District 9

GO SEE IT NOW!!! Seriously, in a year of lame-arse big budget scifi, this film restores your faith. Read the review here, or just get yourself to the cinema. I wanna go again, it's the goods. The smartest scifi actioner since Starship Troopers, and just as wry and cynical too.

MIFF Day 16

Another festival ends, a bit more controversial than normal, what with the Chinese protesting non-stop and trying to hack the website, etc. And to think that originally people were worried about Ken Loach pulling his film because Israel sponsored the festival this year. Still, overall, I think this wasn't as great as some years. Overall the majority of films were okay, but nothing brilliant. There's been a few good ones, but there hasn't been that jaw-dropping moment that's happened occasionally in past festivals. Still, it was a good bunch of films and I had a good time. On to my thoughts on the final four:

Bran Nu Dae

An very enjoyable, silly and raucous musical about an Aboriginal youth sent to a church school to become a priest. He runs away, and most of the film follows his journey back home to Broome. The film is full of great songs, clever and infectious humour, and a generally silly air that's really fun. The Aussie films this year have been pretty much all good, it's nice to see the industry picking up a bit. And especially good to see that MIFF has been co-funding the best ones, like this and The Loved Ones.

Nak

A fairly throwaway CG kids film about a group of spirits who band together to save a small boy from the clutches of a group of evil spirits bent on world domination. The character designs are good, but about halfway through it turns into a giant action sequence where the spirits gain or lose powers with no rhyme or reason. There's some great Sadako jokes for Ring fans, but overall it was a disappointing hour and a half.

A Town Called Panic

But the disappointment was short lived. This lo-fi stop motion is bugnuts crazy and completely awesome. A group of toy figures are used as the characters in the story. Cowboy and Indian live with Horse in a house, Horse is in love with the local music teacher, another Horse, while a Farmer and his Wife live across the way and send their animal to the music school. After Cowboy and Indian destroy their house, Horse and they rebuild, but the walls keep getting stolen. When they investigate, some creatures who live underwater turn out to have been sneaking out of the pond and stealing them. It's random, weird and competely my kind of humour. There's no way to guess what will happen next, simply because it just keeps inventing weirder and weirder plot twists. I'm gonna buy the DVD as soon as Madman release it. Apparently there's a TV series as well, I wanna check it out.

Mother

Bong Joon-Ho leapt onto the scene with Memories of Murder, a striking serial killer film based on real events. It had a dark sense of humour running throughout the tense thriller that really worked. Then he made The Host, which again had a dark sense of humour running through a quite original monster movie. Now with Mother, he's done a noir thriller, as an over-protective mother tries to prove her mentally retarded son innocent of a murder the police have stitched him up for. Kim Hye Ja is incredible as the obsessed mother, determined to do anything to prove her son innocent. I picked the "twist" pretty early on, but that doesn't in any way diminish the film. It's just as funny as his previous films, and just as intricate and well cast. The actors are all great, and the red-herrings are really well handled. Definitely one of the highlights of the festival, and a great film to end another year of MIFF.

MIFF Day 15

Murch: Walter Murch on Editing

Amateurish on-the-nose directing detracts from what is essentially a class by Walter Murch on film editing, and his theories on the matter. He's an engaging and articulate speaker, but when he talks about jump cuts the film jump cuts, when he talks about layered sound the film layers his speech, it's pointless wankery by two directors obviously keen to intrude on the subject and remind the audience that they're the ones interviewing the great man. But he is great, and the potted history of American Zoetrope, the birth of 5.1 audio (designed for Apocalypse Now), his experiments with sound design and his issues with being called a Film Editor are all great stuff. He's not my favourite editor in the world, (I think Lou Lombardo was a far more significant figure in the history of film editing), but I do appreciate what he has to say.

The Maid

A maid/nanny has been with a family for almost 20 years, and she's a little bit of a psychopath. Coming to believe that she's part of the family, and that he has more authority than she really does, she makes life hell for the daughter, abuses and torments other staff hired to help her, and somehow still have the love and devotion of the mother of the household. Slowly, you realise that though she's obsessive and paranoid, the work for the family is what has made her that way. She believes they can't cope without her, and will do anything to stop them from diminishing her role in their lives. It's an accomplished film, as it moves from depicting a figure of comic insanity into a well-rounded person that you ultimately come to love. And it's funny as all hell too. Though on I'm starting to hate hand-held digitally shot films. The over-exposed white just irritates me, is it too much to ask for a DP who knows how to fiddle the white balance and get a bit of beauty in the colour of the image?

