After a shaky start, the festival has bloomed into one of the best we've attended. Today we saw:
Manuscripts Don't Burn
This difficult (emotionally) film is about the Iranian government's campaign to silence the country's intellectual dissidents. It's powerful and interesting (i.e. not boring), but perhaps most remarkable because it was made clandestinely (is that a word?). The filmmaker is only recently out of jail, so we are unclear about how he managed to turn up at Telluride where he is showing his movie and trashing the Iranian government on a public stage. Pray for him.
Mahanagar
My sister, Trina, introduced me to Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray when we were both in college. (I mean she introduced me to his films.) I am a huge fan, so I was eager to see Mahanager lo these many years after it was made. It was selected for the festival (as a classic film) and introduced to us by Salman Rushdie, who told inappropriate jokes and sounded professorial and genial. If only Rushdie's books were as good as Ray's films.
Invisible Woman
What is it with directors who try to turn a famous old man's obsession with a teenage girl into a touching romance. This time it was Ralph Fiennes as Dickens (at 47) doing the dirty with a barely 18 year old actress he "discovered." Maybe Fiennes (the director) was trying to show Dickens as a sympathetic mess, but to me he was just a mess, and a disgusting one at that. The plot is Back Street all over again. Well acted, tho.
Lunchbox
Loved it! This Indian film starring the amazing Infan Kahn was a huge hit here. Apparently in Bombay (and maybe other places) office workers can and often do have lunches delivered to them. The lunch might be prepared by a commercial outfit or it might come from home, fresh off the stove. So this is a story about what happened when a lunch was delivered to the wrong person. An interesting tidbit about the filmmaker: He was a lunch delivery boy before he made this film.
t2
Manuscripts Don't Burn
This difficult (emotionally) film is about the Iranian government's campaign to silence the country's intellectual dissidents. It's powerful and interesting (i.e. not boring), but perhaps most remarkable because it was made clandestinely (is that a word?). The filmmaker is only recently out of jail, so we are unclear about how he managed to turn up at Telluride where he is showing his movie and trashing the Iranian government on a public stage. Pray for him.
Mahanagar
My sister, Trina, introduced me to Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray when we were both in college. (I mean she introduced me to his films.) I am a huge fan, so I was eager to see Mahanager lo these many years after it was made. It was selected for the festival (as a classic film) and introduced to us by Salman Rushdie, who told inappropriate jokes and sounded professorial and genial. If only Rushdie's books were as good as Ray's films.
Invisible Woman
What is it with directors who try to turn a famous old man's obsession with a teenage girl into a touching romance. This time it was Ralph Fiennes as Dickens (at 47) doing the dirty with a barely 18 year old actress he "discovered." Maybe Fiennes (the director) was trying to show Dickens as a sympathetic mess, but to me he was just a mess, and a disgusting one at that. The plot is Back Street all over again. Well acted, tho.
Lunchbox
Loved it! This Indian film starring the amazing Infan Kahn was a huge hit here. Apparently in Bombay (and maybe other places) office workers can and often do have lunches delivered to them. The lunch might be prepared by a commercial outfit or it might come from home, fresh off the stove. So this is a story about what happened when a lunch was delivered to the wrong person. An interesting tidbit about the filmmaker: He was a lunch delivery boy before he made this film.
t2
No comments:
Post a Comment