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
