You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Film Festival, Days 1 & 2

Is there anything more annoying than coming back to find your blog filled with spam comments? Of course there is, what kind of stupid question is that. But it's still pretty annoying right? Yes, yes it is.

Speaking of annoying, having your Palm spaz out on you so that you not only can't tell the time, but can't find out the address of a friend's birthday dinner, and so can't give her the present that you very carefully chose out that day between movies is pretty high up on the list. I'm really sorry, Amphigorey, and I hope you'll agree to meet me for lunch or something at some point during the Festival. :)

Which allows me to gracefully segue into my Film Festival experience. But first, a little griping. I have taken leave, which in most jobs would mean that I wasn't working; but I went into work for a meeting Friday morning out of a misguided sense of duty, and was called at half-past three to be asked a question that anyone in Systems should have been able to either handle or pass on, and then later in the evening someone from work left a message that something had gone wrong, and could I call them back. (I couldn't, as it happens, as I didn't have any appropriate numbers.) As a consequence of that last call I went in this morning to do a bit of work, and I may end up popping in tomorrow morning as well. (I would have gone in yesterday evening, but I decided I was too tired to safely do anything tricky.)

Anyway, enough griping - on to the movies!

***

The first film I saw was Double Dare, a documentary on stuntwomen, focusing on an American woman who had been working in the field all her life (and came from a large family of stuntpeople), and a Kiwi who had been a Lucy Lawless stunt double on Xena, and was just starting out in the industry. The people were charming and real, and the documentary itself was quite interesting, and the director was there... I'm always a bit wary about sticking around for questions. Sometimes you get some really interesting anecdotes and trivia, but sometimes people use their question as an opportunity to address a large and fairly captive audience about whatever pet peeve they happen to have. This, luckily, was one of the interesting ones.

The director talked about the main difficulty they faced on the film being access - none of the production companies wanted them on the sets, and the director talked about the frustration of watching Entertainment Tonight being ushered in to do a puff piece while they languished behind the barracades. In fact, one of the reasons they went with the NZ side of the story was because the Xena people were actually willing to give them access. Stories like this, as well as follow-up on what has happened after the end of the documentary, made this film an excellent start to the Festival. Oh, and it's apparently got lots of cool DVD extras, so I might end up picking this up at some point.

One random observation that I feel like sharing - I don't know what the distinctive characteristics are that make a NZ house so obviously and distinctly NZ, rather than American, but when we cut to the younger stuntwoman's family home, it was blindingly obvious that it was from somewhere around here. I wonder what our houses look like to American eyes.

Next up was The Woodsman, the "Kevin Bacon as a paroled pedophile film". This was a good movie, but not a great one. I have mixed feelings about musicians trying their hand at acting - Mos Def worked well as the policeman checking up on Bacon's character, but Eve's character didn't gel for me. The "bird" symbolism could have used a little lighter touch sometimes, but how can I fault a film that has a Parliment funk track? :) It's a movie I might watch again.

Turtles Can Fly, on the other hand, I don't think I'll rewatch, although I enjoyed it. Set in Iraq just before the American invasion, all the children were excellent - one of the many kids crippled by a land mine using his mained leg as a mock-gun to shoot at the Turkish guard across the the border was perfect. But it certainly wasn't twee - in fact, bits of it were quite harrowing.

Whisky was okay, with a slightly unexpected ending, but intentionally low-key. The owner of a slightly run-down sock factory asks his right-hand woman to pretend to be his wife while his brother comes to visit, but is not really prepared for the small adjustments that have to be made when you allow others into your life. For example, he's showing the woman around his apartment, but he repeated turns the light off as soon as he's out of the room, leaving her standing in the dark. Fairly funny, but I won't be running out to own it.

And finally on Friday, Dumplings. I was chatting to a friend of mine who works at the festival, and she apparently counted 18 people leaving during the showing. I thought it was well done, disturbing, and made me feel mildly ill. Echoing a post Jenni made recently, I find some things very hard to watch, and apparently the chopping up and eating of aborted babies is one of them. Which is a good thing, I think.

Moving on to Saturday, Touch the Sound was a documentary about a deaf woman who is an acclaimed percussionist. The style of the film was quite interesting - there was no narration, and the only way the film-makers came into the film were with titles telling you where you were and what was happening. The focus on "found" instruments, using chopsticks on plates and beercans, playing on the big brass studs holding the drumskin in place, playing electric guitars as percussion instruments - it was the sort of thing that encourages you to sit back and consider both your ambient noise, and the potential for noise that surrounds you.

I think that the thing that sold me on Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (apart from the fact that it was a story I was interested in learning more about) was that they started off the documentary by using Tom Wait's "What's He Building In There?". This was the story of the biggest scandal, the biggest scam in Corporate America that has been dragged into the light of day. Actually, one of the things that struck me was how much music they used - used very well, I should add, but that's not what struck me. One of the things that I learned in preparing for the 48-hour film competition was just how much using other people's music and media can cost. (That was another thing mentioned as a big hassle for Double Dare, by the way - getting clips to demonstrate stuff.) Someone had obviously put a lot of effort and a lot of cash into making this documentary... which made me wonder how much the interests of those bankrolling the film influenced how the film was presented. That aside, there was a lot to like about the film, including the fact that they had interviews with two former traders - one of whom appeared quite remorseful about how he had acted, and one who was google-eyed and kinda scary, and appeared to be slightly regretful that he wasn't still setting up fake outages and driving electricity prices through the roof. I'd watch this one again.

As usual, Homegrown: Works on Film was a bit of a mixed bag. The two I liked most were "The Little Things" (a neglected girl on her 14th birthday and young boy neighbor), and "Tama Tu". The second, done almost entirely without dialogue, was one of the funniest and most touching things I've seen so far - a group of young soldiers from the Maori Batallion are working their way through a bombed-out city, and briefly go to ground. It was filmed in the grounds of Wellington Hospital while they were pulling down the old front buildings, which is why the ruins looked so hauntingly familiar when I watched it, and Peter Jackson lent them the weapons from his extensive cache.

My final Saturday film was Look Both Ways, an Austrailian film about death, birth and relationships. I really liked it. The writer (who was there) had previously focused on short films, including animated shorts, and so the small bits of animation where one of the leads imagines terrible things happening work quite well - in fact, it turned into a really interesting device to examine the different internal mindscapes of a couple of the key characters. This was very much an ensemble movie - in fact, the writer said she did this quite consciously, since she felt that she was essentially making five intertwined short films, and she knew she could sustain the story of a short film.

***

I've kind of realised that I'm much happier to push my boundaries during the Film Festival - I'll go to movies that I'd probably never go to see during the rest of the year, and probably wouldn't sit and watch if they came on TV. Since I almost always enjoy the films I see during the Festival, I'm not sure why that is.

Okay, that's nine down - about fifty-five to go. :)

Posted by svend at July 17, 2005 1:00 AM