You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Film Festival, Days 4-6

One of the nice things about going to a bunch of movies at the same time is that you sometimes get weird synchronicities and parallels in the movies you're seeing. For example, It's All Gone Pete Tong, which was the only thing I saw on Monday, made an interesting contrast to Touching the Sound, in terms of the "deaf musicians" motif. Huh, that's weird -- I've just realised that neither film mentioned Beethoven that I recall. (Just by the by, he had the legs removed from the pianos that he used, so he could feel the vibrations in the floor more fully.) Anyway, while there was a little bit "stupid people and snot are funny" humour, I enjoyed the film -- one of the best uses of a slavering anthropomorphic badger in an apron to symbolise cocaine addiction that I've seen. :)

Monday was also the day I had the car serviced -- it had been stalling when idle, though it always started up with no trouble. I took it to our garage in the morning, and they fiddled with it, but were unable to reproduce the problem; so I picked it up before going in for the movie, and it stalled three or four times between there and Kent Terrace. I took it back to the garage and parked it there, because I thought it might only happen if it had been sitting for a while in the cold... and then I started fretting.

You see, I use the garage attached to the BP in Berhampore. Apart from this time, they've always been fine; they're who my parents go to, my brother worked there once, and my grandfather used to take my car there, so I'm prepared to put up with the inconvenience of the location. However, they are on the same block as a gang house, who have a nice flood-lit gate and high stone wall to deter the nosy. In fact, there was a gang member, patch prominently displayed, standing on the street near the lights and drinking a glass of beer when I parked the car. He asked where I was going, in a friendly fashion; I told him, politely, that I was walking home (which seemed simpler than saying "to my parents house to borrow a car to drive home"). And off I walked to Island Bay to get the van, all the while slightly worried whether I'd come back to find the car in one piece, or at all. Of course, no harm actually came to it, and the garage seem to have fixed the problem, though I'm not driving very much during the Festival. (I prefer to bus in, and then walk home; I'm not normally in a hurry on the way back, it's good exercise, and gives me a chance to listen to music and wind down. ;)

***

Tuesday started with Mad Hot Ballroom, which I liked a lot for, among other things, showing some of the kids dealing with losing. The inevitable comparison is with Spellbound, and I think that Spellbound is a better movie, perhaps because we got to know the kids as people better; but in this one, we got to know the adults a lot more. Plus the music was better. :)

Animation for Kids was okay, but nothing that has me scouring the Net to see again. I did bump into another of my Festival buddies, who was taking her seven year-old niece to it, and had a nice chat to both of them.

Then another of my Socially Conscious films -- in this case, Machucha, about Chile in the time of Allende, and a rich boy making friends with a poor kid from the slums just before the fascists take over and socialist priests and their initiatives "disappear". Lots of stuff to consider about how easy it is to be a liberal in easy times, and what choices we make when the shooting starts.

Then there was The Edukators -- a couple of guys who break in, rearrange the furniture and belongings, and leave a note telling you that you have too much money and too many things, and this won't last long. Now, I must say that I find the idea of someone breaking into my house and going through my stuff really, really creepy. A friend at work talked about hating having an alarm anywhere he lives -- he says he feels "caged" -- but I totally don't feel that. Do I have more stuff than I need? Probably... no, certainly. I have DVDs and books I haven't even looked at yet. Even so... I don't think I've got very much in the way of status symbol objects -- you know, things that serve no purpose except to show how very rich you are, like Name Artist sculpture. And I really want to read the books and watch the DVDs I have. Actually, I'm managing to read a novel every day or two, so that's not so bad...

Just to go off on even more of a tangent, I've decided that reading during the Film Festival is really useful -- it's much less stand-offish than listening to music, so friends feel much less like they're disturbing you, and it's not as lonely as simply sitting and waiting. Of course, since it's likely to be a point of conversation if someone starts talking to you, choosing what to read is moderately tricky -- Foucault's Pendulum sends one message, Starship Troopers sends another, and The Princess Diaries yet another. (Yes, yes, why should I let the opinion of complete strangers dictate my reading material? Well, it doesn't dictate -- it merely colours it, and I have no particular axe to grind, so why not go with books that seem like they'd serve more than one purpose?) Something like Snow Falling Over Cedars is an excellent Festival book, approachable but slightly; but at the moment, I'm working my way through Anne Perry's Inspector Pitt series, which is rather low on the "worthiness" stakes, but has the cache of being a set of murder mysteries written by one of the girls involved in the events depicted in Heavenly Creatures. ;)

Um... where was I? Oh yes, The Edukators. I liked the film, and found the characters to be interesting; but again, not one that I think I'll be seeing twice.

