Entertainment/Culture
TFF38D2F4 The Kid With A Bike
The Kid With A Bike is a film by the Dardenne brothers, who brought “The Child” to the Telluride Film Festival a few years back. There is a strong family resemblance between the films: durable but trouble prone protagonists in gritty, lower class struggles where their every step forward seems to result in a step back and who’s troubles are mostly self-inflicted, and yet sympathetic and identifiable responses to difficult circumstances.
Thomas Doret plays a little boy named Cyril who’s proof to all external harm, but victim to the internal consequences of being abandoned by his father. He is adopted by an attractive and indomitable hair dresser played by Cecile de France who has an affinity for Cyril that seems driven by something strong, but offscreen.
The story moves Cyril from victim to victimizer and finally to redemption in a way that is satisfying and compelling.
TFF D1F3: Albert Nobbs
Albert Nobbs is an great film. See it.
It is the story of a curious butler in 1890s Dublin who suffered a difficult childhood and to survive took a job as a waiter, and the worked his way up to being a butler in a small but swanky hotel. The thing is, he’s a woman played by Glenn Close.
His carefully controlled life is turned upside down when he has to share his room with a painter working on the hotel and his view of the world and of his own future changes dramatically.
Glenn Close introduced the film an described it as a labor of love that she has spent 15 years working on. Her acting is superb and the story is very funny when it tries to be and truly touching without being cloy or saccharine. While Glenn’s performance stands out, none of the cast come up short and Janet McTeer is also particularly strong.
TFF 38 D1F2: Pina
Pina is Wim Wenders tribute to Pina Bausch in 3D. I’m not a big dance fan, not even ballet let alone modern dance, but this was a very beautiful film and I enjoyed it. Wim Wenders introduced the film and told the audience how he had met Pina 20 or more years before starting production and had wanted to make a film about her. For all of those 20 years every time they crossed paths she asked if he was ready to make his film and he said he didn’t know how, but was learning.
Wenders said he was quite taken by 3D, specifically U2 3D which he thought was a great name, but more so that the 3D technology used was sufficient to capture the essence of Pina’s dance, and so he began production, but just before production was to commence, Pina passed away.
The dancers in her troupe convinced him that he should make the film, that it is what she would have wanted, and so the film is both an beautifully shot document of Pina’s dance troupe and a tribute to Pina.
I’ve been involved with 3D film for a long time (going back 16 years I built a stereo rig from a pair of Arriflex cameras for Michael Naimark’s Be Here Now). This was the first time I got to see Dolby’s double-tristmus 3D . The way it works is each projector projects an approximately RGB signal, but with the exact wavelengths of RG&B shifted between them (and not shared). The passive glasses pass only the correct eye’s 3 color wavelengths and reject the rest. Looking through them, one is slightly magenta shifted and one slightly cyan shifted, but you quickly compensate for the slight color error, especially since one eye errs one direction and the other the opposite. If you look through both a left eye and a right eye filter (say by borrowing your neighbors pair and putting them over yours upside down), almost no light passes.
The 3D quality of the movie is quite good, better than shutter glasses with less peripheral annoyance. Only very bright highlights (like the glint of lights in a dancer’s eye) exhibited odd stereo artifacts. It is commonly noted that the focal accommodation and parallax accommodation of a stereoscopic projection is very wrong–your eyes focus on the same plane (the screen) no matter what the image displacement is, so your mind gets two conflicting data inputs – one saying “I see 3D” and the other saying “I’m focusing on a plane” and the result is eye strain and often headaches, and this technology is no different. It definitely caused some eye strain to watch it, but the effect was good and overall I’d say worth it.
TFF 38 D1F1: The Turin Horse
First day of films at TFF began with The Turin Horse, a slow, atmospheric, challenging, inaccessible film by Bela Tarr about what happened to the owner of the horse who’s beating drove Nietzche mad.
