Reviews

Paris is an impressive combination of a unique, socially-minded, film-noir plot, beautiful visual motifs, and further exploration of what DV filmmaking can look like.

Bai Ling is captivating in every scene she's in, and Chad Allen is perfectly suited for the role of the young, struggling cop. We really come to care about both of their conflicted characters.

Throughout the film the repetitive use of mirrors is just one of several visual elements that serve to make Paris artistically moving, and this, in combination with a twisiting plot that takes us between the seedier parts of Los Angeles and Los Vegas, makes this a film you can't stop once you've started.

Sure, we've seen it before--college students sharing an apartment and contemplating the meaning of life and education. But this movie was so fresh it overcame any cliches it may have fallen into.

Each University disaster the students ran into (Professor's not showing up to their office hours, the beaurocracy of departments) rang true not just for UniBo (the University of Bologna--where the film was set) students, but for University students around the world!

Each character was unique and appealing--my only complaint would be that there wasn't enough time to get each one of their life stories. The division of the film into "acts", with titles, was reminiscent of "Requiem for a Dream", and the despite the light subject matter, the transition of the characters, and sub-plots within the plot suggests that the filmmakers might be tributing, or at least influenced by, Aronofsky.

The original text of Pinocchio is arguably one of the most witty, intelligent, mature and revolutionary fairy-tales to have been popularized, from its first line "Once upon a time there was a King. No." to its wealth of characters and morals, it never fails to keep you entertained.

With such a complex, captivating story at his disposal, I expected something breathtaking, or at least unique, from Benigni. What I got instead was pages of a picture book, plucked from the book, and placed on the screen. While every shot would have made a nice illustration, Pinocchio's world never seemed to extend off the page, and I was left feeling not only dissappointed, but lost as to what Benigni's intention for making a film was if not to expand upon the picture book's world. I'm not asking for any changes to the story itself, just the sense that this magic we see before us is more than just the pages of a book.

Benigni as Pinocchio was un-credible--lacking the aspects of either little boy or doll, let alone both.

While the film was lit up by bits of magic like the Cat&the Fox, and the cricket, there just wasn't enough to carry us through an entire film, and I found myself frequently glancing at my watch to figure out when I could return to the more exciting text.

The wave of the future is sure to be digital video, and "The Anniversary Party" is riding high on its crest. Certainly, the night- long -dinner- party- with- the- camera- running film may one day be a cliche, especially with the low cost and filmmaking ease of digital film, but at this point it's a fresh idea, and one that keeps viewer quite entertained. The acting is superb--it doesn't begin to look improvised as one might expect from this format, and even the drug scenes are not over the top. My one hesitation lay in watching a group of 30-somethings experiment with a drug that is usually reserved for a high school/college crowd as though this was a sort of routine practice--but I guess that part of what the movie attempted to impart was a sense of the in some ways isolated world of the movie star with private maids, caterers, yoga instructors and designers. Definitely not a film to miss out on, especially since it's a glimpse of where filmmaking may go, with the availability of longer takes, and the chance to select each shot from a variety of takes once the cost of film is so reduced.