The Sky Crawlers

Is Mamoru Oshii the most over-rated anime director alive? The Patlabor films were cool, albeit foundered by their philosophical moments, but ever since then he's given us pretentious and boring crap. Ghost in the Shell is not a touchstone film, it's just well-animated and stupid. This is his worst to date though. Impressive CG airial scenes, fairly weak cell animation and what sounds like an interesting setting and story are all irrelevant in the end. This is a monumentally boring film, full of itself, and even the dogfights aren't all that inventive or exciting. Drag in musings on love, life, reincarnation and pilots who remain perpetual children because why grow up when you're just going to die anyway and you have a mountain of frustrations. It could have been incredible, the material was right there, but it's shit.

The Chaser

Finally! A Korean film I can rave about. This ruthless and energized serial killer film is highly original and intensely paced. Instead of the typical hunt for a serial killer, he's caught almost immediately. The rush is to find his last victim, who may still be alive, and to gather enough evidence to guarantee a conviction since it turns out he's been caught twice before. The prevailing view of the other two cases was he was a nuisance confessor, but the cops know better. Unfortunately, this is a film of bureaucratic incompetence, political positioning and general disinterest. The violence is harsh and bloody, the characters are likeable, or at the very least understandable, and the story unfolds with a clinical horror for the injustice that comes from so many different agendas conflicting. It's not quite Memories of Murder, but it comes close. I loved it.

MIFF Day 14

Woohoo!!! After the disappointment of yesterday, I scored a hat trick!

The Hurt Locker

War is a Drug, that's the quote that opens the film as Guy Pearce suits up into body armour for a bomb disposal and then gets fried. I'm guessing his presence, brief as it is, was to guarantee funding for the film. He's great for the short moment he's there, but the film belongs to Jeremy Renner as a bomb disposal expert hooked on the thrill of cheating death. The film is an expertly told action/adventure film, jumping from tense defusing of IEDs to general combat and a few telling moments on base. The shaky-cam works most of the time, but occasionally intrudes into moments where stillness feels more appropriate and thus, the shake feels forced, but the tension is well-maintained, a sniper shoot-out in the middle of the desert particularly impressive. It's nice to see a film set in Iraq that doesn't take an overt political position, but simply places us on the front line with a few well-drawn characters and makes any comments about the horror of war purely through audience sympathy. Excellent.

Dead Snow

Zombie Nazi's attack a bunch of medical students in a ski chalet, and the students fight back. This is an hysterically funny zombie gore fest that takes the piss, has a lot of fun, and is more Evil Dead than Night of the Living Dead. It's a splatstick film, one of the best since Braindead, the scene where two of the guys carve up an army of undead nazis with a chainsaw and a mallet is priceless. Gory but not really scary, it's got a few frights but mainly just gross-out gore that'll have you laughing your arse off.

The Loved Ones

I remember the massive disappointment I had with Wolf Creek several years ago. A set of finely drawn characters and a clever set up mutated into a brainless torture porn that did stupid stupid things just to work in some pointless exposition and set up more torture. Now, finally, there's an Aussie horror flick that gets it all right. Starting with a family tragedy, a poor kid named Brent turns emo and cuts himself to deal with the grief of being behind the wheel when an accident killed his father. A girl at school, Lola, wants to go to the school dance with him, but he's already got a girlfriend. Turns out she's a psychopathic serial killer whose father helps her indulge. John Brumpton is brilliant as the twisted Daddy, who kidnaps Brent and helps her torture him as she seeks to find her prince. It's a dark and twisted satire that manages to never cross the line despite being full of awful and horrific things. It's so over-the-top that it's funny, and that's clearly the intention. But it's also got some nice moments examining grief, loss and teen angst. A very intelligent and darkly funny horror film that had me laughing and squirming and enjoying it massively. Great stuff.

MIFF Day 13

Unlucky 13, some good and some bad today. But the Korean's seem to have jumped the shark. I really hope Mother is awesome, everything else has been a bit disappointing on that front...

Members of the Funeral

I'd like to like this film, but its too smug and clever by half. The story of a funeral where a father, mother and daughter all turn out to have a relationship with the deceased. A boy who killed himself. Narrated by the dead boy, we learn that the father is a repressed homosexual with paedophilic tendencies who wanted to be like a father to the dead boy because it got him off. The mother was his teacher who wanted to crush his literary ambition as hers were crushed by her grandfather, a literary professor. And the daughter was his friend, who enjoyed going and photographing dead things with him when she wasn't working at a mortuary. It's full of allusion and smartaleck dialogue, like a scene where the boy talks about his novel, about a middle-aged gay man, a teacher and a girl who works in a mortuary, but he can't find a way to get them all to meet and create a denoument. It's sometimes funny, oftentimes pretentious, and to give credit where it's due, handsomely photographed. But it's a wank, and winds up far too confident of its own cleverness to be likeable, and commits too many of the literary sins it mocks to even be admirable.

