TNMC

Here we see the first few people arriving at the Crandell Theater in Chatham, NY for the 2010 FilmColumbia film festival.  You may not have heard of it but it is a hell of a festival.  Five days, three venues and dozens of features and shorts.  I've been going for the last seven years and loving just about every minute of it.  How such a great festival sprung up in a tiny town like mine is beyond me.

Today I saw three films.  The first is Night Catches Us, starring Anthony Mackie (The Hurt Locker) and Kerry Washington (The Last King of Scotland).  It's set in the mid-70s and takes a look at what happened in the aftermath of the destruction of the Black Panther movement.  Now, I admit not being terribly knowledgeable about the Panthers.  So that definitely affects how I view the movie.  I'm a bit too young to remember this stuff personally and haven't really studied it, so I have no preconceived notions to deal with.  That said I thought it was an excellent film.  The Panthers are just about as murky to me as before seeing the movie but I now have some idea what it would be like to try and live with that in your past.  The acting is excellent and it is a beautifully shot film.  It does a wonderful job of mixing urban decay with wilderness imagery and uses depth of field to great effect to help tell the story.  Definitely recommended.

Next was the French film Partir, starring Kristin Scott Thomas.  She plays a bored housewife who rather suddenly has a torrid affair with an ex-convict.  Thomas is magnificent in the lead role.  Her ability to speak volumes about her character with the tiniest shift of expression is brilliant.  That said, I'm not a huge fan of the movie.  Her husband is never well fleshed out, which makes it much harder to understand her actions.  And I had the third act pretty much figured out well in advance.  But it could well be worth your time just to watch her performance.

Finally, there was The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest, the third film based on Stieg Larsson's series of novels about the cyber witch Lisbeth Salander.  I haven't seen The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo but did see The Girl Who Played With Fire.  I felt a bit lost in the second movie due to having missed the first but felt on much firmer ground with the third.  This is a thriller of sorts, albeit an odd one in which the title character is confined for almost the entire movie.  It's a tale of conspiracy and intrigue and all that sort of thing.  And it's two and a half hours long.  The first couple hours buzzed along pretty nicely for a movie built almost entirely out of exposition.  But by the time that last half hour rolls around, I was checking the clock pretty frequently.  Noomi Rapace isn't given much to do but stare sullenly at one character after another, barely speaking for two thirds of the movie.  I liked the second film in the series a lot more.  I'll probably make the effort to go back and watch the first film, just to see if that changes my view of the other two.

I'll be back tomorrow with another photo and more mini reviews.