<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><!-- generator="WordPress/2.9.2" -->
<rss version="0.92">
<channel>
	<title>Screen Machine &#187; Uncategorized</title>
	<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv</link>
	<description>Long live the new flesh</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:16:14 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<docs>http://backend.userland.com/rss092</docs>
	<language>en</language>
	
	<item>
		<title>SCREEN MACHINE GIVEAWAY: double pass to martial arts epic The Storm Warriors</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
The Storm Warriors is the anticipated sequel to the 1998 Hong Kong film by Andrew Lau The Storm Riders. I haven&#8217;t seen the original film, but going by the trailer below the sequel looks like a heady cross between The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings and Dragon Ball Z. It looks insane.
We have five in-season double passes to give away to Screen Machine readers. All you need to do is email your name and address to screenmachinetv@gmail.com with STORM WARRIORS in the subject line. Easy!
About The Storm Warriors
Legendary heroes Wind &#38; Cloud return in The Storm Warriors. Following Asian box office smash The Storm Riders, this highly anticipated sequel is set to be China&#8217;s biggest CGI martial-arts movie (&#8220;Wuxia&#8221;) to date. Written by the godfather of Hong Kong comics &#8211; Ma Wing-Shing &#8211; and directed by The Pang Brothers (The Eye, Re-Cycle, Bangkok Dangerous), The Storm Warriors has a simultaneous release in Australia and Asia on December 10, 2009.

]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2009/12/15/screen-machine-giveaway-double-pass-to-martial-arts-epic-the-storm-warriors/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>MIFF09 review: A LAKE (dir. Philippe Grandrieux)</title>
		<description><![CDATA[

The third feature directed by Philippe Grandrieux, A Lake is an astonishing, almost unbearably passionate film; it is unlike anything I have ever seen. The film alienated most of the audience that ventured into the small cinema at ACMI last night – roughly a quarter walked out during the screening, and afterwards I heard at least three groups of viewers express anger, confusion, resentment and dismissal. Such responses are understandable, particularly from the uninitiated, for Grandrieux’s film offers nothing at the level of what commonly goes for ‘cinematic appreciation’: utterly unapproachable in terms of characterization, narrative development or ‘good directing’ (well-constructed scenes made up of a sequence of artfully designed shots, with the elements of the scene and their relation to the positioning of the camera reflecting or emphasizing the nature of the narrative situation or the psychology of the characters), A Lake strives for an elementality not heard of in the cinema since F.W. Murnau’s 1927 masterpiece, Sunrise.

It would be ludicrous to judge the film in terms of whether or not it succeeds in this endeavour (inevitably, it does and it does not), rather what it requires, what it asks of its viewer is a kind of accession to the incredible passion with which the attempt is made – or what another, very dissimilar film I saw yesterday would call “love exposure”. This is a difficult thing to ask for and, as was made apparent by the response yesterday, a difficult thing for a viewer to say yes to.&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2009/08/03/miff09-review-a-lake-dir-philippe-grandrieux/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>MIFF09 review: STILL WALKING (dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda)</title>
		<description><![CDATA[

Lately it seems like every year a new film shows up that either proclaims itself or is proclaimed by the most audible voices in criticism as an hommage to the films of Yasujiro Ozu. The latest is Still Walking, by Hirokazu Kore-eda, but already in that act of naming its director we notice something that immediately distinguishes this film from the crowd. Ozu adoration takes on many forms, produces very different effects – sublimity in Hou Hsaio-hsien; devastating pathos in Aki Kaurismaki; mysticist mediocrity in Wim Wenders; inert banality in Vincent Gallo – but it is almost never, interestingly, to be seen in the work of a Japanese filmmaker. Ozu’s body of work is so fundamental to the history of Japanese cinema that inevitably it has been ‘internalized’; just as no Hollywood director can entirely evade the influence of John Ford or Howard Hawks, no Japanese filmmaker can make a film that is not ‘after Ozu,’ inflected by his influence upon how cinema is made in Japan. What this typically means is that, unlike foreign directors who respond to particular, individual attributes of Ozu’s cinema – his unmoving, low-to-the-floor camera setups; his expression of the passing of time and of the generations through the visual motif of the changing seasons; or his achievement of meaning through indirection, with complex and painful emotions and ideas conveyed through mundane everyday conversation – a Japanese filmmaker is unlikely to consider these as isolatable, individually definable elements, but rather as constitutive of the very&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2009/08/03/miff09-review-still-walking-dir-hirokazu-kore-eda/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>MIFF09 review: KATALIN VARGA (dir. Peter Strickland)</title>
		<description><![CDATA[

