You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Film Festival 2008: Day 13

My first movie was Swedish Tango at the Film Archive with Jenni, following the same couple as in Paradise. I don't think it's quite as good as Paradise; you get to know a bit more of the couple's history, and it's kinda fun to see the husband dealing with the driving of someone he can't boss around, but I think that they're a more sympathetic couple when they're in a situation that they're comfortable with.

It was interesting to see how they dealt with the language barrier in Argentina, especially with the character that was taking them around; I doubt I could have done as well. And there were plenty of telling moments - the husband asking why the wife dances so well with everyone else, but pushes and pulls when she dances with him? And near the beginning, he gets very grumpy when she comes home at 5pm instead of 1pm, since he got lunch ready and has been sitting around getting more and more cross while he's been waiting; but he also apologises for being grumpy, and says that it's just because he feels more comfortable when she's around.

The cinematography didn't feel as contrived in Paradise, in that I didn't have any times where I thought, "Well, how did they get that shot?" or "Oh, they're doing some music so we can look at the subjects faces without dialogue." I think I liked how they came across in Paradise more, too; maybe having the friend there as a sounding board helped? That said, it was a fun film, and I'm glad I saw it.

* * *

My next film was at the Paramount. Crazy Love was the story of a New York lawyer who swept a beautiful young woman off her feet; but then it turned out that he was already married. She demanded that he divorce; he faked the papers. She left him and became engaged to another man; he hired goons to throw a caustic liquid into her face, scarring and partially blinding her. He went to jail for fifteen years, continuing to write professing his love; he also overturned the convictions of many of the people he was in jail with, which earned him solitary confinement for a time. He started to charge fees to the convicts he was helping, and sending the money to her; this helped get him parole. He then appeared on TV, asking for her to forgive him, and marry him. She eventually agrees, and goes on a bunch of talk shows with him.

Then some time later the woman he is having an affair with refuses to see him, and he tells this mistress that she had to have dinner and sex with him, or he'd blind her like he blinded his wife. His wife stands by him at trial, and he gets off everything but a minor charge. They've now been married for 25 years.

It's a weird situation. The man comes across as a bit of a shady dealer - an ambulance chaser, a philanderer, someone that might be amusing to have a drink with, but who you wouldn't want to rely on. In both cases he conducted his own defence; in the first trial, he tried more and more outrageous stunts, trying to perform a citizen's arrest on the prosecutor, accusing the judge of being mentally ill, and finally breaking his glasses and trying to slash his wrists. The woman comes across as slightly shallow, and perhaps choosing to marry him more from loneliness than love. But they don't appear to be unhappy with their marriage, despite the bizarre circumstances.

I think that it's interesting to compare this to Donkey in Lahore. There's similar themes of obsession, but the guy in Donkey eventually starts to question what he's doing, and in many ways seemed to be following through because of a feeling of obligation rather than passion; but in Crazy Love, there's no hint that the guy ever doubts his obsession. However - if he was so in love, it's hard to see why he didn't leave his wife, which would have short-circuited the whole thing, instead of stringing the woman along.

An interesting documentary; I don't think I'd need to see it again.

* * *

The Escapist was good, and I liked it a lot. Basically a prison escape movie, we're dropped into the moment when the escape starts, and once the first phase is complete, we go back to see why and how the escape is taking place. We then bounce back and forth between the escape as it unfolds, and the story that happens before the escape; I really liked how they ended up using this.

I seem to be seeing a lot of movies set in and around prisons this year. I don't think I'm really cut out for prison life. :)

In some ways, it's interesting to note what we don't see - we never find out what people did to be sent to prison, though hints of their former lives come through because of some people's skills. It presents prison as a hermetic world, sealed into itself, and the only relationships and rules that matter are the ones inside the bars. I don't think anyone could convincingly argue that these sorts of prisons are anything to do with rehabilitation; they're punishment, pure and simple. And while I'd like to think that the people who stole stuff out of my car while I was on holiday many moons ago would be punished one day, I think I'd forego that if I knew that they wouldn't steal again, or worse.

The film might be a bit violent for some people, and it's a straight-up prison drama without any leavening of humour, but I will certainly watch this movie again, and may well buy it.

* * *

C couldn't make it to Garbage Warrior, so I dragged my sister and her husband along. This was a documentary about an architect who builds what he calls "Earth-ships", homes designed to be off the grid, generating their own power, food and water. He made a bunch of experimental homes in New Mexico, and then got shut down the state for not doing all the things that new subdivisions have to do (like provide roads, archaeological surveys, topographical maps, links to the grid, water and sewage systems, etc). They also frowned upon the fact that many of the houses were experimental, and therefore potentially dangerous - he talked about a house he built that got so hot inside that it melted the plastic case of a typewriter, and laughed as he said that it was lucky that he didn't kill a baby.

So he laid low for a while, then brought the sections into line with the state regulations, and tried to introduce a bill that would allow experimental sites to be set up, where people could try out new and untested ways of building their own homes, without the restrictions of regulations that weren't drafted with these sorts of buildings in mind. During the three years it took for the bill to pass, he and his team went and helped some of the islanders affected by the tsunami that hit Indonesia (we only saw them build one house directly, but they did also pass on their techniques to local builders and architects). He got very frustrated with the legislative process, especially because the first time that the bill was presented, Republicans fillibustered it as part of some larger bargaining strategy; he firmly believes that the law-makers are going to be too slow to deal with the burgeoning crisis.

As you may have guessed, he didn't win me over completely. As my sister pointed out, saying that he was making the first houses that let you live independently was ridiculous, since most houses a hundred years ago were independent for sewage and water, and to a large extent for power as well. And she also pointed out that the houses that they were building were "Mc-Garbage-Mansions", not houses that typical Americans could afford, if only because the land that would be suitable for building them would be limited. And we discussed the fact that you were replacing one set of worries with another; instead of having to earn money to buy food from the supermarket, you had to spend time tending these indoor gardens, for example.

However, she did agree that there was a lot of interesting stuff in the documentary, and I am glad I watched it.

* * *

The Man From London was slow. I mean, really slow. Like - really, really, really slow.

There were only 25 shots in the entire movie. I counted, so I could have something to do.

I was in the front row, so I couldn't easily see how many people were leaving; but I heard an awful lot of seats being put up. In fact, as the opening shot tracked slowly up the boat, taking a good two or three minutes to get to the top, I seriously thought about leaving myself, and asking Jenni whether it was any good the next day. But it had Tilda Swinton in the credits, I thought! She's an excellent actress, how bad can it be?

And she is an excellent actress - in fact, I thought all the actors were very good. They had to be, when the camera was just sitting on the faces, so that they took up a third of the screen, for around thirty or forty seconds. And there were very nicely composed shots, and the technical aspect was very well done, although the dialogue of many of the actors was so stilted and badly lip-synched that it must have been a stylistic choice. And unlike that terrible Thai film that I saw (my high-watermark of terribly slopw and pointless films), there was actually a plot, though some of the actions seemed mysterious and/or overwrought.

However, I heard some of the people who stayed until the end saying that they liked it immensely. I think that perhaps I am not the intended audience; and I'm okay with that.

I don't think I'd watch it again, and I'll probably avoid other films by the same director.

Film Festival 2008: Day 12

My first film was Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S. Thompson. I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that I'm much more familiar with his caricatures and imitations (The Duke from Doonesbury, or Spider Robinson from Metropolitan, or King Mob from The Invisibles); I've never even watched Fear and Loathing, much less read anything more than snippets of his work.

So from the point of view of more or less a blank slate, it felt like I got a lot out of this film. One of the most interesting things for me was that he was involved in many events that I knew from other perspectives - I've been following C's lead and reading All The Presidents Men, The Final Days, and Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat, which meant that when they talked about events during the McGovern nomination process, I remembered some of what Woodward and Bernstein had discovered in terms of the dirty tricks played on the Democratic candidates. And I remember watching a documentary about Muhammed Ali and the "Rumble in the Jungle", so I had some context for his failure to report on it.

But there was plenty that I didn't know - I knew that President Jimmy Carter was fairly well-respected, but not that he had been backed by Thompson after a speech he gave to a bunch of lawyers. Nor that Thompson had run for sheriff in Aspen, shaving off his hair so that he could refer to "my long-haired opponent", and had actually polled extremely well. Nor the extent that he'd been treated like a rock star, nor his extravagant funeral plans.

I think his first wife was right, that he could have been doing a lot of good now; his writings after the Sept 11th bombings were right on the nose, and I think the would have had relevant things to say about the recent Democratic nomination process. But that was the choice he made.

But what would have happened if he'd become Sheriff in Aspen?

* * *

I then went to Animation Now!. There was nothing that stood out like The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello; I liked The Old, Old, Very Old Man because it reminded me of Kate Beaton, in that it was a historical anecdote retold in an entertaining way, and was interestingly minimal in the amount of detail drawn. And Sleeping Betty was funny and fun.

