Coda’s ongoing coverage
of the 2025 Phoenix Film Festival & International
Horror Sci-Fi Film Festival. I'll be using these posts to recap the films I've experienced as
part of these festivals.
THE STAMP THEIF – Directed by Dan Sturman
THE STAMP THEIF is a documentary that tells the story of a group of Americans pretending to make a film (ARGO style) in order to gain access to a Polish apartment building that they suspect has a buried valuable stamp collection, stolen from Holocaust victims.
It's apparent early on
that this film, although a documentary, was written and composed by someone who’s
worked extensively in fiction. It plays out like a heist film or a spy novel. I
actually found it fascinating at how the plot to an actual heist so closely resembles
the making of a Hollywood film.
I was also struck that this
story gives us an entirely different look at Poland than what we saw in Jesse
Eisenberg’s A REAL PAIN last year. The community showcased in that fictional
film was far more welcoming to outsiders. In this film, we see how the country
has been affected by the global rise in this new brand of populism.
With this in mind
however, I found the overall arch of the film to be one of hope. In spite of
the region’s growing ideas of nativism and antisemitism, it was encouraging to find
so many people ready and willing to do the right thing and to honor history’s
ugly truths. There was real value in this discovery.
CHAIN REACTIONS –
Directed by Alexandre O. Philippe
Documentarian Alexandre O. Philippe intervies Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Stephen King and Karyn Kusama about the cultural, societal and personal impacts of Tobe Hooper’s THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE.
It’s difficult to review Philippe’s films. I’ve
seen all of them and thoroughly enjoyed every one of them. But I don’t know
that there is a whole lot of his actual direction that I’m responding to. The
entire premise is typically to have a handful of filmmakers or critics that
most of us cinephiles adore sit down and discuss an amazing film or filmmaker. Then,
overlay clips from a bunch of our favorite cinematic moments and call it done. It’s
a formula that works for me and tons of my community. It makes me wish I was
sitting in the room with them, deeply diving into the entries of this medium
that we all celebrate.
The ingredients of the
recipe are simple, and they make a fulfilling experience. But how much of
Philippe’s creativity is actually imposed onto celluloid? I don’t know. I guess
I don’t really care either. But the thought that we may have not ever seen one
of Takashi Miike’s films if the screening to Chaplin’s CITY LIGHTS hadn’t been
sold out is certainly a haunting and chaotic allegory to the world created by
Tobe Hooper in 1975.
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