Livin' La Lido Loca

First dispatch from Berlin (about Venice)

It might be called the Venice Film Festival, but much of the Venetian cinematic universe — including the grand Palazzo del Cinema — is set on the Lido, a separate island from the main city. Hotel prices on the Lido, naturally, are way, way more than in Venice City Centre, meaning that critics are reliant on a series of Vaporettos (cool local name for water-boat) to get them to the cinema on time. While there is a public water-bus, its steep €9.50 price tag makes it inaccessible to most hustling journalists. Thankfully for these destitute hacks, the festival kindly puts out its own free water-boat, making sure that people can see the new Mann, or Lanthimos, or Fincher film on time.

Except: The Vaporetto is not very reliable. I’ve heard multiple reports of long queues just to get on the board, more resembling Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017) than Summertime (David Lean, 1955). Coupled with the long online ticket queues and unnecessary jostling in the cinema itself, and it seems that the City of Water can quickly turn into the City of Tears.

Still, wouldn’t it be nice to be there? To go to all that effort to see Aggro Dr1ft (Harmony Korine, 2023) — simultaneously praised as the future of cinema and an extended Playstation 2 cutscene. Or the supposedly-brilliant Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023), which is bringing sex scene discourse back into the popular culture mere weeks after Passages (Ira Sachs, 2023) already did the same.

The good news with most of the other films, including the new Wes Anderson, or David Fincher’s The Killer (2023) or Bradley Cooper’s Maestro (2023), is that they’re all going straight to Netflix. In a couple of months, these once-glamorous movies will unglamorous plop onto your home screen, and you’ll go, “I’ve heard about that” and you’ll probably watch it.

I haven’t seen any of those films. I’ve made do with what the PRs graciously give me. And after watching three screeners yesterday, including Heartless (Nara Normande, Tião, 2023) — which I haven’t the heart to pan, despite finding it incredibly boring — and then relaxing with two more films, including randomly putting on Barry Levinson’s interminable Liberty Heights (1999) on Tubi, I think I genuinely don’t want to watch a single moving picture for the next two weeks. No image can move me. I need real life. Good news: I’m off on holiday tomorrow. But no worries, many more scheduled posts are on their way. Check out the posts we’ve already got down below:

Stolen Just Keeps Getting Better

It’s always a pleasure to watch a film that levels up right in front of you. Of course, the filmmaker has a distinct plan all along, carefully modulating tones in order to build up tension. But the effect of watching Karan Tejpal’s debut Stolen (2023) is particularly satisfying, as it suddenly moves from a tense whodunnit to a full-blown, unhinged, thriller — metaphorically (and literally) putting its foot on the gas at the perfect moment.

Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema.

Life Is Not a Competition, But I’m Winning. Mostly Winning.

I’ve been inside the Berlin Olympiastadion three or four times, around it several more. It’s half an hour’s walk from my flat. I’ve always been struck by the solemnity of the building, its solidity and strength — a begrudging testament to the engineering prowess of the National Socialists. But the limestone design is rotting from the inside and requires constant maintenance to lay host to Hertha Berlin games and (very loud and very annoying) Coldplay concerts. 

As a tribute to white supremacy, a fallacy upended by Jesse Owens one-upping his Aryan boys at the 1936 Olympics, it’s also a tribute to rotting and outdated gender norms, codified in binary terms by the sporting games themselves, with neat distribution between male and female events. Given that the Nazis famously burned decades worth of trans literature as part of their purifying project, perhaps it’s not a reach to state that transphobia is a natural product of white supremacy. 

Mixing archive-like footage, robotic, essayistic yet plain voiceover, Zelig-like (Woody Allen, 1983) trickery and live testimony, Julia Fuhr Mann’s debut film Life Is Not a Competition, But I’m Winning (2023) investigates these links between white supremacy and transphobia, moving smoothly between the women trailblazers erased from sporting history to modern day trans, intersex and cis women alike subject to discrimination and medical policing.

Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema.

Sidonie In Japan. Translation, Adrift

Denzel Washington in The Bone Collector (Phillip Noyce, 1999). Robert De Niro in Dirty Grandpa (Dan Mazer, 2016). Jack Nicholson in Anger Management (Peter Segal, 2003). Sometimes great actors just want another house. 

I hope Isabelle Huppert buys herself something nice with the paycheck for Sidonie In Japan (Élise Girard, 2023) — which sees arguably the finest, most subtle, most articulate actress of her generation phone it in with the passion of a Monday morning Teams Meeting. Actress as auteur, she can shape stories to her performances, but even the genius behind L’Avenir (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2016) and La Cérémonie (Claude Chabrol, 1995) cannot save a lacklustre script, bizarre directorial choices and an overall feeling of lethargy that permeates every frame of the inert Sidonie In Japan. 

Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema.

The Freewheeling Spirit of Bolaño Is Excellently Channelled in Foremost By Night

The opening quote of Foremost By Night, borrowed from Robert Bolaño, tells us that this is a horror story, “but it won’t appear to be, for the simple reason that I am the teller.” Inhabiting the spirit of the legendary Chilean novelist, his elliptical rhythms, his political rage, his ability to embrace the mysteries of life and give them stirring power, Víctor Iriarte’s debut film is all about the telling; a riot of formal invention, using the full boundaries of epistolary genre to explore one of the most shameful parts of Spanish history. 

Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema.

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person Lives Up To Its Goofy Title

The habits of vampires, strangely, makes me think about my own life. I am a meat eater, but if you asked me to kill the animals myself, I’d probably turn vegetarian overnight. It’s much harder when you’re a vampire. Not only do you need to drink blood, otherwise you die, but it has to be human blood, and you’re expected to do it yourself. I’d visit the Vatican the next day. 

Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema.