It was around Death of a President that C pointed out that some tickets seemed to be missing -- in fact, all the tickets bar the first one on Saturday, all the tickets on Sunday, all the tickets for the evenings of the coming weeks, and all the tickets on Saturday. (The Sunday tickets were there.) I know that my tickets were bundled up in three or four packets; as near as I can work out, a whole packet went missing at some point between being printed out, and me dividing them up to give to C and Jenni. I don't know whether Ticketec accidentally mislaid them while they were packing them up, or they disappeared somewhere in the journey back to work; but I've looked everywhere I can think of, and haven't been able to find them.
So... in a bit of a panic, I went to the Ticketec office at the MFC, and asked if there was anything they could do to help. Luckily, there was -- they record your name, address, phone number and so on, as well as the seat number of the tickets you were issued, so they can tell the different venues to give you a lost ticket slip on the day. This means that if you turn up and there's someone sitting in your seat, they are out of luck.
My greatest fear was that I'd turn up and find that someone had bought my ticket in good faith from someone who found the packet on the ground somewhere; I'd hate to make people miss out through no fault of their own. That hasn't happened; but I'll talk about some of the excitement that did happen later, as well as how it was eventually dealt with by the lovely people of the Festival.
* * *
After dealing with Ticketec, and texting C to tell her it was sorted, I hurried off to Te Papa to see I Don't Want To Sleep Alone. Now, I know that I said that Belle Tojours was very slow. It turns out I was wrong -- it was merely a touch leisurely. This Malaysian film was, while not the slowest film I've ever seen, would certainly be in the top five. In fact, when the opening shot was a coma patient in a bed, listening to the radio, and the only thing moving in the shot is coma guy's chest, and the shot goes on for about three minutes, I should probably have gone with my instincts and left. On the other hand, it meant that I could watch it in a half-dozing state, just opening my eyes at the beginning of each scene to establish what was going on, and then checking every now and then to see if anything interesting was happening.
The story itself that eventually emerged was fairly simple -- a completely silent man is beaten up, nursed back to health by an Indian migrant worker (for reasons that are never made clear), and catches the eye of a waitress, which makes the migrant worker jealous; there is also a matress that is carried around. In parallel, there is a man in a coma (played by the same actor as the silent man), and the owner of the restaurant (his wife?) looks after him; the waitress lives with them, and the owner treats her horribly. It was done with very little dialogue, and some of the images that emerged were quite cool; but honestly, I feel that I've watched this film so you don't have to.
* * *
My day got more promising when I went to the Film Archive for Looking for an Icon, a documentary on four iconic examples of photojournalism. They were trying to describe what qualities a good photo (from a newspaper point of view) has, what makes a photo into an icon. They talked about how it has to be simple, often ambiguous, and will typically take advantage of the visual language and metaphors that we already know. One example was the student stopping the tanks in Tiananmen square -- they talked about how it plays into the Western myth that one man can make a difference. They also used it as example of how malleable an iconic image can be -- apparently, it's also been used by the Chinese government, but the story they use it to tell is how tolerant, restrained and reasonable the People's Army is.
They also talked about how the story that people bring to iconic pictures can override history. The example they used is the picture from the Vietnam War, with a general shooting a prisoner with a pistol. This is used in many American history books as a symbol of the point at which the American public turned against the war; but in fact, when it was published (front page, above the fold), letters to the editor poured talking about how they needed more men like the general around to win the war. As it happens, the photographer was a supporter of the war, and a friend of the general, and later declared that he wished he'd never taken the photo, and that the general deserved to be remembered with a statue, not this image.
This was a really interesting documentary, and I'd recommend watching it, even though I didn't initially recognise the other two images.
* * *
I then bumped into Ed, and we went into Cocaine Cowboys. This documentary was awesome. Slickly put together, but not in a way that made me distrust the message; full of interview of some of the people directly involved in the cocaine trade at the time, with their conflicting views of each other on display; and full of info that I might have had a vague idea about, in an easily absorbed and fleshed out manner. And they'd gotten Jan Hammer (the Miami Vice theme guy) to do their music. I found this a lot more fun to watch than the Johnny Depp movie about the same topic, and it felt much more informative, too.
Highly recommended.
* * *
I then popped over to the Paramount to see Eye in the Sky, a thriller about the Hong Kong surveillance unit. This was a straight up goo-cops-vs-bad-gangsters, with the various plain-clothes police officers trying to track down a bunch of vicious, violent and well organized jewelery thieves. I liked it; it wasn't a "best of genre" or anything, but it had a pleasant sense of humour, and all the actors fit their roles well. I could quite easily watch this film again, and may end up buying it.
* * *
You, the Living was a very different kettle of fish. Not bad, just... odd. It was a series of loosely connected scenes, effectively; and there was no way to tell what might happen within a scene, or from one scene to another. For example, the first scene suddenly turned into a musical number about how no-one understood the woman (who had been groaning about this particular subject to her boyfriend), and how she wished she had a motorcycle to drive away. While the colour scheme was a bleak grey, blue and green, there were plenty of touches of humour, like the recurring dixieland brass band; and while the people were, in general, depressed, the overall tone of the film wasn't. I liked it, but I'm not sure I'd ever see it again.
* * *
And then there was Severance, a horror film about a corporate retreat in Eastern Europe that goes badly wrong. There were a number of faces that I recognised, like Tim McInnerny (from the bumbling sycophant from Blackadder) as the incompetent team leader, and Laura Harris (Daisy Adaire from Dead Like Me) as the blonde American coworker. There were plenty of false scares, and they had a good line in building up a fright, defusing it; and then suddenly hitting you with a scare from an unexpected direction. There is plenty of humour, albeit generally of a grisly sort; the Film Society review compared it to Shaun of the Dead, which I can see; but bad things happened to good people in this film, much more so than in SotD. If horror doesn't bother you, I'd certainly recommend it.
Posted by svend at July 29, 2007 9:12 AM