big part of the fun of the Gothenburg International Film Festival is getting to see films you would probably never otherwise see. Sometimes you find yourself choosing a film to see simply on the basis of its title, sometimes because the one you wanted to see is sold out, sometimes because it is from a part of the world that you are interested in but which seldom produces films. Africa in my case – I always try to see Festival films from sub-Saharan Africa.
Another part of the fun is logistical – the constant uncertainty of whether you’re going to get in time to the place where the film is being shown. Over the whole Festival I think there were at least three major delays on the No. 6 tram line, the one the Festival and Gothenburg Public Transport bill as the “Festival Tram”.
On the morning of 1 February I found myself on my way to the Haga Cinema on Linnégatan to see Grey Matter, a film from Rwanda. As there was a backup of trams from my part of Gothenburg – some sort of breakdown somewhere – the tram was very crowded: full of teens late for school and having a riot. Then when the tram stopped at Nordstan it was stormed by hoards of kindergarten kids. Standing room only. Fortunately I had a seat but I also had two kindergarteners looking curiously over my shoulder as I tweeted on my mobile phone.
“What are you DOING?” Asks one.
“I’m Tweeting.”
“What’s your name?”
“John – what’s yours?”
“Alma! Ebba!” I see a teacher hovering nervously, separated from us by the sardine packed hordes. I smile at her in what I hope will seem a reassuring manner, but it only seems to make her more nervous. What a world we do live in.
At Prinsgatan I managed to eel off the tram and took myself into the Haga Cinema. Lots people but no queues. Anarchy, but a much lower level anarchy than on the tram. I found the theatre where Grey Matter was to be shown and joined the crowd milling around outside. While we were waiting, I counted 12 people coming out of theatre. Now, I was waiting for the first showing of the day so why were people coming out of the theatre? Perhaps there’d been a private showing earlier, or perhaps they’d been camping out on the floor. (For some reason I prefer to believe the latter.)
Despite the apparent anarchy, once the doors opened everyone hanging around outside was able to get a seat, including me though I found myself seated rather a long way from the door. From being nervous about whether I would manage to get in to see this film, I started to worry about whether I would be able to get out of the cinema in time to get across town to my second film of the day. Oh, the worries one has!
Matière Grise (Grey Matter) was a very moving film, and in places rather disturbing, as you would expect from the first feature length film to come out of Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide. The film is a bit disjointed in that it is composed of three independent stories which do intertwine with one another, but jarringly I thought. The first story is about a filmmaker called Balthazar (perhaps a representation of Kivu Ruhorahoza, the writer and director of Grey Matter) and his struggles to finance the film is trying to make. His government contacts complained that his film is backward looking and want him to make upbeat, educational films about, for example, the fight against AIDS. The second story is a Kafkaesque fantasy about a man locked in a prison and reliving his role in the genocide of the “cockroaches”. (Literally – this story involves real cockroaches.) The third and longest part of Grey Matter is taken up with a young man’s struggle for sanity and his siter’s struggle to help him and hold the two of them together in a family. They are survivors of the genocide; their parents and the rest of their family have been brutally murdered.
Coming out of Grey Matter I found myself drawing parallels with the Korean film Characters that I saw the day before. (See Part 2.) Both films use bracketing stories about the making of a film and in both films the bracketing story blends with the film’s “true” story. I found Characters more than a bit pretentious, but I did not have that feeling about Grey Matter – at least not nearly to the same extent. Yes, the pretensions were there, especially in the first section when the filmmaker is discussing his cinematographic antecedents and references, but they were nowhere near as intrusive as in Characters which really didn’t have anything much to say. The story in Grey Matter was so powerful and the characters, especially in the second and third sections, so much more believable, that the pretensions did not assume the significance they did in Characters.
Grey Matter was one of the films this Festival that I found myself continuing to think about for long after. If I get the opportunity to see it again I will certainly do so.
y second film of the day was the French language Iranian film Poulet aux Prunes (Chicken with Plumbs), a – mostly – live action film by Marjane Satrapi, the author of the charming, funny, touching animated autobiography Persepolis.
Chicken with Plumbs must also be based on a graphic novel. It’s obvious in much of the live action cinematography – there is a quality of tableau vivant over a number of scenes in the film. Also, the film breaks into Satrapi’s characteristic black and white animation in at least one place.