***

Wednesday was a bit of an odd day. Due to a bit of a miscalculation with the buses, I arrived in Courtney Place too late to make it to Tony Takitani, so I had three options: wait until 3:45pm for Election, go to the documentary on the porn movie Deep Throat, or go to the Godzilla movie. I was kind of tempted by the documentary, since the Blaxplotation one had been so interesting last year, but decided to go with the giant lizard instead. And I was rewarded for my decision by bumping into Jenni & Lee!

I kinda wish I had been sitting next to Lee during the movie, rather than behind both of them, because it would have been so much fun to mock the movie while it was going on -- not in a nasty way, because it was obviously very aware of what it was doing, but in a "they obviously intend us to make fun of that guy's mustache" kind of way. But that might have annoyed Jenni, so it was probably good I didn't. :) Anyway, it was the "terrible in a good way" that I was hoping for, so hurrah that I got to see it.

Election was my "Asian gangster" flick -- I've seen some excellent movies in this area at previous festivals, and this was... about average. Some cool stuff about the origins of the Triad secret societies as resistance against the Mongol invaders (who became the Manchu dynasty), and on the politics within them, but nothing truely stand-out.

Next was another documentary -- The Take, whose tagline is "Fire the Boss", and had Naomi Kline as one of the makers. The other filmmaker was there, and he explained that they had two target audiences -- the mainstream festival movie-goer, and activist groups. It was also interesting that he talked about a showing where half the people were workers shown in the film, and the other half were "black-clad culture vultures" (or words very similar) who gave them a standing ovation -- I guess no-one thinks of themselves as a culture vulture, but given Wellingtonians' perchant for black, especially the esspresso socialist set, it seems an interesting observation to make. Anyhoo, the film was about workers who, owed wages and made redundant by owners who've pocketed state handouts and bankrupted their companies, have occupied the factories and started working for themselves as a collective. Interestingly, in the examples we saw, the backpay owed was comparable to the amount the factories were estimated to be worth, so the workers were working through the judicial system to have their ownership legally recognised. In the case of the factory they were focusing on (an autoparts factory), they'd decided that everyone would be paid the same wage; but they mentioned that in other collective factories, the set-ups could be quite different. There are apparently about 200 businesses like this in Argentina now, and the idea is popular in other parts of South America too. There was some background on the disasterous Rogernomic-like "reforms" that led to the collapse of Argentinean manufacturing and flight of capital, and the IMF came in for quite a bashing. In the questions afterwards, it was obvious that the guy had done his homework, since he knew some basics about NZ's experiences, and talked derisively about tax cuts being a solution to anything. Well, actually I guess they're a solution to having a continuing budget surplus. ;) Anyway, a very impressive film, and worth watching.

The final film I went to on Wednesday was 3-Iron - another "breaking in but not stealing" movie, with the twist that he cleans the house and fixes their appliances, rather than exhorting them to change their Capitalist ways. The hero ascertains which houses are occupied by sticking flyers on the doorhandles, and seeing which ones aren't removed the next day -- I really hope that this practice doesn't catch on here, since I find it hard to imagine a more annoying form of advertising, short of someone driving around with a loudspeaker mounted on a car. He meets a woman by accident, who ends up tagging along; he doesn't speak through the entire film, and she speaks only a little.

I liked this film a lot. There was some violence that felt violent (some of the worst relating to golf balls), but nothing particularly graphic, and there were some excellent sequences. Also, I sat one seat along from where I was meant to be sitting -- and it turned out that the seat I'd taken belonged to someone I'd known at college, who I'd bumped into back when I was looking at that house that looked like it had last been decorated in the 70s (with piles that looked like they had been built with more hope than skill). He and his partner are still looking for a place, as it turns out, which makes me feel quite good about the house.

***

10:30am start tomorrow; or rather, this morning, so I'm wrapping this up. Sorry if it got a bit rambley in places, but it's nice to get some of these thoughts down on a page. :)

Posted by svend at July 21, 2005 1:04 AM