Not much happens in this cute little comic, a bird investigates a human walking and napping in the woods, another bird gets eaten, and a snake behaves out of character of species, but the reduced, calm way its drawn makes this a little gem. The bird exploring the sleeping human is particularly endearing.
The odd and interesting concept of combining three short disturbing cinematic visions from Korea, Hong Kong and Japan into a single feature film pays off mostly because of the contrast between the three directors’ very distinctive approaches to scaring or shocking the audience. Where Chan uses colourful unscrupulous hedonism to post a moral warning, Park […]
Trondheim’s marvellous style, applied to a quirky story of alien mishaps, told in hardly decodable symbol language and asynchronously. The result is a delightfully trippy little comic book. An interesting side note concerns the preface, which seems to have been written specifically for the american edition (which I assume is otherwise identical to the french […]
Der Pfad durch die dunklen Palmen bog schon vor Minuten vom Fluss ab, in dem wir auf Alligatorsichtungen gelauert hatten, aber nur springende Fische hörten und sahen. In Kopfhöhe sind bunte Bänder an Bäume und Sträucher gebunden, allenthalben raschelt es im trockenen Laub und Unterholz, Gürteltiere vielleicht, oder ein Waschbär. Von fern hört man die […]
A powerful meditation on innocence lost and the mixed blessings of civilization and progress, this is essential Malick. Of course that also means a healthy dose of pathos and a certain slowness of plot, but when so beautifully shot and arranged, who would want to bicker. I have not seen the story of Pocahontas told […]
It could have been a delightful superhero spoof, with touching undertones of melancholy and underdog happyness. But bad direction, design and editing destroy much of the movie, which occasionally shines (the confrontation betwen Captain Amazing and Casanova Frankenstein is hilarious, for example), but most of the time drags. It’s too bad, the writing is good, […]
Der erste Dollar des Krabbenknaben Ausserhalb des Wassers stehen Black Skimmer aufgereiht, dutzende von langen roten Schnäbeln parallelgerichtet, Elementarfischmagnete auf Jagdpause. Im Wasser ein paar Meter entfernt scheint nichts zu leben, keine Fische, keine Krebse, nur vereinzelte Watvögel und ein paar federlose Hühner stehen in den Fluten. Hier aber, begrenzt vom Ufer einerseits und einer […]
I enjoy watching movies with advertised surprise endings, not attempting to guess the twist beforehand so that it can have maximum impact. Here, I vaguely suspected the ending about halfway through, enough to take away the bottomless feeling I distinctly remember from having in The Sixth Sense, which is too bad. That doesn’t say anything […]
I like LeGuin’s work in general, but this tale of freedom and repression is not her best work. Two groups of exiles coexist on a wild, uncharted planet, one composed of the descendants of prisoners, the other of political exiles, sent away for their disturbing pacifism. When some people in the city try to increase […]
Oh boy, where do I start? It was sombering to see that the concept that so beautifully worked in In the Mood for Love could fall so flat. While this loose sequel explores similar themes, none of the characters got me the least bit interested, the plot was see-through-thin both in terms of what happened […]