Hide your drugs in an elephant’s ass

{mosimage}A poor elephant
escaped from a circus and finds itself lost in an alienated landscape in the
middle of nowhere in the mountains of Norway. This could be a perfect
introductory line for a new animation movie of Disney or Pixar… or not? Imagine
that you start to add to the plot features such as that the elephant is a
junkie, has kilograms of cocaine inside his huge ass, and is followed without
compassion by mobsters and even the Lappish mafia on two wheels!

 
 

 

{sidebar id=5}The name of this
eccentric product is Free Jimmy, and was born from the mind of the
Norwegian director Christopher Nielsen, who brings the spirit of his
tacky underground comics to the big screen. With Free Jimmy we are watching to probably, the most non-political correct animation movie of the
history. The characters have no problem at all along the action to use swear
words, have sex or consume drugs. So I suppose that at this stage, there is no
need to warn that this is not the classic animation movie to watch with your
little children, but more like gathering with some friends, drink some beers
and smoke some…cigarettes, enjoying the adventures of the gangs of freaks that
will wander the screen.

 Technically, the animation is excellent, and the irony
and winks to the spectators (the appearance of the Lappish bikers must be especially
appealing to the Finnish audience particularly, and to the Scandinavian ones in
general) reveal the hard work to create a good script. In any case, there is
also time for the sentimental side, especially in the parts where our poor
Jimmy finds the help of the friendly moose during the runaway.

The cast was
joined by Hollywood super star Woody Harrelson
(that is not going through his career’s peak lately) as the voice of Roy Arnie,
the “animal lover” whose dream is to own a circus some day in the future.

This is the first
animation movie totally created in Norway, and shows one more that the
European animation market is not only going through healthy, but also
innovative times. As negative aspects, I have to pinpoint that is not very
long, 86 minutes, and that I could not avoid to have a feeling of pity for poor
Jimmy all over the film. Nielsen has created the closest equivalent to Trainspotting
in the animation scene nowadays, and it is a crazy journey, as addictive as all
the dope that huge Jimmy carries, so do not better miss it!

The perfect son in law

{mosimage}Mikko Leppilampi looks relaxed and confident
when we enter the studio where his future new project is being shot: 8
Days to Premiere. Like a person who is satisfied with his own life. Nevertheless
he is one of the hottest names in Finland nowadays. Not only for
being considered one of the best young and talented actors, but also for his
obvious charisma for the big masses. Being the host of Eurovision festival has elevated
him into an international status. And apart from all that, he is as handsome as
you can get!


I suppose everybody has been asking you in
the past few days about the experience of hosting Eurovision.

Yes, actually everybody has been asking but
you are the first one I am answering to… because after that I started to shoot
this film 8 Days to Premiere straight away. The final of Eurovision Song
Contest was on Saturday night and on Monday morning at 8 o’clock I was shooting.


So no holidays at all after Eurovision…

No, but it is all right, because this is
like a holiday. Actually I enjoy working at this. It was a very good experience;
the entire week when all the delegations were in Helsinki was a lot of fun, although we were
working very long days, many hours. The audience was changing and I was all the
time in interviews, pictures, etc. It was very tiring but everybody knew that
it was just that week, so we tried to enjoy it.


Were you nervous hosting an event that was
broadcasted live worldwide?

No, I was more kind of excited. When you
have an audience of 15-20 people that you know, you are nervous, but in things
like that, with thousands of people inside the arena and then millions on TV,
you do not even get that. I felt I was just making a TV show and performing for
the audience in the arena as good as possible. After that everything has been
nice. I think I was lucky I went straight away to work. Probably if I had had
one or two weeks off, I had been thinking more about it, or “missing it”.


You started to be really popular in Finland after
appearing in the film Helmiä ja Sikoja, in 2003. How was your life
before that?

I was always doing sports, more than arts. I
would say. I have always been a “physical” person. I was playing ice hockey
almost professionally. I quit when I was 20 because I realized I did not want
to be a player. I spent 2 years in Canada in a boarding school and I
played in school teams. During the years there I realized I wanted to be an
actor.


Did you like it there in Canada?

I loved it. I took part of drama courses and
in plays, and then after I got back and I did military service, supposedly I
was going back to Canada to study cinema production but then I applied in
Finland for the theater academy and then I got it and I stayed. That was pretty
much it. This was my dream and I never thought that it happened, but it did.


