Austin’s annual SouthBySouthwest gathering brings together film, music, art and technology for a few weeks of screenings, concerts and parties. Most people know SXSW as a music festival, but it’s just as big a film event, with hundreds of films and shorts playing all across the city.
One of the shorts chosen to play at the 2010 fest is writer/director Jack Daniel Stanley’s Depth of Phil.
There’s a shot in The Ghost Writer that says a lot about director Roman Polanski. In it, a worker is gathering sea oats and beach grass that the gusty wind has blown onto the deck. As he places it in a wheelbarrow, the wind again blows it back out and scatters it across the deck.
As hard as Polanski tries, the wind keeps blowing his demons out into full public view. The only way he has ever known to deal with that is to make movies, and good ones like The Ghost Writer.
I won’t pretend to know what makes a truly great film. I think I know what many of the ingredients are, but there’s just something that’s often hard to identify that gives a really powerful film its impact. And sometimes when you’re watching a strong film, even a short, you may not fully “get” how good it really is until a few days after, when you’ve had a chance to think about it.
Miracle Fish is that kind of film.
Martin Scorsese doesn’t do “easy.”
If you want an “easy” movie, one you can stumble through, half-paying-attention, then you’d be better off going to see “The Wolfman” or “From Paris With Love.” Do that, and be content not to have to think. But please, if you do choose to see Shutter Island, Scorsese’s new film, I ask two things of you…
First, don’t give anything away with spoiler-filled reviews. And second, if you’re going to share your thoughts on the Internet, think for a moment about what you’ve typed before you hit “send.”
When the Academy Awards announced they were expanding the nominees for the Best Picture category from 5 to 10, everyone knew what the reason was: ratings. Oscar had grown tired of solely recognizing films based on quality, and hoped that by including more films, they’d attract more box-office-friendly films and thus, more eyeballs.
If they honestly gave two shits about recognizing the best films of a given year, the category they expanded would have been Best Foreign Film. That way, a great film like Police, Adjective would not be overlooked.
File this under the “movies you should have seen but probably didn’t” category. Don’t get me wrong, it did almost $80 million at the domestic box office, so you may have seen it. But very few people I know did.
In fact, I happen to think that Knowing is yet another powerful movie from visionary director Alex Proyas (Dark City).
Sometimes I’ll go see a movie, catch a preview or two, and think, “I should see that movie when it comes out.” Then it comes out and, for one reason or another, I miss it.
That’s what happened with Amreeka. And when I finally got a chance to see it, I was glad I did.
There. Do you see that image from the film A Single Man? It’s Colin Firth and Julianne Moore. They’re half-drunk (or mostly drunk), laying on her living room carpet, commiserating about the state of their lives. Have you absorbed the above image completely? Good.
This is exactly what Hollywood wants you to think A Simple Man is about. But it is not.
Some of you, many of you, may be unfamiliar with the work of director Werner Herzog. That is understandable.
Those of you unfamiliar with the work of David Lynch, on the other hand, may excuse yourselves from reading the rest of this review and buy a ticket to see Avatar for the fourth time. Clearly My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? is not a movie for you.
Austin, if you haven’t figured out by now, is a pretty cool place to live. We’ve got great restaurants, Sixth Street, a vibrant arts scene, and not-quite-teenage girls running around shooting their own zombie-horror films.
Wait, what?!?
