Hlynur is the ultimate slacker. He sleeps all day, drinks all night and fails to maintain any kind of sensible relationship with members of the opposite sex – except for his mother whose home he still lives in. Life is pretty simple in a depressing and dull sort of a way until Hlynur sleeps with a beautiful Spanish houseguest (the wonderful Abril) who it then transpires is his mother’s lesbian lover…Read More »
Directed by
Internet wrote:
There’s to much to say about each individual movie, but the level of quality is high and most of them has very strong concepts. My favorite is also the first one, “Skin”, directed by Elin Magnusson. It’s a beautifully shot sex scene between a man and a woman all dressed in a skin-colored body stocking. Slowly they cut parts of their body skin open, and in the end there’s nothing left of this shell. Only humans. It’s sexy, erotic is probably the best in this collection of high quality shorts. “Body Contact” was almost scary to see, because it seems so real at first. It’s about a girl who want’s to make a porn movie and films the whole experience together with her friend. They find a man from the southern parts of Sweden and manipulates him to be in the movie. It’s both funny, and even a bit unpleasent. “On Your Back Woman” is a cute wrestling-themed short with three lesbian couple. I think cute is a good word (maybe the director will disapprove there?), but it’s also strong movie with strong love.
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Rotterdam 2009: Guy Maddin Will “Send Me To the ‘Lectric Chair”
By R. Emmet Sweeney on 01/29/2009
Guy Maddin, courtesy of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, 2009
Guy Maddin is a hoarder of uncanny images, from the candy-colored Alpine tableaus of “Careful” to the frozen horse heads of last year’s “My Winnipeg.” A commission from the Rotterdam Film Festival centers around another: Isabella Rossellini blasted out of an electric chair.Read More »
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If you are moved by the death of a parakeet at the beginning of The Elementary Particles (Elementarteilchen), you are in for a bumpy ride, as all of humanity as we know it will be wiped out by the film’s end in a brief written epilogue. Of course, those who have read the novel (Les particules élémentaires in its original French, Atomised in its UK version) saw this coming, but for those who are unfamiliar with Michel Houellebecq’s cult hit that explosively mixes sex, death and science to annihilate mankind – and blames the flower power generation for it in the process – this might come as something of a shock.Read More »
After the tsunami struck the coast town of Takua Pa, young architect Ton moves in town to develop a construction project and settles in a small hotel run by Na, a young sensitive local girl. They begin a secret love affair, but soon rumors spread and they meet with strong opposition from the town’s residents.Read More »
Continuum
This film narrates simple enjoyable stories from everyday life that explore the continuum of life and death, of love and paranoia, of trade and value, of need and invention, of hunger and enlightenment. The five moments of its childlike innocence branch out into a more intricate gamut of an urbanscape, culminating into a space where the stories no longer exist as singular threads in their own vacuum but come across and play with each other to form a larger fabric of life.Read More »
Despite a complete lack of financing and cast, driven young director Miguel Gomes is hell-bent on making a film and dives headlong into a cinematic kaleidoscope. With a camera and a small crew, Gomez travels to a remote Portuguese mountainside, where the Pardieiros music festival is under way, and begins filming the townsfolk. While the festival sets one’s eyes ablaze and toes tapping, Gomes finds a narrative slowly and sneakily emerging. Locations, songs, and characters from the documentary are recast as echoes of their former selves. Townspeople are reincarnated as members of a family band and incestuous subplots unfold. These colliding realities beg the question: Is the beginning of the film merely research for following fiction? Is truth a rehearsal for fiction here, or is it the other way around? This one-of-a-kind diptych probes the intersection of documentary and fiction filmmaking, suggesting that story and reality are echoes of one another. Ravishingly photographed and brilliantly assembled, Our Beloved Month of August is a travelogue to get lost in, an indigenous film created by tourists. It’s also a window into a fascinating filmmaking process that continues to unravel long after the credits roll.Read More »
From The New York Times:
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: October 20, 2004
Thanks to movies like “36 Fillette,” “Romance” and “Fat Girl,” Catherine Breillat has acquired a reputation for both fearlessness and perversity. Her two most recent movies, “Anatomy of Hell” and “Sex Is Comedy,” arriving in New York theaters within a week of each other, will no doubt extend that reputation, though in different ways. The newer movie, “Anatomy of Hell,” which opened last Friday, takes her fascination with female sexuality to a new extreme of literal-minded explicitness. “Sex Is Comedy,” which was completed in 2002 and which opens at Film Forum in Manhattan today, is much less graphic than “Anatomy,” and it is probably Ms. Breillat’s most restrained and self-critical film. There is less nudity and less on-screen sex than in her previous movies, but a good deal more self-exposure.Read More »
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Following up on the surprise success of their micro-budget production THE PUFFY CHAIR (2005), brothers Jay and Mark Duplass turn their handheld DV camera toward skewering the pretentiousness of the independent film world while tossing in a few horror film scares for good measure. The result is entertaining and unique, with enough laughs, insight, and excitement for adventurous viewers. After seeing the accolades heaped up on a colleague for his laughable film (WE ARE NAKED) at a Los Angeles film festival, Matt (Ross Partridge) decides that he can do better. Read More »