22nd Five Films, 2007
This is kind of awkward, as I saw some of these almost a month ago, but that's July for you.
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Traces of Love (Kim Dae-sung) at the IFC for the New York Asian Film Festival. A young, likable lawyer loses his fiance when a building collapses downtown. He feels responsible because he'd told her to wait for him in a cafe there. He goes on a trip through a national park area to trace the route she'd planned for their honeymoon when he meets up with someone else doing the exact same thing (well, sort of). Wistfully melodramatic and very pleasing to look at.
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In Between Days (Kim So-Yong) at the IFC Center. This was my first ticket purchased as a member (w/ free popcorn!) and since it's been a busy month I haven't yet been back, but from the newly released calendar, I'm hoping to see This Is England, Helvetica, Jeff Garlin's I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With, Charles Burnett's My Brother's Wedding, and basically as much of their twelve-film mumblecore series, The New Talkies, as possible. Oh, and Traces of Love felt like a movie that somebody else would really enjoy, but for some reason I was not into it. It's a fairly intimate portrait of the trials and temptations an adolescent Korean immigrant girl who lives somewhere in New Jersey. +
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Cruel Winter Blues (Lee Jeong-beom) at at the IFC for the New York Asian Film Festival. It's about a gangster from Seoul and his inexperienced sidekick who travel to a small town in order to take revenge on a mob boss. Difficulties arise when the gangster makes friends with the mother of his arch-enemy. This is an awesome movie for all kinds of reasons. There are interesting, richly detailed male and female characters of all sorts of ages and backgrounds. The protagonist is at once both sympathetic and kind of disgustingly greedy and egotistical. Plot twists. The final death scene. The shopping scene. I don't know.
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Le Doulos (Jean-Pierre Melville) at Film Forum for a Stylus review.
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Knocked Up (Judd Apatow) at Loew's Lincoln Square. This place has kind of interesting decor in the large main hall connecting the individual theaters. I personally liked this better than The 40-Year-Old Virgin, though Brendan claimed a preference for the former as it had more memorable comic riffs. Stuart Klawans had a kind of obnoxious review in The Nation that I'm not going to link to, but I would agree that there is sort of a weird, fundamental difference between the conflicts faced by the male and female characters. That may be true, but it's still almost entirely hilarious.
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Traces of Love (Kim Dae-sung) at the IFC for the New York Asian Film Festival. A young, likable lawyer loses his fiance when a building collapses downtown. He feels responsible because he'd told her to wait for him in a cafe there. He goes on a trip through a national park area to trace the route she'd planned for their honeymoon when he meets up with someone else doing the exact same thing (well, sort of). Wistfully melodramatic and very pleasing to look at.
+ + +
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In Between Days (Kim So-Yong) at the IFC Center. This was my first ticket purchased as a member (w/ free popcorn!) and since it's been a busy month I haven't yet been back, but from the newly released calendar, I'm hoping to see This Is England, Helvetica, Jeff Garlin's I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With, Charles Burnett's My Brother's Wedding, and basically as much of their twelve-film mumblecore series, The New Talkies, as possible. Oh, and Traces of Love felt like a movie that somebody else would really enjoy, but for some reason I was not into it. It's a fairly intimate portrait of the trials and temptations an adolescent Korean immigrant girl who lives somewhere in New Jersey. +
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Cruel Winter Blues (Lee Jeong-beom) at at the IFC for the New York Asian Film Festival. It's about a gangster from Seoul and his inexperienced sidekick who travel to a small town in order to take revenge on a mob boss. Difficulties arise when the gangster makes friends with the mother of his arch-enemy. This is an awesome movie for all kinds of reasons. There are interesting, richly detailed male and female characters of all sorts of ages and backgrounds. The protagonist is at once both sympathetic and kind of disgustingly greedy and egotistical. Plot twists. The final death scene. The shopping scene. I don't know.
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Le Doulos (Jean-Pierre Melville) at Film Forum for a Stylus review.
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Knocked Up (Judd Apatow) at Loew's Lincoln Square. This place has kind of interesting decor in the large main hall connecting the individual theaters. I personally liked this better than The 40-Year-Old Virgin, though Brendan claimed a preference for the former as it had more memorable comic riffs. Stuart Klawans had a kind of obnoxious review in The Nation that I'm not going to link to, but I would agree that there is sort of a weird, fundamental difference between the conflicts faced by the male and female characters. That may be true, but it's still almost entirely hilarious.
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Posted on Sunday, July 29, 2007
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