Do you feel  that everything was going
very fast? Helmiä ja Sikoja was released only four years ago.

I think my life’s pace has been very fast
all the time. I was going from one hobby to another, kind of “I am going to try
that…and then I am going to try that other thing”. I was skating and
snowboarding also, then playing hockey, playing drums (that was the musical
part of my youth). When I got inside theater school I realized this was really
my thing. Then after that everything has gone pretty fast, but that was what I
was hoping to be like. It is just the way it goes, so it does not feel so bad.
My work is more public than some other work from my theater colleagues, who
work in 3 plays at the same time, but they do not write on newspapers about
them, so people don’t know about them so much.


But you do not have the feeling of being too
busy?

That was I was seeking for. I definitely
want to keep both music and acting for the rest of my life. I have been very
lucky.


Did it have something to do the fact that
your father was a singer too?

Well, we never had the question whether it was
all right to become an artist or not. It was more like nobody was pushing me. I
never felt pressured; it was more that I had to find myself, and realized what
I wanted to do.

{mosimage}
If somebody would offer you to participate
in Eurovision in the future, as the singer representing Finland, would
you accept?

It is very hard for me to comment on that. It
depends on the people who vote about the one who deserves to go there. I am
not even thinking about it now. 


You appeared in Paha Maa and you
appeared in a short  cameo in Valkoinen
Kaupunki. How is your relation with director Aku Louhimies?

The cameo was made before Paha Maa.
Valkoinen Kaupunki at the beginning was not made to be a movie, it was made to
be a TV series called Irtiottoja. So
it was just a cut from that material the taxi driver’s character. I was just
lucky enough to be in one of the clips they put in the movie. Aku kind of tried
me out, to see if I was good enough for the role in Paha Maa. I felt it
was a bit like a test.


What can people expect from this new
project, 8 Days to Premiere, from director Perttu Leppä?

It is probably the most challenging role
that I have ever done. It involves making 3 most known love scenes in the
theater history, they are from Romeo and Juliet, so to be able to act
like that, in Shakespearian language… it was quite challenging, and then with Laura
Birn is very easy to work, she is very talented. The director writes his
own movies himself, and then they direct them and cast them himself. It is
going to be romantic and funny. When the audience is watching, they won’t be
sure if they are watching a scene from Romeo and Juliet or from 8 Days
to Premiere.

The plot in 8 Days to Premiere
reminds me a bit of this other production, Shakespeare in Love

Do not tell that to Perttu! He would not
like that comment much…

Children of Men

{mosimage}Alfonso
Cuarón belongs to
the new generation of Mexican directors that keep conquering the Hollywood cinema industry, at the same level than those other two greatest representatives of this new Mexican wave: Guillermo del Toro and
Alejando González Iñárritu.

Iremember watching three years ago his film Y Tu Mama También (2002) at my
place, together  with my two Mexican
flatmates that I had at that time, and I faced that film in the same way that I
was facing days ago Children of Men, just with no particular hope of
finding anything special. In both cases Cuarón´s movies really got me by
surprise. I liked a
lot Y Tu Mama También. I considered that the director had been able to
create a very personal new style of “road movie”. This new film has still many
features of road movie as well, being the feeling in a certain way similar to
years ago. Cuarón achieves one of the freshest science fiction movies of the
last years.

The film is
based on the book The Children of Men by P.D. James, and brings
us into the year 2027, in a violent city of London that reflects the chaos and lost of
hope of all the humankind. Immigration is brutally fought back by a
semi-totalitarian government and meanwhile, the youngest man on earth has died
at the age of 18, and the women are not able to get pregnant anymore. People
live immersed in an existence with no hope, since no more children run in the
parks and the streets, but then a miracle happens when suddenly a new baby is
going to be born in this brave new world.

Clive
Owen finds a role
just made tailor-sized for him. After his shocking appearance as
“taking-no-shit  hero” in Sin City,
this time the character has more human features, more weaknesses that make them
at the same time closer to the spectator. Julianne Moore and Michael
Caine have surprisingly small roles, but decisive to catch the audience
into the plot. Caine, same than the good wines, just seem to be better and more
adorable actor with the past of time, and as the old hippie smoker Jasper, he
looks superb.

