St. Louis Film Festival 2007
This year I watched three films at the festival. I had hoped to get the chance to see four, but unfortunately it was a busy week. So without further ado, the films:
Crossroads / Jujiro: A restored print of a 1928 silent Japanese film. The sets and costumes were very expressionistic. The thing that most struck me about the film was how much the cultural language of film has progressed. While it is easy at times to question the speed and pacing of modern films, it’s also very interesting to note how much faster a plot concept can be conveyed in modern films. Much of that speed is knowing how quickly the audience will have sufficient plot information in order to proceed.
The Method: A spanish film about 7 executives vying for a particular position in a shared interview. As the movie progresses the candidates eliminate each other in a series of psychological situations. The film almost entirely takes place in the office used for the shared interview, but is set to the backdrop of the IMF / World Bank protests occurring outside of the building in Madrid. In some rather biting social commentary, the applicants break for lunch, and comment that they are unable to see what is happening in the street, that the building they are in is too tall to see the protest.
The last film I saw in the festival was a collection of dark or satirical animated shorts. I tracked down a few of them online. Here they are for your computer viewing pleasure:
I had seen Rabbit before, and I quite enjoyed 458nm, but Le Marche des Sans-Nom really impressed me.
Related video’s on Youtube for Le Marche des Sans-Nom also gave this interesting little piece of animation: The end. I’m also really looking forward to Killer Bean Forever to come out. For those of you haven’t seen the original Killer Bean 2, I highly recommend it. It features John Woo style shootouts between a collection of computer generated beans. Killer Bean 2 came out sometime in 1999, and landed the animator a job doing CG for Matrix Revolutions. He then quit and has since been working on his first feature film, Killer Bean Forever.
Enjoy.
