Part of The Oregonian's team coverage of Week 1 of the Portland International Film Festival:
"The Extraordinary Voyage"
If this documentary isn't a special feature on the eventual "Hugo" Special Edition Blu-Ray, well, it should be.
Co-directors Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange recount the real-life rise, fall and rediscovery of silent-film and special-effects pioneer Georges Méliès -- liberally seasoning their biography with clips from his surviving films (and the films of contemporaries who aped his style) -- along with fascinating turn-of-the-century footage and talking-head praise from the likes of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Michel Gondry and Costa-Gavras. The filmmakers then make a stirring case for film preservation as they recount their painstaking decade-and-change struggle to restore a hand-tinted print of Méliès' masterwork, "A Trip to the Moon."
The doc ends, triumphantly, with a presentation of the complete resurrected "Trip" with an odd new soundtrack by the French music group Air (which, fear not, does not make the whole thing come off like Giorgio Moroder’s pop-song-choked edit of "Metropolis").
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B-plus; France; 79 minutes. Plays at PIFF at:
- 8:45 p.m. Friday 2/10, World Trade Center Theater
- 3 p.m. Sunday 2/12, Whitsell
Portland International Film Festival reviews: Week 1 (The Oregonian, Friday, Feb. 10, 2011)
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