,
taking him into the secret, unexplored places of his own heart.</i></span></span></div>
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</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Set in Buenos
Aires, this witty, beguiling feature masquerades as a familiar
romantic comedy, only toconfound expectations by testing the
boundaries of gender and social demarcations. PLAN B is Marco
Berger’s first feature film.</i></span></span></div>
<div class="western" lang="en-US" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>CAST:
Manuel Vignau and Lucas Ferraro</i></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
Pablohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15887502533607948733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4227554388362167770.post-87945057544354775952012-04-10T13:49:00.001+01:002015-01-10T18:36:32.603+00:00RESISTANCE reviewed<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Amit
Gupta's <b>Resistance</b>, based on Owen Sheer's novel, looks at the
ambiguities resulting from the very thin line separating our impulse
to survive and collaborating with the enemy to do so, as a German
platoon takes over a desolate and distant Welsh valley, during World
War 2, after the failure of the Allied invasion of Normandy in D Day.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;">The
Germans find all the men had left the valley, so they are on edge,
yet they slowly start to uneasily befriend the women, who were left
behind. In particular, Albrecht (Tom Wlaschiha), the captain, falls
for Sarah (Andrea Riseborough), a relationship established between
them all the time on a knife edge. Sarah feels incapable to resist
the overtures of Albrecht, particularly due to the help given to the women by the Germans to run the farms in the middle of a severe winter, but her devotion to her husband, who is
supposed to be in the mountains with the other men from the valley
fighting the Germans, and her country, led her to play a double game:
on one hand, befriending the captain, on the other, planning her
escape. </span>
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Soon
news about the captured, tortured, and shot men from the valley start
to filter to the valley, while the captain tries to keep his men
alive until the nearing end of the war.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">While
I thought that the uneasy relationship between the invading Germans
and the women is handled quite sensitively, I found the whole
premise of the film unbelievable. A failure of D Day would had not
led to a German invasion of Britain, it would had only delayed the
end of the war for some time. Allied forces were already advancing
from Italy, while the Russian were doing the same from the East, the
German army was already weak in terms of men and resources, Germany,
the country, was already economically ruined.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Cinematically,
I found the constant use of flashbacks to the Russian campaign to be
distracting, at best, and completely useless at worst, as a
background of contained violence had already been established by some
much more effective shots of random executions in the valley.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #e69138; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>Resistance
DVD and Blu Ray is already on sale in Britain, courtesy of Metrodome
Distribution.</b></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/43ZTQHvq_-w?rel=0" width="640"></iframe>
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Starring
Andrea Riseborough and Michael Sheen</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.49cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;"><span lang="en">D</span><span lang="en">-Day
has failed and Britain is under Nazi occupation. </span>Following on
from its acclaimed cinema release, RESISTANCE comes to DVD and Blu
Ray in March. </span>
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sarah
Lewis (Andrea Riseborough), a 26-year-old farmer’s wife, awakes one
morning to find that her husband has disappeared along with all the
men in the valley. Assuming they have joined the Resistance, the
women of this tiny community pull together, taking on the running of
the farms, and wait, desperate for news. A German patrol arrives in
the valley, the purpose of its mission a mystery. When a severe
winter forces the two groups into co-operation, Sarah begins an
acquaintance with the patrol’s commanding officer, Albrecht (Tom
Wlaschiha). Cut off from the surrounding war, the lines between
collaboration, duty, occupation and survival become blurred.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;">Based
on the critically acclaimed novel by Owen Sheers, RESISTANCE features
sensational lead performances from British rising star Andrea
Riseborough (Brighton Rock, Made In Dagenham) and Tom Wlaschiha
(Enemy At The Gates, Valkyrie, Brideshead Revisited), and co-stars
Michael Sheen (Frost/Nixon, The Damned United). </span>
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Trailer
© Metrodome Distribution</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<br /></div>
Pablohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15887502533607948733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4227554388362167770.post-61905170144998563862012-04-02T19:18:00.001+01:002015-01-10T18:36:43.420+00:00Leon The Pig Farmer reviewed<br />
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</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I
suspect that to fully enjoy, and appreciate, this comedy, an
understanding and knowledge of London Jewish culture and traditions
would help, something I am lacking. However, this does not mean that
I was incapable of laughing, or, more often, quietly smiling, at the
irreverent humour.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However,
I did think that much of the humour, and the central story line of
the film, is constructed onto a series of stereotypes, those of the
Jewish family, the Yorkshire pig farmer, the supposedly liberal
artist (Maryam D'Abo), the adventuress, the arriving Jewish boy in a
