Sunday, December 23, 2007
My best of list for 2007, taking into consideration that it was within this calendar year that I saw these films (some may have opened outside of this time frame) and that I select according to the degree with which I was personally affected by the work, factoring in secondarily the particular ‘cinematic’ significance of [...]
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Rating:
2007 is quickly becoming the year when filmmakers got musician narratives right. My list of top ten films for the year is punctuated by three solid testaments to this fact: Once, I’m Not There, and now Control. The hype surrounding Anton Corbijn’s ‘Control’, a biopic on the life and all-too-early death of [...]
Rating:
“This is how the perfect human falls” – from ‘The Perfect Human’
I finally got around to watching the Lars Von Trier ‘experiment’ known as ‘The Five Obstructions’. In this documentary quite unlike any documentary, Lars challenges his creative mentor, Jorgen Leth, to a sadistic game: Jorgen must direct his classic short film ‘The [...]
Sunday, September 30, 2007
3.5/5 stars *with some qualifications given below.
Disillusioned with the status-quo mentality of his parents, Christopher McCandless did in his early twenties what many only fantasize about: he fled consumerist society in search of truth and meaning. A modern-day Thoreau, with a conviction that grew more and more resolute the further he trod, Christopher donated [...]
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Commence TIFF withdrawal.
As a sort of trade-off this year, I saw more films than ever before and consequently wrote less. I have scribbled notes for four films but now that I am facing school again head-on, realistically I am not going to have the time to review each film individually. So this is [...]
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Rating:
Todd Haynes’ paradigm-setting biopic of Bob Dylan, ‘I’m Not There’, is as defiant of interpretation as the man it portrays. Certainly no biopic has been done in quite this fashion, not least of all due to its unusual rendering of the subject through multiple selves intermittently dreaming one another and embodied by actors [...]
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Rating:
Johan matter-of-factly confesses to his father that he loves a woman who is not his wife. The elder farmer asks him to take a walk, and we move along with them from the dark interior of the barn to the blazing white light of a winter day. Look at the pastures, [...]
Saturday, September 8, 2007
[rate 3]
“And what do you do?”
I rarely do shorts. I prefer feature length films which allow narratives to gestate without the pressures of time weighing heavily upon them. Thus it is with a certain reservation that I watch shorts, and in particular, collections of shorts around a common theme. Last year at [...]
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Labour Day came and went. In what has now become a hallowed tradition I spent the morning doing the College Park shuffle inching ever so slowly towards the ticket exchange booth. The morning line-up contained communal grumblings and quasi-conspiracy theories about the lengths the festival group have gone to shortchange us in their [...]
To misquote William Shatner: it is a very… good… year. To commemorate it I plan to see more films then usual at the Toronto International Film Festival, upwards to fifteen, counting rushes. Some cursory observations: poor crop of documentaries, the Real to Reel tends to be a very strong category but this year [...]
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