Time:
Kim Ki-duk made my 2005 Top Ten List with last year's festival
offering, 3-Iron, and his latest picture reminded me a
lot of a movie that made my 2004 Top Ten List. Time
obviously can't hold a candle to Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but some of the themes
are quite similar. Instead of characters altering their
memories, they radically change their appearances via plastic
surgery (apparently a burgeoning phenomenon in South Korea),
which still leaves them in the same peculiar situation where the
two romantic leads meet on a beach but aren't totally sure if
they know each other.
Se-heui (Park Ji-yeon) is worried that boyfriend Ji-woo (Ha
Jeong-woo) is getting tired of her boring face. One day,
she vanishes and Ji-woo is heartbroken and confused. Six
months later, he strikes up a friendship with a cafe waitress (Seong
Hyeon-ah) who may or may not be Se-heui fully recovered from
post-cosmetic surgery. If he's not sure, there's no way
you'll be sure. What you will realize, however, is that
there's no better way to psychologically terrorize your mentally
unstable girlfriend than getting a little plastic surgery of
your own. Oh, and you'll also learn that Hyeon-ah does an
exquisite brand of crazy.
This Is England: It's
July 1983, and runty Shaun (Thomas Turgoose) is having trouble
fitting in at school because he doesn't dress like he's in the
horn section of Madness, or have the hair of a Culture Club
cover band member. Wearing bell-bottoms and having a dad
die in the Faulklands is not, in case you were wondering, a key
to scholastic popularity. One day, on the way home from a
particularly rough day, Shaun meets up with a gang of skinheads
who take him under their wing. Not that racist kind of
skinhead, but the original kind that devoted their lives
to ska and West Indies fashion and important stuff like that.
Things take a dark turn when Combo, a former member of the
clique (Stephen Graham) is released from prison and begins to
convert the group into the bad kind of skinheads.
The kind that beats up Pakistanis and whatnot. There is
obvious discomfort as the ranks become divided, and Shaun is
sold on the rah-rah pro-England sales pitch from Combo. England
doesn't go anywhere to different or exciting, but it is another
solid effort from Shane Meadows. The breakthrough
performance from Turgoose, though, is the real draw here.
Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait:
Knowing the running time of this film is the same as a
full-length soccer match (90 minutes), the painfully-long
opening credits really took their toll on me because I assumed
they'd take away from on-field action. I'm a big fan of
Zinédine Zidane, who you might remember as the guy tossed from
the World Cup final a couple of months ago, and I was
super-anxious to get a peek at this movie, which aimed 18
cameras at Zizou during a run-of-the-mill Spanish league match
that pitted the French star's Real Madrid against Villareal on
April 23, 2005. Some of the cameras are the wide shots
that you're used to seeing during televised soccer games.
Some are extremely tight shots of Zidane's face, or his feet,
but they're all dark and grainy, like anything shot by famed
cinematographer Darius Khondji. Sometimes the sound is
manipulated so that you hear only footsteps and the ball being
kicked around the pitch. Sometimes the images are
accompanied by a blistering soundtrack from Scottish
post-rockers Mogwai.
As a lover of soccer, of Zidane, and of Mogwai, I found Portrait
to be absolutely hypnotizing. That said, if you're not a
big footie fan, or you don't like experimental cinema, you're
going to want to headbut someone in the chest if they take you
to see Portrait. It's not going to convert any
soccer haters because it doesn't show you any part of the game
Zidane isn't involved it. Penalty kicks and free kicks go
unseen, and you only get fleeting glimpses of other players,
no matter how popular, photogenic, or box office-tested
they might be (see Bend It Like Beckham).
Infamous: Pundits
have, for months, been busy asking America if they're ready for
the slew of 9/11-related films being pushed on the public in
2006. The important question going unasked is this: Is
America ready for another movie about Truman Capote and his
various trials and tribulations as he researched and wrote the
groundbreaking novel In Cold Blood?
If Infamous was inexplicably better than last year's
Oscar heavyweight Capote, the answer might be
"yes." But Infamous is inferior in every
imaginable way, from writer-director Douglas McGrath's decision
to play up the film's comedy (!) to his lazy use of interviews
with the other characters in the picture. The laughs are
actually a bit of a welcome change, merely because they do help
to establish some sort of chasm between the two movies.
But when the comedy makes way for the high drama, which features
much less ambiguity about Capote's true feelings, it simply
reveals Infamous to be a less-successful version of the
exact same story. Toby Jones does a decent job as the
famous writer, but offers little of the depth shown by Philip
Seymour Hoffman.
The Silence:
New South Wales police detective Richard Treloar (Richard
Roxburgh) has been, following an incident during which he
witnessed an informant brutally murdered right in front of him,
temporarily busted down to a job managing a new museum of police
history until he gets the all-clear sign from the department's
shrink. While examining old crime scene photos, Richard
discovers what he believes to be a secret involving both his
department and personal life. Or maybe he's just a big
nutter. That's for you and Richard's curvy Scottish
psychiatrist (Skye Wansey) to figure out in this two-part
television special from Australian television that played like a
very special episode of Cold Case. Nice, but
nothing remarkable.
Breaking and Entering:
Will (Jude Law) and Sandy (Martin Freeman) have just opened a
new architecture office in a warehouse in North London's sketchy
King's Cross. When they're burgled twice in a very brief
span, the added stress does not bode well for Will's home life,
which includes trouble with both his wife (Robin Wright Penn),
daughter (Poppy Rogers), and the baying fox that keeps him up at
night. You can almost smell the trouble start when Will
starts to stakeout his office at night and befriends a Romanian
prostitute (Vera Farmiga).
Meanwhile, the acrobatic boy responsible for the break-ins (Rafi
Gavron) is at odds with his mother (Juliette Binoche) over
things like truancy and his ties to fellow displaced Serbs known
for criminal behavior. The two stories collide in a very
devastating way that really shook me up thanks to solid acting
and a very strong script and directorial effort from Anthony
Minghella (Cold Mountain), who is making his first
present day flick in 13 years. His last three film have
seen five Oscar nominations and two wins for acting alone.
I've not quite been able to put my finger on it yet, but it
took me a while to move once Entering ended. It
shook me up, though I'm still wondering what the point of
Farmiga's character was. Still, while I sat there
paralyzed, I got to enjoy a new Sigur Rós song that played over
the closing credits. Today was officially the post-rock
day of the festival.