flashy car, the male attitudes towards fatherhood, the artificial
insemination establishment, just to name a few. As a result of this
structure, I thought that the inherent humanity of the central
character, Leon Geller, is somewhat washed away.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
story is quite simple: Leon (Mark Frankel), a sensitive Jewish boy,
after resigning as a state agent for ethical reasons, finds that his
real biological father is a Yorkshire based pig farmer (Brian
Glover), due to a human error in the artificial insemination clinic,
to the horror of his “adoptive” father (David de Keyser), an
Orthodox Jew. This hiatus between the cultural traditions of the two
families, and the transgressive nature of their relationship, is the
engine driving the laughs.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b><span style="color: #cc0000;">Leon
The Pig Farmer</span><span style="color: #e69138;"> The Kosher Edition DVD is directed by Vadim Jean and
Gary Sinyor, and is already in sale in Britain, courtesy of Network
Releasing.</span></b></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mark
Frankel, Janet Suzman, Brian Glover, Maryam d’Abo, Connie Booth and
Gina Bellman star in Jean Vadim and Gary Sinyor’s hilarious,
acclaimed debut feature film </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background: #ffffcc;">Leon</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background: #ffffcc;">the</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background: #ffffcc;">Pig</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background: #ffffcc;">Farmer</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">.
Winner of 5 awards, including </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background: #ffffcc;">the</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Venice
FIPRESCI Prize and Edinburgh International Film Festival’s Best
First Feature in 1992, this 2-disc set
titled </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background: #ffffcc;">LEON</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background: #ffffcc;">THE</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background: #ffffcc;">PIG</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background: #ffffcc;">FARMER</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> – </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background: #ffffcc;">THE</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> KOSHER
EDITION contains high definition and standard versions of </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background: #ffffcc;">the</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> film
and is available to own on 26th March 2012, RRP £19.99. </span></i></div>
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i></i></span><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><span style="color: #222222;"><br /></span></i></span></div>
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background: #ffffcc;">Leon</span></span><span style="color: #222222;"> Geller
is a sensitive, angst-ridden Jewish boy at breaking point. Disgusted
by his job at a London estate agent, he quits to work in </span><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background: #ffffcc;">the</span></span><span style="color: #222222;"> catering
business. Equally frustrated by a thwarted romance, he then throws
himself into an intense affair with Madeleine, a non-Jewish, slightly
unhinged artist whom he befriends after a near-fatal collision. These
developments do not please </span><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background: #ffffcc;">Leon</span></span><span style="color: #222222;">’s
family…</span></div>
<span style="color: #222222;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #222222;">Then, he learns an unimaginable truth: he owes
his existence to artificial insemination, and thanks to a mix-up
at </span><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background: #ffffcc;">the</span></span><span style="color: #222222;"> sperm
bank </span><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background: #ffffcc;">the</span></span><span style="color: #222222;"> donor
was Brian Chadwick, a </span><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background: #ffffcc;">pig</span></span><span style="color: #222222;"> </span><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background: #ffffcc;">farmer</span></span><span style="color: #222222;">from
Lower Dinthorpe, Yorkshire. In deepening turmoil, </span><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background: #ffffcc;">Leon</span></span><span style="color: #222222;"> decides
he must now get to know his biological father – making yet more
extraordinary discoveries in </span><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background: #ffffcc;">the</span></span><span style="color: #222222;">process!</span></div>
</span><span style="color: #222222;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
SPECIAL
FEATURES: </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #222222;"> “</span><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background: #ffffcc;">The</span></span><span style="color: #222222;"> Unkindest
Cut of All” short film </span></div>
</span><span style="color: #222222;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
Audio
commentary </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Theatrical trailer. </div>
</span></i></span><br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
Pablohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15887502533607948733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4227554388362167770.post-89833329520929196872012-03-23T15:01:00.000+00:002015-01-10T18:36:54.895+00:00Jackie Chan 1911 Revolution reviewed<br />
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</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A nationalistic biopic
of Sun Yat-sen (Winston Chao), who has been said to be the founder of
modern China, after overthrowing the corrupt Qing dynasty and setting
up the republic in 1911, and his top military commander, Huang Xing
(Jackie Chan).</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>1911 Revolution</b> is a
