new phone / dogtooth . rage . my blueberry nights . ratatouille

i was so complete idiot yesterday when i left my phone alone for merely a second while i opened the car for the guy to change the tires. in that millisecond it was gone and i was forced to carry out ridiculous body searches on the guy who had just passed by. i was so embarrassed. that effectively meant that i had to get me a new phone and i got one with a better camera but way slower in response. oh well, live and learn.

meanwhile the film watching just got more intense with the main festival that started today- and we are already two films down. sally potter’s ‘rage’ purports to be a story shot on a cell phone backstage of a fashion show. fashion models (including a deliciously camp jude law), designers, businessmen, cops and all sorts of fixers speak against a blue (or pink/orange/red) screen to the camera over seven days while accidents and murders occur on the ramp. it must have been the acting that redeemed the film because i really liked it – in spite of its pretensions and the fashion industry expose storyline and characters. but ‘dogtooth’ took the claustrophobia of domesticity and made it horrifying- but never unbelievable and always with a nasty sense of humour. two girls and a boy are kept captive in an ideal house- swimming pool and sundeck- by their parents. complicated plots are woven to make prisons inside the prison- rituals of celebration and rewards, competitions and games. only one outsider is allowed to enter to satisfy the sexual urges of the boy. it would be unwatchable if it was not so brilliantly funny in parts and shockingly dark in others- like the killing of the cat, or the scene where the elder girl finally gets a name ‘bruce’ by watching jaws, or the removal of the dogtooth by the dumbbell.

without christopher doyle wong kar wai has gone crazy with darius khondji over ‘my blueberry nights’. the scenes in the bar where the two would be loers meet shimmer in glazing and mirror- hazy dizzying madness. as norah jones journeys across the country to find herself after a break up- it merely gets more visually gorgeous and utterly pointless. all style going nowhere.

ratatouille made me hungry. a rat cooks up french cuisine in a fancy restaurant in paris. my favorite scene was the rat rising from the sewers of paris climbing the pipes of an apartment building watching murderers and lovers until he gets to the roof and looks across at the eiffel tower. it reminded me of my favorite of the paintings that ranz, sau and pottu had made- ‘the boy in the balcony’.