Chicken with Plumbs tells the story of world-famous violinist Nasser Ali Khan and how he goes about committing suicide – first failing humorously, but finally tragically succeeding. Why does he suddenly decide to kill himself? Is it the row with his wife? Is it his broken violin which he is unable to replace? It turns out to be because of a lost love, recently re-met. In good Thousand and One Nights style the film contains many small stories that appear to be incidental, but that all contribute to the whole, and make for a very satisfactory completeness in the film. As I left the cinema I found myself tweeting that “Chicken with Plumbs is the best film I’ve seen so far this #GIFF”.
With a certain amount of perspective now – and having seen a few more films at the Festival – I want to revise that statement. Chicken with Plumbs was certainly one of the most complete and satisfactory stories that I saw presented in a feature film. Visually it was also very satisfactory – beautifully made, with wonderful sets, very good acting, funny and sad. But it was also very sentimental. It was a more rounded story than the one in Persepolis, but not nearly as edgy. True there were a few references to the history and politics of Iran, but Chicken with Plumbs is a fantasy. It would work perfectly well without any of those references and could very easily have been transposed to another country than Iran. I enjoyed it, I recommend it, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to see it a second time. (The trailer is fine though… )
That was my last film of the day as I had some translation work to do in the afternoon, so I shall break off my account here. Continued in Part 4!
ne disadvantage of being a dedicated Gothenburg International Film Festivalian is the headaches you sometimes wake up with. They’re the consequence of craning your neck for hours in uncomfortable cinema seats. But it’s all worth it (he says, knocking back the aspirin).
[BTW, the embedded video here to the right is the GIFF vignette from last year. I'll embed this year's at the beginning of Part 3.]
Sunday 29th January I only had one film to look forward to. I was going to see Death of a Superhero in the evening, but had other things to occupy me during the day. My good wife Mrs SC, on the other hand, was set up for a full day – getting up early and coming home late.
Her first two films were back-to-back Chinese documentaries. The 90 minute The Interceptor from My Hometown (director Zhang Zanbo) and the 2½ hour Fairytale by Ai Weiwei. Fairytale documents Ai Weiwei’s week long installation in Kassel in Germany in 2007 with 1001 Chinese people and the process of selecting them and bringing them to Germany. (Fascinating and positive says Mrs SC, though the first half about the selection process was the most interesting.)
It’s The Interceptor from My Hometown, though, which has most frequently come back in family conversation since GIFF. The Interceptor… is about a civil servant, a man from Zhang Zanbo’s home town, a former schoolmate, whose job it is to help the Chinese local authorities save face by stopping citizens submitting petitions of complaint to the central government in Beijing. The people have the legal right to petition the central government, but when they do they shame the local administration. More than this, the central government would find it impossible to function if it was forced to deal with every infringement of people’s rights and livelihoods made by the local authorities. Consequently the local authorities employ people to ‘intercept’ petitioners, and bring them back home (where they can expect to be punished for their temerity in trying to exercise their legal rights). The central authorities turn a blind eye to this practice.
y headache had cleared by the time I got to see Death of a Superhero in the evening. I wanted to see this film because the principle character is played by Thomas Sangster who you’ll remember from Love Actually as Liam Neeson’s stepson Sam, the little drummer-boy in love. It had completely escaped my attention that Andy Serkis was heading the cast list, so it was a pleasant surprise to see him as well.
Death of a Superhero is charming about teen angst and anger, moving about cancer and funny about all three. Fifteen-year-old Donald (Sangster) is dying of what I take to be leukaemia. Certainly a cancer. He is undergoing chemotherapy, has lost all his hair and sports a variety of t-shirts with macabre comments (“One more PET scan and I’ll glow in the dark”). The boy is a cartoonist and graffiti artist (a good one) – though the book on which the film is based doesn’t seem to be a graphic novel, which was my first thought. The film is about how Donald, his family, schoolmates, girlfriend and thanatologist (death therapist – Serkis) cope with his illness and inevitable death.
Very good acting. Believable story (up to a point – still in two minds about the high-class call-girl and the thanatologist’s role in paying her for services unrendered). Well-made film though. Worth seeing.
