It's Friday again.
Here in Kenya, as most of you know, it is a public holiday, Moi day, to commemorate the time the now-retired-yam-eating chap came to power. Funnily enough, contrary to the intended spirit of the day most people I know in this town seem to be at work.
I, nevertheless, have taken a few moments for moi, and have been surfin' and crestin' the waves of cheap internet time to check out the magic available on screens elsewhere in the world. These I gladly share with you.
It is likely that the closest we will get to seeing these films here will be either through these reviews, or on pirated versions where you can see the heads of the audience and hear their coughing better than the dialogue. Yes, of course I am bitter that the best choice film currently on the Nairobi screens inspires me enough to make me want to get back to work.
Which I shall now do.
Kill Bill
"Really, no one delivers that sheer, aneurism-inducing rush with the same intravenous efficiency as Tarantino. It may not be the best film of the year, nor the best Tarantino film. But it's sure as hell got to be the best way, the only way, to mainline pure adrenaline in the cinema... this isn't the floatingly beautiful martial-arts tradition as resurrected by Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Zhang Yimou's Hero. It's a world of Manga and comic-book serials, of flash and trash and assassins.... a.......reverence for classic Asian martial-arts pulp-celluloid......"
Spirited Away
"Spirited Away is the result of organic, non-GM animation: everything is hand-drawn before being digitalised. Yet it has a dazzling quality that I have come to associate solely with the new generation of animators and FX stylists, a fleetness and lightness in the way it switches from the close-up on a deft little sight gag or a sweet character observation, sweeping out for a breathtaking panorama of an extraterrestrial landscape imagined with passionate detail and specificity. I can't think of a film that is so readily able to astonish and wears that ability so lightly and insouciantly. ...Spirited Away is fast and funny; it's weird and wonderful. Mostly wonderful."
Belleville Rendezvous
"Belleville Rendez-Vous has the pungent, gamey quality of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amelie, but its innocence and charm are less contrived. The animation itself is superbly detailed and vividly eccentric, and as for the story - it's impossible to tell if it's a children's story for adults or an adult's story for children. Or if it matters. I was beguiled from the first second."
(Film reviews by Pete Bradshaw, www.guardian.co.uk)
10 September, 2003
