Twin Cities International Film Festival 2008

[Mysterious Dude]

http://www.mspfilmfest.org/2008/

I'm making an effort this year to see as many films as possible this year. This is partly why I've put off my other projects (such as my cinematography thread) for the time being. Without further ado...

http://www.mspfilmfest.org/2008/images/stories/films/RestisSilence-01.jpg

The Rest Is Silence

I was afraid this movie was going to be a Merchant/Ivory type of film (a really boring costume-type drama). It actually a very fun movie -- the most enjoyable I've seen so far at the festival. Recent Romanian films tend to focus on the unpleasant Soviet years (or the unpleasant post-Soviet years), but this film is set way before that, prior to World War I, when I guess Romania wasn't a complete shit hole. Who knew? It concerns the making of the first full-length Romanian film in 1911 about the war of independence against the Ottoman empire in the 1870's. As I was watching it, I assumed it was a fiction, possibly inspired by D.W. Griffith, but at the end, they showed clips from the original film, and indeed it was a real film. And not only that, but it's on google (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=46782515450581 04771)!

Anyway, the movie isn't perfect. It meanders a lot, and that girl in the picture above appears occasionally throughout the film, but never gets too involved and has no real purpose that I can discern. Plus, there's this weird segment that's all still drawings of the characters. Maybe they ran out of money to film that segment normally. In any case, it's still a very polished and good-looking movie, and for the most part, a lot of fun.

***½

[Mysterious Dude]

http://www.mspfilmfest.org/2008/images/stories/films/Little-Moth.jpg

Little Moth

The film China doesn't want you to see! There are some things about this movie that ought to make it right up my alley, what with the whole kids-being-mistreated angle. I was wary about seeing it, though, because I read that it was filmed with digital video. In a previous year of this film festival, I saw another film made on digital video, and I thought it looked just awful. The video in this film is better and less distracting, though there are times when it looks like it was filmed by some kid playing with his parents' video camera. Even beyond the image quality, though, you can tell the movie was made for no money. It was filmed on the real streets of China, a technique I like, but it's not enough to save the film from the non-acting. None of the characters ever show any emotion in this film, at all. See that girl's expression in the picture? That's the only expression she makes in the film.

**

[Mysterious Dude]

http://www.mspfilmfest.org/2008/images/stories/films/Savior'sSquare-01.jpg

Savior's Square

A husband and wife have much invested in a new building project the husband is working on. Very early in the film, they learn that the company which had contracted the building has gone bankrupt. What follows is two hours of despair. It's not a bad film, and likely a commentary on the growing pains of Poland's conversion to capitalism. The acting is exceptional. But still, it could have used a little hope amidst all the misery.

***

[Mysterious Dude]

http://www.mspfilmfest.org/2008/images/stories/films/Katyn2-01.jpg

Katyn

Andrzej Wajda is still alive, apparently, and still making World War II films. Now, however, he is free to criticize the Soviet Union, specifically for its massacre of some 22,000 Polish citizens, one of whom was Wajda's father, in 1939. Much of the story is quite confusing, with characters disappearing for long stretches of the film, and other characters being introduced far too late in the film. There's not much here that I haven't seen in previous World War II films.

***

[Mysterious Dude]

http://www.mspfilmfest.org/2008/images/stories/films/London-to-Brighton.jpg

London to Brighton

A victim of circumstances. A few years ago, I saw Kekexili: Mountain Patrol at this film festival, and every reel was shown completely out of focus. People in the audience were constantly yelling "focus!" throughout the show. So I expect at least one movie every year to have an amateur in the projection booth. London to Brighton played fine for the first forty minutes or so, then the reel was changed and the new reel was playing upside down and backwards. At first, I thought it might have been some artistic device to show that we were going into a flashback or something, but then it didn't stop. So they stopped the film and were unable to fix it in time, and gave us free passes for a future show. Thus, I will forgo giving it a rating.

I will say, however, that it seemed to be a poor man's Lilja 4-Ever, and a very silly film about a girl's descent into prostitution. I will not be trying to see the second showing of the film.

[Mysterious Dude]

http://www.mspfilmfest.org/2008/images/stories/films/AutumnBall-01.jpg

Autumn Ball

This is an Estonian film. Estonia is a tiny country in eastern Europe that used to be part of the Soviet Union. I've never seen an Estonian film. That's the main reason I wanted to see this movie. How often does one get to see Estonian films? Even Estonians probably don't get to see Estonian films very often.

Anyway, this is an interesting movie. Six people in large city are connected to each other in different ways. A doorman at a restaurant wants to be a writer, and has sex with many different prostitutes, writing down their names and astrological signs in a book afterwards. He thinks he has found the one for him when he meets a woman who is angry at her architect husband. An old man gives small presents to a young girl, whose teacher naturally assumed the poor man is a pedophile. The girl's mother, meanwhile, tries to avoid her former husband, who comes to her place of work to harass her. The movie is somewhat fractured like Savior's Square. The stories aren't complicated, but they're a little hard to follow because things aren't always explained clearly. It requires just a little more concentration than the average film.

***½

[Mysterious Dude]

http://www.mspfilmfest.org/2008/images/stories/films/TraceyFragments2-01.jpg

The Tracey Fragments

Here's a movie that is so fragmented, it had to declare itself as such in the title. Unlike Autumn Ball and Savior's Square, though, it's actually pretty easy to follow. A teenage girl's Autistic younger brother has gone missing, and she has gone out into the city to search for him. The scenes are shown out of order, but all is revealed in the end. Almost every scene also makes use of split screen in some way, and I know some people will be annoyed by that. I kind of like it, though. When so many of the films in these festivals are filmed with pretty dull cinematography and editing, it's nice to see a movie with a little cinematic flare.

***½

[Spinal]

The Tracey Fragments

***½

Good to hear some positive feedback. I'm definitely looking forward to this one.

[NickGlass]

Eh, I wasn't so impressed by The Tracey Fragments' supposed cinematic innovations. Here's my capsule review:

After giving a natural performance in the abysmally precious Juno, Ellen Page is back to her shrill antics ala Hard Candy in The Tracey Fragments. As twitchy as her Tracey is, it does suit the frustrating film-which is an erratic, if occasionally mesmerizing, smattering of edits. The screenplay and cinematography are meant to reflect Tracey's unorganized and aggressively angsty diary, but the result is more like a journal composed by a well-read girl who is trying way too hard to imitate James Joyce's type of modernism. Unlike Joyce's literary techniques, this forced portrait of a mental patient as a young woman hinders emotional insight instead of observing it.

The structural and visual fragmentation is a cinematic experiment meant to represent the psyche of a teenager in the wake of a disturbing event, but the film's various devices are more ostentatious than insightful. This isn't the debut for director Bruce McDonald-a longtime editor for Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter)-but he still hasn't grown from a talented editor into a successful director. His attempt at cinematic innovation is admirable, but the experiment never coalesces.

Even after all the facts are revealed, the titular character is still in shambles, never fully reaching the arc the conclusion apparently desires. The Tracey Fragments starts in pieces, tries to pull itself together by the end and then falls apart again upon reflection. Formally and thematically, Fragments is surely no misnomer.