Sell Out!

The first ever "Manglish" musical, which means it's in English, but as spoken by Malaysians. It starts with an hysterical parody of self-indulgent festival films, as a director who has won an obscure festival award is asked about why his films are so boring. His defence is that life is boring, if people weren't so busy they'd notice it, so his films let them do that. Also funny is the fact that there's a 5 hour director's cut of the short film. It mocks pretension heavily and had the audience in stitches. Then it shifts into the film proper, a story about an ambitious television host who jumps on the reality show bandwagon with a program interviewing people just as they die. She crosses paths with a poor engineer who's built an 8 in 1 soyabean machine. It makes soy sauce, soya milk, tofu, etc, all in the one machine. He's a dreamer, and his bosses aren't happy, so they have him exorcised. Unfortunately the dreamer side of his personality doesn't vanish, but hangs around, so suddenly there are two of the guy. A dreamer and a pragmatist. It all culminates in a reality show advertisement for the machine, with the audience voting whether the dreamer or the pragmatist should die on television. It's weird, it's fun, it has a song asking money why it likes rich people more than poor people, and it's very very silly. Fun.

The Bastards

A film you admire more than like, this is a slow burn thriller filmed in long uninterrupted takes. Two illegal immigrant Mexicans break into a house toting a shotgun. A single mother lives there, her son out at his friends. She's addicted to crack or ice. The men arrive, force her to cook for them, go swimming with them, etc. Apparently an ex-boyfriend has paid them to kill her. It's a deeply uncomfortable film with a moment of violence so shocking and graphic the entire audience was in shock. It's the first time in ages I can remember being so disturbed by a moment of violence. The Q&A afterwards was very instructional too. I asked a question for the first time ever at MIFF, because the director spoke of the film as being about immigrant workers, but I only saw it as a home invasion story. He said the home invasion being an allegory for crossing the border, and the messed up state of the woman showing how life on the other side isn't necessarily all that great either. And the cost to the two men, they leave with less than what they started with. It's kinda obvious when you think about it, but the style of the film draws you so into the moment, there's no chance for reflection. I think the film is incredible, but I wouldn't recommend it necessarily. It shook me up quite a bit.

Breathless

Another Korean misfire. This time it's cycles of violence as abusive parents pass on their violence to their children. And gangsters pass it on to their underlings, and their violence affects the lives of others who become violent, etc. It's the story of an incredibly violent gangster who is slowly transformed by a schoolgirl who isn't intimidated by his violence, he punches her unconscious and when she wakes up she yells at him. Slowly they become close to each other, but the film hints, and then finally confirms, that he's the man who killed her mother. Meanwhile her brother starts to work for him, and as he comes to understand the monster he's become, the monsters he's bred rise up against him. There's nothing original in this story, but the performances are solid. It ends about five times before actually concluding, another frustration as it tries to work out the story it wants to tell, but the final image of the girl seeing brother attack a foodstand, as the gangster did when their mother was killed, is poignant.

G.I. Joe

It's more coherent than Transformers 2, but the effects are waaaaaaaaaaaaay below that standard, maybe worth a drunken DVD night, but don't waste your money unless you have no other way to kill two hours. Read the review here.

MIFF Day 12

Che Part 2: Guerrilla

Well, I've got my answer on how to do an uncritical film about the life of Che, you skip from just prior to the successful takeover of Cuba to his last year in Bolivia. While part 1 was a story of idealism and success, part 2 is a story of idealism and failure. Unlike the Cuban revolution, the Bolivians didn't want foreigners to come in, start a revolution and liberate them. The driving force of Che's philosophy, namely that if revolution is absent in the people, you jumpstart it by going in, isn't really critically examined, but it is acknowledged. There are even vague references to Che's participation in the execution of Cubans as one of the Bolivian soldiers, a Cuban, says Che executed his father. Both films are based on Che's diaries, so it's a bit much to expect a film that delves into the setting and backstory. The human rights abuses in Cuba aren't mentioned, and Che is portrayed as a fairly noble man who wants to better the lives of the people he fights for. And the people are definitely shown to be oppressed, but simply unwilling as yet to fight for their rights. It's a beautifully shot film, less interested in Che himself this time around as with the collapse of his revolutionary expedition, but it's a great story of failure. I mean that in the best way possible. Where everything went right in Cuba, it goes wrong in Bolivia. I just wish there were also Parts 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3, telling the stories of his actions in Castro's Cuba, in the Congo and in Venezuela. I haven't heard much about them, and I'd love to know more.

