The next day started with Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. I ended up slipping in about 30 seconds late, but that didn't seem to hurt. I know that Jenni was reluctant to go to another serial killer movie, but I'm not sure that's what I'd call this; it felt more like a fable. A fairly gruesome fairytale, if you will. A boy is born is the fish markets with a magic sense of smell, but his mother is killed for abandoning him... and then death follows him in all his interactions. He becomes obsessed with preserving smells; in particular, preserving the scent of a young woman who he accidentally kills (or rather, the scent of young woman-ness).
I liked the movie; it did most of the right things, including using voiceovers well. (I wonder whether voiceovers work better in these sort of movies, where people tend to be archetypes rather than characters.) I'd watch it again, even though the end was a bit upsetting. (Not wrong, just upsetting... poor Alan Rickman's character!)
* * *
Then it was off to the documentary that Jenni had already seen and recommended, My Kid Could Paint That. This was about the 4 year-old who was being a touted as a genius modern painter; the documentary maker started to film when everyone thought that everything was above-board, and had been filming for about six months when 60 Minutes accused the little girl (Marla) of being a fraud, and saying that the father (who maintains throughout the film that he simply prepares the canvas and the paint) at the very least actively coaches her, and may in fact "touch up" the paintings, or even do them from scratch.
After watching the documentary, what appeared to be going on? (Taking into account, as the filmmaker himself pointed out, that editing can have a profound effect on the story we see.) Well, the gallery owner came across as being prepared to do whatever it took to get money, and as having a real chip on his shoulder about "modern art". The mother appeared to be pretty much completely honest, and a bit unhappy about all the pressure and fame, even before the unpleasantness began. And the father... at a best guess, did help a bit in terms of direction, even if he never put brush to canvas; but he painted himself into a corner (ho ho) by denying that he did anything at all, and now is unable to back down.
The film-maker took questions afterwards, and was very frank about how much his choice about what footage to use would have influenced how we saw this story, and this family. It was something he agonized about, he said; but he ended up having to make choices based on what he felt was representative, and then live with those choices. I also asked the "does it matter" question, and he felt quite strongly that it did, because with a modern art piece you are buying a process and a story as much as a physical piece of canvas; and even with traditional art, buying a "Goldie" by the chap who is living in Foxton when you're told you're buying a piece of NZ history is fraud.
I thought that this was a really interesting documentary about a really cute kid. I'd happily watch it again.
* * *
The Unpolished was a film about a girl whose family give her no boundaries (her father is a drug dealer, her mother kind of drifts, they both sleep around), and she tries to seek ways and places to fit in. She wanders into people's houses and steals pictures so she can put herself into normal family scenes; she lies about her life, about how she's the daughter of a diplomat; she does her best get into the local school, at first by just coming in, sitting down, and hoping no-one will comment.
This was an interesting film, in that it felt all over the place -- scenes often didn't end where you'd expect them to, and events that you might expect to have big consequences just didn't. For example, you see some of the layabouts throw the girl in the pool, and you don't hear her break the surface or breathing; you cut to her mother, getting up, looking slightly concerned, and you think oh ho, this is will be the "Save the girl from drowning, people get yelled at" scene. But nope, they just cut away, and look, there's the girl, and she seems fine.
I ended up liking this film, but I probably wouldn't watch it again.
* * *
Then it was off to the Film Archive to see the doco Comrades In Dreams. I really, really enjoyed this film, though I'm not sure I could tell you why; I was smiling for pretty much all of it, even though there were other emotions too -- compassion for the American theatre owner who was doing three or four jobs so she wouldn't have to sit and think about how lonely she is, for example. Or when the North Koreans start crying when they remember the death of their Glorious Leader... I'm not sure exactly what I felt then.
Or there was the surprise when the owner of the traveling Indian cinema, when he declared that marrying for love was worse than stabbing 100 people to death in his village.
Actually, I was kind of surprised that the Indian culture seemed the most alien to me. The North Korean cinema (which we saw clips from) is a bit heavy-handed and message-heavy, but it had a leavening of humour, and I found it easy to relate to the theater-owner's life-stories. The Indian cinema, on the other hand... well, for instance, they can't show any Western films like Titanic, because, it was explained, the villagers wouldn't understand it -- they only wanted stories they know, in settings they know, so they can go home and tell the story to their family. But the situation was completely different in Burkina Faso, where the street vendor talked about how much she empathised with Rose, and her total commitment.