conventional propagandistic film reminiscent of the wide eyed Soviet era films exalting the “achievements” and the “virtues” of the
Revolution, or the North Korean propaganda machine, where everybody speak, or rather, declaims like in the
history books, wide eyed, standing stiff, looking at a bright future,
usually symbolized by the rising sun over the horizon, or a similar
visual cliché, the camera filming them from below. A bad history lesson, without the usual Jackie Chan humour or his
antics, the last scene clearly indicating the attempt by the Chinese
Communist Party to cast itself as the true heirs of Sun Yat-sen's
legacy.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Some
of its themes were brilliantly treated by Bertolucci's <b>The Last
Emperor of China</b>. None of the subtlety and depth of analysis and
characterization of Bertolucci's film is found in Jackie Chan <b>1911
Revolution</b>, being no more than a Stalinist cult to a a significant historical figure portrayed as a one dimensional
cartoon-like hero.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Sun
Yat-sen and the 1911 Revolution deserve a serious cinematic
treatment, this one is not.</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #e69138; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>Jackie Chan 1911 Revolution is on sale now in Britain in DVD and Blu-ray formats, distributed by Cine-Asia.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/GXNMUh4Ckts?rel=0" width="640"></iframe>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Action
legend, Jackie Chan, commands the screen as Huang Xing: the fearless
resistance leader and military </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">genius,
who opposed a 20,000-strong Imperial Army during the 1908 Guang Xi
Uprising with only 200 men! Now, as military commander to legendary
revolutionary leader, Sun Yat-sen, he will lead an impoverished and
vastly outnumbered rebel army against the Emperor’s elite Royal
Forces in a battle that will change the course of history!</span></i></div>
Pablohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15887502533607948733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4227554388362167770.post-60938115139467482822012-02-27T19:24:00.004+00:002015-01-10T18:38:59.176+00:00The Front Line reviewed<br />
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</div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">During
the last days of the Korean war, the armies of both North and South
Korea battle for an isolated mountain, as which side possesses it is
essential for the final demarcation of the armistice border between
the North and the South during the ceasefire talks between both
sides. May I mention that both countries are still, technically, at
war, as no peace treated has ever been signed.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It
is quite interesting that <b>The Front Line</b> has been filmed now, as the
tension between the North and the South has again arisen, with
accusations and counter-accusations being thrown across the Armistice
line between the heavily armed but economically weak North, and the
South, one of the strongest economies in South East Asia. It is also
significative that the opening scene shows a military jeep wading its
way in the streets of Seoul through a demonstration held by students
who oppose the war and claim for the reunification of Korea. As it is
when one of the protagonists of the film, Lieutenant Kim Soo-Hyeok,
exclaims that <i>“the enemy is the war itself, not the commies”</i>.
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This
is a film about people who have died long before they actually die,
because of the brutality of the war, because of the many who they had
to kill, because killing becomes like breathing... Or, as Cha
Tae-kyeong (Ok-bin Kim), a deadly sniper in the North's army
nicknamed Two Seconds (because the bullet hits its target two seconds
before the shot is heard), says, after she has killed yet another
soldier from the South: <i>“What that the boy who sang?”</i> Or the
commander in the North's army, who used to know why he was fighting,
but he had long forgotten it in the mud, the rot and the blood
spilled on both sides.
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
way I read it, director Hun Jang did not make an anticommunist North
propaganda film per se, but rather cast his eye on the battle
fatigued people who were actually fighting each other rather than the
rather paranoid leaders and high brass from both Seoul and Pyongyang,
as we see Lieutenant Kang Eun-Pyo, the officer who was in that jeep,
being later reprimanded as he criticised his superiors for labelling
commies peasants who were given a gun and a kind of uniform by the
North just because they wanted something to eat. The climate and the
geography are unforgiving, have no illusions about that. The
depiction of this brutal war is also unforgiving, no illusions about
that either, so if you, readers, cannot stand scenes of extreme
violence, then this film is not for you.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Security
Command Lieutenant Kang Eun-Pyo (Ha-kyun Shin) has been sent to
investigate a possible communist infiltration in the so-called
Alligator Company, based in the Eastern front line, and the
suspicious death of its commander, who was found to have been killed
by a pistol used by the officers of the South Korean army. Once in
the Aero-k Hills, Kang Eun-Pyo finds his old friend Kim Soo-Hyeok
(Soo Goo) as a Lieutenant, also commanding the troops, a man he
thought was missing in action in an early episode of the war that we
see in a flashback. What he finds in those tough hills was not a
communist plot or infiltration, but extremely weary and fatigued
soldiers from both sides who just had enough of the war and who, in
between the fighting, had managed to establish some kind of human
contact. The kind of situation that is seen as intolerable in both
Seoul, as we see in the film, and we suppose in Pyongyang too, but we
do not see that as <b>The Front Line</b> is narrated from a South Korean
point of view.
