1991-2000

“This film depicts landscapes, metaphorically and actuality, of the southern island called Panyi. It reflects the impression of the shooting time at the island for several days. The sounds are taken from different sources, but all were recorded while the subjects were not aware of the recording apparatus. Thus, this piece may be called a re-constructed documentary. The title is intended as a parody of the word that is being used by the West to describe Thailand or other “exotic” landscapes. This film is the voice from individuals who reside in such environment. The film is presented in crude and rugged quality, as it is a product from the uncivilized.”

by Apichatpong WeerasethakulRead More »

Quote:
As much as Olivier Assayas resists having his themes and styles pinned down, one is tempted to put Irma Vep at the center of the French filmmaker’s shape-shifting oeuvre. A virtually ad-libbed project—written, shot, and edited, like Wong’s Chungking Express, in a creative rush between larger productions—it uses a gallery of frazzled characters to crystallize many of Assayas’s obsessions and, casually and boldly, makes the medium itself the most frazzled character of all. Appropriately, the setting is a hectic Parisian movie shoot in which director René Vidal (Jean-Pierre Léaud), once respected but now shaky and befuddled, plans to remake Louis Feuillades’s 1915 serial Les Vampires. Read More »

The story of Venezuelan revolutionary, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez

Review:
A television production in format but not form, Olivier Assayas’ ambitious Carlos spans many years and many hours in recasting the life story of Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal. With a script that hews closely to the facts of the life of Illch Ramírez Sánchez (who adopted the “Jackal” moniker once he became a revolutionary), this action-oriented drama finds its talented director in territory that he recently explored with his similarly themed, but entirely fictional, works Boarding Gate and demonlover. Just as those two movies depicted espionage as a globalized phenomenon, Calros shows the international face of terrorism. Like those movies, this globe-trotting epic has as many scenes set in anonymous airports as in identifiable cities. Even more peculiarly, though, like those genre exercises, Carlos offers a kinky combination of sex and guns that, making this more titillating and exciting than standard biopic fare.Read More »

Quote:
Apichatpong Weerasethakul brought an appetite for experimen­tation to Thai cinema with his debut feature, an uncategorizable work that refracts documentary impressions of his homeland through the surrealist concept of the exquisite corpse game. Enlisting locals to contribute improvised narration to a simple tale, Apichatpong charts the collective construction of the fiction as each new encounter imbues it with unpredictable shades of fantasy and pathos. Shot over the course of two years in 16 mm black and white, Mysterious Object at Noon established the director’s fascination with the porous boundaries between the real and the imagined.Read More »

Alvin Straight is a very old man with a quiet life in a small country town. When his brother gets seriously sick, he decides to put away their differences and visit him after many, many years. So, alone, he begins a long journey through hundreds of miles, just to see again his brother, even if it’s the last thing he will ever do… Based on a true story.Read More »

Essentially a prequel to David Lynch and Mark Frost’s earlier TV series “Twin Peaks”. The first half-hour or so concerns the investigation by FBI Agent Chet Desmond (Chris Isaak) and his partner Sam Stanley (Kiefer Sutherland) into the murder of night-shift waitress Teresa Banks in the small Washington state town of Deer Meadow. When Desmond finds a mysterious clue to the murder, he inexplicably disappears. The film then cuts to one year later in the nearby town of Twin Peaks and follows the events during the last week in the life of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) a troubled teenage girl with two boyfriends; the hot-tempered rebel Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) and quiet biker James Hurley (James Marshall), her drug addiction, and her relationship with her difficult (and possible schizophrenic) father Leland (Ray Wise), a story in which her violent murder was later to motivate much of the TV series. Contains a considerable amount of sex, drugs, violence, very loud music and inexplicable imagery. Written by Douglas BaptieRead More »

The lives of several people spanning from 1936 to 1993 are chronicled during their overnight stay at a New York City hotel room. The hotel room undergoes minor changes through the century, but the employees of the hotel remain unchanged, never aging.Read More »

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Ostensibly a set report on the filming of Lost Highway for Premiere magazine but of course a much more ambitious piece than that; as you can only expect from Foster Wallace. This is more a nuanced (and very funny) interrogation of the whole Lynchian aesthetic with Wallace trying to get straight in his own mind why he’s so fascinated by Lynch’s work.

This is not the Premier piece but the greatly expanded version that appeared in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. If you enjoy this, please do hunt down a copy of this wonderful collection of essays (this is far from the best piece there; still pretty good though).Read More »

Quote:
If something characterizes Reichardt’s work, it’s that it always finds its characters downhill. And if that vivid decadence, that pain of not being anymore that transmit the characters in River of Glass, Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, her three features, already causes anguish, those great moments of pain captured by the director intensify, through condensation, in each of her short subjects. Death is lord and master in the shorts Then, a Year and Travis, and also in Ode, the only mid-length film by this daughter of cops (him, scientific; her, narcotics). Then, a Year combines, without attempting any kind of narrative, Reichardt in her adoptive Portland with a pastiche that mixes statements from different shows about crimes of passion. This idea is resumed in Travis, video-installation where that focus that never reaches the image, sensed as violent close-ups of a fixed photograph, is centered in politics: Reichardt infinitely loops fragments from the interview with a mother that has lost her son Travis in Iraq, and who, in every little confession, leaves a piece of her heart. Lastly, in Ode, the director shows the courage for loving of two young Baptists, capturing, for three quarters of an hour, the story of a love that could never be between Billy Joe and Bobbie Lee, and its tragic outcome. And the inevitable one, because there’s no place for the humbled joy of those poor old hearts in the oppressive world of the religious deep America.Read More »