You hear that, Mr Andersen?

FF Days 7 & 8

Ok, just a quick note to say I'm single again -- C & I are on good terms, and I dealt with being miserable about it near the beginning of the week. :) (It seems quicker and less awkward to mention something here.)

Oh, while I'm on non-FF notes - Anne, my brother's blog is Superlate over in LiveJournal land - nice, meaty entries.

Also, I was walking home tonight, and as I was coming out of the bus tunnel, "Misty Frequencies" by Che Fu started on my mp3 player. I kept walking, and noticed the big fern that's growing out of the hill on the Hataitai side, and then crossed the road, where there's a cabbage tree. And I was really happy I was in Wellington, wandering home, and that it felt... safe. I think I'll probably still end up working overseas for a while at some point, but I don't think I want to live anywhere else.

Oh, and then I got something by Ernest Ranglin, from his Below the Baseline album -- I think it was "54-46 (was my number)". This is one of my favourite albums, probably one of my top five, instumental ska from one of the originators of the form. And in the track "Surfin'", out of nowhere comes this little trill from.. I think it's the opera Carmen, maybe four bars in the middle of the track that just slot right in there. Just thinking about that album makes me happy.

(Other albums I really like are the first, self-titled Elastica album; and the Everything But The Girl album Eden, to pick one; and Cornerstone Roots' Soul Revolution; and Minuit's The Eighty-Eight. Oh, and Chungking's We Travel Fast. Actually, there's a lot of music I really, really like, so I better stop heading down this road. :)

***

Thursday was made rather more exciting than it needed to be because I managed to leave my schedule behind. But I knew I was starting at 10:30, so I was able to work out what my first film was, and I already had a ticket for my last film; and I remembered mentioning that I was going to a classic, which had to be On Dangerous Ground, which let me deduce the other one fairly quickly. :)

If people went to 2046 hoping for a sci-fi flick, they would have been bitterly disappointed. The author/narrator did write a science fiction story, but it only appeared as a framing device for his relationships with various women in Singapore and Hong Kong in the 60s and 70s. (From what we saw, I don't think I'd have enjoyed the novel anyway. :) It was an okay "playboy writer learning about relationships" movie, but not outstanding.

Moolaade, my next movie, centered around a North African village where a woman declares her protection over four girls who've run away from their circumcision ceremony. The acting was uneven, though there were some good performances; if nothing else, it was interesting for what it showed about the vocabulary of movies in that region -- what makes sense as a story in this medium there. There was one excellent sequence of a woman singing of her grief for her child, while the story of what happened is shown in flashback. The impression that I got was this was a film where this culture was talking to itself, more than one aimed at talking to outsiders.

Then it was off to the slightly less comfortable seats of Te Papa for a film noir cop story, On Dangerous Ground. Some great lines here, including an exchange between two detectives about seeing the worst kind of people in police work, and the importance of still maintaining human contact: "How do you live with yourself?" "I don't -- I live with other people." I liked it, even though parts of it were dreadfully corny - I could easily imagine owning it.

Finally, Pinboy, a Latin film about a man who gets a job setting up pins in a bowling alley. This was quite a slow-moving film, and I left a little dissatisfied... though I think that's because I kept on waiting for them to explore the history of the guy, to give some sort of context as to why he chose this job when everyone is telling him that it is terrible, dangerous work that won't develop transferable skills and has awful hours. I might have enjoyed the film more if I'd watched it on its own terms; but it's too late now, since I definitely wouldn't sit through it again. :)

***

I was going to go to five films today, starting with Howl's Moving Castle with Jenni & C; however, even though I got there more than half an hour early, they sold out the theater when I was only one person away from the ticket counter. So I bought a ticket to my next movie, and met up with C (who was behind me in the queue), and we went to stand in the sun in case Jenni hadn't managed to get a ticket either. (I tried calling Jenni, but unsurprisingly she had her phone turned off.) So instead, C & I wandered down to Oriental Bay in the nice warm sun and had hot chocolate and doughnuts, and developed theories of moppetry based on the example moppets in the general area. :)

Next was The Ax, a film about an unemployed man who decides to find a job by wiping out the other possible candidates, and then knocking off the person whose job he wants. It was slightly unnerving how much you found yourself rooting for this guy, especially since the filmmakers did a fairly good job of making his rivals likable people. It was one of the better films I've seen at the festival, and one I'd happily watch again.