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>The
themes in <span style="color: #cc0000;">The Front Line</span> are not new per se, the blood (of the
soldiers) and the glory (of the leaders), the two comrades in war who
face each other, but they fight together against all odds, the
liaisons established between enemy soldiers on the battle ground, the
hill which has changed hands more than thirty times just for the
leaders and the generals to draw a line on a map. However, director
Hun Jang has put them brilliantly together here, resulting in a film
which is both visceral in its realism yet intelligent in the way it
deals with its subject. This is not a war epic, but a film about war.
However, I thought that the flashbacks, while vital in many occasions
to understand the unfolding story, were also overdone.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
discs also contain the following enlightening features:</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Making
of</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Aero-k
Hill – Action and SFX making of</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A
daily record of battle – Making of production</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ceasefire
Agreement – Production design</span></li>
</ul>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b><span style="color: #cc0000;">The
Front Line</span><span style="color: #e69138;"> is released in Britain by </span>Cine-Asia<span style="color: #e69138;"> on DVD and Bluy-ray on
Monday 27 February 2012.</span></b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b><span style="color: #e69138;"><br /></span></b></span></div>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Fz1hJ-ms9RM?rel=0" width="640"></iframe>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><span style="color: black;">In
the final decisive battles of The Korean War, the battle-worn armies
of North and South Korea face a brutal deadlock on the rugged Aerok
Hills. Fears of treachery and collusion with enemy forces trigger an
investigation into the men of the South Korean Alligator Company. </span>
</i></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><span style="color: black;">A
veteran intelligence officer accepts the assignment and discovers
mysterious and tragic occurrences surrounding a former comrade he had
long thought dead. </span>
</i></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>In
the epic battle for survival that follows, the two men become locked
in a deadly battle of wills. One will sacrifice his humanity for the
sake of his ‘brothers’; the other will discover compassion in the
agonies of war. Ultimately, both will be forced to fight
side-by-side, so their loved ones can enjoy freedom for just one more
day… </i></span>
</div>
Pablohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15887502533607948733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4227554388362167770.post-34902762846795275642012-02-20T19:45:00.002+00:002015-01-10T18:38:45.633+00:00MISS BALA reviewed<br />
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</div>
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<i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
<i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: center;">
<i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Daddy was right. She
shouldn't have gone to the pageant.</b></span></i></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Murky is one of those
words which have been used, and misused, too many times. However,
Gerardo Naranjo (his excellent<b> I'm Gonna Explode</b> still lingers in my
memory) has captured the visceral murkiness of the drug wars and
institutional corruption in Northern Mexico in <b>Miss Bala</b>, where
nothing is what seems to be, where the violence has become as much as
part of daily life as the weather. Miss Bala is not only a dramatic
example of cinema vérité
at its best, but also a gripping thriller on its own right. Issue
based cinema can also be entertaining, and Miss Bala certainly is,
with its fast pace and more turns and twists than a plate of drunken
spaghetti. Yet it left a sour taste in the mouth long after having
viewed it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Laura
Guerrero (model turned actress Stephanie Sigman is admirable in her
first role), a 23 year old young woman, jokes with her friend that
the prize for the winner of the pageant to choose Miss Baja
California is not only the crown, but also to sleep with one of those
rich guys behind it. If she had known how prophetic were those words!
Laura is just a young woman who wants to get out of her rather
plodding life in a provincial city in the North of Mexico, to make
some money, joining the queue of the many others who aspire at
something else in their lives.
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">By
being on the wrong place at the wrong time, Laura becomes involved in
the violent drug wars ravaging the Northern provinces of the country,
as she witnesses the attack on a night club used by the police by a
gang of narcos, led by Lino Valdez (Noe Hernández is admirable in
his portrayal of Lino's psychopathic intensity and intelligence), the
battles between the narcos and the estate para-military police being
openly warfare, those scenes being admirably set up by Naranjo. Three
tense days follow, during which she becomes a drug mula for the
traffickers between the USA and Mexico, worrying for the fate of her
little brother and her father, a winner of the crown of Miss Baja
California after the rather convincing intervention of Lino, and a
sexual pawn who is used by both Lino and General Duarte (Miguel
Couturier), the commander of the estate police force – she was
right, she became the prize for the General...