Morphia

Requiem for a Dream, set in revolutionary Russia. A doctor in the middle of nowhere becomes addicted to morphine and does all manner of great and terrible things along the way. He saves lives, wrecks lives and slowly descends further and further into a hell of his own making. It's not the cheeriest film around, and the end is striking and sad. Then again, could anything else be expected from the director of Cargo 200, one of the most depressing (and impressive) films of last year's festival.

I Need That Record!

A lament for the passing of the independent record store, this doco features a number of interviews with store owners, musicians and suprisingly(?), Noam Chomsky. It charts the rise and fall of the local record store, the competition from big chain stores and their "loss-leader" selling strategy (one classic line mentions stores buying their CDs from Best Buy because they could get them cheaper there than from the label itself) and online piracy. There's a great bit of archival footage showing Chuck D and Lars Ulrich arguing about Napster. Lars actually makes some good points, which is interesting given the vilification Metallica got for going after Napster. It's also a lament for the passing of small local stores in general, with Chomsky connecting it to a lowering in civic involvement. Without small local places where people meet, community dies. But it's not all doom and gloom. There's stories of owners who've found ways to continue trading, and new stores that open up. In the end, it's a very balanced documentary about our changing times and the impact it's had on music retailing.

MIFF Day 11

The King and the Bird

Wow, this was unexpected. An animated film from 1980, little seen outside of Europe, and I have no idea why. This is incredible. A retelling of a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale, but completely demented and totally sweet. The King of the title is a vicious little bastard, but he dies early on, assassinated (in a very humorous and totally karmic way) by a portrait of himself, come to life and leaping off the canvas. There's a Chimney Sweeper and a Shepherdess, also paintings, who fall in love and escape their paintings to seek love in the real world. The jealous king orders his police to hunt them down so he can marry the Shepherdess, and the Bird of the title aids them in their escape. There's hundreds of little details that are absolutely charming. The baby birds, the King's puppy, they get heaps of scenes that are just lovely. And the imagination on display is staggering. There's an underground city, a megalopolis style castle complete with elaborate elevators, the secret police appear in a number of inventive guises and there's a giant steam-powered robot centurion as well. Add to that the animation is incredibly well-crafted, with several scenes of buildings collapsing where the level of detail had me gobsmacked (remember, this was done in 1980, because computers could assist in such things). All in all, it's a crime more people haven't seen this gem. It's a stunner.

Che Part 1: The Argentine

Part one of Steven Soderberg's hagiography to Ernesto "Che" Guevara is a brilliant piece of cinema. Beautifully photographed, expertly paced, it's nice to sit in a cinema and know you're in the hands of a master filmmaker. It's a great film, definitely worth watching. Part one is probably the easier of the two to take, as it covers the period before Che became the questionable figure most people would prefer to not talk about. I'm curious to see how they tackle part two. Advance word is that it's a highly uncritical film that fails to deal with Che's participation in death camps and doesn't really address the ethics of his philosophy on how to foment revolution, whether the indigenous population want it or not. But that's the second film. This one is excellent, and the guerilla battle where they take Santa Clara in particular is a great piece of war cinema.

It Might Get Loud

A doco about guitarists, in particular Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White, it's basically three guys talking about their passion for music. And really, that's all you need, because they're all three very vocal about their passion. The different approaches they take are all interesting, and there's a golden moment where The Edge shows where he'd be without his effects rack. The opening to Elevation is completely uninspiring. But for him, the effects rack is what he loves to play with. Jack White hates it, preferring to play with old guitars that he has to wrestle to get the sound he wants from them. He likes to fight his instrument, and the blood on the fretboard isn't a figure of speech. Jimmy Page is less forthcoming about his process, but his tale about his move from session guitarist to Led Zeppelin is inspiring. And seeing all three musicians seated together and swapping techniques is great too.