I don't think I can say the same about Mysterious Skin. I'm happy to say it was a good film; in fact, I think it's an excellent film. But I also found it quite a harrowing film, much more so than, say, The Woodsman. This was much more graphic and... well, awful. I felt similarly ill in parts of this as I did in Dumplings, and that's a film about eating babies. Maybe it's the whole "sex as a loathful need" thing that I found hard to deal with, and the mixing of sex, violence and contempt. The child actors were very good, and the gay friend was a good counterpoint to the whole "young guy being paid by older men for sex" thing (in terms of emphasising that this wasn't about sexual orientation). But yeah, I'm not going to watch again -- not for a good, long time, at least.

Next up was Morgue's recommendation, The Zoo, about a Palestinian zoo in a city completely surrounded by the Israeli's security wall. I thought this was a really, really good documentary. The filmmaker said that he wasn't setting out to make a political film, and I think that in a very true sense, he succeeded. For example, the main story follows the zoo's vet trying to retrieve a couple of baboons from a closed amusement park, so we see a lot of the checkpoint soldiers: what impressed me was the evenhandedness which he displayed in showing these soldiers. Even more than that, in fact -- rather than getting the feeling that he was showing us the Bad Soldier, and then the Good Soldier (to show balance), you felt like he was just showing who they ran into: some of them happened to be dicks, and some of them were indifferent, and some were sympathetic, and all of them were young. What struck me most about it was that the general mood wasn't hopeless. Even though there were so many crappy things about their situation, there was a feeling of "this won't be forever", people finding ways to manage, and there being hope for the future. The filmmaker mentioned meeting a guy who was learning five languages -- he didn't think he'd ever be able to travel, but he wanted to be able to teach his children for when they were free to go.

This film was made pretty much entirely by one guy - he had a camera which he chose because the audio was good and he knew he wouldn't have a boom-man, and the filming was all done in one brief flurry - I want to say ten days, but it might have been only three. He talked about the frustration and worry that no-one will want to see the film while he was sitting in his mother-in-law's lounge with his laptop and a crappy old TV, editing together his footage; and he talked about the difficulties with distribution, and how he could only afford to send his movie to festivals that didn't require a fee for the film to be submitted. He also talked about wishing that he could grade the film properly and so on; I wish I had more clout within Digital, because it would be awesome to be able to say, "Yeah, come on over and we'll do some stuff while things aren't busy." (Of course, the other problem with that is the fact that things are busy, but nevermind.) I guess it can't hurt to ask...

The final film I saw today was Crash. I liked it a lot, and I could easily imagine picking this up on DVD. An ensemble cast of really good actors, and some excellent portrayals of the racial politics of LA. I can't talk too much about what I liked about the film without entering spoiler territory, but yeah, good, and it'll probably come back. One of the things that it made me realize is that I really don't worry about being killed by random violence. I mean, I can imagine being robbed, or beaten up badly, or maybe being in a fatal car accident - but shot, or even fatally stabbed? I mean, I'm sure it happens, but it's not something I'd even consider if I'm thinking about walking home late at night. And the racial politics, too -- it is there, but nothing like as deep as it appears to be in the States. I mean, I'd be really surprised to hear about police flagging down a well-dressed young Maori driving a luxury car, for example.

Hmm. I realise that I've been saying quite a few negative things about the US, so I want to emphasise that I know many awesome Americans, and that there are many admirable things about America; the scary aspects don't make the good ones go away.

***

Okay, it's way later than I intended, so I'll leave you with a quote from bash.org:

<Tscully> Gimme a C!
<Lich> C!
<MikeB> C
<A_Flayer> C!!
<Tscully> Gimme a H!
<Lich> H!
<MikeB> H
<A_Flayer> H!
<Tscully> Gimme a EESE!
<Lich> EESE...
<MikeB> EESE!
<A_Flayer> EESE
<Tscully> Gimme a CAKE!
<Lich> CAKE!
<MikeB> CAKE
<A_Flayer> CAKE!!
*Tscully runs off with the three cakes
<Tscully> Suckers.

Goodnight, everyone.

Posted by svend at July 23, 2005 2:38 AM