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Stephanie
Sigman's performance is one of the best I have watched in recent
times with her ability to portray the wide range of human emotions
crossing the character of Laura Guerrero, the young woman caught as
an unwilling pawn in the narco war, as she witnesses the atrocities
that happen in front of her eyes, betrayed by those who thought she
could trust upon, and, ultimately, realizing she was as much as an
expendable pawn as the American DEA agent, Kike Camara (José
Yenque), was, murdered in an horrific fashion in front of her. As much of Mexican society is.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Naranjo
does not moralize in Miss Bala, he constructs instead a vivid picture
of how is to live in a society where brutal violence is a daily
occurrence that can erupt at any moment anywhere, where institutional
corruption means that no one is what seems to be, where the narcos,
los valientes (the fearless) are seen by many as another players in
this war rather than as mere criminals, where both authorities, the
estate police. and the traffickers benefit from each other as
parasites do.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>When
the last scene of Miss Bala is over, I just did not know any longer
what was what in this mêlée. This is what Naranjo has so admirable
conveyed, that behind that apparent façade of social order being
imposed by force there is only a desolate land: existential and
social emptiness.</b></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #e69138; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>Miss
Bala is out in DVD in Britain on 20<sup>th</sup>
February 2012.</b></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>A
Metrodome Distribution release.</b></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There
are no special features in the DVD.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/vPvr34kDlqo?rel=0" width="640"></iframe>
</div>
Pablohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15887502533607948733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4227554388362167770.post-71000729855817335002012-02-16T16:34:00.000+00:002015-01-10T18:40:19.615+00:00HADEWIJCH reviewed<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In Bruno Dumont's film,
Hadewijch, a novice in a Catholic convent who has taken her religious
name from a 13<sup>th</sup> century mystic, has fallen in love with
Christ, and desperately seeks catharsis for her desires for Him. </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Mother Superior
decides to expel her as, in her words, her love of God and the Son of
God has become obsessive, the world could offer opportunities for her
that the walls of the convent could not. Her words became prophetic
in unintended ways.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I can distinguish in Dumont's film, who has a
background in Greek and philosophy, three chapters, although they seamlessly blends into a coherent
whole:</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The love for Christ</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Seeking catharsis</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Catharsis</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Once she is back in
Paris with her parents in their sumptuous baroque apartment, her
steps echoing through the vast rooms, Céline's
days, she has gone back to her civilian name, drift between waiting
for her exams results, caring for her beloved dog, praying and
wandering around. The camera zooms to her hands playing with a
crucifix as she meets three Arab boys in a café,
and she eagerly goes with them to a gig on the Seine. An uneasy
relationship develops between her and Yassine, one of the boys,
although she rejects his advances as she is a virgin, and wants to
stay that way, in spite of her eagerness to befriend strangers,
because she wants to give herself to Christ. Yassine, whilst
respecting her, finds difficult to understand her feelings. Céline
invites the boy for lunch with her parents, an occasion that
amplifies their differences as he rebukes her for calling her father,
a government minister, a “jerk”.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However,
this chance meeting with Yassine leads her to an encounter with
Islamic Fundamentalism through his brother, Nassir, a religious
studies workshop leader. She seeks his advice, as a religious man, as
she believes he can help her in her quest for God, for Christ. He
recruits her for his campaign to avenge the humiliation of his people
after a visit to Lebanon, where she witnesses the aftermath of an
Israeli aerial attack, where she sees the smoking ruins of a house,
the body of a little boy killed in the bombardment, and, most of all,
she experiences the anger, that anger coming from the guts. In a
democracy, there are no innocents, is Nassir's argument, so we all
are target for punishment. In her sacrifice, she glimpses her union
with Christ.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Céline
is a very open and innocent young girl, at no moment she hides or
flaunts the comfort and wealth of her family, in a way, she sees them
as much as an obstacle to her desire to give herself to Christ as her
body is. There is a recurrent theme in the film, the film opens with
it, as we watch Céline
climbing a steep hill, panting, crying, reaching a shrine on a hill
top church, where she prays for her beloved Christ, the symbolic value of this ascent being visually beautifully rendered. However, she has
