aka Kwaidan
“Ghost Stories”
JP, 160 min
Posts Tagged ‘ghosts’
Kaidan (Masaki Kobayashi, 1964)
August 14, 2009Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975)
July 10, 2009Zerkalo
108 min
Mr. Brack6 has called Stalker his favorite film on this site, and I must follow suit and call this Tarkovsky mine. I was able to see it in the cinema tonight, and it was one of the most spiritually significant experiences of my life.
I’ve seen it before on dvd, and it’s always been something special and moving, but seeing it projected like this was something else entirely. See it if you can… no guarantees you’ll feel the same way (another viewer overheard walking out of the theater seemed to have only gotten out of it that Tarkovsky is a proponent of patriarchy and russian nationalism[?]) but if you can go into it with an open souleye and you’re a human being who isn’t completely overcome by fashionable ironic amoralism… it might really work.
For me it’s one of the grandest achievements of art, all art… it encapsulates and makes timeless what it is to be a being possessed of consciousness. Breathtaking (or rather breath-holding) moments of sublime stillness, small movements (wind or the breath of god?), tearing tears out of my eyes, all of them earned, all paid for. And if you lost your soul, you can still appreciate it on a purely technical, film school level; in this realm its achievements are vast… and still but a fraction of its riches.
Win.
A Tale of Two Sisters (Ji-woon Kim, 2003)
March 18, 2009KR, 115 min
suffers near end due to pacing issues, B+ overall, excellent visual elements, shhh
the Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, 2001)
March 13, 2009el Espinazo del diablo
SP/MX, 106 min
A new student at a school for orphans attempts to uncover the killer of the ghost who haunts the orphanage during the final days of the Spanish Civil War.
i’ll give it a “really rather good”. not really sure i understand who the target audience is supposed to be, considering the adult themes present, but it’s certainly more satisfying and less derivative than its “spiritural sequel”, which, in spite of del toro’s clear skill with imagery…
