Month: June 2006

Unshown Cinema

Special event

The Los Angeles Film Festival–officially in its fourth year–is still finding its groove, but it’s improving. A few years ago, Chicago critic Roger Ebert called the Sundance Film Festival the “de facto Los Angeles film festival,” and said that as the world’s film center, Los Angeles needs a festival less than almost any other place in the world: “There’s no need for one in a town where every commercial release plays usually before it plays anywhere else.” Well sure, if all festivals do is premiere industry films; fortunately, festivals are where hundreds of international films that won’t ever play …

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The Road to Guantanamo

Film review

Given the kneejerk partisan response to An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s informative documentary about the realities of global warming, I have little expectation that Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’ new visceral docudrama about human rights abuses in US prison camps will provide a wake-up call to the dwindling numbers of internment policy loyalists–but one can always dream.

The Road to Guantanamo (winner of the best directing award at the Berlin Film Festival) comes to US screens at a time when the mainstream media has rediscovered the prisons in Cuba used for people captured in the war on terror: imprisoned …

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Mr. Arkadin

DVD review

Like many cinephiles, I’ve been slowly making my way through Criterion’s DVD set of Orson Welles’ Mr. Arkadin the last couple weeks. Welles was never allowed to finish editing his 1955 picture and it has appeared in various forms throughout the years, so Criterion includes the producer-finished Confidential Report version, the so-called “Corinth” version that corresponds most closely to Welles’ vision, and a newly reconstructed “comprehensive” version created by the Munich Film Archive that combines five different versions; plus various essays, interviews, radio shows, and a novel attributed to Welles but likely adapted from the screenplay by somebody else. For …

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Arthur Lipsett, 21-87

Film review

Several weeks ago, I managed to see Arthur Lipsett’s astonishing collage film, 21-87 (1964), in Toronto at the NFB Mediatheque, but I postponed writing more in-depth about it until I could obtain a copy on video. Unfortunately, I’ve discovered that it isn’t available for individual purchase, even though the NFB offers DVDs of A Trip Down Memory Lane (1965) and Very Nice, Very Nice (1961), the film that earned Lipsett an Academy Award nomination and an invitation by Stanley Kubrick to create the title sequence for Dr. Strangelove. (He declined.)

21-87 is a particularly hard film to write about …

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Cavite

DVD review

Just when we thought reality had lost its capacity to shock us in dramatic films, the threadbare DV production Cavite (2005) has popped out of the indie festival circuit. If you get the chance to see it at all, you’ll probably learn it was made by two film school graduates with a few dubious films under their belt and a website that reads like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Production. But it’s a film that is emotionally streamlined, elliptical in its construction, and morally complex in its suspense, and it offers a visceral look at contemporary life in the Philippines.

Adam, …

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Buffalo Boy and Oxhide

Film review

I’ve recently seen two significant films from Asia, Ming Nguyen-Vo’s Buffalo Boy (Vietnam, 2004) and Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide (China, 2005). While their details differ, similarities abound: both films are feature debuts by their respective filmmakers; both explore the impact of family trades (involving cattle) on the individuals that comprise them; and both are set in specific locales recorded in striking, elliptical ways. And both are available on DVD–Buffalo Boy was released in North America a few weeks ago; Oxhide should be out (with English subtitles?) from MK2’s CinÈma DÈcouverte in France, but it looks as if it might’ve …

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