developed in her quest with each appearance of this film, culminating
in the last scene where she, at last, finds her catharsis in an
unexpected manner.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Julie
Sokolowski gives a powerful and nuanced yet low key rendering of the
path that Hadewijch has taken to reach her goal, while Yassine Salime
as Yassine gives an excellent performance as the Arab boy from the
projects (council housing) with no training nor job, while Karl
Sarafidis conveys the low burning yet explosive anger of Nassir for
the humiliation of his people. David Dewaele plays the small time
crook doing odd jobs at the convent, where he meets Hadewijch.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><span style="color: #cc0000;">Hadewijch</span>,
a meditative cinematic study on the nature of religious faith and passion,
carnal passion, and their impact in contemporary society, offers some
thoughtful insights on the nature of terrorism, Julie Sokolowski
particularly being worth of praise for the depth and development of
her character.</b></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #e69138; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>Hadewijch
will be released by New Wave Films on selected British cinemas on
February 17, 2012.</b></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For
screenings please click <b><a href="http://www.newwavefilms.co.uk/view-film-detail.html/?viewListing=Mzk=&cat=1" target="_blank">HERE</a></b>.</span></div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/v858aunD3kw?rel=0" width="640"></iframe>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
Pablohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15887502533607948733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4227554388362167770.post-66719546885546006592012-02-08T17:30:00.000+00:002015-01-10T18:39:10.550+00:00AFTERSCHOOL reviewed<br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There
are some films which are the better precisely because they are
difficult to put into a labelled box, such as teenage angst,
thriller, horror, murder, or whatever. Antonio Campos' sparse yet
mesmerizing Afterschool is certainly one of those, apart of also
being visually brilliant, and, interestingly, sporting a sound track
almost devoid of music, environmental sound being exquisitely
sculpted as a counterpoint to the narrative.
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ezra
Miller somehow manages to put a strongly expressive depiction of
Robert, yet simultaneously conveying his lack of expression of his
inner feelings to the outside world. This is quite an achievement for
a young actor, Afterschool being his first film. Robert is a closed
book to all those around him, the master of the private East Coast
boarding school (Michael Stuhlbarg), to the school councillor (Gary
Wilmes), to his girlfriend (Addison Timlin as Amy), to his room mate,
Dave (Jeremy Allen White). We do not see his parents, apart from a
brief phone conversation with his mother that we overhear, a
conversation where he does not say much, either. With a few brush
strokes, Ezra Miller paints the character of a troubled, lonesome
boy, who finds his pleasure watching masochist porn on the internet,
later trying some of what he has seen on Amy, who becomes, for a
short period of time, his girlfriend. A boy that conveys very little
to the outside world, yet who has a kind of pent up energy inside him
that he, perhaps, cannot either control or understand. Monster?
Psychopath?
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Antonio
Campos does not give any indication of what is to follow, there is no
<i>and they lived happily afterwards</i> that distinguishes so many
mainstream movies, no sense of closure of any kind. The very last
scene, in the school library, is telling on this respect. It is for
us to ponder what this lonesome boy is to become, mass murderer or
poet? Rapist, or genius? The sound track is a powerful factor in this
clinical and cold stare of the lens on the character, as there is
almost no music to emotionally guide us in what has been, in what is
to come. Environmental sounds have been moulded and sculpted to
punctuate the dialogue, the silences, no sweet notes to accompany the
lovemaking between Robert and Amy, only the chirping of birds, the
rustle of the wind; or the sharp staccatos of a tray falling in the
canteen, drowning the conversation between the youngsters. There is a
hint of Haneke here, as it has been pointed out by other critics,
those non judgemental eyes, that non judgemental lens staring at the
abyss that lies behind the apparent calmness of the human condition.</span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
other interesting point in Afterschool is how the camera is used
under Campos' direction, gone are the thirds composing rule, we often
see main characters either on the edge of the frame, or partly
outside it, we see bodies and no heads, the camera pans on a room and
we see only the top of the heads of people crouching, or a beautiful
bokeh in a school hall for a spot to come forwards, metamorphosing
into Robert. By using the camera in this manner, Campos is constantly
conveying a sense of disorientation, of uneasiness, of not knowing
what is what, of the kind of existential limbo that constitutes the
world as seen through Robert's eyes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
outline of the story is, really, quite simple. The complexities lies
in the psychological level, in what lies underneath our actions.
