My favoured festival - the Fantasy Filmfestival - started on Wednesday, so the next days I will continue to post about the movies I saw there :-)

Mein Lieblingsfestival - das Fantasy Filmfestival hat wieder begonnen, daher werde ich die nächsten Tage über die Filme schreiben, die ich dort gesehen habe :-)

22. Fantasy Filmfest Frankfurt

29. August 2008

14:45 Uhr FOCUS ASIA:

Mad Detective 6/10 - Sun Taam Hongkong 2007 / 35mm / 89 min / kantonesische OmeU
A schizophrenic detective has the ability to see a persons real personality and is therefore capable of solving the weird cases. Unfortunately, everybody finds it hard to work with him... Cool idea, especially the szenes in which the audience sees the world through his eyes, but after 30 minutes, you basically have seen everything you have to see in this movie...



17:00 Uhr FRESH BLOOD / WETTBEWERB :

Mum & Dad 8/10 - Großbritannien 2008 / digital / 85 min / englische OV
A young girls ends up captured by a hostile family, who torture her at the basement, acting like a perfect family. Very funny, bloody, black British humor :-) Brilliant cast, the movie is nicely done, well edited and written.

19:15 Uhr SELECTED FEATURES :

Dance of the Dead 9/10 - USA 2008 / digital / 95 min / englische OV
Zombies mess up at high school prom night :-) I don't like Zombie movies, I really don't (o.k. besides the Romero one's - but only because of their social implications and observing on society). I don't find the concept thrilling, so they mostly bore me, but this is a funny one, it really is! Great dialogue, almost Tarantino or Rodriguez like, black humor, absurd situations, cute cast - I didn't expect to like it, but I really, really have... :-)

21:30 Uhr FOCUS ASIA :

Like A Dragon 3/10 - Ryû Ga Gotoku: Gekijô-Ban Japan 2007 / 35mm / 110 min / japanische OmeU
Maybe I was already to tired, but I didn't understand that movie. Some people are on their way in Tokyo, fighting, bank robbing, searching for something (?) and it is so hot, that everyone's gonna behave crazy. Ok??? The small image you see, is the best scene in the movie...



30. August 2008

15:00 Uhr SELECTED FEATURES :

100 Feet 4/10 - USA 2008 / 35mm / 105 min / englische OV
I really love Famke Janssen, so she was the reason for me to watch this movie. Sadly, it wasn't worth it. We simply have the next "you as a prisoner are not allowed to move in a radius more than a 100 feet, otherwise you go back to jail" movie. Unfortunately, she killed her husband in this house and his ghost loves to torture him. This movie is as predictable as illogical :-(

17:15 Uhr SELECTED FEATURES :

Waltz With Bashir 10/10 - Israel/Frankreich/Deutschland 2008 / 35mm / 87 min /
hebräische OmdU
This is it - my first 10 out of 10 movie on this festival. That's not surprising regarding all the praising we hear after it's premiere in Cannes. But nevertheless, it's brilliant. A typically Israeli anti war movie with all it's perfect qualities, but for the first time done as an animation movie. Just awesome!



19:15 Uhr FRESH BLOOD /WETTBEWERB :

JCVD 5/10 - Belgien/Luxemburg/Frankreich 2008 / 35mm / 96 min / französisch/englische OmeU
I'm not a big fan of Jean Claude Van Damme and the movie didn't change that, although I have to admit, that it is different: JCVD basically plays himself, becoming captured during a bank robbing and being used by the robbers as the one who has to communicate with the police - so everybody suspects him being the criminal. Nice idea, but sadly, that's not enough...



19:15 Uhr SELECTED FEATURES :

Nothing To Lose 7/10 - TBS / Niederlande 2008 / 35mm / 90 min / niederländische OmeU
This movie deals in a very sensitive and surprising way with the "Stockholm syndrome", when a young girl gets captured by a retarded killer. The best thing is the end of the movie and the fact, that unlike so many other movies before, this one shows, that the truth always has more than one side...



Picture taken from the official Fantasy Filmfestival site, no harms intended.