There is no
space here for a future time imagined full of hyper-intelligent robots or other
overwhelming special effects. The action is very natural all over the film, and
that is one of the features that shock the viewer: its realism. A couple of
scenes like the chase between the motorbike and the car in the woods, or the
birth of Kee's baby in a filthy room will be recorded inside you memory for a
long time.

Cuarón is
able to show that he does not need elves and orcs to create an amazing trip for
his actors. He just need to surrender them by all the miseries of the humankind
(where to start: war, terrorism, egoism, intolerance search of power, racism…)
to make us feel uneasy facing the thought that maybe this imaginary future
could not be so far from a real one in a couple of decades…

Undoubtedly,
one of the nicest surprises of this year.

Children of Men

Director:
Alfonso Cuarón

Cast:  Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Michael Caine, Claire-Hope Ashitey

Rating: 5 

Fur

{mosimage}Diane Arbus, (born Diane Nemerov), was a photographer married with Allan
Arbus (and later divorced), that became famous for her personal style of
portraying “freaks”, those people living apart from the normal American
post-second world war society.

Fur: An imaginary portrait of Diane Arbus is
based on the book by Patricia Bosworth, and shows us once more how good
actress Nicole Kidman can be. A character totally made for the Australian red
haired talent, who masters like nobody else in Hollywood the art of releasing sensuality
behind a faked shyness. Together with her, the “recovered” Robert Downey Jr who
is living a second golden era with his appearance in this or other recent
titles like Zodiac.

The action is
centered in a particular stage of Diane’s life, when she starts to open her
eyes to the world and open her body to the forbidden side of sensuality that
always attracted her. Still married, she is giving the first steps into freedom
and emancipation. So for those who are expecting a detailed biography of the
photographer, better look for other sources. The film is centered basically in
the relation between the ambiguous two main roles, Diane and Mr. Sweeney, but Ty
Burrell, in the role of Diane’s husband, is a perfect third wheel for
conducting the action.

The collection of
freaks show their human side in a film subtly intended to break the borders of
discrimination and alienation in the world. Many will not understand the movie
and will get bored, but for others, me included, director Steven ShainbergSecretary) achieves a different and
entertaining film.
(who already shocked many conservative minds with his previous little essay
about love and sadomasochism)

Exploitation in the grindhouse

{mosimage}

Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino present a double feature of sex, violence, sleazy characters, zombies, freaks and bizarre plots. Death Proof and Planet Terror now on dvd.

Once again Quentin Tarantino digs deep into American cinema subculture revisiting exploitation films; a genre of cheap production and prurient images. These films broke cinematic taboos, including explicit sex and nudity, explosions and destruction, drug and weird perverse plots. They were most popular in the 70s and were shown in so-called grindhouses, theatres offering a non-stop programme, which consisted of a double feature or double bill, a phenomenon in which theatre managers would exhibit two films for the price of one.

Along with long time friend Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, From Dusk Till Dawn), Tarantino came up with the idea of filming a double feature like the ones grindhouses used to show. The result is Grindhouse, a film consisting of two separate feature film segments: Planet Horror, directed by Rodriguez, and Death Proof, by Tarantino. The first is a zombie tale and the latter, the story of a crazed man, played by Kurt Russell, who murders young women with his “death proof” stunt car.

Like in the traditional double bill, each feature is preceded by fake trailers for other exploitation films and coming attractions. One of those trailers, Werewolf Women of the SS, is directed by Rob Zombie and features Nicolas Cage as Fu Manchu.

The film opened in April in the United States and it got positive reviews, although it performed poorly at the box office. However, for the rest of the world, Grindhouse has been split into two different movies: Death Proof, which premiers on 1 June and Planet Terror, which will arrive a little bit later on 20 July. In the international version, the features will have a different and extended cut. It is also possible that the fake trailers will be different as well. The extended version of Death Proof will be shown for the first time at the Cannes Film Festival.

The producers and Tarantino explained that the movie was cut in two because most non-English speaking countries would not understand the double feature tradition. However, many fans see it as a way of being forced to pay twice for what was originally conceived as a single film.