Monday 30th January I was busy all day with work and my cineaste self got put on the shelf. To make up for that, on Tuesday 31st I managed to see four films.
ickets for GIFF are not cheap – just one fifth below the price of the regular, expensive cinema tickets and no cheaper than the tickets for screenings at the not-for-profit cinemas. But there is the daypass option. The GIFF daypass is a flat rate ticket that gives you free entry to any film starting before 4pm on weekdays. If you see at least six films with the daypass, you begin to ‘save’ money. This year I only had four days in which to use the daypass, and Tuesday 31st was my first. I got off to a good start and used it to see my first three films of the day. The fourth, which was an evening screening, I had to pay extra for.
My first film was Iris, a Finnish-Swedish costume drama which was showing at Draken, the festival’s core theatre. It was a popular showing, but Draken is a real, old-fashioned film theatre and can swallow 700 people or more, so it was not overfull by any means.
Iris turned out to be a children’s film. Very nicely made, pretty good child actors, and the story was good overall, though I thought it a bit uneven in places. It wasn’t quite the film I’d expected to see. I had misinterpreted the description in the catalogue and was expecting an historical drama about the experiences of a turn-of the century Finnish-Swedish artist and her family. The film turned out to be an account of a summer in the 1890s when Iris (Agnes Koskinen), the eight-year-old daughter of artist Ester (Maria Salomaa) is sent away to the Åland Islands to live with her uncle and his wife while Ester visits Paris. The Ålands are an island group lying between Sweden and Finland in the Baltic Sea; they belong to Finland but speak a form of Swedish called Finland-Svensk.
Iris is a sweet film about the culture clash when town-bred, bohemian Iris has to adapt to a rougher, working-class life in the country. It’s hardly a new subject, but apparently this is the first time a children’s costume drama has been made in Åland, so it’s been a big thing for the Åland community. Scandinavians are generally very good at making children’s films, and Iris is no exception, but it’s not an exceptional film. Kids might like it.
My second film of the day was the Belgian-Togolese Blue Bird. Also a children’s film, in the sense that the protagonists were two children, five or six-years-old, but so very much more. Blue Bird is based on a play, L’Oiseau bleu, from 1908 by the Belgian symbolist writer Maurice Maeterlinck. In fact, though the film and play start in the same place (the children are playing with a blue bird which escapes), the film quickly departs on its own journey and weaves an independent – though still symbolic – story out of the lives, games and improvised performances of the Togolese actors, none of whom are professionals. Filmed entirely through a blue filter, the heat and the light of sub-Saharan Africa (which I know also from personal experience – myself a six-year-old) was transformed in shades and tones of blue. This contributed to the mystical, magical quality of the film.
Now, at the time of writing five weeks later, I think of all the films I saw at this year’s festival, Blue Bird was the one that left the greatest mark visually. I dreamed in blue the night after seeing it.
After Iris and Blue Bird I was a bit dazed, but I had another film to see. Definitely not a children’s film this one, but after the previous two, I was perhaps less than receptive to Characters.
It seems the South Korean director, Kwang-Ju Son, has made a number of short films before, but this is his feature film début. Well, it looks like a long film made by a short film maker. I’m still not really sure what Characters is about, beyond depicting a couple of handful characters in various constellations. There’s more than a nod in the direction of Pirandello here (Six Characters in Search of an Author), but I don’t think the director is able to pull it off.
Each of the characters has his or her story, some brief and clichéd, some more complex though fragmented. Some of the stories link up: the popular film maker trying to make a film to please the critics; the scriptwriter with family problems. At the end the scriptwriter phones one of her own characters (played by the same actress), who then walks away into a wasteland that turns into the sea. Pretentious? Mmm…
ou’ll be pleased to know I took a break between Characters and my final film of the day. I rested my eyes (and my neck) and then met up with my wife and, as it happened, our niece in the student bar at Chalmers, the technical university. We had a meal and a drink and prepared ourselves for The Boy who was a King, a Bulgaria documentary. Mrs SC and I met in Bulgaria and have a soft spot in our hearts for the country. At GIFF, if there’s a Bulgarian film being shown, we try to see it together. This year there were two films from Bulgaria, but I wasn’t able to see Tilt, so that left …
The Boy who was a King is a weird, weird documentary about Simeon Saxcoburgotski who was the last Tsar (king) of Bulgaria. He inherited the throne after the death of his father Tsar Boris III at the age of six in 1943. Exiled in 1946 by the post-war communist government, Simeon lived in various places, eventually settling in Spain, his wife’s homeland, where he lived the life of a playboy or a businessman, depending on who is telling the story. In 2001 he became the first former monarch to be elected by popular vote as Prime Minister of the country he had once ruled as king.
