7/10
Canadian filmmaker Isiah Medina's first feature 88:88 premiered at TIFF last year to some acclaim. It is much closer to experimental video art than anything else. Images flicker by in seconds, jump-cutting and bleeding into each other. The audio, a collection of whispered voiceovers, freestyle rapping, one-sided phone conversations, sound and music almost never matches what's seen onscreen. An obvious point of reference is latter-day Godard. Another is latter-day Malick, mostly due to the voiceovers. Robert Ashley may also be a distant antecedent.
The title refers to what's shown on electronic clocks after one's power has been cut and then restored. It would be wrong to say 88:88 is "about" being poor, but it's certainly a theme. I saw a tweet once that said something like "I'm first world poor - I use my iPhone or my laptop to check my online banking to see how broke I am". That's sort of a main idea here, where iPhones and weed take priority over heating bills.
Medina is a young guy and there is a "student film" vibe here but I don't mean that in a wholly negative sense. It's simply a film about many themes that a lot of college or university level students would spend a lot of time musing about - money, philosophy, skateboarding, girlfriends, parents, what to do with one's life. Some may scoff at a movie dealing with such first world problems (and the pretentious presentation to go along with it), but it's undoubtedly a film about themes that are real to Medina and his friends and many others his age. Visually it's fun to watch, there are some really great shots, and at 65 minutes it doesn't overstay its welcome.
No comments:
Post a Comment