AFI Festival
-
AFI Fest 2012: Electrick Children and Simon Killer
In Dogtooth, an authoritarian father’s carefully constructed sham world falls apart after one of his sheltered daughters watches Rocky IV and Jaws. In Electrick Children (above), a 15-year-old Mormon girl (played by “25 New Face” Julia Garner) gets pregnant after listening to a rock ‘n’ roll song on an unmarked blue cassette tape. The narrative similarities essentially end there but, given their equally unorthodox takes on coming of age in cloistered environments, the two are oddly complementary. Split between rural Utah and fabulous Las Vegas, Electrick Children‘s visual world is entirely at odds with what its doe-eyed protagonist is used to on her big-sky homestead: neon lights, dingy […]
by Michael Nordine on Nov 9, 2012 -
AFI Fest 2012: Antiviral and Caesar Must Die
In diagnosing a cultural affliction without so much as mentioning a possible cure or even treatment, Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral coldly suggests that it’ll only continue to spread. The outlandish-but-believable premise – involving a high-end clinic that harvests and sells celebrities’ infections to their obsessed fans – brings to mind both Children of Men and, of all things, Idiocracy for how depressingly realistic its vision of the near future ends up being. We want to think that something like this could never happen, but there’s more than a little evidence to the contrary. The fact that nearly every element of the […]
by Michael Nordine on Nov 7, 2012 -
AFI Fest 2012: A Hijacking and Paradise: Faith
Between A Royal Affair, The Hunt, Eat Sleep Die, and now A Hijacking, it might be wise to start thinking of 2012 as something of a banner year for Scandinavian film—Denmark in particular. (Let’s call Klown the exception that proves the rule and leave it at that.) An impressively restrained thriller about a cargo ship commandeered by Somali pirates, Tobias Lindholm’s second feature has the kind of ripped-from-headlines premise one would expect Hollywood to have capitalized on by now. In an early sign of his rather un-Hollywood approach, however, the frequent Thomas Vinterberg collaborator shows us extremely little of the […]
by Michael Nordine on Nov 5, 2012
