You know when you watch something and all you can think is, “What the fuck?!” Just out of Men and Chicken, a truly bizarre comedy about a group of ludicrous degenerate brothers. Mads Mikkelson is utterly unrecognisable as a gross, imbecilic compulsive masturbater. Sørren Malling is equally mad as he disciplines his brothers with slaps round the chops with a stuffed owl. Described in style as “if Franz Kafka had written The Three Stooges” and that is spot on. Deeply weird.
Well, Bridgend was the first dud of the festival for me. Still 1 out of 31 isn’t bad.
It’s about the string of suicides that took place in the Welsh town of Bridgend, mostly by teenagers. Despite the dramatic and interesting subject, the film managed to be both boring and add absolutely nothing to the topic. The teenagers, while played well by the cast, were like sock puppets from an adult fantasy of teenage life, where everyone’s young, beautiful, hedonistic and drinks, dances, gets their kit off at every available opportunity and leaves a pretty corpse. The low point for me was when a lassie washes her boyfriend’s shitey arse, and to thank you, he shags her with the unsuccessfully cleaned shite still clinging to his arse and legs. Painful load of toss.
I mean, at no point does any of the action take place anywhere other than Bridgend and yet the number of establishing shots of the treeline surrounding the town was unreal. I started to silently think, “Meanwhile in San Francisco” like when there’s a shot of the Golden Gate bridge in The Room.
It was like Skins but with a suicide every 20 minutes. Which thinking of it, would have improved Skins.
A gangster movie about an Argentinian crime family in the 80s who took advantage of the turbulent political climate to make their money by kidnapping, ransoming then killing their victims.
As everybody knows, cars are not my favourite thing and car films are somewhere below videos on slug mating rituals on YouTube on the list of things I wanna watch, so when I say that Speed Sisters is an excellent fucking movie, you know it’s a fact. Following the highs and lows of the Palestinian female race car team, it’s both compelling and enjoyable. I loved Marah and really felt for her, and I loved her Dad who totally had her fucking back.
A fucking tense and brutal movie about a dipshit band walking in on a murder in the backroom of a white supremacist redneck bar after a gig. Never have I routed against Patrick Stewart before but he plays the neo Nazi leader with beautiful, skillful malevolence in this Assault on Precinct 13-esque siege. Well worth seeing.
A surreal comedy in which Catherine Deneuve pumps a gorilla. Our realm of existence is essentially a game of Sims God plays in his trackies while halfcut because he’s giant cruel deadbeat. Luckily his goth daughter is gonna come to Earth and fuck up his shit. Easy to compare in style to Amelie, but actually much weirder. Thoroughly enjoyed it.
An absolutely beautiful, slow, moving documentary. The whole film is like a poem about water as a cosmological, geographical, spiritual, biological, historical force. Both personal and political, it is tells the story of Chile’s history as well as the filmmaker’s own life experiences in what becomes a song of water as a unifier between celestial bodies, the natural world and ourselves.
A documentary by one of few foreign filmmakers granted access to film in North Korea. His attempts to get a real idea of the lives the 23 million people who live in this media punchline of a country are, of course, hopelessly thwarted and the movie becomes an examination of the propaganda war surrounding the isolated nation. What is the truth about North Korea? Is it even possible that we could know the truth about North Korea? Fascinating documentary, very open about its own flaws and subjectivity, as part of the very subject it’s examining.
It is very frank about the fact that everything being shown to the documentary crew is carefully chosen, groomed, controlled by the authorities. Yet even when he tries to break out, make an impromptu visit to chapel for mass, he can’t be sure that anything going on around him is real. North Korea is so different culturally anyway, and there seem to be many sincere interactions with ordinary people that it’s so difficult to judge.
This features some excellent Dear Leader dance numbers, check it out.
A coming-to-terms-with-grief/romantic friendship Hollywood movie full of bittersweet humour. Much more entertaining than that synopsis makes it sound.
If it helps, a lot of shit gets smashed with a sledgehammer in this movie.
A crime procedural based on a real miscarriage of justice in India. While the film shows multiple versions of how crime could have been committed, what it emphasises strongly is that there is no solid evidence against those convicted of the crime, and only the echo chamber of media gossip is what’s against them.