What was the last movie you saw at the theaters?

Running Scared with Paul Walker. It was strange, violent and good

Zozo (Josef Fares, Sweden)

Zozo is the name of an eleven-year-old boy and his story starts in Beirut, Lebanon in 1987 where he lives with his family. The Lebanese Civil War really heated up that year on the streets of Beirut, but we see Zozo (Imad Creidi) and his friends having adapted to life and carrying on as normally as most young boys do. His parents have been trying to arrange their transport out of Lebanon, as Zozo's paternal grandparents had immigrated to Sweden years ago. Their passports are in order and the tickets have finnaly been approved when his entire family: Mother, Father and older sister and brother are killed in an attack. Zozo survives and manages to take the passports and make his shocked trek toward the airport. A nice girl (Antoinette Turk) and a sympathetic military guard eventually get him across the battle torn countryside and to his flight. He arrives in Sweden to his relieved grandparents (Elias Gergi and Yasmine Awad). But their way of dealing with grief is decidedly old school, and they decide the best way for Zozo to get past the horrors is to never speak of them.

Zozo's grandfather is a great character, a funny, brassy, don't-take-any-crap-from-nobody spirited man who loves his grandson dearly. He tries to teach him about being tough and standing up for himself, swinging first and asking questions later, but after all Zozo has seen violence is not his style. This gets him into trouble when he enlists in school and runs into some Swedish bullies. But he does make one friend, another boy with pain and loss in his eyes (Viktor Axelsson). The first parts of the story that take place in Beirut are effective enough, but full of familiar wartime scenes. There are also some odd fantasy sequences throughout, such as Zozo having conversations with a talking baby chicken and fairly elaborate dream sequences. Director Fares is trying to capture the thoughts of a small boy with these diversions, but they're pretty extraneous in the end. Where the movie succeeds most is the second half spent in Sweden. The trials and triumphs of minorities in a new culture are more interesting and have a feeling of authenticity. I would have liked to see shorter strokes in establishing the Beirut material and more of the narrative spent with grandpa in Sweden. It sttill makes for a nice little movie.

GRADE: B-



Geuddae Geusaramdeul - The President's Last Bang (Im Sang-Soo, South Korea)

Very strange movie that recounts the 1979 assassination of South Korean President Park Chung Hee and the failed coups d'état that followed. Park himself had come to power in 1961 as a Colonel during a bloodless coup. His policies turned South Korea's economic fortunes around in the '60s, but by the early '70s he was losing popularity so he passed a new Constitution in 1972 that made him essentailly a dictator. He was shot and killed while in residence at a safe house in Seoul by Kim Jaegyu, his longtime friend and director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. There is still confusion over what exactly motivated Kim, but whatever attempt at a coup there was failed and he was taken to Army headquarters and the Prime Minister regained control. Kim and the chief conspirators were all tried and executed.

Those are the "facts" of the assassination, but The President's Last Bang is not a simple docudrama recounting events. Director Im Sang-Soo has made a very odd mishmash of action film, satire and dark comedy, and frankly it doesn't all ever come together. Yun-shik Baek is very good as Director Kim, the assassin, playing him as a man full of darkly amusing quirks. But even if you knew the basics of what went on as I described above, you'd have a hard time following the progression of events in this movie. It is told in a linear fashion, but there is zero consistency of tone and too many characters wander in and out of the narrative beyond the priciples to keep track of. The assassination itself, a bloody round of shooting where the President and a dozen others are gunned down, is done in a gory style that would make Chan-Wook Park or Takashi Miike proud. There is also the darkest of comedy as men slip around in the large pools of blood and try to reattach missing limbs. But nothing in the hour plus leading up to this bloodletting has prepared the audience for this shift in tone, other than some of Baek's performance. Then there's the comedy of errors that leads to the coup being supressed and the conspirators captured. But none of this material fits together. You get the feeling Sang-Soo was probably going for a Dr. Strangelove-like take on the events, but he has no idea how to make that into a coherent narrative with a unifying tone.

The President's Last Bang certainly has some memorable bloody bits and a few perverse chuckles, but it is a mess of a movie.

GRADE: D+

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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

Just wondering which Chan Wook Park and Takashi Miike films you've seen, Holden?

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I was wondering that myself when I read that line.

We have our difference in opinion on the film (I personally took no qualms with the structure and actually felt that it gave it a very charismatic, in the momement kind of feel), but the assassination itself wasn't all that brutal. There was a decent amount of blood, but it was nowhere near Miike's often trademarked ultraviolence. And contextually, the process of death was nothing like the protracted agony and extremes of Park's Vengeance trilogy...

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Latest Movie Review(s): Too lazy to keep this up to date. New reviews every week.

