A brilliant feature debut, Manuel Pradal’s Marie Baie des Anges is about homeless, reckless youths at loose on the Riviera. Philippe Rousselot, the great color cinematographer of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva (1981) and Alain Cavalier’s Thérèse (1986), produced the film. This is a genuine film. It proceeds by shots rather than scenes. No narrative drives the […]
Daily Archives: June 20, 2007
From Iceland, Denmark, Germany, Japan and the U.S., Fridrik Thor Fridriksson’s Cold Fever is a road film, a glorious multilingual fish-out-of-water comedy. Atsushi Hirata, a young Japanese executive for a fish company (yes; also mull over the guy’s first name), visits Iceland out of filial respect. His parents died there accidentally seven years earlier, and […]
Fusing atmospheric elements of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and novels by Kurt Vonnegut, Igby Goes Down is a dark comedy that strains to be cutting-edge while all the while seeming out-of-date. It’s a coming-of-age tale, of sorts, about 17-year-old Jason Slocumb, Jr., nicknamed Igby, a poor little rich boy who whines his way […]
Initially it seems an extraneous line—a peripheral bit of amusement. At the dreamy Los Angeles restaurant-club The Blue Gardenia, a male bartender remarks to a patron, “I fancy men myself.” Yet this utterance suggests the elusive theme of one of Fritz Lang’s most underrated films. Her loyalty to her boyfriend, who is fighting in Korea, […]
Dennis Grunes 