—-

Grindhouse: Death Proof
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Cast: Kurt Russell, Rosario Dawson, Vanessa Ferlito, Danny Trejo and Timothy V. Murphy
Premiere: 1 June

Cinema bathed by the midnight sunlight

Sodankylä is the lucky place where the Midnight Sun Film Festival is held. The 22nd festival once again presents a great selection of films and filmmakers and is perhaps the best of its kind in the country. Founded in 1986, the well-known Finnish filmmakers Aki and Mika Kaurismäki had an important role in its development and still help the municipality of Sodankylä to make the project possible. And over the years the organizers have definitely been able to create a unique experience for cinema lovers that many have named as the “spirit of Sodankylä”.

The location, so close to nature, is perfect for relaxing and enjoying all the hours of light, far from the stress of other cinema festivals, which are organised in the heart of big cities. The atmosphere is informal and the cinema on offer huge; especially considering that the films are screened almost 24 hours a day during the five days of the festival. If the weather is fine, tens of thousands of visitors will pitch their tents in the festival area to enjoy this mix of exceptional art and nature.

These special features are complemented by the high quality of the programme and the special guests that visit the festival every year. On this occasion, we will have names such as Iranian Abbas Kiarostami; Swiss filmmaker Claude Goretta (famous for films such as The Lacemaker); the Italian veteran director Vittorio De Seta; Canadian Michel Brault; and Giuseppe Bertolucci, "the younger brother" of Bernardo.

So if you were planning to spend some relaxing days in Finnish Lapland, and you are a true lover of good cinema, you must not miss this one!

 

Midnight Film Festival will take place in the village of Sodankylä from the 13-17 June 2007.

 

{mosimage}Abbas Kiarostami

Born in Iran in 1940, he is one of the most important directors in his country. In his films there is always the search for the human touch and observation of the small details of reality. He has received many different international awards such as the Golden Palm in Cannes in 1997.

Selected Films:

Close-Up (1990)

Life, and Nothing More… (1992)

Though the Olive Trees (1994)

The taste of Cherry (1997)

ABC Africa (2001)

 

{mosimage}Claude Goretta

Goretta has been one of the most important Swiss directors during the last few decades and has also worked as a TV producer. He has made most of his feature films in France, and co-directed his first work Nice Time (1957) with Alain Tanner. He was born in Geneva in 1929.

Films:

La dentellière (The Lacemaker, 1977)

La Provinciale (The Provincial, 1980)

Orfeo (1985)

L`Ombre (The Shadow, 1991)

 

—-

Midnight Sun Film Festival

13 – 17 June

Sodankylä

The spider is back

Maybe many of you did not know that before this original appearance, Stan Lee dismissed the design for Spider-man that Jack Kirby initially drew. In this first design, that was never published, Spider-man was heavier and with more muscles, and instead of acquiring his powers because of the radiation, he could get his amazing powers carrying a ring. Ditko's ideas prevailed.

Marvel did not believe in the success of the new hero, and the first adventures were published in a magazine that was going to be imminently closed. In August 1962 Spider-man's first adventures were published in the magazine Amazing Fantasy #15. More issues of the magazine were published and the readers quickly identified with the new hero and asked for more. The result: the first issue of The Amazing Spider-Man was published in March 1963. The rest is comic history.

{mosimage}The first appearances of Spider-man in films date back in the 60s and have nothing to do with the enormous budgets of the Sam Raimi's movies. The first adaptation is an amateur movie directed and performed by Donald F. Glut done in 1963 in which Spiderman fights Dr. Lightning. Three years later, the first commercial Spider-man was done in Turkey (Örümcek adam, 1966). More popular were the tv movies and series in the end of the 70s.

Thanks to Sam Raimi the series went big in 2002. It was the first film of what it is expected to be a series of six. And what can the spectator expect in this third Spider-man film: Well, amazing new enemies such as Sandman and Venom, the extreme beauty of Kirsten Dunst as the red-haired Mary Jane, and overall the excitement of watching Spider-man dressed in a black costume fighting against his most powerful enemy: his dark side.

Commander Zero

Around the streets of Manugua, Edén Pastora carries a gun while driving a car brought from Mexico and speaks to the camera. It is the first sequence of the documentary Edén Pastora – Commander Zero (Eden Pastora – Komentaja Nolla). The film portrays one of the most intriguing characters of the revolution in Nicaragua and follows him in the municipal elections for mayor of Manuagua in 2006.

