You hear that, Mr Andersen?

10,000 Spoons

I've decided that I'm going to have to break up what I'm going to say about the movies I've seen into several different sections, to keep things manageable. I feel bad that I haven't yet had a chance to catch up on other people's blogs - on the other hand, I've spent a large chunk of this evening tracking down a copy of the Microsoft Truetype fonts so that my flatmates don't have to put up with the peculiar decisions that the browser was making regarding the most appropriate substitute for Times New Roman. However, before I begin the first of these filmic interludes, a short tale of woe from this morning...

***

I've been slightly worried about the car. I'd noticed that it sometimes had trouble starting - I thought that this was particularly true when I parked it facing down the hill and had a mostly-full tank, though I wasn't sure whether this was a real observation or just superstition. Thanks to a complicated set of circumstances (that I won't go into here, as they would serve no purpose save to illustrate my poor time-management skills), I ended up parking the car overnight on a very pronounced slope instead of the garage - and sure enough, the next day the car failed to start, and ran very roughly when I eventually got it going. I managed to get it into the garage - though it stalled several times, set off the smoke detector, and I ended up having to push it into position.

So it was with some trepidation that I set out this morning to take the car into the garage for a tune-up and to get the oil changed. I could feel the engine wanting to stall several times, and as the car is an automatic, revving the engine is somewhat complicated - as I came to the lights at the head of Willis St, I had to change into neutral and put the parking break on, rev, and then when the light changed, quickly switch back to drive and take the parking break off. So when I stalled in front of the lights on the corner of Webb and Taranaki St, I was less surprised than vaguely embarassed. After waving the cars past, and getting a passer-by to help me move my car onto the pavement, I stood behind the flashing hazard lights and waited 45 minutes or so for the AA man to appear.

It's surprising - or, if you find yourself in my position, alarming - how close to each other people are willing to throw these huge chunks of metal in order to avoid the risk of waiting through a change of lights. One of the reasons I had to stand outside the car was because it was simply to harrowing to sit through the near-misses; in fact, when the tow-truck came later, he was clipped by wing-mirrors not once, but twice while attaching the car. I suppose I should be grateful that people are probably more wary about clipping a Mercedes than a tow-truck.

Anyway, the AA mechanic initially wanted to fix the car sufficiently that I could drive it to the Berhampore garage. In the course of his investigation, I saw more of the insides of an engine than ever before - previously, I've been happy for it to be a black box that took random amounts of money from my wallet at petrol stations, and pulled my groceries, books or friends from one place to another with relatively little fuss. But now, spark-plugs were hauled out for inspection, the distributor cap was pulled off and tweaks were made to the size of the gap, I held pliers to block off a hose while the engine revved... all of this is more my brother Phillip's domain rather than mine, so I felt a bit out of place. Anyway, after an hour or so of puzzled tinkering, he discovered that the air filter had a puddle of petrol in it, which was why the engine kept on flooding; and after a bit more tinkering, he found that it was coming out of the motor, and that he could get it to run fine - if I didn't mind petrol dripping down inside the engine compartment. We agreed that this might not be a wonderful idea, and the tow-truck was summoned - driven, as it turned out, by the same chap who hauled my mini away when it met its untimely demise.

(For those more au fait with things mechanical: it seems that something was letting fuel into the pistons when the car was parked on a downward angle, and it was seeping past into the sump and mixing with the oil - this is where the petrol that was filling the air filter was coming from. Or at least, that's as close as I can remember the problem being explained to me - the AA guy said that he'd never seen it before.)

So my poor not-so-wee car is being nursed back to health - thankfully, I'm still at the festival for quite a while yet, so it should have plenty of time to recuperate. Unfortunately, it's meant that I've missed Come Drink With Me, which will puch my average number of movies for the festival a smidgen under five a day; it did give my mother and sister Catherine a chance to tease me about how little I've unpacked, though, so it wasn't a complete waste. :)

***

There are four movies I've seen in the festival that you might characterize as anti-"Coporate America": Supersize Me, The Corporation, The Yes Men and Go Further. The first focuses more on the fast-food industry, but plays to very similar themes as The Corporation - advertising is increasingly aimed at catching consumers while they're young, for example. But they take very different approaches - SM went to a school and showed small children flashcards, demonstrating that they could identify Ronald McDonald but not a traditional picture of Jesus Christ (though one child had a stab at it, and guessed it might be George W.Bush); The Corp., on the other hand, interviewed the author of a paper that examined what strategies children successfully used to get their parents to buy things - a study done for advertisers, in order to have more effective campaigns. (Nagging, unsurprisingly, topped the list of successful strategies.) I felt that they were both quite effective, not just in conveying a message, but giving the viewer reasons to take the message seriously.

