Archive for January, 2008

Internation Film Festival Rotterdam 2008

Posted 1946 days ago · Tagged: rotterdam film festival · 4 Comments

Hi, I’m back home after visiting the film festival in Rotterdam and hanging out in Amsterdam. We drove down there late Monday and came back this morning, here’s what happened.

Tuesday

We arrived some time before noon, at the Hans Brinker Budget Hotel, a place that is famed for being disgusting but it wasn’t actually that bad. The room was acceptable, although there was no place in the bathroom to hang or put anything. The hotel’s bar was pretty cool and there was happy hour between 17.00 and 18.00 so we didn’t complain much.

When we were settled in we left to take a look at Amsterdam, we quickly realized they have a lot of cool cinemas and we ended up ordering tickets for a sneak preview, hoping it was Cloverfield. While waiting for the movie two guys from the school decided to get tattoos (the guy with the "?!" has a Metal Gear Solid tattoo on his shoulder, awesome!).

After eating we moved to the cinema to settle in for the highly anticipated Cloverfield only to realize the movie was Charlie Wilson’s War, a weird, political film with Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman, about the war in Afghanistan. It was rather crappy and Dutch people have no fucking cinema etiquette. People just wouldn’t shut up. After the movie we got drunk.

Wednesday

We got up a little late, but since we were free to do whatever we wanted that didn’t matter much. We started the day off by walking to the Photography Museum Foam, and that was very interesting. The first part of the gallery was beautiful photos that didn’t really make sense until you read the description, e.g. a container to cryogenically freeze people, a playboy magazine for blind people, the only legal marijuana farm in the US (government-controlled of course), nuclear waste shining blue in the dark, and an extremely detailed photo of the Death Star II model (the one that’s not completed). The second part of the gallery contained photographs by the famous photographer Weegee. He usually took photos from New York crime scenes in the forties, and they are really stunning. There was also a photo of Stanley Kubrick, on the set of Dr. Strangelove (left).

We then continued on to the center of the city, looking at shops, and I almost bought this, but ended up buying this and this instead.

In the evening we went drinking again, at a cool bar that had the Blues Bros. on the facade (right), and then we went on to the Red Light District. Of course I knew about the district, the famous site of hookers and drug dealers, but still, seeing young girls in lingerie, in almost every window, waving at you, was so surreal. And so sad.

Thursday

The first day of the film festival, we got to Rotterdam around 11.00, and quickly realized how incredibly boring the center of that town is. The first movie I watched was Bootleg Film, a weird Japanese flick about a cop and a yakuza gangster. It was bad. Then I went on to see an Argentinean movie called El Otro, about some guy having a mid-life crisis. That was bad as well. When we drove back to Amsterdam in the evening, we realized that Cloverfield premiered, so, running to the cinema from the bus, me and this guy Mikkel (1st tattoo further up) got two tickets! And it was fucking awesome! A solid action movie, one of the best I’ve seen in a long time, the handheld camera thing worked very well. So, eventually we got to see a great movie that day.

Friday

The last day, first I saw a Brazilian movie, Mutum, and I’m sorry to be such an ass here, but that was god awful as well. Just like El Otro there was no real storyline, no real conflict for the main character, it was very dull. But then we settled in for the European premiere of Juno, a movie that was just recently nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Picture category, and it actually lived up to he hype. It was hard not to enjoy it, and it reminded me a little about Garden State. The last thing I did before we went home was buying a 6 GB USB Stick for 30€ (~225 DKK), a pretty good bargain. (The mall also had a huge TV, left)

Over all it was a nice trip, although the film festival isn’t really starting until next week (No Country for Old Men, I’m Not There, The Darjeeling Limited, Q&A with the Coen Bros. etc.) so that kind of sucks. Also, one of our bus drivers was a frickin’ asshole, not wanting to turn off the light in the bus because of "safety issues" (although he suddenly did several hours later), not turning up the heat, whining when we wanted to take a piss and stretch our legs when we had breaks (yeah, he wanted us to stay in the bus) and on the trip home he complained that he had to stay in line behind some of us at a gas station. The other bus driver was cool. Also, Dutch is fucked up.

All my pictures from the trip.

Zombie and Rotterdam

Posted 1951 days ago · Tagged: rotterdam film festival · 2 Comments

It’s been a week with ups and down, I’ve been having a course in adaptation, we all thought it was going to be about how to adapt a novel, but we were all wrong. Our teacher, Marcell, has a rather different definition of the word, in his opinion adaptation is also just getting your thoughts down on paper, so everything is an adaptation in his mind. I didn’t really learn anything, we mostly sat around discussing stuff, and he never really concluded anything or gave us the right answer, so not really the best week ever.