There are lots of stuff that I'd like to mention -- the North Korean film with the kimchi scientist, the chat that the Burkina Faso theater owners had with their wives under the tree, the wierd moments while the Indian guy discussed what things he wanted his family to look for in a woman, the American owner rollerblading, the Koreans talking about how the female theater operator got the guy together with his wife, and how she met her husband. But I can rant about that stuff in person.
I really liked this documentary a lot, and wish the makers, and all those featured in it, all the best.
* * *
I think the reason I didn't really enjoy The Night of the Sunflowers was because I went in expecting a very different film. For some reason, I had this idea in my brain that it would be a horror, and in those films, the good guy and bad guy are pretty distinct -- you've got the good guys, who act as anchors to the camera, and have bad things happen to them; and you've got bad guys, who are gradually revealed. That was not this movie -- instead, you find out how horrible most people can be, given the right circumstances.
The story is told as a series of sections, each with its own title -- "The Competent Authorities", or "The Old Guard"; the focal character changes in each section, but it's generally someone we've met, or at least seen, in a previous section; while each section is a slice of linear time, a new section generally jumped back in time to give us context and information about the person we're following. This was used to build tension a number of times to good effect -- you knew that a certain event was about to happen, or was happening elsewhere, and you were waiting for the section to catch up so you could see what happened next.
Looking back, it was a well-made film -- I just wasn't in the right mood to see it.
Priceless was my first movie of the day, and as always, Audrey Tautou has an incredibly gorgeous face. It's probably something to do with the fact that her irises are so dark, so her pupils appear really big, though that's only part of it. Gad Elmaleh does pretty much what we saw him do in The Valet last year, which is act helpless and dorky around beautiful women.
The film's plot is pretty light -- a gold-digger mistakes a barman for a guest at a big hotel, and he loses his head over her; he eventually falls into her world, and she teaches him a few tricks. But is she as hard-hearted as she'd like to be?
It's fine, though nothing special; they manage to keep your sympathy for the main characters (which isn't easy when you realize that they're essentially playing on people's need to feel loved), and if you like looking at Audrey Tautou (or Gad Elmaleh, for that matter), it's not a bad movie to see.
* * *
Cowboys and Communists was another example of "documentary maker in the middle of the movie": in this case, she was a waitress at "White Trash Fast Food", a restaurant at the bottom of a block of flats in East Berlin. It had been a place to eat since the building went up -- first, under the Communists, a traditional German place, with the occasional wedding party; then (briefly) a Chinese restaurant, right after the Berlin Wall came down. So when White Trash moved in, it already had pagodas painted on the walls and Chinese masks over the doorways; they just laid a layer of boho gewgaws over the top, brought in the mostly-naked transvestite fetishist burlesque show, and sold burgers while DJs like Peaches span the disks.
This was a bit of a shock to the system for the other residents of the building, especially the members of the Building Association from before Reunification.
The filmmaker (Jess Feast) gets some really interesting stories out of both sides, and in many ways it's the old East Germans that steal the show. The main chap that she speaks with, Horst Woitalla, was a journalist in the old regime (I think he now sells papers), and he has many interesting things to say about what life was like under the old regime for him. And you can understand their point of view: they traded having the Stasi and a really invasive State for the knowledge that they could get an education, medical care, and could even reasonably expect to holiday abroad (as long as they didn't mind going to somewhere like Poland, Russia, or Vietnam). In their eyes, they traded this compromise for the "freedom" to go hungry, uneducated, and unable to go anywhere, unless they're one of the lucky ones with money.
There is some empathy for these guys on the part of the people downstairs, too -- many of the staff (and one of the owners) feel displaced from their home in the US, because of the cultural changes there under Bush; but that's not going to stop them from doing their best to run their business.
I liked this documentary a lot, and would recommend it... although some of the floor-show is quite explicit, with one act making me feel a bit ill.
* * *
The Digital Space... a compliation, so a mixed bag. Previously, there have been a lot more in the way of story in these shorts; this was less true this year, I think. The first short was of a mechanical snail, all clear gel and mechanical whirring and and cool blue LED glow; it would have been slow to watch if it had been a real snail; but it was sufficiently interesting to engage my attention for the duration. "Monster Samuri" was a bit of a disappointment -- it really felt like an animation test for a promising-looking short, rather than something that should be shown on its own. "NannyBot" was fun, though.
