The problem with catching buses into town is the feeling that you get when you've been waiting for 20 minutes, and then a bus comes that won't actually get you all the way - do you catch it and transfer, or hope that another bus will come?
With some swift bus-juggling, I actually made it to the Paramount with ten minutes to spare, and had plenty of time to settle in for Yes, That's Me, a film of the recording of a 35-year veteran bluesman Dave Murphy's first album. Unlike, say, Struggle No More, the film is sharply focused on the subject and the recording - apart from a few appearances by the sound engineer, the only person talking is the musician, and it's all filmed at either the recording studio during the making of the album, or the Botanic Gardens (where he works). You do get a sense of his story, including his struggle for fifteen years with bipolar disorder after a car accident; but the bulk of the movie is watching him sing and play. And I'm really glad I heard him play.
I'll probably buy the album, but I don't think I'd need to watch the film again.
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I'm sitting in the Paramount, waiting for C, while hordes of small children run around like mad things, waiting for Animation for Kids. While I'm waiting, I thought I'd mention one indication that I might have been at the Film Festival too long: I was sitting on the bus, and a couple of people were talking in Somalian (or whatever) behind me, and I thought, "There aren't any subtitles, it must just be incidental dialogue."
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Animation for Kids was good, as ever; this year, there weren't any clips that made the fairly demanding audience restless, though a few of the credits went on a little bit too long for some spectators. Standouts for me include A Sunny Day, the story of a day in the life of the Sun (which had numerous clever conceits, like the sun using clouds as shaving foam, and turning the hills over like a page to change the colours from night to day), and Tôt ou Tard, which had a bat and squirrel living in the same tree, where the environment was controlled by some sort of elaborate clockwork, which they ended up having to fix together.
Oh, and Captain Cumulus, where a small boy in a plane is helped by a bear (the plane has a dial labelled "thing that makes me go up"), and a film that the guide tells me was called Homage to the Grip, where a small bunny with an enormous roll of cable chases the camera bird across a multi-coloured landscape, trying to plug it back in. Man, I'm noticing some of these film descriptions are just plain wrong!
Anyway, good fun, and I might have a look online to see if some of these people have done anything else. And I think it would be awesome to do something one day that could be included in a future Animation for Kids.
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C & Jenni went off to have fun without me, and I went to Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell. This was an interesting film, in that it's music I probably wouldn't have enjoyed at the time that it was made, but I think I might now. This was a guy who grew up in small-town Iowa learning the cello, and moved out to San Francisco to join a Buddhist commune, and ended up doing avant-garde pop and dance music in New York. While never wildly successful during his lifetime, he nevertheless recorded a tonne of material, some of which have seen release since his death to modest success.
This was an interesting film for me, not because of the music per se (I liked what I heard, but admit that I hadn't heard of him before this movie), but because of the picture it drew of the man he was, and the people around him. In particular, I liked seeing his parents, who felt like they didn't completely understand their son, but loved him anyway. They didn't really like his music (though they like it more now), and they were surprised by him being gay - but when he was dying in the hospital of AIDS, and they were meeting his long-term boyfriend for the first time, when the doctor asked them what should happen, they said that it should be his partner's decision.
I wouldn't watch it again, but I'm glad I saw it, and I might keep an eye out for some more of his music.
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And then it was off to Nandos for some much-needed spicy chicken, and to Te Papa for Max & Co., a French clay-mated kid's film with anthropomorphic animals, about a boy searching for his father, a corrupt playboy who runs the near-bankrupt factory that employs the town, and the evil scientist who is hauling Buzz Co.'s fly-swat business out of the red by creating great clouds of vicious mutant flies.
This was an excellent film, but the thing that was most impressed me was the character design. It was obvious what animal each creature was meant to be, but you could also tell the sort of person they were meant to be - the playboy toad had a elegant coif of hair, the seductive chanteuse cat had a page-boy haircut, and the hard-bitten female rabbit worker had a careful blond coiffure and big bum (which she referred to). There was even a scene set at a play, where animals of one type wore masks to imply they were other types - the foolish rich merchant wore a turkey mask, for example, and occasionally gobbled. And the three flies that we see chatting are all very distinctive, too; and the mutant flies look really good.
