The retrospective strand of this year’s LA Film Festival focuses on hot rod movies, one each from the fifties, sixties and seventies. I caught cult favourite Hot Rods From Hell (1967), a fairly standard representation of the genre, with cross-generational conflict – “these kids have nowhere to go and they want to get there at 150 miles an hour” – and bargain basement exploitation production values.
One of the films I was most keen to catch at this year’s LA Film Festival was the Portuguese hit of the European circuit, Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto. I nearly didn’t make it for, in an incomprehensibly idiotic bit of programming, there was less than twenty minutes to get from The Silence Before Bach in Westwood to the Landmark on Pico; it was either that or choose between the second August screening and the sole showing of much-praised United Red Army on Sunday. Presumably I am not the only fan of narrative experimentation faced with this quandary. Bah! But I made it literally just in time, for the charming opening, where a vixen prowls around a chicken coop, takes the plunge and comes up empty-handed (-pawed?).
One of the best strands of the LA Film Festival is the “Films That Got Away”, featuring titles of recent vintage whose chance for US theatrical distribution seems to have passed. Particularly valuable this year is the presentation of European festival success Die Stille vor Bach, not least since aged Catalan director Pere Portabella has declared that he will never release his films on DVD.
Fresh from acclaim on the international circuit, Koreeda Hirokazu’s Still Walking (Aruitemo aruitemo) comes to the LA Film Festival. It takes place over one hot summer’s day as a family reunion of three generations leisurely unfolds through eating, chatting and taking a stroll. Much food is prepared, nothing very striking actually takes place, and none of the characters is especially out of the ordinary. This is well-worn territory, both in Japan and abroad, but what distinguishes this film is the skillful and natural way in which relationships, resentments and regrets are revealed, gradually and gently.
Twenty-something East London comes to the LA Film Festival, via acclaim at Sundance and San Francisco, with Alex dos Santos’s Unmade Beds. We’re introduced first to footloose Axl (Fernando Tielve) , looking like a younger, sweeter Jack White under a mop of unruly black hair, who’s come to London from Madrid to seek out the father he never knew. In between drunken evenings he cannot remember, he thinks he finds him in an estate agent’s (a finely relaxed performance Richard Lintern) and builds a cautiously friendly relationship whilst remaining ambivalent about revealing his identity. Meanwhile, Vera from Belgium (Déborah François) and a young Dutchman (Michiel Huisman) start a hesitant relationship in which they retreat to hotel rooms and fix their meetings time by time, without exchanging phone numbers or even names. Continue Reading
This year’s LA Film Festival is proud to host selections from Ambulante, the traveling film initiative established by Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal to promote documentary culture from across Mexico. I tend to avoid documentaries in favour of features, but even if it meant a mad dash from the Landmark to Westwood thanks to a previous late-start screening, I was not going to miss Nacido Sin.
The subject is José Flores, born into extreme rural poverty without arms (and some toes) and standing about 3 feet tall. My interest in him came about due to his role as the id of the Christ-figure in Alexandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain (1973), and he went on to have a fairly extensive screen career; quite aside from his arresting appearance, self-possession and strength of personality made him a pretty good actor. But he has now returned to his first profession as a street musician, playing the harmonica and the rubbing the “guiro” with a road attached to his foot (he also has rather a nice singing voice).
Film festivals can be pretty serious affairs, and the LAFF is no exception, so it’s nice to take a break now and then for something more lighthearted. Glenn McQuaid’s I Sell The Dead is a rollicking comedy about a pair of 18th-century grave-robbers, affectionately evoking the parochial camp of Hammer Horror, with a dash of Monty Python silliness.
The cartoonish tone extends from the extravagantly grotesque rival gang up against which Grimes and Blake (Larry Fessenden and Dominic Monaghan) repeatedly butt, via occasional dissolves to comic book graphics, to the central conceit, whereby selling the undead proves more lucrative than robbing regular corpses. It’s told in flashback from Blake’s execution cell, the episodes related to cheerfully hammy priest Ron Perlman over a bottle of whiskey.
The LA Film Festival brings us a bold local product (from Mexico), Los Bastardos. Jesús and his younger friend Fausto (estimable first-timers Jesus Moises Rodriguez and Rubén Sosa) are Mexican day labourers in LA. They wait with the others outside the downtown Home Depot, go on a job, drink beer in the park. So far so usual. Except they’ve a sawn-off shotgun in their backpack and they were picked up already that morning for a “quick and easy” job about which they’ve agree not to blab. Something is afoot.
Already a circuit hit at locations from Thessaloniki to Toronto, via Karlovy Vary and Venice, Claire Denis’s latest comes to the LA Film Festival. 35 Rhums is a quiet film of little incident but deep emotion; that it was inspired by Ozu’s similarly restrained film of a familial bond, Late Spring, comes as no surprise. Joséphine and her father Lionel live together in the Parisian apartment where she grew up, forming a family with neighbour Gabrielle, who carries a torch for Lionel, and Noé, whose easy relationship with Jo seems to have been prevented from blossoming into partnership by his inaction and the comfort of familiarity.