Yesterday I was en extra in a big student-made zombie movie. It was the climatic scene of the movie, a lot of killing and maiming, and it was cold as hell. Also, to make it more realistic, we got C-Vitamin tablets (that dissolve in water), and when you put those suckers into your mouth everything explodes in a nice cascade of saliva: gross. It was a lot of fun though, can’t wait for the final result.

Almost all zombies, unfortunately I was taking a piss at the time.

In 1,5 hours I’ll be on my way to the Rotterdam Film Festival, we’ll be down there from Tuesday to Friday so that’s going to be cool as well. Unfortunately we won’t be there when the Coen brothers come for a Q&A Session, but hey, that’s life. Also, we’ll stay at the Hans Brinker Budget Hotel, a hotel famous because it’s so disgusting… This is hanging in their main hall:

More zombie pictures:

Gore! The movie will be shot in black and white to make the crappy make-up look more realistic.

Me, moments before I’m turned into a zombie.

Water + C-Vitamin pills.

A Real Gangster Movie

Posted 1958 days ago · Tagged: eastern promises, viggo mortensen · 11 Comments

Hi, this review is going to be a bit different than the usual. I’ve decided to spend some more time on the articles I write in the future, and that’ll hopefully show. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

Eastern Promises
Director: David Cronenberg
Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts
Runtime: 100 minutes

With his previous movie, A History of Violence, and Eastern Promises Canadian director David Cronenberg moves closer to the mainstream audience, but that is in no way a bad thing. Mortensen’s lead performance is extraordinary, and authenticity is on the top of the list as we’re introduced to the brutal world of organized crime in London.

We follow the charismatic Nikolai Luzhin, played by Viggo Mortensen, who’s working for the Russian mafia in London. His path is crossed by midwife Anna Khitrova, played by Naomi Watts, who’s desperately trying to get information about an orphan child, whose mother had tie-ins with the Russian family. The movie’s antagonist, the cozy, grandpa-like mafia leader Semyon, is well-played by Armin Mueller-Stahl, a character whose darker sides are almost entirely established by other sources, e.g. a diary telling us that he raped a 14-year old girl, a very interesting way of treating the character. Naomi Watts’ character is, on the other hand, very bland, from the get-go you know what she’ll end up doing, and her behavior seems to vary notably, very out of character and rather tedious, although her personal story wakes some interest. As her contrast we have Viggo Mortensen’s character, which’s without a doubt the most fascinating in the movie. With a slick performance worthy of an Academy Award Mortensen makes the rough world completely believable. As always he really did his homework, studying Russian gangsters and their tattoos, learning some of the language, and getting all his dialogue translated to Russian, it resulted in one of the best Russian accents from a non-Russian actor, I’ve ever heard. In retrospect it’s peculiar to think of Ed Harris’ wonderful performance as a tough guy in A History of Violence, and then see Mortensen completely top it in Eastern Promises. I’ve always liked the half-Dane, especially his real life personality, but this is the first movie that’s really opened my eyes to his extraordinary talent.

Like all Cronenberg movies, there’s violence, brutal violence, but it all seems to have a purpose. In the movie’s opening shot we’re witness to a brutal murder, a boy literally saws the throat of a Russian gangster, and we see everything. But it works, and the brutality fits the brutal world we’re about to enter. As in A History of Violence the movie ends with a big fight scene, here a nude Nikolai is ambushed at a bathhouse, by two fully clothed thugs with knifes. Fighting them completely naked – with nothing censored I should add – makes the character seem unusually defenseless. The fighting is typical Cronenberg – over-the-top with neck stabbings and eye gushing – but it all works, it feels real, and it’s simply an amazing scene. The movie’s tagline “Every sin leaves a mark” comes to life rather literally, since the Russian mafia uses tattoos as individual business cards; they tell the story of your life, crimes you have done, prison sentences you have endured, etc. The authenticity of the movie’s tattoos is very high; most of them look like they do in real life and the crew spend a lot of time researching this. In addition to that, the movie also deals with issues like human trafficking instead of the usual gangster stuff like drug dealing and money laundering, and that also adds another layer of realism. Furthermore you have Mortensen’s incredible performance and the fact that most of the movie is shot on location, in London, making Eastern Promises one of the most authentic gangster movies I have ever seen. It is clearly a must see, although the weakest part of the movie is the ending, with a twist that wasn’t really needed, and it ruins some of the integrity of Mortensen’s character. Nonetheless, a great movie from the Cronenberg/Mortensen duo.

