| | Sundance Film Festival 2008...the second day. Same setup--three films--and all of them this time were extremely different.
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Mermaid
(Dir./Screenwriter: Anna Melikyan--World Dramatic Competition -- Russia)
 
The first act of Mermaid is imaginatively explosive, waking people from the coma of creative mediocrity. It's a fairy tale set in Russia and it's about a girl who wants to be a ballerina. The only problem is, that's "not her destiny." The film is hilarious, shocking, and always surprising. The sound pulsates and screeches and screams its way into your air so you can truly feel Director / Screenwriter Anna Melikyan's magic. Her heroine is a loner, a quiet and desperate-for-love little girl who wants to meet her father. In this journey she realizes she has power in her self--not figuratively, but literally--and this becomes the catalyst for nearly everything else that will happen later on in the film.
The director of Sundance introduced the film as one of the movies this year that is "truly original" and there is no exception about that. Melikyan gives us a different way of seeing the dreary and developed Moscow today and does so with a production design and the kind of cinematography that will inspire anyone to pick up a camera and capture something beautiful.
Mermaid is not a perfect ride but it shouldn't be. Its wildness and unpredictability shift from fable to traffic to imagination to picturesque beach scenes that possess the idyllic spirit of aesthetics, as a concept. I won't give away anything else but to say...I'd love to see this Russian fairy tale win the Audience Award. And I think it has a good shot at it. For everyone I saw, including myself, voted "4 stars" for this dark and dreamlike comic fantasy. See it. As soon as you can. Neville's Grade: B (But if I only was to grade the first hour: A+)
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Goliath
A random DV low budget film about a man who recently gets divorced and loses his cat while in the process. To cope, he searches for his cat (Goliath) and hopes to find redemption there. However, things change as we see the painfully funny (and sometimes only painful) effects divorce can have on one's life. This movie means well and has some incredibly funny and original scenes but it's gratuitious by its end and goes for an ending that feels "edgy" rather than "honest." Whenever a writer does that I always feel a little cheated. Still, I appreciated this film as a Sundance selection. Why? Because it's so lyrical it makes you actually think hard about what is actually going on onscreen b/c there's so little dialogue. For serious film buffs only. Neville's Grade: C
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Alone In Four Walls
Not much needs to be written about this Russian documentary film in competition for the World Documentary award. It's about a group of young adolescent boys who are put into an educational/correctional facility for stealing food, stealing small items and oh yeah...murder. They are all younger than 13 and it's all done with interviews with the children (and a few of their parents). It's an eye-opener documentary for sure and one many people need to see. Community is such a powerful thing. We all really do need it no matter how young (or old) we are. Neville's Grade: B
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| | Posted 1/23/2008 10:40 AM - 54 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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