Thursday, July 31, 2014

Ebertfest 2014, Day Four

Ebertfest used to have a "free kids matinee" on Saturday mornings.  Why that ended, I do not know.  Maybe the scarcity of quality family films made it difficult to program.  Whatever the case, it kinda returned this year with the delightful Wajdja.  That might be the first time I have ever written (or said) the word "delightful," so do not take this recommendation lightly.  The character Wajdja reminds me a lot of the title character in The Great Brain books, but it is unlikely that the writer/director Haifaa Al Mansour ever read those Utah-based books.

A Simple Life is one of those slice of life movies that stays with you due to the power of the story and the filmmaking.  At the end I felt like I was a better person for having seen it.  What more can I say?

I wish that liked Goodbye Solo more.  Filmmaker Ramin Bahrani has taken the minimalist approach before with a lot of success, but this time I found myself not caring.  Three months later I barely remember it.

I am afraid that if I were to revisit Oliver Stone's oeuvre that his films would not fare very well compared to my current lofty opinion of many of them.  This was my first viewing of Born on the Fourth of July, and I was surprised by how Stone bombards the audience to the point of nausea.  Maybe that should be expected considering his other films, but I was definitely not expecting a film that is not that far off from Natural Born Killers.  TAKE IT DOWN A COUPLE OF NOTCHES, OLIVER.  OR FOUR OR FIVE NOTCHES.

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