Although the film starts conventionally enough, with clips of newsreels and amateur films showing the young prince in the palace grounds, gradually the feeling grows that something is not quite right here. The first interviewees, long retired palace servants are straightforward, though they are filmed from a distance, sitting in chairs or wandering through the rooms, apparently talking to themselves. From there the film gets increasingly peculiar. It’s as if the director, Andrey Paounov, has gone out of his way to track down the most extreme people to interview. The taxidermists in the natural history museum, the ‘white-trash’ Bulgarians who dive from the wreck of the royal yacht, the founders of a royalist club, the Japanese immigrants who sing their self-composed paean of praise for him, the seamstress who has made a suit for him with a record number of pockets (and who thinks he is a giant of a man, over six feet tall, when he is clearly not much taller than his cousin Prince Charles in the clips where the two of them are seen together).
Simeon himself comes across as far and away the most normal person in the film. And I’m still not sure if Andrey Paounov is out to ridicule Simeon and his followers, or if he is trying to make a Bulgarian film in imitation of the sort of pseudo-documentaries that get airtime on commercial TV.
he Göteborg International Film Festival (familiarly known as GIFF) takes place annually at the beginning of February in Gothenburg, and has done so for 35 years. Or is it 34? I know they jumped over the number 13 but can’t remember if they managed afterwards to make the numbers correspond to the years. Not that it matters really.
GIFF started small in the 70s and has grown and grown. Today it’s the largest of all the Nordic film festivals. Most importantly (for reasons of local pride) it’s bigger and more prestigious than Stockholm’s international film festival. (Ha! Take that, Capital City!)
Gothenburg’s festival has now reached the stage where it offers some 450 long films (and dozens of shorts) shown in 9 or 10 different locations over a 10 day period, and attracts an audience of some 32,000 film lovers and cineastes. It’s also an important venue for the trade, with deals being done and prizes being competed for. The series of seminars and debates held in the new-since-last-year Lagerhus social central offers extra events to interest the general public, students of film and film buffs who may be taking a break from the rigours of end-on-end movie going. There are side events – this year’s video installation Curtain Callers at Magazingatan 3 for example. And there’s a social side to the festival which spills over into the pubs and clubs.
I’ve attended GIFF annually since moving back to Gothenburg from Sundsvall in 1998, but I was a sporadic visitor even before, when I had the opportunity.
The beginning of February, in cold-damp Gothenburg. Of course you want to be sitting in a packed cinema, all breathing together. As ever, this year, I found myself wondering if I would break my record and go down with a cold within the first 24 hours. But no, both I and my good lady Mrs SC remained remarkably healthy throughout.
And I managed to tweet all the way through the week about the festival and the various films and events I went to. This blog entry is based on those tweets.
My first film was The Color Wheel. An American film shot entirely in grainy black and white. (I think the title was supposed to be a joke.) Lots of shaky Dogma-style hand-held camera action. There were some funny lines (especially in the first third of the film) and situations. Still, I wouldn’t choose to see it again. I had the feeling it was a student effort produced as a final, graduation masterwork. All the characters (bar one) seemed about the same age, friends or classmates of the director and writer? The principles, Carlen Altman (JR) and Alex Ross Perry (Colin) were clearly revelling in improvised backchat, some of the other actors though were clearly uncomfortable with this and were, simply, wooden. And the story … well, I felt the story hadn’t really been worked out and the conclusion was clichéd and a bit desperate. As the lights came up after the film was over, the guy in the seat next to me said “I don’t know”, and that was my reaction too.
Two weeks on, I still don’t know.
Left: Still from The Color Wheel with writer & actor Carlen Altman as JR. Right still from QM I think I’ll call her QM with Ann-Sofie Sidén as QM.
My second film of the festival was actually a series of short art films by Ann-Sofie Sidén. All interesting and enjoyable each in its own way, and all of them of much higher production quality than I, at least, am used to seeing from films made for video installations.
