A companion piece to Good One, Julie Keeps Quiet explores the theme of trust and boundaries between youngsters and the adults that they trust to take care of them. Julie is promising student in a Belgian school with a passion for tennis - and is good at it too. Her long-time coach, Jeremy is suddenly suspended for unknown reasons, but rumours abound it is for inappropriate behaviour around one of the players. Julie, clearly tightly bonded to her coach, seeing him as getting her to the star player status she currently holds, finds herself deeply conflicted between her loyalty to the person she idolizes and her own experiences with him which she now begins to question. As investigations begin and testimonies are requested from all involved, Julie's inner conflict begins to affect her work and her training; just how much can and should she be not speaking up about.
Though it handles the subject matter deftly and with a sensitive hand, Julie Keeps Quiet could have been tightened up a little; we see many many shots of Julie just practicing tennis, with the investigation happening almost as a secondary thing in the background - which I suppose from Julie's point of view is both her focus in life and exactly how she wants it to be. Still, there are only so many times you can see tennis practice before you start to think it's padding the runtime a bit.
But that's my only complaint about the film; it is otherwise a contemplative examination of what can - and probably does - happen many times over, and how that can set up a young life on the back foot, hesitant to trust where adults have previously let them down. 8
To round things off, we have an anthology film, made up of four segments by different Korean directors, around the short story by Ernest Hemingway of the same name, and the Edward Hopper painting, Nighthawks.
Metamorphosis follows a low-level gangster who does wrong by his boss, and is earmarked for execution only to get away by the skin of his teeth. Wounded from the confrontation and with his ex-team on his trail he collapses at the door of a high-class drinks bar, only to wake up shortly afterwards bolt upright awaiting his first drink. The unassuming lady behind the bar is not all she seems and things begin to get weirder as other patrons arrive.
Contractors takes the ghoulish act of contract killing and gives it an absurd comedic twist, as the initial hit costing millions is subcontracted out further and further down the food chain (with the intermediaries taking a generous cut) until the bottom-feeders - a trio of not especially bright hustlers just trying to make some money until their real jobs come around - get some vague facsimile of the details of the hit, and a few hundred yuan each for their troubles. Naturally, the wrong wrong things happen to the wrong people.
Everyone is Waiting for the Man is a dark thriller perhaps closest to the original text; a pair of cops on a stakeout are convinced that a murderer will appear at the doors of a drinkery at the dead of midnight, but it seems there are others out there after his head. Who amongst the assembled crowd is the real killer?
Diaspora City, for me the weakest of the bunch is more of a bonus film where the filmmakers threw out the rules and just decided to have a bit of a laugh. Again the theme of two assassins awaiting a man at the door of a drinking establishment is explored; but through the lens mixing film-noir and Tarantino-like artsy fight sequences, and an absurdist, almost childlike acting by the bartender and her clownish employees. This juxtaposition between the deadly and the silly creates tension as the clock hits six, but it was just too out there and so jarring compared to the others.
As a whole, The Killers is a slick and enjoyable piece of cinema and there was definitely something there for everyone from the supernatural to comedy to thriller to the abstract and absurd, and didn't require any knowledge of the source material to appreciate (in fact, from other reviews I have read, familiarity of the original text may be a disadvantage). I enjoyed it a lot although I would have moved Diaspora City to somewhere in the middle so the anthology could have ended on a higher note. 8
The crossing of lines seems to be a theme of many films recently especially from a female perspective, perhaps encouraged by the highlighting in recent years of the daily crap that many women face just as part of their normal daily lives. Good One is a good example of such a film. Taking place in the Mountainous Catskills outside New York, Daughter Sam and her dad, Chris take what appears to be the latest of numerous trips from their downtown home to get away from it all. As a teen, her mobile phone being well out of range causes anxiety but its clear that though she might not say it, Sam enjoys the father-daughter time enough to tear herself away from other relationships for a few days.
Along for the ride is Matt, Chris's longtime friend. Similarly aged but not nearly so successful with the important things in life, his son keffled at the last minute leaving the three of them on their own and Sam without a chat buddy for the duration of the holiday, which means she's relegated to listening to the two old men bickering about how to pack a backpack.
