Recently in VIFF 2009 Category

Two of the better fest trailers I've seen, from the 2009 Vancouver International Film Festival:

Sex after the jump:

As the quaintly anachronistic title suggests, "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus" is as whimsical and rickety as any Terry Gilliam contraption -- an apparent labor of love, and not just for its star Heath Ledger, who died during production, but for the smoke-and-mirrors tomfoolery that goes into the construction of illusions. Another of Gilliam's charmingly antiquated, hand-crafted thingamadoodles, this one gets off to a bit of a slow start -- trying to set up too many stories... but spinning too many stories, and keeping track of them all, is also a good part of its subject.

Ledger's untimely death unavoidably became another element, since he hadn't finished filming his central role at the time of his demise. Gilliam, as you probably know, figured out a way to complete the film with three other actors -- Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell -- stepping in to complete the part. Once you're watching the movie, that no longer seems like such a strange or desperate move, but I'm not going to tell you how or why it works. (Remember that Natalie Wood died during the filming of "Brainstorm" and Brandon Lee in a production accident on the set of "The Crow," but those two pictures were completed, for better or worse. David Lynch's "Mulholland Dr." was a failed TV series pilot that wasn't released theatrically until Lynch said he dreamed an ending for it.) A title card at the end announces it as a presentation of "Heath Ledger and Friends."

"American Casino" may be mis-titled in some respects because although it acknowledges the casino-gambling principles behind the world financial meltdown that have been obvious and undeniable for many years, the most revealing facet this very fine "Frontline"-style documentary is how it portrays rabid entrepreneurialism spreading through American culture like a fatal self-replicating virus. The widespread damage -- not just financial, but physical and emotional -- is devastating, and the majority of victims in the United States are mainly the middle- and under-class. "American Casino" shows us a nationwide Hurricane Katrina, with similar political causes and consequences, that has decimated lives and property -- and was entirely man-made.

Without pushing the metaphors too far, the movie (directed by Leslie Cockburn and included in VIFF's "Follow the Money" series), traces the very real connections between the endlessly multiplying and dividing derivatives that caused the crash to the wrecked dreams and deteriorating real estate that now blight both urban and suburban areas from Baltimore to California. While people in offices were using computers to calculate "fourth-dimensional" Ponzi schemes that defied human comprehension, others were being evicted from their homes.

The tong hackman is a little orange-blonde tattooed biker, most often dressed in a pair of black shorts, sandals that match his hair, and nothing else. He picks up a girl who has split with her motorcycle-riding boyfriend and becomes the Poutiest Girl in the World. They shack up on his father's land in a one-bed structure covered with a clear plastic tarp. She throws tantrums and torments him. There is a lot of drinking, smoking, fishing and cell phoning. He attacks his business with methodical professionalism, hacking and beating those who can't pay their debts to his boss. A gang of others arrive with machetes to take their revenge. Things get hot, and the boss tells him to get out of town to Guangzhou and hide out for a while. But what about the girl?

That's a basically accurate plot description of Yang Heng's "Sun Spots," a striking Chinese film that received its world premiere here at the Vancouver International Film Festival. But now let me come at it from another direction entirely....

Lars von Trier, maker of calculating horror comedies, is a shrewd showman -- if not exactly in the classic Hollywood tradition then at least in the Barnum & Bailey one. He pleases his audiences by teasing, taunting and testing them, keeping his tongue in his cheek. I picture him as a dancing, grinning little prankster on the fringes of world cinema, alternately flaunting a streak of astringent sadism and hiding for safety behind a shield of facetiousness.

He's also, in "Antichrist" particularly, a thudding literalist whose mock-academic ideas and images are so over-rationalized and in-your-face that (like the mysterious cry of a baby placed too far forward in the sound mix to be haunting or ambiguous) they don't have much room to resonate. When they ought to be harrowing, they're obvious and over-explained, which cuts them off from genuine emotion or experience. Nevertheless, "Antichrist" is a serviceable, sometimes atmospheric horror movie, until the last chapter-and-a-half when it just goes flat. By then it's already gotten a little too much of a charge out of commenting on its own giddy morbidity, and whether the audience is laughing at it or with it doesn't matter. Either way, the laughter is dismissive.

1) Despair, one of the Three Beggars, on one leg. (LVT ought to know that Despair is grey, not black.)

Opening shot of the year: The acoustic guitar music plays over a company logo at the head of the film, before the movie proper. A woman in a purple brocade jacket and a blue skirt walks through a field of tall, brown grass. Percussion enters the picture -- or the soundtrack. She looks us in the eye, and dances. (Bong Joon-ho's "Mother")

Final shot of the year: In a group of people photographed through a pair of thick, smoked-glass doors, only the title character appears out of focus. (Lucrecia Martel's "The Headless Woman")