At seventy years old, Francis Ford Coppola could really be doing anything. If he was at all comparable to any of the seventy year old men we know, he would be spending the rest of his days mall-walking, drinking a lot of refillable McDonalds coffee, and carrying a surplus of mixed seeds to feed the squirrels....
Since every synopsis that I could find of Granaz Moussavi’s My Tehran for Sale mentioned that it featured scenes of underground raves, I expected that this film would largely be about raves and partying in Iran. Knowing that movies about raves are notoriously horrible, I was curious to see if this was different in Iranian cinema....
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If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times: if there is one thing missing in the tired genre of modern failed marriage dramas, it has got to be the serious lack of scorned lovers having intimate affairs with trees. In his latest film, Nymph, Thai director, Pen-ek Ratanaruang skilfully illustrates his understanding of this dilemma in contemporary filmmaking and delivers with a very strange portrait of a relationship gone wrong. Opening with a long and mysterious single-shot take, Ratanaruang subtly introduces the audience to a supernatural element residing in a forest. Nothing weird about that. However, as the film progresses, the director’s treatment of a couple struggling to keep their relationship afloat seemed to, at times, come across as more of a comedy than was intended. Not that there is anything inherently funny about leaving your cheating wife for an extremely sensual tree that occasionally takes human shape. Love comes in many forms. A friend of mine told me that it was a cultural thing and that I probably couldn’t understand it. I guess he is right.
I should have known what to expect from my previous experience with the films of director Hirokazu Kore-eda; but when hearing that I was about to watch a movie about a blow-up sex doll that comes to life, I couldn’t help but to get ready for a campy Troma Entertainment-style comedy....
Like most films that boast hospital-inducing gross-out scenes, it goes without saying that Lars von Trier’s Antichrist is not the easiest film in the world to watch....
Though I am not some film student that regularly watches movies for their intrinsic beauty, Island of Dreams by Tsuta Tetsuichiro is one movie that I love...
We had originally planned to write a preview article for the film festival. Looking at the calendar, it looks like we are now exactly half-way through the festival. Perhaps too late for a preview...
I should have known what to expect from my previous experience with the films of director Hirokazu Kore-eda; but when hearing that I was about to watch a movie about a blow-up sex doll that comes to life, I couldn’t help but to get ready for a campy Troma Entertainment-style comedy....