Clear Cut: The Story of Philomath, Oregon (Peter Richardson, USA)

Good documentary that ultimately encapsulates much of the curent "Blue State/Red State" divide. First the history: Philomath is a small town in central Oregon, 93 miles south of Portland. Since the 1800s, it was a huge timber industry town. One of the wealthiest loggers, Rex Clemens, was so proud of the community that he set up many philanthropic programs. One of these established in the 1960s was that every single graduate of the Philomath public High School is automatically awarded a full scholarship for the college of their choice, if they wish to attend. The original idea was for kids in this timber town to have opportunities to become something other than loggers, if they wanted. There were no restirictions put on eligibility, and the scholarship value would constantly shift to match the tuition cost at nearby Oregon State University. Obviously that's an incredibly generous program, and the only one like it in the country attached to a public school.

But in the 1980s trouble started. All but two of the once dozen saw mills closed down and the demographic of the town changed. After Rex Clemens died his wife, Ethel, sold a piece of land to the school district for a new primary school. A dispute over the revelation of some old buried fuel drums and contaminated soil on the property spilled onto the pages of the local press, and the superintendent basically accused Ethel and/or those around her of concealing the problem. It was eventually settled, but it got uglier than necessary. It was only a sign of things to come. The school started changing with the times, typified for many of the old guard by things like removing an old wooden indian mascot that was deemed offensive for the day, a peaceful in-school display by the few gay and lesbian students and perhaps the worst sin of all a science curriculum that may suggest that logging is not a benefit to the environment (though even the most biased students in those classes have to admit no teacher ever really said the timber industry was in the wrong...but they could just "tell" what they really think). In 2002 and 2003 this all came to a head when Steve Lowther, the nephew of the late Rex and Ethel who controlls the Clemens Foundation, basically made an ultimatum to the superintendent, Terry Kneisler: he and a few key teachers had to resign immideately and the so-called political correctness in the school had to be stopped or the foundation would cut off the scholorships immediately.

The public war that erupted fiercely divided the community and was big news in Oregon...and to the cable outfit FOX News, who picked it up as a story about the heroic Lowther standing up for good old fashioned values in a world gone mad. The county School Board convened a special panel to investigate the claims of inpropriety by Kneisler and teachers, a panel that included voices from all sides of the argument (including Steve Lowther) and gave everyone a chance to speak their peace. When the chairman of the investigating committee determined the superintendent had done no wrong and the county even extended his contract, the Clemens Foundation stopped the scholorship program. They didn't phase it out, they just cut it off some nine months before the class of 2003 was to graduate. A year or so after the battle was over, Kneisler did resign anyway. Lowther reinstated the scholarship program, but now it has strict guidelines for eligibilty: a parent has to be employed in industries like logging or mining and/or the student has to be a member of a specific set of groups like 4H, the Boy Scouts of America and Christian organizations.

The bottom line is that it is private money so of course the Foundation can do whatever they like, but instead of just saying what they really felt they made it a fight over "values", and instead of phasing the scholarship program out over a period of even two years to give the kids a chance to make other plans rather than the opportunity they had been promised from first grade onward, the individual students bore the brunt of the punishment in what was a clash of personalities as much as anything else. The venemous ferocity of Lowther and his supporters and the lack of courage to just stand up and say out loud they don't like homosexuality or care about science but wrap that all up in the flag and Jesus as justification is a microcosm of how too many individuals and communities are divided today.

GRADE: B+



Al otro Lado - To the Other Side (Gustavo Loza, Mexico)

Interwoven fictional stories of three children effected by the same thing: the loss of their father emigrating from their community to "the other side" where they will hopefully make more money, even as illegal labor. The children are all about ten years old or so: Prisciliano a boy from a poor village in central Mexico, Fátima a girl from a small town in Morocco, and Angel a boy in Havana, Cuba. Unfortunately the film is uneven. The Cuban story is the least satisfying and the child actor simply isn't able to pull it off. The Mexican story, while sweet, is more like a fable and employs Magical Realism that sets it too apart in tone from the other two narratives. The best by far is the story of Fátima, who witout even being able to speak Spanish manages to trek from her remote town all the way to Spain to find her father, who left her and her mother six years before to make his fortune. It has the kind of subtlty and power and sense of reality the other two do not plus the young actress is excellent, and expanded to a full feature that character alone would have made for a better film.

GRADE: C+ (but an A- for Fátima's segment)



C.R.A.Z.Y. (Jean-Marc Vallée, Canada)

Good, stylized coming-of-ager set in Québec. We follow Zachary Beaulieu, from his birth on Christmas Day in 1960 until the age of twenty-one. One of five sons of Gervais (Michel Côté) and Laurianne (Danielle Proulx), right from the beginning Zach (played by Émile Vallée as a six to eight-year-old) doesn't feel like he fits in. He hates all of his brothers and when Dad senses he may like playing with dolls more than footballs he begins to pull away too. His Mother is very supportive in her quiet way, he is clearly her favorite, and she believes he has a gift from God to heal people. The bulk of the story takes place when Zach (now played by Marc-André Grondin) is aged fifteen to twenty-one, from 1975 to 1981. Director and co-writer Jean-Marc Vallée captures so many details of the time period and middle class dysfuntion perfectly. As one small example, I don't remember any other movie so spot-on recreating the feeling of a depressed and confused teenage boy disappearing into his room to crank up Bowie and Floyd and tell the world to fu*k off. There are some stylized and flashy directorial flourishes in the storytelling, but they fit with the darkly comic tone of the dramady. There's quite a lot packed into C.R.A.Z.Y. that I'm not even getting into here, and for all the plot strands crammed into 127 minutes it all works and flows organically. The cast is excellent, especially Marc-André Grondin and Michel Côté. The aging of Côté is also among the best I've seen, and poppa Gervais is a terrific character that he embodies with zeal, anger, love and frustration.