Robert, a young student, decides to take video as his after class
activity, that all students are urged to take (although McDonalds
will probably be still hiring staff after graduation, as the
schoolmaster cheekily mentions). Exploring the school buildings with
the camera, he happen to capture the death of the Talbot twins, two
beautiful and popular young girls. He apparently helps the one still
surviving, until she dies in his arms. And this is the point, we do
not know what actually happened, even with the video camera running,
as Robert was giving his back to the lens. We learn, later, that the
girls died from a poisoned drug overdose. So, who actually gave the
drug to them? Someone inside the school? A climate of paranoia is
created. The staccatos in the sound track exacerbates it. The
uncertainty of the memorial video is crucial to depict this
atmosphere.</span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Did
he kill the surviving Talbot girl? If he did, was that an act of
mercy? Or was he play acting on what he has seen in the cesspit that
the internet can also be?
</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Campos
does not give a clear indication of what is what, he throws the
questions at us, open ended questions. The whole film has been
constructed with this aim in mind. </span>
</b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>This is the brilliance of Afterschool.</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #e69138; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>AFTERSCHOOL (18) is available to buy in Britain on 13th February 2012, RRP £9.99</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>It is distributed by Network Releasing.</b></span></div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/vMTDPX6t5P8?rel=0" width="640"></iframe>
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<b><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Special features:</span></b></div>
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</div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Deleted scenes</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mobile phone videos</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Teacher testimonials</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">New York Film Festival trailer</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Theatrical trailer</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Image gallery</span></li>
</ul>
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>AN
INTERVIEW WITH ANTONIO CAMPOS, DIRECTOR OF “AFTERSCHOOL” (18)</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>STARRING
EZRA MILLER FROM "WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN"</b></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>1.
What was your inspiration for making the film?</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In
my last year of high school, 9/11 happened in our first week back.
That day my best friend's father died in one of the towers, and at
the end of that year, after we all graduated, another close friend of
mine died in a freak accident in Amsterdam. It was a strange time,
and the bookending of that with these two events was quite confusing.
I felt very connected and disconnected at the same time, and all the
ideas I had had for films I wanted to make seemed somewhat trivial at
the time. Then I had this idea about a boy who witnesses the death of
two girls by drug overdose--girls he had never spoken to and only
knew from passing in the hallway or through gossip. How does he deal
with it versus everyone around him? For me, the idea being how does
he deal with it feeling so close but at the same time disconnected
from the death.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222;"><b>2.
Are the internet clips shown at the beginning of your film real and
why did you choose them? Did </b></span><a href="http://nastycumholes.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc;"><b>nastycumholes.com</b></span></a><span style="color: #222222;"><b> ever
really exist?</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Some
of them are real and some of them were staged by us. I wanted to give
a pretty broad spectrum of what you see on Youtube or Youtube kind of
sites, in no particular order, almost in the way that you could
potentially consume them online. So if you haven't seen that
particular clip of THAT baby, you most likely have seen something
like it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Unfortunately,
I wanted to have a clip from a TV show somewhere, but this would have
been impossible to get clearance for or to recreate.
Nastycumholes.com doesn't exist. We had to come up with a porn
website that didn't exist, which if you ever try to do, you will
realize is nearly impossible. Almost every filthy combination of
words has been taken. My art director who was designing the site and
i kept throwing ideas around, and one of our young actors came in and
started throwing some pretty awful, disgusting names around. But he
landed on "nastycumorifices" which wasn't quite right
but close. So we replaced orifices with holes and we had it.
Apparently, it was only the dirty mind of a teenager that could come
up with something so offensive that no adult could come up with!</span></span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>3.
Is Afterschool a positive or negative portrayal of the YouTube
generation? Has the internet made people in general better or worse?</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's
really the portrayal of one boy who happens to be part of this
generation. And it isn't necessarily a positive or negative portrayal
in my mind, really just a portrayal; whether it's good or not, it's
up to the audience to decide. I think the internet, like any
technology, comes with its positive and its negatives, but the fact
is that technology for as much as we try to use it to bring people
together, ultimately works in doing the opposite somehow.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>4.
How difficult was it to get such a natural performance from the young
cast?</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It
wasn't difficult. As a director, you just need to listen and treat
your young actors with as much seriousness and respect as your older
actors. Their opinions on things are just as valid. The kids also
spent a lot of time getting to know one another before and during the
shoot,and that comfort and chemistry carried over into the film.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>5.
