Look out! He's got a knife!

World Cinema Showcase

I only saw 2 movies in this festival this year, one yesterday and one today.

Yesterday was Across the Universe, the third movie from director Julie Taymor (Titus, Friday). I loved both of Taymor's previous movies; this one is just as visually stunning as those, if not more so, but is basically a rotten movie with no decent story and no interesting characters. It's vaguely held together by the conceit of having the characters sing Beatles songs to express themselves; this comes off as a contrived gimmick. Some scenes are marvellous fun, and I wasn't bored, but the extremely lazy script (by Ian LaFrenais & Dick Clement, from a story by them & Taymor) was irritating in that it seemed like it could have been quite good if they'd just tried harder. The cast is also very dull and unmemorable, particularly Rachel Evan Wood - the movie has a love story at its centre, but it's impossible to care about such dull people who break up and get back together almost arbitrarily. This is a movie where the highlights are cameos by Bono and Joe Cocker, neither of whom I like.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days was a Romanian movie set towards the end of the Ceauşescu administration, about an illegal abortion. While not as harrowing as some have made it out to be, this is an excellent movie with some nail-biting suspense that I would highly recommend to anyone who doesn't need their movies to be high-gloss, happy and shiny, and neatly wrapped up in a tidy little bow at the end.

Neither movie is a complete waste of time in my opinion, but one is a nearly brilliant while the other is bubblegum that loses its taste before the end.