Katalin Varga marks  the feature film debut of British director Peter Strickland. At 35,  Strickland is not particularly young for a newcomer, and so perhaps  it is no surprise to learn, as one does from just watching the first  few minutes of the film, that he has already learnt his craft extremely  well. What is surprising, and which only becomes apparent gradually  through watching the film, is that Strickland is not just extremely  competent for a new filmmaker, but that he possesses an astonishingly  assured, distinctive visual style and a sophisticated, occasionally  devastating capacity with sound. 
Filmed and set entirely in  the rural wilds of Romania, Katalin Varga chronicles a journey  taken by the title character and her son, Orban, after Katalin’s husband  banishes them from their home following a scandalous discovery about  his wife’s past. It doesn’t take long for the nature of this discovery,  and the true nature of Katalin’s journey, to reveal themselves; once  they do, the generic character of the film and the events to come is  revealed just as quickly: this is to be a ‘rape-revenge’ film, a  murderous voyage in search of two men who raped our heroine and thus  annulled the possibility for her to ever achieve an innocent, pure union  with her husband and child.
If one expects Strickland’s  distinctive vision to be manifested through playing with the conventions  of the rape-revenge&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2009/07/30/miff09-review-katalin-varga-dir-peter-strickland/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Ritual spectatorship and capitalism in Jarmusch&#8217;s THE LIMITS OF CONTROL.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
I’m always up in arms about empty film references but what distinguishes Jim Jarmusch from, say, a Quentin Tarantino, is how he uses his film references as a jumping off point to make something new and meaningful. The point of the exercise is not in ‘getting’ the reference but in where he takes it. In The Limits of Control, as in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Jarmusch is riffing off Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai but reconfigures it to create his most overtly political film yet.
What Jarmusch takes from Le Samourai is its alienated assassin whose spartan life is defined by ritual. We meet the nameless assassin (Isaach De Bankolé) as he dons an immaculate suit in an airport toilet, meets a couple of men who give him cryptic instructions and follow him as he meets up with a disparate group of odd people, each with nonsensical instructions to further the assassin on his way. He lives his life by a strict code: no sex, no guns, two espressos in two cups. Like Alain Delon in Le Samourai, Issach De Bankolé is more or less expressionless and silent. But where Le Samourai’s assassin stood for the modern alienated man, the empty rituals of Jarmusch’s protagonist are symbolic of genre/Hollywood cinema.
The Limits of Control may on the surface level be about an assassin’s encounters with a series of spies, but the film might also be best described as being about a filmgoer’s encounters with a series of critics. The designated&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2009/07/29/ritual-spectatorship-and-capitalism-in-jarmuschs-the-limits-of-control/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>MIFF09 review: ABOUT ELLY (dir. Asghar Farhadi)</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
A group of friends go on a holiday by the sea, and after a while one member of the group, a young woman, disappears; the rest of the film chronicles the friends’ attempts to deal with this disappearance. If this description of the plot of Asghar Faradi’s About Elly might give the impression that Faradi is gunning for the position of ‘the Iranian Antonioni’ (as Abbas Kiarostami might be called the Iranian Rossellini, Jafar Panahi the Iranian De Sica, etc.), that turns out to not really be the case. Despite lifting its storyline straight from the art cinema classic L’Avventura, About Elly is very much a mainstream film with mainstream concerns; it has nothing in particular to do with the great Iranian cinema of Kiarostami, Mohsen Makmalbaf and others. Seen in this light, though, the film eventually reveals itself to be very good for what it is. Though I can’t say I exactly understand why both of its sessions at MIFF have been sold out days in advance – nor why, given this immense popularity of an Iranian film, the festival organizers couldn’t even bring themselves to program Kiarostami’s fascinating new work, Shirin (which screened at the Sydney Film Festival) – About Elly is certainly a sensitively acted, thought-provoking film.
Unlike Antonioni, Faradi uses the situation of the missing, probably drowned woman to make sharp observations about his society, particularly its treatment of women and marital relationships. One could sense that this was probably the point of interest for much of&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2009/07/27/miff09-review-about-elly-dir-asghar-farhadi/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>MIFF09 review: TONY MANERO (dir. Pablo Larrain)</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
When I first heard about this movie, a couple of months ago, I quickly skimmed the review and got the impression that it was a kind of uplifting documentary about a resilient guy living in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile who uses his love of disco to overcome oppression and fully express his individuality. Fortunately, a day or two before it was due to screen at MIFF, I decided to read about it more closely to see if it’d be worth getting to, and discovered that it was to be quite a different animal than I’d initially gathered. Both unrelentingly ‘realist’ in that gritty way of much ‘world cinema’ that gets currency on the festival circuit and at the same time offering itself and its central character, Raul, as a kind of social allegory of the Chile of Pinochet’s military dictatorship, Pablo Larrain’s Tony Manero is definitely not a documentary, and definitely not uplifting.