The documentary was made by Spanish filmmaker Álvaro Pardo, who has been living and working in Finland since 1979 when he decided to moved from Madrid to study cinema at the School of Motion Picture, Television and Production Design in Helsinki. “I didn't mean to stay this long in Finland. I was just a visiting student, trying to learn editing and cinema,” he remembers, “but then I started working, I got married and well, I'm still here.”

 

Why did you decide to make a documentary about Edén Pastora?

The idea came to my mind when I read an article that said that Edén Pastora was selling all his possessions because he didn't have any money to live. I was shocked because he had been such a great personality. We all also know that all the Sandinsta leaders are millionaires now, so I wanted to know why he was so poor.

How is possible that he didn't have the money?

He was considered a traitor, and a CIA agent, but he was only a guy who disagreed with the Sandinista regime. He received money from the CIA just to do something in which he believed, like he could have taken the money from any other source. He didn't have anything to do with the counter-revolution in Honduras.

{mosimage}Was it easy to get in touch with Edén?

Actually, it was. I got lucky. I didn't know much about Nicaragua and I didn't know anybody there. I contacted the author of an article I read that told good things about Edén. I contacted the journalist and he got me in touch with Edén. When I arrived there, Edén was in Mexico to get a car and nobody knew when he was coming back. After five or six days, he appeared. He's always very keen to be interviewed and I started the pre-production.

How was the filming?

It got a bit complicated because Edén never tells what he's planning to do the next day. It's a custom from his guerrilla days. Many people hate him there and would like to see him dead. I made two trips to Nicaragua. The first lasted around twenty days and then he decided to run for major, so I came back for another twenty days.

Is Managua a dangerous place?

Yes, it is. There's a lot of poverty and people have nothing to lose. Anything you have is more than they have.

What is your opinion about Edén now that you spent such a long time with him?

I always thought that many things he said in media were not true, but after spending time with him, everything he says is true. He is very optimistic and charismatic. One tends to like him so much that one is willing to do anything for him. On a bigger scale one might be able to fight and die for him.

Edén Pastora – Commander Zero will be show on YLE 2 on 8th May 2200

A film (finally) exposed

Louhimies is the most acclaimed director inside Finnish borders in recent times and, with only five films, he has achieved a great reputation and, more importantly, captured a personal style in each one of his films. Having received the Jussi award two consecutive years, he is also a controversial character, not only because of the plots of the films, but also concerning issues in the post-making, which contrasts with his calm attitude. However, it seems that internationally, the Kaurismäki brothers are still unreachable when referring to exporting Finnish films abroad.

Riisuttu Mies will surely create a great deal of discussion among the most conservative sectors of the Finnish population. Nevertheless, the topic is quite controversial, since throughout the movie we follow a gang of peculiar priests, male and female, that split their thoughts between the love for God and the love for the bottle, the power and frantic sex – not exactly the kind of movie that many religious people would feel comfortable watching.

{mosimage}Many can argue that Louhimies pushes their stories to limits that have more to do with fantasy than with the reality of Finnish society, but it is certain that his acid critic always hides some parts of truth. The director is obsessed over showing us the darker side of Finnish society that goes further than lakes, sauna and Lapland. And surely he achieves it with his raw style.

In the main roles we find a group of old collaborators in his previous movies: Samuli Edelmann as the fatty childish priest aspiring to bishop –who is a director and musician himself, having released Rock and Roll Never Dies some months ago, Matleena Kuusniemi in the role of his calculative wife and Laura Malmivaara (who also happens to be the wife of the director) as the hippie young priest, Eve's apple. For those of you who live in or visit Turku, the locations of the churches may be familiar.

With Riisuttu Mies, some themes are repeated by the obsessions of Louhimies, such as the difficulties in love relations, the infidelity and the flexibility of moral values. You can like his visions of society or not, but surely it is worthy to give it a try and watch it.

Goya’s Ghosts

Milos Forman’s new film, Goya´s Ghosts, offers a biography (and it seems that the polemic Czech director never gets tired of the genre) of one of the most important painters in all history, the genuine and genial Goya, interpreted by Stellan Skarsgård. But it must be said, that the appeal of a new Goya´s biography is used in this case as a mere excuse for representing a critical vision of Spain during that twisted time of darkness and light. Goya´s role gets quickly eclipsed by another superb performance by Javier Bardem, who is able to provoke, equally, love and hate in the eyes of the spectator. Goya´s artwork has a secondary role in the plot, since Forman is more obsessed with showing the fight between the reason of the French Illustration and the madness of religious fanaticism, with the obsolete role of a numb monarchy in the middle. And he certainly achieves it.

