Father Geek Here... The Cab's waiting and I got to go soooo here's the Flu with his 3rd report on the RIO FILM FEST down in Brazil...
The Flu here, in the third day of the Rio Film Fest.
And, man, what a day... I went from one edge of the city to the other, running in order not to miss that next screening. And if there was a day in which I couldn't miss out on anything, this was probably it. Two amazing, wonderful movies. One not so much.
Well, the day started slow. Sort of. I watched The Bourne Identity 'cause there was nothing better at the time. I was really looking forward to this. I've been waiting anxiously for Doug Liman's next after watching Go. I was hoping The Bourne Identity would be a wonderful, Face/Off style, action movie. It wasn't exactly that. The pacing just wasn't right. I mean, the fight scenes kick ass, no doubt about it, and the chase in Paris is a lot better than the one in Ronin. But that's about it. It just didn't manage to grab my atention. And the romance between Matt Damon's and Franka Potente's characters is just made so obvious so early on that it was just as ridiculous as Anakin/Padmé (although we all knew from zero hour that they would end up groping each other, you gotta admit that it was as bad as a Dawson's Creek episode). Appart from those few cool action scenes, The Bourne Identity delivers a promise it doesn't keep.
It got out of the theater and ran to the subway. I had to get halfway accross town in about thirty minutes. It was a race, but I was damned if I was about to miss the next movie: Spirited Away. Lucky for me, there was a short movie before, which I was able to catch. It was called The Werewolf and The Colonel. It's a pretty cool animated movie, in a very Brazilian way. It's actually a musical, and the whole story is sang, without one dialog at all, about a werewolf that's eating all the goats in a retired Colonel's farm. Then, on the next full moon, the general was ready to kill the werewolf, who then decided to go after the Colonel's daughter, who looks kinda like a mermaid. It was pretty cool and funny and the way the song told the story was just brilliant.
Then, after that short movie was finally over... It was time for Spirited Away. I went into the theater knowing absolutely nothing about the movie. Which was better, because if I read about it somewhere, I would probably think it's too weird. At the beggining it actually is, but as it progresses, you realise this is actually a great fable. It's like a japanese version of Alice In Wonderland. Not in a long time have we seen such a movie, with so much magic and entertainment. Well, I don't know exactly what to tell about the story that could be considered as too much, but let's go: Chihiro is a little girl, going to the first day in her new school with her parents. But as they take a detour, Chihiro's parents fall victims of a strange curse and are turned into pigs. Desperate, Chihiro suddenly finds herself surrounded by all kinds of creatures and, with the help of human boy Haku, finds a way to walk amongst these creatures until she can find a way to turn her parents back to normal and finally return home. It seems a lot weird at first, but with time, EVERYTHING falls into place. It is indeed not only Mr. Myiazaki's, but anime's finest moment.
After leaving this "experience", I left the theater looking myself about to face another experience, a much more intense one. Das Experiment. I heard people saying that this was a heavy, shocking movie, but in no way was I prepared for what I have seen. Tarek Fahd (Run Lola Run's Moritz Bleibtreu) is a taxi driver who makes himself a guinea pig for the title's experiment: a group of men, which is divided into two groups, is thrown in a jail to have their behavious studied. One is a group of guards and the other of prisoners (the group where our "hero" fits). Everything starts calmly, but then the inevitable happens: the tension between the two groups builds up and then a war starts. The guards, drunk with power, abuse their authority and are able to fool the scientists to get what they want. Not since Requiem For A Dream has a movie shocked me so much. I now realise, after watching Das Experiment, the world we live in, where human beings will do the most absurd things when the last goal is money (here, a reward of 4000 marks at the end of the experiment, which make the guards take the experiment to the last consequences, completely paranoid about everybody). Also, Justus von Dohnanyi leads the show, as the dictatorial guard Berus. This is german cinema at its best. Tom Tykwer couldn't have done it better himself.