Eden Log

An object lesson in low-budget science fiction, this is HR Giger channeled through Shinya Tsukamoto. A man wakes up with no memory of who he is or where he is, and slowly climbs through the levels of an underground greenhouse. There's a tree that is harvested for its sap, apparently the sap provides power to a city above, but it also turns the workers into aggressive mutants. There are guards fighting off the mutants while trying to find someone loose in the complex. Is it him they're after? Or someone else? There's shades of Bio Shock, Half Life and Flashback in the story, and the end somehow skips explanation to go straight to denoument, though how the man knows to do what he does is unexplained, but it's still cool. The visuals are absolutely top notch, with some incredible in-camera editing tricks as a projector plays back a scene and the man finds different flat surfaces to hold up to get the whole image. The slow reveal of the entire sequence had me transfixed. The film is shot in completely desaturated colour, with lots of darkness and backlight making the most of what would have been a minimal budget. It looks the goods, and the design is stunning. It's let down a bit by the end, but visually it's one of the most striking SF films in quite a while.

MIFF Day 10

Citizen Havel

Vaclav Havel was President of the Czech Republic for 10 years, two 5 year terms. This documentary followed him for pretty much that entire period, though the highs and lows, crises and successes. And he's an amazing man to get to know. A playwright and poet, jailed as a dissident and then finally elected President, he has a fractious relationship with the parliament despite the fact they keep electing him President. He's a funny, intelligent and very observant man. The film is clearly made for a Czech audience, as a lot of the political situations referred to aren't properly explained, prior knowledge seems to be assumed. But it's easy enough to work it out, and it's a wonderful portrait of a really likeable man. And as an insight into the behind the scenes of politics, surprisingly frank and honest too. At the moment, it's my favourite film of the festival.

Unmade Beds

And funnily enough, this is my least favourite film of the festival so far. Will somebody please tell young filmmakers that while the French New Wave was a wonderful thing, apeing it doesn't work if you don't have interesting characters and engaging actors. This is a wank of a film, all about pretentious bohemians living in a squat in London. Two stories run through it. One is the story of Axl, a young spainard come to town to find the father who abandoned him. He's a dull character and scenes between him and his father that could be charming or emotionally engaging are just flat. I can't work out why. The second story is slightly more successful, Vera, getting over a broken heart, meets a guy and they have what again could be a whimsical romance. Except again it kinda falls flat. Vera is a more engaging presence, but it still doesn't really sell itself. Comparisons to Wong Kar Wai are flawed, because in the best of his work (which this film does seem to aspire to) the actors have a strong presence and the characters have personality. This film just doesn't manage it. It's like a copy of a copy of something that was good. The soundtrack is awesome however, which is about the only thing that got me through it. Maybe I'm getting old and cranky, but this film just completely failed for me.

Nymph

Pen Ek Ratanaruang is a filmmaker I've come to love, ever since his drunken introduction to Last Life in the Universe at MIFF some years ago (2004 I think). His films are minimalist, but always arresting. This is no different. A couple go camping in the forest and the husband goes missing. The wife goes home, the husband suddenly appears. They go back to the forest and he disappears again, but not before dealing with his wife's affair with her boss. It's got a constant unsettled mood, as it's more a ghost story than anything else. There's a spirit or something in the forest, and the husband appears to have become it's lover. There are no answers, but the sense of a kind of benign but occasionally malevolent force permeates and makes for engaged viewing.

MIFF Day 9

Paper Solider

As I said to another festival-goer after the screening, I really like the film, but I'm not entirely sure why. The story of the men and women behind the USSR's Cosmonaut program, it's mainly the story of a doctor slowly cracking under the pressure and the effect it has on his two wives. Wives unaware of the other's existence until near the end of the film. But even that isn't really the film in anything more than the loosest sense. It's a series of vignettes, told through elaborately staged single tracking shots (the Russians love their long takes), that capture the personalities of the people, small stories of victory and failure, the story doesn't so much advance as move in the background. But the cinematography is gorgeous, and the acting is excellent. Comparisons to Tarkovsky are misplaced however, long takes may have been a mark of his style, but he created moments in time with very formal control of the elements of the shot. Each moment signified something. Paper Solider doesn't have that sense of significance to its compositions, it's more an extended moment to capture the chaos of so many people communicating at cross purposes all at once. I'm not sure what it all amounts to, but I enjoyed every minute of it.

John Gollings: Eye for Architecture

An interesting 50 minute doco about photographer John Gollings. He's a fascinating personality, lively, engaged and always willing to speak about his work. His photography is amazing, and this is a good insight into his working methods and the projects he's been a part of. Particularly excellent is seeing him try to photograph a stadium in Shanghai, which as it turns out, isn't actually finished construction. The shots he creates are beautiful, and the creativity with which he disguises the fact it's a construction site in instructional.

