Tag Archives: hirokazu koreeda

Everyone's a Critic, Reflections

Pitching my final piece

On Monday we pitched ideas for our major portfolio pieces to the class. I’m continually impressed and jealous of the great ideas people in the studio come up with — their ideas had a ton of variety and personality, while mine are pretty straightforward by comparison.

I have two options in mind for my piece. I’ve been thinking about the idea of expressing criticism through video rather than text, so both of my ideas are subjects that would lend themselves to visual presentation if that’s the way I end up going. My plan is to outline/sketch each piece in writing before turning one into a video essay, so I can keep all of my options open for the final piece (and giving me an out if I find the video process too difficult and have to go back to text). I’ve been watching a lot of video essayists on YouTube in preparation (in particular nerdwriter1, YMS and Dan Golding), and I’m really excited to give it a go myself.

Option 1: After making a number of films with clear and admitted stylistic influences (i.e. Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese), Paul Thomas Anderson perfected his voice with There Will Be Blood.

Option 2: The symbolism and significance of food, cooking and eating in the films of Hirokazu Koreeda, particularly focusing on Still Walking, Like Father Like Son and Our Little Sister (and perhaps widening out to the significance of food in Japanese culture/film generally?).

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Media 1, Thoughts

Cannes program highlights

The official line-up for the Cannes Film Festival was announced a few days ago, and as expected it’s a hell of a collection of films.

Every year the Cannes announcement is exciting for two reasons: one, as the world’s most high-profile festival, many filmmakers premiere their work at Cannes and it’s fun to get a look at what some of my favourite directors are up to; and two, the Melbourne International Film Festival draws a lot of its program directly from Cannes, so in some ways it’s a very early MIFF pre-announcement.

I’ve been to MIFF every year since around 2009 (seeing between 30 and 50 films across the three weeks of the festival), and I plan to continue that for as long as I live in Melbourne, so these are (hopefully) some of the films I’ll be watching in August:

  • It’s Only the End of the World (Xavier Dolan, Canada) – Dolan is a 27-year-old Canadian director who can only be described as a wunderkind. He’s made six films prior to this (the first when he was just 20), and at least two of them are modern masterpieces. It’s Only the End of the World sees him working with two of my favourite French actors, Marion Cotillard and Vincent Cassel.
  • The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook, South Korea) – Park’s first feature film since he made the jump to Hollywood with Stoker (2013). He returned to his home country to make this period film set in South Korea and Japan of the 1930s, which seems like it might be a little out of his usual wheelhouse.
  • After the Storm (Hirokazu Koreeda, Japan) – I’ve been on a huge Koreeda kick for the past few weeks. He makes amazing small-scale family dramas that aren’t flashy on the surface, but underneath are just endless caves of emotion and humanity. They don’t call him the reincarnation of Ozu for nothing.
  • Baccalaureat (Cristian Mungiu, Romania) – Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is probably in my top 20 films of the 21st century so far, and his follow up Beyond the Hills is also incredible. The only synopsis I’ve found for Baccalaureat so far is quite vague (“a family drama about parenting set in a small Romanian town where everybody knows everybody”), but the beauty of Mungiu’s films are that they’re not usually about what you think they’re about.
  • The Red Turtle (Michael Dudok de Wit, Netherlands) – Dudok de Wit won an Oscar in 2001 for his short film Father and Daughter, in my opinion one of the most soulful and beautiful animated shorts of all time. The Red Turtle is his first feature film, a dialogue-free story about a man trying to escape a desert island. If that doesn’t sound like it could sustain a feature-length film’s running time, you haven’t seen what Dudok de Wit can do without dialogue.

Those are my most anticipated picks – if these five films make it to MIFF in August I’ll be a very happy camper.

 

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