Sitges Dispatch. 7.

As the festival slowly fades out, we do our best to be everywhere we should be and take a peek at every film possible, even those no one seems to know anything about - or especially those, as the pleasure of discovering a hidden gem is not really comparable to that of confirming the existence of a widely acknowledged great film. Saturday is, therefore, a day for three titles that are not exactly on everyone's radar.

First, The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, a dark fairy tale from the Quay Brothers. Well, that wasn't easy. As with MirrorMask, this is just a series of pretty tableaux without a plot to pull them together and make the whole thing cohesive or enjoyable. Well, there is something here - the story of a doctor who abducts a dead opera singer (the absolutely beautiful Amira Casar, recently seen in Anatomy of Hell) to convert her into a mechanical creature - but it's not involving enough to keep a viewer from falling into deep sleep, lulled by desaturated colors, dense landscapes and boring gimmickry. Will this take a prize? Stranger things have happened.

When everyone hated Final Fantasy, the rebel in me took up its defense. While everyone talked about the human actors vs CGI thing, it was forgotten that this was one of the most creative, exhilarating and moving pieces of animation ever made, a creation full of ecstatic set pieces that could set our hearts on fire. As the only fan of Final Fantasy on Earth, I came to Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children (an entry in the Anima't parallel section) completely alone, only to discover that this is not exactly what I was hoping for. Technically exhibitionist to the point of pure cheesiness, possessed by an aesthetics way too new-agey, this feels more like a long and expensive intro to a videogame than a movie. Only for unconditional fans of the FF universe.

Two failures out of three. Okay, and the third? The horrid French thriller L'empire des loups recounts the investigation into the story behind three corpses of clandestine immigrants - clichés, effects-ism and outright mistakes abound. Since it's based on a novel by the same writer of The Crimson Rivers and helmed by the director of Kiss of the Dragon, it wasn't realistic to hope the day would improve, and it didn't. Know what? Tomorrow there won't be any surprises. We'll just attend every single screening of David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, four in all.

Posted by dwhudson at October 17, 2005 1:26 AM