Friday, September 18, 2009
10 films in 10 Days: Day 2/3 - Synecdoche, New York and Vicky Christina Barcelona (coming)
Physical State: achey
Mental State: sleepy
Music: The Antlers - Hospice
Fashion sense: jeans, black t-shirt
Off to a great start with the reviews, ha ha. Day 2/3 and I'm already slipping, nice. I will post reviews of this film above and Vicky Christina Barcelona later today. Slight diversion to "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" which while entertaining might not fit in with these festival types I'm writing about. Stay tuned.
UPDATE: Sorry this 10 films/10 days project kind of didn't get going after the first post. In retrospect it was way too ambitious. BUT I am thinking of ways to maybe turn something like the Tokyo! review and things like it into some sort of regular feature (maybe even a podcast someday. Michael Geoghegan isn't doing his anymore it appears, so...). I have had that project percolating for about 2 years now. Perhaps perhaps...
Physical State: achey
Mental State: sleepy
Music: The Antlers - Hospice
Fashion sense: jeans, black t-shirt
Off to a great start with the reviews, ha ha. Day 2/3 and I'm already slipping, nice. I will post reviews of this film above and Vicky Christina Barcelona later today. Slight diversion to "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" which while entertaining might not fit in with these festival types I'm writing about. Stay tuned.
UPDATE: Sorry this 10 films/10 days project kind of didn't get going after the first post. In retrospect it was way too ambitious. BUT I am thinking of ways to maybe turn something like the Tokyo! review and things like it into some sort of regular feature (maybe even a podcast someday. Michael Geoghegan isn't doing his anymore it appears, so...). I have had that project percolating for about 2 years now. Perhaps perhaps...
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
10 films in 10 Days: Day 1 - Tokyo!
Ayako Fujitani & Ryo Kase in Michel Gondry's "Interior Design"
Physical State: slouchy
Mental State: bored
Music: Chihei Hatakeyama - Saunter
Fashion sense: jeans, grey t-shirt
Last week I had started thinking about how much I really wanted to go to this year's 2009 Toronto Film Festival but also realizing that I had left it too late and a lot of what I wanted to see was sold out already. I've just moved back to Toronto from Calgary and didn't consider ordering the tickets ahead of time, so I ended up SOL. But I managed to get a new library card and got to thinking, with all these great dvds perhaps I can still watch some cool films and have a bit of a taste of what TIFF would have been like. A chance to still satisfy my film nerd tendencies. So I decided this past weekend I'd watch 1 film everyday for 10 days and post about them as I go along. Traditionally in the 12 years I've been to TIFF I'd buy a book of 10 tickets (one year I bought the 30 ticket book and that was pretty intense). So in that spirit for all the film geeks (and the 3 people who might be reading this blog), I've decided to go ahead with my ambitious little project. Of course this comes almost a week after the TIFF has started but I'm going to do it anyway. One caveat though, I am no Pauline Kael but I will try my best.
The first of my 10 films is actually 3 short films collected into one called Tokyo! The producers selected three contemporary filmmakers to encapsulate their impressions of the Japanese city. Made up of 1. Michel Gondry's "Interior Design" 2. Leos Carax's "Merde" and 3. "Shaking Tokyo" by Bong Joon-Ho, Tokyo! is a delight for fans of each of these directors' works. The film compilation is accompanied on the dvd by some great director interviews and featurettes about how the films were made. In all cases Japanese was not the directors' native language and they worked with exclusively Japanese crews through an interpreter.
Gondry's effort Interior Design is a great addition to the portfolio of a director who consistently pushes the envelope when it comes to filmmaking. I think back to some of his great videos for Bjork or films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as two examples that seem to be akin to this short film. Based on the graphic novel "Cecil and Jordan Go To New York" by cartoonist Gabrielle Bell, Gondry transfers the story from Brooklyn to the Japanese metropolis expertly. He also worked side-by-side with Bell to develop the script and create the film. Hiroko and Akira have come to Tokyo to find work, an apartment and hopefully for Akira, a chance to debut his art film and get some exposure. In the process, his girlfriend Hiroko seems to take a back seat to his ambition and success. She feels that she is fading further and further into the background. The turns of the plot eventually finds Hiroko deciding that in effect she is nothing more than "furniture" and needs to be more useful. This seemingly tiny Tokyo story then takes a surreal Kafkaesque turn as Hiroko transforms from a quiet, forgettable girl into a wooden chair, as only Gondry could envision. At times lonely and darkly humourous, this was my favourite of the three stories in the collection.
The second effort in the series, Merde, is a play on the common film tradition of the monster movie, as imagined by the French filmmaker Leos Carax. Carax hasn't made anything in the past 9 years and is very selective of any projects he takes on, so this had a lot to answer for in my opinion. In Merde we find Denis Lavant playing a mischievous sewer-dwelling troll who terrorizes the people of Tokyo, cutting a swath of destruction throughout. As a typical monster in the tradition of Frankenstein's monster or Godzilla, Merde acts strictly on his impulses for survival and has no conscience or regard for his victims. When the repercussions of his actions prove fatal, he is captured and put on trial for mass murder. Only one French magistrate in the world speaks his language and comes from his race, he becomes Merde's defender in the trial. There is a polarization of the people of Tokyo taking sides either in support of Merde's human rights or demanding his execution. The film also at that point becomes Carax's blackly humourous comment on the celebrity of criminals. A huge scale work for Carax, I felt this story, while quite ambitious, was not as interesting as the other two.
