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Last Active 09-07-22 7:15 am
Joined 05-07-11
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| Film Festival, AKL, 2018
It's film festival time here in the superior antipodean country folks, and fear not: your trusty correspondent has mortgaged his first-editions to buy a 10-pass, is adopting his best Anthony Lane voice, and bringing live coverage right to your bedroom. List will be updated as I see more films and become increasingly insufferable. Your edification is my gratification. | | 1 |  | Christian Death
Only Theatre of Pain
FIRST REFORMED - Paul Schrader. It took Taxi Driver two hours to transform a city into a hellish bazaar; First Reformed does it in a particularly brutal, sinister 30 seconds, almost as an afterthought. Nominally about a minister experiencing a crisis of faith after researching global warming, it takes about three quarters of the film to realise it's not about global warming and all, and the recurrent ticking clocks? Let's just say they don't signify what you might initially think. It owes a debt to Bergman's majestic Winter Light, as certain plot beats are cleaved to uncannily (substitute one couple's fear of nuclear apocalypse for fear of climate change; one persistent former lover with one nebbish one) but First Reformed repays it's debts in a relentless bleakness, a formal innovation which focalises the film diegetically through Toller in such a subtle way I only realised how much after the fact, the way the plot, thematic concerns and direction collide, overlap and evade only | | 2 |  | Harvey Milk
Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men
because Toller, himself, evades. "The darkness has always been there", he councils an unbalanced man at the beginning; what he can't - won't realise is that, regardless of the state of the world, it's in him most of all. The abrupt climax is a harrowing, viscerally real piece of film-making that left me genuinely shaken and upset, and the ending of the film is the bleakest possible road. A distillation of a long and storied career designed to explode when compounded with audience expectation. This was one hell of a boom that will linger with me for a long time. A masterpiece. Further watches required. 4.5/5. | | 3 | | Happy Family
Lucky
LUCKY - John Carroll Lynch. A swansong for a fine actor, Harry Dean Stanton -- so elegaic is the tone of the film that if one was cynical it could be inferred that the movie would have been saved until after Stanton's passing had he lived decades longer -- Lucky is a largely placid affair detailing the minutiae of Lucky's life in a way that recalls early Van Sant. Banality here is shot lovingly, merging with an AllAmericanTM freneticism
that makes one think if you haven't lived in small town usa, you haven't lived at all. Surprisingly, the existentialism is kept to a minimum, evidenced largely by Stanton's uncanny knack of communicating through barely perceptible changes in facial arrangement, different intonations of words ("realism" most notably). Sure there are a couple of weird scenes -- this is Lynchian technically - but it's the straight stories (hehehehe) that are the most moving. Warm and tender as the man himself was purported to be: R.I.P. 4/5 | | 4 |  | Burial
Burial
WINGS OF DESIRE - Wim Wenders (1987). A beautifully shot, exquisitely directed classic of """foreign""" cinema that I wouldn't have gone to see had a friend not bullied me into it. For all it's merits, it just cannot overcome the hoariness, the hamminess, the weird tonal melodrama. In my favourite scene, a camera pans through the denizens of a library going about their differing tasks and indicating their different backgrounds, all of them drawing from an accumulation of knowledge and culture; who needs angels to "testify and preserve reality" when we have such repositories of knowledge? ...probably most of the people the downtrodden people the film focuses on, and the films obvious desperation to enter the same annals it deifies lends it a quality simultaneously histrionic and wooden. The restoration looks fine but will test your tolerance for sepia. 2.75/5 | | 5 |  | Strict
Kiss
what's next let's wait and see this album rules btw | | 6 |  | Brainbombs
Obey
