Italy Trip Videos - Part 3: Tuscan Countryside and Venice

The town of San Gimignano and other scenes from the Tuscan countryside. Music is "Mazurka Bastiaise" from an unofficial Curb Your Enthusiasm soundtrack.



Next up is Venice. Best city of the trip, but also the most overrun by tourists. Murano and Burano are a couple of nice islands that you can reach by water bus. The name of the song is "Don't Be Afraid, You Have Just Got Your Eyes Closed" (yes, really) by Múm.

Italy Trip Videos - Part 2: Nighttime in Rome

Here's the next video in this ongoing series. Nighttime shots from Rome, Florence and Venice. I was still learning the camera on this trip, and I don't think I fully figured out how to take night shots until Venice. You can probably see the progression from this video.

The song is called "Fixed Income" by DJ Shadow. (No iTunes link because it's not available.)

Italy Trip Videos - Part 1: Churches, Ancient Rome

I've edited some of the pictures from my trip to Italy this summer into video slideshows. This is the first batch, there will be more to come!

Churches

A quick tour of some of the many churches in Rome and Florence (not including the Vatican, which deserves its own video). The song is "There Is a Number of Small Things" by the Icelandic electronic group Múm.



Ancient Rome

Palatine Hill, the Roman Forum, and the Colosseum. Music from the Inglourious Basterds soundtrack ("The Green Leaves of Summer", "Rabbia e Tarantella").

Impressions from TIFF: City of Life and Death

Links: TIFF site, IMDB

When I think about this movie, two scenes stand out in my mind. In the first scene, the camera follows a Japanese soldier as he walks up a hill and looks down. The camera continues to move upward to show what the soldier sees on the field below: the bodies of Chinese POWs that the Japanese troops have just killed in a mass execution. The second stand-out scene shows a firing squad execution of a Chinese man, softly focused in the background, while a Japanese soldier's face is shown in the foreground. The composition of the frame is phenomenal.

Both scenes depict horrible events in a visually stylish way, which pretty much sums up the movie for me. The film is about the Nanking Massacre, an event that took place just before WWII. The Japanese Army invaded the city in China and committed many atrocities there. For a movie like this, it's hard to separate the heavy subject matter from the artistry of the filmmaking. I don't really want to tackle what the film is about. Many words have been written about the topic and I don't think I have anything to add to that discussion.

What I want to focus on is how the movie addresses the subject matter. First of all, the black and white cinematography is simply stunning. The set design is very realistic, and it really makes you feel like you're there.

So what does it feel like to be there? For the first third or half of the movie, I had a very uneasy feeling because I was anticipating what horrors were going to happen next. Being familiar with the history, I went into the movie expecting to see shocking images. Sure enough, it is very uncomfortable to watch, but actually not as graphic as I expected. The emotional impact comes more from the suggestion of what's going on rather than showing it, and in that way, it's very effective. For example, one scene shows a mass shooting of Chinese POWs, but only in brief glimpses. The film spends much more time showing the reactions of the other inhabitants of the city to the sound of guns they hear in the distance.

For the latter parts of the movie, my sense of uneasiness died down and was replaced by numbness. The movie is so unrelenting in portraying one unpleasant situation after another that after a while you just have to block it out and stop thinking about it. The performances of the characters in the movie seem to become increasingly hopeless and lifeless. Basically, the only thing I felt was lack of feeling, which is what I think the film is going for in depicting the stress and trauma of war.

This is one of those movies that's difficult to watch, but I would like to see it again. I feel like I should have deeper opinions about it, but as I said, all I felt was numb in the end. Maybe on a second viewing, I'll be more able to absorb it. All in all, it was a powerful experience.

4 out of 5

Impressions from TIFF: The Sunshine Boy

Links: TIFF site, IMDB

When I first looked at the schedule for TIFF (seems like so long ago), The Sunshine Boy was one of the first movies that caught my eye. I've always been interested by the subject of autism. I think it's because I like to learn about how different people experience the world in different ways. It's hard to imagine how someone with autism perceives their environment, which is exactly why I find it fascinating.

The film is a documentary which follows the mother (Margrét Dagmar Ericsdóttir) of an autistic boy, as she interviews experts and other parents of autistic children, while trying to find some way of improving her son Keli's life. The film does a good job of mixing educational material with more personal stories so that it doesn't devolve into information overload. It's shot beautifully, especially the scenes showing the family exploring various Icelandic landscapes. As an added bonus, the film uses songs by Sigur Rós as background music throughout; they're one of my favourite bands and I thought the music suited the movie well.