Go Further, on the other hand, was somewhat disappointing. It documented a tour that Woody Harrelson did in a bus burning eco-fuel down the west coast of America. They brought along a smoking, meat-eating commentator to act as the "everyman", as well as Woody's yoga-instructor and raw-food chef - the "everyman" filled his role of being initially skeptical, and then spouting the "milk is full of blood and pus" line at every opportunity. This was the movie that I found most frustrating - while there were moments of insight into America, like the kids huffing monitor cleaner while chatting to the camera, it was obviously a feel-good movie for believers, rather than a serious attempt to inform anyone about anything; we saw a skeptic be converted, but we didn't see any real reason to be converted ourselves. I suppose it's very difficult to convey in a compelling way someone feeling better from a change of diet - but seeing that the everyman could do yoga at the end of the trip did not make me feel the slightest inclination to give up baked goods. :)

There were things that I felt let the other two I've mentioned down - SM was a little too anecdotal for my taste, for example. And The Corp. lamented the ongoing loss of commons in the world, but didn't refer to the classic tragedy of the commons problem at all, let alone suggest solutions - which gave (to me, at least) the solutions they talked about a superficial air. However, I don't see these things as fatal flaws; all documentaries have biases, and theirs were obvious from the outset. And compare the bald "blood and pus" assertions of Go Further with the interviews in The Corporation with the investigative journalists that tried to break the story about the misuse of growth hormones on dairy cows who were suppressed by the Fox Network in the most bumbling manner possible - one was the opportunity to gross people out and clown around, and the other was interesting and informative.

The Yes Men is slightly more tricky... I thought it was a good film, and I was engaged, but on the other hand - the whole "let's play on people's goodwill and show how dumb and hypocritical they are" seems to be something that's a popular tactic among activists in the States, but one that makes me intensely uncomfortable. I think that my problem with it might be that it feels like a way of attacking the people, rather than trying to solve the situation - sure, it's funny to dress up in a gold jump-suit with a huge phallus, or to blare Muzak at the patent-holder's house (as I seem to recall Michael Moore doing), but apart from solidifying the Us versus Them divide, I'm not sure what purpose it serves. And I don't find it surprising that they got no reaction from a hall full of international delegates, but did get one from a classroom full of American students - the students were in a situation where a certain amount of back and forth is expected, and there would be a certain amount of kudos in challenging an outrageous statement (after all, their teacher was friends with these guys, remember - he was unlikely to have a class where pupils were expected to come, take down notes, and leave in silence). But in an international conference, where you are among people you may have met for the first time that day... well, the point isn't to discover truth so much as to make contacts, so if someone says a bunch of outrageous stuff, where is the profit in challenging it? It might embaress the host, it would almost certainly alienate the organization, and you have no direct stake in what's being talked about - so you don't give them any questions, you plan to talk over how crazy it was with your friends afterwards, and you move on.

I also found myself out of synch with the laughter in the audience a number of times. There was one point where they had convinced a number of accountants in Australia that the WTO had decided to wind itself up; people found it hillarious that they had been taken in, but I found it terribly sad - the accountants they had tricked were elated, and agreed with many of the points that the Yes Men made about the unfairness of current WTO policies. These seemed like good people who wanted to do the right thing - if they had seemed like they had changed their tune for the sake of expedience, sure, chortle away, but if they were expressing relief that good was winning... well, to me that's tragedy, not comedy.

It did have the line "Sincerity is less fun than satire", which I thought was excellent; but I suspect it should be - Sincerity is less fun than satire to do.

***

It's a little later than I intended, and I've still got to get an international driver's license at some point, so I'm going to have to abandon my plan to check out anyone else's blogs or to cover any of the lighter (or at least, less contentious) movies, and get some sleep. More tomorrow, hopefully!

Posted by svend at July 28, 2004 2:21 AM