Gearing back up for some blogging this week after the PSIFF and an enjoyable offline project, writing the DVD liner notes for Tartan Video’s upcoming second Ozu boxset in the UK containing The Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947) and The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952).
I attended a couple fun screenings last week, [...]
Entries from January 2005
Updates…
January 24th, 2005 by Doug Cummings · No Comments
Categories: Site news
PSIFF diary 4
January 16th, 2005 by Doug Cummings · No Comments
Hawaii, Oslo (Erik Poppe, Norway)
The last film I’ll review for the PSIFF is perhaps my favorite, and solidifies the strong Scandinavian presence at the festival this year. The last couple of years have produced a number of ensemble films offering post-Altman, interwoven stories (two examples are Germany’s Lichter [Distant Lights] and Peru’s What the [...]
Categories: Film festival
PSIFF diary 3
January 13th, 2005 by Doug Cummings · No Comments
Forgiveness
More from PSIFF…
Breath (Sandeep Sawant, India)
Told with vivid emotional clarity like the best of mainstream Indian cinema, this debut by director Sawant (filmed in the cinematically-rare Marathi dialect) is a deeply compelling story about a rural boy and his grandfather who travel to a city for medical treatment. The boy is suffering from serious vision [...]
Categories: Film festival
PSIFF diary 2
January 12th, 2005 by Doug Cummings · No Comments
Cold Light
More from the Palm Springs International Film Festival:
Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)
Weerasethakul’s latest film is one of the best puzzle films I’ve seen in years: a brilliantly cinematic depiction of supressed sexual desire carefully alluded to through the suggestive body language between two young men (a lackadaisacal worker and a soldier on leave) and [...]
Categories: Film festival
PSIFF diary 1
January 9th, 2005 by Doug Cummings · No Comments
Strings
Palm Springs may be famous as a desert resort, but I’m writing this as I wait in line at the city’s annual film festival, huddled under an awning while rain pours down around me. Not that I mind; I’m enjoying the Southern California deluge this year and it enshrouds the surrounding mountains in a [...]
Categories: Film festival
Le moindre geste
January 6th, 2005 by Doug Cummings · No Comments
A few recent gems from France:
Categories: Film review
Best of 2004
January 2nd, 2005 by Doug Cummings · No Comments
Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow
I’ve been traveling a bit during the holidays, and combined with the devastating news of world disaster, it has been difficult to blog about movies the past couple of weeks. Now that the new year has begun, however, and Los Angeles seems especially prepped for good screenings the next few [...]
Categories: Commentary · Film review