London Film Festival: Delta

Still plugging away here in London, still comparing notes constantly with Tim, and suddenly finding my way into more and more substantial films, with the unlikely duo of James Bond and Che Guevara to follow in just a few hours. I can't say that Kornél Mundruczó's Cannes prize-winner Delta is up to the level of what I saw yesterday or of what I hope to be in for today (at least with the Soderbergh), but it's a better movie than its worst habits, glaring though they are, might have led me to think before I pondered it for another two days. Here's that review, with short words on the alliterative trio of W., Waltz with Bashir, and Wendy and Lucy to follow shortly. (A.O. Scott offers a fetching little scribble about Delta here, and I agree with every point he names, including his half-embarrassed appreciation for this half-intolerable movie.)

I will not, however, be finding anything more to say about Philippe Grandrieux's A Lake, the kind of morose and self-important slog where homely and barely-lit actors say things like "No one has dominion over the wind!" before shedding a single tear. I dozed off too often during A Lake to give it a fair grade (Tim, having a similarly snoozy-hallucinatory experience of this soporific clunker a few rows back, gave it a D–), but my standing line about the movie is that it makes Bruno Dumont look like Stanley Donen.

On a completely unrelated note, except insofar as anyone who has sat through a slow and brutal poem like Delta or an bloviating ordeal like A Lake deserves a spot of psychedelic cheer, I cannot possibly recommend this YouTube bonbon highly enough. Congrats for reaching the end of this post, and thanks for following my festival courage; I assure you that I myself am not dying in this town, and in fact can see quite clearly why Virginia was so batty about London: