Gateway Cinephiles

Film Diary: Guru

2007
Director: Mani Ratnam
Viewed: March 30, 2008
Format: DVD - Adlabs (2007)

Film Diary: Atonement

2007
Director: Joe Wright
Viewed: March 28, 2008
Format: DVD - Universal (2008)

Film Diary: Peter and the Wolf

2007
Director: Suzie Templeton
Viewed: March 29, 2008
Format: Television - PBS

Review: Paranoid Park

2007
Director: Gus Van Sant
Viewed: March 25, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Director Gus Van Sant, now in his mid-fifties, is enraptured with the psychology of young people. There are few living American filmmakers as unflinching and unabashed in their artistic curiosity towards the teenaged or young adult mind. Van Sant’s new film, Paranoid Park, is more than a reaffirmation of this impulse: it may be his most gently ambitious and conscientious work to date. The film hums with a jumbled, embryonic sensibility that is strangely effective, and often outright devastating. Van Sant’s tangled approach inherently precludes the dramatic ferocity that might have made Paranoid Park a legacy knockout. That said, what the film offers is a valuable, pained glimpse into the adolescent heart of darkness, realized with visual and aural audacity.

Read the rest…

Review: The Band’s Visit (Bikur Ha-Tizmoret)

2007
Director: Eran Kolirin
Viewed: March 22, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Eran Kolirin’s The Band’s Visit is a film as light as meringue, but with a rich, complex flavor. It rests on the well-worn comedic premise that strangers trapped together in one location invariably provide insight and wisdom to one another. One might term this rule the “Breakfast Club principle” and the films that follow it “anti-road comedies.” In this case, an Egyptian police band finds itself stranded in a backwater Israeli village for one memorable night. Although the story sticks close to the traditional fish-out-water formula, Kolirin’s insightful and nuanced thematic layering adds up to something more rewarding. The resulting film is unexpectedly dense, lovingly rendered, and occasionally laugh-out-loud hilarious.

Read the rest…

Film Diary: Hot Fuzz

2007
Director: Edgar Wright
Viewed: March 22, 2008
Format: Television - Cinemax

Film Diary: Blades of Glory

2007
Directors: Josh Gordon and Will Speck
Viewed: March 22, 2008
Format: Television - HBO

Film Diary: Serenity

2005
Director: Joss Whedon
Viewed: March 22, 2008
Format: Television - HBO

Film Diary: The Rules of the Game (La Règle du Jeu)

1939
Director: Jean Renoir
Viewed: March 23, 2008
Format: DVD - Criterion (2004)

I picked this up on a whim after seeing that it topped the Satyajit Ray Memorial List of the 100 best non-English language films, hosted at Edward Copeland on Film. The Rules of the Game seems so simple at first blush, but it really does suck you in with its unexpected emotional and thematic density. I could sense that this was a film that would offer something new every time I watched it, even as I was watching it for the first time. Definitely a candidate to share as one of my official screening selections.

Film Diary: The Bourne Ultimatum

2007
Director: Paul Greengrass
Viewed: March 23, 2008
Format: DVD - Universal (2007)