MIFF 2013 - Day 14
THE DAY OF THE CROWS
With a healthy dose of Miyazaki in the mix, this excellent French animation tells the story of a boy raised in the woods by his father. He lives in fear, knowing that if he steps beyond the edge of the wood he will cease to exist. At least until his father breaks his leg and the forest spirits guide him to the nearby town where a kindly doctor helps him. Having experienced kindness, the boy spends the rest of the film trying to find where his father has hidden his love for him, searching the woods for it like a lost toy. It's beautifully constructed, more than a little weird, and has a lovely emotional ending.
A HIJACKING
Tobias Lindholm is quickly carving out for himself a niche as the writer of dark and arresting stories. Having previous written The Hunt for Tomas Vinterberg, here he writes for himself, directing the story of a ship hijacked by pirates, and the protracted negotiations undertaken by the company's CEO to get his men released. What starts off looking like it will be a story about the men on the ship very quickly becomes a study of a hard-nosed businessman's alpha-male tendencies brought under the microscope. Like The Hunt, it's a film you admire more than enjoy, but it's an incredible piece of work.
MONSOON SHOOTOUT
The first third of this film had me questioning why I'd bothered to see it. It's tedious. A rookie cop who is too naive for his own good screws up an investigation and lets a crook get away. It ends up with the crook throwing acid on him and his girlfriend. Stop. Rewind. Now he shoots him dead instead of letting him get away. A totally new reality plays out. and a third, and a fourth. While it's not particularly brilliant, the contrasting stories are ok and the final version is a smart little suckerpunch that pulls things out of a formal experiment and into a more traditional narrative. It's not that satisfying, as the final image pulled me out of that reality too much, but it's a reasonable piece of entertainment.
THE CONGRESS
Robin Wright is all washed up, offered a deal to sign away the rights to her image and be scanned into a computer. She takes it, and becomes an action star inside a computer, while caring for her ill son in her actual retirement. Then she's invited to the Futurist Congress, enters a world where drugs turn everyone into animated characters, and falls through multiple layers of reality. It's a loose adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's The Futurological Congress, and the animated sections are really trippy. As a whole it fails to cohere, but that can be said of most Lem adaptations. There's heaps of interesting ideas explored, but I thought Brandon Cronenberg's Antiviral and the short film More used them to greater effect. This has a lot of nice animation though.
With a healthy dose of Miyazaki in the mix, this excellent French animation tells the story of a boy raised in the woods by his father. He lives in fear, knowing that if he steps beyond the edge of the wood he will cease to exist. At least until his father breaks his leg and the forest spirits guide him to the nearby town where a kindly doctor helps him. Having experienced kindness, the boy spends the rest of the film trying to find where his father has hidden his love for him, searching the woods for it like a lost toy. It's beautifully constructed, more than a little weird, and has a lovely emotional ending.
A HIJACKING
Tobias Lindholm is quickly carving out for himself a niche as the writer of dark and arresting stories. Having previous written The Hunt for Tomas Vinterberg, here he writes for himself, directing the story of a ship hijacked by pirates, and the protracted negotiations undertaken by the company's CEO to get his men released. What starts off looking like it will be a story about the men on the ship very quickly becomes a study of a hard-nosed businessman's alpha-male tendencies brought under the microscope. Like The Hunt, it's a film you admire more than enjoy, but it's an incredible piece of work.
MONSOON SHOOTOUT
The first third of this film had me questioning why I'd bothered to see it. It's tedious. A rookie cop who is too naive for his own good screws up an investigation and lets a crook get away. It ends up with the crook throwing acid on him and his girlfriend. Stop. Rewind. Now he shoots him dead instead of letting him get away. A totally new reality plays out. and a third, and a fourth. While it's not particularly brilliant, the contrasting stories are ok and the final version is a smart little suckerpunch that pulls things out of a formal experiment and into a more traditional narrative. It's not that satisfying, as the final image pulled me out of that reality too much, but it's a reasonable piece of entertainment.
THE CONGRESS
Robin Wright is all washed up, offered a deal to sign away the rights to her image and be scanned into a computer. She takes it, and becomes an action star inside a computer, while caring for her ill son in her actual retirement. Then she's invited to the Futurist Congress, enters a world where drugs turn everyone into animated characters, and falls through multiple layers of reality. It's a loose adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's The Futurological Congress, and the animated sections are really trippy. As a whole it fails to cohere, but that can be said of most Lem adaptations. There's heaps of interesting ideas explored, but I thought Brandon Cronenberg's Antiviral and the short film More used them to greater effect. This has a lot of nice animation though.
posted by Andrew Lee at 12:48 AM
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