For the most part, Good One is just a buddy movie - two friends, and father and daughter spend a bit of time away from it all to bond and mend a few fences. But you know there is something coming on the horizon, and the film injects a few red herrings along the way to keep you interested. When it finally comes, it is muted in it's execution such that many people might wonder what the fuss is about, although many of those I suspect would be male.
This is a film that tries to centre in on a single, stupid but seemingly small incident and asks the viewer to think, discuss and ruminate on it's effect for a while. 7.5
You might conclude, given the horrendous situation that the Ukraine has been in for the last couple of years, that their cultural output may be affected. Perhaps in a similar way to how Japan processed the fallout of World War II by creating stories around the theme of annihilation, so too may this film be seen as the product of potentially being wiped from the face of the earth in the still escalating conflict.
We are introduced to Andriy, a low-key grunt worker ferrying nuclear waste to one of the moons of Jupiter, when the earth - packed solid with nuclear waste until someone realized that might have something to do with all the new earthquakes - catastrophically explodes, killing everyone instantly - except Andriy and his overly attentive robot companion Maxim.
Unsure how to come to terms with this sudden rise in the human rankings - to the top no less - he hits the several stages of acceptance pretty hard, before his crashing down is met with a distress call from across the galaxy - another person - a mysterious woman - has also survived but needs rescuing.
Equal parts deadpan end of the world humour and a genuine exploration of the best and worst of human spirit, U Are the Universe is surprisingly both entertaining and touching, and I found myself affected somewhat by it's ending which brings quite the lump to the throat Another example - if one were needed where my lowish expectation of a film going in was pleasantly surpassed. 8
Sadly my time at Leeds this year was curtailed by home and work commitments so my time at the cinema this year is less than I had hoped. The prices have also skyrocketed which doesn't help. Back around 2008 when I first started going a bit silly and watching as many films as I could, there would be LIFF passes available for something around £70. These days a full pass will knock you back £340, and that's before 2 weeks of train travel on top.
And one of my £10 purchased tickets was wasted anyway due to a run of traffic jams, delayed trains and missed connections making me over an hour late for the first film on my list, Stranger Eyes. I keffled and had a bowl of hot ramen instead at the nearby Bento Box.
LIFF Shorts - Winning Films
So I coseyed down in Everyman for a curated selection of the supposed best short films of the festival, as voted on by the judges.
Utilizing an orchestra as a backing track, The Rider shows the Doma India technique of bonding with horses; a man skilled in the art gets very up close and personal to a pack of wild horses, taming them completely and then leading them on a gallop into the sunset. It moved from abstract to wierd to really quite touching in the course of five minutes. 7
This Madness of Loving - Leb
Abstract and overly-long, a simple film animating the dance moves of a man in a darkened room somewhere, occasionally lighting up the drab with traced chalk lines. It didn't move me much. 4
Beso de Lengua - Mex
Two young gay men hit it off just a bit too much on their first date, somehow ending up in hospital from making too many facial clicking sounds, or perhaps just sucking each other's faces off. Its difficult to tell. 7
Paula Says Hi - UK
Paula - or Paul when not in her alter-ego form lives quietly and alone in a care-worn flat. Seemingly with little contact to the outside world and living with cerebral palsy, they show us a glimpse of the thing that brings passion to their life. Sometimes Paul and Paula appear side by side as two people discussing their love of cosplaying, and how it helps them bring meaning to their lives. Heartwarming cinema. 8
At that very moment - Arg
An intriguing experimental film where a young Argantinian girl is trusted with a video camera and so uses it to narrate the small but growing world around her; brother and parents, toys, bedrooms, house, and the little village where it resides. A nice way to see what is important to you when you are that age. 7
Following some of the most important developmental years of her life, Rae can't get out of bed. Not due to teenage sulkiness but a mystery chronic illness that renders her with no energy. As it worsens and she imagines her useless doctors in a variety of gruesome endings, she finds out who she can really rely on in the world. 8
Shadows - Jor
A scruffy but no less beautiful animation about a young girl negotiating the maze-like structure of an airport as she flees her arranged marriage and uncaring in-laws, wrestling with her conscience at the heartache of leaving her baby behind. 8
An Orange from Jaffa - Fra
Nice little film about a chance meeting of strangers. Mohammed, a young Palestinian man with a Polish passport is making his way through Gaza (the film seems to have been made pre-war but in an unsettled region) towards Israel, where he has to pick his checkpoints wisely. After several failed requests, Farouk. an ageing taxi driver agrees to take him where he needs to go. But attempts to get through border checks, manned by young, bored and heavily armed soldiers blessed with a crumb of power leads to an escalating situation where they could both lose their liveilihoods. 8
Yes its the film festival again, no I haven't posted in the year since the last one. Don't you know how busy my days are? I made a wall, if thats an excuse. It's probably not.