GRADE: B+



Kheili Dour, Kheili Nazdik - So Close, So Far (Seyyed Reza Mir-Karimi, Iran)

An existential road movie set in modern-day Iran where an extremely successful and self-obsessed neurologist learns the limits of science versus faith. After getting wrapped up at work and his extracurricular activites of on-line gambling, Doctor Alam (Mesoud Raygan) misses his son's eighteenth birthday, which is also just before the Iranian New Year. Finally on his way out the door he glances at some X-rays that had been delivered without any of the usual information. Horribly he realizes they are his son's, accidentally sent before the other physician could deliver the news personally, and they show an inoperable tumor. Alam's son only has a few weeks to live, and when he rushes home he finds an empty house: his son and his friends have left for the desert on a two-day competition with their astrology club. Alam gets into his Mercedes Benz and heads off into the sand, but finding his son won't be as simple as he thought, and before he gets there he has to confront the limitations of his scientific capabilities and his lack of a belief in God. Some of the desert sequences bring to mind Antonioni's The Passenger (1975) with excellent cinematography by Hamid Khozui-Abyaneh. Seyyed Reza Mir-Karimi, the director and co-screenwriter, strikes an excellent laid back tone that underplays the melodrama in favor of subtle introspection that leads to a powerful and well-earned conclusion, and Mesoud Raygan gives an outstanding central performance (he reminds me of an Iranian Javier Bardem). The subject matter could have been handled as pretentious hokum in other hands, but So Close, So Far is an engaging and profoundly philosophical piece.

GRADE: A-

So that was it: those last four movies I saw on Sunday brought my grand total to thirty-four feature films and eighteen short subjetcs in sixteen days. That still left about thirty-three features and thirty-two shorts I didn't see, and the ones I'm sorriest I missed are Fateless (Hungary), 4 (Russia), Skřítek (Czech Republic) and Look Both Ways (Australia).

Lots and lots of good movies, a handful of great ones and a couple stinkers. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, The Wild Blue Yonder, Neil Young: Heart of Gold, So Close So Far, KZ, Kissed by Winter and L'Enfant were my favorites, though I didn't even see the best movie playing at the Festival: Lars von Trier's Manderlay, which I already own on DVD and have seen upwards of ten times, so I went to see unknown stuff instead (though I'm sure I'll pay to see Manderlay when it comes to the regular theaters in town). Overall I think the quality was a little off from last year's selections - not in the number of great and bad films, but the middle range of good stuff seemed a bit stronger in 2005. But don't get me wrong: I'm not complaining! It's most definitely a great, great event and I can hardly wait for February to roll around again.



I do love Portland, OR.

Pikey sounds like you had a great time thanks for all the great reviews

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Buddha

The last one I saw is Brokeback Mountain... it was incredible!!!!

chronicles of narnia

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Ive tried and realized, theres something about you, something about your ways.... mwah

Hello!

You saw yourself at the movies?

(Intros in the intros thread mate )

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Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

Correction Golgot, Dan Peguine said he saw the film "Hello" not himself.

Is that a Lionel Richie flick?

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Hehe, I thought of that song too. That word always makes me think it.

Thanks taking the time and writing all of those reviews Holden. I really enjoyed reading all of them.

I don't think I have been to the movies since I saw The Chronicles of Narnia...

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Capote with my mother and sister, I was so afraid they would hate me for picking that movie. they said it was my choice... and well... I couldnt resist! It was great and surprisingly enough I think they enjoyed themselves.

The Hills Have Eyes (2006)

I love you Alexandre Aja. Hills has more balls than any horror film of the past 15 years, without question. In addition, it is one of the most brutal films I've ever seen. I loved it. I have such a profound respect for Aja with the trailer invasion sequence that I can't even put into words just how in awe I was.

This film is a divider. If you were on the fence about seeing it, don't see it. The people who will truly enjoy this movie, like I have, are a very small, horror-loving group. If you don't enjoy horror, don't see it for you will only come off petrified of the places Aja so valiantly goes.

I wasn't a huge fan of the original plus Aja showed huge potential (imo) in Switchblade Romance, so am looking forward to seeing this tmw. Yay.

The Hills Have Eyes. Again. Less than 24 hours later. I love this movie.

Between last night's showing and tonight's I've personally seen over a dozen couples leave the theater after the trailer invasion. I haven't seen that happen in any single other horror film I've ever seen in a theater. I respect that.