But the description for Changing Evan reads: "A little film about the filmmaker's daughter. Just when he thinks everything is going well, Evan gets chicken pox." What it should say is, "This is the damn abstract-shapes-painted-onto-the-film-and-free-jazz one." And then there was Herr Bar, which had landscapes, plants and animals made up of bits of photographs of people, which is one of those ideas that is probably just as cool, or even cooler, in conception than in execution. And then there was Hezurbeltzak, a Common Grave, a short that was scratchy and unpleasant in music, drawing and subject, which actually made me whisper to Ed, "Bring back the free jazz."

All in all, I can't say that Jenni & Lee didn't make the right call in skipping it this year.

* * *

I slipped out as soon as the credits started for the last short, but still missed the first few minutes of Gomorrah. This led to me trying to remember where it was set; with the bright sunshine, gangs and general run-down air, I assumed South America, but I could hear that the language wasn't quite right. In fact, it was set in Sicily, and the three main themes seemed to be the high levels of debt, how deeply the criminal organizations are embedded into everyday life, and how these things impact on loyalty.

It was okay; I don't think I feel any deep need to rewatch it.

* * *

I then ducked out to get something to eat, and a caffeinated beverage (to stop the fourth-movie nod-off), and then it was back to the Embassy to see And When Did You Last See Your Father?, a British film about daddy issues. Well, less individual issues, more an entire year's subscription. :) A writer who feels that his father doesn't respect him, and that his father gone done his mother wrong, and who he resents for all the little cheats that his father got away with, has to deal with him dying.

It was well acted, and did a good job of showing why the son resented his father, while making clear that a lot of the problems were that the two of them just didn't understand each other, and so kept rubbing each other up the wrong way. It probably didn't help to have a jolly-people-along father if you were an awkward adolescent. And it also dealt with the whole fact that people dying of old age gradually fail - the main character takes the title of the film, and asks himself, when did he last see his father when he was a full person, before illness chipped away bits of him?

A good film, but I'm not sure I'd feel the need to see it again.

* * *

And then it was off to the Paramount for Standard Operating Procedure; I hadn't remembered that C was coming, so that was a nice surprise.

Where No End In Sight looked at the mishandling of the aftermath of the Iraqi War in general, and Taxi To The Dark Side focussed in on the mistreatment of prisoners in the internment camps and Gitmo, Standard Operating Procedure focused on Abu Gharab, and in particular the events and people surrounding the horrific pictures that came out of there. They did this by showing the pictures in context, talking to many of the people who were in the pictures or convicted, and talking to the Brigadier General who was in charge of the prisons (but not Military Intelligence, or the various non-army people who used them for interrogation of "ghosts), and a professional civilian interrogator who was there, and one of the people who assembled the case against the soldiers who were eventually charged and sent to prison.

As with Taxi To The Dark Side, you got the strong impression that these were kids out of their depth. They were young, they were being told that these people were killing their buddies, they were being shelled every day, and they were being told to use "whatever means necessary" to soften the prisoners up. And there seemed to be one guy, the guys with the glasses, who liked to push things a bit too far - though it's hard to tell, because they couldn't interview him (he's still in prison), but the fact that he got the girl who holds the leash in one of the infamous photos pregnant, while marrying another of the women who appears in the photos... I think that might indicate the kind of guy he is.

One of the things that was chilling was that one of the women who appears grinning and giving a thumbs-up in numerous gruesome or grotesque photos was writing to her wife at home, talking about how bad things were getting, and that she was taking photos as proof of what was going on; but she's still grinning in the photos. Oh, and that when the army found out there was going to be an investigation, someone told all the soldiers that there was a short amnesty, and that they should shred or otherwise destroy any evidence of wrongdoing. I mean... what the hell?

One of the things that is so frustrating is that we know about what happens in this sort of situation - the experiment where undergrads were split into prisoners and guards was done in the seventies, and is a staple of first-year psychology texts. The situation that the army created was almost designed to produce the abuses that occurred; and the most stupid thing is, we know that this sort of torture doesn't provide useful intelligence anyway. It's viciousness and loss of moral standing for nothing. And the people who ended up at the sharp end are punished, while the people who either deliberately, or through incompetent negligence, set up the situation to fail so badly get away scot free. Bah.

Film Festival 2008: Day 10 & 11

I was running a bit late for Note By Note: The Making of Steinway L1037, and actually missed the first five minutes; but I'm glad I didn't give it a miss, and not just because I had already paid for a ticket. The basic conceit was that the documentary would follow the construction of a concert grand piano, from timber to timbre, so to speak. Along the way, they interviewed not just the many expert craftsmen who hand-craft the Steinway pianos, but also those who play them - people coming to the factory to find a suitable instrument for a concert, but also a family who is buying one for their son, so that the grandfather can still enjoy it. There was lots of discussion about pianos can differ from one another, and why different people might choose different pianos. There were interviews with classical and jazz musicians (including Harry Connick Jnr) about how the piano differs from other instruments, different artists' playing styles, and why they started on the piano - one of them credited a Tom & Jerry cartoon, where the mouse is trapped inside the piano and being hit by the hammers.

They also talked a bit about how much the piano has fallen from the time when every home would have one, and how hard it is to find good craftsmen and keep the tradition going; they had workers from all over the world in the shop. I'd known that the inside of the piano was complicated, since I know how much of a jump in expression that it allowed for composers; I just hadn't realised quite how complicated.

It was a nice change to see a documentary that was just slightly melancholy, instead of one that made me angry or horrified.

* * *

And then I dashed out to the fruit & vege market outside Te Papa to pick up some apples, and then got back in plenty of time to take my seat for Secret Sunshine. Unfortunately, I then realised that I didn't have the tickets that I had picked up for Jackie with me, and I needed them for my next film; since Soundings theatre doesn't have any phone reception, I had to make my way past a bunch of people, and go out and call C (who was luckily still at home); C completely saved my bacon, and agreed to drop off the tickets in town. I then had to go back in and get past my long-suffering seat-mates again, in the dark.

The movie itself was about... well, the existence of evil in a world with a good God, and how people deal with grief. A woman and son move to her husband's hometown after he dies in a car accident; the mechanic who picks them up from their broken-down car becomes infatuated with her, and does his oafish best to win her heart. Soon everyone in town knows her life story, including the fact that she's ostensibly planning to buy some land as an investment; which is why someone thinks that she's got enough money to make it worth kidnapping her son, which goes horribly wrong.

There's a bunch of Christianity in this film, and it's kinda weird to think how alien the iconography and setting would be to a Korean mindset - pews are kinda distinctive pieces of furniture. (There's one bit where her friends are sitting around talking, and one says that she'll become Christian later, so she won't have to carry out the expensive funerary rights for her parents, and her children won't have to do it for her.) And there's the problem of trying to forgive someone, and then finding out that they've become Christian, and believe that they've already been absolved of the crime that you were trying to forgive them for - how could God do this to her, she asks, forgive this man before she was ready to? So she decides to try and get even.

I have mixed feelings about this film. It's a hard question that they're trying to address, and I don't think I agree with the answer that they come up with; but that doesn't make it a bad film. And there are parts that are quite funny. I won't be watching it again, however.

* * *

Off to the Embassy I trotted, backtracking once I got the text that C had left the tickets at the Soundings theatre, and met up with Jenni, Jackie et al. for Mongol, an epic about the early life of Genghis Khan. It was... well, an Asian historical epic, with revenge, betrayal, honour, sweeping landscapes and big, bloody fight scenes. It was also something of a love story, which was a bit of a surprise.

On the whole, while there were a few slow sequences, I really liked it, and I suspect that I'll go to the next installment.

* * *

My next film had me at the Paramount, for Let The Right One In, a Swedish young vampire flick. I managed to get C an icecream, despite technical difficulties on the other side of the counter; and I'd just like to note that lemongrass and ginger is actually quite nice as an icecream.

The basic story - a 12 year-old boy is being bullied at school, and a young girl who has been 12 for a long time moves into the flat next door with a man who is probably not her father. There's hints that the boy might be troubled (folder full of murder stories, plays with a knife), but we see enough to know that he's basically a good kid. The girl tells him, when they first meet, that they can't be friends; as you might have guessed, this isn't true.

This film doesn't suffer too badly from Our Vampires Are Different, which is actually quite neat. And they do a good job at raising empathy for the girl, while not diluting what she is. All in all, a pretty good vampire film.

* * *

And then I went to Timecrimes, a time-travel movie. This was... all right, but not brilliant. I mean, they'd put a lot of thought into making things consistent, but the motivation of the main character to do some of the things he did was opaque - in particular, his quick and complete acceptance that paradoxes could not be allowed to happen, and the lengths he was prepared to go to in order to prevent them.