It is a long film, entirely in black and white, with very little dialog. It is visually quite striking, but definitely not going to make it to the cineplex. The story grows perhaps allegorical or possibly apocalyptic, but maybe reverses the story of creation. Maybe not. But things definitely go from bad to worse to cosmically bad.
Italy at Night
I was playing with long exposures with the NEX5. I got a cool picture with a shooting star in the background – it wasn’t visible to the naked eye, but showed up on the image (almost typed “film”). It was a 30 second exposure at ISO 6400, very cool that it resolved the color of the trees and tower by starlight.
The village was is an automatic HDR composition which reports 3.2 seconds at ISO 1600.
Films at TFF 37
I saw the following films at the Telluride Film Festival. I’ll try to get around to adding a few notes on each:
- Chico and Rita
- Oka! Amerikee
- The Illusionist
- Moana: A Story of the South Seas
- The First Movie
- Precious Life
- Incendies
- Inside Job
- Tabloid
- Happy People: A Year in the Taiga
- The Way Back
- Le Quattro Volte
- Tamara Drewe
- Never Let me Go
- Biutiful
- Of Gods and Men
- Black Swan
The film festival was excellent, as always. The films selected are rarely anything less than excellent, so reviews tend to range from good to superlative. It is probably the best film festival to attend for people who really love films. While the environment is low-key and friendly, the festival is attended by luminaries of the film industry and most films are introduced by the directors. Technically the festival is flawless and some of the venues are fitted with top of the line projection and sound equipment.
HDR video with SLRs
HDR is kind of cool – a nice way to get past the limitations of solid-state image sensors and recover some of the latitude of film, even improving on it.
The problem is that solid state image sensors tend to have very linear responses to light – an underexposed image vanishes into the noise floor of the sensor while an overexposed image clips off to pure white. Film exposure response is commonly called an “s-curve” and basically means there’s some data in the random conversion of a light sensitive molecule here or there even in the most underexposed image, and a few that resist converting under the harshest blast of light such that there is perceivable data in both.
This film is a pretty impressive example of HDR video. But there’s something a bit odd about such a technical achievement in cinematography mixing up “underexposed” and “overexposed.” The funny thing is, they’re using the terms as in making a print (e.g. printing on photo paper) or an x-ray where more light darkens the print: the paper starts out white and turns black with more light vs. a film or digital exposure where the media yields a black result that increases in representational lightness with with increasing light exposure.
Chico and Rita
TFF 37 Mini Review: Chico and Rita, Spain-Cuba, 2010, 96m
Chico and Rita is an animated story of a talented Cuban jazz pianist named Chico and the love of his life, the talented singer Rita. They chase each other across the Americas and across the decades, overcoming personal and political barriers to their marital bliss. The director went to significant effort to stylistically match the period in geography, dress, and music. The movie’s soundtrack is filled out by performers such as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
Miscreants of Taliwood Free Tonight
Carolyn and I saw the Miscreants of Taliwood at the Telluride Film Festival last September and had an opportunity to talk with the director, George Gittoes. We felt the movie was an important record and George an important resource for the people we work with in DC and arranged to have him come for a screening.
Miscreants is the only western film by the only western observer in the Tribal region of Pakistan along the Afghan border during the tumultuous period starting with the siege of the Red Mosque/Lal Masjid in June of 2007 and including the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.
This is a unique document, the sole direct, ground-level view of the geographic heart of Taliban ideology and a core operations center for Al Qaeda. Further, the opportunity to speak with Gittoes is particularly exceptional as his two years in the region were marked by extraordinary encounters that he was unable to incorporate into his documentary because “when people are pointing guns at you, taking out your camera gets you killed.”
We are screening it tonight, Wednesday, February 24th at 8pm at the Letelier Theater at 3251 Prospect Street, NW (upper courtyard – above Café Milano) Wash, DC 20007 202-338-5835. Admission is free. A parking garage is located between Café Milano and Café Peacock.
There will be a Q & A with George Gittoes immediately following the screening.
