Apparently, It's Make Incorrect Assumptions about Foreign Films Week


I thought this was going to be a colder version of The Impossible (2012) and sadly had procrastinated in watching it, but the avalanche (clearly there is no need to raise a spoiler alert) is merely a prop to the action—or lack thereof. The pace is glacial and the mood is tense, and it's not coz you're waiting for another avalanche. This film is about relationship, and I mean that discretely from relationships, because that would have been to easy. Director Ruben Ostlund (2014) is picking at scabs and discomfiting the viewer, yet we're paralyzed with fascination at our own image. He also does very interesting things with music (not just the Vivaldi), and equally with silence, both aural and visual. The Force Majeure here is definitely not made of snow. 
Shout out to Ingrid Eng for the excellent subtitles.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

But There IS Joel Kinnaman...

Image
ALT: Joel Kinnaman as Tak Kovacs in a dark, strange world, wearing a blue coat and shirt; he's looking around in wonder. Oh god, I didn't know whether I could get past the first episode: I love dystopian futures, but this seemed hackneyed...  Altered Carbon has the feel of sometimes The Hunger Games , sometimes Harry Potter , often Repo! The Genetic Opera or Gotham City or Narcopolis .There's martial arts, comic booky treatments, digital effects and story content. Some of it is dumb, and the names for things in the future are lazy: The Array is the internet, a sleeve is a host, ONIs are basically smartphones, Poe is like TNG's Data, Meths are the 1%, and paying my chip-implanted fingers is technology that's already here. The "strong, independent woman cop" is the lamest character attempt/trope out there, and the actress is terrible. The producers seem to be trying to appease audiences on every front rather than trying to make a solid, consistent produ...
Read more

What I Didn't Like About "The Martian"

Image
Photo: http://codices.info/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/machr.jpg I just finished ripping through the 369-page  The Martian by debut novelist Andy Weir, self-confessed science nerd. This year, I have read more fantasy/sci-fi than ever, and several books have been about scientific disasters and/or space, but I tend to go for the more blockbuster and less techie stories, having practically failed science every year after intro biology. We won't even discuss maths. I'm a luddite, and I don't want to be scratching my head during my precious escapism hours. So books that go into thrust and scientific measurements and velocity and the nightmare-inducing periodic table of elements are a little intimidating for me. The story, if you haven't heard yet about the book or the upcoming Matt Damon movie, is about an astronaut named Mark Watney who gets stranded on Mars after a mission mishap. That's all I'll say in the interest of avoiding spoilers à la "Who Shot...
Read more

Featured CONTACT Exhibition

One of the CONTACT Festival exhibitions I hope to get to is that of Osheen Harruthoonyan, which is taking place at Pikto. You can preview some work here . Looking forward to that and many other shows. Ck out the CONTACT directory magazine or view the info at their guide page .
Read more