Several people have said that they wouldn't mind action figures of the characters. :)
I really liked the way that the characters were portrayed, as well; the cat, Cathy (which they pronounce "Catty") stood out for me as not falling prey to the many obvious possible cliches, being a beautiful woman who is neither the femme fatale nor the final love interest. I liked the plot as well - while it wasn't a roller-coaster of twists and turns, there were sufficient surprises and subverted expectations to keep me interested.
If this comes out on DVD, I will buy it.
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After standing around and chatting for a while, I went off to the Film Archive for my last two films of the day. Unfortunately for the length of this post, the second-to-last was another compilation, Homegrown: Programme 2. The programmer (who had just come from her premier of Trouble Is My Business, which I wasn't able to fit into my schedule) talked about the importance of the short film as a training ground for people before they did feature films; this motivated one of the film-makers to defend the short film on it's own terms. However, it's certainly true that there aren't many venues where short films can be shown... unless you count YouTube, I guess.
The first short was Eclipse, just music and scenes from the streets of Mumbai. There were plenty of beautiful images, including some impressive shots of aerial wildlife (the end credits mentioned that no birds were created by CGI in the making of the film); but ultimately, it was just music and scenes from the streets of Mumbai. The next was The Moth a dance/live animation film about... well, seeing a moth as you're falling asleep, kinda. It was okay.
The next was The Graffiti of Mr Tupaia, which I thought was the strongest and most affecting of the shorts. The basic story is that a primary school's cleaner, an older Polynesian man, finds a piece of graffiti under the toilet roll in a stall in the girl's toilets that says, "I want to kill myself". I really liked the way that the film showed the character of the cleaner, and how his solutions to the various problems he was confronted with sprang out of how he interacted with the world. I'd recommend seeking it out.
Then was Aphrodite's Farm, which I quite liked - they had a bunch of fun with the cinematography, like showing the film strip being pushed aside by another strip of film when they referred back to an earlier scene, or the animated newspaper photos. The acting was a bit on the hammy side, but this may have been a deliberate stylistic choice. It was basically a folk-tale (or more accurately, a tall tale) set in 1930s Taranaki.
Bridge was the next short, and had an upset woman missing a train, being pursued down the tracks to under a bridge, where she knocks herself out; when she comes to, her partner, who she was leaving, is standing on the underside of the bridge, with his gravity reversed. The effects were quite well done, though the woman running into the bridge was unconvincing; it made me start thinking about how you could sell that kind of shot to the audience. The story of the film was all right.
I knew Eel Girl was in this programme, since I know one of the Producers (though not well), and several of the other Weta Digital people worked on it. Basically a science fiction horror short, the effects, makeup, costuming and set were excellent. The story itself felt a bit truncated; I would have liked to have a reason to care about the protagonists. Still, it looked pretty good.
Last up was Ronnie Grimble, a lonely man with an unusual scheme to get company. It was pretty obvious early on what was going on, and while the acting was fine and the set design was really neat, I found the story a bit shallow. Again, as a whole, it was okay.
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Finally, I saw Yella, a German film about a woman moving on from a failed company and relationship to a job in another city, while being stalked by her ex-boyfriend for whom she used to keep the books. Bit by bit, she ends up losing her moral compass as a consequence of being in business, until something horrible happens.
It's weird - as soon as the boyfriend drove them off the bridge, I thought, "Okay, it's going to be either a Sliding Doors alternate worlds thing, a It's a Wonderful Life thing with a restart, or it'll be a dream or hallucination." Well, it wasn't a Sliding Doors thing.
It's an okay film, but it has a downer ending, and didn't pull me in enough to make that powerful enough for me to recommend this movie. I don't think I'd watch it again.