NOLAFF: Saturday Night Films

So last Saturday was Day Two of the festival. I spent the day at the Canal Place Cinemas in Downtown. I watched a couple of short films... all of them sucked... one even went to Cannes this past year and "The Cost" would've made this film it's bitch!

So anyway, after eating some Beignets and Espresso from Cafe Du Monde (where I will take any of you fools who come out to visit), I went to see "No Subtitles Necessary: Laslo and Vilmos". This is a doc about the two great Hungarian cinematographers and best friends Laszlo Kovacs, ASC and Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC.

These two baddass hombres were in film school in Hungary in 1956 when the Russians invaded. They shot all this documentary footage of the invasion and brutality and then smuggled themselves and their footage outside of the country. They then decided to go on to Hollywood and ended up working with the new rebel 1960's filmmakers and eventually shot such films like "MaCabe and Mrs. Miller", "Easy Rider", "Targets", "Ghostbusters", "The Deer Hunter", "Deliverance" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". It was a really great story of two guys who were like brothers for over 50 years until Laszlo died last year. Great stuff. My only complaint was the camera work, it kept cutting to this "artsy" b&w handheld wide angle in all the interviews that showed all the behind the scenes stuff and then these really obscure closeups of the interviewees. It got annoying... but it was still a good doc.

Next up was "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans". Holy crap... this movie is batshit crazy. Nicholas Cage is insane as a drug addled, rebel cop with a hooker girlfriend. All in all I can say it was entertaining, but disturbing.

Here is an example: Nic Cage goes up to a club, waits outside for a young couple to come out, accosts them for drugs, smokes CRACK with the girl while holding a gun on the boyfriend and then fucks her on the car while making the boyfriend watch and saying things like "Your daddy molested you when you were a kid and now your a little whore who gets fucked..." then he goes and sees iguanas in an interrogation room with Val Kilmer... get my drift????

So recovering from that... I saw the coolest doc "It Might Get Loud" with The Edge, Jimmy Page and Jack White jamming and talking about guitar and basically being awesome. It was a really good watch and made me want to jam. Definitely check it out.

So thats my Saturday... I've got plenty more films to post about, so until next time... peace out!