Film review – Page 13

LAFF 2007

June 21, 2007 Doug Cummings Commentary, Film review

Robert Koehler and I are both planning to attend this year’s LAFF, and as of this afternoon, it looks like I’ve been granted press credentials for the festival, so I plan on writing about a decent share of films. (And rewatching a few favorites, such as Honor of the Knights, Times and Winds, Syndromes and a Century, and Paraguayan Hammock.) With everyone lamenting the death of newspapers–premature though it may be–it amazes me that serious bloggers continue to get shut out of many festivals. I know I’m not the only cinephile who considers the internet my …

Class Relations

May 11, 2007 Doug Cummings Film review

DaniËle Huillet passed away last year and although her filmmaking partner Jean-Marie Straub announced he won’t continue making films, their legacy lives on through not-fast-enough New Yorker DVD releases (last year’s The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach and this June’s Moses and Aaron) and implicitly through the work of contemporary filmmakers like Pedro Costa and Harun Farocki. Fans of Costa’s static but lush images, nonprofessional actors, social concerns, and elliptical narration are witnessing the spirit of Straub-Huillet firsthand. As Costa tells Thom Andersen in a recent issue of Cinema Scope: “They were the fastest, the most furious, the …

Tekkon Kinkreet

May 8, 2007 Doug Cummings Film review

Though they’ve been around since the mid-’80s, Studio 4°C is emerging as a pretty exciting Japanese animation house. Their 2004 genre-bending adventure Mind Game has already achieved cult status here, and Tekkon Kinkreet (screened Sunday at the VC film festival) could easily do the same: a lavish urban fantasy based on the acclaimed Black & White manga by Taiyo Matsumoto, it’s a work of rare technical ambition that also manages compelling drama.

Both films combine epic detail with psychedelic flourishes–their stories shift fluidly between real worlds and dream worlds, just as the animation is fixed between hand-drawn sketches and …

Goethe-Institut and “Starring Berlin”

May 4, 2007 Doug Cummings Commentary, Film festival, Film review

One of the cultural institutions here in Los Angeles that screens movies on a regular basis is the Goethe-Institut; currently, it’s showcasing “Starring Berlin,” a series featuring the capitol in 40 films, from Paul Leni’s Backstairs (1921) to Detlev Buck’s Tough Enough (2006). The series continues throughout the year.

I’ve known about the Goethe-Institut for a while, but never visited their facility until this week–and what a treasure it is. Just east of Wilshire and Fairfax, their Media Lounge alone contains hundreds of books, VHS tapes, and DVDs–largely arranged by filmmaker–with rarities like Wenders’ Kings of the Road, Fassbinder’s …

Unknown Forces

April 19, 2007 Doug Cummings Film review, Uncategorized

Last night at the REDCAT, Thai filmmaker (and graduate of Chicago’s School of the Art Institute) Apichatpong Weerasethakul opened his first solo exhibition in the US, entitled Unknown Forces (2007). A filmmaker who often blends narrative and experimental techniques (particularly structural innovation) in his feature films, I learned he also produces and distributes avant garde works through his company Kick the Machine, and has created several video installations for gallery spaces over the years.

Unknown Forces is set up in a bare, roughly 40-foot-square, darkened room, with four large, looping video images projected on three walls, and a …

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

April 1, 2007 Doug Cummings Film review

Yesterday, the Japan Foundation of Los Angeles hosted a lovely event, a free screening (with a box lunch!) of Mamoru Hosoda’s sweet and captivating anime, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006), the latest adaptation of the 1965 serialized novel by SF author Yasutaka Tsutsui (Paprika).

Hosoda is a Ghibli veteran (he was originally slated to direct Howl’s Moving Castle), and the film boasts a polished, vibrant aesthetic–a sunny rendition of contemporary Tokyo teeming with background detail–populated with well-rounded characters. Makoto is a perpetually late, tomboyish (as befits her masculine name) high school student who doesn’t excel …