Following a special section in last year’s AFI Fest, and a trio of titles at this year’s LA Film Festival, I am developing rather a fondness for Québécois cinema. Without presuming to pigeonhole an entire region’s cultural output, one can recognise in Le Vendeur a quiet wit, straightforwardness and lack of illusions that seem characteristic.
I like to tell anyone who’ll listen that Argentina is producing some of the most imaginative cinema in the world right now. The LA Film Festival presentation of Gustavo Taretto’s Sidewalls (Medianeras), for all its slightly inconsequential whimsy a smart, detailed and funny romance-in-waiting comedy that happily upholds the national reputation.
The 2011 Los Angeles Film Festival wrapped up this weekend, after ten days of much better movie-going than the programme had suggested. Everyone was very proud of the 800+ army of volunteers, who manned the downtown streets and lurked in groups around every corner of the Regal 6, asking what movie we were going to see and in one case, simply whether or not I was there to see a movie. And the film-maker’s lounge was a default destination, in part for the unimaginable quantities of free Stella and Jamesons they handed out throughout the festival’s ten days.
It’s always nice to check out local independent films and the LA Film Festival offers up a good handful. Some, like Entrance or How To Cheat, are being promoted but not always well received, of course (and L!fe Happens looks highly iffy) but when it works, the local film can be rather special. Echo Park-set Mamitas received its world premiere at the festival this week and is going to be, I would guess, a deserved shoe-in for the audience award.
Actor Paddy Considine has been at his most powerful and frightening in the midlands dramas of Shane Meadows (A Room for Romeo Brass, Dead Man’s Shoes). The LA Film Fest presents his first film as director, Tyrannosaur, which adopts the same tone of inchoate anger and ups the grimness, taking us a bit further north to Leeds and a world of drab cul-de-sacs, old pubs and a perfectly rendered charity shop full of banal objects that barely register in the consciousness.
Korea has a reputation for crazy/extreme cinema but that’s hardly the sum of it. I’m dying to hear more from Cafe Noir‘s Jung Sung, for example. In the meantime, however, the LA Film Festival presents us with the super-quiet divorce drama Come Rain, Come Shine (Saranghanda, saranghaji anneunda).
A young unnamed couple are separating. We find this out in the long long single hood-mounted shot that opens the film. She drops the news almost casually; his reaction is so non-existent that we wonder for a moment if we heard right. But this sets us up for the film’s remarkably subdued tone: the rest plays out on rainy Sunday afternoon/evening, entirely in their handsome apartment, as they consider whether or not to go to dinner in the torrential rain, find a lost kitten, are visited by their neighbours looking for the same and, occasionally, discuss their impending break-up after five years of marriage.
They say there’s a renaissance in African cinema at the moment. That may well be, as I’ve had the chance to see two decent new films from the continent within the last couple of weeks: the rollicking Viva Riva!, from the Congo, and now from Ghana, courtesy of the LA Film Festival, The Destiny of Lesser Animals.
The Los Angeles Film Festival is gearing up for its second year downtown. Last year’s inaugural move from Westwood was accomplished smoothly, with frequent shuttles between venues, and a splendid mini-retrospective of forgotten Argentinean director Leopoldo Torres Nilsson. There’s nothing as striking in the retrospective section this year, and few obviously standout titles in the main selection, but you never know what unheralded gem will turn up. So from Thursday June 16 through Sunday 26, check out the screenings at the Regal Cinemas in LA Live, as well as shows at REDCAT, the Downtown Independent and special events at the Ford Amphitheater.
The 2010 LA Film Fest had another success with the North American premiere for the Japanese gone Hollywood film, Golden Slumber – an intentional reference to the classic Beatles song which is sung multiple times over in the film. The funny thing about this film is that it felt very much like an American action film with a bit more edge and better characters.
The film is about a sweet, gullible guy named Aoyagi who is framed for assassinating the Prime Minister. Due to his sweet nature, a lot of favors and some good friends, he’s able to fight back against a group of scary government officials who are trying to trap him.