On the other hand, it is a pity that such an interesting figure as Goya himself does not get more importance in a film whose title points directly to him. Maybe, we will have to wait until Forman decides to make a film about the Spanish Inquisition (or a new biography of its leader, Torquemada) to get an accurate description of the genial painter from Aragon.

Milos Forman´s film passes the test of the Spanish Inquisition, but somebody should teach him some more lessons of history: regarding how the Spanish citizens were able to fight the French oppressor without such a huge help from the British, as he wants us to believe on screen.

He-Men go to war

Take 300: a mixture of one car commercial/remake director, one sexy ‘graphic novel’ (from the creator of Sin City), spiced up with a few speeches about freedom, and served lukewarm with IMAX-tailored cinematography. The result: a product that even the creators refer to as the ‘300 experience’ rather than calling it a film.

Director Zack Snyder (of Dawn of the Dead-remake fame) remakes Gladiator and Sin City at the same time and casts snarling action figure Gerard Butler as the take-no-shit Leonidas, the king of the Spartans and patron of chiselled abs. And when Snyder expands Frank Miller’s original comic book by adding a political intrigue sub-plot, where limp-wristed liberals do their worst to hinder the brave Spartans from beating the hell out of a force of million Persians lead by the enigmatic Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), it’s hard not to start seeing this as a republican wargasm film. But maybe drawing such conclusions from this film are uncalled for, since 300 is pure entertainment, which does not concern itself with depth.

After such a my critical onslaught, it has to be said that 300 is nonetheless a fast-paced yarn and a stunning visually: every shot is a piece of art, sometimes directly lifted from Miller’s source work and the battle scenes are, at their best, breathtaking. Still, it’s hard to care for any of the two-dimensional characters and the end result is ultimately unsatisfying: this is combat pornography, where you can fast forward the boring bits and watch spears pierce flesh and blood-spattered man-flesh gleam. Which makes watching 300 like watching somebody play a game on a super-charged game console rather than sitting at the cinema.

…And justice for all

Alfred
Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Federico Fellini, Robert Altman and Cecil B.
DeMille are some of the film directors who never won the Best Director Academy
Award, and it seemed Martin Scorsese was to follow that black list after five nominations.
All of his generation mates had won the award: Coppola, Lucas, and Spielberg,
but in February Scorsese finally joined the club and was rewarded for his film The Departed.

The award
now feels more like an honorary Oscar before it is too late. Even though the
film is an outstanding effort, it pales into insignificance when compared to Scorsese’s
masterpieces, such as Raging Bull,
which is now being rerun in selected theatres across Finland.

Raging Bull (or Kuin
Raivo Härkä in Finnish) is a tragic biopic based on the life of the harsh
obsessive middle-weight boxing champion Jake LaMotta. The film is popular for Robert
De Niro’s extreme interpretation. He gained more than 25 kilos to play LaMotta
in his declining days in the '60s and he trained as a boxer entering three
matches in Brooklyn, winning two of them. It was actually De Niro who convinced
Scorsese to make the movie.

In spite of
his initial lack of interest, Scorsese took the movie to his own style. He
portrayed life in the Italian ghetto in New York, adding many elements of first
generation Italian-American subculture.

The drama
and the real punishment of LaMotta were outside the ring and his alienation
from his family and brother. Nevertheless, Scorsese put great effort into the
fighting scenes. The sequences were rigorously choreographed beforehand and
planned frame by frame in the storyboard.

The black
and white cinematography by Michael Chapman gives the film a tone that resembles
the boxing films from the 1940s and '50s, and it seems timeless. With the passage
of time, the praise for Raging Bull
has grown and it is now seen as a great American movie, plus one of Scorsese’s
best. In 1986, Aki Kaurismäki paid homage in his hilarious short film Rocky VI.

Raging Bull was the first Best Director nomination for
Martin Scorsese, which was one of eight nominations including Best Picture, and
won Robert De Niro a Best Actor award and Thelma Schoonmaker an award for Best
Film Editing. More than 25 years later, thanks to The Departed, Martin Scorsese is awarded with his well deserved
Academy Award.

