The world's economic climate has done many things. Most notable in the film world is a slew of expository documentaries that both infuriate and embarrass the American way of life, and the way money is wasted and controlled. Something Ventured, refreshingly, is nothing like that. It's a completely unashamed love-letter to capitalism and its virtues. Something to be celebrated with a bit of caution. After all, one step and the filmmakers behind movies like Capitalism: A Love Story, or Inside Job will never let you forget it.
Something Ventured takes a look a the very first venture capitalists, those working in the industry before it even had a name. These are the people responsible for launching companies like Apple, Atari, and Genentech. The film itself is even executive produced by Paul Holland, a partner at the venture firm Foundation Capital. It is directed by Daniel Gellar and Dayna Goldfine.
Hahaha, which means, "Summer Summer Summer" in Korean (where the film hails from), won director Sang-Soo Hong the Un Certain Regard award at the Cannes Film Festival. In previous years, the prestigious award has gone to films like Dogtooth, and Tulpan. Understandably, I expected much more than a mild comedy about a group of young people that get drunk and have sex. A lot. This does seem, after all, to be a bit of business as usual for twenty somethings.
I'll give Sang-Soo Hong the quirky way he told the story. The film initially begins as two friends meet to discuss recent trips they both went on. As the stories are told, the audience gets to see exactly what happened, and how. Immediately, we find out that these two friends spent much time with the same people, but don't know it. However, we're never really shown the two friends except through black and white still images played along side the audio. It reminded me of grade school slideshow projections, the ones where you changed slides at the ding of the bell.
Catherine Breillat has become famous as a French director who is not afraid to push the boundaries of sexuality in her films. Often she preaches precariously on the awkward time between childhood and adulthood, during those tumultuous years of sexual awakening. It shouldn't come as a surprise that her latest endeavor re-imagines the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty by Charles Perrault to, more or less, examine the mind of a young girl developing into a woman.
I'd like to avoid terms like post-apocalyptic when describing Sung-Hee Jo's End of Animal. But it's necessary. Please do not conjure images of 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, or anything by by Roland Emmerich. It's much closer to the almost-great movie The Road by John Hillcoat, in that there is no emphasis on the how or why. But more on the immediate and up close and personal effects it would have on a group of individuals.
This is a healthy reminder to anyone that were something like to happen say, here in America, would it really matter who did it, when, and why--the Chinese or the Russians? Not really. It's this nearly clinical standpoint of the film that keep its message and atmosphere timeless, avoiding avenues that might make it more culturally relevant to South Korea (the film's origin), and less so to any other group of viewers.
I'm going to be completely honest, my first film at SFIFF was underwhelming. It's a little film (with an even smaller budget) called The Selling. The festival catalog calls it witty and original, and claims it deftly handles a blend of humor and horror. I found none of these qualities in Selling.
I have just arrived in the bay area for the 54th San Francisco International Film Festival. While the relationship is still young, I don't mind saying that San Francisco is my favorite city America. Whether SFIFF will become my favorite American film festival has yet to be seen as this is my first year attending. The weather is considerably more favorable than Park City in January.
The giant monsters movie genre, at least in the most nostalgic terms, is nearly extinct. Sure, Peter Jackson’s King Kong was pretty good. And Cloverfield saw a good bit of success financially and critically. But it seems as if the movie-going public’s imagination is uncaptureable, by any good measure, by the idea of enormous, loud, dangerous creatures (Rush Limbaugh doesn’t count). But rumors swirling through the festival mills about an indie gem called, unceremoniously, Monsters held great promise for the movie niche. And, it seems, these rumors are well founded. Gareth Edward’s feature film is charmingly ethereal and, at times, staggeringly beautiful.
Take Shelter, the sophomore effort from writer/director Jeff Nichols, represents a major step forward from Nichols’s first film, Shotgun Stories. Shotgun Stories, a very good movie in its own right, showcases Nichols’s particular skill for building and sustaining tension and capturing the nuances of interpersonal relationships. But where Shotgun Stories at times feels aloof and seems to linger too long on some scenes, Take Shelter is tightly edited and intimately involves the viewer in the lives of its characters.
Lucky McKee's film The Woman, was easily one of the most shocking at Sundance. Reactions have been pretty extreme and it's certainly an 'interesting' movie. With the film on many people's minds, we decided to sit down with Mr. McKee and ask him a couple questions about the movie.
If I asked you to name some films that take place in New England, where the wedding weekend brings together a painfully dysfunctional famly to butt heads and cry for several days, it wouldn't be too hard to list a few. Among these are probably Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding and Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married. Sam Levinson's Another Happy Day seems to be a marriage, if you will, between these two earlier films. Sure, you'll substitute pedophilia for domestic abuse, and self-mutilation for drug addiction, but all the basic parts are there. Because of the similarities, I originally passed on Another Happy Day in favor of catching Araki's Kaboom. But once Another Happy Day won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance, it seemed I ought to give it a chance.
