360 [HD]

`Everything comes full circle.' Fascinating and Challenging, a Cinematic Treasure
Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles (City of God, Blindness, The Constant Gardner, etc) once again demonstrates how far away from reality his films can take us, but at the same time how closely he can examine human foibles so that rather than being a spectator he involves the viewer into squirming through our own errors of assignations, past, present and future. The screenplay for this extended psychological thriller is by Peter Morgan (Longford, The Queen, Frost/Nixon. The Last King of Scotland, etc) and yet both men attribute the inspiration to Arthur Schnitzler's 1897 play La Ronde which scrutinizes the sexual morals and class ideology of its day through a series of encounters between pairs of characters (shown before or after a sexual encounter). By choosing characters across all levels of society, the play offers social commentary on how sexual contact transgresses boundaries of class. Meirelles and Morgan weave together the stories of an array of people from disparate social...

We've Seen It All Before
Billed as a modern remake of the wonderful 1950 French film. La Ronde, 360 turns out to simply be another in a long line of Six-Degrees-Of-Separation-type films (or perhaps, considering its global span, another in a long line of Babel-type films). Unfortunately, there is really no development of story or character, so all that is left of any interest in watching how the lives of the characters randomly intersect on an international scale. The cast is good, with the stand-outs being Ben Foster and Anthony Hopkins (who in a rather small role ironically does his best work in years), but at the end one is left with a big "So What?"

IF THE ROAD FORKS. TAKE IT
I imagine this is titled 360 because "Ring" and "It's a Small World" were already taken. 360 involves a number of disjointed stories that have a way of intersecting or not. There are many indie films out there that do this, some work better than others. The ones that work have quirky stories that hold our interest. This one does not. The stories consist of an escort, infidelity, a sex offender, a man looking for his missing daughter, and a Russian. There may be a few more.

The Denver airport was filmed in Minnesota, apparently they figured no one travels enough to either place to notice. While the acting wasn't bad, the stories were presented in a mundane fashion. One of the problems with the film is that you know in advance the story will circle back so you spend your time concentrating on how it is going to do that rather than try to take in what is on the screen.

If you like intersecting indie films, try Jason Freeland's "Garden Party" a modest production...

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