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December 28, 2006
Jim's Interkosmos makes Best Shoestring Sci-Fi of 2006
You can get this now from Thrill Jockey
Less deep but more far out, Interkosmos also uses faux documentary techniques to tell its space-exploration story. The style is thrift-store vintage, with a sprinkling of communist good cheer in a tale about a Soviet-era program. Writer-director-star Jim Finn wrote the script after he finished filming, less interested in building a narrative arc than in creating the proper tone. Interkosmos includes newsreel footage of cosmonauts in training, cheap and charming animation and several musical interludes, including one of a field hockey team smacking balls for Marx and Lenin. The film's central story thread features Falcon and Seagull, cosmonaut lovers flying separate spacecraft in parallel orbits. Their conversations, spiked with pregnant pauses, are far more banal than anything you'd overhear in a high-school cafeteria. Falcon sings to Seagull ("Clang clang clang went the trolley/Ding ding ding went the bell"). She tells him it sounds like capitalist trash. At times, Interkosmos' hip, deadpan style threatens to grow tiresome, but then Finn injects something unexpected to liven it up. By the end, Interkosmos has coalesced into a colorful portrait of an imagined time where movies and space travel were happy, bubbly things. via Wired
(Thanks Eliel)
Posted by cat at 01:56 PM