I was quite lucky today, since I had three films in a row that C was interested in seeing, and she's going to come to the last one I have today as well. (I'm currently sitting in the cafe of the Film Archive, typing while she reads.)
First, we went to Paris, a film by the same person as The Spanish Apartment. It's one of those films that is difficult to summarize, since there were at least two main stories, and a handful of secondary ones, some of which appeared not to go anywhere (and perhaps that was their point, that sometimes things are left hanging). It was set in Paris, and followed a the lives of a scattering of people, some of whom were intimately involved (like the greengrocer and his ex, or the social-worker sister and the dancer brother who is dying of a heart condition, or the professor specializing in Paris history, his young pretty student, and his architect brother), and some whose lives touch only tangentially (like the bakery owner, who kept abruptly switching between sacchrine sweetness to her customers, and sharp-tongued haranguing of her staff).
I liked it, but it was a bit disjointed, and I suspect that there were parallels that the film-maker intended me to see but that I missed. Whether that is a comment on the film-maker's skill or me, I cannot say.
* * *
We went to Sweet Mother's Kitchen to grab a quick lunch; unfortunately, it seemed to take ages to catch the eye of the wait-staff, and we pretty much had to gobble down everything quickly, and were still a tad late for Bigger, Stronger, Faster*; we were worried, since it had been mentioned favourably on the National programme, which tends to mean a full house, but we managed to find seats together without too much hassle. (C mentioned that it was true for books as well - even if they'd been in for ages, a review on National Radio meant that the reserve list for it would grow a mile long.)
Anyway, this was a documentary that was about steroid use, made by a body-builder who didn't use steroids but who has two brothers who do. It goes into the actual dangers of steroid abuse (3 deaths in the US in a year) and the evidence (or lack thereof) for their long term deleterious effects, as well as interviewing some of the most vocal advocates of the ban (whose line seems to be "don't talk to me about statistics, my son killed himself because of steroids, and the other possible contributing factors had nothing to do with it, which I know, because I'm his father, and my son died"); but also illustrated the confused attitude that the US has towards the use of enhancing drugs, talking to musicians who use beta blockers to control their anxiety, and students who use Adderall or ritalin to improve their grades. It also illustrates, in a small way, the cost of the cult of success (looking at people, including his older brother, who are making themselves miserable pursuing an unrealistic dream of all the glory that will follow the lucky break that's surely just around the corner), the dangers of an unregulated supplement industry, and the weird consequences of the increasing obsession of males with their body image.
Regarding the last point, there was quite a telling sequence with one professor, who illustrated the changing societal attitudes towards the male body with GI Joe dolls, which went from an average guy when he was introduced, to having a slight six-pack, to being shaped more like a professional body-builder than a soldier.
I liked this documentary. It wasn't world-changing, but it was solid, and told me things I didn't know. I'd watch it again.
* * *
Then we went off to the Film Archive for Let's Say..., the French documentary where the film-maker got groups of kids whose parents all do the same job, and asked them to rank the importance of various jobs, as well what they understood their parents jobs to be, and making up and acting out scenes from their parent's jobs. There were maybe three prompting questions audible from adults in the film.
I really enjoyed this film. There were plenty of interesting surprises, like the circus kids putting entertainers at the "least important" end of the spectrum, and acknowledging that it would be sad if there weren't entertainers, but they weren't as essential as doctors or grocers. The farming kids knew how to put on a realistic cow-birthing, the doctor's kids had a good grasp of how telling a young woman that her elderly father is dying of cancer would work, and the restaurateur's kids had a bit where the "daughter" can't get anyone to give her a ride to her friend's, and the "mother" says something like "Sighing won't solve anything, young lady!"
(There's also a nice bit during the credits where the kids talk about what they'd like to do when they grow up; in one of these, one girl asks another, "Did you never want to be a singer, or an astronaut?" The other girl says that she'd consider being an astronaut, but with all the practice and touring, being a singer would be too much work.)
I'd now really like to have a look at the director's previous film, where young cancer patients were encouraged to role-play as doctors as a coping mechanism. I really enjoyed this film.
* * *
C went off home to have some dinner, and I stuck around and saw Christopher Columbus - the Enigma. This semi-documentary looked at the life of a Portuguese doctor and his wife, whose mission in life seems to have become proving that the titular character was actually born in Portugal, in the village of Cuba. It was a bit weird; it had many long, dreamy shots, and some of the actors were very stilted, especially in the later parts where I believe the main characters were playing themselves. And there was a weird woman who kept turning up, wearing green and carrying a sword; she might have been representing the spirit of Portugal or something?
(I'm afraid that I actually started to drift off in this movie, so it's possible that she was explained at some point.)
There were some cinematic choices that I found interesting - for example, a lot of the footage representing the doctor's immigration to the US was shot upwards. This may be because it's a lot easier to dress an actor in 40s regalia than to dress a city street in the same (and in fact, they didn't do it the whole time), but I think that you could make a virtue of the necessity - if you were consistent with it, the idea of "everything was bigger/more powerfully real in the past", or possibly the conceit of seeing the past from the point of view of a child, could be a cool stylistic choice.
But... yeah. Not a film that was able to keep me awake, which is not a good sign.
* * *
Luckily, this meant that I was well rested for Be Kind, Rewind. Doubly lucky, in fact, because I had written in my schedule that it was on at Te Papa, which meant that I ended up dashing to the Embassy with about five minutes to spare. Luckily, C had actually looked at her ticket, and so was waiting patiently when I got there.
The basic plot is that two guys end up having to recreate a bunch of movies using their video camera when one of them accidentally erases all of the tapes in the video rental store that the other is temporarily in charge of. This gives the film the opportunity to do ingenious low-budget takes on a variety of classic scenes from movies of the past.
There's some reference to copyright law, but there's an interesting contradiction; the thing that they get in trouble for doing (making "copies" of existing films) could arguably be called parodies, which I believe have some protection under US law; when they make a film using recordings of Fats Waller, on the other hand, they're definitely breaking copyright law, since I'm pretty sure that the performances won't be long enough ago to have fallen into the public domain yet, and there's almost no chance that the copyrights belonging to the composers and/or lyricist have lapsed, since they're held for 70 years after the death of the author (unless they were originally published before 1923, which might be possible for a few of his classic tunes).
But enough of my obsession with copyrights.
The films that they choose are interesting - no Star Wars, for example, and very little from before the 80s (apart from 2001, which was made in 1968). I guess a lot of it would have had to do with finding iconic scenes to recreate, since it might be hard to make a scene that was unmistakably Casablanca. Actually, that one might not be that hard... if you could rely on the people watching having seen the original.
It wasn't a particularly deep film, but I don't think it set out to be. There was definitely a joy in the sort of practical effects that a low-budget film-maker can use when he doesn't have the money to do CGI - using a fan to simulate film-flicker, instead of switching on the appropriate filter in Premier, for example. Some of the things they did were actually quite effective in a way, like having cardboard cutouts of oldey-time cars and moving them on the street. I'm sort of surprised that the 48Hour Film Competition people didn't try to sponsor it, or at least make sure that to have fliers to hand out to people.
I liked it, and would happily watch it again at some point.