Raul is obsessed with Tony Manero, the character played by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Every week he goes and sees the movie when it plays at a nearby cinema, and repeats every line that comes out of Travolta’s mouth in English that he has clearly learnt solely from watching this film. When anyone appears to get in the way of his determination to become ‘the Chilean Tony Manero,’ like when the projectionist at the cinema one week runs Grease instead of SNF, Raul does something horribly violent to them. The whole time he maintains the same dour&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2009/07/27/miff09-review-tony-manero-dir-pablo-larrain/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>MIFF09 review: ANNA (dir. Pierre Koralnik)</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
Review by Conall Cash (catabloguing.wordpress.com)
A film whose soundtrack I’ve known for a long time but which I never expected to get a chance to see, watching Anna at MIFF was a real treat. A little bit Funny Face and a little bit Blowup, as anarchic as Godard but also as loving an ode to the movie musical form as Demy, I guess Anna, which was made for French TV in 1967 and directed by Pierre Koralnik, could most succinctly be described as an extremely successful combination of Nouvelle Vague stylings and Serge Gainsbourg/Yé-Yé style rock’n’roll. With music by Gainsbourg and a cast featuring, aside from the man himself, Anna Karina, Jean-Claude Brialy and Marianne Faithfull, the film is a zany, endlessly entertaining delight.
Brialy, as the fashion advertising executive (or something) who falls in love with the photograph of a girl that he finds in his company’s dark room (note the Funny Face reference), doesn’t so much play a character as enact a sequence of poses of lovesickness, as if he were doing a theatrical performance of the fragments that make up Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse. Karina, as the girl in the photograph who Brialy never recognizes as the same person because whenever he sees her she’s wearing a rather adorable pair of glasses, is also not really required to ‘act’ in any terribly dynamic way, but it’s to her credit that she manages not only to convey grace and loveliness, but to be genuinely convincing as a lonely, hopeful&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2009/07/27/miff09-review-anna-dir-pierre-koralnik/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>MIFF09 report: Laura Mulvey probably wouldn&#039;t have enjoyed &#039;Anna Karina &#8211; In Conversation&#039;</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
A friend once remarked to me that, whenever he sees an advertisement for MIFF, he accidentally misreads it as ‘MILF.’ Upon entering the Festival Lounge for the conversation with Anna Karina today, one could have been forgiven for thinking that David Stratton, her interviewer, and many members of the audience had made a similar error. A weird, not terribly satisfactory, and occasionally rather sexist event, the conversation with Ms. Karina offered her a kind of adoration, but an adoration so totally defined by an understanding of her as ‘muse’ to a series of great men – Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Serge Gainsbourg – that there wasn’t much for her to do besides tell some stories about these great men as the private individuals she knew. Ms. Karina was and still is a very charming woman, but with her limited English she wasn’t able to steer the conversation in more interesting directions, even on the rare occasions – in fact, there was only one, when a young woman in the audience asked her to talk about maintaining a sense of her own femininity in her (private and public) relationships with these men – at which the opportunity arose. Most of the time it was a kind of cozy lovefest, the weird thing being that the objects of this love were not entirely present: on the one hand, the various men Karina worked with in the early part of her career, who constituted the real interest for Stratton and much of the&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2009/07/27/miff09-report-laura-mulvey-probably-wouldnt-have-enjoyed-anna-karina-in-conversation/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>MIFF09 review: OUR CITY DREAMS (dir. Chiara Clemente)</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
Review by Conall Cash (catabloguing.wordpress.com)
A fun idea for a documentary, Our City Dreams follows five female artists of different ages who have moved to New York City from a variety of locales, and made their lives and their careers there. Attempting to offer impressions of the personality, artistic sensibility and personal history of five different contemporary artists in the space of about ninety minutes, the film is not exactly Rivette’s Belle Noiseuse, but it’s impressive how much it manages to pack in given its limitations, without feeling at all cluttered. It helps that the filmmaker, Chiara Clemente, has chosen five immensely likable, interesting women as her subjects, so that even in the cases where we may not really have been offered much insight into the artist’s work, we feel as though we’ve got to know them so well that we’ll be sure to make a note to read up about their work afterwards. Ultimately, this motivation that the film leaves you with to go and find out more about each of the artists is far more significant than the overall structure with which Clemente surrounds the individual portraits; despite the traveling shots of various cityscapes that pop up between each segment, and the use of NY-centric music on the soundtrack (from cool Brooklyn bands like Japanther to Gershwin-style standards), not much of an impression of New York is really offered, beyond showing it to be a place where, if you’re successful, you can get a pretty big apartment and/or studio&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2009/07/27/miff-review-our-city-dreams-dir-chiara-clemente/</link>
			</item>
</channel>
</rss>
