First up on Sunday was U with C & Jenni. A French children's film, but where the Kirikou movies of last year felt like fairly straightforward retellings of folktales, this felt... well, I thought of Flight of Dragons or The Last Unicorn, though this might be aimed at a slightly younger market. (Er, but not with the patronising attitude that many English-language films for children often seem to have.) It was beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, with painted land and seascapes that were full of great daubs of colour. It was funny, pretty, and even the slightly melancholy ending isn't without hope. I'd certainly consider giving it to a kid, providing either their reading, French, or memory was up to it.
And I'll consider buying a copy for myself. :)
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It was hard to watch A Civilized Society without wanting to throw something at the screen whenever Lockwood Smith's smiling mug popped up. (But I thought C might be a bit annoyed if I got us thrown out, so I manfully resisted.) I still remember him coming to my secondary school just before I was going to enrol for university, and promising to abolish university fees when National got into power. He got a great big cheer for that... which was presumably balanced out by the many, many boos and hisses he got over the years when university fees not only stayed, but went higher.
I fundamentally disagree with the attitudes that drove educational reform at that time. I feel that the education is a lot more like health than, say, purchasing equipment for a business -- there are lots of advantages for everyone if everyone is healthy, and there are advantages for everyone if everyone gets as much education as they can stand. It's not just a case of it being unfair that the people who got the advantage of a free education depriving me, and my brothers and sisters and friends, of the same advantage; while I'm not saying everyone should be forced into a single educational mould, I don't think that I, personally, am better off with a bit more money in my pocket while someone with a great talent but at a decile one school gets no chance.
Actually, that brings up a good point -- surely, the funding model is fundamentally flawed. If you're wanting to produce good grades, then the answer isn't to give funding to the schools that have good grades already? I mean, they're obviously doing fine with the money they've got! Wouldn't it make more sense to try and divert the money to lower decile schools, so that they can get the more experienced teachers and specialist programmes to help their pupils achieve? If the goal is to help everyone, doesn't it make sense to help those who need help more?
I understand the drive of parents to put their child in a environment that is likely to let them succeed, and why they don't want their kids to go to school with problem kids. I don't think it's okay to have disruptive kids or kids that act out stopping the kids that want to learn... or at least, have no particular objection to learning. But I don't think that the ghetto-ization of low decile schools is the right answer, or that you should have to have money to buy your way out of the problem. I wish there was an easy and obvious answer.
Um, anyway -- the documentary was good, and I learned a bunch of stuff that went over my head as a student at the time. Someone asked, in the Q&A afterwards, whether he deliberately picked out clips that made the teacher's union look fair-minded, and the right-leaning politicians look like arrogant pricks; as it turns out, he actually worked from transcripts, trying to find illustrative quotes in the archives of the television news of the day. The arrogance and smarm of the politicians were... just there.
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Animation Now, which I saw with Jenni and C, was the usual mix of nifty and mediocre. There were fewer "play music and show random images", but they weren't completely absent; on the other hand, there were a number of shorts in this category that played with the idea that you can show just a little of the image, just some salient feature, like a headlight, and the brain will fill in the rest of the bus. Related to this, there was a nifty short, Weiss, with a man walking through a featureless white landscape, who could only see the obstacles by the shadow he cast. There was also a neat little CGI short of wee machines exploring a jungle planet (Burning Safari), and a wildly colourful and baroque short that had a song narrating the action (The Tale of How) Unfortunately, the song itself was quick, choral and confusing; I kind of wish that there had been subtitles. There wasn't anything on the level of Jasper Morello, but it also wasn't as bad as it's been some years.
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Then it was time to say goodbye to C and Jenni, and scurry off to dinner, and then on to The Monastery, a documentary about a cranky old Danish man who wants to donate an old, decrepit castle to the Russian Orthodox church to use as a nuclear missile silo. No, actually a monastery; I was just wondering if you were paying attention. He is a bit of a obstinate sod, and there's a strong suggestion that he might have a touch of Aspergers -- he admits that he's very single-minded, and never really liked anyone in his life apart from his father. (And he had a wierd thing about people's noses.) The interactions between him and the head nun who comes to see whether the site is suitable are pretty funny, because they're both so strong-willed, though polite.
Well... fairly polite. :)
Anyway, I thought it worked pretty well as a portrait as a very interesting individual, and I'm glad I saw it.
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Finally, there was the Korean gangster movie, A Dirty Carnival. There were a number of times where I thought, "Hang on a tick; have I seen this movie already?" Not that this was a bad example of the genre... perhaps because it was such a typical member of the genre, with sets and set-pieces from a half-dozen other gangster or alienated-young-Asian movies. (The kareoke bar, the dinner with all the people from school, the big fight with bats and bits of lumber where the main character and his allies are outnumbered...) The most distinctive feature was probably that the main character had a friend trying to make a film about gangsters, which lead to some movie-within-a-movie hijinks; but I'm always a little leery of those sorts of schenanigans, since it can so easily feel like the English essay on how hard it is to write English essays.
To sum up, it was not a bad film -- I enjoyed it, and think that it's a fair example of the genre. But there are certainly better ones.
Posted by svend at July 25, 2007 9:41 AM