On the whole, I liked this collection, but none of the shorts were stand-out for me.
* * *
Next was The Secret Life of Words, with a young partly deaf woman who seems to be struggling with some inner demons. She's forced to take some time off work from her job in a factory, and ends up being employed as a nurse (which she has training for) on an oil rig, to look after a burn victim until he's stable enough to move. The burn victim (played by Tim Robbins) then tries to draw her out.
This film felt quite play-like; by which I guess I mean that many of the characters had soliloquies, little rants where you could easily imagine the lights on the other characters dimming for the actor's time in the spotlight. And there were a very limited number of characters and sets. Yeah, I don't think it would be hard to convert this to a play; I wonder whether that's the writer's background?
I liked this film, but it was hard. It's not really a film I'd watch to relax; but I was moved.
* * *
And then I met Jenni, and we went off to Noise. Basically, the police are hunting someone who killed a bunch of people on a train (sparing one girl who got on later, for no apparent reason), who may or may not have killed a young woman a short time later. Our main character is a policeman who had a fainting spell, tinnitus, and been given a doctor's certificate exempting from everything but light duty; he is posted in a caravan in the area, so that people can drop in if they see or remember anything. Someone mentioned the similarities between this film, and last year's Last Train To Freo, and I can see that; not the intense locked-room pressure, but the real interactions of the people. Things like one of the people who drop into the caravan who departs with a cheerful, "Well, off I fuck."
The pressure of the noise that the constable is hearing is portrayed very intensely. The one thing I really liked is how untidy it was -- there were a bunch of things that would, in a conventional cop story, end up being the clue that cracks the case, or at least be explained, but that's not how it works. Sometimes a gunman spares someone, and no-one finds out why. And I like how it ends, though I can see why Jenni wanted a few minutes more.
This was a good movie.
I started Monday with La Vie En Rose. I'd hoped to drag C along, if only to tell me if I was missing any jokes in the French, but she wasn't able to get the time off work.
I wouldn't call myself a huge Edith Piaf fan -- I enjoy her music, but don't own any. I might now.
The main actress, Marion Cotillard, is superb; I actually wondered whether they'd gotten another actress to play Piaf at her oldest, she did it so well. The way she held her hands, the imperiousness and the nervousness, the joy when singing... it was just all very good.
The rest of the film is good, though sometimes it meandered, and the fact that it was non-linear meant that there were a few sequences whose place in the timeline was unclear to me. (I did my best to keep track by the state of Piaf's hair, and how severely plucked her eyebrows were.) I guess most films about a person's life are going to be a bit unruly, just because people are complicated. The revelation on the deathbed felt a little forced, though.
All in all, I really enjoyed this film, and I hope C gets to see it soon.
* * *
Half Nelson is a film about a history teacher who coaches basketball, engages and challenges the kids in his class, is writing a book... and isn't strong enough to cope with all the pressures, abusing alcohol and drugs to escape. One of his students (whose family, it turns out, have their own set of issues with narcotics) isn't picked up after a basketball game, and finds him high on crack in the toilets; a friendship cautiously forms.
This isn't To Sir With Love. While the teacher is getting in trouble for not following the curriculum, the students are obviously already learning, and most of them are enjoying it -- and we see evidence that he's inspired some of his previous students to go on to university to study history. What we see is him losing his grip, and the student helping him, while going through her own problems.
It also gets points for having both the "What do you call cheese that isn't yours?" and the "Interrupting Cow" jokes. ;)
One of the few reservations I have was that I found that, after events that happened at a colleague's place, I lost empathy with the teacher for a while.
I liked this film; it might be a while before I'd be prepared to see it again, though.
* * *
Exiled is one of the better films in the Asian gangster noir genre I've seen this festival. Very stylish, ballet-like gun battles with puffs of red mist, loyalty, betrayal, honour, and all the other elements that make a good movie of this genre. I think the reason I liked this better than others I'd seen to this point is that had a certain sense of formal inevitability -- I'm not sure I'll be able to express it well, but one of the things I like about noir is the feeling that everything has to happen, and there's no escaping your fate. Maybe that's why it's a popular genre in Asia? And in this case, it felt quite fable-like; people were closer to archetypes, than particular people, which is another thing that I like in the genre.