Anyway, desperate not to miss a LIFF for one year and slightly buoyed by the news that the dried and picked clean bones of the Bradford Film Festival has actually rattled back into life again - albeit in a much leaner, low-budget form - gives me hope that maybe after several years of general decline things may be looking up.
I started with my kids 10th birthday party, which we used as an excuse to take him and some similarly noisy friends to the newly refurbished Hyde Park Picture House to see Flow, the quite lovely new film from Latvia about a cat in a world strangely vacated by humans but still showing signs of their footprints on the world. Cat the cat lives happily in what appears to be his owners old house, experiencing daily hi-jinx with the similarly feral animals living nearby, until a flood of water takes him on a journey across the waves in a handily passing boat occupied by a capybara. As capybaras do, he's pretty relaxed about the new passenger but as they journey together through the echoes of the past, new animals appear that aren't so easy to get on with.
Flow is the project of Gints Zilbalodis over several years after pricking up ears with his debut film Away, which he created pretty much by himself. Flow has a similar look that shows its not from a big budget animation house, yet still looks pretty gorgeous, doing the best it has with a perhaps limited pool of object models. Refreshingly, it sidesteps the goofy route taken by many other films of its type by retaining as much 'animal-ness' to the creatures as possible, minimizing any anthropomorphic behaviour that would lead to, say a pigeon wearing shades that acted like an Italian mafia don. Its hard to remove entirely or there would be little story here other than some animals tearing each other apart for food, but it's pleasingly kept on a tight leash.
This in itself is refreshing and should be applauded. Many has been the animated film in recent times that have just been [american] people but they're animals because kids love animals and theyre wacky because kids love wacky - I'm looking in your general direction, Under the Boardwalk. So to see the animals of Flow acting for the most part like animals would feels like there's a different direction being explored in how filmmakers approach storytelling for a younger audience.
Flow does take a couple of small leaps of faith by the viewer; quite how a cat understands the finer points of how to steer a sailboat after only a few hours onboard is a bit of a stretch; and the biblical levels of water does require a bit of boxing away at the back of your mind just where it came from and how it goes away just as mysteriously. But as a visual spectacle to wow the kids it kept a group of them quiet and agog for a good 90 minutes, and I enjoyed it too. 8
Rita is an ageing and lowly cleaning lady in her local chapel in a
backwater village somewhere in Argentina. Jealous of the local pack of
ladies who always seem to have something interesting to do and the attentions of the local father, she happens
upon an old statue of a saint, supposedly the town's 'Santa Rita', missing for decades. Corralling her meek and simple husband, who loves her dearly but wants nothing more than a quiet last few years, they sneak it back home and hatch a plan to make Rita be centre stage when the statue miraculously reappears.
There's something quite arresting with this film, it is gentle but with a playful mischief lurking just behind the screen. Nothing shows this more than the viewer experiencing the unusual situation of an abrupt false ending midway through (with a minute or two of credits to dumbfound the audience), after which the hapless Rita has her perspective completely changed, along with the rest of us. It turns from a quiet caper reminiscent of an episode of Last of the Summer Wine, into something deeper and more affecting. It was a genuine surprise. 8/10
Strange as it may seem, Bhutan has only had access to the internet and TV since they were given a democratic system in 2006. Since then, filmmakers from the region have slowly started to make their presence felt. Here is one of them.
