Hey folks, Harry here with our 3rd report from the fest. For those that haven't sought out Z CHANNEL - A MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION - do so at all costs it's fantastic! As for the other films - there's a couple here that sound interesting. Got another Rotterdam report coming up shortly so here ya go....

Hey Harry/Mori,

I'm visiting the Rotterdam Film Festival again this year (my 4th time), and this is the report of my first day there. This year sees the arrival of a new festival director, Sandra den Hamer, but she seems to be as Asia-centric as Simon Field ever was, so no worries there.

DAY 1 (28 january)

Z channel - a magnificent obsession (Xan Cassavetes) (3,5 out of 5)

This documentary has already been reviewed a few times on your site, and is actually a very interesting but overlong look at the life of Jerry Harvey, the main programmer of the Z Channel, a film channel that was only ever available in the LA area, but was very influential nonetheless (well, "nonetheless"... it WAS LA, of course). Harvey made it his personal mission to screen films he thought were overlooked by the general public. In an era without DVD or even a big VHS market, Z Channel was the only opportunity to see many of these films.

Cassavetes interviews many filmmakers whose careers were helped tremendously by Harvey, such as Henry Jaglom and our very own (ie, Dutch) Paul Verhoeven. She deftly avoids falling into the talking heads-trap by crosscutting an enormous amount of old film material, of films shown by the Channel, of course. A man as obsessive and driven as Harvey, however, must have made some enemies as well, but nary a bitter word is spoken. Cassavetes can't entirely evade the pitfall that's actually mentioned in the film itself: making a hero out of a man who left so much human wreckage behind him.

Besides, Jerry Harvey's story could have been condensed to a more manageable length. At two hours, the documentary overstays its welcome quite a bit, and gets mired in anecdote after anecdote of yet another enthusiastic industry veteran.

Still, it's always fun seeing people like James Woods and especially Quentin Tarantino speak, and the story of the Z Channel is an interesting one.

So cute (Kim Soo-hyun) (2 out of 5)

Last year's festival was a veritable feast of South Korean cinema: gems like Memories of murder, Spring, summer, fall etc. and most of all Save the green planet! were all showing. But even South Korea can't produce only winners, as evidenced by this barely coherent effort.

So cute deals with the lives of one father and his three sons, all from different mothers. One day the second son brings home a young girl for his father to marry, but all the male inhabitants of the delapidated apartment end up falling for this bubbly, energetic creature, who goes by the name of Soon-yi. Madcap, occasionally funny antics ensue.

The film is absolutely riddled with problems: at nearly two hours, it's way too long; it's wildly inconsistent in both tone and style; the character arcs are unbelievably shallow; most of the performances are lousy; the dialogue was seemingly cobbled together from a finished Scrabble game. And yet, there are some redeeming elements here: a twelve-year-old girl falls in love with the second son, and fights with Soon-yi over him, and the third son, a somewhat dimwitted but quite dangerous gangster, is at least a mildly interesting (and well-performed) character.

It's not enough to salvage the film, though: a fact I might have been warned about when the father of the family began talking about his possessed penis(and for your own sake, if that somehow aroused your interest: stay the hell away).

Dead man's shoes (Shane Meadows) (4,5 out of 5)

Ah, this is more like it! I must say I wasn't very impressed by Meadows' last effort, the abysmal Once upon a time in the Midlands, but Dead man's shoes blows that film completely out of the water. It's the story of Richard (another phenomenal Paddy Considine role), a retired military man, and his mentally handicapped brother Anthony, who return to the village they grew up in to take revenge on some local bad seeds. What Richard takes revenge for isn't entirely clear until the end of the film, so I'll not spoil it here: suffice to say that this is a man consumed by hatred, not least of himself.

Yes, it's another take on the revenge-genre, but a very brilliant one: by contrasting the comic ineptitude and fear of the small-time crooks with the sudden and extreme violence that Richard wreaks, the film becomes darker and darker, and ends up as a wholly involving, raw and visceral tale of a man on a mission of eventual self-destruction. Once again Meadows has pulled some of his inspiration from Westerns, and this time, it works in his favour.