I have to go back to the movie theater now :-)

My favoured festival - the Fantasy Filmfestival - started on Wednesday, so the next days I will continue to post about the movies I saw there :-)

Mein Lieblingsfestival - das Fantasy Filmfestival hat wieder begonnen, daher werde ich die nächsten Tage über die Filme schreiben, die ich dort gesehen habe :-)

22. Fantasy Filmfest Frankfurt

28. August 2008

14:45 Uhr FOCUS ASIA:

The Rebel - Dòng Máu Anh Hùng 7/10  Vietnam 2007 / 35mm / 103 min /  vietnamesisch/ französische OmeU
Finally movies from Vietnam match the quality and the standards Asian movies provide for a long time now and which are never really reached by American movies :-) In this amazingly beautiful piece of work, a government agent arrests a female rebel and can't stay the way she's got tortured, so that he finally helps her escape from prison. On the run, for the first time he realizes who his people get threated by the French occupying force.



17:00 Uhr SELECTED FEATURES:

XII  4/10 USA 2008 / digital / 110 min / englische OV
I didn't really expected much from this movie, it was announced as a conventional slasher movie and the only reason for me to watch it, was the appearance of Buffy/Angels Mercedes McNabb as the heroine's close friend. The movie was so predictable, with completely uninteresting characters - especially the female main character was such a good girl, so boring and whiny, that it was really hard to watch. But Mercedes made it worth as a blond, egoistic, but finally smart & tough woman. She talks differently and seeing her shooting in the bad guy's head was just amazing. Of course, she was only the "heroine's best friend", so it was clear, that at the end, she wouldn't made it, but until then, she was fun to watch :-)



21:30 Uhr SELECTED FEATURES :

Awake 7/10  USA 2007 / 35mm / 84 min / englische OV

I'm so tired of this constant problems with livejournal and html, that I'm seriously thinking of quitting this journal. I'm so fucking tired of it! It needed more than 2 hours to write this article because of the constantly not working source code, which is is proves as a valid code by W3C! I'm tired... And now, just using the view, it constantly deletes my last lines.... Liking horror movies doesn't mean I like to have a Livejournal with an artificial intelligence :-)))

Awake has lots of beautiful people - Hayden Christensen, Jessica Alba, Lena Olin - with quite some problems and behind the good looking surface, everything is different. It is therefore nice to watch, although Hayden proves another time, that he is better with posing than with acting. But that's good enough for this movie and I enjoyed watching it. They didn't focus so much on the fact, that in spite the anesthesia he can feel everything, but more on the things he learned about the people around him.

Picture taken from the official Fantasy Filmfestival site

My favoured festival - the Fantasy Filmfestival - started last night, so the next days I will continue to post about the movies I saw there :-)

Mein Lieblingsfestival - das Fantasy Filmfestival hat wieder begonnen, daher werde ich die nächsten Tage über die Filme schreiben, die ich dort gesehen habe :-)

22. Fantasy Filmfest Frankfurt

27. August 2008

20:30 Uhr OPENING NIGHT:

Eden Lake:
Großbritannien 2008 / 35mm / 91 min / englische OV
In this movie a really naive young couple want to spend a good time at some deserted lake, but they ran in a group of teenagers and violence starts spreading between this to groups until a the very bad and bloody ending...
This movie has a lot of violence, especially from and against teenagers, but besides that, it's not very interesting: the couple isn't always likable and a lot of things just happened, because they simply behave naive or don't think it through. So it's hard to follow the couple decisions and more and more the movie becomes unrealistic. You really start wondering, how often you run into people, you desperately try to avoid in a desert place like the woods around the seas, which are introduced ad huge and wild, but at the very long show down, they suddenly seem to be as small as a park...



22:30 Uhr SELECTED FEATURES

Shivers:
Eskalofrío Spanien 2008 / 35mm / 91 min / spanische OmeU

A typically Spanish horror movie: A teenager with allergic reactions against the sun moves with his mom to a godforsaken part of Spain, a little town in a canyon, with therefore very few sunlight. A couple of murders take place and of course, everyone suspects the new citizens. Claustrophobic, but conventional and a little to predictable

Picture taken from the official Fantasy Filmfestival site