I mean, my take would be -- if paradoxes ended the universe, surely someone else in the universe would have invented time travel and ended it before now?

I don't want to spoil the movie for people who might see it, but I have to agree with a person I chatted with afterwards, who said that there's really only one tense period in the movie, near the beginning. Not as confusing as most of the time-travel movies I've seen at the festival (apart from that terrible Kiwi one), but ultimately not as satisfying either.

* * *

Then suddenly it was Monday again, and the end of C's leave. Getting up in plenty of time (though not early enough to go in with C, unfortunately), I went to the Paramount for Billy the Kid, a documentary about a guy in his early teens who is smart, but has trouble fitting in, or keeping still for that matter. Especially at the beginning of the documentary, his eyes were always darting around nervously, and he seemed wary in the halls; he seemed to have trouble judging how much to share, or how to deal with people.

This was a pretty painful movie to watch; I suspect anyone with dorkiness lurking in their adolescence would find it difficult, seeing him make some of the same mistakes, but on camera. I mean, I never wore my karate outfit to my potential girlfriend's parent's diner (or did karate at all, come to that), but I can remember when that might have seemed like a good idea. :) And I didn't have the pain of my mistakes recorded forever on film.

One of the things that was curious for me was that a large number of his cultural touchstones seemed to be from the eighties - quoting The Karate Kid or The Terminator, wanting to grow his hair long like Gene Simmons (who is the band Kiss; the effeminate aerobics guy is the other one) and talking about ACDC and other rockers from that era. I don't know whether it's that area, or because he was so close to his mother; but it seemed weird that his tastes weren't more, I dunno, contemporary. Aren't there still mainstream rockers out there?

Oh, the end credits had him singing along to "God Gave Rock & Roll To You", which I only know from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.

All in all, I'm glad I watched it, but I don't know if I could manage it a second time.

* * *

I then ducked out to have lunch; because I actually had a pretty big break, I decided to head to Sweet Mother's Kitchen; as I walked towards it, I bumped into Pete, who works above them, so we had lunch, and he filled me in on the latest happenings at Chez Andersen. After a nice po' boy, I went back to the Paramount for La Zona, a drama about a gated community in South America. The basic plot concerns three thieves that manage to slip in, and accidentally kill someone; two are killed as they try to escape, and the third disappears inside the area. Complicating matters are the fact that a resident accidentally shot a security guard during the confusion, and the residents are desperate to keep the special status that keeps the police (and subsequent harassment and corruption) out of the community, which they'll lose in the event of a violent death.

The roving vigilante groups and mounting paranoia is exacerbated by a police captain who is relentless in pursuing the crime, though sometimes get the impression that he's more offended by the idea of a different law for the rich, than any need for justice per se. And the son of one of the more reasonable council members ends up making contact with the remaining thief...

This was a pretty good crime drama, and it occurs to me that it would make an interesting murder mystery setting, with the intense video surveillance coupled with the inexperience in evidence collection that the security guards probably have, and the resident's intense desire to not see any problems. I don't think I'll be watching it again, though.

* * *

Then it was off to the Film Archive for three films in a row (which is why I now have an aching backside). The first was Buddha Collapsed Out Of Shame, a drama about a little girl who decides that she wants to go to school "to learn the funny stories". She has to deal with a series of obstacles - she can't find her mother to get money for a notebook (walking along the ridge to town yelling, "Mama, I'm falling! You have to come catch me, mama!"), so she takes some eggs to the market to try and sell them; I can't believe that no-one took pity on her adorableness.

Then, once she starts off to school, she is grabbed by a gang of older boys who declare that they're Taliban, and she's an American spy; they grab her notebook (because girls shouldn't go to school), and tear out pages to make paper aeroplanes to "shoot" at the Buddha that was blown up by the actual Taliban. They then dig a pit, which they tell her is her grave, and that they're going to stone her, ignoring her insistence that she doesn't want to play, "the stoning game".

The child actors in this film are really good - the gang of boys are really quite terrifying, and the smaller kids do an excellent job. The little girl, in particular, is very good indeed. But the society that they show... I dunno, I'm glad I never had to deal with that sort of thing as a kid, that's all I'll say.

* * *

Continuing my difficult film run, I next went to If We Knew, about a Swedish paediatric clinic for premature babies, and the circumstances where you stop artificially supporting the infant, and whether it is ethical to euthanize a baby that you know is going to have a miserable life of constant suffering. This sort of thing is basically why I'm really, really glad I am not, and will never be, a doctor.

There's something about the death of children, especially babies, that is really difficult to deal with. I know that I'm often nervous around infants, because it's so obvious how fragile they are - a moment's clumsiness could make a huge difference. And it was obvious that all of these doctors really cared about the children they were trying to look after.

For completely different reasons to Billy the Kid, this is another movie that I don't think I could easily watch again.

* * *

And then to round off my difficult movie experience, I had Donkey In Lahore, a documentary about an Australian puppeteer who, after a ten-day visit to Pakistan, decides to convert to Islam so he can marry a young girl he met there. As you might have guessed, he's not always the most practical of souls, and admits in the course of the film to his bride-to-be that he has Borderline Personality Disorder. As plan after plan falls through (because he doesn't have enough money to get a house in Pakistan, and can't get his idea for a Pakistani puppet TV programme off the ground, and he can't get all the documents necessary for the visa so the young woman can come to Australia to be with him), and the obvious cultural differences stay to cause tensions (he was a goth, his sister is a lesbian, her brothers don't consider a conversion in Australia to make him a "true" Muslim), it seems that this is going to be the story of a disaster. But, while not wanting to spoil the ending, it seems to be a happy one.

At the end of the film, I'm still not sure that the whole thing was a great idea - they might both have been happier if the puppeteer had laughed off the girl's suggestion that they get married. But I guess it's a testament to something that they went through with it, and everything pretty much worked out. The adaptability of people, maybe?

Film Festival 2008: Day 9

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.

* * *

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."

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

Film Festival 2008: Day 8

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.

Film Festival 2008: Day 7

C had me scrubbing the shower (we had someone staying that night), so we ended up having to catchi a taxi to Taxi to the Dark Side - tres extravagant! And also tres creepy, now that I think about it. We managed to get to the Paramount in plenty of time, though C graciously gave up her seat in the middle-front to Stacey, since she's a firm believer in tradition.

This film was an interesting contrast to No Way Out, basically documenting how the soldiers at Abu Garab, Guantanamo and other prisons were made to feel that they needed to push things further, get results, and generally escalate things, all without being specifically told to do so by the top brass. The pernicious effect of 24 was mentioned, where torture produces accurate information quickly, and a sense of urgency that is generally the argument justifying torture is set up. (One of the experts explains how advocates will say, "Okay, there's a bomb somewhere, and this guy knows and isn't talking, isn't it okay to torture him to save the lives of the people the bomb is going to kill?" Except there's no bomb, the urgency is fake; and what if the guy just doesn't know?)

I think that the most interesting thing in the film for me was the interviews with the people within the military who opposed the situation, as well as the segments with one of the FBI guys whose law-enforcement approach got muscled out in favour of the CIA's "beat the crap out of them until they talk" strategy. There also seems to be something happening around Colin Powell - his chief of staff appeared in both docos, and this one talked about how he was fooled into telling the UN that they had verified links between Iraq and Al-qaeda (which turned out to have been made up by a "high-value suspect" who knew nothing, and just wanted to stop the CIA from continuing to torture him). I remember the feeling of disappointment when he became a mouthpiece for the Bush Administration for the Iraq War; though it seems kind of crazy to have any feelings one way or another to the guy, I'm kinda glad that his reputation is getting somewhat rehabilitated.

Anyway, it wasn't quite as depressing as No Way Out (mainly because the Bush clique didn't get everything their own way), and I'm glad I saw it.

* * *

I then cajoled C into coming along with me to Paradise at the Film Archive. I'm very pleased I did, because it was awesome, though my judgement might be coloured by the fact that I've got a Danish grandfather. It was a documentary about a Swedish couple in their eighties, and the plot was basically a battle of wills between the fiery husband and the calmer wife over whether they should change one of the walls in their dining room into a feature wall - the husband was dead-set on it, and the wife thought it was a bad idea, but was reluctantly willing to go along with it.

There were many touches that made this film awesome for me - the dark red cottage with white trim that reminded me of my grandfather's house in Hatepe, the husband's playing jazz trumpet on the toilet, and the way they affectionately bickered. And the friend that came over to their house reminded me of my grandmother's friend Sylvia.

