MUBI Update: 21 July 2011

Lots of exciting new things going on on MUBI this week!

To begin with: Melbourne.  This terrific Australian city hosts one of the world’s finest international film festivals.  And guess what?  We’re bringing some of their best films to your PS3.  Starting Saturday, July 23, we’ll be showing free films from the festival, each one showing on MUBI a day after it screens in Melbourne.  The lineup is exciting and as usual the availability of individual titles varies from country to country, so be sure to check back each day to see what’s added.  The partnership ends August 7, so watch what you can during these festive two weeks.

Oh, and you want to know what the heck that image above is?  It’s one of the films from Melbourne that will play worldwide on MUBI.  One of the Tiger Award winners at this year’s Rotterdam film festival, Sergio Caballero’s Spanish feature Finisterrae is so bizarre and inexplicable, I’ll leave it to the  festival to describe it:

“Two Russian ghosts take a ‘spiritual’ journey through the north of Spain, hunting a great oracle who will offer them the chance to be reborn. Through snow-covered fields, forests of plastic ears and flocks of reindeer, the ghosts—one carrying a windsock, the other on horseback (or wheelchair)—trek ever closer to their goal. First-time filmmaker Sergio Caballero (co-director of the beloved Barcelona music and art festival, Sonar) blends high art and low comedy in this quirky modern-day fable inspired by Philippe Garrel’s La Cicatrice intérieure.”

We have additional exciting news coming out of Australia, this time only for Australian and New Zealand audiences.  If you’re coming from those countries, be sure to head to MUBI on Wednesday, July 20, as we’re releasing the hit festival fashion documentary Yves Saint Laurent – L’amour Fou (Pierre Thoretton, UK/France) a day before it comes out on DVD there.  Yves Saint Laurent built one of fashion’s most celebrated empires, and this moving documentary chronicles his rise, his lifelong partnership with Pierre Bergé and their decision to auction off a lifetime of precious art and objects.  Additional bonus exclusive for MUBI PS3 users: we’re showing an hour of extra footage about Yves Saint Laurent exclusively through August 7.

Here are some more recent highlights now playing on the platform:

Carcasses (Denis Côté, Canada)

By most accounts this utterly unique documentary is the best film yet by up and coming Canadian auteur Côté.  “The most audacious Canadian feature in many a moon, Denis Cote’s fourth effort attains a rare state of Herzogian weirdness,” says Jason Anderson of Eye Weekly. “Opening as a quasi-doc portrait of Jean-Paul Colmor, the affable proprietor of an enormous junkyard in the backwoods of Quebec, Carcasses then shifts into a more flagrantly mythic mode as Colmor’s metal-strewn kingdom is invaded by teen marauders. That the latter group is played by actors with Down’s syndrome may cause some consternation but the proceedings’ air of quiet awe and spirit of playfulness make Carcasses something rare and wondrous.”

Available in: France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK, Austria, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand

The Pillow Book (Peter Greenaway, UK)

Peter Greenaway’s films “work by combining images, words, quotations and sexual situations,” says Roger Ebert in his 3 and a half star review.  “His…film ‘The Pillow Book,’ starring Vivian Wu (from ‘The Last Emperor’), is a seductive and elegant story that combines a millennium of Japanese art and fetishes with the story of a neurotic modern woman who tells a lover: “Treat me like the pages of a book.”  If that’s not enough to entice you, the New York Times calls the film “rapturously perverse” and finds Greenaway “at his most atypically seductive, creating a spellbinding web of cruel elegance and intricate gamesmanship, exploring the exotic, haunting beauty of the bizarre.”

Available in: Portugal

The Fall of the Louse of Usher (Ken Russell, UK)

“The ultimate ‘home movie’?”, asks Darrell Buxton. “Shot in the director’s back garden over a six-month period on an infinitesimal budget, The Fall of the Louse of Usher ought to have disciples of one-time ‘enfant terrible’ Ken Russell salivating, producers flinging open their chequebooks and showering the great man with millions, and the arts world in general besieging parliament and demanding that Ken be given a life peerage. What will really happen is that this camcorder masterpiece will be ignored by most, and dismissed as trash by 90 per cent of those who do manage to see it. If you’ve got the slightest interest in movie mavericks, outrageous visual style, Edgar Allan Poe, or fighting against adversity, I urge you to seek out…Usher wherever you can.”

Available in: UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, Spain, Italy, Portgual, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland

Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden)

This film is “the first Bergman film to knock me flat,” wrote Darren Hughes in 2001. “I watched it again the other night, still mesmerized by it all, and still unable to adequately explain its power. The greatest compliment I can give Cries and Whispers is that it is a profoundly religious film, by which I mean that it is deeply concerned, first and foremost, with the struggles of the human condition in light of the presence — or, in Bergman’s case, the absence — of God. That it approaches this subject with such grace and honesty makes it a masterpiece.”

Available in: Italy

Score:

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