Set in 2006, just as the newly formed government pushed for democratic engagement with it's people, who viewed this new way of thinking with suspicion and confusion. In a remote village of Ura, the elderly local Lama listened on the crackling radio thrust into his personal space as mock elections were announced, sighed, and instructed his monk assistant, Tashi, to acquire two guns. He was going to sort this out once and for all.
Coincidentally, Ron, an American rifle collector appears on the scene. He has heard of an old man in the village with a very rare rifle, and might be willing to part with it for the right words. He hires local villager Benji as his guide to the area and they arrange for the swap. Problem is, a local Lama's wishes takes precedence in these situations, snatching ritches from Ron's grasp.
What does the Lama want with the guns? Will Ron catch up with the monk and do a deal, and what over the police on Ron and Benji's tail who have been alerted to a suspicious 'arms dealer' on their patch? Reminiscent of the setup from a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, each faction descends on the final confrontation and the (western, at least) viewer is kept guessing as to the outcome. If you were hoping the Lama would go ape and spend the last third of the film creating a bloodbath, I have to inform you that you will be disappointed in the final scenes, but most should see a satisfying, if unspectacular resolution to things. 7/10
As is usual these days, my dusty blog comes briefly to life once again around November, and once again I promise myself and anyone still listening that I'll post more in the following year. It probably won't happen. Hey look, this year and the 2020's have been pretty crap so far and my optimism tank is running pretty low.
At the turn of the 20th Century, a ragged group of mercenaries from a bunch of countries including the Spanish, American and British are busy colonizing the outer skirts of Chile and Argentina, and somewhere near the border of the two we find 'Lieutenant' Alexander MacLenan, a Scottish soldier in charge of a lot of other bored soldiers as they force slaves of varying colours to erect cattle fences around their newly 'acquired' land. Trouble is, the pesky Indians who seem to think that they own the place keep messing things up, and so MacLenan is tasked by his landgrabbing bossJosé Menéndez to finda safe route out to the Atlantic with which to transport their livestock. Taking sharp-shooting half-Chilean Segundo with him, self-assured and bloodthirsty Texan 'Bill' is brought along for the ride at Menéndez' recommendation, given that those indians will shoot you given the slightest chance.
What you expect to be perhaps an awakening of the morality of an embittered man doesn't work out that way, and my first reaction to that was disappointment. But this is not a nicely tied up story about how a bad white man saw that he could be a good white man, but a reflection of the barbarity on the colonized by the colonizers.
It's dark and unrelenting in this depiction of the period if Chilean history, and even when the third act takes a step back, you are still reminded that for most people of the land at the time, this was a period where many never saw justice other than the convenient interpretation of the word decided on by the settlers themselves. 7.5/10
I had to give La Palisiada a lot of slack to get anything good out of it. In the beginning, which can be roughly described as a prologue, we appear to be in the Ukraine around 2010, as two families and their children spend some time together. After a number of disjointed scenes, a throwaway line uttered by teenage son Kiril as he wanders around the flat he has managed to newly acquire, filled with his dad's 'horrible' paintings, he refers to some of them as 'the worst things he has ever done', a clue as to where the film is making it's way towards.
Kiril is a spoilt, opinionated and unlikable floppy haired little git. Somehow in a relationship with Ayasel, things come to a head during an argument and thankfully we don't have to put up with him any more in the film.
Rewind to 1996 in newly liberated Ukraine, and the parents of the couple are now the focus. At this point the purpose of the film begins to coalesce, as we are shown through deliberately gritty and grainy 4:3 format the past lives of people who in the present are known only as loving fathers, taking part in what passed for justice in the newly liberated Ukraine of the mid 90's, where the habits of soviet influence still meant that so long as someone paid for a crime, that was the main thing. Someone shot one of their comrades and Bohdan, a young offender with some mental problems seemed guilty looking enough to do. Only at this point do we reflectively get some appreciation of the prologue, showing the cleaner, high-definition and relatively carefree lives of their children who, were it not for the actions of the past, may not have a tragedy of their own to deal with. If you can be patient during the first 15 or so minutes and put up with the numerous errors in the subtitles, you can find something of worth here but this new director would do well to tighten things up a bit in their next film. 6/10
Eking out a living in one of Brazil's poorer areas, single mother Suellen sits in the toll booth day after day to put food on the table for her 'maybe' new boyfriend who seems to be taking some liberties, and her son Antonio, who has taken to posting Instagram videos singing along to campy classics in his disco-lit bedroom. What should be an escape from Antonio's dull existence and an exercise in finding out who he is and where his passions lay, Suellen sees as an illness robbing his child of a 'normal' existence.
