Screening Log

This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.

January 2008 activity

Total Log Entries: 53

Total Comments: 41

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Dans la Ville de Sylvia / En la Ciudad de Sylvia / Spain / 2007

Rather curiously, this film is turning up in a lot of end-of-year best-of-2007 lists. I appreciate the appeal of its minimalist narrative — essentially, a young man sits around in a Strasbourg café sketching one beautiful young woman after another, then wandering around the city — where the weight of the film is on the texture of light, sound, image. But there’s a certain dubiousness to the whole enterprise. Imagine every lissome beauty from every Eric Rohmer film dropped into one single film, and you get an idea of what seems to have driven José Luis Guerin in conceiving this film. Its saving grace is that it at least acknowledges in the dialogue the creepiness of the main character, and, in comparison to the Asian school of narrative minimalism, there’s a charming, airy lightness to the whole film.

by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
08 Jan 2008 12:53 PM | Submit Comment

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