If you could go back in time to make films, what decade would you
choose and why?</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sometimes
I think I would like to go back and be making films in the 70s when
there was a real freedom in the studio system and American mainstream
cinema was really daring. Other times, I'd like to go back to the 40s
or 50s in Hollywood where the studio system was really strong and you
had all these wonderful craftsmen from the crew to actors all on the
same lot, constantly making movies. Obviously, there were huge
restrictions but at the same time, it just made filmmakers work
harder and be more creative to be subversive in their work. At the
end of the day, I wasn't there, and there must be some reason that I
was born when I was to be making movies now.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>6.
What¹s the craziest experience you¹ve had so far promoting this
film?</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We
had been asked last minute to show Afterschool at a private club's
screening series. In the back and forth with the coordinator, we
realized that this screening wasn't being held at the club but at a
much bigger theatre in Times Square. Unfortunately, I was in a
festival in Nashville but my producer Sean Durkin and actors Ezra
Miller (We Need to Talk About Kevin) and Jeremy Allen White went to
the Q&A. First, my actors were greeted by a big bouncer outside
the theatre who upon discovering they were the stars of the film,
said, "You know, if you need any protection, I've got your back.
For now, maybe you should get back stage quickly since the movie's
getting out soon." Confused, they asked "Why?" "Well
this is a screening series for senior citizens. They came here
tonight thinking they were going to see The Soloist (with Jamie Foxx
and Robert Downey, Jr.). No one told them that was cancelled and that
they were screening your film. Once the film started, people started
screaming, 'This isn't The Soloist! Where's Jamie Foxx? Where's
Robert Jr.?!' And people started leaving in groups, complaining to
management. I haven't seen your film, but people are pissed."
They go backstage, and eventually Sean arrives and hears the story.
The critic who is moderating the event--a local NYC TV critic-- gets
backstage, completely flustered and annoyed. "Who's the
director? Who directed this?!?" Sean tells him why I'm not
there. "Oh! Great! The director doesn't even show up. You know,
I had no idea they were showing this tonight. I'm not taking
responsibility for this." He introduces Sean, Ez, and Jeremy to
the stunned audience of elderly people (of which there are still two
to three hundred) and right away says "I'm not going to say
anything, except to let you know I had nothing to do with this
screening choice. I thought we were gonna see The Soloist."
Still very flustered, "I guess I'll just ask one question and
then open it up. Why would you want to make this film?" They
all give their answers, unwavering about why everyone involved was
excited about the film. Well, the critic just didn't have anything
else to say, and the angry audience was unleashed on them. "This
was the worst movie I've ever seen. Why couldn't you have made a nice
movie like The Soloist? What was the point of that?! Why would they
show a movie about these crazy kids to people our age?!?" So
they answer all the questions they can, politely. Apparently, they
were very excited about such a heated response, as I would have been
too. But then the tide turned. Someone stood up and very loudly said
"All of you who booed this film or who left the theatre should
be ashamed of yourselves! We're not just a bunch of senile senior
citizens who need to be shown nice pictures every week. This is the
most important film we've ever been shown at this series. This film
is about the world that our grandchildren are living in and we should
be seeing more films like this!" At this point, half of the
remaining audience gave a loud applause. The critic who began with
nothing nice to say, kind of slumped back into his seat, and said
"Well, yeah, I guess that is true. This film portrays a world we
haven't seen much in films." The discussion went on for so long
after this, between the people from the film and even between
audience members that the critic said that he had to leave and that
everyone could stay if they wanted to but most of his Q&As don't
last this long and he had to get home to his kids. So he left, and
Sean, Ezra, and Jeremy stayed with the audience for another
half-an-hour discussing the film with the audience of passionate
senior citizens. By far the best post screening discussion.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>7.
What web site could you not live without?</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'm
sure I could live without any of them if I had to. I would say IMDb
or Youtube, but 10 years ago I didn't have any of them and I was
fine.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>8.
What advice do you have for young filmmakers trying to make their
first feature?</b></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Do
something personal and do something for as small of a budget as
possible, since the smaller the budget the smaller the risk for the
investors and the bigger the freedom you'll have to take risks. In
general, I think young filmmakers should experiment as much as
possible with their short films. You'll quickly realize what you like
and what you don't like, what you're interested in pursuing and what
bores you.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And
by the time you get to your first feature, your voice as filmmaker
will be a lot clearer and louder.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><br /></span></span></div>
Pablohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15887502533607948733noreply@blogger.com0