September 3, 2007

Venice, 9/3.

64th Venice International Film Festival "The spirit of the 70s is firing up the Venice Film Festival, where - just past the midpoint - sex, war, politics, corporate evils and spiritual quests, depicted in star-driven Yank passion pics, are the talk of the Lido, alongside similarly themed global offerings." Nick Vivarelli and Ali Jaafar take stock.

Also in Variety:

  • "Jalil Lespert (Tell No One) makes a confident feature helming debut with 24 Bars [24 Mesures, also known as 24 Measures], a four-character study of emotionally crippled souls who meet by chance on Christmas Eve," writes Jay Weissberg. "Though the subject isn't new, Lespert's studied yet free-feeling construction, lensed largely at close range, keeps interest focused throughout unexpected twists and turns." Also: "It's a sad day when a vet helmer like Carlo Lizzani takes a film to Venice as poor as Hotel Meina." More from Ray Bennett in the Hollywood Reporter.

  • Alissa Simon on Andalucia: "Second feature by French-Senegalese helmer Alain Gomis explores themes similar to those addressed in his debut, L'Afrance - namely, loss of identity, sense of disenfranchisement, reactions to entrenched power and a quest for inner peace. Poetic, elliptical pic unfolds in short, sensuous stream-of-consciousness-like scenes that evoke an interior world of emotion and sensation."

Small Gods "The words stylish and Flemish are rarely used in the same sentence by cinephiles, but after Koen Mortier's Ex Drummer from earlier this year, there is now a second film that just would justify their conjunction: Dimitri Karakatsanis's demented road movie Small Gods," announces Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net. "Like the language of its title indicates, the film owes more to English-language (and particularly US) cinema than home-grown fare, with Malick's Badlands as the most obvious inspiration for this tale of three lost souls - of which at least one nominally kidnapped - travelling by camper through a dream-like Belgium, both escaping from and heading towards violent collisions in various shapes and forms."

"My favorite surprise so far has been Asif Kapadia's Far North," decides the Observer's Jason Solomons. "Like his debut The Warrior, it's about survival, fate, the natural and the supernatural, a film not afraid to be bloody and brutal, showing animals killed as in old-school geography books rather than eco-sensitive modern wildlife docs. But it's the shock ending that set people talking over the first few days here."

"Director Ridley Scott turned grumpy old man yesterday, declaring 97% of modern films 'stupid' and claiming mobile phone and other modern technology was killing cinema," reports Helen Pidd for the Guardian.

Covering the coverage: Venice 07. Index.



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Posted by dwhudson at September 3, 2007 10:53 AM