I didn't have a chance to write anything during the day, so here are some brief impressions. I likes The Station Agent, so I had hopes that The Visitor would be as good. I think it is, though there's a lot of sadness, too. A university professor who's drifting in his tenure is forced to go to New York to present at a conference; he discovers an immigrant couple living in his apartment, which he hasn't visited for several years. He ends up letting them stay, and... well, I think it's worth watching.
Definitely not action-packed, but a good character piece.
* * *
From Street To Sky is a documentary about Tigilau Ness, front-man for Unity Pacific, rastafarian, former member of the Polynesian Panthers, jailed for protesting the Springbok tour during the Apartheid years, born in NZ of Niuean parents, and father of Che Fu. I like his music, and I liked this documentary, which has plenty of music, and plenty of history. If anything, my only complaint is that it is too short.
* * *
I wish I'd watched Fear(s) of the Dark late at night, or at least in a state of mind more conducive to being creeped out. This was a collection of a number of shorts illustrating things about the dark that four or five authors found scary, animated in a bunch of different styles. Some of them were narrated histories, some were pretty straight ghost stories, some were just creepy sequences with a grinning courtier loosing a vicious dog-pack one by one on various victims, and some were a bunch of abstract shapes with people talking about their fears, anything from death to the fear of becoming bourgeois and conservative.
I liked it, and would like to watch it again when I'm in the right mood for it.
* * *
My third film at the Film Archive was The Cool School, a documentary about the emergence of a Los Angeles art scene during the fifties and sixties. I found it very interesting, even though I don't actually like very much of what is classified as modern art, though some pop art is pretty cool. (I don't think that they're hoodwinking people, or that they're wicked; I'm just don't get pleasure or interest from most of these pieces, and I've got plenty of other things that do interest and please me.) The way that the personalities interacted, the galleries and cliques emerged, and the prejudices of the New York art scene were gradually overcome (or not) were all quite interesting, perhaps moreso because all of the aesthetic judgements were received wisdom for me.
I don't think that I would watch this again, but I don't regret that I saw it.
* * *
Lake Tahoe was by the same person who did Duck Season, so I had a fairly good idea of what I was getting into - lots of long shots, people sitting around and filling time, conversations where important stuff is implied rather than said, and slightly quirky people and situations. In this case, a young man has crashed his family's car, so he walks around town trying to find a garage that's open to help him.
This film is definitely not put together in a standard way, and I could see it being really boring in another person's hands. For example, the camera will often linger on a shot after the character has left the shot; this means that sometimes (but only sometimes) they can come back into shot, with evidence of stuff that's happened out of sight in what they look like or are doing, and other times just serves to emphasise the passing of time. The shot will often fade to black, while the background noise continues, and then it'll fade back up to show the characters in different positions, to indicate time has past; and then do it again another couple of times, to show that they're stuck there for ages.
Another thing that makes the film enjoyable is the humour - the girl in the auto-parts shop hands her baby over, then asks him to hold the baby until it falls asleep, and then gets out her tape deck; she promises to keep the volume down low, but another fade to black and we come back to her rocking out to a pop/punk ballad. Or the kung-fu obsessed young mechanical whizz, or the ageing garage owner who listens to the description of the problem, describes the part that the boy needs, and then sends him to hunt through the junk pile while he goes to lie in his hammock.
While there might not be enough action for some people, I'd happily watch this again.
* * *
I was prepared to be disappointed by Fighter, which Jenni had described to me as Bend It Like Beckham, but with martial arts instead of soccer, and no humour. I agree that it was less fun, but I'm not sure that I agree that made it a worse film. I think that the relationship between the girl and her sifu was good, and I liked the way that the issue of race and religion was there, but not overplayed - the friendship between the main girl (a Muslim of Turkish descent) and the Danish girl felt quite natural, and the scene where a bunch of Scandinavian girls are sitting around, drinking and talking about boyfriends felt a lot more like gentle teasing than prejudice.
Did I enjoy Bend It more? Sure; but I really liked this movie, too.
* * *
Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone was another film I was a bit nervous about - most of what I knew about it was that it eventually has a downer ending, and that it is chock-full of What Do You Mean It's Not Symbolic. I thought it was very good looking, as you'd expect for a movie remake, and was fine as a setting-up film, though it would have been nice if something had been resolved.
I will almost certainly go and see the next one.
Posted by svend at August 4, 2008 12:21 AM