Late review - London Film Fest 2010 Day 4 - CARLOS

CARLOS is a sprawling, intense five hour cine-spectacular biography of the cack-handed, vainglorious terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez aka Carlos aka Carlos The Jackal. Written and directed by Olivier Assayas and originally broadcast as a three part mini-series on French TV, the film was shown in its original length, back to back at this year's London film fest.It is also being released in some...

Guest Review - ENTER THE VOID (Extended version)

The following is a guest review by Alex, fellow cineaste, and proponent of the Flat White:If you can leave Gaspar Noé’s excellent Enter the Void (the full extended version clocks in at 2 hours and 37 minutes) without feeling a little tripped out, you may have a pretty serious drug problem. Noé himself has said of the film: “The best and worst response I got from the movie is that when you come out,...

Yokohama Art Navi (ヨコハマ・アートナビ)

Yokohama Art Navi’s Youtube Channel contains a mini-treasure trove of short alternative animation by young Japanese artists. The films were selected by renowned animator Koji Yamamura (see my reviews of Kafuka Inaka Isha, Atama Yama, and Man and Whale) and were all made within the last ten years. It’s an exciting video gallery of the best of rising animation talent in Japan. Many of these films...

Whisper of the Heart (耳をすませば, 1995)

Most coming-of-age stories about young teenage girls tend to revolve around the themes of popularity, overcoming self-confidence issues regarding physical appearance, and crushes on boys who tend to have only their charm and good looks to recommend them. Whisper of the Heart (耳をすませば /Mimi wo Sumaseba, 1995) refreshingly presents a young female protagonist with other things on her mind than such superficial...

London Film Fest 2010 - Day 16 - Closing Night Gala - 127 HOURS

I don't do extreme sport. I don't really do common or garden sport. In the words of George Burns, 'I never go jogging: it makes me spill my martini.' If some fuckwit decides to go up a mountain or into a canyon on his own, without telling anyone about it, and then gets his arm trapped under a boulder, I basically have no sympathy. I mean, I'm glad said fuckwit survived, but do I really want to watch...

London Film Fest 2010 - Day 16 - KABOOM

KABOOM is a bizarre little movie set in a surreal day-glo version of a So-Cal college campus. Said campus is populated by horny, promiscuous teens who spend all their time fucking, SMS-ing and...er...getting sucked into the machinations of an evil cult that's trying to bring about the end of the world. Writer-director Gregg Araki's is exploring similar territory as in his previous work - teenage sexual...

London Film Fest 2010 - Day 15 - COLD FISH / TSUMETAI NETTAIGYO

COLD FISH is basically insane. It's an insanely conceived movie about insane people. It's hilarious, sexually explicit, ultra-violent, horrifying and ridiculous. It's the sort of movie that you sit through, alternately laughing and nauseous, and when the lights come up you think, 'what the hell just happened here?!'J-horror director Shion Sono based the movie on a true case of a serial murderer in...

London Film Fest 2010 Day 14 - HOWL

HOWL is a beautifully made film about Allen Ginsberg's iconic Beat poem, published in 1955. Honest, raw, sexually explicit, Ginsberg described the reality of life on the road in the counter-culture - how young urban hipsters were really living and feeling. That rawness and authenticity - the proud joy at enjoying sex, drugs, literature, music and good company - and the anger at the establishment,...

London Film Fest 2010 Day 14 - SUBMARINO

Nick and Martin are brothers living in contemporary Copenhagen, struggling to deal with the childhood trauma of their little brother dying of neglect as the result of their mother's alcoholism. Nick has served time, and now passes the day at the gym or drinking and the evenings with a hooker. Martin is a junkie who turns to pushing to support his little boy. Both of them, in their own fucked-up way,...

