Current location:	housesitting, I miss my computer!
Current mood:	happy
Entry tags:	film festival, sff

Films: Day three and four
None of these reviews are particularly spoileriffic (the A Lake one is slightly).


Treeless Mountain is a Korean movie about a six year old girl trying to look after her three year old sister as they are dumped on an aunt by a mother that can no longer cope. Lovely performances are drawn from both kids, as they trustingly try to bring their mother back by filling the piggy back she left them with. The film doesn't take the sentimental route, but the story it tells is compelling. It made me keep thinking of Cynthia Voigt's Homecoming, despite the much younger children.



An Education. This film was brilliant. I'll freely admit the only reason I went to see it was because I loved Sally Sparrow in Blink (Dr Who) that much, the subject sounded a bit offputting, and not really aimed at me. I'm very glad I went - it was hilarious - the whole audience was laughing, and at the same time I was watching the screen through my fingers in embarassment a lot of the time. At the same time as being joyous it doesn't avoid the ethical issues or the seriousness of the payoff. Carey Mulligan made a very believable 16 year old (moreso than most American tv teenagers), though her voice sounded closer to her real age (just checked, it is only 24. And I see she's going to be in Never Let Me Go, way cool. Sounds like Keira Knightley got the main part though.) Good performances from Peter Sarsgaard (does he specialise in ambiguous?) and Olivia Williams. I'm sure An Education will get a wide release.


An Education was preceded by another NZ short, Six Dollar Fifty Man, which was a really nicely done little story about a small bullied boy fighting back.


A Lake was pretty much pretentious crap. All extreme close ups, blurred action shots, real time scenes and not enough dialogue. Possibly it didn't help that I saw it right after the slick, dialogue heavy, An Education, but I just wasn't in the mood for it. The inside scenes were so dark I couldn't tell if imbecile boy was grooming his horse or having sex with his sister. And all the facial closeups really fucked with my prosopagnosia, I had real trouble telling characters apart, which was worrying in a cast of six characters. I thought at one point that there was a jump forward of seven years in there, but there wasn't. Every action and look was thrumming with supressed meaning, which got old fast. The singing seemed a bit random too. Altogether it made me very grateful for storytelling conventions, which exist for a reason. I'm sure some people loved watching this and got heaps from it, but not me. Despite this rant, it didn't annoy me as much as last year's Silent Light, but I definitely need to start spotting the phrases in the synopses that flag these movies.



Moon is a really good, genre savvy, science fiction film. I thoroughly enjoyed it, it made me think of all sorts of stories and authors, the most obvious being some nice homage to 2001 though I think it's closer to The Abyss in tone. It was well worth seeing. There should be more science fiction out there like this, where the story is supported by the special effects instead of being ruled by them. It made me think of last year's Timecrimes although it's less plottily complicated than that, and more sfnally part of something larger.


Tally:
7 films, 2 shorts
4 kid centred
2 coming-of-age
2 made me cry
1 Kazakhstan
2 sfnal
1 person snoring in the row in front of me
1 dud

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