The first film was QM, I think I’ll call her QM in which a paranoid psychiatrist ‘studies’ a mud-woman (QM = Queen of Mud) imprisoned in a room in her house. I’m not giving anything away when I say QM escapes at the end. The second film was Head Gallery Piss Up. It documents the installation in a gallery in Vienna of a squatting, pissing, full-size model of the artist in bronze. Fascinating and surprisingly funny! The third film was Curtain Callers a film of events behind the scenes before, during and after a performance at the Stockholm Royal Dramatic Theatre. This latter piece (as mentioned above) was also being show as an installation (5 screens side-by-side with surround-sound audio) which I also managed to see later in the week.
All 3 films were worth seeing, though they probably benefited from being seen together and with Ann-Sofi Sidén present and answering questions put to her by an interviewer and the audience. She was disappointed – to say the least – about the projection of Curtain Callers at the Bio Roy. Too bright, she said, too loud.
Later the same day (this is Saturday 28th January) I saw my third film and first documentary, Deaf Jam in one of the lecture theatres at Gothenburg’s Technical University, Chalmers. Part of the fun of GIFF is getting to see films in places one wouldn’t normally visit. I’m only ever at Chalmers at festival time.
I though Deaf Jam was fantastic. I tweeted that I was blown away. A film of deaf teens working with American Sign Language and imagery to create visual poetry … and then finding ways to communicate to/with hearing poets and on to an audience of predominantly hearing people.
I was so impressed I tweeted an appeal to Swedish Educational Radio (Utbildnings Radio) to: Please! Buy Deaf Jam and show it on TV. No response though.
OK – A bit long for a blog entry (but about par for me). I’ll break here with the intention of continuing in a later entry. I’m also planning to write some longer reviews of some of the films and post to the IMDb – I’ll add links as I go along. In the meantime, here’s the trailer for Deaf Jam.
(dir. Pipilotti Rist – Austrian – German language)
y first film of the Gothenburg International Film Festival 2011 was this colourful, exuberant and anarchistic story, the first full-length feature film by Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist. A good film to start the festival with, as it happened, though (appropriately) that was a consequence of serendipity rather than forethought.
The film tells the story of Pepperminta (Ewelina Guzik), who seems to be a combination of Alice from Wonderland and Dorothy from Oz, and who exists in time both as a young adult and as a child. (Her child self is played by Noemi Leonhardt). She lives partly in the real world, partly in a fantasy, but the two are not always separate. Pepperminta’s fantasy overlays reality like coloured plastic over the camera’s lens changes the colour of the world the lens sees.
Pepperminta is on a quest to live without fear, to help everyone she comes in contact with to know themselves and achieve exactly what they “really, really, really want”. Along the way she gains champions and partners: the fat, shy Werwen (Sven Pippig), Edna NeinNeinNein Tulip (Sabine Timoteo), and the elderly Leopoldine (Elisabeth Orth) who is close to death. Pepperminta helps each of them to overcome their fears and they join her and become her followers and accomplices.
The film makes great use of colour and perception, but also goes out of its way to focus on more senses than just sight: sound, touch, smell and taste also figure prominently. Special effects are generally of a more analogue than digital sort, for example, the stop motion sequences with strawberries or clothes, or the clever cutting in the “transporter” scenes when the characters travel to Pepperminta’s hideaway via her bath. Still, the production values are professional – this is video art for a cinema audience – and the film’s 80 minute running length does not seem too long.
It is not the most intellectually challenging of films, and I suspect some people will be irritated by the adult Pepperminta in the first few scenes. However, if you can reach the Nirvana of suspended disbelief quickly enough I think the film will charm and delight.
Unless you understand German, make sure you see a sub-titled version.
Yesterday evening I went to see my very first 3D movie: Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I know, hopeless. Why did I not see Avatar? Or Tron?
Well, that’s the way it goes.
The experience was not as disturbing as I’d feared. I only had to leave the salon once, fighting nausea but I managed to return to see the rest of the film after visit to the loo. (And it may have been the steak tartar got up as hamburger that I ate just before visiting the cinema that was to blame.)
On the other hand, the experience was not as exciting or as beautiful as I’d hoped. One scene of snowflakes falling around Lucy was nice – otherwise I didn’t feel the 3D experience added anything. Still, I should probably try out a made-for-3D film before dismissing a whole technology.
I didn’t enjoy having to hold the extra glasses on my nose  (see picture). I obviously have a short nose. And I particularly didn’t like the subtitles hovering above the surface of the film – though perhaps that’s something one would get used to.
