Ludwig / Grigris
Oct. 12th, 2013 06:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishOne of the 101 things I'd like to do over 1001 days is to see ten movies at the Vancouver International Film Festival. As noted elsewhere, due to poor scheduling I've only got two VIFFs before the end of my thousand nights and a night are up, so that's five films per year. This year due to various scheduling difficulties (Farthing Party, work, other commitments, not bothering to pick up a film schedule) I didn't start looking into this year's movies until Wednesday night, and the festival closed on Friday. Luckily I found five I was interested in, and the scheduling worked out.
These two were from Thursday. I'll write up the three from Friday later.
Peter Sehr & Marie Noëlle (dirs.), Ludwig II
(trailer)
A biopic of Bavaria's most famous king, known mostly for castles and opera. Ludwig is a sensitive artistic Francophile who ascends the throne at eighteen upon his father's death. As king, Ludwig is more interested in spending his country's money on art and Richard Wagner's music than on guns and raising an army. This works better when your next-door neighbor is not Otto von Bismarck. After losing a war to Bismarck's Prussia, being forced to fight against his beloved France, and then seeing his country dragged into a German empire, Ludwig retreats into his own little world, building his fairy-tale castles until his councillors have finally had enough and depose him on shaky grounds of madness.
Big sweeping vistas and great costumes, and the one thing the 19th century unquestionably had going for it was men's facial hair. More seriously, like most biopics this suffers from trying to cram a real person's life into some form of coherent story, with the result that people other than Ludwig, Wagner, and Ludwig's capable (and, near as I can tell, wholly fictionalized) prime minister, Lutz, feel very thinly drawn.
To the left, those three are fantastic. And both Ludwig's struggle with his sexuality and his eccentricities and quirks are treated with some amount of respect (at least, as much as possible in the late nineteenth century). Recommended.
Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (dir.), Grigris
(trailer, of a sort)
The festival description claimed this was a film noir, which I suppose it is, defined very loosely. Grigris is a club dancer in Chad, who needs an awful lot of money for his stepfather's medical bills. He tries honest work, which doesn't pay, and then stealing gasoline, which he's bad at. He convinces the crime boss to let him try again, and gets to drive the car filled with gas. He proceeds to sell it to someone else (I'm not entirely clear on who this guy is) for enough money to pay off the medical bills, and lies about it being stolen from him by the police. Of course he gets busted, and has two days to come up with the money for the gasoline. So he and the hooker he's been falling in love with all movie run off to a remote village, where they fit right in. Eventually the crime boss's second-in-command finds him, and is about to shoot him when the women of the village rise up and kill that guy instead.
The characters are well-done and the run-down desert atmosphere comes across strongly in the city scenes. Not a bad movie by any stretch, just... not very tightly crafted or well-constructed, which seems to be what I'm looking for in a noir. Meh.
These two were from Thursday. I'll write up the three from Friday later.
Peter Sehr & Marie Noëlle (dirs.), Ludwig II
(trailer)
A biopic of Bavaria's most famous king, known mostly for castles and opera. Ludwig is a sensitive artistic Francophile who ascends the throne at eighteen upon his father's death. As king, Ludwig is more interested in spending his country's money on art and Richard Wagner's music than on guns and raising an army. This works better when your next-door neighbor is not Otto von Bismarck. After losing a war to Bismarck's Prussia, being forced to fight against his beloved France, and then seeing his country dragged into a German empire, Ludwig retreats into his own little world, building his fairy-tale castles until his councillors have finally had enough and depose him on shaky grounds of madness.
Big sweeping vistas and great costumes, and the one thing the 19th century unquestionably had going for it was men's facial hair. More seriously, like most biopics this suffers from trying to cram a real person's life into some form of coherent story, with the result that people other than Ludwig, Wagner, and Ludwig's capable (and, near as I can tell, wholly fictionalized) prime minister, Lutz, feel very thinly drawn.
To the left, those three are fantastic. And both Ludwig's struggle with his sexuality and his eccentricities and quirks are treated with some amount of respect (at least, as much as possible in the late nineteenth century). Recommended.
Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (dir.), Grigris
(trailer, of a sort)
The festival description claimed this was a film noir, which I suppose it is, defined very loosely. Grigris is a club dancer in Chad, who needs an awful lot of money for his stepfather's medical bills. He tries honest work, which doesn't pay, and then stealing gasoline, which he's bad at. He convinces the crime boss to let him try again, and gets to drive the car filled with gas. He proceeds to sell it to someone else (I'm not entirely clear on who this guy is) for enough money to pay off the medical bills, and lies about it being stolen from him by the police. Of course he gets busted, and has two days to come up with the money for the gasoline. So he and the hooker he's been falling in love with all movie run off to a remote village, where they fit right in. Eventually the crime boss's second-in-command finds him, and is about to shoot him when the women of the village rise up and kill that guy instead.
The characters are well-done and the run-down desert atmosphere comes across strongly in the city scenes. Not a bad movie by any stretch, just... not very tightly crafted or well-constructed, which seems to be what I'm looking for in a noir. Meh.