A wife wins her unwitting freedom in the form of a camera before she finds herself behind the limits of her marriage. A husband refuses to look beyond himself, to see that the siren song no longer calls him. A marriage continues to spawn new lives, to add its frailty and its weight, its babies and its abuse into this world. Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments is this brand of simple story, though a curious film. This is not to say the story is simply redundant or (heavens, no) boring, but, as you might guess, its curiosity refreshes the “period piece slash woman’s picture” frame that marketing (in a backwards-thinking move) will do its best to make appealing—thus subverting that the film’s evident wonder with light (and its negative) balloons its niggling tendencies into something advanced and graceful. Troell moulds what some may see as clichés away from strictures by—it’s simple, yes—observing the familiar and attending to how it forms, or how it can form, the new.
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The Carpetbagger has posted the nine semi-finalists for the Best Foreign Film Oscar Nomination. Comparing this list to the list of 67 films submitted for consideration by their countries of origin, the only real notable omission I can spot is Italy’s Gomorrah; I’ve sen some bloggy chatter already lamenting the exclusion of Let the Right One In, but that film was passed over for submission by its home country of Sweden in favor of Everlasting Moments (which did make the shortlist). The full list, with links to the films we’ve covered (as you’ll see, we have a lot of catching up to do), after the jump.
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After months and months of anticipation, encompassing countless breathless reviews, surprise festival accolades, and angry warnings from supporters of the Swedish vampire film that I’d better stop dismissing it as “The Swedish Vampire Film”, there was probably no way in frozen-over Scandinavian hell that Let the Right One In could have lived up to the hype. So––sorry––but I don’t think it’s a masterpiece. That said, I find its widespread popularity to be extremely encouraging. Aside from its lovely cinematography and sensitive child-actor performances, Right One’s real selling point is the humanist gild it lays on its genre lilly. Maybe this is why I’m less than blown-away by it––it’s hardly the first film I’ve seen this week which uses basic genre tropes to delve deeper into everyday human horrors––but if this a new trend, I’ll have more, please.
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