PIFF REVIEWS: 'The Giant Buddhas' and 'Skritek'


A couple of my capsule reviews from The Oregonian's much larger coverage of the opening weekend of the 29th Portland International Film Festival. Click on the title links for official Web sites.
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'The Giant Buddhas'

Shortly before 9/11, the Taliban had their hands in another atrocity: As part of their campaign to wipe out non-Muslim artifacts, they ordered troops into Afghanistan's Bamiyan Valley to destroy enormous Buddha statues that dominated a cave temple on the Silk Road for centuries.
 

Swiss filmmaker Christian Frei travels around the world to reconstruct the tragedy: He interviews cave refugees and a professor searching for a lost Bamiyan Buddha, and shows undercover footage (shot by an Al-Jazeera reporter) of the statues being dynamited. (The smoke plume from one demolition, presented noiselessly, eerily echoes the World Trade Center collapse.)

It's devastating and important, until Frei loses control of his documentary's shape and goes on what feel (to me) like needless side-trips -- including traveling back to the site with "Kandahar" star/journalist Nelofer Pazira, the recipient of sleepily narrated letters from the filmmaker.

B+; Switzerland; 95 mins. (1:15 p.m. Saturday, Guild; 6:45 p.m. Tuesday, Guild)
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'Skrítek'

"Strítek" is told in an audacious style: Writer-director Tomas Vorel deliberately undercranked his camera while filming this slapstick story about an Eastern-bloc butcher's family (and the occasional magic troll), meaning everything moves just a little too quickly. In small doses, it's a neat way to get at the dehumanizing qualities of big-city life -- qualities further accentuated by Vorel directing everyone to speak in wordless gibberish and smack each other around like they're in a Stooges comedy. 


The film feels a bit like a feature-length, existential "Benny Hill" sketch -- a very odd effect indeed, given the subject matter, which includes cartoonish family angst and the skinning of pigs and cows. Unfortunately, it gets more than a little tedious toward the end.

B-; Czech Republic; 87 mins. (1 p.m. Saturday, Broadway; 5:15 p.m. Sunday, Broadway; 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Broadway)

PIFF: It's raining films
PIFF: The best of the opening weekend
PIFF: The real world: docs that rock
(The Oregonian, Feb. 10, 2006)

29th Portland International Film Festival (official site)

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Posted: Fri - February 10, 2006 at 12:22 PM        

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