I don't want to spoil the ending, but it was good enough that I'll probably try to find it on DVD, if only to show to my family. I'd recommend it, and I'm looking forward to Swedish Tango, which features the same couple deciding, after sixty-five years of marriage, that they need to learn to tango. It should be great! :)

* * *

I then grabbed something to eat (and C grabbed some of what I grabbed), and then I said goodbye to C and headed to Te Papa for California Dreaming (Endless). I was a bit intimidated at first, since it was nearly three hours long, and Te Papa films are often worthy (which means, often dreary), but I was pleasantly surprised by this Romanian film; unfortunately, I believe that the director has died, and I think it was before completely finishing with the film's editing. The basic story was set during the Balkan war, where a train with a squad of US marines and a few Romanian soldiers is transporting radar equipment to Kosovo when it's stopped by a corrupt station-master, who refuses to let the train go without the proper customs papers. The mayor sees this as a great opportunity to perhaps get some publicity and/or investors, the local factory workers see it as a chance to get their grievances heard, and the American captain sees it as a chance to get more and more frustrated. There are flashbacks to WWII, with people reassuring each other that the Americans will be here soon, which ends up tying into the station-master's motivation; and there are the tensions that arise when the local girls start taking a shine to the exotic Americans, including the daughter of the station-master.

The film could definitely be a lot tighter, and there are some predictable bits, but it's basically pretty good.

* * *

When I got out of that and headed to the Embassy, the weather was rotten - freezing cold and driving rain. I got there as quickly as I could, and then Jenni & Lee turned up and we watched Empties, a Czech film about an older chap who gives up teaching after wringing out a smelly sponge over the head of cheeky student, but then finds that he can't stay inside cooped up with his wife, and so takes a sequence of odd jobs until he finds a niche that allows him to exercise his social nature. He has a bit of a roving eye, though he's never been caught, but which makes it awkward when it turns out that his daughter has just been left with a young son for a younger woman.

I thought it was funny, and the way they portrayed his dreams (with various women dressed as railway employees coming into his carriage and drawing the curtains) was really nifty. And you should make sure that you stick around to see the bit after the first lot of credits.

It's a bit slow, and not hilarious, but I'd happily watch it again at some point.

* * *

And then finally, I went to Elite Squad, about BOPE, the elite police division in Rio de Janeiro. Written by the same guy who did City of God, there were definite similarities in style - for example, the film started more than partway through the story, and then went back and explained how they got there. It also had a lot of jerky, hand-held camera shots to give you a sense of the confusion and intensity of action, and some pretty damn good music.

The basic plot followed a couple of idealistic new recruits, and a hard-bitten captain who's about to have a baby and starting to suffer from the stress of his job. There's something weird going on about the attitude towards the police - something like, the gangs that run the slums are violent, homicidal scum who will kill the kid hired to be a look-out if they fail their job, so BOPE are justified in extreme measures in order to deal with the extreme problem. And there's definitely a weird, cult-like fascism going on; but on the other hand, it's contrasted by the film's depiction of the "normal" police.

It's weird to try and understand a society where the police are corrupt by default, not just in terms of shaking down shop-owners for protection, but having sergeants demand bribes to pass on leave requests, and Captains giving standing orders for bodies to be shifted into other precincts to make the statistics look better. In contrast, the film makes it clear that BOPE is, by and large, not corrupt; on the other hand, they're not really police, either. Their structure seems are more paramilitary, designed to go into the slums and shoot the drug-lords, than any sort of community policing. And the problem with using soldiers as a police force is that you're training a bunch of hammers, and if something that isn't a nail turns up, there's the likelihood that it'll be hammered down anyway.

Seeing their interrogation techniques so soon after Taxi to the Dark Side was weird, since they would basically grab people and then torture them until they got information. But they show the gangs to be even worse, and the members of BOPE clearly think of themselves as the good guys, even though the main characters become more horrid the further in they get. I get the impression that maybe there's something like Starship Troopers going on here, but any message like that has gotten a little muddied by the horribleness of the situation.

I liked the film, but I'm not sure I should have.

Film Festival 2008: Day 6

I saw my sister Ellen before Rain of the Children, because a bunch of people from her work were going; C came into town with me, but decided that discretion was the better part of valour as far as Vincent Ward films go, and went off shopping until Welcome to the Sticks.

While I totally understood C's trepidation, it was actually a really interesting documentary about the life of a Maori woman, Puhi, who he had made a documentary about (In Spring One Plants Alone) in 1978, near the beginning of his film-making career. But when he went back to investigate her life, and about her son, he ended up making a film showing a lot of aspects of life among the Tuhoe from around the turn of last century onwards, as well as some Maori attitudes towards mental health, the role of women, and how curses can travel down through the generations. This was a woman who had fourteen children, but had lost all but one - some to disease or hunger, but some to other people, who raised them as their own.

I sometimes found the recreations a bit hammy, there's something oddly stilted about Vincent Ward's delivery, and I felt... uncomfortable, I guess is the best word, about hearing the documentary maker putting words in the mouth of a dead woman, though Rena Owen did a fine job of delivering them. But it was a good movie, and I'm glad that I saw it.

* * *

When I was watching Flight of the Red Balloon, it starts off with a scene directly referencing the original film, The Red Ballon; and when we finally saw the object, I thought to myself, "The balloon isn't as vibrantly red as in the original". And I think that it's fair to say that this was generally true: not that everything was less red, but that this a much more muted film. It had a lot of shots that felt like they went on for too long, and no real sense of resolution, and the life that we saw was a slice that didn't draw me in.

All the actors were good, especially the child actor; but I just wasn't interested in the film, which I really wanted to be. Not terrible, but not recommended.

* * *

Then it was off to the Paramount Bergman theatre to watch Boy A, which is about a young man who had committed a terrible crime when he was a young boy, and his attempt at reintegration into society. In a way, it's a dark mirror to the movie In Bruges, in that it asks the same question about the possibility of redemption after an unforgivable act, but the answer it gives is much bleaker. I thought that it was well acted, and made me care about the people; but it had a certain inevitability to it that meant that I was never really tempted to hope, and so I kept my emotional distance.

Jenni mentioned that there was a point near the end of In Bruges where you could left, and it would have been a happy ending for everyone; I think the fact that everything pretty much goes well until near the end was why there wasn't any dramatic tension for me, since it was obvious what the shape of the movie was going to be. I'll admit to thinking about leaving the film before the bad stuff happened to the main character, though.

A well-made film, but I'd have no desire to rewatch it.

* * *

And after all this bleakness and gloom, it was a nice change of pace to come to the Embassy and see a light French comedy. But before we got to that, there was the short Noise Control, an animation by the same people who did Pearl, Florrie and the Bull. This one was about the rooster in Kapiti who had been made the pet of a local kindergarten, and was shot by a noise control officer for crowing in the early hours of the morning; this made the international news because the kindergarten children found him dying in their sandpit the next day. However, it was also about the film-maker's son, who provided the voice for the rooster by being interviewed about his band and his music, and how they dealt with the neighbours when they practised in their suburban cul-de-sac.

Then it was on to Welcome to the Sticks, about a post-office manager so desperate to get a transfer to a plum position to please his wife that he ends up going too far, and being exiled to The North (I.e. to the north of Paris). His son is worried that he will lose toes from frostbite, and he and his wife are not much more optimistic. He goes on his own, and eventually finds that he quite likes it; but his wife falls in love with him again now that she's convinced herself that he's suffering nobly for his family. So when she decides that she can't let him suffer up there alone, he tries to get his new friends to give her an experience of the Dread North that confirms all her prejudices, so that his marriage will stay saved. There's also a romance sub-plot between two of his employees, with an awesome domineering mother as the main obstacle.

I really liked this film. It wasn't particularly challenging, or difficult, or innovative; but it was fun, and engaging, and warm. The translator appeared to do an excellent job of getting across the accent-based humour (which is pretty impressive, if you think about it). I think that a similar vein of humour could probably be mined by making a movie sending someone from Auckland down to the rural south, though the dialect jokes won't be as extensive - there's only so many times you can roll your "r"s...

I might well pick this one up on DVD.

* * *

And then C went home, and I waited at the Embassy for my next movie, slightly hungry. This lead me to an unfortunate discovery - one of the times that you really notice when a film has long stretches of silence is when you're trying to eat an apple. (Also, when there's a band playing in the lounge bar behind you.) Lorna's Silence is about an Albanian woman who has married a Belgian junkie for citizenship; he believes that he'll be getting a payout when they're divorced, but she knows that the plan is to let him OD. Once she is a Belgian citizen and he's out of the picture, she will in turn marry a Russian man, implied to have criminal connections, to give him citizenship. She's got a boyfriend, and they plan to use their money to open up a café. Unfortunately, things start going wrong when the junkie decides to try to get clean; when she tells her boss, he reassures her that they'll just fake an overdose, and she starts to feel sorry for her faux husband, which in turn starts making her boss doubt her loyalty.