The last film in the trilogy, Shaking Tokyo, comes from Korean director Boon Joon-Ho (The Host) who turns in an interesting vision of Tokyo as a city of lonely souls or hikikomori (shut-ins). We discover at the outset that our unnamed protagonist hasn't left his house in over a decade, relying on money from his father and pizza delivery to survive in his shut-in world. A world he has total control over where everything including toilet rolls, pizza boxes and books are meticulously stacked. It is only when he meets a fetching pizza delivery girl who faints during an earthquake, that his life changes. After falling in love with her he considers leaving the sanctity and security of his home for the first time spending days trying to muster up the courage to go outside and find her. Bong comments in the directors' interviews that he was struck by how people in Tokyo live individual parallel lives, buying takeout dinners for one and rarely connecting socially. This film was the result of that personal impression.
Overall this film is a great collection of three foreign directors' interpretations of the Japanese city, its scale, its loneliness, its people. I would find it really exciting to see this made into a series of compilations and hopefully that may be a possibility down the road. Definitely worth a rental.
Tomorrow, its my take on Charlie Kaufman's confusing and ambitious epic: Synecdoche, New York.
Ayako Fujitani & Ryo Kase in Michel Gondry's "Interior Design"
Physical State: slouchy
Mental State: bored
Music: Chihei Hatakeyama - Saunter
Fashion sense: jeans, grey t-shirt
Last week I had started thinking about how much I really wanted to go to this year's 2009 Toronto Film Festival but also realizing that I had left it too late and a lot of what I wanted to see was sold out already. I've just moved back to Toronto from Calgary and didn't consider ordering the tickets ahead of time, so I ended up SOL. But I managed to get a new library card and got to thinking, with all these great dvds perhaps I can still watch some cool films and have a bit of a taste of what TIFF would have been like. A chance to still satisfy my film nerd tendencies. So I decided this past weekend I'd watch 1 film everyday for 10 days and post about them as I go along. Traditionally in the 12 years I've been to TIFF I'd buy a book of 10 tickets (one year I bought the 30 ticket book and that was pretty intense). So in that spirit for all the film geeks (and the 3 people who might be reading this blog), I've decided to go ahead with my ambitious little project. Of course this comes almost a week after the TIFF has started but I'm going to do it anyway. One caveat though, I am no Pauline Kael but I will try my best.
The first of my 10 films is actually 3 short films collected into one called Tokyo! The producers selected three contemporary filmmakers to encapsulate their impressions of the Japanese city. Made up of 1. Michel Gondry's "Interior Design" 2. Leos Carax's "Merde" and 3. "Shaking Tokyo" by Bong Joon-Ho, Tokyo! is a delight for fans of each of these directors' works. The film compilation is accompanied on the dvd by some great director interviews and featurettes about how the films were made. In all cases Japanese was not the directors' native language and they worked with exclusively Japanese crews through an interpreter.
Gondry's effort Interior Design is a great addition to the portfolio of a director who consistently pushes the envelope when it comes to filmmaking. I think back to some of his great videos for Bjork or films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as two examples that seem to be akin to this short film. Based on the graphic novel "Cecil and Jordan Go To New York" by cartoonist Gabrielle Bell, Gondry transfers the story from Brooklyn to the Japanese metropolis expertly. He also worked side-by-side with Bell to develop the script and create the film. Hiroko and Akira have come to Tokyo to find work, an apartment and hopefully for Akira, a chance to debut his art film and get some exposure. In the process, his girlfriend Hiroko seems to take a back seat to his ambition and success. She feels that she is fading further and further into the background. The turns of the plot eventually finds Hiroko deciding that in effect she is nothing more than "furniture" and needs to be more useful. This seemingly tiny Tokyo story then takes a surreal Kafkaesque turn as Hiroko transforms from a quiet, forgettable girl into a wooden chair, as only Gondry could envision. At times lonely and darkly humourous, this was my favourite of the three stories in the collection.
The second effort in the series, Merde, is a play on the common film tradition of the monster movie, as imagined by the French filmmaker Leos Carax. Carax hasn't made anything in the past 9 years and is very selective of any projects he takes on, so this had a lot to answer for in my opinion. In Merde we find Denis Lavant playing a mischievous sewer-dwelling troll who terrorizes the people of Tokyo, cutting a swath of destruction throughout. As a typical monster in the tradition of Frankenstein's monster or Godzilla, Merde acts strictly on his impulses for survival and has no conscience or regard for his victims. When the repercussions of his actions prove fatal, he is captured and put on trial for mass murder. Only one French magistrate in the world speaks his language and comes from his race, he becomes Merde's defender in the trial. There is a polarization of the people of Tokyo taking sides either in support of Merde's human rights or demanding his execution. The film also at that point becomes Carax's blackly humourous comment on the celebrity of criminals. A huge scale work for Carax, I felt this story, while quite ambitious, was not as interesting as the other two.
The last film in the trilogy, Shaking Tokyo, comes from Korean director Boon Joon-Ho (The Host) who turns in an interesting vision of Tokyo as a city of lonely souls or hikikomori (shut-ins). We discover at the outset that our unnamed protagonist hasn't left his house in over a decade, relying on money from his father and pizza delivery to survive in his shut-in world. A world he has total control over where everything including toilet rolls, pizza boxes and books are meticulously stacked. It is only when he meets a fetching pizza delivery girl who faints during an earthquake, that his life changes. After falling in love with her he considers leaving the sanctity and security of his home for the first time spending days trying to muster up the courage to go outside and find her. Bong comments in the directors' interviews that he was struck by how people in Tokyo live individual parallel lives, buying takeout dinners for one and rarely connecting socially. This film was the result of that personal impression.
Overall this film is a great collection of three foreign directors' interpretations of the Japanese city, its scale, its loneliness, its people. I would find it really exciting to see this made into a series of compilations and hopefully that may be a possibility down the road. Definitely worth a rental.
Tomorrow, its my take on Charlie Kaufman's confusing and ambitious epic: Synecdoche, New York.
