Galerie sztuki

Fests and events, 10/20.

“In its third edition spread over four days from November 13 – 16, 2008 at Landmark’s Embarcadero Center Cinema, with special live events at the Apple Store and the Ninth Street Independent Film Center, the San Francisco Film Society presents the San Francisco International Animation Festival (SFIAF), which celebrates ‘one of the most fertile, creative and productive forms of artistic, experimental, commercial and industrial media.’” A preview from Michael Guillén.

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Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) 08, 10/20.

“It’s October again and time for accounting another year of horror film releases on DVD. The crop’s been down, owing partly to diminished disc sales overall, and the fact of known quantity chillers being offered up in past seasons. We’ve pretty nearly dredged the lake.” Nevertheless, John McElwee finds a few highlights for the season, thanks mostly to the little studio that could – “My policy dictates that whatever is good in Hammer mitigates all that isn’t” – and an event honoring a very special face: his wife “says I ignore household matters but am vitally interested in what Boris Karloff might have said on some street corner back in August 1933, to which I reply, Well, what did he say?”

Speaking of whom. Observer film critic Philip French has chosen his five “scariest films” and at the top of the list is Frankenstein, whose director, James Whale, comes in for special praise from Jonathan Lapper, too: “Now that man could direct.”

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London 08, week 2.

The London Film Festival opened last week and runs through to the end of the month. How’s it been going so far? The Observer’s Jason Solomons hits a few of the highlights, while the Guardian’s Xan Brooks looks ahead, with recommendations for the second week: “Might I recommend Tony Manero…?”

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NYFF 08. Index.

The New York Film Festival is one of the most thoroughly covered events of each movie year – at least online, and certainly on a per-film basis. For all the obvious reasons: It’s in New York, a city thronged with writers working for media old and new, and some simply for themselves. Most importantly, the festival is a vital measure of the year so far, just before Hollywood rolls out its awards season contenders. Not a complete measure, of course – many would like to have seen, say, the new Claire Denis in the lineup – but here’s what we’ve got:

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Brooklyn Rail. October 08.

“Defining the end points of the continuum of fine art/popular culture, performance artist Mark Tribe’s Port Huron Project and actor cum Charlize Theron paramour cum director Stuart Townsend’s Battle in Seattle highlight every (should be) obvious parallel between today’s wars and corporate oligarchies and those of yesterday,” writes Sarahjane Blum. “Both The Port Huron Project and Battle in Seattle offer guilt trips of the highest order, and we should learn a thing or two hundred from the anti-war icons of the Vietnam era, and the thousands of protesters who stopped 1999’s World Trade Organization. But if politically engaged filmmakers keep focusing on how little ground has been won, will we lose sight of how much ground has been lost?”

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NYFF. Let It Rain.

“The insidious nature of racism and marginalization that underpins the discourse in It’s Hard Being Loved by Jerks also surfaces in Let It Rain [site], Agnès Jaoui’s third (and lightest) ensemble collaboration with screenwriter and actor, Jean-Pierre Bacri,” writes Acquarello.

Akiva Gottlieb in Slant: “Let It Rain is certainly no departure for Jaoui and company; it’s another less-than-caustic battle of the sexes set among the comfortable and brilliant, with plenty of verbal jousting but little political frisson. Even when Jaoui and co-star Jean-Pierre Bacri’s script hits upon the evergreen conversational lightning rods of gender and class inequality, its characters end up sounding frivolous.”

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NYFF. Serbis.

“To my knowledge, Serbis is the first film to equate third-world life in the late capitalist era to squatting in a rundown porn palace,” writes Kevin B Lee in Slant. “Mike Judge, who predicted in Idiocracy that Starbucks will one day sell handjobs, would feel thoroughly validated to see the goings on in the Family Theater, the last of a Filipino theater chain run by a family that’s as defunct as its business…. Absurdly comic and harrowingly explicit, Serbis feels too surreal and conceptual to be taken as docu-verisimilitude, but it needn’t settle for such conventions when every frame is alive, breathing dank sweat and sighing desperation. This house of sin and cinema runs by its own rules.”

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NYFF. Bullet in the Head.

“It may seem a bit hackneyed to start a review with a question, but this film undoubtedly requires it: can there be movies that are only good after they are seen and not while watching them?” Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs’ Notebook: “Bullet in the Head is nothing but a frustrated viewing, an experiment for the spectator, but one without a point. But afterwards there is an appeal to it, I admit, its sneakiness – irritating in execution – becomes conceptual and more stunt-like in retrospect, the viewing all done with and forgotten in its dullness, and mostly just the curious idea surviving.”

“There’s virtually no dialogue (two words are spoken towards the end) and almost all the sound we hear is ambient: traffic noise, birdsong, background chatter,” explains Evan Kindley at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. “The film is shot like surveillance footage, recording the movements of an unnamed man around the Spanish city of San Sebastian.”

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Synecdoche, New York, round 1.

“As the Oscar-friendly writer of Being John Malkovich (nominated), Adaptation, (nominated) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (won) [Charlie] Kaufman has already earned a significant amount of acclaim,” writes David Carr in the New York Times. “Driven by the concept of a synecdoche – roughly, a part representing the whole — he takes one man’s fear of irrelevance and drapes it across a vast landscape of human concerns…. On the telephone in San Francisco just before an all-night flight to Spain, Mr Kaufman was happy to talk about anything, except what [Synecdoche, New York] ‘means.’”

“Imagine The Truman Show rewritten by Samuel Beckett and directed by Luis Buñuel and you’ll get some idea of what Kaufman is aiming for here,” suggests Ambrose Heron.

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Abu Dhabi Dispatch. 2.

David D’Arcy, from the festival that wraps today.

With the huge number of Indians working in Abu Dhabi – doing everything from building the endless number of new towers 24 hours a day to arranging shipments of money earned by those many workers back to the subcontinent – you would think that there would be a growing market here for Indian films, especially since there are unprecedented funds in India to produce and promote them.

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