Features

Film grec réalisé par Panos H Koutras. L’objet de la rubrique « Cheezy Monsters » ne pouvait passer à côté de cet ovni (c’est le cas de le dire).

We are nearing the end of the lazy summer season and its heat wave and procrastination before the drudgery of September kicks in is at an all time high, so the more mind-numbing the film the better to ease the pressure. It’s the perfect moment to catch up on all those so-bad-they’re-good cinema classics, from the more obscure to the increasingly popular thanks to the main actor’s ever growing fame like Shark Attack 3 : Megalodon. It was in that spirit that I sat down yesterday night and (…)

The Paris in the title is basically Australia’s version of Royston Vasey in Peter Weir’s uncharacteristically weird ozploitation classic; a small town whose inhabitants cause car accidents to use salvaged valuables and bits of scrap metal as currency. The Parisians fear outsiders nearly as much as they fear the local young people who are running as wild as they can within the confines of the small town. Passers-by, drifters and visitors or either killed or sucked into the Paris community and (…)

ParisCinema Festival 2010 offering number three is Romanian film If I want to whistle I whistle, directed by Florin Serban.

Today’s pick from the Paris Cinema film festival is Benjamin Heisenberg’s The Robber, winner of the Student Jury prize.

This is the first of a few reviews of some of the films presented at the ParisCinema film festival in July 2010.

Mundane History (Jao Nok Krajok)
and Q & A with director Anocha Suwichakornpong

XXY weaves together three landscapes: the fluidity of the ocean, the violence of the scientist’s laboratory and the arid determinacy of life on dry land. Fifteen year old Alex, who so far has been subsumed by neither a male nor female gendered identity, is marooned on the shore. For writer/director Lucia Puenzo this is where things are forced into a fixed shape. XXY (in my opinion grossly mistitled -the film has been criticised as misrepresenting Klinefelter’s syndrome and actually resists (…)

Chris Morris’s jihad comedy Four Lions depicts five inept Muslim ’suicide bombers’ and has been praised as a delightful expose of the ’moral idiocy’ of such an act. Here I discuss the forthcoming sequel.

My expectations weren’t particularly high when I went to see the Clash of the Titans. And I must say I was looking forward to it, perhaps moved by some masochistic feeling that compels me to go see films that are going to provoke my inner academic (knowing a few things about Greek mythology). And yet I’m always up for a laugh. The movie in all its blockbuster glory fulfils what it sets out to do: it has drama, romance, fights and big scorpions. My concern is that it promises to tell a (…)

I first caught Transamerica about 15 min in, on a tiny television set in a small family-run hotel in St Malo. That was back in 2006, about a year after its release and I was working as a tour guide in France. In the first few minutes this is what I thought was going on: a very masculine-looking woman teenage hitchhiker are driving through the US. What I didn’t get was whether it was a man or a woman playing Bree. It was only when the credits rolled that I realised it was Felicity Huffman. (…)