TIFF Day 7
The Hurt Locker: The best action movie I’ve seen in years. This movie should be controversial, if anyone really pays attention to it. It shows the adrenaline rush of war, and why some soldiers crave war, while emphasizing how horrific it is. Jeremy Renner and Anthony Mackie are amazing as the leads, and all the supporting actors are good too (including Evangeline Lilly, whose acting here is better than on Lost). As I mentioned in the previous blog entry, I am a big fan of Kathryn Bigelow’s movies, and I think this is her best. 10

Tale 52 [Ιστοριά 52]: I liked this film although on a different day I might not have. It’s one of those films like The Machinist or Mulholland Drive where nothing seems to make sense; you ask yourself whether what you are seeing is the character’s fantasy, dream, or hallucination, or is there some supernatural or science-fiction explanation like time-travel? Or will we get to the end of the movie with no explanation at all? In Open Your Eyes (in my opinion the best of this subgenre) and The Machinist, we get an explanation at the end of the movie that pretty much sorts everything out into something consistent. In other movies, with no such explanation, I often have the impression that the filmmaker really had no coherent vision for the film, but just a whole bunch of cool ideas, and decided to mash them all together cryptically hoping that someone in the audience would see a brilliant work of art. In Tale 52, even though we never get a coherent explanation, I still am satisfied that the filmmaker knew what he was doing. It doesn’t have the exceptional acting of The Machinist but Tale 52 mostly managed to hold my interest, with various curiosities like a repeated game of Greek Scrabble. It even pokes fun at itself by having the characters talk about a movie they went to where somebody fell asleep. The trailer is on YouTube or at the film’s official web site. You can also watch the director’s Q&A at Rotterdam. Tale 52 has a lot of originality even though it isn’t stupendous. I will definitely be interested in seeing the next movie by director Alexis Alexiou. 7

Killing Kasztner: Very good documentary about an interesting and complicated subject. Kasztner was a Hungarian Jew who saved thousands of Jews from the death camps by negotiating with the Nazis in 1944. He emigrated to Israel and was assassinated in 1957 by an Israeli extremist after being accused of having collaborated with the Nazis. The documentary, directed by Gaylen Ross, explains this story while chronicling the attempts of Kasztner’s descendants to rehabilitate his name and establish him as the greatest Jewish hero of the Holocaust. Meanwhile, the film also has several interviews with the man convicted of murdering Kasztner, who was released from prison after seven years. I felt that there were a few important questions that the film did not delve far enough into (such as the contents of various affidavits Kasztner swore) but this somewhat long documentary is rivetting throughout. 8

Skin: I thought this movie, set in apartheid-era South Africa, was pretty good, but I wish I had not read the desciption in the TIFF guide because for the first hour of the film I was only thinking, “okay, the acting is good but the story is exactly what I expected”. There’s enough drama but it needs some surprise. It is certainly worth seeing if you don’t know anything about it beforehand. 7