London Film Fest 2010 Day 14 - SURVIVING LIFE (THEORY AND PRACTICE) / PREZIT SVUK ZIVOT (TEORIE A PRAXE)

SURVIVING LIFE is a classic Svan Jankmajer film: animation interspersed with live footage to create a surreal vision of life - at once a Kafka-esque nightmare, and very, very, funny! In this particular flick, Eugene is a middle-aged, happily married man, who has a surreal dream about a young, beautiful, sexy woman in red (Klára Issová). In his waking life he tries all manner of old-wives tales to recreate that dream, and even resorts to psychotherapy...

London Film Fest Day 2010 Day 13 - LEMMY

LEMMY is an infuriating documentary. The directors have an all access pass to Lemmy Klimister - legendary Motorhead front-man/bassist; obsessive fruit-machine player; drinker; womaniser; and general all-round bad-ass - and they squander it by producing an unfocused, over-long, indulgent documentary. You can tell this is a bad film because you leave the theatre wanting to know more about Lemmy -...

London Film Fest 2010 Day 13 - OCTOBER / OCTUBRE

OCTOBER is yet another film in this year's Festival that features a lonely man living an emotionally impoverished life, using whores for release, and finding an unlikely salvation. Frankly, by this point, I'm getting tired of seeing alienating commercial sex, no matter how stylised the framing and how good the acting. Anyways, for what it's worth, in this film, the iteration sees a Peruvian money-lender...

London Film Fest 2010 Day 13 - THE SLEEPING BEAUTY

Following her previous film, BLUEBEARD, Catherine Breillat revisits the fairy-tale world with her latest film, THE SLEEPING BEAUTY. She twists strands of various fairy-tales into a whimsical, go-where-it-may story of a little girl fearlessly discovering love, becoming a teenager, and exploring her sexuality. We start in an eighteenth century middle-European castle, with Princess Anastasia cursed...

VCinema Satoshi Kon/Kihachiro Kawamoto Memorial Episode

At Shinsedai in July, I had the pleasure of meeting Coffin Jon of VCinema.  As I have been doing research into the career of Kichachiro Kawamoto, he invited me to join the conversation for  Podcast 15: a memorial episode to Kawamoto and Satoshi Kon.  In addition to our conversation, the podcast includes insightful interviews with Mark Schilling of The Japan Times, Jasper Sharp of Midnight...

Kinema Junpo Top 10 Animated Films (キネマ旬報ベストテン, 2010)

Celebrated Japanese movie magazine Kinema Junpo has made lists of what they consider the top 10 Japanese Animated Films and the Top 10 Non-Japanese Animated Films. The pre-2003 films all appeared in Laputa’s Top 150 Japanese and World Animation Films, but with a very different ranking order. The list seems to be limited to feature and short films (ie no TV series). Here they are, followed by my...

London Film Fest 2010 Day 12 - UPSIDE DOWN: THE CREATION RECORDS STORY

UPSIDE DOWN: THE CREATION RECORDS STORY is a deeply dull piece of pop hagiography created by fanboys and insiders for nostalgic middle-aged former floppy-fringed Brit-pop hacks. It is basically an homage to Alan McGee, ginger-haired rock impresario who came to London in the early eighties, started putting gigs together, and eventually formed a record label that put out acts that were typically acclaimed...

London Film Fest 2010 Day 12 - CARANCHO

I found watching CARANCHO to be a rather alienating experience. It's all very well acted, and beautifully filmed. The movie drips with social realist integrity. The central romance feels authentic and the finale builds to a point of genuine tension. But for all that, and I'm not sure why, it somehow just didn't work for me. Maybe it was the unrelentingly dour environment or the lingering sense that writer-director, Pablo Trapero, was more interested...

Akino Kondoh Selected for the Guggenheim's You Tube Play

The digest version of Akino Kondoh’s Ladybirds’ Requiem (てんとう虫のおとむらい/Tenshō Mushi no Otomurai) was chosen earlier this week as one of twenty-five short videos for the Guggenheim Museum’s first biennial You Tube Play celebration of creative video. With this project, the Guggenheim aims to harness the power of video-streaming sites like You Tube to promote contemporary art. Their goal was to “attract...