Predators, the latest entry in the saga started by John McTiernan’s Predator in 1987 is clearly the result of the collaboration between its producer, Robert Rodriguez, and its director, Nimród Antal. Started as Rodriguez’s project 15 years ago, Predator owes him the main story and a great deal of the characters; but, for those who have seen Antal’s earlier films, Antal’s involvement is quite noticeable.
In the fourth and, apparently, the last installment of the Shrek series, the main character feels he isn’t the same ogre as always; eventually, he misses the days when he was alone and free. It’s ironic how the audiences felt with each sequel the same way about him and his appearance in the first installment, back in 2001.
Alain Resnais has never considered himself to be an auteur. Faithful to an ancient belief, popular during the thirties in Hollywood cinema, that considered the scriptwriter the auteur of a film, he always paid a great deal of attention to the sources of his films.
It’s more of a stereotype that directors usually reinvent themselves all the time: they usually do it because they make films for a certain audience, and audiences aren’t likely to tolerate variations of the same film; hence, you have directors shifting genres, or directors that used to shoot dramas, shooting comedies, or the other way around, significantly transforming their cinematic visions over the years.
After publishing two novels (The Life and Deeds of Elijah and Theodosius the Small) and signing the scripts for many Romanian films in the pas few years, Razvan Radulescu makes his debut as a director, together with Melissa by Raffi, with the long feature First of all, Felicia.
Certainly, in this year’s competition there were plenty of interesting directors, but lesser overall impressive films. Not they were bad: just two or three of them seemed embarrassing: Devil’s Town for sure, Bel age, arguably. Mostly, there were films made for different kind of audiences, directed idiosyncratic by promising new names of European cinema (and not only European, if we think about Anocha Suwichakornpong)...
Somehow, Aurora was a bit too strong, too ambiguous, and too dark to let you watch another film for the next 24 hours. When compared to it, Rdau Muntean’s fourth film, Tuesday, after Christmas, feels less intense and less challenging, even if there is word of mouth that it’s Muntean best film in years. It may be so: nothing about Tuesday, after Christmas feels useless, added for the hell of it; on the contrary, when the final scene fades, you have the feeling that it can’t be just that.
On the night of Aurora’s premiere at Cluj, Cristi Puiu excused himself for coming at his first Romanian screening dressed casual; there is a very popular joke about it since then, which cleverly assumes that what Puiu should have worn wasn’t a tuxedo, but the clothes he wears most of the time as Viorel, the main character in his third film, Aurora.
It’s been three days since the first screenings at the Transilvania International Film Festival (TIFF) and the program looks rather balanced: for each film shown in the official competition, there is somewhere another screening that would likely make you forget about the twelve fresh films competing for the Transilvania Trophy. Four of the twelve were already screened: Nothing Personal, A Rational Solution, R and Reverse.
Among the many spectacular gestures of Andy Warhol, his theatrical visions of rock’n’roll are less documented. As the actual manager of The Velvet Underground, he had the unusual (back then, at least) idea to project images over the performances of Lou Reed and John Cale’s band. The performers were becoming merely misty shapes; what was left was the mix of images and music.