There was pretty much only one real surprise in this movie; otherwise, all the things that you'd expect to happen come to pass, and there's very little tension. Basically, this wasn't as good as I was hoping.

Film Festival 2008: Day 5

By three methods we may learn wisdom:
First, by reflection, which is noblest;
Second, by imitation, which is easiest;
and third by experience,which is the most bitter. -- Confucius

This is the quote that started Up the Yangtze, a film that was a lot busier than I was expecting - according to the woman I sat next to, the director had been giving some really good interviews on National Radio, which she thought accounted for the excellent attendance. The film-maker's grandfather had told him all about the Yangtze when he was growing up, and then his family recently went on a cruise up the river. They're calling these the "farewell cruises", since the water is rapidly rising because of the Three Gorges Dam, and the film looks a bit at how this is affecting the people that live by the river.

There is some footage about the new housing that has been created for the displaced citizens, and some of the anger that these people feel about corrupt officials not paying the proper compensation, but the film mostly focuses on a couple of teenagers who have taken jobs with a particular cruise liner. One is a city boy, who boasts to his friends about how he'll be much richer than them, and talks about how he can't be bothered to help anyone but middle-aged people (because the young and old are such poor tippers). The other is a girl who really wants to stay in school, but her parents are very poor, and need her to get a job. We get to meet that family, who are living in a shack that they've built on land abandoned because it's right next to the river and will soon be flooded; they've planted a bunch of vegetables, and are taking advantage of being able to live off the land for a while. She obviously finds it quite hard adjusting, and misses her parents; but by the end, it seems like she fits in.

(The guy is let go for arrogance after his initial trial period.)

One of the things that was quite surprising was how much access that the cameras seemed to have, given other films I've seen set in China (like China Blue a couple of years ago). Apparently the director formed a relationship with the cruise-line, which allowed him to go with them when they were doing their recruiting drive, and let him follow a bunch of different applicants, as well as giving him access all over the ship. And because he is ethnically Chinese (as well as being Canadian), he was able to blend in - he said that people thought that he was with a local news crew, and were quite open in their complaints about corrupt officials.

(Actually, that's one of the things I think is most worrying about this particular mega-dam project: widespread corruption coupled with a large construction project that could catastrophically fail seems like a recipe for Disaster Stew.)

There was some mention of the idea that "the little family must suffer for the benefit of the big family", and many of those affected seemed resigned to the fact that the flooding would take place, and actually believed that the government was doing the right thing; but in some ways, that's probably one of the reasons why the compensation issue was so touchy.

Speaking of touchy subjects, there was a scene where we saw the new recruits being told about topics to avoid - Quebec separatism, for example, and the Northern Ireland question. In fact, telling them what they shouldn't talk about would probably constitute a fairly good primer on world affairs.

There's some stuff to say about the culture of tipping, but it's getting late, so I'm just going to move on.

* * *

I had hoped that C was going to make it to The Hollow Men, but unfortunately she couldn't. This was a documentary about the behaviour of the National Party in the last election, and how they very carefully engineered their message to allow them to shift to the right while still claiming to represent the centre. Using PR people, an advertising agency that specialised in conservative political advertising in Australia, and focus groups, they made sure that their potential voters weren't scared off by the unpopular positions that they held - undoing the nuclear ship ban, and scrapping various worker's rights, for example.

Looking at the sausage factory behind the closed doors in politics is never likely to be pretty; but the thing that disturbs me is the idea that National knew that the majority of NZers wouldn't agree with a large number of their policies, so they made sure that they only heard about stuff that they'd like, with the idea that they'd get in, and then make the changes that they felt needed to be made for our own good. I guess that Labour has an advantage in theses stakes, since they've been running things for quite some time, so people know what they're trying to do.

Overall, it was a bit light, but I enjoyed it.

* * *

Just before going to In Bruges, I bumped into Steve, and was having a chat when work rang. I wasn't able to diagnose the problem over the phone, so I ended up knowing that I was gong to have to go into work that evening, which rather put a damper of the rest of the day.

I'd heard that this was a good movie, and wasn't disappointed. Two Irish gangsters are sent to Bruge to hide out after a hit gets complicated; the older one loves it, and the younger one thinks it's a crap-hole. But, as it turns out, it's a crap-hole where they're making a movie with a midget, which mollifies him somewhat.

I thought it was a funny film, and I liked the twisted sense of honour that the gangsters showed. The tone gets noticeably darker towards the end of the film, and there's quite a bit of gore by the credits. I'm not saying it's a bad thing - just something that I noticed.

I'm really glad I saw it, and would happily pick it up on DVD.

* * *

After this, I dashed up to the Film Archive for Flower in the Pocket, a Malaysian film about a father who has more or less abandoned his sons to look after themselves while he sinks into shift-work and depression. There's not a whole lot of plot going on, but there was plenty of interesting character interaction to watch - in particular, how the two boys relate to a young Muslim girl that they end up playing with.

A bit of a slow film, but pleasant. Not one that I feel a need to watch again, though.

* * *

And finally that night, I met up with Jenni to watch Ben X. Basically, a teenager with Aspergers finds he does really well in a MMO, but can't handle real life, especially the intense bullying. Jenni felt some trepidation, because of some stuff she read on IMDB; and there were definitely some moments where we both had to look away, and that I for one was grateful that there was someone else there to look worried at.

In the end, however, I found the movie very satisfying indeed - one of the movies that make it worth my while going to things that I think may be outside my comfort zone, and one of my best experiences so far at the festival. However, just like my positive feelings towards Ringu might be influenced by the fact that I drank a litre of Mountain Dew before watching it (and so might have been inclined to a jumpiness that made the movie even more deliciously creepy), the expectations that I had going into this movie (and the amount of speculation that I did in my head about where the movie was going) probably made a big difference to my enjoyment, and I'm not at all surprised that many people didn't enjoy it as much as I did.

I liked how they cinematically suggested that the main character was casting the things happening around him in MMO terms, and I think I'm definitely going to watch this again, since there are some stuff that I think would benefit from a second viewing. But I'm not sure whether I need to own the DVD.

(I have the pending days reviews finished; but I might not have time to post them before polishing them; luckily, tonight is an early night! Well, I finish at 10pm, anyway. Unless I decide to go to the Batman movie. :)

At work...

Don't have time to finish my reviews today, because of work things. Heading into Rain of the Children; let's hope it's not River Queen.

Film Festival 2008: Day 3 & Day 4

My first movie on Sunday was Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go, a documentary about a school for troubled children. C and I were running a little behind schedule, so we got to our seats a touch late, but I'm really glad we made an effort to get there - it was a really involving film, and I enjoyed seeing the teachers deal with the spitting and swearing, getting the kids to trust them and helping them work out why they felt the way they did, and how to deal with it. It was really nice to get glimpses of the parents too, and seeing the teachers talking to and interacting with them.

There were many moments that stick in my mind. One was a kid who found it really hard to sit still, and was really excited to be having lunch with his mum; but he had a printed list of questions (that he'd obviously worked out beforehand) that he wanted to ask her, mostly about his Dad (who she had separated from some time ago, and had lost contact with). He would attack the potatoes, peas and crumbed chicken cutlets for a couple of seconds, and then carefully read out his question, while his little sister clambered around on the seat next to him, and his Mum listened carefully, and seemed to think before answering. Another was a teacher's conference about a second boy, where one of the teachers was describing his home life - his youngest brother had cancer, he was a middle child, and his father had admitted to not liking him very much. We saw them dealing with his problems, and the careful, tentative way he interacted with his father; and we saw him after a weekend with his parents, where they had a book to write down all the good things he did, and his joy at earning a CD player for his room - him grinning while playing "Bright Sunshiny Day" is the image the film went out on.

One weird thing that we noticed was that they looked in detail at about four kids, but they were all boys, and there were definitely girls at the school. However, it may simply be a matter of who they were able to get permission to film.

* * *

I knew I'd seen The Red Balloon a long, long time ago, but I didn't really remember anything about it. Watching it as an adult who has now visited Paris (albeit very briefly), it was an odd mix of familiar and strange. I think it still works well as a kid's film, although I suspect that there are some messages there that wouldn't get into a kid's film today - for example, the end sequence would probably have to be changed in case children tried to emulate it. And someone would probably insist for someone in the gang of kids who terrorise the kid to have a change of heart, to act as a role model for kinds who are in gangs. Maybe there would be an anti-drug message slipped in there as well; though given it's a story about a red balloon that follows people around, maybe not. Anyway, I could easily imagine showing it to a kid today.

