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The Big Long Film Report (part 2)

Photo of shadows on a red brick wall

I know this entry is kinda overdue, but my life is a bit upside-down lately, so here it is — late. :)

Last Saturday we'd walked from Côte-des-Neiges back downtown via Westmount, a little charred by the sun whilst admiring the view and being flabbergasted by the size of the houses there. The odd thing is, you can get used to looking at big houses after a while. I slept two thirds of Sunday — I guess I needed it.

In short, we kept away from cinemas, eventhough the festival didn't end until Sunday. I saw 5 more films between the last film report and the end of Friday. These are:

"The Legend of the Sky Kingdom" was by all means an excellent animation, although the video quality was a bit poor and I'm not expert enough in the medium to know why. Visually very creative, good music, but ... the Christian undertone was much too obvious. Why bother to use the name "Ariel" when "Jesus" would have sufficed? "The road to the Sky Kingdom is a person"? Kinda a bit clumsy. "Valley of Death"? That's straight out of Psalm 23. I came out of the cinema thinking about its similarity to "The Pilgrim's Progress" (which I haven't read in its entirety, but have read Enid Blyton's retelling of the story many moons ago). Eventhough the art work was great, I think it lacked solid originality in its treatment of the subject.

"Mosku" is ... somewhat long-winded. It is a big long saga that doesn't want to end, but it was interesting to see the portrayal of the particular life style of Finnish reindeer farmers of the time.

"Les Marins Perdus" features one of the last screen appearances of Marie Trintignant. A film that attempts to suffocate you, but not quite stifling enough for my liking. Some brilliant photography, but it was the music that had more of my attention, having been co-written by Gabriel Yared, who also wrote for "City of Angels" (the re-make with Nicolas Cage).

Now, I am not a home movie fan. I'm hopeless at sitting in front of the TV for any length of time unless I get suitably psyched up before hand, or unless I'd randomly flicked on the TV and something good was on. My lack of TV-watching habit probably came from too many years being deprived control of the TV remote, hence at some point, I must have given up completely. :) So ... for me to say that I'd get something on DVD — meaning that I have the intention to watch it again at home — it really says something about how much I liked the movie. Currently, I own a grand total of one DVD ("Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise") which was a gift; there are five others which I would consider owning, two of which I saw at the end of this film festival.

"Man Watching Video" was originally called "Rewind", but the title was apparently changed because it would have made little sense to the majority of Koreans. It has the most beautiful opening sequence I'd seen in any film recently, a delicate story line littered with small, seemingly unconnected and insignificant events, which duly reminded me of Haruki Murakami's novels. The hunt begins for the book upon which this film was based. After watching "Mosku" on the Friday, we spotted the movie director of this film in the cinema foyer and were able to ask him to write down the name of the author. However, I suspect that the book by Lim Young-tae has not been translated into English.

From Singapore came "15", a maddening but brilliant portrayal of Singaporean "pai-kia" (bad boys), teenagers who are part of gangs and their struggle with existence within a sterile, suffocating society. The treament of language in the dialogues and songs (yes! songs!) blew me away — the same which was lacking in the Malaysian "You Fang Chu Zu". This is the true tongue of South East Asians of this region — the mixing of dialects and languages. Somewhat surrealist at times, and often difficult to watch, this movie is surprisingly moving. And funnily enough, most of the swearing was in Hokkien rather than Mandarin Chinese. It was a good film to end this festival on. :)

(Incidentally, all the characters within the picture accompaning this entry took a photo each: see here, and here.)

Posted by sniffles at September 11, 2003 10:10 PM