Another film fest update

I gotta tell you guys, this film fest is really making me happy. I've seen some wonderful films, but more than that, I've really enjoyed taking the train down to TC (which is what I call Tower City in my head) and chilling for the afternoon. Plus, as a special treat, they've totally cleaned the floors of the theaters there -- at least they have in the individual theaters the festival is using. That is good and really necessary thing.

As mentioned in a previous post, my gal Tina scored us some VIP passes for the last few days. Sadly, they are no longer in our possession, but we made the most of them when they were. Between visits to the hospitality suite in the Ritz, we managed to sneak in screenings of Vogelfrei, Mugger, and Slingshot. Today, I went down by myself and saw my much-anticipated Russian double-feature: The Russian Triangle and Cargo 200. Each of these movies was excellent, but each was also really freaking dark. They were all dark in different ways, but I always left the theater as the credits started to roll with that same depressed soul and a slow mumbled "Fuuuuuucccckkkk" under my breath.

The three I saw using the VIP passes were all unique insofar as they didn't employ the traditional straight-forward story-telling approach we are so used to in mainstream movies these days. (Note: I'm a fan of stories, so don't interpret that last sentence as some snobby indictment of Hollywood.) Vogelfrei was interesting, a single film consisting of 4 separate films, each depicting the life of the same man, but at different ages. This guy lived one of those silent yet desperate internalized lives, the kind only Nordic folks seem able to live. Mugger was interesting, particularly as the dapper anti-hero lost his composure throughout his day. I was totally not ready for the ending, and it sparked one of the most interesting post-film conversations I've ever had. I really feel like it was the middle of a fantastic narrative, which is probably exactly what the director intended. Slingshot was kind of like one of those films where there are several intersecting plot lines, but in reality it was just a sprawling picture of a community where every individual's life intersected with every other individual's life in thousands of direct and indirect ways every day.

Today's films, the Russian two-fer, were great. I expect big things from Russian film -- for my money, other than some French interludes in the 60s and 70s, they do the very best work. And as globalization has had its way, Russian (and their peers from the post-Soviet republics) filmmakers been able to pair their artistic genuis and technical skills with greater technological sophistication, creating things on as grand a scale today, in relative terms, as they did in the days of Eisenstein nearly a century ago.

The Russian Triangle competes with films like Traffic or Syriana (or, god help us, Crash), but adding an interesting and well-spun murder spree to the social commentary. Cargo 200 is interesting and well-filmed, but really far out there. Taking place in the middle-80s, as the USSR's inexorable demise became increasingly clear, this film uses bureaucratic politics as the backdrop to a really fucked-up story. Two guys walking out of the theater in front of me compared it to Psycho and Deliverance. I could see both references, but I was more thinking along the lines of Reservior Dogs or even a 90 minute Slavic version of the nastier bits of Pulp Fiction. As I type this, I'm willing to bet Bill Guentzler, the Cleveland Film Society's Artistic Director, would agree that Alexey Balabanov is Russia's answer to Quentin Tarantino.

Anyway, I'd recommend seeing all of the above films, though caution viewers against Vogelfrei if they are suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder and against Cargo 200 if they have a weak stomach or a teenage daughter.

Bonus fact: So far, of the 8 films I've seen, I've managed to show up late to 7 of them. No matter what I do, or how early I leave my apartment, I cannot help showing up 5-10 minutes late. Interestingly enough, the only one I made it to on time, Slingshot, was one of the films where the actual director was in the audience. So I was lucky enough to hear Brillante Mendoza riff for a few minutes about the film he had made. That was cool.