On the other hand, I might think carefully before showing a kid The White Mane. I'm pretty sure that the footage will end up as nightmare fuel for some of the kiddies in the audience, since they showed the titular horse fighting for supremacy with another horse for several minutes - viciously kicking and biting, with blood from the bites visible on the flanks. Or the boy riding his horse, chasing a rabbit, and then getting off and chasing it on foot; people saw it as play, and went "ooh!" when the boy nearly fell on the rabbit getting off his horse, which meant there was an audible emotional clunk when we cut to him roasting the rabbit over an open fire. And the ending was really interesting, since the narration basically said that the horse and boy swam off to a land where men and horses can be friends; but watching as an adult, you know that what they mean is, they're both swept out to sea, drown, and die. It's weird to imagine watching the movie when you were too young to understand that, and then re-watching it again later and having this movie change from a nice ending to a downer.

There were lots of cool things in the film - the toddler who was very nervous when offered a turtle to play with, and then we see crawling over the turtle and obviously having the time of their lives; or when big brother is hammering a nail with a rock, so the toddler decides they'll do it too, or carrying a load of hay and grass twice their size to feed the horse. And there were many other glimpses of life that you wouldn't see in a kid's film, like the pet flamingo (which are freaky-looking birds) or seeing the bones of the fish that the kid eats. And both the kid and the horse had emo hair! :) But I would be a bit more hesitant about showing this film to a preschooler... which maybe means that I'm buying into the idea of coddling kids, too.

* * *

The next movie was Persepolis, which was definitely not a kid's movie, for all that it was animated. Based on the graphic novels, it was very good indeed, with an excellent use of "Eye of the Tiger" during the main character's battle with depression. There were lots of really good little moments, especially in the parts where we see her as a little girl; in retrospect, it reminds me of Kate Beaton's comics with her younger self. A really interesting look at life inside Iran, particularly at a time when some elements within the US so obviously want to go to war with it.

* * *

C then headed home, and I headed into The Counterfeiters, a film about a Jewish master counterfeiter who was recruited along with a group of other concentration camp prisoners to create bogus Allied currency, initially to flood their economies, but later simply to support the German war effort. They looked at the ethics of working with the Germans to survive, whether a single person's conscience should be allowed to condemn four others to certain death, and how people deal with being treated (relatively) well when they know that their family is being starved and killed by the people they're working for.

* * *

And then it was time for Ashes of Time Redux, a very beautiful Asian epic, made slightly confusing by the fact that they changed narrators several times (and I didn't pick it up until some time during the second swap), and because two of the main leads had quite similar faces. (So did two of the minor characters, but that turned out to be because they were the same person with a split personality.)

Beautiful, rich colours and great shots, slightly confusing fight sequences, a convoluted storyline (plus several storyline-lets), and several tragic love stories (plus at least one happy one).

* * *

The next day was Monday, first day of C's holidays, and a beautiful blue sky; we caught the bus in, and watched No End In Sight, a documentary about how the Bush administration managed the aftermath of the Iraq war. The number of steps that were disastrous, and that they were advised were disastrous, and should have been obvious were disastrous, almost beggars belief. Choosing to ignore the number of people that the army says that they'd need to keep the peace and establish a government in Iraq, simply because they "can't imagine" that you'd need more people to do that than to win the initial war? Throwing out all Ba'ath party members, so that basically all public servants no longer have jobs, or hopes of getting jobs? Disbanding the army, automatically putting huge numbers of armed, trained, unemployed and pissed-off men in the streets for the militias to sweep up? Fail to declare martial law after the war, so that all the goodwill is frittered away and looting and lawlessness become the norm? Make the administration of Iraq a treat to be doled out to new graduates whose parents are players in the Bush political machine, keeping them there for nine months and shipping them back just as they're starting to learn to job? Etc, etc, etc...

One of the people involved in the initial, hastily assembled team (who was fired for being "too difficult to get along with" by the new Rumsfeld appointee) said that the original group had joked that there were 500 ways to get the reconstruction wrong, and only two or three to get it right; but that they hadn't imagined that they'd try all 500 wrong ways first.

A really good documentary; but in many ways, a very depressing one.

* * *

We wandered over to the Film Archive, and chatted about the film; then C wandered off into the glorious sunshine, and I went in and saw Huloo, who is a Chinese immigrant, Tai Chi master, fisheries expert, and generally interesting character. I think that one of the most interesting things about this film was that he wasn't that big a figure - he'd done seminal work in the field of dating eels by their osteoliths, and developed several technical innovations in the art of net design, and sailed a Chinese junk to America, just missing out on getting to compete in a certain famous yacht race, and was probably the first person to teach Tai Chi in NZ; but they were all achievements on a human level, and that, I think, was what I found interesting.

I think I would have liked a little more context about what was happening in the world around him. For example, how the experience he and his family had as Asian immigrants to Christchurch that early compared to other immigrant families, or more information about how fishing research worked in NZ, or... actually, none of that was necessary for the portrait of the man, but maybe I would have liked their picture of the man to be more of a window into the world he lived in. But maybe talking about the documentary that it isn't, and wasn't intended to be, isn't that helpful.

All in all, I liked it, but wouldn't call it essential viewing.

* * *

Barefoot Cinema: The Art And Life of Cinematographer Alun Bollinger, at that same venue, was next. Another documentary about the life of a New Zealander, this one famous for being the backbone of many classic Kiwi films by being the one who actually set up and/or captured the images. However, while I liked the stuff about the films he has been involved with, one of the nicest things about this film was how they showed his family, from the extensive interviews where his wife turned up (both with him, and alone; they had only known each other three days when they married!), to the serious discussion of the suicide of one of their sons. It felt quite a privilege to meet "Al-Bol and Hel-Bol", and he seems a genuinely nice man.

To go off on a slight tangent - looking at their early life in a commune, it made me think about how un-counter-culture I am. If I had been a young man at that time, I would probably have been doing the same thing I did in real life, and been at university. (I'm not sure what I would have ended up studying, though - if my father was still an optometrist, I guess that's what I would have studied, though I'd probably still have done psychology, and something nice and impractical, like anthropology.) Anyone have thoughts about what the 70s version of you would be doing?

This was a good documentary about someone who seems a good man, and I felt I learned quite a bit about NZ cinema, too.

* * *

My next film was O'Horten. A Norwegian train driver, Od Horton, has to retire, and ends up wandering around at a loose end, having... adventures might not be the right word for being accidentally locked in a public bath and ending up having to go home in a pair of red high-heel boots because your shoes have gone missing.

Actually, I'm not sure there's a one-word summary for that.

The film ambles along at a leisurely pace, and there are plenty of incidents that are more to do with illustrating life going on around him, than to advance the "plot", such as it is. There is one very nice sequence where rain has made the roads slippery with ice. Horton is clinging to a pole, and a man on a fallen motorcycle slides calmly down the sloping road in front of him. A man crosses the street with a fish tied like a handbag (at the head and the tail), and explains that his wife has sent him out for salmon, since they have guests for dinner. He recrosses the street, and a bald man with glasses in a black business suit slides past sitting down with his briefcase, as if this is how he commutes home every day; he glowers briefly at Horton for no particular reason.

Now that I write it, it sounds much more Lynchian that it actually was; please remove any unintended undertones of menace, since they weren't there in the original. :)

I can say with some confidence that my sister Ellen will like this movie, since a Citroen DS features prominently; however, the owner does describe it as "a toad", which may put her off.

There was definitely something interesting being said about age, and what you do with yourself when all the routines that define your life are taken away (because of health, or retirement), and about regret. I was pleased to find out I can apparently recognise Burgen, though "hilly, raining and Norwegian" was a fairly big give-away. And the main actor was superlative, and I might see if I can find other things he's been in.

I learned several things from this movie. One is that 67 year old Norwegian train drivers would be the greatest cat-burglars in the world, if they could only avoid lighting pipes in the middle of airfields or attracting the attention of small boys with drum-kits. The second is that driving with someone who likes to pull their hat over their eyes is dangerous, because you may end up having to look after a large dog and steal some skis. And thirdly, sometimes you have to do things that are scary.

Oh, and that this is a good movie.

* * *

As I was coming out of the movie, I bumped into Ellen's friend Mia, and had a bit of a chat with her; it was really weird to see her, since I've seen her in a number of movies, and I knew she now lives in Auckland. Ellen, if you read this, you better make sure you see her soon, since she has a surprise for you! :)

I then went into Jar City, where I was joined by the lovely Jenni. She had seen O'Horton previously, so we compared notes; she likes it, too.

Jar City is essentially a police procedural concerning a murder, which turns out to have sprung from other, previously concealed crimes. As the tangled web unravels, and we begin to see how all the piece fit, we also get to see a cynical, canny detective agonize over his daughter's problems, that only she can fix.

I really liked the banter between the police, and the way that it turned out that the central mystery sprang from the sort of accidental revelation that an in-depth study of the genetics of a population can bring to light. This is one of the reasons that genetic counselling is such a tricky business - what if a routine genetic test shows up an infidelity? Or if the data can yield up that information, if one goes looking?