There are some great lines in Fantastic Voyage (some of them cited below), but I ended up going for a cheap joke at the expense of Raquel Welch and Donald Pleasence. I was inspired by the strip in the middle of the postcard above here, which is a still from the DVD. (What she’s actually doing is zipping her wetsuit closed preparatory to leaving the submarine to help unclog intake filters.) In my defence, the film-makers blatantly included Ms Welch in the cast only for her well-endowed chest – she has minimal acting duties.
Now the Oscar-winning special effects seem dated. The sea of arterial red corpuscles looks suspiciously like a back-projected close-up of a lava lamp. But lense flares (for example in the picture below) do hint at one of the effects JJ Abrams was trying to recreate in his recent ‘re-envisioning’ of Star Trek. (See here.)
A further source of memory confusion is that I almost certainly read Isaac Asimov’s novelisation of Fantastic Voyage (in which he corrected all the more gross scientific errors) before I saw the film.
Still, the scenes with the miniaturised submarine voyaging through a human body to deliver a surgical team to an otherwise inaccessible blood clot impressed me no end. It was one of the things that motivated me to achieve the high grade I did in my Biology O-level when I was 16. (Grade 2. I did better in Biology than in English Language. Which may not surprise any of my former students who have had the pleasure of studying English with me!)
Here are some of the great lines from the film I could have used but didn’t:
Arterial wall to the left!
They’ve crossed over into the jugular vein through an arterial veinous fistula!
That puts us right here which means we can head for the subarachnoid cavity.
The semilunar valve should be on our left any second now.
One other thought: In American films and TV series, 80% of the time, if one of the characters speaks in a British English accent, you know that’s the villain. Fantastic Voyage is no different. As soon as Donald Pleasence opens his mouth you know he’s the bad guy.
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The Internet Movie Database page for Fantastic Voyage (1966) here.
The second DVD out of the box as I work through my birthday present to myself, is JJ Abram’s Star Trek from last year (2009).
Taking this film as my subject here also gives me an opportunity to brush off and republish my original review. (‘Review’ doesn’t seem quite the right word, but judge for yourself here.)
Star Trek is a film with a wonderful flora of quotes, but so many of the good ones are in-jokes for fans of the original series. I choose to illustrate instead one of the most puzzling features of the future. The lack of development in prosthodontics.
Poor Leonard Nimmoy, the original Spock, reappears (through one of those handy wormholes in the time-space continuum that Science Fiction films thrive upon), sucked away from 24th century, and masticates his lines through what appear at times to be rather ill-fitting dentures.
In my imagination I hear him advising his younger self.
Live, floss and prosper.
Oral hygiene, young Spock, oral hygiene. Even in 2387 dentists still can’t make false teeth that actually fit.
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The Internet Movie Database page for Star Trek (2009) here.
As my own birthday present to myself, I bought a box of DVDs (mostly Science-Fiction related). I anticipate working my way through them bit by succulent bit (inclding, of course, all the Extra Material) and boning out some favourite quotes. Which I plan to share here in postcard form.
As chance would have it, the first film I watched was Tim Burton’s remake of The Planet of the Apes from 2001. It’s not a better film than the 1968 original, but it’s not nearly as poor as the reviews made out – those I read when it first came out and which put me off seeing it on the cinema screen.
Some of the actors behind the mask produced some really fine performances. Tim Roth and Paul Giamatti were outstanding, I thought, and Helena Bonham Carter was pretty damn good too, though her mask was less convincing.
Anyway, my nomination for the best line from the film has to be this one. Spoken by Paul Giamatti as the orangutan slaver, Limbo, who is selling humans as slaves:
The young ones make great pets. Just make sure you get rid of them before they mature. Believe me, the last thing you want is a human teenager running around your house.
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The Internet Movie Database page for Tim Burton’s film here.
The IMDb page for the original (1968) Planet of the Apes film here.
Helena Bonham Carter’s makeup/mask at The Make-up Room here. [Ah sad to say that link seems to be broken ]
Interview with  Helena Bonham Carter about her role in The Planet of the Apes at Cinema.com here.
Yesterday evening to see Star Trek. Very satisfactory!
(Italicised text below quoted from the Star Trek trivia section of the appropriate Internet Movie database page. Pictures from the IMDb’s collection of photos or taken from stills from the film’s trailers on the Star Trek Movie official site.)
