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Montreal's
Fantasia
Festival turns 15 this year, a
sweet milestone for a grassroots event that now sprawls across three
weeks every summer with an international array of horror,
sci-fi,
action, Asian, comedy and suspense flicks. There's a deep focus on the
auteur, as well as the often cultish actors and crew behind fabled
genre classics—oldies like The Wicker Man
and Shivers
were honored—plus guys like special-effects master Tom
Savini hanging
out, generating mayhem through
their sheer badass aura. Read
more >>
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In
This Dispatch:
- What's
New: Heartbeats; Life During Wartime; Leon Morin, Priest; and
more.
- What
We're Watching: Source Code.
- Explore:
FILM OF THE WEEK: El Bulli.
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Xavier
Dolan's second feature studies
the rollercoaster of passions amongst two friends and the object of
their affection, a young Adonis whose feelings remain ambiguous
throughout the film. With its curious mix
of comedic farce and intense,
love-triangle motivated romantic drama, the film is held together, says
Wesley
Morris of The Boston Globe, by
"Dolan’s delirious visual talent." He continues, "all the
dramatic protraction gets at both a heaviness of romantic desire and
emotional viscosity." Revisit our podcast
with the budding 22 year old writer/director and star.
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In
his podcast from 2009's New York Film Festival, GreenCine Daily Editor
Aaron HIllis gathers friends to discuss Welcome
to the Dollhouse
auteur Todd
Solondz's latest, on DVD today,
Life During
Wartime,
a quasi-sequel to 1998's Happiness,
in which all of the characters are now played by different actors. They
wonder, is Solondz a misanthrope,
or a humanist whose characters just happen to engage
in ugly, perverse,
cruel behavior? Armond White answers definitively: "He cares about the
difficulty of
forgiveness; that's a very humane
instinct on his part. He doesn't hate people, he understands how
difficult it is to be human." In his re
view
he continues, "Solondz’s situations are funny, shocking and
tough, but he’s never sarcastic—which is why
his
exacting satire upsets some viewers, especially those accustomed to
enjoying hipster disdain."
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Part
romantic drama, part philosophical debate, and not too far distanced
from the French New Wave, Leon Morin, Priest,
comes from auteur Jean-Pierre
Melville ( Le
Cercle
Rouge, Army
of
Shadows, Le
Samourai). In an excellent
review from the soon to be retired blog Gordon and the Whale, Joshua
Brunsting writes, "(it)
is a masterpiece of atmosphere. With WWII playing the backdrop, the
film is an odd blend of implied doom as well as carnal lust, and
Melville plays these two notes off each other like a musician."
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Anyone
weaned on what now is called fantastic cinema should be warmed by the
budding career of Duncan
Jones. Like the best
science-fiction writers, he understands the genre as an imaginative
prism to reflect on the human
condition. He knows that it's not about
the hardware but the software: the emotions tied up inside of
extreme existential situations made possible by weird science, and the
philosophical what-ifs those scenarios provoke. The melancholic Moon,
Jones' 2009 debut, also revealed the director's reflexive awareness of
the canon. Sam
Rockwell plays a technician on a
solitary, multi-year assignment to a lunar base who encounters a
duplicate version of himself, amid other odd discoveries like... he's a
clone.
Read more >>
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Despite its title,
El
Bulli: Cooking In Progress
isn't so much a food documentary as a depiction of a refined industrial
process. For foodie types, Ferran Adrià's
three-Michelin-stars establishment is one of
the most important homes
of molecular gastronomy (or, as he defines it when imagining nervous
diners' reactions, all that stuff using liquid nitrogen). For
Adrià, semi-industrial
hardware and unnatural-sounding
additives are as essential as olive oil and fresh produce, tools rather
than novelties. Vadim Rizov explores this stone-faced portrait
of the titular Spanish Restaurant's 2008-09 year for this edition of Film of the Week.
Read more >>
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Norway
in our Hearts and Minds
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