I started out a bit wary on Sunday, but as it turned out, all of the lost ticket passes were actually correct this time around; and on Monday, they actually arranged for replacement tickets for me! So yay to the Festival people!
Vanaja was my first movie -- a low-caste 15 year-old girl becomes a servant to the village's high-caste landlady, and manages to wheedle her way into lessons for kuchipudi, a style of dance that only high-caste women are usually taught. There were many things that were interesting in this film -- the unremarked racism (where dark == low caste == ugly), the fact that the landlady can run the estate (but it's her son that gets to sit giving out the money, and tries to run for public office); and the horrible things that Vanaja is expected to just put up with. Oh, and the high-caste lady's son is a real piece of work.
Actually, I feel that I should clarify something. If I say, "North Koreans seem to genuinely grieve their Great Leader's death", or "Indians seem to believe that lighter skin is higher caste, and thus more beautiful", I talking about what a given film seems to portray, rather than being true for all North Koreans (or whoever) everywhere at all times. Most of these countries, I've never been to, let alone lived in or studied; so I'm at the mercy of what the film chooses to show.
That said -- lighter skin being associated with higher caste, and thus being more beautiful, does seem to come up in a number of different films about India, including documentaries; it makes me look back at last year's John and Jane (a doco about Indian call-centre workers trained to mimic American accents), and see the woman who bleached her skin and so forth in an attempt to look more American in a new light. I wonder how much international relations are still affected now by the fact that different cultures have different ideas about what good looking means, and how you should react to people who look a certain way.
Anyway, to get back to the movie, I really enjoyed the dancing itself; the story felt a bit all-over-the-place, but that might just be a cultural difference. I liked it, but I'm not sure that I'd re-watch it.
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Then it was a mad dash to Tekkonkinkreet , to find someone to buy my extra tickets. I think Jenni and Lee made the right call -- the seats in the main block are far more comfortable. On the other hand, maybe uncomfortable seats would have stopped Jenni falling asleep...
The basic story? Two street kids (angry Black and child-like White) defend their territory of Treasuretown against other kids; the Yakuza bring in foreign consultants who start to kick out all other gangs, and buying up property to make an amusement park. (Though I've gotta say, when we eventually see the amusement park, it looks like it would give me nightmares if you took me as a kid.) There's also a subplot of a Yakuza who has grown up in Treasuretown, and decides to retire rather than get involved, and how the mob decide to deal with him.
Jenni & Lee's main complaint was that it was very, very slow. They were wrong -- they haven't seen Belle Tojours, let alone I Don't Want To Sleep Alone. But it certainly didn't have the pace or inventiveness of Paprika. All in all, I've seen anime I've liked a lot less, but it wasn't special.
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Jesus Camp, on the other hand, is kinda special. (I believe I overheard someone say that it's on Google Video, if anyone who missed it is interested.) It's about the indoctrination of the young people in the fundamentalist movement, by community pressure, summer camps, home schooling, and the repeated emphasis about how important it is to ignore other, "sinful" viewpoints, and to pray rather than think. One of the kids also calls what most people would consider to be a "conventional" church (without jumping up and down, shouting out and speaking in tongues) as "dead" churches, and claims that God isn't in them.
And the scary thing is, the film-maker could show the film to the people he interviewed, and they might well be happy with the final result. (Even with the radio presenter there to give a contrasting viewpoint; they'd probably put it down to the need to have "balance".) They talk of how important it is to get hold of the kids, so they're ready to lay down their lives for God, like the Muslims... and said with absolute conviction, that's pretty scary. Or even, in one of the barn-like churches, one of the church leaders saying that their movement didn't need to meet to discuss what they believe, because they all believe the same things, from the bible. I wish I could recall the word he used for meeting, because I realised that it was a bit of a dig at either the Methodists or Anglicans... and now I realize that the guy making the comment would have been, "disgraced pastor Ted Haggard, whose drug-fuelled sexual trysts with another man have since hit the headlines." Huh.
A thing that stuck me particularly is tied up in their condemnation of Harry Potter (and calls to put warlocks to death). The reason isn't anything to do with the literary value of the books, or the fact that it worries me that they don't think their kids will learn their lesson the third or forth time they run full tilt into a pillar at the train station. Rather, it's that they don't seem to see that some of the things that they were doing at the camp had were in fact folk magic, plain and simple. The example that sticks in my mind is one of the camp leaders writing something like "secular government" on a bunch of coffee cups, and getting the kids to come up and smash the cups with a hammer, while praying that the parts of the government that they saw as against them are thrown down and smashed in the same way -- this seems a lot less like asking God and opening your heart to his will, and a lot more like ordering him about.
(Oh, and getting the kids to say hi to and pray for President Bush, while one of the organisers wielded a cardboard cut-out of him, saying, "Here he is, here's President Bush!". Jokes about relative shallowness et al. are left to the discretion of the reader.)
One of the take-away soundbites was a comparison of the religiousness of Sweden and India -- the speaker said that the US is a country of Indians run by Swedes. Well, for all the boring-ness of Sweden, I know which country I'd rather be a citizen of.
All that said -- I don't think that the people portrayed are bad people, or come across as bad people. (Except maybe that Haggard guy.) I think that their world-view is scary, and that they give people like Haggard too much power uncritically; but one of the things that was uncomfortable was that the kids seemed like good, sincere kids, and the main woman seemed like a worthwhile person. And I guess that's the really uncomfortable thing; it'd be easier if the people involved were bad, and they aren't.
Ooh, this is interesting -- there's a response to Haggard by the film's makers, talking about how he's condemned it, and more interestingly, how the other people in the film like it.
A very interesting, very worrying doco. Worth seeing.
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C and I then went off to Helvetica, a documentary about the typeface. It was very cool. Even William (a muesum display designer we got to know during the 48Hour Film competition) got turned around from an active dislike of the font to a grudging respect, in part because the doco gave a good context for what else was happening in typefaces and design when Helvetica started to become ubiquitous.
One of the great things about the documentary was how opinionated designers are. Some of them raved about how well Helvetica uses negative space; others blamed it for both the Vietnam and Gulf war. They talked about how there was a period of time where companies were reinventing their corporate identity, and going from a busy logo with cursive script saying "Brookfields Widget Company" (with an engraving of a Widet maker, and maybe some fancy scrollwork) to just "WidgetCo", centered, in Helvetica -- and how this felt so modern and unfussy. But on the other hand, one designer pointed out that you only need to see a fragment of the Marlboro logo to recognise it, because the font is distinctive; you couldn't do the same with, say, American Apparel or American Airlines.
This was an interesting and funny doco. I liked Cocaine Cowboys slightly better, but this is definitely worth a watch.
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The final movie I saw on Sunday was A Guide to Recognising Your Saints. There are two stories going on concurrently -- the story of the author's young adulthood (her mother calls his friends "a pack of wolves", and that's not too far wrong); and the story of the author, who left his home fifteen yeas ago and never returned, going back to convince his father to go to a hospital.
The movie plays with the fact that it is a movie -- there are brief to-the-camera statements by some of the childhood friends, and there's some over-the-phone dialogue shown as a transcript, for example. And the childhood gets a narrator; at the beginning, the author is shown at what looks like a reading, and he hesitatingly begins to forshadow the story.
This movie was based on a true story -- the screenwriter's life, in fact. And if you stayed until the end of the credits, you got to see someone who I presume was the screenwriter's actual father, talking about the real version of one of the main characters of the movie.
I liked it, but probably wouldn't see it again.
Posted by svend at August 3, 2007 8:33 AM