TIFF - DAY7

A Few Days Later (Niki Karimi)

I want my money back! never have I felt so pissed after wasting money and time on a crappy movie like this and thinking i could've seen anothe movie instead of this amateur work (still can't figure why it was chosen for TIFF).

Sad thing is -like my friend was saying- movies like this give Iran a bad rep, so they do more harm than good. I'm all for 'l'art pour l'art'' and minimalistic movies, but hey you gotta have something to tell first and then settle on the form/style , Kiarostami is a good example of this, where the audince still takes something away from the movie. The audience were totally confused about what the movie was trying to convey. A lady asked Ms. Karimi "what was the message of this movie?" and she replied i don't have any message, and then babbled about how movies are -like Spielberg's "Dreamworks" company!!- a work of dreams and how hard it is to make a decision and how she was trying to portray a woman who has to make a hard decision.

Well thank you Capt. obvious, well done! because we couldn't have figured it out without your help, how about working on your script next time so characters have a meaning and don't just appear and disappear like ghost dummies. how about a story for your next film? something that the poor viewers might find a "bit" engaging and compelled to follow.

You'd expect for a actress with 25 films (some with the best directors in Iran) in her resume, to know what narration means and if your film fails to communicate with the viewers, you're literally done, regardless if you're an overrated celebrity female actress in your country or not.Unfortunately that's not the case in some star-deprived countries. Leave film making to those who have talent and stick to what you do best (hint: acting).

S&Man (JT Petty)
Why do we watch horror movies? do we sympathize with the torturers or the victims?

Can documentaries be trusted? why do we believe a documentary is valid where it could be totally fake? what's the critera for distinguishing them? don't we decide if they should be true or not? do we want them to be true, even if know they are not?

Do we enjoy the Abu Ghraib prison pictures? why do we rush to accident scenes? to see the blood? to see the dead bodies?

Are we all of voyeurists by nature? is that why we watch movies? where do we draw the line between voyeurism and wattching movies? aren't they essentially the same thing?


Leave it to JT Petty to ask these blunt questions and then decide yourself. That is, if you can still deal with yourself, the sense of guilt and embarrassment after watching this shocking and cleverly made movie.
the final sequence just blew me away, very twisted and layered.