GOODBYE SOLO, 35 SHOTS OF RUM, Virna Lisi: Venice Film Festival 2008
Wendy Ide reviews Claire Denis‘ 35 Shots of Rum in The [London] Times:
"Four days into the Venice Film Festival, and the programme feels as though it has been temporarily hijacked by hubris and bombast. With a spectacularly inept thriller (Barbet Schroeder’s Inju, La Bete Dans L’Ombre) and an incoherently hallucinatory gangster movie (the unwatchable Plastic City by Lu Lik-wai) on offer, the audience is more than ready for something intimate and meaningful, a film that doesn’t play like an assault with a blunt weapon. Claire Denis’ exquisitely understated 35 Shots of Rum couldn’t have come at a better time. There’s a palate-cleansing truth and compassion to the movie, which feels like a cool hand on a fevered brow — the memories of the raging awfulness of some of the festival’s high-profile dogs has been gently blurred by the warmth and humanity of Denis’ film."
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Mick LaSalle discusses La Donna del giorno (which could be translated as "The Woman in the News") in the San Francisco Chronicle:
"Last night I saw Virna Lisi in a movie called La Donna del giorno, about an ambitious Milanese model who is found on the side of the road, raped — but as a result of this terrible misfortune, she becomes famous. This 1957 film is a critique of the media, and while it’s not a brilliant overwhelming masterpiece, it’s more than good — the kind of very fine film that isn’t noticed in a time of masterpieces but is further testimony to a healthy cinema. Lisi is magnificent in it, by the way.
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Shane Danielsen disses Inju: The Beast in the Shadows at indieWIRE:
"Compared to the latest from Barbet Schroeder, however, [Yu Lik-wai's Plastic City] seemed a work of towering genius. His first dramatic feature since 2002’s Murder By Numbers, Inju: The Beast In The Shadows saw a French crime writer (Benoit Magimel) travel to Kyoto — ostensibly to promote his latest novel, but actually to track down a mysterious Japanese rival, a reclusive bestseller who seems intent upon dispatching his competition. Perhaps it’s a crime-fiction thing: it’s hard (if tempting) to imagine Salman Rushdie and John Updike ever taking literary bad blood to quite this level.
"Film festivals are by definition a mixed bag, and one is bound to encounter things that displease or disappoint. It’s rare, though, to see something genuinely inept. But from the very first frames, it was clear that this was precisely that. Leaving aside its reverential awe for the ‘exotic’ East (though not SO exotic that most locals, when encountered, don’t speak perfect French), and its appalling screenplay (in which the ’surprise twist’ was evident from the first fifteen minutes), the actual direction — the blocking of scenes, the individual shots, the direction of actors, or lack thereof — could most charitably be described as ‘amateurish.’"
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Deborah Young reviews Vegas: Based on a True Story in The Hollywood Reporter:
"Iranian helmer Amir Naderi (The Runner) has been making borderline experimental films in the U.S. since 1993, mostly set among alienated urbanites in the Big Apple (Manhattan By Numbers, Marathon.) His fascination with the perversities of American society finds new ground, literally, in Vegas: Based on a True Story, a pointed moral tale about people who become so obsessed with money they destroy every good thing they have. Unfortunately, the director’s plunge into traditional narrative cinema is too one-note to work at feature length."
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Ronnie Scheib reviews Ramin Bahrani’s Goodbye Solo in Variety:
"In this benign version of Collateral, the only person a cabbie’s passenger wants to kill is himself. Ramin Bahrani’s brilliant follow-up to Man Push Cart and Chop Shop concerns a Senegalese taxi driver in Winston-Salem, N.C., and a taciturn old loner who hires the cabbie to drive him to his jumping-off point. Utterly engrossing dual-character study, unfolding with a serene disregard for indie quirkiness, Goodbye Solo radiates authenticity, as much in the town’s unmistakable tobacco towers as in the characters’ mindsets."
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Eric J. Lyman on the chaotic 2008 Venice Film Festival in The Hollywood Reporter:
"The main story at the midway point of the 65th Venice Film Festival has become the grumbling about the festival itself.
"Industry players say that business is off compared to previous years; gossip journalists are complaining about the relative lack of red carpet star power; critics bemoan the a lack of quality films in the lineup; and technical issues are making Internet access on the Lido either absurdly expensive or unreliable."
THE BURNING PLAIN, INJU, PONYO ON THE CLIFF BY THE SEA: Venice Film Festival 2008
Marco Pontecorvo, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Venice Film Festival 2008
Venice Film Festival 2008 - Too Little Hollywood
George Clooney, Brad Pitt: 2008 Venice Film Festival
Sarasota Film Society’s GLBT Film Festival 2008
North Carolina Gay & Lesbian Film Festival
Venice Film Festival 2008 - Competition Line-Up
ASK NOT, WERE THE WORLD MINE, THE LOST COAST: Outfest 2008
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