Again, I learned many things from this movie, such as the fact that Norwegian roads apparently make the sound of a rich male choir whenever you drive cross-country on them, and that the best way to find a historical rape victim if you're a police detective is to go up to the front door and, without introducing yourself or mentioning that you're from the police, asking the little old lady who answers, "Have you ever been raped?"

The booklet write-up mentioned something like "CSI on a shoestring budget", and I can see that - going to the archives meant talking to a person who came back with a bunch of paper files, and at the scene of the crime evidence was going into plain paper pages instead of fancy clear plastic ziplocks. And in the end, they crack the case with legwork more than labwork, which is probably more true to life than the CSI depiction of the world.

I liked this film. I'm not sure I'll buy it on DVD, but I'd happily watch it again.

Film Festival 2008: Day 2

Before we start into comments about today's movies, I'd like to mention a few other matters.

Firstly, a package arrived from darkest Ireland, with pretty Canadian stickers. It was a present from the lovely Giffy and the great and terrible Erik, and both C and I think the books that they gave us are flipping great.

Secondly, all this blogging goodness is brought to you courtesy of my newest toy - a tiny, tiny laptop. It's a HP 2133, and it's around the same size as an Asus EEPC, but designed so it can have a keyboard that is much closer to full-sized (92%), which makes it a lot easier to type on. It also has a screen with a decent resolution, and it feels more solid than the white plastic of the other box. I'm not necessarily saying that everyone should rush out and buy one (especially since they'll bring out a new range when the Atom processors come out), but it's a lot handier than lugging my full-sized laptop around, like I did last festival. Weirdly, I've had a bunch of strangers comment on it and ask me questions about it while I've been using it; not geek boys either, but normal citizens.

(I've not mentioned to them how I managed to completely lock it up by trying to install anti-virus software that didn't play nicely with it. At least Avast seems to be working okay.)

And finally, one thing that I didn't mention in the last post about the CSNY movie was that one of the shock jocks the movie interviewed drew a distinction between the actions of that group and the Dixie Chicks. Apparently, one of the things that most outraged the sensibilities of God-fearing Americans(tm) was that the Dixie Chicks slammed Bush to a London audience, which they felt was pandering to that group while running down people who brought their music back home; he respected CSNY for actually saying this stuff to American faces, so that people could actually respond. I thought it was an interesting point of view.

* * *

For my first film, I was running a bit late. You know the feeling when you're running in the rain, and you step in a puddle, and you know you're going to have a wet sock for the rest of the day? Well, it's bad enough when you're going into the office, and can theoretically take off your shoes and let your socks dry; but it's an even worse start to a day of watching movies, where taking off your shoes would definitely mark you as a weirdo. (Though it turned out not to be as bad as I thought it would be - hurrah for leather shoes!)

My Winnipeg was interesting - more of a poem than a documentary. Unfortunately, I didn't find it as clever as the person making it thought it was, and the mixing of fact and fiction annoyed rather than intrigued me. I would like to visit Winnipeg, though... so, net win for the filmmaker? Maybe not; it might just be because of Kate Beaton being from Manitoba, and because we've been watching Slings & Arrows. (Which I would thoroughly recommend, BTW.)

My assessment? Kinda interesting, but I'm not sure I would have watched it to the end if it had been on YouTube.

* * *

Next was La Corona, about a beauty pageant in Brazil's largest women's prison. There was plenty of detail about the pagent, but I didn't feel like we really got to know any of the contestants, or the context of the pageants, or their normal lives as prisoners, or how and why the prison differed from, say, a British or American prison... there were hints, like the brief description of the crimes that the contestants were incarcerated for, or the fact that the prisoners weren't in uniform, but it felt like we were just being shown the event, rather than being given any insight into what it meant.

While the same could be said for the short that preceded it, the fact that it was so short meant that it was easier to forgive these shortcomings in The Fighting Cholitas. This was a documentary about four Bolivian Indian women who are in a professional wrestling league where the hook is that they fight in the traditional layered dress of the cholita. I think that reading TVTropes.org has given me some idea about what the world of the luchadore is about, and seeing this very different take on a semi-familiar idea was quite neat.

* * *

Next was the film I've liked the best in the Festival so far, Stranded: I've Just Come From A Plane That Crashed On The Mountain. I saw this with C, and the fact that they talked to the actual survivors (and two of their fathers, and people involved in their eventual rescue), walking step by step through what happened, with photos from the time they were trapped, and footage taken from the time they were found - it showed how they had to wrestle with their consciences before they could even think about using the bodies of these people who had been their friends as food, even though it was the only way they could possibly survive. Since I've only ever really heard about their situation as a punchline, rather than having any idea about what really happened, this film was exactly the kind of thing I like in a documentary.

A group of the survivors, along with their children, and the children of some who didn't survive, came out to the site of the crash, and we saw some of them talking to their children about their experiences out where it had happened - one of them said that only sixteen had survived, but their friends' sacrifice in sustaining them meant that now over a hundred had survived (meaning the children and grandchildren). The film also mentioned that everyone on the plane was from the same neighborhood, and that the survivors still lived there.

It was a good film, and I recommend it.

* * *

I then said goodbye to C, moved my car in order to avoid an unpleasant parking fine (finding a handy park in a sneaky place in Mt Vic, that I chose not to reveal in case I can use it again), and then it was off to Ira Sach's Married Life. This is about a married man who has fallen in love with someone else, but he doesn't want his wife to suffer when he leaves her - so he decides that the kindest thing to do is to kill her. It's set in the 40s, and very consciously draws on the tropes of the movies of the time - there were voice-overs, for example, and someone in the Q&A session noted that it wasn't in wide-screen, and the director/writer confirmed that this was a deliberate choice, since it was more about the intimate observation of people, rather than sweeping vistas.

I thought that the people that the film evoked were well-realized, and that the point about people not necessarily really understanding or even truly knowing the people that they were most intimate with was well presented. Pierce Brosnan does a very convincing turn as the ladies' man who's the best friend of the main character. And I was really impressed about what a good job they did of keep our sympathy with the guy who is basically planning a murder, for what he believes are the best of reasons. The director also mentioned that the ending of the film differs from the book, and that they filmed the ending a bunch of different ways before settling on what we saw on-screen, which sounds like an awesome DVD extra in the offing. It's a neat movie, though definitely not the comedy that I would have guessed from the festival write-up; it's much more than that. I might well watch it again - not immediately, but sometime.

* * *

Then it was popping into SMK to say hi to Kate and friends, and then off to Te Papa for The Duchess of Langeais, which was a very French period costume drama film. (That is, Society is hypocritical and cause people to sacrifice their happiness on the altar of Standards and Manners, the costumes and sets are gorgeous, and love caused people to do stupid things and, eventually, die.)

(For some reason, I can't help thinking of The Critic, who once said, "I like French fims, pretentious boring French films, I like French films, two tickets si vous plait.")

Actually, while that is often true for me, in this case the film never really drew me in; perhaps it was because I found it very hard to read the emotions of the main actress, and never really empathized with the lead actor. It was beautiful as all get out, but ultimately I wouldn't recommend it.

* * *

And then I met up with C to watch Vexille. Afterwards, she compared it to the Final Fantasy movie, and unfortunately she makes a good point. There were many pretty scenes, some of the crowd scenes were impressive, and I liked the way the confrontation in the laboratory played out; but the love triangle was a bit clumsily done, the moral message was a bit simplistic, and the faces were way too deep in the plastic corpse-land of Uncanny Valley to bear the burden of the emotions that they were meant to be expressing. As an anime film, it's fine, but certainly not great; I don't imagine I'd rewatch it.

Film Festival 2008: Day 1

My first film of the Festival was Hunger, which centered around the notorious Maze prison just before and during the hunger strike of IRA prisoners there. This was an uncomfortable film to watch - not just because of the way that the film shows the violence that went on towards the prisoners, and how they were mistreated, but because it refused to turn the guards and riot police into monsters, or the prisoners into matyrs. For example, there was a tacit acknowledgement that many of these men were in prison because they had killed people - I say tacit, because the film does very little to put the events it shows into context. Indeed, this is a film of long, slow shots and almost no dialogue, though we do get occasional snippets of radio broadcasts with various British politicians saying things that are often unintentionally appalling. To a certain extent, it leaves up in the air whether the hunger stirke was a selfless or selfish act, though it does mention that the main character, Bobby Sands, would probably have opposed the peace accords that eventually arose.

My general feeling? I think it was a powerful film; but I felt a bit empty afterwards. It certainly made it clear to me why peace in Northern Ireland was so hard to acheive; but to the extent that obvious parallels can be drawn between that situation and the current occupation of Iraq but the US, it's very depressing. The resolution of the IRA prisoners, the refusual to compromise or negotiate... given what they experienced under the British, I understand that I don't understand how they feel; but I do feel that they were wrong - not in the hunger strike, but in the bombings and other killings.

