Reykjavík Grapevine - 28.09.2013, Blaðsíða 27

RESTAURANT- BAR
The only kitchen
in Reykjavík open
to 23:30 on weekdays
and 01:00 on weekends
5.990 ikr.
Vesturgata 3B | 101 Reykjavík | Tel: 551 2344 | www.tapas.is
Taste the best
of Iceland ...
... with a spanish undertone
Icelandic Gourmet Fiest
Starts with a shot of the infamous
Icelandic spirit Brennívín
Than 6 delicious Icelandic tapas:
Smoked puffin with blueberry
“brennivín” sauce
Icelandic sea-trout with peppers-salsa
Lobster tails baked in garlic
Pan-fried line caught blue ling
with lobster-sauce
Grilled Icelandic lamb Samfaina
Minke Whale with cranberry & malt-sauce
To finish our famous Desert:
White chocolate "Skyr" mousse
with passion fruit coulis
Future My Love
(Dir. Maja Borg)
Anglo-Swedish experimental film-
maker Borg is first seen hitchhiking
with a sign that says, ‘VENUS.’ Her
destination is the Florida redoubt of
utopian futurist Jacques Fresco, a
spry nonagenarian who preaches
sustainable design, an end to the
“monetary system,” and a new soci-
ety of technological abundance. Over
a truly perplexing grab-bag of wonky
interviews, obscure archival footage,
images of industrial waste and urban
alienation, and black-and-white 8mm
footage of her muse Nadya Cazan,
Borg’s voiceover muses on society
at the conceptual level and recounts
a possibly real-life love affair. Like all
utopians, Fresco believes in social
engineering; in this loopy, lovely film,
Borg muses on the rational future,
and our irrational attachments to the
past.
The Missing Picture
(Dir. Rithy Panh)
The Paris-based Panh has made sev-
eral documentaries about his native
Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge,
whose regime Panh, unlike the rest of
his family, survived. That backstory
becomes the explicit focus of Panh’s
newest nonfiction film, even as his
memories remain, by design, elusive.
Superimposed over flickering archi-
val footage or arranged in meticulous
tableaus, hand-carved clay minia-
tures—hundreds of them—stand in
for his family, Khmer Rouge soldiers,
and fellow labour-camp internees in
black-inked uniforms, the marks of
the carving tool ever more defined
in their ribcages. This account of a
genocide takes on a daring beauty,
giving Panh’s lost family, and millions
of others, a dignity in their victim-
hood.
Mistaken For Strangers
(Dir. Tom Berninger)
Matt Berninger, lead singer for The
National, writes moody, elliptical
songs about the minor disappoint-
ments that add up to a life. Failure
is also the subject of his younger
brother Tom’s documentary—though
here failure is abject, visceral slap-
stick. Matt invites Tom to join the
band’s tour in support of 2010 com-
mercial breakthrough “High Violet,”
as a roadie-slash-fly-on-the-wall-
documentarian. After he’s fired for
incompetence on both counts (actual
interview question posed to drummer
Bryan Devendorf: ‘Have you—how
many, like—how many, like, what
kind of—if you've done drugs, how
many drugs, what kind of drugs and
how many drugs have you done?’),
the film becomes a document of its,
and Tom’s, salvaging.
Tom At The Farm
(Dir. Xavier Dolan)
For his fourth(!) feature, 24-year-old
French-Canadian auteur Dolan adapt-
ed Michel Marc Bouchard’s play. He
also edited the film, and stars as city-
mouse Tom, who travels to the dairy
farm that was the childhood home of
his closeted lover, Guy, dead at 25 for
reasons never explicitly given. The
atmosphere is damp and autumnal,
a fog that never quite lifts, even as
considerations of urban and rural
life, and repressed and expressed
sexuality, play out in Tom’s just barely
sexless dominant-submissive rela-
tionship with Guy’s butch, homopho-
bic brother. Motivations weaken as
the third act goes psychodrama, but
Dolan’s direction is stylish, his little
flourishes of virtuosity complicating
but not compromising the tone of
implication.
Two Lovers
(2008, Dir. James Gray)
Gray and his new film ‘The Im-
migrant’ are honoured at RIFF,
an excuse to screen his previous
effort: a contemporary melodrama
inspired by Dostoyevsky’s ‘White
Nights,’ starring Joaquin Phoenix,
a miracle of innocent volatility as
a man torn between his parents’
hand-picked choice and the troubled
goddess across the way (Gwyneth
Paltrow). Gray’s films are explicit
in the manner of classic drama yet
still multi-layered, and so richly
shot—genre heirlooms rooted in
three-dimensionally evoked, deeply
unglamorous white-ethnic Brooklyn.
Here, the Russian-Jewish commu-
nity of Brighton Beach, with its gray,
wet winds coming in off the ocean,
and warm, smothering interiors, is a
lifelike, ironic setting for drama that's
never quite dreamy.
Five of RIFF’s best titles, reviewed
By Mark Asch
Critic’s Picks
Still from ‘Future my love’
27 RIFF