Natural disasters are easy prey for filmmakers wherein the melodrama is grown organically out of the true story the film portrays. This is usually their downfall, as the events and performances are so over-the-top and seeping with mushiness that they get thrown onto a Cable Network and forgotten–all for the best. Then there is one […]
Movies
AFI FEST 2012 Film Review: Leviathan (Dir. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel US/UK/France 2012)
Leviathan is a fantastic audio-visual experiment, presented as by the Sensory Ethnography Lab. The emphasis is on the sensory, so to get the other out of the way, it is filmed entirely on and around a commercial fishing vessel and yes, it’s a hard life for these fishermen, with much of their work machinelike in […]
AFI FEST 2012 Film Review: Wrong (Dir. Quentin Dupieux France/USA 2012 )
Even if one’s not seen Quentin Dupieux’s loopy telekinetic tire movie Rubber [2010] it’s quite clear from the start of Wrong – the wrong “A Film By” credit, followed by a nice if obvious gag on the hackneyed alarm clock shot – that this is going to be another surreal oddity. Dolph (Jack […]
AFI FEST 2012 Film Review: Berberian Sound Studio (Dir. Peter Strickland UK 2012 )
This is unashamedly unconventional, but in a fan rather than snooty way. Using (mostly) just diegetic sound from the post-production of a fictional mid-70s Italian horror movie, Peter Strickland has followed his superb debut, Katalin Varga [2009], with a largely non-narrative nightmare hymn both to the electronic soundtrack experiments of that time, and to the […]
AFI FEST 2012 Film Review: ‘Rise Of The Guardians’
Rise of the Guardians feels so familiar, like a piece of childhood come back to life on screen, that you cannot help but fall in love with the characters, fantastical or real in the form of children.