Basically, there is a man who has returned to town; one group has been told to kill him by a mob boss who he tried to kill many years ago. Another group is trying to save him. The man, and the two groups, are all friends. Gangster noir ensues.
I liked it, would happily rewatch it, and will probably buy it at some point.
* * *
In a complete change of pace, Quinceanera is the story of a girl near her 15th birthday (a big deal in Hispanic culture in the States) who gets pregnant, despite denying that she's "done it" with a boy. Her pastor father throws her out, and she goes to live with her grand-uncle, who is also looking after her cousin (whose family want nothing to do with him, either). This is set in Echo Park, an LA suburb which is becoming gentrified, and part of the story is the affair between her cousin and the two gay men who buy their great-uncle's house and the property that it is attached to.
Many of the actors that appear are non-professional, or appearing for the first time (they went non-Union for reasons of budget); this is not at all evident on the screen. The film-makers were there (a white gay couple), and unsurprisingly, they were asked about how the Hispanic community felt about the film -- apparently, they've been very supported by that community, and they talked a lot about how they tried to make sure that they got stuff right by talking to the people in their neighborhood right the way through. (They live in Echo Park, and everything was shot locally; many of the locals also appeared.)
This was a good movie, and it seemed even better once I realised the constraints they were working under. I'm not sure whether I'll try and see it again, but I'd probably watch it all the way through if I started watching it by accident.
* * *
A Few Days In September was my final movie of the day, with the lovely Juliette Binoche getting to play a kick-ass French secret service agent. (Though like most NZers, my attitude towards the French secret service is somewhat ambivalent after the Rainbow Warrior.)
I remembered that it was a thriller, and the pic shows a speedboat; however, it's much more a cat-and-mouse thriller than the action-thriller I was half-expecting. I liked it, even though the twist was obvious fairly early; it perhaps wasn't as tense as I like my thrillers.
Worth watching on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
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.
* * *
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.
* * *
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.
* * *
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.
* * *
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.
There were some complications on Saturday and Sunday because Jenni thought I hadn't bought tickets for her and Lee for the films within the block of lost tickets. This wasn't as big a deal for some things like Jesus Camp, because my tickets to the Embassy were much better than what they'd managed to get, so they just sold them on; but in the Paramount (for Tekkonkinkrete), their seats were in the comfy area, so I ended up having to explain the whole "lost ticket pass" thing to slightly dubious Japanese couple... the fact that I had only five minutes to get there from my previous film further complicated the situation, but at least I was fairly sure that I wasn't depriving the couple of a better seat, even if the other person in the row was a chap I eventually decided to call "Mr Wiggles". But I'm getting ahead of myself.
* * *
Animation for Kids was the usual mix -- mostly good, with one or two duff ones thrown in. And even the duff ones were pretty, for the most part. I think that it's a lot funnier to draw your own morals from them -- for example, the moral of "At Home WIth Mother Hen" is apparently that if you don't eat your dinner and play outside, your mother will go and have a baby, while you're forced to eat out of the rubbish bin. I think that's an important lesson for children to learn.
There was even a short that mentioned Island Bay -- Fatcat & Fishface's "The Wreck of the Diddley", all about pirates singing a storm where they thought they'd die-diddly-die. I must see if it's online anywhere, so I could show Mum.
"Toy Artist: Papa & Baby" was good, as was "Jaime Lo, Small and Shy"; I liked "The Night Watchman", and "Caffinches", and "Moutons" was good, if weird (though a bit upsetting if you thought the fisherman was going to eat the sheep that the black sheep helped him catch). On the other hand, "Tzaritza" didn't do anything for me, and while the animation in "A Mouse's Tale" was good, the story was terrible -- especially the end, where the narrator actually says "Then he realised the Mother Knows Best", even though there's nothing that we were shown that supports that. Bah.
* * *
Then it was the first of the movies that I had to get a lost ticket pass to with Jenni -- My Best Friend. And what a farce that was -- the pass said that the seats were in row "M"... but as it turns out, the people who wrote the pass were reading the info screen wrong, and the "M" that they had seen was for Film Society "M"ember. So... it was lucky I went in early, so that I was able to get the correct seats, in row "L", before the movie started. One startling thing -- I went up to one of the festival organizers (who I'd never spoken to before), and she said, "Oh yes, you're the one who goes to everything." Is that a good kind of fame? :)
(I'm that Jenni hadn't bought tickets for this film -- I feel really bad for the amount of hassle Jenni and Lee (and C) have had to go through because I didn't notice the missing tickets earlier.)
