VIFF 2015 (most of)
Oct. 4th, 2015 08:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishI did not expect to knock that off the list this year, but this was a decent year for VIFF movies. And I've still got at least two more coming this week.
Very good: A Tale of Three Cities, High-Rise, Ayanda
Good: 600 Miles, 808
Not bad: Beeba Boys, The Anarchists, The Classified File, A Perfect Day
Not my thing: The Assassin
Mabel Cheung (dir.), A Tale of Three Cities
A mid-twentieth-century love story set in a village in Anhui and in Shanghai, with a frame story in Hong Kong. In the middle of the Sino-Japanese War, Yuerong is a single mother trying to raise two daughters, and Daolong is a customs agent and Nationalist spy. They meet when Daolong catches Yuerong smuggling opium and lets her go, and again at Daolong's wife's / Yuerong's third cousin's funeral. Gradually they warm to each other as various circumstances (Yuerong's mother, Daolong's former superior officer) force them apart.
Beautiful, and frequently quite funny. I found the ending to be unspeakably sad; your mileage may vary.
(A Tale of Three Cities is based on the lives of Jackie Chan's parents. I note with interest that the director has also made a documentary on the same subject.)
Deepa Mehta (dir.), Beeba Boys
This is a movie about Sikh gangsters in Surrey (a Vancouver suburb with a lot[1] of gang activity). Take Goodfellas, then replace Italian Catholics with Sikhs, and there you are: the "beeba boys" of the title are literally the main character's "good boys."
[1] Relatively speaking. I believe Surrey has had something under twenty homicides this year. For DC or Baltimore this would be "last month" or perhaps "Thursday."
Not really a lot else for me to say about it: good performances, serviceable script, a cameo by Paul Gross. If you want to see a movie about Sikh gangsters, this is the movie for you!
Hou Hsiao-Hsien (dir.) The Assassin
I was warned, and I went anyway.
In the eighth century, skilled assassin Yinniang is sent back to her home to kill her cousin and first love, Tian Ji'an.
The Assassin was advertised as a wuxia, a film in the style of Crouching Tiger or Hero. Some of the reviews mentioned the director's inimitable style, and that this was his first wuxia film but it wasn't exactly a wuxia. Robin Laws described another film as being very Taiwanese in a good way, "not the boring Hou Hsiao-Hsien way." This should have been sufficient.
The half-dozen fight scenes are very good. Sadly only one lasts longer than about a minute. The rest of the movie is taken up with political maneuvering that I didn't quite follow well enough to care about, and slow lingering shots of meaningless or deep (your choice) conversations. In the hands of a better director or writer, or possibly editor, these could have revealed unexpected emotional depth. Here they mostly ran up the screentime.
Very pretty, but fails to do much of anything interesting with its prettiness.
Gabriel Ripstein (dir.), 600 Miles
Arnulfo, a teenaged Mexican gunrunner for a cartel, accidentally kidnaps ATF agent Tim Roth. Unsure what to do with him, he drives south to turn him over to his uncle.
A surprisingly slow and thoughtful film: lots of quiet long shots. The ending was ... unexpected and not wholly believable, except that I can't think of any other way it could have ended. Also, the director made the very very cool choice to put what could have been a cute post-credits blip running in voice only over the credits. Made it that much more ominous, and it gives some insight into Tim Roth's character.
Ben Wheatley (dir.), High Rise
The director of A Field in England, with what I'm told is his first big-budget feature.
... I have enough to say about this that it's going to warrant its own post.
Sara Blecher (dir.), Ayanda
(Promo materials and the film title card refer to it as Ayanda; VIFF calls it Ayanda and the Mechanic)
Ayanda wants to make bespoke furniture, but she also wants to keep running the garage that's her only tangible memory of her dead father. This is a movie about growing up and grieving and letting go, in a lot of different ways.
Relentlessly bright and cheerful even when it's sad. Possibly my favorite movie of the year. The whole movie's subtitled; characters switch between English and what I assume is Afrikaans sometimes several times in a sentence, which I assume is an accurate representation of Johannesburg.
Elie Wajeman, Les Anarchistes
A policeman infiltrates an anarchist cell in fin-de-seicle Paris.
This was a well-shot and well-acted movie that left me vaguely unsatisfied. I mean, it's a costume drama, with the emphasis on both halves of that statement. I don't know what more I expected from it. It felt like something I didn't really need to go to a festival to see.
Alexander Dunn (dir.), 808
A documentary about the Roland TR-808, the drum machine that's featured in a ridiculous number of hit records. Lots of interviews with artists and producers. It all started to get sort of same-y towards the end but that's made up for by the founder of Roland explaining how the 808 got its distinctive sound: by overloading faulty transistors. Which is also why they stopped making it: the transistor process got good enough that faulty transistors weren't being made in numbers large enough to support continued 800 manufacture.
I liked this, but I like the "interesting people talking about something they think is cool" style of documentary.
Kwak Kyungtaek (dir.), The Classified File
A rich man's daughter is kidnapped and Detective Gong reluctantly takes the case. Shortly he learns he was assigned because the girl's mother visited a fortune-teller who told her that only Detective Gong would be able to get her daughter back.
This was mostly a police procedural set in South Korea, with a fortune-teller along for the ride. Structurally and stylistically, it's a perfectly normal Western blockbuster... and then there's the whole cultural deal with the fortune-teller. I'm glad I saw it, but like with The Anarchists I'm not sure I needed to see it in a film festival. These are movies I expect to get a limited release in North America, is I guess what I'm saying.
Fernando León de Aranoa (dir.), A Perfect Day
Balkan aid workers Tim Robbins and Benicio Del Toro try to haul a dead body out of a well.
This was not entirely what I expected. It's funny (you'd expect that with those actors), and serious, and sometimes very dark. Good script, and well-done all around. I'm not sure why I didn't think more highly of it; I would certainly recommend it to people looking for that sort of thing.
no subject
Date: 2015-10-06 04:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-07 04:53 am (UTC)The trailer does a pretty good job of conveying most of the mood, though it gets darker than you'd think from the trailer.
edit: to attempt to expand on that a bit: the movie treated Sophie the idealistic ingenue rather poorly at the start, in ways that felt less "ha ha misplaced idealism" (that's later) and more "ha ha we can make the young woman uncomfortable," and that left a foul taste in my mouth for much of the rest of it. I don't know if it's actually a problem, or if it's just a combination of things that I'm very sensitive to.
no subject
Date: 2015-10-08 12:51 am (UTC)