Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with another couple of reviews from a different film fest, the well known Rotterdam fest. We have a spy who has seen a pair of movies, one he's lukewarm on, the other he really likes. Reading the review I'm not exactly sure what his problems with [REC] are. I loved [REC], my favorite "we have to record this" type movie to date, but I'm always for lowering the expectations and not letting the hype machine make it out to be something it isn't.

He also talks about the Japanese film THE MOURNING FOREST, which won the Golden Palm at Cannes last year.

Enjoy the reviews!

With the arrival of the annual filmfeast that is the Sundance Film Festival, I feel once again obliged to inform you of the wonderful cinematic events of similar magnitude happening… somewhere else. Case in point being the annual filmfeast that is the International Film Festival Rotterdam, 37th edition, taking place right now in The Netherlands. (A country which might very well be completely annihilated very soon because of the explosive reactions to an already controversial 10-minute film proposed by Dutch populist right-wing politician Geert Wilders. The film has as its central subject matter the proposition that the Koran is a fascist book that incites hatred and violence. At this time, noone has seen the film, nor is it even certain the film exists at all. A fierce debate has been going on about this film and there is a genuine fear that if it turns out to be as controversial as some claim it will be, events similar to that following the publication of a series of cartoons in a Danish newspaper that are considered offensive in orthodox Islam beliefs could follow. Several people died in riots that took place in multiple places all over the world. Anyway, back to more enjoyable movies now…)

This year, I won't be able to attend as much of the festival as I would like (only bought 25 tickets…) but I'm still looking forward to several interesting features I've got lined up. My prediction for the Surprise Film: There will be blood. Hopefully… My prediction for my reviews: There will be spoilers, so tread lightly…

As it goes on festivals, there will always be a few let downs among the lucky finds. The much hyped Spanish horror flic [REC] falls somewhere in between these two categories. While it scores big points for being at times pretty damned intense and having a few excellent scares and some bloody effects, for every thing it does right it does several things badly. The set-up is pleasantly simple: a two-person tv-crew spends a night with the local firebrigade for a program called 'While you sleep'. After a few hours spend at the station where we get to know the energetic young host of the show Angela and a few of the firemen, a call comes in about a 'person trapped in a building'. They rush out and find two policemen already at the appartment building and worried occupants saying they heard an old woman scream in her room. The characters in the building are made up of a standard group of stereotypes and genre-requisits, but they are played well by the ensemble cast the whole reality angle is on their part consistent and pretty convincing. Shooting all this with the motto "Film everything", Angela and her cameraman… whose name I can't remember… which brings me to one of the problems of the film. This is a reality-show spoof, basically, and the presentation is as if we're watching the complete unedited footage that was shot that night, warts and retakes and all, and from the moment they arrive at the building the events seem take place almost in real time. So Angela does interact with the cameraman as they discuss angles and ideas to film, when the situation isn't getting out of hand yet. But at several points throughout the film, the cameraman basically 'disappears' from the narrative, and the camera almost becomes a cinematic camera, with cuts and edits and all, while the other characters suddenly completely ignore him in their frantic discussions about how to evade the increasing number of zombies that roam the residential building. Yes, I said zombies, and luckily there the movie does many things very right. A virus of unknown origin has apparently escaped in the building, and almost immediately after the crew arrives the building is sealed off completely by government emergency forces. People start to die or at least get seriously injured immediately after arriving as well, and being unable to get out the building, give the wounded the care they need and with an unknown and horrible threat somewhere in the building, the tension is pretty high from early on in the film. But the filmmakers let this tension slip away, in an apparent desire to quote or downright copy pretty much every zombie or horror movie ever made, which makes the film extremely predictable, and after twenty minutes in the film or so, I could see every scare or twist coming. In the end the movie also looses serious momentum with our tv-crew hiding out in a mysterious supposedly unoccupied room in the building, where the simple set-up that was working so well for the film is suddenly burdened with an elaborate and confusing (virus or posession? what's up with that?!) twist explanation for the events taking place. I won't spoil the whole thing, mainly because there'a one final awesomely cool and freaking scary zombie to deal with, but I can tell that it doesn't save the film from being no more than pretty good, something that doesn't seem to justify the apparent hype that surrounds this film. Adjust your hopes and you'll enjoy this flic very much, but it isn't the second coming or saviour of the reality-horror genre. At the festival, Romero's Diary of the Dead is playing as well as a sort-of double bill kind of thing.

A movie that I did enjoy very much was The Mourning Forest by Japanese writer and director Naomi Kawase. This already won the Grand Prize of the Festival and was nominated for a Golden Palm at the 2007 Cannes filmfestival, and deservedly so as far as I am concerned. In this slow and beautifully filmed story we follow a young nurse Machiko (played by Machiko Ono), who volunteers in a nursing home taking care of elderly. She has a special connection with one man, Shigeki (Shigeki Uda), a widower who has almost stopped communicating and seems to live in a hazey world of memories in his mind. On a trip they take together, their car gets stranded and when Machiko returns from looking for help Shigeki has disappeared, into a deep forest. Machiko follows and finds Shigeki, and while she seems to think they are lost, he appears to have a clear goal. We find out he is looking for the grave of his long deceased wife Mako, and the trip through the incredibly lush and greener than green forest becomes a journey of mourning, a way to deal with passing and mortality, both for Shigeki and in a way for the young Machiko as well. She has to carry a lot of the film, with Shigeki saying very little, and when he does, it rarely seems to be directed at her. There is a real connection though, and that is thanks to the strong performance by both actors and the production work. A major star of the film as well is the beautiful forest, which seems to get older and bigger as they make their way through it. There's something really powerful about the sight and sound of leaves, bushes or grass gently waving in the wind, and this film has lots of it.

I'll come back with reviews for Gus van Sant's Paranoid Park, Roy Andersson's beautifully funny You, the living and more weirdness from this fest… I hope life finds you all well, and…

greetings,

dapascha