Anyway, the movie itself was fun, as I'd hoped. It starts with the main character attending a funeral... but only to talk to the widow about a piece of antique furniture that the deceased was going to sell him. He then goes to a dinner with associates, and jokes that there were only seven at the funeral, including the widow; but then one of the others at the table rather unkindly says that there won't be anyone at his. This leads to a bet, where the main character declares that he'll produce a best friend in a week's time.
Complications, as they say, ensue.
This was a fairly simple French farce, but fun. I liked the portrayal of the main character -- the insistence that there is some formula or trick to being sociable; his painful attempts to learn it, and his eventual redemption on national television (though not in front of the camera) were well worth it to me.
I'd happily watch this again.
* * *
I then hurried off to the Paramount to sort out my other lost ticket passes, and arrived back with about ten minutes to spare... at which point I discovered that the reason that they had given us seats in the "A" row is because they were looking at an "A"dult ticket; after some tense moments, we eventually got shunted into the house seats.
I'm glad that C & I got to see This Is New Zealand, which consisted of three parts -- a short from 1969 encouraging Australians to come and visit NZ (entitled "C'mon to New Zealand!", a documentary from 1970 about New Zealand's presence at big overseas trade fair, and the movie that was shown (using three projectors; it had been remastered to one for this showing) in the NZ pavilion.
Someone commented to the filmmaker (who was there) that it was all very white, and very male. He agreed, but said that you had to remember that it was a product of when and where it was made... and that at that time, New Zealand society was predominantly Muslim, so most women were kept in purdah... This got a good laugh from the audience.
These films really were from their time -- not just in terms of fashion, or how "modern city" seemed to mean "show us knocking down old buildings, and putting up new, 'fashionable' ones", or even how the tourism short for the Aussies showed that yes, we have nightclubs and stripshows. What was really noticeable was that not everything was polished and on-message: plenty of people weren't smiling as if they were having the most awesome time in their lives, glasses had lipstick marks and smudges, and not everyone was fit and beautiful.
It was an interesting set of films, and an interesting talk afterwards.
* * *
Just so you don't don't think that my dealings with the Festival staff are an endless litany of woe, not only did the Paramount sort me out properly, they also placed Jenni and I together, so that we could comment to each other about Maggie Gyllenhaal's general lack of, erhm, "feminine support".
(Is "feminine support" a real euphemism for bras? If not, it should be.)
Anyway, SherryBaby was a movie about a woman coming out of prison, and wanting to reconnect to her daughter (who was a baby when she went in). She is, unfortunately, quite selfish, and craves the spotlight -- not just from her daughter, but her whole family. She had been put away for stealing to support a drug habit, and she is still struggling to stay clean; but she's quite prepared to use sex to get what she wants, as well as just for fun. We definitely get hints that something might have been very wrong in her home growing up; but she also shows that she's able to grow.
Jenni made the interesting observation that broken women are generally shown as having something horrible in their upbringing (such as rape, or parental abuse), whereas men are more often allowed to be intrinsically broken (though there are exceptions to this, such as Mysterious Skin). This probably says a lot about the myths that society tells itself about men and women, both their relative agency, and their "innate purity" (for want of a better term).
I liked this movie, but I don't think I need to see it again any time soon.
* * *
I was fully prepared to deal with the uncomfortable seat that I booked for the next movie... and then my seat basically lurched over when I sat in it, with the screws clearly pulled out of the floorboards. I felt very sheepish bothering an usher about it, given all the bother I'd been to the staff that day, but I didn't think I could comfortably balance the whole movie -- and so I got to see this movie from the comfort of the house seats as well. Yay!
Paprika is definitely the best anime I've seen this Festival. I liked Tokyo Godfathers (by the same guys) enough to buy it last year, and I had no problem with following what was happening... except when I wasn't supposed to. (There's a point where I'm reading the subtitles, and thinking, "What the heck? 'The pillow of the tamarin is rigid with taco sauce'?'" (or something similar). And then it's like -- oh, I see, he's bonkers. That's fine.
The basic plot? Psychotherapists have developed a machine to enter people's dreams, to help them deal with their problems. Someone has stolen some of the equipment, and started to use it for their own nefarious ends.
I really liked this movie, and fully plan to buy a copy.