TIME
6/10
The second of two Kim Ki Duk films being shown at this year's festival - the first was Breath, which as I mention below was really enjoyable, but with a pretty strange plot. This one's got an unusual plot too, but wasn't nearly as good in my opinion. It's about a girl who has such low self-esteem that she decides to leave her boyfriend of two years by disappearing entirely out of his life and getting plastic surgery so that she can come back six months later and woo him again. See, she thought he was getting bored of her looks, even though he wasn't. And six months later, when she goes back to him, she succeeds in seducing him as this new girl, except that he's still hung up on the gal he loved that disappaered. And so on the story goes. It's an interesting look into relationships and what is important, but the real lesson I learned is not to ever go out with mentally unstable Korean girls. (Not that I would since I'm married and all, but you get the idea). I've liked every other Kim Ki Duk film I've seen, but I've not seen all of them. So far, this is my least favourite.

A FEW DAYS IN SEPTEMBER
6/10
A few yawns in August. This one came highly recommended to me. It stars Juliet Binoche (good), and John Turturro (good), and is a French thriller type film (good) about spies and stuff (good). So all these things pointed to reasonably good expectations for me. Maybe that's why I was disappointed. Or maybe it's the bad cold I have. Anyway, this didn't grab me - it felt long and dragged out, lacking in story, characters like the one John Turturro played seemed more a nuisance than a necessary part of the story, the whole relationship between the two 'kids' of the missing spy from different families was almost grating to watch. I mean really, they're 20-something years old - why are they acting like 12 year olds half the time? Try it in case it was my cold making me a little less tolerant, but don't have very high expectations...