8/10

Windows XP vs. Mac OS X Leopard

Posted 1967 days ago · Tagged: mac os x, windows xp · 2 Comments

I bought a Macbook three months ago, and I love it, the operating system is awesome, but for the last month I’ve been using Windows XP instead, here’s why.

Leopard is superior to Windows XP in almost all cases, everything just works, instant search, bluetooth, WiFi, etc., you rarely need to configure anything. Quickly browsing files have never been easier with Quick Look, and doing stuff like installing applications is incredibly easy, you have one file, move that to your harddisk and the program is working. To uninstall the program again, you just delete the file. But, it lacks two very fundamental features:

I hate the fucking dock, first of all, it takes up too much space, if you minimize it, making it the size of the Windows taskbar, the icons become too small to identify. Another problem with the dock is the difficulty identifying individual windows, for example IM conversations. You can only see if an application is running or not, to see all windows you can alt+tab, a waste of time in the long run. You can also use a feature to cascade all the windows on the screen, making them all miniatures, and thus, again making it hard to see what windows belong to what.

The other problem, which is way more serious, is Leopard’s Finder application, the equivalent to Windows Explorer. In Windows XP it’s very easy to adjust the viewing options of your folders, they all look the same, just like I want them. In Leopard trying to save viewing options is crap, ie. it doesn’t work. For example, every time I plug in my external harddrive I have to adjust what the folders look like, how they are organized etc. Also, the folder windows don’t remember the size I left them in, they always seem too small when I open them, and it just ruins your experience when you have to adjust the god damn windows all the fucking time.

Please get it fixed Apple, I’m already tired of this bug-infested Windows crap.

Day of the Resident Evil

Posted 1968 days ago · Tagged: crappy movies, mad max, milla jovovich, resident evil · 1 Comment

Resident Evil: Extinction is supposedly written by Paul Anderson, but he mainly just ripped off Day of the Dead and Mad Max 2, a mix that actually sounded pretty cool, but ended up being quite a mess. You may not have seen Day of the Dead, but the following is taken directly from that movie: A scientist living in an underground, military base is going to be fired, if he doesn’t start getting results. He is trying to domesticate the undead, to use them as a peaceful working force. Just like in Day of the Dead, a zombie is shown operating commonly used objects, and later a superior officer complains that he is losing men when retrieving specimen for the scientist. Also the entrance to the facility is crowded with zombies. The Mad Max 2 part, which is more forgiving since it’s a somewhat common theme, is about the caravan lead by Claire Redfield (the red-head from Resident Evil 2), they even have a school bus, just like Mad Max. Alice is just like Max, she rides around in the desert, looking for gasoline. Another similarity is when the caravan decides to go to “the promised land”, in Mad Max 2 it’s some beach resort, in Resident Evil, it’s Alaska… The infection spread from America, to Europe and even Asia, so why the hell would Alaska be unaffected? Never mind.

Naturally Alice runs into the caravan, apparently one of the caravan soldiers is also in the sequel, because he and Alice know each other. Alice have been running from the Umbrella Corp., but the underground facility just happens to be nearby and it picks up a signal when Alice uses her psionic powers, she’s a total jedi, moving objects with her mind and stuff. The scientist wants Alice’s blood, he’s been experimenting with clones of her, putting them through various tests, but they all died, now he wants the real deal, because Alice’s blood is apparently the cure to domesticating the zombies. No, I have no idea how that makes sense. Anyway, he sends zombies after the caravan, they’re fought off, Alice finds the facility, goes inside and kills the now mutated scientist (he injected himself with what I assume was an experimental sample of the cure).

In the end there’s no real resolution, we don’t get to know what happened to the people going to Alaska and we didn’t find out if Alice’s blood cured anything, but why would it? The movie ends with Alice getting ready to take down the Umbrella organization for good, but, they’re the only ones trying to create a cure, so wouldn’t that be kind of stupid?

Resident Evil: Extinction – 4/10.

Bonus: Stupid use of creative license: The hidden elevator to the secret, underground facility, appears if you step near it’s hideaway. Awesome security, no wonder Umbrella never succeeds.