Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
The Flu’s been busting some serious ass covering the Rio Film Festival for us, and he’s back today with a whole mess of stuff for you to enjoy. Dig in!!
Hey, everybody, The Flu here, in yet ANOTHER day of marathon, beutiful sights and great movies, in the Rio Film Fest.
The last day was all about good movies. I finally watched Igby Goes Down, which I was anxiously looking forward to. And, amazingly, the movie did not dissapoint me. It’s that thing that, the more you look forward to something, the less rewarding it becomes. Didn’t happen here. Igby Slocumb is sick of his family, and, after being expelled, decides to run off to find a better life, away from his family. Igby Goes Down is brilliant and has an incredible resemblance with Catcher In The Rye. Igby is a lot like Holden Caulfield and is portrayed surprisingly well by Kieran Culkin (which, if the numbnuts at the Academy were fair, could at least be nominated). This is the perfect movie to all those who feel like life isn’t fair to them.
The concept of 11’09’’01 (or simply September 11) is simple, and, by now, everyone knows about it: 11 movies, each one with a different director, from different countries, all of them with 11 minutes, 9 seconds and 1 frame. There were some brilliant movies here. The best, in my opinion, by Ken Loach, where he chronicles another September 11th, when Chile’s president was removed from his position by an american iniciative. I just wanna state that I have nothing against the U.S., I have nothing against it, I love it. I’m just in a neutral position, were it’s just easier for me to be impartial about this movie. Okay, back to the movie, another episode I loved was the french one, where a deaf woman is about to dump her boyfriend via letter, just after he leaves for the WTC on September 11th. Surprisingly enough, I also thought Alejandro Gonzales Iñarritu’s episode was brilliant. With the screen completely black, he used mostly sounds to show the true despair of the people who were there. Closing your eyes will also help a lot to put yourself in your shoes. Of course, there were those episodes that just didn’t do anything to me. The one from Japan made no sense to me, even with the message at the end. Anyways, this is another great movie, a beautiful iniciative which gave the opportunity for everyone to hear the opinion of the world on that terrible disaster.
Next up was Dogtown & Z-Boys, a documentary about the skateboarding stone age. It’s a pretty regular documentary, but with an interesting subject. Of course, you’re gonna enjoy this a whole lot more than I did if you’re really into the whole skateboarding thing, which isn’t exatcly my case. I go as far as the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games, so I never heard about the Zephyr team. It’s not a bad movie. Far from it. The footage was great. The interviews were pretty funny sometimes. But I did get that feeling that this was a movie directed to an audience of skaters.
Finally, I got out of Dogtown & Z-Boys and ran to Odeon, the oldest and biggest movie theater working on Rio de Janeiro. This is a true movie theater, like the ones in the old days, with a balcony and everything. In a time of multiplexes, it’s really great to know that you can go to the movies and really feel like you went there to see a piece of art, not just an entertainment. And it’s even better when you go to watch a classic like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, which was my case. There were about a thousand seats in the theater, and it was full. If you consider that today was the presidential election here in Brazil, it’s a pretty amazing thing to see this. I was also surprised to see that Costa-Gavras was there, amongst fans! The experience was great and the movie, in a restored copy, was better than ever. What happened is that Metropolis had MANY different versions, and this version I watched had all of them in it, plus texts describing scenes that were in the original copies but that are now lost forever. It really ticked my curiosity off. And I was amazed to know that that lost footage is about a quarter of the original copy! But it doesn’t matter. Metropolis is wonderful in any version it may be shown.
For now, that’s about it. Now that I’ve finally felt the sour taste of talkback, I feel like I’m starting to become part of the gang.
The Flu, gone.