To make the film appeal to the casual audience, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman cut down on the technical terms, increased the action and named it simply “Star Trek” to indicate to newcomers they would not need to watch the other films.
On the other hand, for those who remember the original TV series, there are plenty of nostalgia nuggets to spot. Such as …
Majel Barrett, the wife of “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry, has a role in this film as the voice of the Enterprise computer.
A role she played in the original TV series and several of the spin-offs. She completed recording two weeks before her death on December 18 2008.
The film is dedicated to her and to Gene Rodenberry, Star Trek’s daddy. Above: Zoë Saldana who plays ‘Lieutenant Uhuru’ (middle left) also played a character in The Terminal (2004), an immigration officer who is a Trekkie in her off-time (far left). New Zealander, Karl Urban, was shot to world stardom as ‘Eomer’ in The Lord of the Rings (far right) – looks a bit different as ‘Dr McCoy’ (middle right).
Zoe Saldana never saw “Star Trek” [the original TV series] … However, Saldana’s mother was a Star Trek fan and sent her voice mails during filming, giving advice on the part.
Yeah. I’m sure that helped!
Karl Urban is a longtime self-described “religious” fan of the Original Series. He used to watch it on Saturday mornings in New Zealand with his dad.
My dad wasn’t at home and my mum thinks SF is just silly. And I still turned into an SF fan – how’s that? Above: When the credits rolled I couldn’t for the life of me work out which character Winona Ryder had played. Had to check on the IMDb. She is ‘Amanda Grayson’, Spock’s mother. That’s her, in character on the right. On the Extra Material, somebody regrets losing a scene where ‘Amanda’ gives birth to Spock, because “it’s the only scene where here ears aren’t covered and her humanity is revealed.” (As opposed to the vulcanity of Spock’s father). But as you can see from this picture, (still from the DVD) the curve of her human ears are plain – for a brief moment at least – under her headscarf.
Simon Pegg who plays ‘Montgomery “Scotty” Scott’ (in the strip above centre left) is better known in England as a comedian and comic actor. He played ‘Shaun’ (far left) in the zombie spoof Shaun of the Dead (2004).
Years before, Simon Pegg’s character in “Spaced” (1999) joked about every odd-numbered Star Trek film being “shit”. Now he says: “Fate put me in the movie to show me I was talking out of my ass.”
This film is number 11.
Scottish fans have complained that Pegg is English – they think the role should have gone to a Scot. This ignores two facts:
1) The original ‘Scotty’ was played by James Doohan, a Canadian of Irish extraction. 2) Neither Zachary Quinto nor Leonard Nimoy – who both play ‘Spock’ – are, in fact from Vulcan. (Not many people realise this.)
To develop the female characters, the wives of J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman were consulted. In fact it was Katie Abrams’s approval of the strong female characters that convinced her husband J.J. to sign on to direct.
This statement just leaves me speechless. What “strong female characters” – there is Uhuru and then there is … ? In this respect the film shows its socio-historical roots very obviously. But if you’re going to re-make a 1960s boy’s adventure with the original assembly of characters, what can you expect?
The girls – and I use the word deliberately – are there, but in the background (and in very short skirts). There are also two mothers. ‘Kirk’s’ and ‘Spock’s’. One gives birth to the hero: “He’s beautiful”. The other is protective and proud of her son. They’re positive images I suppose, but clichés. And they don’t occupy much screen time.
Oh yes, and the baddy is motivated by the death of his wife who we also see briefly. Visually (above) it is very striking.
Production designer Scott Chambliss used the layout of the Enterprise bridge from “Star Trek” (1966), but gave it brighter colors to reflect the optimism of Star Trek; (J.J. Abrams quipped that the redesigned bridge “made the Apple Store look uncool”).
Taking advantage of the 35mm 2:35:1 anamorphic stock film, cinematographer Daniel Mindel caught as many lens flares (a photographic effect where light sparkles everywhere) in the film as possible, to create a sense of wonder that enhanced the film: “There’s something about these flares, especially in a movie that potentially could be incredibly sterile and overly controlled by CGI, that’s just incredibly unpredictable and gorgeous.”
Revolutionary Road is not Titanic despite Kate and Leo.