When an opportunity arises to send her son to an expensive 'gay conversion' centre, she takes it without a second thought for the danger that she is putting her family in. With great performances particularly by the two leads, the film gives a view into the difficult waters of a culture steeped in religion and religious beliefs dictating who and what a person should be to be happy, and the hypocrisies we use to make them fit our actual lives. 8/10
In a visual style I can best describe as a Pigeon Street with modern technology, this inventive short toys with the idea that light can travel slowly through certain substances, and how at extremes, this might affect how someone sees their world. Nice but you have to leave your logic muscles at the door. 6.5
Alice is very bored and very, very horny. With colourful and flyaway imagery, we follow her through a typical day of annoying little brothers and unfulfilled fantasies, where even there the drudgery of the realities of life seem to encroach. Energetic, free-spirited and vibrant animation succeeds, often explicitly to convey the creature desperate to come out. 7.5
Remember How I Used to Ride a White Horse (Cro) (preview)
Very much one of those shorts that either pings with you based on your life experiences, or will completely go over your head. For me, it was very much the latter. A coffee shop worker, fashioned it seems from sweaty wax into a form resembling a brunette Lisa Jones from Team America, flumps around while some guy sits with his headphones on and distorted noise coming out. He does nothing, even when another man appears, lies on the floor, and then is gone again. Then there are some piles of salt, and a horse. And also a robot wood chopper chopping infinite wood. And the coffee shop is called White Horse so ... she originally rode it? Also, the actual horse was not white. The animation was wooden, the scenes abstract and nonsensical, the characters annoying and without purpose, and any message of some life unfulfilled was hidden too far behind it all for me to give a fig, and I disliked almost every part of it. 2
Suffering from a similar level of message obscurity, Suruaika did at least have some good animation. In a noir world of cats where some cats are people and some cats are just cats, one taxi-driver cat avoids the strays on the street as he ferries his clients to and fro. After running one down he feels compelled to take in the strange looking orphan kitten that remains, only for it to get larger with every day, connected somehow with the exponential growth of cat cats on the roads, that he now seems to have no problems in mowing down in their thousands. Something something something rampant consumerism? I really don't know and it makes me feel old. 4
Well. If anything was going to get us back on track it's a far-out, far-eastern parody of various western and eastern animations, as GMAN, a He-Man anime type, confronts in DBZ style, his reluctant nemesis, GHEAD, who is basically a cyclops with a tin can for a head. In super smooth but increasingly batshit fight scenes, the traditions of an anime good-evil fight are subverted as GHEAD tries to come to terms with just being sick and tired of it all. Mad. Mad as hell and I loved it. 8
A tale of childlike woodland sprites, those who exist in the sun-dappled daytime who have the power to make the ingredients of the forest floor dance and sing, and those of the darkness who covet them. When the two worlds come together, a sprite finds himself in the darkness with no way back. Beautiful, magical and with themes reminiscent of Majoras Mask. 7.5
As two conjoined beings eke out an existence next to what appears to be the river Styx, we see just how poisoned their unequal relationship is. Wracked by nightmares brought on by her hopeless existence, the sub-servant half is given a chance to break free but at a terrible price. The use of cloth and textile to create visceral flesh and bone is gruesomely effective, and puts a shiver down the spine. 7.5
Finally, a short and humorous look at how recycling could maybe go a bit too far. Cloth character models much tidier and less gruesome than in Skinned, but with the most amusingly mundane death in animation history, it provided us with an amusingly abrupt finish to our animation journey. 7.5
Freddie is enjoying the good fortunes of youth, enabling her to travel where she will, meet people and see things. I remember those days with fondness. Korean born but put up for adoption at an early age and brought up in France, her plans for a trip to Japan are scuppered by the weather and she diverts to an impromptu visit to Seoul. Fortune finds her mingling with a crowd, including the quiet Tena, who fortunately speaks French and so helps her with the locals. As we join her in the film, Freddie is contemplating her suggestion to visit the Hammond Adoption center to trace her birth parents.
