Cinequest so far
Mar. 2nd, 2003 01:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jfbBrief notes on the events I've attended so far. The short version, for folks in the San Jose area: Go see Solitude today (Sunday), and Black Tape if it sounds interesting and you have dramamine.
The opening film was The Movie Hero, starring Jeremy Sisto from Six Feet Under (I hear) as a guy who believes he has an audience that follows him everywhere, Dina Meyer as his Love Interest and court-assigned therapist, and Peter Stormare as a Suspicious Character. I laughed a lot. Meyer's first scene with Sisto was hilarious, which took me by surprise as I'd previously encountered her only as the least unsympathetic Starship Troopers trooper and the grown-up on Birds of Prey. She should do more comedy. Recommended if you get a chance to see it, especially if you love movies and are, like me, a sap.
Black Tape takes the ostensible form of a videotape full of footage taped by a young Kurdish woman and her (ex-?) military Iranian husband, who imprisons her at home and cuts off her contact with her family and the rest of the world. It's scary and sad, and interestingly told. A good film but not for everyone--also, not for anyone prone to motion sickness, as the camerawork is excruciatingly handheld.
The Invisible is a Swedish film about a schoolboy (roughly a high school senior, I think) who, um, gets killed, and then nobody can see him, and he tries to find a way out of his predicament. It was well made, and had a certain tone that Hollywood wouldn't adopt, but it was basically a high school ghost story. Not a bad way to kill some time, but not something I'd rush to.
My first schedule change of the festival: When I showed up for the Student Shorts program today--late--there was a line stretched down the hallway. It turned out that due to some logistical problems it'd ended up in a theater with half as many seats as they'd sold. They arranged to run a second screening immediately after, which left me with a blank space to fill in my schedule.
Through experience I've arrived at one firm rule for Cinequest: I never go to see a film described as an exploration of the dark side of the human psyche. (Without being flippant: If I wanted that, I could just stay home.) But, the only other thing playing at the same theater at that time was Solitude, which, I quote, "reach[es] into the absolute blackness of the human mind". And it was great. The characters--an undiscovered artist, her friend who is taking her to Flagstaff to get her work seen, and her friend's psychotic brother--are compelling and the story is unpredictable. Best thing I've seen so far.
Every year I go to see the student shorts competition. The last few years there's only been one screening, first thing in the morning when only the most dedicated will attend. I was really pleased to see that this year they'd scheduled two screenings (in addition to the extra one they added because of the logistical error), at a reasonable hours. The theater was packed with what I took to be SJSU kids, who whooped loudly for a couple of films by their classmates.
As always, the shorts were of widely varying quality, but all interesting. I especially liked La Americanita, about a Cuban-American teenager whose summer is ruined when her cousin sets out on a raft to Florida; Those Who Trespass, a documentary about four nuns who served a prison sentence for protesting on U.S. military property; and Misdemeanor, a dialogueless film about a homeless girl who commits a crime and then regrets it.
James Woods, in one of the "conversations" they do here (think Inside the Actor's Studio), was smart, ribald, hilarious, and generous. A great treat.
On the way out of The Invisible I said to Mike that one thing I love about seeing foreign films is realizing over and over that the word "okay" has become a part of every world language. Friday night I heard it in films from Iran and Sweden. Saturday I saw a Danish film whose title was Okay. A family drama with artificial insemination, teen angst, infidelity, and terminal illness (the four stages of family drama life), it had well-drawn characters and a satisfying story, but, as with The Invisible, if it's the kind of movie you want to watch, you can probably find one in English.
The opening film was The Movie Hero, starring Jeremy Sisto from Six Feet Under (I hear) as a guy who believes he has an audience that follows him everywhere, Dina Meyer as his Love Interest and court-assigned therapist, and Peter Stormare as a Suspicious Character. I laughed a lot. Meyer's first scene with Sisto was hilarious, which took me by surprise as I'd previously encountered her only as the least unsympathetic Starship Troopers trooper and the grown-up on Birds of Prey. She should do more comedy. Recommended if you get a chance to see it, especially if you love movies and are, like me, a sap.
Black Tape takes the ostensible form of a videotape full of footage taped by a young Kurdish woman and her (ex-?) military Iranian husband, who imprisons her at home and cuts off her contact with her family and the rest of the world. It's scary and sad, and interestingly told. A good film but not for everyone--also, not for anyone prone to motion sickness, as the camerawork is excruciatingly handheld.
The Invisible is a Swedish film about a schoolboy (roughly a high school senior, I think) who, um, gets killed, and then nobody can see him, and he tries to find a way out of his predicament. It was well made, and had a certain tone that Hollywood wouldn't adopt, but it was basically a high school ghost story. Not a bad way to kill some time, but not something I'd rush to.
My first schedule change of the festival: When I showed up for the Student Shorts program today--late--there was a line stretched down the hallway. It turned out that due to some logistical problems it'd ended up in a theater with half as many seats as they'd sold. They arranged to run a second screening immediately after, which left me with a blank space to fill in my schedule.
Through experience I've arrived at one firm rule for Cinequest: I never go to see a film described as an exploration of the dark side of the human psyche. (Without being flippant: If I wanted that, I could just stay home.) But, the only other thing playing at the same theater at that time was Solitude, which, I quote, "reach[es] into the absolute blackness of the human mind". And it was great. The characters--an undiscovered artist, her friend who is taking her to Flagstaff to get her work seen, and her friend's psychotic brother--are compelling and the story is unpredictable. Best thing I've seen so far.
Every year I go to see the student shorts competition. The last few years there's only been one screening, first thing in the morning when only the most dedicated will attend. I was really pleased to see that this year they'd scheduled two screenings (in addition to the extra one they added because of the logistical error), at a reasonable hours. The theater was packed with what I took to be SJSU kids, who whooped loudly for a couple of films by their classmates.
As always, the shorts were of widely varying quality, but all interesting. I especially liked La Americanita, about a Cuban-American teenager whose summer is ruined when her cousin sets out on a raft to Florida; Those Who Trespass, a documentary about four nuns who served a prison sentence for protesting on U.S. military property; and Misdemeanor, a dialogueless film about a homeless girl who commits a crime and then regrets it.
James Woods, in one of the "conversations" they do here (think Inside the Actor's Studio), was smart, ribald, hilarious, and generous. A great treat.
On the way out of The Invisible I said to Mike that one thing I love about seeing foreign films is realizing over and over that the word "okay" has become a part of every world language. Friday night I heard it in films from Iran and Sweden. Saturday I saw a Danish film whose title was Okay. A family drama with artificial insemination, teen angst, infidelity, and terminal illness (the four stages of family drama life), it had well-drawn characters and a satisfying story, but, as with The Invisible, if it's the kind of movie you want to watch, you can probably find one in English.
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Date: 2003-03-03 12:35 am (UTC)