Once upon a time there was a movie named World War Z, scheduled to be released in the Fall of 2012, starring Brad Pitt. That didn’t happen. In June of 2012 the release of World War Z was pushed by Paramount Studios to June of 2013, and six weeks of re-shoots were scheduled; plus a […]
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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: The Angel’s Share (Dir. Ken Loach UK/France/Belgium/Italy 2012 )
There are pockets of whimsy in the Ken Loach filmography, but following 2009’s Looking for Eric, he seems more fully than ever to be embracing an Ealing-inflected lightheartedness. The Angel’s Share starts off in reasonably familiar territory, as a succession of poor, unemployed Scots have their petty crimes recounted in court, and the community service […]