Ray Pride

(A fost sau n-a fost?, 2006) Corneliu Porumboiu’s "12:08 East of Bucharest," winner of Cannes 2006’s Camera d’or prize for Best First Film, is wry, dry and gorgeously shaped comedy, deeply satirical while being played with the slyest of hands. Cristi Puiu's "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" (2005) shared the Palme d’or at Cannes, and its dark comedy remains one of the most sustained accomplishments in recently movies. While "12:08" works at a gentler length, Porumboiu shares with his countryman an abiding reverence for human imperfection while dealing in a steady cinematic gaze. Yet there is a beautiful eruption halfway through "12:08": We meet the grumbling denizens of this small backwater in the hours before a talk show is convened at the local station, asking if there was anyone in their village who had convened in the town square before 12:08, the time Ceausescu’s rout by helicopter from Bucharest was broadcast when his regime fell on December 22, 1989. Small bits of characterization are immaculate: watch the mother serving breakfast to her grown son, the talk-show host and station owner. The grandly choreographed comedy comes with the talk show itself, enacted in real-time between three men and a succession of angry callers. It’s remarkable, and then the ending: snow falls, streetlights flicker to life. The night is damp and cool. 89m.

"12:08 East of Bucharest" opens Friday at the Music Box.

(2007-08-14)

Also by Ray Pride

Engineering This Fiasco
Kinsella's writing-directing debut, "Orchard Vale," an experimental feature about a band of outsiders after an off-screen collapse of civilization, opens the 14th Chicago Underground Film Festival on August 15, just a few weeks after his decision to leave the band Make Believe
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Engineering This Fiasco
Ever prolific, Tim Kinsella, who began his public life as a musician at the age of 16 in the band Cap'n Jazz, has recorded dozens of albums since, and with the meltdown of the music industry, has shifted to filmmaking, itself a troubled medium for anyone wanting to make a career today. His writing-directing debut, "Orchard Vale"
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(2007-08-07)

Life after Life
Charles Burnett’s great, fluky, lyrical, post-neo-realist, nearly lost, eighty-minute valentine of verisimilitude to 1970s Watts and to the struggles of the American working class is a 16mm student film, black-and-white with offhanded yet lyrical photography (yet always of documentary intensity), shot over a year of weekends for about $10,000, but it is a loving, attentive dream, detailed with the rhythms of a life almost none of us have lived
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Tip of the Week
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The Odyssey
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Tip of the Week
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Space Odyssey
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Tip of the Week
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Bombs Away
(2007-07-13)

iPhone Has a Home
(2007-07-10)

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