POMO

Men in Black II is a misguided and spasmodic patchwork of spectacular scenes, a third of which could have been cut out and no on would have been worse off for it. But then the film would have been an “unusable” 60 minutes. I’m actually asking myself why I’m giving it three stars. Maybe just for the divine dog.

At first, I was quite bothered by the digital visual aspect and low-budget quality of Khaled. The film begged for a more dignified look and dark, high-quality symphonic music. As the minutes passed, however, I was fully mollified by the nicely intensifying screenplay and creative directing in combination with the cinematography, which enhanced the drama fantastically (see, for example, the shot of Khaled running down the corridor to the cellar with a frying pan in his hand). In this instance, the cheap digital image was no longer a detriment, but rather gave the film naturalistic authenticity. The young actor and, mainly, the UNIQUE subject on which this brilliant film is based are worthy of praise.

A girl reassesses her attitude toward life after she is hit by a car and narrowly escapes death. Sitting behind the wheel of the car was a successful young man who, though a proud defender of the law, leaves the scene of the accident like a coward. However, his remorse shatters everything on which he had based the values of his life. An elderly man, with whom the young man had been talking in a bar just before the accident, searches in vain for the source of happiness in life... etc., etc. Cultivated, intelligent, visually spare dialogic philosophizing with a bit of irony and fatalism. Though 13 Conversations About One Thing is an enjoyable alternative to Hollywood light entertainment, it comes across as a futile attempt at “would-be independence” and thus lacks the credibility and sincerity of similar European films.

Filament is a film about the hardships of a strange Japanese family. The father is a transvestite and finds pleasure in photographing his family and himself dressed in women’s clothes. And the son and daughter are adolescents with no future, living in a world as gray, heartless and formulaic as the world of their computer games. The cause of all of this is their mother, who abandoned them ten years prior and ran off with a “younger male”. This film is culturally distant, yet intimate in terms of its subject matter, beautifully enabling us to get to know all of the characters through their endearing weaknesses and long-hidden and ultimately expressed feelings. It’s a beautiful film about family cohesion, forgiveness, love and self-sacrifice. The sad and overly dramatic moments are lightened up with gentle, casual humor. The director doesn’t try to overdo it and wring tears out of us, instead preferring to stay on an easy-going poetic level.

The first half of Unfaithful is excellent. Adrian Lyne is a brilliant psychologist and he fantastically captures the development of a married woman who is torn by unbridled sexual passion and a guilty conscience because of her infidelity and “hurting the people she loves”. The scene on a train with the sex flashbacks is absolutely fantastic in this respect. And in the bathtub scene, the director superbly captures the alienation that the protagonist feels in relation to her husband. I devoured this excellent first half, shot in Lyne’s typically hypnotic style, with bated breath. In the second half of the film, however, the screenplay devolves into cheap, half-baked, self-parodying thriller clichés.

The arid, dusty plains of Iran without a drop of water. Minimal camera movement. No music. A world without emotion, without colour. A well-off middle-aged man intent on suicide, looking for someone in this environment who would be willing to bury him the following night for a hefty financial reward. It doesn't matter why he wants to die – and we won’t even find out. Abbas Kiarostami doesn’t like to manipulate viewers’ feelings, preferring instead to just let them observe and compose their thoughts. What makes this film so interesting that I couldn’t take my eyes off it? If I managed to find that out, the magic it possesses would fall away. In any case, this is the first film to make me feel thirsty when it was over.

A nice, deep, sad story. But as coldly and uninterestingly filmed as any Austrian or German TV series. A waste of the big screen!

We spend the whole time watching  a group of people (veteran actor, neophyte actress, successful producer, a chauffeur who wants to be a successful producer, etc.) as they search for happiness in life during the titular festival. The unsuccessful ones seek success, while the successful ones take it for granted and long for a happy partnered life and love. And there are a few gratuitous shots of billboards for Stigmata, Fight Club and Entrapment. But there is no humor and no satire à la Robert Altman. Only boring dialogue, which makes sense only in the last third of the film, when the characters start to take off their masks. Very weak.

The world of underground passages and grass in Microcosmos has been transformed into beautiful nature around the world. It’s just a shame that all of the shots in the film are so short and we can’t enjoy the best of them as we can in the slower, more fluid and more hypnotic Baraka. In any case, it is necessary to see Winged Migration on the big screen and, because of the collapsing iceberg, at least in Dolby Digital!

A psychedelic trip about a group of actors who are trying to make a historical film in Venice. Mike Figgis overshot the mark this time. Conceived in the style of a documentary, Hotel is nothing more than a patchwork of incongruous theatrical acting, dreamy visions and slightly titillating sexual obsessions. Most of the film is shot with a digital camera or through various filters, and in places the image is split into four parts, in each of which we see something different. It’s the same concept as Figgis’s previous Timecode). But what does it all mean? Paying tribute to the process of filmmaking? Or to the art of acting? At the festival screening, a third of the audience walked about before the film was over, another third applauded enthusiastically at the end, and the remaining third (myself included), who stayed until the end only because of a large dose of tolerance, left with a bemused smile.