Suffocation of youthful dreams by 1950s US middle-class norms. None of the characters really sympathetic – mostly rather pathetic. All immature and kicking at the limits, but no one daring to cross them in any practical way except at the end when Kate’s character April tries to solve her problems. (OK there’s a Greek chorus – the lunatic son of the realtor – but he’s also trapped in the mental asylum and his parents’ protection.)
Leo’s character Frank less sympathetic than April; April is at least tragic in a small-town, Madam Bovary sort of way (though she sins far less).
What was the point of this film? I feel I’ve seen/read this story before. Many internal references to other films – deliberate I suppose. Based on a book from the early 60s, set in late 50s. But what does it have to say to us today? Could it be more relevant to a US audience? If this film had been made in US in early 60s I think it would have been scandalous and ground breaking (and would probably have existed in censored and uncensored versions). But today … it’s just a costume drama.
It’s a good costume drama. Director Sam Mendes makes good costume dramas (thinking of Road to Perdition), but he’s made films that seem relevant too (American Beauty). This isn’t one of those. It is very true to its period though, perhaps overly so? Very stagey.
For a Swedish audience Involuntary (De Ofrivilliga) has more of relevance to say.
Revolutionary Road worth an Oscar as ‘best film of 2008′? – Oh, come on!!
Revolutionary Road screenshot
The above is a screen shot from the movie’s official homepage, the illustration of DiCaprio and Winslet is from the picture gallery on the same site.
——————————————————– 30th January
OK, having checked the Oscar site I see that Revolutionary Road has not been nominated as one of the best films of the year. A relief. I see it has been nominated in the catagories of Art Direction and Costume Design – so my “costume drama”" reaction wasn’t so far off the mark. Michael Shannon (who plays the “Greek chorus – the lunatic son of the realtor”) is nominated as best supporting actor, with which I have no beef.
My local newspaper, though, rates this film rather more highly. This morning’s edition includes a review awarding the film 5 points out of a possible 5, and the (middle class?) reviewer writes: “The question of what is an authentic life is … just as relevant to the middle class of today.” And “Possibly the film would have been even more interesting if the neighbours had been genuinely happy with their choice of life (a life in the suburbs can be authentic)”.
——————————————————– 3rd February
I just uploaded the illustration, so I’ll take the opportunity to add this note. I listened yesterday to Mark Kermode’s weekly film review podcast (at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/podcasts/kermode/) and was relieved to find he felt much the same way about Revoutionary Road as I do. Relieved because in this church, Dr Kermode is one of the greater prophets.
big part of the fun of the Gothenburg International Film Festival is getting to see films you would probably never otherwise see. Sometimes you find yourself choosing a film to see simply on the basis of its title, sometimes because the one you wanted to see is sold out, sometimes because it is from a part of the world that you are interested in but which seldom produces films. Africa in my case – I always try to see Festival films from sub-Saharan Africa.
y second film of the day was the French language Iranian film Poulet aux Prunes (Chicken with Plumbs), a – mostly – live action film by Marjane Satrapi, the author of the charming, funny, touching animated autobiography Persepolis. 
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ne disadvantage of being a dedicated Gothenburg International Film Festivalian is the headaches you sometimes wake up with. They’re the consequence of craning your neck for hours in uncomfortable cinema seats. But it’s all worth it (he says, knocking back the aspirin).
ickets for GIFF are not cheap – just one fifth below the price of the regular, expensive cinema tickets and no cheaper than the tickets for screenings at the not-for-profit cinemas. But there is the daypass option. The GIFF daypass is a flat rate ticket that gives you free entry to any film starting before 4pm on weekdays. If you see at least six films with the daypass, you begin to ‘save’ money. This year I only had four days in which to use the daypass, and Tuesday 31st was my first. I got off to a good start and used it to see my first three films of the day. The fourth, which was an evening screening, I had to pay extra for.
ou’ll be pleased to know I took a break between Characters and my final film of the day. I rested my eyes (and my neck) and then met up with my wife and, as it happened, our niece in the student bar at Chalmers, the technical university. We had a meal and a drink and prepared ourselves for The Boy who was a King, a Bulgaria documentary. Mrs SC and I met in Bulgaria and have a soft spot in our hearts for the country. At GIFF, if there’s a Bulgarian film being shown, we try to see it together. This year there were two films from Bulgaria, but I wasn’t able to see Tilt, so that left …
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