Monday, February 28, 2011
Sunday, February 27, 2011
del Toro Time: Cronos
Cronos (1993, Guillermo del Toro)
Cronos is an early film from Guillermo del Toro which not many people mention when they are called upon to think of some of the director’s work. It lacks the polish and shine that his later efforts would be blessed with, but arguably has just as much heart and intelligence as those subsequent films, maybe even more so. Watching Cronos, it was quite clear to me that del Toro was absolutely giddy at the prospect of regurgitating all the morbid and off kilter ideas jumbled up in his mind. Film is Del Toro’s venue to not only create, but to liberate. More specifically, to liberate everything his unique imagination has to offer. Rather than witness the resulting movie become a discombobulated mess, the writer and director respects the venue of cinema enough to delivers something comprehensible, touching and out of this world all at once.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Films du Fleur de lys: En Terrains connus
En Terrains connus/Familiar Ground (2011, Stéphane Laflame)
An exercise that could prove to be highly interesting and stimulating would be to survey Québec filmmakers, specifically screenwriters and directors, to better understand what their cinematic influences are. While the English-speaking side of the Canadian film industry produces a genuinely good hit and a genuinely noteworthy piece of artistic cinema every now and then (one thinks of Guy Maddin’s work in recent years and David Cronenberg’s more Canadian flavoured films before that), the Québécois film industry has been a fire storm of critical and box office successes for a solid decade, the latter component being evaluated in relative terms obviously. There are no Avatars around here. Frequent readers know that Between the Seats enjoys the the risk of a fun comparison every now and then, and so today I liken the modern Québecois film, specifically drama, to the modern Japanese film. Sufficiently engaging overalls plots to catch the attention, but mostly propelled forward by character driven narratives, ones that may camouflage themselves with quiet, still exteriors, but which often bottle up rich emotional journeys just beneath the surface.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Review: Enter the Void
Enter the Void (2009, Gaspar Noé)
There is a titanic struggle which lies at the center of almost all movies, one that frequently determines how a given film shall be remembered, and sometimes if it will be remembered at all. In essence, how much weight shall both the style and the substance of said movie carry? Tilted more to one side than the other, a project incurs the risk of feeling too heavy, its momentum stalled by too much exposition, or to being too didactic, or simply too complex for retain the interest of the viewer. If the pendulum sways too far in the opposite direction, then what the audience is left with might be too many ‘bells and whistles’ or a bunch of ‘pretty pictures’, but this time pictures that don’t say a thousand words. Describing this as a contest is not entirely fair, for the goal of the filmmaking team is to naturally find a balance between the two. Not necessarily a perfect balance, but something close. When things are weighed as evenly as can be, the results can prove incredible. In that way it resembles marriage, or better still, time travel. When done well, it can be a blissful, stunningly perfect thing, but you have to work at it. Marty McFly (Back to the Future, 1985) didn’t have the option of just ‘winging it.’He had to work to save his own life, and did while singing Johnny B. Goode.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Saturday, February 19, 2011
review: Never Let Me Go
Never Let Me Go (2010, Mark Romanek)
Warning. The following review will reveal details of the film’s plot.
It has been said many times before that the best science-fiction movies are those which succeed at tapping into our common humanity. Space travel, time travel and talking robots are dynamic tools for telling creative adventure stories, but those films which rise above the fray are possessed with a manner of speaking about who we are, what we would like to be and even what we fear about ourselves. In the science-fiction genre, movies does not require any specific, pre-packaged structure. Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go is among the more subtle versions of sci-fi storytelling, revealing a world where almost everything is as we already it, to the extent that the actual fantastical elements of the plot are carefully hidden away from regular societies. The oddities in question are artificially created individuals whose sole purpose is to donate organs to their ‘real’ human counterparts while still young and healthy. Given how each is perfectly modelled after human beings, two significant effects result. The first concerns their donation of vital organs, after which a certain amount of generous giving, they die off. The second is on another level altogether: being 99% percent human has cursed the doomed souls with the capacity for intelligence, individualism, compassion, hatred and love. It is the full simulation experience, only that one does not live past his or her late twenties and is burdened with the knowledge they will die at a young age.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
review: The Illusionst
L’illusionniste (2010, Sylvain Chomet)
What is this activity I partake in? Popularly referred as ‘blogging,’ it has become one of the most widely used online forms of communication between people from different cities, provinces and countries. This blog is used to review movies, as many others are too. Have you really paid attention to how many of such blogs there exists? Hundreds, most likely thousands. There is even a Large Association of Movie Blogs to gather around the varying opinions of all these people who write gleefully on the internet. The persistent emergence of internet reviews written by regular movie goers has, throughout the past few years, supplanted the traditional movie review, that which is written by the trained cinema critic. We have all read, heard and listened to stories about newspapers firing their movie critics because few people pay attention to them anymore. Film criticism, true film criticism (not the ‘pretend’ variety Between the Seats practices) is dying breed of film discussion. Sylvain Chomet latest exercise in animated storytelling, L’Illusionniste, is equally concerned with such a phenomenon, specifically in the world of performance art.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
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