The camera keeps on rolling

Born in
Lithuania, but exiled to America in 1949 after spending some time in a
displaced persons camp, the life of Jonas Mekas is all about films. He is
considered the godfather of avant-garde and experimental filmmaking and he was
one of the founders of Film Culture
magazine, the American response to Cahiers
Du Cinema. In the 60s and 70s, he was one of the top names of the art world
as he worked and filmed with artists such
Andy Warhol, Salvador Dalí Allen Ginsberg and John Lennon.

Jonas Mekas
remembers that he decided to film his own movies after watching The Search (Fred Zinnemann, 1948), a
film about displaced persons made after the war. “I saw it with my brother and
we got very angry how little understanding of the real situation there was in
this film, about what it means to be displaced”. After that, Mekas bought a
camera and has been filming ever since.

Some of his
most representative films were showed in Tampere, where he was the guest of
honour. In his short films, he portrays people and places or he shows bits of
life, like a diary. He enjoys presenting the happy moments of life. He often
films himself and others dancing and celebrating: “I leave the depressed
moments for the modern artist”, he said during his visit to Finland.

There is no
better expression of this diary form than his current project: 365. Every day during 2007, Jonas Mekas
will release one short film that will be available to download from his
website. These are short films that include old and new material. He takes his
camera everywhere: “Some footage from Tampere might appear in 365 this month or the next one”.

Preserving
film was another duty for Jonas Mekas: in 1970, he was one of the co-founders
of the Anthology Film Archives in New York, a non-profit organization devoted
to the preservation and exhibition of experimental film. However, prefers to
look ahead than look back: “With the new technologies, the language of cinema
gets richer. Different forms are developed. Everything is changing and that is
beautiful!” he claims. The Lithuanian filmmaker understands cinema as a
constant evolution, in which current films cannot be understood without the
previous ones.

As 365 shows, Jonas Mekas is neither afraid
of that evolution nor of new technologies. Indeed, he welcomes the new forms of
expression without fear and does not plan to stop filming. As he says, “perhaps
after 365, the next project will be the 1001 nights”.

The 365 project and other films by Jonas
Mekas can be downloaded from www.jonasmekas.com

Casino Royale

Casino
Royale is based on
the  novel of the same name by the father
of Bond, Ian Fleming, and presents the first adventure of Bond just
after getting the status of 007: an agent with a license to kill. It combines
the best of the old Bond films with the use of the new technologies.

Daniel Craig
is convincing as the new Bond: virile, seductive, ironic and with a powerful
gaze not seen since Sean Connery himself. The “Bond girls”, Eva Green
and Caterina Murino, are sensual and wild; the action is brilliant; the
fights are vibrant; the baddies are perfect in their roles; Judi Dench
is superb as “M”; and the locations are astonishing.

The critics
loved the film and the audience loved Craig (especially the women), so why did
I not feel totally satisfied after watching the movie? Maybe I have become too
conservative or maybe I have started to get a bit tired of this continuous race
to show in the movies how the latest technologies are always available for
saving the world. Maybe since the last Mission:
Impossible trilogy, I have started to feel bored of so many games with
mobile phones, and so many satellites locating the “seed of the devil” in some
remote island in the middle of Pacific. I feel annoyed with this
“ultra-technological saturation” every time I try to watch a spy movie.

Nevertheless,
I liked the movie a lot. It is sometimes very explicit, even raw (like in James
Bond’s torture scene, which you can feel directly in your own testicles) but
you cannot deny that the film’s rhythm absorbs you for its 144 minutes.

Summer of ’84

{mosimage}Kid is a
confused girl trying to find her place in this world, between being Swedish and
Finnish, and being a child and an adult. Not knowing where she belongs, she
desperately wants to be loved by her mom, but at the same time she is ashamed
of her. Kid is almost a teen and her sexuality is starting to awaken, which
makes things even more complicated for her. The tension between Kid and her
mother rises so high that it almost destroys everything.

In many
ways Aavan Meren Tuolla Puolen is a
nostalgic and bright movie paying regard to the fact that it is director Nanna
Huolman’s first feature length movie, plus the young actors’ first movie. In
addition to good storytelling, the acting is excellent, especially the young
talent Mia Saarinen, who performs very well. The scenery is beautiful with
thousands of Finnish lakes and endless forests, and the Art Director made a big
effort to find artefacts from the ‘80s. A great film that reflects exactly how
the Finnish summer of 1984 was!