Jaffe

Tribeca film festivel 2007

Last week was the sixth annual Tribeca film festival here in New York City. An old high school friend of mine, Hoy, works at the Tribeca Film Institute, the organizers of the festival, and comp'd me tickets to a couple of the shows.

A Dirty Carnival can be described with one word - violent. This Korean film tells the story of Byung-du, a low-level mobster trying to help his dying mother and younger brother and sister. Byung-du's 'career' seems to be moving along nicely until he's reacquainted with an old friend from school, Min-Ho, who is now a movie producer. A Dirty Carnival has elements of other mob movies such as Goodfellas and The Godfather (and even goes as far as completely duplicating the scene in The Godfather where Carlo is strangled in a car). There's even a scene at the end that was similar to The Sixth Sense and Fight Club, where the main character flashes back to earlier moments in the movie to help explain why the current scene is happening. Overall, although I thought the movie was interesting, I didn't think any of the themes were very original, and really couldn't get past the brutally violent fight scenes.

Dj Spooky's Rebirth of a Nation is a DJ-meets-film experience. Dj Spooky's show involves him 'remixing' DW Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, a controversial film used by the Ku Klux Klan as a recruiting tool. I enjoyed the idea, having a soundtrack playing to the film, and Dj Spooky 'mixing' the film in the same spirit as he would mix music at a club. I think I would have enjoyed it more, and gotten more out of the experience, if I had seen the original movie. Dj Spooky was recently interviewed on NPR, which you can listen to here.

Labels: film, New York, Tribeca

posted by Aron @ 12:39 PM