SIFF Day 9 (The Cloud, Still Alive: A Film About Krzysztof Kieslowski)

Now that beer-retard has basically dared me to finish my SIFF blog, I pretty much have to don’t I? This day got off to a great start with the German film The Cloud, a big budget disaster movie about a nuclear accident combined with a teen love story. I loved the first half of this movie, the director Gregor Schnitzler really does great things with very little. He gets the character interest going really quickly, and when the event occurs you really get a taste for the chaos. No big effects, nothing but people going absolutely bonkers trying to get the fuck out of dodge. He really captures the chaos and fear well, and when tragedy strikes you feel it deep in your gut like a sucker punch. Then right about the time the movie started cruising into it’s second half, the film broke and melted. I was pretty irritated, here I am really getting into a movie and this has to happen. Then some idiot yells “Meltdown!” and everyone has a good chuckle about it. Yeah ha fucking ha.

Sadly the film could not carry its momentum into the second half. The unplanned intermission didn’t help things, but even without it I’m sure I would have felt that things went downhill as the film coasts into a more traditional drama. It is decent (if overly long) and well done, but after that first thrilling hour I was pretty disappointed. Then after the movie faded to black, some titles came on discussing how many nuclear plants there are still operating in Europe and I realized that this was actually an anti-nuclear-power scribe, which actively irritated me. What is worse? A promising movie that heads South or a movie that is consistently crappy? I guess consistently crappy is still worse, but I do hate those films that plunge off the cliff.

After this it was over to The Egyptian to see Still Alive: A Film About Krzysztof Kieslowski which I was really looking forward to, seeing as how I am a big fan of the man’s work. Sadly this was another boring and unilluminating telling of facts, with little of any serious interest. Hey you know what? Kieslowski made some movies! They were really good! He’s dead now! There you don’t have to go see this. On the up side, I did get to spend some time reflecting on a man whose films were vital to my transformation into film nerdism, which is cool.

It was also around this time that I realized something else and my movie watching. If you look at my listology lists of films seen, they are marked with how they are viewed (on film / video, at home / at the theatre.) 90% of them are in the theatre. During this screening I realized I am not just a fan of film, but there is something about the ritual of going out to the movies that actively enthralls me. Seeing a film in public with other people is like comfort food for me. When the time comes that the experience is no longer available I would not be surprised to see my interest in film fall away … not completely … but significantly. It just wouldn’t be the same anymore.

Thank you to the movie theatres of my life, I love you all.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 8:46 pm and is filed under Movies, SIFF 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.