A Loving Friend

The screening had to be abandoned due to technical difficulties, but the film will definitely warrant a proper viewing whenever it becomes available. Donald Friend was a well regarded artist who also happened to be a paedophile preying on the boys of Bali. But even today his supporters will claim he wasn't a "bad man", or at the least avoid discussing the dark side of his personality. The film charts the development of the idea of a "cultured paedophile", someone who is accepted rather than condemned because of their artistic output. It's a damning piece of work, just on the strength of the little we got to see, and is definitely going to be a talking point if anyone ever gets the guts up to show it anywhere. After all the controversy over paedophile priests, it is perhaps a good time to start to examine the intellectual and artistic world and the double-standards that appear to be maintained. After all, Roland Barthes was a major contributor to literary theory, but that doesn't mean he shouldn't have gone to prison for the things he did.

MIFF Day 8

Happy Birthday to Me, Happy Birthday to Me...

It's a great thing to have your birthday in the middle of a Film Festival. Even better when every year they manage to have a lineup of great films to see on the day.

Roy Andersson Shorts

Only two of the shorts here demonstrate Andersson's trademark style, the other three, while containing his wit are far more conventionally shot. You, The Living was a privately financed film, apparently due to his fractious relationship with various funding bodies. Given that the films they financed are the ones that don't really feel like him, I can understand why he doesn't like them much. All up, the man's a great talent and his films are great.

Moon

I've been looking forward to this film for a while, ever since I saw a trailer online. And it didn't disappoint. A taut film about a man, alone on the far side of the moon going crazy, possibly. Or maybe discovering something very sinister about his existence. It's notable for the way it plays with identity, perception and artificial intelligence. Knowing the audience reaction to a HAL like machine, the film surprises and is, in the end, a very moving story of men coming to terms with who they are. The score by Clint Mansell is very effective too, a slow drip drip of sound that builds the tension expertly. An impressive debut by Duncan Jones.

Hansel and Gretel

A supernatural inversion of the traditional Hansel and Gretel story, where three children live in a house in the forest and trap unsuspecting adults into playing the role of their parents. Anything the children wish for becomes reality, and they can wish for very nasty things. It becomes a story of abuse, cycles of violence and attempts to hide from the evil in the world. The fairytale made real style is creepy and effective, and the end is surprisingly hopeful for a story that is mostly grim.

Examined Life

Director Astra Taylor's previous film, Zizek! established her fascination with philosophy. Here she takes it further, trying to create a philosophical discourse on life inside 90 minutes of talking heads. She's grabbed a who's who of philosophers to discuss their ideas, some are awful, some are fascinating. Cornel West is a man I want to read more on now, his exuberance for ideas is infectious. Peter Singer remains an unsympathetic controversialist, though some of his ideas have merit. Kwame Anthony Appiah speaks about the global village in a way that does away with notions of cultural relativity. Judith Butler manages to not say anything stupid (she leaves that to her writing I guess). And Slavoj Zizek maintains his position as rockstar philosopher and self-described monster. It's hit and miss, but the hits are excellent and it's nice to have a film that requires you to wrestle with it.

An Education

Written by Nick Hornby, directed by Lone Scherfig (Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself), this is a film of great performances and clever dialogue. It's a charmer, though at its heart there's more than a little bit of darkness. The story of a girl who is seduced by a much older man (she's 16, he's 34) who offers her the life she's always wanted to lead. There's a price to this, of course, and when it comes time to pay, it's a heavy one. The film never judges, never creates a sense of unease about a situation that could easily be viewed as more criminal than misjudged, and magically, it gets away with it too. It's an immensely enjoyable film that walks the line and does it adroitly.

Sauna

I'm not sure what I think of this film yet. I really enjoyed it, it was visually stunning and the fact it's a sort of horror take on Tarkovsky's Stalker had me engaged, but it's too short in the end. At 83 minutes, it never develops any of it's ideas fully, and they're great ideas. In the middle of a swamp lies a single white building, the sauna, nobody knows who built it but monks who built their monastery nearby believed it could wash away a man's sins. And Erik and Knut have things to be forgiven. The idea that the promise of forgiveness could drive a man to do greater evil is a potent one, and there are moments in the film that tease with the possibility, but in the end it collapses into a few creepy shots and a particularly horrific moment that feels lifted from a Silent Hill game. It's a creepy film, but frustrating because the material it throws up is far more interesting than the final execution.