“Haunting” is the word that comes to mind when watching Ray Lawrence’s third feature film Jindabyne. It took two decades to make, but the final product is a potent vision derived from Raymond Carver’s short story “So much Water, So Close to Home.”
Better known to horror fans for his work in front of the camera in films like the Scream Trilogy and “Masters of Horror” creator’s Stephen King’s Riding the Bullet, David Arquette makes his debut as feature film director with The Tripper, a slasher film set at an outdoor music festival where a bunch of hippies have gathered to camp out and get high. The party has an uninvited guest – a hippie-hating killer decked out in a very realistic looking Ronald Reagan costume.
2007 is the year that the Cannes film festival turns 60 and to celebrate the occasion they asked 35 world-ranking directors to mark the b-day bash with a three-minute short. For many Chacun son cinema shall bring out the pearly whites among he few cinephiles lucky enough to see the film. Sixty is also nifty because of the onslaught of other projects that will most likely make it at this year’s fest. Both a culmination of what I’ve read in Variety and cineuropa.org and my own two cents worth, this is a taste of some of the stuff we can expect to see at this year’s 60th.
It’s been almost fifty years since the People’s Liberation Army of China began their occupation of Tibet. It’s only in the past ten years, however, that a handful of films have surfaced concerning the resistance. Seven Years in Tibet and Kundun are the most well known examples, but the problem with those films in lies in their occidental interpretation of an oriental culture.