iffb 2 : IN BETWEEN DAYS

Since I took the night off from volleyball, I had the time to catch an unscheduled fest flick. "Unscheduled" here means not included in my fest "spreadsheet." (Originally I'd planned on catching CHALK, then motoring across town to get most of my league vball night in, so I didn't have a movie post-it'd in for Thursday night.)

I had a mess of options - BEFORE THE MUSIC DIES, WORDPLAY, COCAINE ANGEL, and IN BETWEEN DAYS. WORDPLAY was my top chioce, then DAYS... When I got out of CHALK I found out that MUSIC and WORDPLAY had already sold out of advance tickets, so there would only be rush tickets for those shows. DAYS and ANGEL still had advance seats for sale. For a while I lingered in the rush line with Nurse Jen for WORDPLAY, but as WORDPLAY's seating time got pushed by what I'm pretty sure must've been post-film Q&A from an earlier show going long, I ended up chickening out and opted to go with IN BETWEEN DAYS, what looked to be a quiet sad teen angsty film. Nurse Jen ended up catching COCAINE ANGEL w her fella. I'll hafta bug her for a quick review of that one.


IN BETWEEN DAYS is melancholy and heartbreaking. I think it'll help the movie experience if you make yourself mentally "ready" for that going in... able to watch and match its somewhat slow pace, which is, honestly, thin on action, and even dialogue. Be ready for the film equivalent of a teenage funk... with subtitles. =) Once you're at that level, it's a great experience of quiet teenage sadness... Felt a bit Christopher Doyle/Wong Kar Wai and Jarmuschy at times, only without the hip soundtracks.

Alas, no Cure song. At least, nowhere or when in a prominent way. Or did I completely miss it in a karaoke bar scene...? Frack...

Heartbreaking is exactly the word. Teenage unrequited love. Pretty universal, no? Two friends, adolescent teens, who do most everything together, and one is crushing hard on the other, and the other... well, he wants different things on different days. There's more dimension to the film than that, though. Nearly still scenes of the edge of the urban sprawl, accompanied by the girl's voice, from a phone call, or is it the spoken words of a letter, or simply her wished thoughts, to the father back in Korea who left her and her mother...

Heartbreaking.

What I'm saying is. Well, if I actually had a heart. Yup. You guessed it. Broken.

The kid actors in it are perfect.

I heard some snickering remarks as the film let out, about the relationship between the kids - something about how it's a great friendship (between the Aimee and Tran, the girl and boy central to the story), if you're into not talking at all and connecting thru playstation games. They spoke as if they couldn't relate, but maybe younger people would, like it was a generational thing. A bit off the mark, in my opinion, but I can see how audiences might come away with that. I fear they may have been expecting something more typical "teen movie..."

Maybe it plays differently for me because of how I experience the dialogue. Although I have to rely on subtitling for meaning, I'm sorta familiar w the attitude and inflection behind the spoken Korean words as well.

Eh. Screw it. Those guys are dummies.

=)

Me. I really loved it. It made me sad. Teeny/high school age/era/phase movies, done right, make me happy, even when they're sad, y'know?

By the way, both CHALK and IN BETWEEN DAYS are playing again. Check out the schedule and film blurbs for more info ticket availability.

The theater for this show wasn't even half full. I think maybe that it's just not gonna draw all that many viewers over the course of the festival. With that in mind, I rated it a 5 out of 5 to give it a bit of a boost.

The short film that preceded it, PERFECTION, starring Ming Na Wen (of SINGLE GUY and STREET FIGHTER, heh), was decent in concept, and solid in 90 percent of the execution. The film drops in every couple of years on the life of a Chinese girl, and then woman, growing up in the states dealing with the pressure to live up to certain expectations, to get everything in her life in order and on schedule. These scenes are set to music and intercut with an ongoing scene of the girl playing a game of Lakeside's Perfection (w the many uniquely shaped pieces you had to put in their slots before the timer ran out and the slots regurgitated their pieces - remember?)... Low-level clever. Shot well enough, stitched together well enough, but the resolution didn't work for me, tho. I gave it a 2.

Keep on keepin on~