The first film of the Fest for us, about an Algerian refugee who has washed up in Quebec. He takes over as the teacher for a class at an elementary school – their teacher committed suicide by hanging herself in the classroom, where one of the kids found her. All the kids in the class really need a hug, but because this is the 21st century, none of the teachers is allowed to give them one.
Extremely arty – directed by Guy Maddin, who I did not know much about, but he seems quite popular among film aficionados. To me, the film was like a moving, b&w version of the artists’ haunted house at my house last fall – people dressed in vintage clothes, moving about in vintage interiors, and saying short meaningful phrases to each other, like “I remember”, and “Quick, lay her down she’s filling up” – about the drowned girl who was nonetheless walking around. With Jason Patric and Isabella Rosellini.
Girls & boys in striped shirts and skinny jeans. Scenes of Paris in the late 1960s (1970s, really) intercut with environmental pollution – dirty water spewing out of pipes and trees being felled. All with the soft look and colors of Kodachrome – like when people scan their childhood photos to post on Facebook. Mark liked that all the skinny girls had normal-size breasts.
Mostly everyone’s favorite so far – the story of Dom, a night clerk at a little hotel in Le Havre, who meets a fairy named Fiona who grants him 3 wishes. Lots of physical humor, like Dom & Fiona on a scooter chasing a car with their baby on a cushion sliding around on top of the trunk. There’re also a couple of great dance scenes, one underwater and one on a rooftop.
Crooked cops and drug dealers chasing each other through a disco. In French which made it more interesting – I liked how the cop who polices other cops was flic des flics instead of maybe IAD – internal affairs division – as we’d say. We had to sit in the front row, though, and my neck really hurt by the end.
Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Pacquin) at 20 playing 17, an upper west side exclusive private school girl who probably causes an accident by running alongside a bus, talking to the driver, distracting him, so he runs a redlight and kills a woman crossing the street with her groceries. It’s directed by Kenneth Lonnergan, who also directed You can count on me – and Mark Ruffalo and Matthew Broderick are in both movies. J. Smith-Cameron, who’s also been a character in True Blood (Sam Merlotte’s white trash shape shifter mom) plays Anna’s mom who’s an actress, in lots of small plays in NYC. There’s a funny scene where the mom is talking about how she’d briefly been on a TV show and it just paid the bills – foreshadowing that she & Anna would both be on True Blood a few years later.
Posted from my iPhone, at least partly