Impulsive and tangential, her heart isn't truly in the escapade; and when she learns her parents are separated and only dad wishes to make contact, her disappointment is lowered further when he turns out to be a needy drunkard.
Feeling the pull of both her biological and adoptive homelands, and the emotional thump of her mother's rejection amplifies Freddie's emotional decision making - leave the disappointment behind and return to the comfort of her old life, or derail her life and stay in the hopes her mother will reply to the request, and not turn out to be another bum.
Park Ji-min who plays Freddie seems to be just barely maintaining composure throughout, you expect her pursed lips to explode with an angry release of frustration at every predicament she finds herself in, and the ups and downs on her journey of self discovery keep the interest going through to the end, sometimes leading to particularly tender and heartfelt moments thanks to a cast underplaying their parts compared to a typical high energy Korean film. 7
Jeanne is fast approaching middle age, single and her life is falling apart. The culmination of a life's work project to find a solution to the oceans microplastics has ended up as a very expensive fish toy at the bottom of the sea. Her reputation in tatters and her frantic attempt to save the project reduced to mocking YouTube videos, she also has to deal with the death of her mother, who threw herself off a bridge in a fit of depression.
Fighting bankruptcy, the only option is to sell her mother's Lisbon apartment, but first Jeanne must get there and expose her already fragile emotions to the stress of a thousand family memories as she chucks her childhood in the skip.
The plane journey gets worse as Jean, a large and oafish petty thief happens to tag along like an unwanted shower curtain salesman, and just doesn't seem to want to go away.
Everybody loves Jeanne plays out unsurprisingly as a 'girl meets idiot who turns out to be actually quite nice actually but is still an idiot but at least he's not an arse' sort of film. There isn't any plot twists here, but it is very enjoyable. It's played as a romcom of sorts but finds time to meditate on Jeanne's journey of healing as she reconciles her mixed feelings for her mother, who regularly berated Jeanne and her brother at least as much as she loved them; memories of childhood handled tenderly mix with Jeanne's inner monologue, which, much like the excellent BoJack Horseman episode 'stupid piece of shit' - which could so easily have been a direct inspiration - shows her inner insecurities and suggestions that she too might suffer from the same depression that plagued the mind of her mother. It's a beautiful, tender and funny film and one I would really recommend - and given my relationship with pretentious French films in the past, who'd have predicted that with a French romcom? 8
I originally wanted to see the Korean thriller Confession, but it had sold out so I'm assuming it was as good as Jeanne, which I managed to wangle the last ticket for.
My backup choice had some parallels to Return to Seoul, in that it dealt with a young girl brought up in a country other than her birth one. In this case, the geography is reversed, with young Kurdish teen Sarya, fleeing the middle east with her family after her father is wanted for taking part in an illegal demonstration, and finding refuge in Japan. For a while they forge an existence with a similar group of Kurds in Saitama; Sarya has a promising school record, the beginnings of a romance with a work mate and her aims to become a teacher look on track. But it starts to fall apart with the news their refugee status has been rejected and their visas are taken away. With temporary status they can't work or travel, and with their meager savings, their landlord starts to run low on charity. As with Jeanne it didn't have any major twists and turns, and whereas the earlier film had a pleasing mix of humour and emotional clout, My Small Land only has the latter. That's not to say it was only half as enjoyable, but the heavy scenes had to work harder to keep up. Fortunately, the acting, especially by Lina Arashi playing the young lead with maturity beyond her years helps to carry this off. It did meander a little and may not reach the sort of satisfying conclusion some may wish for, but I left with a hopeful warmth for the family that all would be well. 7
