Let The Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in)

When I saw this was listed on the St. Louis International Film Festival (SLIFF) schedule I was pretty excited.  I’d been seeing the most incredible trailer for this on HDNET and was completely intrigued.  This is the movie that defines 1980’s era character study Swedish coming of age vampire films.  It’s already regrettably setup for an American remake by Cloverfield director Matt Reeves.

The screening was sold out for this one, which might be the exception to the rule for SLIFF screenings from my limited attendance so far.  (It is truly an impressive festival, I should mention.)  I really loved this film.  This is really a drama with bloody goodness and not so much a horror/thriller film as one might expect.  It’s a gorgeous one at that and every frame in this movie is suitable wall art. 

I look forward to catching this one again on the big screen.  It would be a shame if a little bit of reading scared the majority of the American audience away.  This movie will play better on the big screen with all of the associated communal benefits.

Now somebody please release Tomas Alfredson’s previous works in the U.S. so I can see how this all started.

 Trivia Points – The title is apparently a reference to the Morrissey song Let the Right One Slip In.  (Moz feels like an old friend by now)

Here are a bunch of stills from the film for your viewing pleasure:

Operation Filmmaker

This is a little documentary worth seeking out.  I caught it this week on the fantastic PBS series Independent Lens and remember hearing about it somewhere (maybe NPR’s This American Life?) several months ago.  The story follows aspiring Iraqi filmmaker Muthana Mohmed as he is plucked from his country during the first year or so of the current Iraq war after being spotted by filmmaker Liev Schreiber on an MTV human interest piece about young Iraqi’s living through the war.  Schreiber decides that he will fly Muthana to Prague to give him the chance to work on his film Everything Is Illuminated.  Illuminated producer Peter Saraf and Schreiber have hired two documentary filmmakers to chronicle Muthana’s time on the set, but don’t seem to have thought the decision through beyond the potential self-congratulatory public relations story and potential DVD special feature aspects of bringing Muthana along.  Muthana quickly finds himself dissatisfied with the tasks he is asked to do and expresses fear of returning to Iraq and being singled out for assassination after working with the American Jews on a film about the German holocaust.  Suddenly Muthana is a problem that no one wants to deal with.  Only documentarian Nina Davenport sticks around to follow Muthanas story as Illuminated completes filming and the crew leave.

The film chronicles Muthana’s sometimes duplicitous nature and the ups and downs of his hustling to pursue his dream as well as the personal ups and downs of his working relationship and friendship with Davenport herself.

Strays

This is Vin Diesel’s writing and directorial debut from 1997 that was recently released to DVD for the first time.  I picked this up at the video store because I remembered hearing Sydney Lumet mention it as the reason he cast Diesel in Find Me Guilty.  This and The Man in the Chair have a lot in common.  While I can’t say that either one of them are films I’m likely to watch again, they both have a lot of heart and it is enjoyable to watch these little personal projects get made out of sheer determination on the part of the filmmakers and all of their cast and crewmembers.

The Man in the Chair

I grabbed this at the local video store because I like Christopher Plummer and thought the idea held some promise.  It’s uneven but has heart.  Plummer is really good through a lot of it.  The editing leaves something to be desired and it feels like a first effort, though IMDB tells it differently.  Still from director Michael Schroeder’s body of work, it seems likely that this is the first “personal” movie that he has attempted to make.  Given that this was almost certainly made for very little money, the casting was well-chosen and you can see everyone gave this little movie their all.

The Matrix

My kids have wanted to watch this for a very long time.  The R rating kept me from watching it with them, but upon viewing it again not long ago, I realized that it really makes no sense to have received that rating.  I have to say that this is another movie that is truly great at being what it is.  I did find the sequels to be disappointing and merely capitalized on one half of what makes this movie so enjoyable; the special effects.  They loved it and I thought it held up well.

Shall We Kiss? (Un baiser s’il vous plait)

This is the first Emmanuel Mouret film I’ve had the chance to catch and may be the first of his films to have received American theatrical distribution.  I can’t claim to know too much about him, but I understand he is extremely well known in France.  This is mostly a quirky romantic comedy, but there were a couple of moments that were extremely effective and interesting.  He uses the camera in some interesting ways in these moments and I will keep him on my radar. This worth catching on DVD at a minimum if you can’t make it to the independent theatre to see it.

Swimming with Sharks

I re-watched this little movie for probably the third or fourth time last night.  I hadn’t seen it for many, many years and really didn’t expect it to age particularly well.  I watched The Usual Suspects about three years ago and it felt completely dated and nearly unwatchable to me.  I was really pleasantly surprised to find this movie still worked.  This is a little movie that couldn’t have cost much at the time.  Despite a shaky start with some fairly rough audio quality and a few dubbing problems here and there, this is a great little movie.  It still works based on the strength of the writing.  This movie is damned funny and contains one of the essential sarcastic and cynical Kevin Spacey performances.  The Big Kahuna is another little gem that seems to be overlooked in Spacey’s canon and covers some of the same ground.

The Shield Around the K

A documentary about the influential K Records.  Shot with extremely limited means, but unlike the Chomsky movie, couldn’t really dream of being a profitable project based upon the subject of the film.  It’s hard for me not to admire something so earnest.

Dan In Real Life

A romantic dramedy starring Steve Carell, Dane Cook and Juliette Binoche (what?!).  I spent a lot of time during the movie trying to place one of Carell’s daughters.  It was Alison Pill who I had watched in the weird little movie Dear Wendy.  Anyway, this is not really my favorite genre of film, but this little movie was better than I thought it would be.  Not great but not bad.

The Invasion

Another movie I caught with my son.  He is at the age where he straddles the line between these kinds of things and more kid-centric movies.  This was a movie with a cast that is better than the movie probably because they signed on to make Oliver Hirschbiegel’s movie and then ended up making a re-written (by the Wachowski brothers) and largely re-shot James McTeigue movie.  Filmmaking by committee.  I wonder if the other one was a better film.