Saw five movies at the yearly/six-monthly (I can barely keep track) one day alternative cinema festival.
Drama about an older married woman (Blanchett) in the 50s who begins an affair with a young female store clerk (Mara). I'm not sure where all the high praise for this one comes from, the much-lauded acting isn't all that much (Mara in particularly is shamelessly coasting of innocent caught-in-headlight-doe-eyes) but more tedious is the directing by Haynes which IMO fails to capture the right atmosphere for the time period, the sexual tension between the two leads and in fact often just uses plain ugly photography. A drag.
I fukking hated this movie so bad. It's like someone saw Juno and said to themselves, 'You know what, I can write a story just as obnoxious and pretentious as this. Hell, I can even make it worse!' and then proceeded to do so, hurting the world of novels and now cinema for evermore. The forced hipster quirkiness is at an all-time low, from the plain annoying to the shameful classic cinema pandering (you can't hate this movie, look at all the movies it shout outs! Werner Herzog mentions people, a true cinephile can't hate this!). More painful to sit through than chemo to the point the possibly-quite-nasty stereotype of Earl is almost welcomed because even in his stereotypical this-is-what-white-people-think-black-teenagers-are-like way Earl at least feels like a real character in a movie consisting of painfully constructed cartoon characters. Did I mention the direction is abominable with terrible camera angles and a general sense that if the camera isn't standing still, the director has no idea what to do with it. fukking indie-hipster fukking shameless tearjerker garbage.
Solid drama about chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer, mostly because of the tight screenplay by Steven Knight (the man who brought us Locke). It felt a bit like a Ron Howard picture, a bit of A Beautiful Mind mixed with Frost/Nixon and a dash of Rush. Although in the end it's pretty hard to make chess look interesting on screen and director Edward Zwick just isn't skillful enough to pull it off, which prevents the movie from ever reaching that unique level that a Ron Howard picture does.
The surprise of the night (and maybe of the year), this humorous black comedic drama about a single day in the life of a group of humanitarian aid workers during the Balkan-conflict. There big mission for the day is to remove a corpse that's been dumped in a local water well to ruin the water supply, but with the lack of a rope and none of the locals or anyone in the UN cooperating, this proves a lot harder to be than it should be. Boasting a strong lead role by Benicio Del Toro, Tim Robbins' funniest (and best) role in years and nice break-out role for Mélanie Thierry, the movie is the right kind of cynical and sarcastic as it continuously balances between drama and humor. Deserves far more credit than it's been given by critics.
If you like your heavy-handed dramas to become even more hard-hitting, look no further. Rarely have I witnessed a movie that attacks your senses harder than this Holocaust drama about a concentration camp worker who takes the body of a boy as his son and attempts to give him a proper burial. Shot in 4:3 format (or close to it), the movie plays heavily with focus as the movie is almost entirely shot in close-up of main character Saul, with all the horrors of the Holocaust playing in the background in a near-constant state of blur, humans being stripped, beaten, shot, dragged, burned, while the sound is pumped up so loud you hear every scream, squirm, drop of blood, knees sinking into the dirt, final breaths and whatnot. It's a helluva job to sit through as it is (as evidenced by the many people who gave up on it and left), but with a minimal narrative and a main character who acts selfish and against other people's interests, it becomes agonizing. Does it make for a good movie, I dunno, but I do know it makes for must-see cinema.