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Mar. 8th, 2004 01:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jfbNo NYT summary this week--I'm still at Cinequest. I've been meaning to post about some of the films, but I just haven 't been home that much. So now I'm trying to write this on a PDA. Um, if I end up doing this a lot I'm going to have to adopt that all-lower-case, no-punctuation style that's so popular with the kids.
Anyway, here are some highlights so far.
Two of my favorites, unexpectedly, are documentaries. In Awful Normal, first-time filmmaker Celesta Davis and her sister and their mother, after 25 years of pretending nothing happened, confront the man who molested the girls when they were five and eight. Direct, complex, very intense, and kind of amazing what they got on camera. Often a film about an "issue" will be didactic, full of facts and generalizations. This one brings out the nuances of its subject by just showing one story about a few real people. Cinequest page, IMDb page.
The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam is a lighter film, also with a family angle: Filmmaker Ann Marie Fleming goes searching for the life story of her Chinese great-grandfather, a world-famous Vaudeville magician now largely forgotten except by other magicians. Fleming uses animation to bring old photographs and illustrations to life, which is a really cool form of magic itself, but wouldn't matter without the fascinating story--or stories, many of which are apocryphal--of Long Tack Sam himself, crossing national and ethnic boundaries (he married the love of his life in Austria in 1908). Official site, Cinequest page, IMDb page.
Aaand that's all I managed to key in today. (And I revised it and added links at home.) The stuff about the really good performances and the many many good short films and the brushes with filmmakers I admire will have to wait.
Anyway, here are some highlights so far.
Two of my favorites, unexpectedly, are documentaries. In Awful Normal, first-time filmmaker Celesta Davis and her sister and their mother, after 25 years of pretending nothing happened, confront the man who molested the girls when they were five and eight. Direct, complex, very intense, and kind of amazing what they got on camera. Often a film about an "issue" will be didactic, full of facts and generalizations. This one brings out the nuances of its subject by just showing one story about a few real people. Cinequest page, IMDb page.
The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam is a lighter film, also with a family angle: Filmmaker Ann Marie Fleming goes searching for the life story of her Chinese great-grandfather, a world-famous Vaudeville magician now largely forgotten except by other magicians. Fleming uses animation to bring old photographs and illustrations to life, which is a really cool form of magic itself, but wouldn't matter without the fascinating story--or stories, many of which are apocryphal--of Long Tack Sam himself, crossing national and ethnic boundaries (he married the love of his life in Austria in 1908). Official site, Cinequest page, IMDb page.
Aaand that's all I managed to key in today. (And I revised it and added links at home.) The stuff about the really good performances and the many many good short films and the brushes with filmmakers I admire will have to wait.
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Date: 2004-03-08 07:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-08 08:02 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2004-03-08 08:49 am (UTC)