Tuesday, day number five of the festival is just about the midpoint, and as in the middle of a long distance race, the pace seems to have abated to cruising speed, conserving energy for the final race to the wire, waiting for Meryl Streep to pull into town, and the closing Concha awards. On Monday actor John Malkovitch appeared at a one-man press conference wearing the coat of many colors he has been sporting around town. John was the sole representative for the Coen Brothers film "Burn After Reading" which also features George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Tilda Swinton. The other actors did the honors a few weeks ago at Venice and apparently didn't need two beach cities in rapid succession, but Malkevitch lives in Paris and tends to make the rounds of the European fests. He delivered the usual low-key serious-artist mumbly-monologue which has become his film festival trademark, and then moved on.

The second morning press screening was the Turkish film "Pandora's Box", which is basically a study of the effect that advanced Altzheimers disease has on the modern Turkish family of an elderly woman, especially her two middle aged daughters and a rather wayward son. There have been so many Altzheimers films in the past two or three decades that this one offered nothing really new, except for the Istanbul and general Turkish setting. If anything, it reminded me a little of Toyoda´s Japanese masterpiece of the genre, "Twilight Years", 1975, but had none of the subtlty and style of the Japanese master. Having gotten the message after an hour or so, a bit dazed myself, and craving some fresh air I took a walk.

One of the more talked about films on Monday was the Spanish competition entry "Tiro en la Cabeza" (Bullet in theHead) by Jaime Rosales. This is a kind of hitman thriller with no spoken dialogue and all filmed from "across the street" --the point of view of the killer, whom we never actually see. A weird one-of-a-kind opus with perhaps overtones of Basque ETA terrorist activity. I missed it but the buzz on this one is strong. In the evening at the splendid Teatro Victoria Euegnio I took in the dreamy romantic nightmare from Japan entitled "Tokyo Sonata". The theater which was closed for many years and is now renovated, looks more like a gilded opera house than a cinema venue and was the original home of this festival when it first got started over half a century ago. Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to the late-great Akira Kurosawa) personally introduced his film in Japanese via a Spanish interpreter on stage, saying that it was bsasically the portrait of an average middle-class Japanese family -- which, indeed,it did turn out to be, with however some bizarre twists and turns, ending up something like a piece of Theater of the Absurd by Ionesco with a coda by Debussy. More details later.

The only press conference of interest to me on Monday was a general meeting with some of the directors involved in the ongoing Japan Film Noir sidebar. Among them were Masato Harada, Kaizo Hayashi, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, director of the Belgian co-produced Tokyo Sonata film. Harada who spend many years in LA as a correspondent for the leading Japanese film magazine KINEMA JUNPO, speaks fluent English and has been kind of a spokesman for the group, although there are some surprisingly able Spanish-Japanese interpreters around. Monday was a nice sunny day, so some journalists including yours truly, spent part of the afternoon on the beach. After all, all work, and no sunshine can make Jack a dull reporter.

by Alex Deleon, Tuesday, September 23