2012 Florida Film Festival - Highlights, Day 3

Sunday's Day 3 was a relatively protracted day of screenings, watching only two feature documentaries along with their accompanying documentary shorts. If part of the allure of film festivals is to experience a wide variety of movies, then a natural result of that is being able to experience vastly different cultures. And the two documentary features I screened Sunday--in widely disparate ways--were eye-opening looks at places and situations that exist on the other side of world.

THE JOSEPH SZABO PROJECT

2012 Florida Film Festival - Highlights, Day 2

Day 2, which is actually the first full day of the Florida Film Festival, always (ALWAYS, I tell you!) seems to begin not with a bang, but with a stutter. Technical difficulties at the makeshift tickets booths outside the Regal screenings generally mark the beginning of each year's festival before things settle down as the week progresses.

In any case, the two Saturdays are usually the busiest days for me during the festival, as I normally try to fit in 5 or 6 screenings. I (and my sister, who joined me for the entirety of Day 2) opted for only five this time, skipping one of our scheduled movies for something I like to call dinner.

Khen Shalem's THE OTHER SIDE

2012 Florida Film Festival - A Brief Preview

The arrival of spring is usually one I greet with dread. Plants in bloom make my sinuses go "boom". The Florida heat is beginning to rear its ugly head and this past winter--or should I say "winter"--was almost nonexistent. But another April means another Florida Film Festival. And another week-plus of movie watching and hopping from screen to screen or from theater to theater and sneaking in a meal in between films (or during films) and more movie watching.

Month In Review: March 2012

 

In a new, hopefully regular feature here, I'll be briefly writing about things I've seen over the past month but didn't get a chance to discuss in longer form. Here's what I watched in March.

Marchons! Marchons!

Last week marked the 70th anniversary of that obscure, little movie called Casablanca. In honor of such an occasion, Turner Classic Movies presented a special screening of the movie in theaters all across the country. At least in my area, the theaters showing the movie had two screenings, 2 pm and 7 pm. I attended the matinee screening and, somewhat surprisingly for a early Wednesday afternoon, the theater was packed. Unsurprisingly, that audience skewed much older than me. But peppered in the crowd were some younger folk and some who hadn't yet seen the film. (The girl next to me, for instance, audibly gasped when Ilsa brandished a gun in Rick's upstairs quarters.)

As prelude to the movie, TCM's Robert Osborne hosted about a 15-20 minute documentary discussing the legacy of the Michael Curtiz film. A doc like that is fine when randomly on TV or as a supplement on a DVD, but when it precedes the actual movie, it dilutes its power. So much of it consisted of scenes from the movie that I felt as if I were witnessing the movie pass before me instead of watching it, even though that act was still to come.

In any case, the movie started with nary a hitch. Sure the much older, shabbily dressed gentleman two seats away from me burped several times during the screening. And when I say burp, I don't mean one of those things you do as you put your hand to your mouth and silently let out a breath. These were belches, audible certainly to those other than myself, especially to the four elderly women sitting right next to him. Outside of that, the only other distractions came from the faint whispers of those reciting the more quotable lines of the film. I could hear the woman in front of me say (along with Bogey), "We'll always have Paris," then (not with Bogey), "Awwwww!"

Duplass, who zooms his camera.

In the Duplass brothers' Jeff, Who Lives at Home, Jeff (Jason Segel), who--more accurately--lives in his mother's basement, is presented as your typical slacker. Or at least your typical movie slacker. He's a couch potato, he loves his bong, and a pair of shorts and a hoodie is his sartorial preference. He also believes in signs. Or should I say he believes in Signs, the 2002 movie starring Mel Gibson. The M. Night Shymalan film gets Jeff thinking. Thinking that everything happens for a reason. That something great is his destiny. That everything is connected. That the wrong-number phone call he gets in the basement for somebody named Kevin is a sign that he must follow the first "Kevin" he sees into a bad neighborhood and play a pick-up basketball game with him.

Woulda, shoulda - Oscar edition.

You want picks? I got picks. (Except for the Shorts categories.)

Closing the books on '11

2011 was a kind of spectacular movie year. From middlebrow, awards-bait movies to foreign dramas, obscure indies to highly ambitious visual epics, small-scale documentaries to big-budget blockbusters, the past year had a treasure of riches that ran the gamut of styles and tastes. And we are now getting to a point where the availability of these vast array of titles is rapidly growing. Yes, you can see the latest $200 million action flick or buddy comedy at your local megaplex. But you can also discover any number of smaller, more obscure movies or even rediscover those Hollywood blockbusters at your own leisure in the comfort of your own home with the growing access to streaming titles online and on demand. As I endeavored to narrow down my favorite movies of the past year, I began to notice how this access affected what I chose. And because of it, my top 10 has maybe the widest variety it has had since I started making these year-end lists.

"Earthly matters never cease to surprise."

In Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, the titular character suspects to his sister-in-law Jen that his terminal kidney illness is karma for past deeds. Deeds that aren't necessarily wrong or immoral given the context. Except of course, in this film, we aren't really given the context. In an earlier scene, the apparition of Boonmee's late wife, Huay, sits down at the outdoor dinner table. Moments later a monkey ghost--an invented mythological creature to us, a thought-to-be mythological creature in the world of the movie--creeps up the stairs. Somehow, Boonmee and Jen intuit that the creature is actually half monkey ghost and half human and is Boonmee's long lost son, Boonsong.

Everyday People

A Separation--from Iranian director Asghar Farhadi--begins and ends with a two-shot, each with the same two characters. But while the first has them facing the same direction, side-by-side, it serves as a harbinger of the rupture that will eventually befall two separate families. They are directly facing the camera and, despite their opposing desires, are active and adamant in their stances. By that final shot though, they're simply waiting, the wear of the baggage accumulated through the course of the movie pushing them to either ends of the frame that might as well be a mile long.