To me, the driving force of the film is Margrét's desire to get to know her son. Keli's autism is quite severe and he is non-verbal, so I believe that the family saw him, understandably, in terms of his disorder, rather than who he was as a person. As she meets other families who have been able to learn to communicate with their autistic kids, she starts to hope for the same thing with Keli, and this hope transfers to the viewer.

Margrét eventually chooses to explore a teaching and communication technique called Rapid Prompting Method (RPM). The method was developed by a woman named Soma Mukhopadhyay to communicate with her own autistic son, and involves the child spelling out words by pointing at a board with letters on it. (It's more complicated than that, but that is the ultimate goal that they work towards.)

This is where my feelings got a little ambiguous. I'm a skeptic at heart, and I began to doubt the authenticity of RPM and the letter board technique. In all the scenes where they showed the kids "speaking" with the letter board, Soma is holding the board. It almost seems as if she is moving the board as much as the kids are pointing to it. How much is Soma leading it or at least anticipating what the kids are going to say? Is she using the film to sell her method by making it look more effective than it really is?

My ambivalence and doubt reached its peak in one scene which could be considered the climax of the movie. We see Keli talking with Soma through the letter board while Margrét watches. The scene is either one of the most moving scenes I've seen in a while, or a somewhat exploitative fabrication, depending on whether I believe that RPM is what it claims to be.

I have been swinging back and forth between these two positions since I saw the film. When I was sitting, watching in the theatre, I had on my skeptical hat and was dismissive of the scene. However, when I got home and lay in bed trying to fall asleep, I thought back to it and changed my mind a little. There certainly is a lot of power in the words that Keli says, which, when coupled with the Sigur Rós song (Ára bátur) playing in the background, brought me close to tears just from thinking about it. (I won't reveal what he says because I think it needs to be experienced by watching the film.)

In the end, though, I don't believe that there's any black and white way of judging a teaching system or technique, and I'm sure that it works better for some people than others. My skepticism doesn't take away from what I think is the main message of the film: that autistic kids are capable of more than their condition would seem to allow on the surface, and that there is hope for reaching them through various techniques. Whether or not I fully buy into RPM in particular, the film is very informative and thought-provoking.

3.5 out of 5

Impressions from TIFF: The Warrior and the Wolf

Links: TIFF site, IMDB

This was a Chinese historical drama. The titular warrior hides out in a village during a break in the battle and meets a woman in the village and they develop a relationship. "The wolf" could metaphorically refer to any number of things and is open to interpretation, so I won't give anything away by discussing it.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this one. While I found the basic plot satisfying, and the visuals nice to look at (especially one special effects shot of a desert sandstorm), there were some issues with the film that prevented me from really getting into it. First, I had a problem with the introduction in the first 20 minutes or so. It attempts to give the background of the war and the warrior's involvement in said wair in a non-linear way. It jumps back and forth in time and I had a hard time following what the current storyline was. I don't have a problem with non-linear storytelling, but to use it to establish the foundation for the rest of the film didn't work, and it affected the experience for the remainder.

The other big problem I had was with the relationship between the warrior and the village woman. It reminded me of the flashback sequence in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (which was my least favourite part of that film). Boy meets girl, boy holds girl captive, boy rapes girl, girl inexplicably comes to love boy. Obviously within that culture and in that historical time period, gender roles were different, but I just couldn't believe in that relationship.

At the end of the film, there was a Q & A session with the director and main cast. Someone asked a question regarding how the two stars of the film (Maggie Q and Joe Odagiri) and the director (Tian Zhuang Zhuang), who all speak a different native language, dealt with the communication barrier on set. The gist of their answers was that it wasn't a barrier, and that the energy and the emotion of the film was understood by all, regardless of language. A nice sentiment, but unfortunately, I don't think this energy translated to the screen. In the end, I think the movie felt like a series of well-done scenes, but didn't come together into a coherent whole.

2.5 out of 5

Impressions from TIFF: The Disappearance of Alice Creed

Links: TIFF site, IMDB

Two men kidnap a girl. That's pretty much all I can say about the plot without giving away the various twists. What I found interesting about this film was that the three main characters are the only people in the whole movie. Also, almost the entire story takes place within 2 rooms
in an apartment, and everything develops from the dialogue and interaction between the characters and the performances, which were great. In that sense, it's kind of like a play. On the other hand, it's shot with some stylish cinematography, which gives it sufficient "movie-ness" that you might not even notice how small the scope is. (Some people in the audience actually chuckled when the credits rolled and they realized that there were only 3 people in it.)

Excellent acting, great script, great style, and some very cool and unexpected twists. My favourite of the festival so far.

4 out of 5