I survived a weekend of movies (barely).
Friday
La Vie En Rose - I really had no strong interest in Edith Piaf's story, but this movie was quite something. The lead actress's range was pretty stunning; she portrayed Edith, a sort of weird-looking woman, between the age of 20 and 40-something (she aged a lot in the last few years of her life). She really made the movie quite engaging; I was always waiting for her to do something crazy. And although I didn't really know much of the music, they used her original recordings for the songs and they were great. Recommended.
Saturday
Big Rig - Another winner, this documentary about long-haul truck drivers was great, not only as a portrait of these men and women and their world but also as a way to see America. The director used shots of the open highway, natural spots, and man-made monuments to great effect as the movie traveled across the U.S. My only complaint (and it's pretty minor) is that the sound mix wasn't good enough to make the CB chatter clear enough to understand. The visuals deserve a big screen (depspite being filmed on video), but it's definitely going to make a good rental someday -- if they get a distributor, and they really ought to soon.
The Cloud - I guess this is supposed to be Germany's version of a big Hollywood blockbuster. Frankly, it didn't seem as ridiculous and over-the-top as one might expect a disaster movie from America to be. It sort of starts out as this teen romantic comedy thing, and right when the romance starts to kick in, sirens signaling a nuclear accident sound and the couple is separated for nearly half of the movie. I thought it worked pretty well as a political (anti-nuclear power) film, and the lead actress, through whose face we experience most of the events in the movie, was excellent (and only 18 or something like that). It came out in 2006, so I suppose it's available in good video stores already.
Sunday
Fever of '57 - This was a great one, maybe one of my favorites of the festival at this point. Starting with the launch of Sputnik, the movie explores not the effect on space exploration that followed but rather the effects the space launch had on the Cold War. I can see now how easily this news could be (rightly or not; mostly rightly) interpreted as a sign that the U.S. was behind the Soviets in weapons technology. One cool interviewee was the son of Nikita Kruschev. Well, well worth a viewing. It's not as much about science as about the Cold War, so if you're not that into space stuff it's worth seeing anyway.
Nanking - Talk about a downer. This excellent, if incredibly sad, documentary focused on the Japanese attack on and occupation of Nanking, China, in 1937. The story was told through interviews with survivors and actors portraying others through readings of their letters and diaries. These others included a number of Westerners who were in the city during the occupation and did their best to stop the killings and the rapes. For the most part, it worked, because most of the actors were excellent B-list character actors who became their roles. However, I was a little jarred out of the moment every time Woody Harrelson appeared on screen as the American clinic doctor. I just could never quite buy it. However, the story is so compelling that you get sucked right back into the narrative, as tough as it is to hear about what happened in Nanking. It's probably not an easy one to see unprepared, but it was definitely well done and worth a viewing if you can.
Woman on the Beach - So far in this festival, the movies have been pretty good, and I've also been lucky to have the director appear at more than half of the screenings I've seen. This is one screening where I wish the director was around, because I think he has a lot to answer for. The SIFF programmer who introduced the film said that this director's works consistently place in the bottom 10 for SIFF audience scores. Still, they keep putting him in the festival for some reason. Maybe they should take the hint. It's not that the film was all bad. I thought the actors were quite good, and the characters for the most part had some interesting quirks and such, the kinds of elements of a movie that make you want to stay. (I might also mention that this screening was 9:30 on a Sunday night, and the movie was two hours long.) The direction, however, was a bit listless in places. And the plot... well, I think there was some sort of moral or point that was lost on me. I could see a lot of places where a better editor could have livened things up just a tad. And at the end, the movie pretty much just stopped. I was glad, because I was tired and it was late. But it didn't really resolve a thing. Maybe my friend Chris will see something that I didn't, though.
I get a two-day break before seeing a movie on Wednesday night, and then I get another break until the weekend sometime. It would have been nice to have a little bit more non-movie time to do stuff this past weekend, but I'll take what I can get.
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