phobophob

John Akofrah tries to combine documentary and personal essay, which sounds promising. He merges archive imagery with beautifully shot - though heavy post produced - wintry landscapes of Alaska to tell the story of immigrants coming into the UK from the 60s onwards. Sadly, what starts out as a promising experiment ends up being a self indulgent, problematic and almost arbitrary combination of found footage, literature and music, each of them of high quality but all of them together boring and hard to bare. Like a cook who thinks combining expensive ingredients automatically will result in a exquisite dish John Akomfrah is wrong. It makes a mess and in the end you are just sad about the useless waste of the high class ingredients.

I saw this movie today at the Viennale at an afternoon screening and i had a hard time to sit thru it. it seemed overly pretentious and misogynistic to me. don't get me wrong, i enjoyed visitor q and i realized the Belle de Jour, Vivre Sa Vie references. But Shion Sono was not able to pull of the absurd combinations of violence and sexuality that made these movies work. on the opposite. it seemed like a constant male masturbation fantasy with a few literature references tossed in to justify it. even looking at it from an exploitation angle, it just failed to deliver. the acting was less than convincing and at best as average as the mise en scene and also the use of music was terrible, constantly failing to set the counterpoint as obviously originally intended. in the end it left the bitter taste of a conservative paradigm where women were punished for their sexuality, got their private parts cut of and were kicked in the stomach. anyway, there seems to be innocence in pissing.

i took my girlfriend to see this one after reading a very promising article about it in my monthly cinema newspaper. i regretted it after about 15 minutes of the movie. the main idea to it, to let a story develop by it's protagonists, thus making it a semi documentary, seems promising, but suffers under the usual problems movies have that relay on their actors as directors. they are non. so the movie is constantly on the verge of failure, while thru most parts being plain - i am sorry, but i have to use that word - boring. it is, as the short movies of weerasethakul, heavily based on long steady shots and seemingly unconnected pieces of sound and dialog. this may work as an installative work in an art context but definitely fails to deliver when watching it for about 90 minutes in a cinema. the only refreshing moments of the movie are the ones of self reference. one in which one assistant of the director appears, telling him that the whole thing does not work and that they better should have written a script, and one in which a kid actor is asking if he finally can go home (and if not, if afterwords he at least can get a burger at kfc :). i have to admit i really felt with the kid.