There's probably some thoughts in there about how they should have been treated differently if they were soldiers, but that it's hard to see how to distinguish between soldiers and organized crime when the people who want to be counted as soldiers also want the protection of being treated like civilians before they're caught. I don't know. I have very mixed feelings about guerrila warfare.

I suspect the theme of how division and escalation can make peace seem impossible, as well as the weird pyschology that emerges in prisoner/guard situations and terrorism are going to be recurring themes in a number of films I'm going to see.

* * *

The second film, CSNY: Deja Vu, was a concert film about the a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young tour where they played a mix of music from their heyday during the protests against Vietnam war, and music that Neil Young has written in protest against the war in Iraq. There were many interesting things about this movie - the way that the Vietnam-era songs fitted in with the heightened terror alerts and banning of liquids from airline flights that happened during their tour, for example; or the way that some people booed, and got up and left during the song "Impeach the President" when they played their first Southern concert... while others stood up and sang along loudly. It was also interesting how much they emphasised that they weren't against the troops, but against the special interest groups and politicians that were sending the troops into danger. They had interviews with a number of veterans, and they made it clear how divided the country was (and presumably is) because of the war.

All in all, quite a cool film, and I'll certainly check out Neil Young's website. (Dammit, my hands keep wanting to type "Neil Diamond". Stupid fingers.)

* * *

Next was To Each His Own Cinema. It was a compilation of various directors' three minute ideas about cinema... which makes it very difficult to summarize. I do recall that Lars von Trier was reliably... himself? I dunno if I would like to know him, but I liked seeing him taking a pickaxe to the self-important businessman who wouldn't stop talking in the film. In general, the European entries seemed to be more focused on the individual experience of seeing film (half-empty or almost completely empty theatres), while man of the Eastern films were more community-oriented; but that certainly wasn't a hard-and-fast rule. Cronenburg was reliably bonkers, for example.

All in all, some flashes of brilliance, some "eh", and not as compelling as the documentary about film theaters in different parts of the world that I saw last year.

* * *

Continuing the compilation theme, I next went to Homegrown: Programme 1, a collection of NZ films. The one by the maker of Banana in a Nutshell, Take 3 was cringeworthy - not because of the film, I hasten to add, but because of the way that the depicition of how NZers of Asian descent were treated was obviously drawn from real life. I really liked This Is Her, though it was really weird seeing the friend of my younger sister giving birth on screen. And I liked the depiction of the Maori tangi in Patu Ihu... it reminded me of my grandmother's death, in a good way. Coffee and Allah was quite cool, in a "not all immigrant experiences are uniformly bad" sort of way. And the person-smuggling film was fine, though bleak, and maybe a little... unsurprising?

(I found the other film, The Road Out Of Town, a little confusing, and I'm afraid that it might have been the film. There were bits that were quite cool, like words being formed out of the cigarette smoke, but I didn't come away understanding what had gone on - and not in an interesting, Lynchian way.)

So, four out of six isn't bad.

* * *

So, I am now sitting in the Embassy, sneakily charging my computer, while a mediocre lounge band plays in the background. (Well, to be fair, they're okay, but their singer keeps forgetting the words; and it's not like it's hard to remember the lyrics to "Play That Funky Music White Boy". They're doing the Wild Cherry version, not the Vanilla Ice travesty... which I guess is a point in their favour. :)

So far, my Festival experience has been pretty intense. I'm really hoping for something fun for my next film. Let's hope that it delivers. :)

Huh, they're now playing Fatboy Slim's "Praise You" -- a very credible effort by the drummer to simulate the drum machine. More later.

* * *

In a bit of a hurry, so -- Sukiyaki Western Django was definitely an interesting experiment, but in the end it basically felt a bit formulaic. That's not to say that it wasn't fun to watch an extremely stylized Western/Samurai mashup, but it felt like I knew all of the beats before they happened. In fact, it was like they had thrown a whole lot of tropes into the pot, and let them sit their - two teams of bandits taking over the town, the star-crossed lovers, the handsome Lone Gunman who rides into town and ends up taking out both groups. The visuals were really cool, and it wasn't an unejoyable experience (though I'm not a big fan of Tarantino's "I am a giant ham"school of acting; I much prefer the Brian Blessed school of Giant Ham acting); there was also a weird point where we saw a hanged body, and I thought, "What the hell is Pearce doing in this movie?" (It wasn't Pearce, as far as I know, BTW.)

In summary - I'm glad I went, but I won't be getting it on DVD.

* * *

After the movie I bumped into the lovely Kate, and the equally lovely Damon, and we had cake at Sweet Mama's Kitchen while they endured me rambling on about various things. Kate in particular is to be commended for keeping an interested face on while I was talking about FileMaker networking problems. And then she even gave me a ride home afterwards! That Kate, she's a trooper. :)

Onto my next set of films!

Film Festival Schedule

I guess I might as well give my actual schedule. :) But first, as few random links, to keep my hand in.

* * *
I saw these trays from Art Effect Chicago, and thought that they were pretty awesome -- not awesome enough for me to pay $175US for a tray, but awesome nonetheless.

* * *

This is from a while ago, but I feel it's an important tip -- when robbing a bank, do not try to disguise yourself as a tree. I thought that it was interesting to note that even the police involved can't avoid making vegetation-based puns. Then again, how often is an opportunity like this going to arise?

* * *

Lolcat translator? Lolcat perl module? Yes we can has.

* * *

And now -- my schedule!

Friday, July 18th
Pa 11:30am - 1:10pm Hunger
Pa 1:30pm - 3:10pm CSNY: Deja Vu
FA 4:00pm - 5:50pm To Each His Own Cinema
Pa 6:00pm - 7:20pm Homegrown: Programme 1
Em 9:30pm - 11:35pm Sukiyaki Western Django

Sunday, August 3rd
TP 11:15am - 12:35pm The Order of Myths
FA 2:00pm - 3:25pm Revue
Pa 3:45am - 5:25pm The First Saturday In May
Em 6:00pm - 7:20pm The Freshman
Pa 8:15pm - 10:00pm Not Quite Hollywood

After a long hiatus...

I am actually still alive.

I haven't been able to find the time to read blogs for nearly a year now, and it seemed a bit rude to write one without reading other people's; but the Film Festival is coming up, and this is a good way for me to organize my thoughts, and provide a record of the many cool (and occasional naff) films that I see during this time.

Which reminds me, I should finish last year's coverage.

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Now I'm here, there are some articles that I've run across that may be of interest to people.

First is Ben Burtt talking about his work on the new Pixar film, Wall-E. Burtt is a sound designer (he made the Star Wars blaster sound by hitting a power pole guy wire with a hammer), and he talks about how he finds and creates the sounds he uses. (Be sure to click on the "Classic Ben Burtt Sounds" link!) Given the role I've ended up playing for Jenni's Angels in the 48 Hour Film Competition, it's kinda inspirational -- this year was probably the most sound-intensive we've done, and we certainly used a number of sounds out of their original context. Examples include a file folder sliding down a wooden slope and hitting the floor (used when Dr Discharge flies into the couch), a large slamming metal door (when one of them is slammed against the wall), and a straw being pulled out of the plastic top of a disposable drinks container combined with a roar (for Nick's transformation into Dr Discharge). In case you haven't yet seen our latest effort, here it is:

Unfortunately, it looks like independent film is only going to get more difficult to succeed in; the speaker whose notes I linked to talked about how 5000 movie were made last year, 603 of which were released theatrically in the US, and that there's room in the market for about 300; and that Sundance received 500 submissions fifteen years ago, but receives 5000 now, of which maybe five get a theatrical release and make money. He makes some suggestions about how to improve your odds, and points out an interesting distinction between the film and music industry -- basically, that the movie industry dropped the price per unit significantly when they shifted from tape to digital, whereas the music industry increased it. (Which has led to the weird phenomenon of soundtrack cds costing more than the movies they're from.)

In the more mainstream movie world... well, mainstream-ish, anyway... there's Studio Ghibli's Gake no ue no Ponyo, "an animated adventure centered on a 5-year-old boy and his relationship with a goldfish princess who longs to become human." Unfortunately, Studio Ghibli keeps removing the trailer from YouTube, otherwise I'd link you to it.

And finally, how could I neglect to link to "Weta's Special Effects Wizard", the marvellous Norman Cates? (I know, old link, old news. Nevertheless, *I* hadn't seen it. :)

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And because it's important to link to random things, how about Rice Field Art? Actually, it may be worth poking around that site further -- the Hip-hop Chess Federation, bizarre high voltage installations, and glacier surfing. Oh, and a festival celebrating Mike the Headless Wonder Chicken!