SCFZ

VIFF19 kicked off tonight. I attended the opening gala, which featured a screening of Atom Egoyan's latest.

Wow, I really hate film festivals. Lots of circle-jerking and pageantry and the always fun combo of indigenous land acknowledgements interspersed with shout-outs to Telus and whatever shitty North American car manufacturer is sponsoring this year.

Anyway, I haven't seen much Egoyan and don't particularly like him, but this ("Guest of Honour") is my favourite of the ones I've seen. Thewlis is a pretty great actor

bure420 wrote: ↑Fri Sep 27, 2019 6:34 am VIFF19 kicked off tonight. I attended the opening gala, which featured a screening of Atom Egoyan's latest.

Wow, I really hate film festivals. Lots of circle-jerking and pageantry and the always fun combo of indigenous land acknowledgements interspersed with shout-outs to Telus and whatever shitty North American car manufacturer is sponsoring this year.

Anyway, I haven't seen much Egoyan and don't particularly like him, but this ("Guest of Honour") is my favourite of the ones I've seen. Thewlis is a pretty great actor

Yeah, most (bigger) film festivals suck! But you can see some great films there, so that's usually pretty nice.

I'm also not a fan of Egoyan, but maybe I should watch some more of his stuff. Now that you mentioned him, I recalled that my last Egoyan I saw was "Ararat", at the cinema, some 16 years ago.

Saw Parasite. Not a Bong fan (unless the name lacks capitalization) but I loved this, 4/4

bure420 wrote: ↑Mon Sep 30, 2019 12:48 am Saw Parasite.

Loved it too - funniest film I've watched in ages!

bure420 wrote: ↑Mon Sep 30, 2019 12:48 am Saw Parasite. Not a Bong fan (unless the name lacks capitalization) but I loved this, 4/4

I also don't like Bong (seen Memories of Murder, The Host and Snowpiercer so far), but heck, I guess I'm gonna watch this one as well and give Bong another chance to (finally) win me over. It just looks and sounds too delicious to pass up.

It's nothing like Snowpiercer. Shares some similarities with Memories of Murder for sure, but I found it much more interesting in terms of composition and movement. Also I felt a lot of moral ambiguiity in the film that I didn't sense in MoM or Snowpiercer. A lot of ppl (on lboxd) seem to believe, or appreciate, that the film features some sort of expositional treatise on class....I disagree. It features a class struggle. The particular struggle in the film is too complex to be reduced to any "opinion" or "stance"... and that's just fine, imo

Yeah, that class struggle angle is what made me interested in the film. Otherwise, I would have just passed (just watched Snowpiercer cause I love films taking place on trains, and at least in that regard it delivered).

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Celine Sciamma becomes the first director by whom the first FOUR movies I watched were 4/4. Not only that, but this one makes my top 100 and is probably my fav new release since Mommy by Dolan

What can I say? It's beautiful and sad, and every shot is like, well, it goes beyond cliche to say, but a painting. If I had a digital copy of this there are 1000 incredible stills I could post