Toronto Film Fest 2006, Day Nine
Sep. 17th, 2006 02:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
przedWell, the final midnight is over and I'm still (mostly) awake. So what the heck, let's see if I can write coherent reviews for yesterday.
Title: Time
Director: Kim Ki-duk
Country: South Korea
P's Rating: Recommended
Kim Ki-duk is the artsy enfant terrible of South Korean cinema. This time he's taken on a twisted tale of obsessive love. Seh-hee is so jealous of her boyfriend's wandering eye that she decides to do something about it. Something extreme. She has cosmetic surgery to completely change her appearance, disappears for six months, and then re-appears, as a waitress called See-hee, to try and seduce Ji-woo. Ji-woo begins falling for See-hee, but the only problem is he can't forget Seh-hee, and so both their lives begin to unravel. Beautifully shot, sensitively acted and constructed with a genius narrative twist at the end, this is a truly wonderful film.
Title: Chacun sa nuit
Director: Jean-Marc Barr & Pascal Arnold
Country: France
P's Rating: Not-so-good
Lucie, her brother Pierre and three of her brother's friends are inseparable. They play together, are in a rock band together and sleep together in varied combinations. But when Pierre disappears and then is found beaten to death, Lucie embarks on a quest to find out what happened to her brother. Unfortunately for Lucie, she discovers that Pierre's death is pointless; unfortunately for the audience, the film is rather pointless as well.
Title: The Magic Flute
Director: Kenneth Branagh
Country: U.K./France
P's Rating: Recommended
Aided by a libretto translated into English by Stephen Fry, Branagh has moved Mozart's famous opera to the trenches of World War I. It may seem an odd transformation, but it definitely works. (Tenor Joseph Kaiser, who sings the role of Tamino and did a Q&A after the film said he found that setting it in such a perilous time helped give some of the wild leaps that various characters make some psychological grounding, and I think he's right.) The singing is wonderful, and apart from a bit of cheesey CGI work here and there, the sets are magnificent. And René Pape in the baritone role of Sarastro is marvelous.
Title: Time
Director: Kim Ki-duk
Country: South Korea
P's Rating: Recommended
Kim Ki-duk is the artsy enfant terrible of South Korean cinema. This time he's taken on a twisted tale of obsessive love. Seh-hee is so jealous of her boyfriend's wandering eye that she decides to do something about it. Something extreme. She has cosmetic surgery to completely change her appearance, disappears for six months, and then re-appears, as a waitress called See-hee, to try and seduce Ji-woo. Ji-woo begins falling for See-hee, but the only problem is he can't forget Seh-hee, and so both their lives begin to unravel. Beautifully shot, sensitively acted and constructed with a genius narrative twist at the end, this is a truly wonderful film.
Title: Chacun sa nuit
Director: Jean-Marc Barr & Pascal Arnold
Country: France
P's Rating: Not-so-good
Lucie, her brother Pierre and three of her brother's friends are inseparable. They play together, are in a rock band together and sleep together in varied combinations. But when Pierre disappears and then is found beaten to death, Lucie embarks on a quest to find out what happened to her brother. Unfortunately for Lucie, she discovers that Pierre's death is pointless; unfortunately for the audience, the film is rather pointless as well.
Title: The Magic Flute
Director: Kenneth Branagh
Country: U.K./France
P's Rating: Recommended
Aided by a libretto translated into English by Stephen Fry, Branagh has moved Mozart's famous opera to the trenches of World War I. It may seem an odd transformation, but it definitely works. (Tenor Joseph Kaiser, who sings the role of Tamino and did a Q&A after the film said he found that setting it in such a perilous time helped give some of the wild leaps that various characters make some psychological grounding, and I think he's right.) The singing is wonderful, and apart from a bit of cheesey CGI work here and there, the sets are magnificent. And René Pape in the baritone role of Sarastro is marvelous.
