It's somewhat disheartening to have your mother threaten to hold your laundry hostage unless you tidy up the kitchen for your flatmates. (I feel I should explain why I was washing clothes at my parents house. I won't, but I feel I should. :) I guess this is a danger of letting your parents see your place of residence before you've had a chance to totally unpack.
Speaking of parents, I've had a pretty good crop at this festival. Morgue's mother and father are people that I only ever seem to see at festivals, now that he's away. It's not that much of a surprise, I guess, but they're nice people, so it seems a shame that I only see them once a year...
... except, of course, when Morgue decides to organize a spontaneous gathering in Courtney Place from the other side of the world. :)
I also saw and chatted with Emba's mum (though I might be hard-pressed to remember which film it was that I saw her at) - she seemed in good spirits. And I've bumped into the Hurstling and her parents on a number of occasions.
There are also people that I've met by sitting next to them at the festival and chatting - in all but one case, I been glad that I met them. And there are the ushers, who seem to be starting to recognise me; I actually made friends with one last year, and she's now floor manager for the Embassy. It's through this connection, by the way, that I discovered that they've asked whether they can have a theatre cat, and been told "no".
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As the title suggests, I'm going to quickly go over a number of films that are at the weirder end of the spectrum: The Saddest Music In The World, Aaltra, A Page of Madness, Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat In Space, Coffee and Cigarettes and The Five Obstructions.
Tamala was annoying. There were many, many instances where it was very nearly good. There were some good lines and images, but I'm afraid you don't get a laugh from me by having something cute-looking swear. And the audience seemed to have a very low standard when it comes to weird Japanese song lyrics - when you've heard the theme-song to Azumanga Daioh talking about imagination cake and the temptations of wheat, singing about a packed lunch lacks a certain zing.
I have mixed feelings about The Saddest Music In The World and Aaltra. I can see what they're trying to do, and I think that they did it quite well - but the kind of comedy that they're trying to do isn't really the kind I enjoy. I don't think that they're bad films; in fact, I'd say they were quite good films, well shot and well-made. (Saddest Music more so than Aaltra - the subtitles in the latter were unreadable at times, with white text over a grainy, highly exposed black-and-white filmstock.) And I think that Saddest Music evoked the films of the period very well - for example, Maria de Medeiros has a beautiful, waif-like face very evocative of early filmstars. But in the end, I simply failed to click with them.
On the other hand, I quite liked A Page of Madness, though I know that I was viewing it in quite a different way to the other films. It was, after all, a silent film made in Japan in the 1920s - I think I was prepared to work with it more than I would be for other, more modern films. I thought it worked quite well, and the music, though obviously not what the director would have envisioned, was evocative and helped me engage in the movie.
I also enjoyed Coffee and Cigarettes and Five Obstructions. C&C built on it's own internal gags well, and had many amusing bits; I didn't get into it initially, but by the end I enjoyed it. I did notice that the continuity guy wasn't on the job for the sketch with the woman reading the gun magazine - the pages that were shown in long shots were definitely different from the ones that we saw when we changed angles. (Okay, look, I notice books, all right? :)
Five Obstructions was an excellent study on how constraints can actually help the creative process - although it also showed that if you're good, you can also deal with, "Okay - do it with no constraints". I think that, in some ways, the 48-hour film competition scratches some of the same itches, though I doubt any team I know will flying out to Cuba to film. :) But the transition from, "What?!" to "Here, look at this!" was very fun to watch.
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While I'm thinking about it - something that I didn't find exactly fun to watch was the Torrence Community Dance Group getting excited planning for their MTV award ceremony presentation in Spike Jonze Rarities. (These are the people in the video for "Praise You" by Fat Boy Slim.) They were so eager, and so oblivious to their limitations... I just dreading the point that their bubble would burst, and they'd realise that they just weren't that good. But they were happy, and excited, and they argued about whether making train gestures was a step backward from running around like an aeroplane. In a way, I can see how it's presumptuous of me to feel bad for them - after all, they're happy, the people watching them are happy, where's the harm? But I feel bad for them anyway. For similar reasons, I'm not as keen on Waiting For Guffman or Best In Show as other people I know.
The other parts were okay, but didn't really give me any new insight into what Spike Jonze does or how he does it.
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I should point out that I've actually been glad to have gone to all the films I've seen. I'm slightly worried that I've been being too negative. Next time, I promise to talk about some of the films I've really enjoyed.
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I have three sets of glasses frames to try out, and an appointment at 9am to have my eyes tested. I hope I get the chance to ask my flatmates their opinion tomorrow morning before they rush off to work. In light of this, I guess it's time to get to bed.
Posted by svend at July 29, 2004 1:53 AM