The otherwise emotional ending goes ever so slightly over the top, but I'm still prepared to call Dead man's shoes a small masterpiece.

Brothers (Brodre) (Susanne Bier) (4 out of 5)

Once again, I wasn't entirely convinced by the filmmaker's previous project, which in this case was Open hearts, a Dogme '95 film. Brothers at least leaves that restrictive set of rules behind, though I believe it was still shot on digital camera.

Brothers is the story of two, you guessed it, brothers. One is Michael, a major in the Danish army, and the other is Jannik, an irresponsible small-time criminal, who is just released out of jail the day Michael is sent to Afghanistan. Michael is obviously the favourite of his father, a fact that Jannik finds very hard to deal with. Then, a helicopter with Michael aboard is taken down by Aghan rebels, and Michael is presumed dead. After a couple of heartrending, realistic and very well-performed mourning scenes, Michael's wife Sarah and their children begin to pick up the pieces. In their grief, Sarah and Jannik grow closer and closer, and eventually fall in love. Then, of course, Michael returns...

So yeah, it's Pearl harbour's plot. But before you run screaming for the hills, this is a much better film (for one thing, it doesn't star Ben Affleck, and for another, it isn't 3 freaking hours long(sorry, I'm seeing a shrink about this)). A lot of humour, arising primarily from comments made by the amazing child actors, is in the film, and it's balanced well with the central drama. All the characters are likeable (until the ending, but I'll get to that) and sympathetic, and the character arc of Jannik is very moving and well-thought out: he finds a purpose in life in taking care of his late brother's wife and children.

I have one major hang-up with the film: when Michael is detained in an Afghan rebel camp, he has an experience that leads to an eventual mental breakdown. This breakdown brings the central conflict to a very abrupt and unsatisfying head, and goes way beyond any subtle handling of the subject matter. The film would have been better served by an unaltered Michael, for it's hard for an audience to identify with a man who almost goes insane.

Still, the nicely open ending makes up for it. Brothers comes highly recommended.

The neighbor no. 13 (Inoue Yasuo) (2,5 out of 5)

This film is part of Rotterdämmerung, a part of the main programme dedicated to bringing the darkest films to the public's attention. Because I won't be able to see Miike Takashi's new film, Izo, I decided to make up for it with The neighbor no.13. This manga-adaptation is about a teenage boy, Yozu, who has a violent alter ego. This devil, who goes by the name of no.13, wants nothing more than violently murdering Yozu's high school bully Akai, and anyone who stands in his way.

Before the film started, we were told that the film was refused at other film festivals, because it was deemed too violent, and that Rotterdam would of course never refuse a film on those grounds. This elicited quite an enthusiastic response from the audience. The filmmaker stoked the fires of anticipation even more by saying that, based on the crowd response to the word "violent", we were exactly the right crazy people to see the film. Well. This debut film has many problems, but a surplus of violence isn't one of them.

The film takes way too long to get going, reaching for a tense atmosphere through moody music but never getting there. Yuzo spends most of his time lounging in his apartment, going to his job, etc, but nothing ever really happens. There are some weird stylistic breaks, but that's it. Once no.13 really breaks loose, kidnapping Akai's son, the film gathers some steam, and especially one chilling scene where the little six-year-old kid is threatened at knifepoint lingers in the mind, but it's a case of too little, too late: even the mildly interesting twist ending can't save The neighbor no.13 from mediocrity.

Maybe those other festivals had better reasons than the practically nonexistent (for a Japanese manga adaptation) violence to refuse the film entry. And maybe Rotterdam should know better than selecting the umpteenth style exercise from the land of the rising sun.

Well, that's it for day one. I'll be back tomorrow with, among others, the new Kim Ki-duk flick, Samaritan girl.

The Last Lizard, signing off.