VIFF 2013: They Shot Pictures Recap Podcast

Part of my on-going coverage of VIFF 2013. Here is an index.

In addition to writing here at The End about the movies I saw at the Vancouver International Film Festival this year, I am also podcasting about them on They Shot Pictures, an auteur-focused show I co-host with my pal Seema. She went to the Toronto Film Festival this year and we recorded two episodes comparing our experiences (well, it was one really long episode that we split in half). Part One is available now, in which we talk about the movies we both saw:

Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs
Hong Sangsoo’s Our Sunhi
Ben Russell and Ben Rivers’s A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness
Mark Peranson and Raya Martin’s La última película
Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin
Miguel Gomes’s Redemption
João Pedro Rodrigues’s The King’s Body
Johnnie To’s Blind Detective

I'll update this post in a couple of days when Part Two goes live.

This Week in Rankings

I'm back and almost recovered from the Vancouver International Film Festival, so it's time for a rankings update. My on-going festival coverage can be found here on its own index (now featuring a ranked list!), so far I've got reviews of seven of the films I saw there, along with reviews of Hong Sangsoo's Nobody's Daughter Haewon (which didn't play at the festival) and Johnnie To's Blind Detective (which did play there, but only after I left). I'll have a couple episodes of They Shot Pictures coming soon as well, the one on Akira Kurosawa's Samurai movies we recorded weeks ago and a festival wrap-up episode on Vancouver and Toronto. The last couple episodes of The George Sanders Show have covered a pair of classics and their remakes, Harakiris and Solarises.

These are the films I've watched and rewatched over the last couple of weeks, and where they place on my year-by-year rankings. Links are to my letterboxd comments, where applicable. For this week I've ranked the films of 2013 for the first time, but certainly not the last.

Harakiri (Masaki Kobayashi) - 12, 1962
Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky) - 8, 1972
Dressed to Kill (Brian dePalma) - 11, 1980
Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper) - 21, 1982
Millionaire's Express (Sammo Hung) - 21, 1986

Solaris (Steven Soderbergh) - 36, 2002
Hara-kiri: Death of a Samurai (Takashi Miike) - 24, 2011
Wolf Children (Mamoru Hosada) - 8, 2012
Four Ways to Die in My Hometown (Chai Chunya) - 23, 2012
Room 237 (Rodney Ascher) - 27, 2012

Dredd (Pete Travis) - 31, 2012
Gebo and the Shadow (Manoel de Oliveira) - 34, 2012
9 Muses of Star Empire (Lee Harkjoon) - 41, 2012
Good Vibrations (Lisa Barros D'Sa & Glenn Leyburn) - 51, 2012
The King's Body (João Pedro Rodrigues) - 54, 2012

La última película (Raya Martin & Mark Peranson) - 1, 2013
The Missing Picture (Rithy Panh) - 2, 2013
A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhangke) - 3, 2013
Blind Detective (Johnnie To) - 4, 2013
Our Sunhi (Hong Sangsoo) - 5, 2013

A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (Ben Rivers & Ben Russell) - 6, 2013
Nobody's Daughter Haewon (Hong Sangsoo) - 7, 2013
Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-liang) - 9, 2013
Yumen (JP Sniadecki, Xu Ruotao, & Huang Xiang) - 10, 2013
The Great Passage (Yuya Ishii) - 11, 2013

Trap Street (Vivian Qu) - 12, 2013
New World (Park Hoonjung) - 13, 2013
Distant (Yang Zhengfan) - 14, 2013
Mahjong (João Rui Guerra da Mata & João Pedro Rodrigues) - 15, 2013
Anatomy of a Paperclip (Ikeda Akira) - 16, 2013

Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón) - 17, 2013
Redemption (Miguel Gomes) - 19, 2013
Burn Release Explode The Invincible (Kim Soohyun) - 20, 2013
Bends (Flora Lau) - 22, 2013
3x3D (Peter Greenaway, Edgar Pera, Jean-Luc Godard) - 23, 2013

My First Love (Keiko Tsuruoka) - 24, 2013
Grigris (Mahamat-Saleh Haroun) - 25, 2013
Longing for the Rain (Yang Lina) - 26, 2013
The Spider's Lair (Jason Paul Laxamana) - 27, 2013
Camille Claudel 1915 (Bruno Dumont) - 28, 2013