DISOBEDIENCE - Sebastian Lelio. Movie was pretty gay LOL / say what you will about Lelio, but he doesn't fall pray to the transgression of the title. Instead, an assortment of character clich-- err, i mean archetypes, are shuffled around a chess board with International Grandmaster precision. The results are as dour as they are tedious. McAdams shines, admittedly, with the eternal struggle of whether she should stay or go; unfortunately the film was shot with inducing claustrophobia in mind, succeeding instead in drawing out insularity; her potential lover's character is rendered in false dichotomy platitudes; anyway, one doesn't care. Oh and there's the confused cuckolded husband who is so incompatible with his wife it's difficult to imagine how *that* thing worked beyond plot contrivance. 2/5. That said it did spark some thoughts beyond the film itself: | | 7 |  | Pierre Boulez
The Three Piano Sonatas
How long will we accept queer cinema divesting itself of the libidinal dynamic? I understand it's fraught, especially with sapphic relationships, but there's no sexual tension, not really any convincing display of sexual dynamic (with one expectorating exception) -- as much gay sex as the cloistered Jews of the film would like, basically. This is more than a flash in a pan, for me. It evades from the very thing it purports to talk about. Sex is a component of romance in this relationship. Treat it like a fucking adult. Also: why do I prefer decidedly non-film-fest fare like Dear Simon, DEBS, The Way He Looks over "arthouse productions"? I feel like the queer characters in films of the upper class come from enclaves, cosseted environs (B U C O L I C I T A L Y), weird environs to appeal to certain sensibilities. How much more lovely it is when gay people gay around in something more like real life. *extremely cisco voice* let me see that thooooooongggggg | | 8 |  | NoMeansNo
Wrong
...on further reflection i may have judged Disobedience unfairly. it is on its own merits an interesting watch about what it's like to return from exile to a repressive community in stasis; perhaps by assuming it would be a work of Queer cinema I was attributing my own assumptions prematurely. watch this space. | |
Winesburgohio
07.21.18 | s/o to the upstanding, well-dressed septuagenarian lady sitting in front of me at First Reformed who shouted "what is this shit?" after it finished and turned around to me, huffed, and said "i suppose this is my fault for daring to want a proper ending". The film festival: bringing people together :') | verdant
07.21.18 | gay list | Winesburgohio
07.21.18 | in queer culture we call it a "gist" / strap on, i'll either watch Disobedience or something French tonight so it's only going to get gayer | neekafat
07.21.18 | good First Reformed rating, you see Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot yet? amazing film | Winesburgohio
07.21.18 | it's not at the festival and doesn't have a scheduled NZ release date :(((((, i've heard such things | neekafat
07.21.18 | Ohhhhh I didn't read the description hahaha, well I hope you enjoy the rest of the films! | neekafat
07.21.18 | "i suppose this is my fault for daring to want a proper ending"
Very surprised I didn't hear this at my viewing | ramon.
07.21.18 | ugh i need to get on first reformed asap | Frivolous
07.22.18 | [2] seems amazing | Frivolous
07.22.18 | great writeups as always wines | Winesburgohio
07.22.18 | thanks!! i watched Disobedience! i did NOT like Disobedience!
have u guys seen it yet hurry up i want to discuss it. potential spoiler @neek: i thought the ending was agonisingly, cruelly clear, though i accept i am an idiot | neekafat
07.23.18 | Most endings of art films seem pretty straightforward and then when you think about them, they're really oblique
This was the opposite for me | Havey
07.24.18 | give report on new koreeda or commit sewer slide | Winesburgohio
07.24.18 | all the sessions are sold out, i'm on the waiting list!! fingers crossed i don't have to slide my way down ANOTHER drainpape, i've been putting on the pounds since i discovered KFC do hot and spicy chicken, a true meal of the kino coneisseur
plan is to catch the Oum Kulthum "doco" this afternoon. many music sites will refuse to tell you this, but she is very good | Winesburgohio
07.24.18 | think u might 2 First Reformed Haveyourprostatechecked, although i think the Nattvardsgästerna allusions will bother u more than i | Havey
07.27.18 | isn't that a shitty biopic
there's an actual 1996 doc on kulthum ('a voice like egypt') available on the youtubes, might watch that one sometime | Winesburgohio
07.27.18 | it was actually a shitty biopic film-within-a-film :sunglasses: |
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