My first movie was The Order of Myths at Te Papa, about the way Mardi Gras is celebrated in Mobile, Alabama. This is the oldest continuous celebration in the States, starting several years before the founding of New Orleans. It's made slightly more complicated by the fact that there are, effectively, two Mardi Gras - one run for whites (where the only black people involved in the parade are torch-bearers, marching bands and dancers), and one for the blacks. There are two Kings and Queens of Mardi Gras elected, two sets of elaborate costumes prepared, and two parades. There is no real movement to integrate the two celebrations (there is one integrated "mystic society", and it has a grand total of one white member), but we saw the black King and Queen turn up at the coronation ball of the white King and Queen, and they were welcomed very graciously, and there seemed to be indications that the two groups might, if not integrate, acknowledge one another more.

The two groups definitely had different flavours of approach. The black celebration seemed to take itself a little less seriously, while still getting into the pomp of the thing; the white celebration was much more about the history and tradition, and many of their "mystic societies" had rules that meant that you had to be from the right sort of family to join. The white Queen's grandmother was the oldest living former Queen, and was from a wealthy landowning family; her n-th great-grandfather brought over the last slave ship to the USA, after it had been made illegal, and arranged to have it set on fire, fully loaded, to cover up the crime. The slaves that escaped the ship settled in the woods nearby, an area that is now called Africa-town.

There were plenty of indicators that there were definitely still some issues going on; one of the white Queen's court talked about how she felt a bit weird about the whole thing, and there was a scene set at a country club (white patrons, black service staff); we see this woman talking to one of the dishwashers in the kitchen (getting in the way of people trying to work), and then she goes back out the front and sits down with her mother and a bunch of other well-off white women. And very few of the blacks in Africa-town own the property that they live on; it's all leased from the family of the white Queen.

But there was the new "mystic society" that seemed to be full of beer-drinking blue-collars, who got costumed up and went out to a school for kids with developmental challenges (or whatever the right term is these days). And the black King and Queen were both school-teachers, and the kids were obviously really proud of them. And the designer of the trains for the black royalty was absolutely chuffed when the main designer for the white royalty had nice things to say about her work.

It was an interesting documentary, and I'm glad I saw it.

Speaking of ancient traditions - I'm happy to report that one of my Festival traditions was kept intact for another year, because I managed to bump into Morgue's parents at this showing. I'm sad that I didn't see more of them, but it was good to have a quick chat, get filled in about some of the movies that I've missed, and compare notes about some of the films we'd all seen.

* * *

Then I was off to the Film Archive for Revue, a black-and-white Soviet propaganda film presented without commentary, full of news of the patriotic plays being put on by farming collectives, and how noble the young medical students choosing to go and live in the new settlements were, the way that various factories were going the extra mile and producing over quota to honour various events... and the wicked peasant woman who was feeding bread to pigs - bread, that valuable commodity! And look at her house! And owning animals by yourself, not in common! Shameful.

It was a really interesting piece of propaganda, and relatively sophisticated. For example, when they have a kid asked whether he enjoys work, rather than bursting with Soviet pride, he looks realistically (and humorously) dubious. It would have been nice to get some context for some of this, but I think that seeing it unfiltered like this was really interesting, too.

I might not watch it again, however.

* * *

Then it was off to a very different sort of documentary - The First Saturday in May, about races, racehorses, and the people who own the racehorses. This was very much a "let me show you how this world is" sort of narrative, rather than any sort of questioning of the world or it's structures. There was nary a hint about the shady shenanigans that tends to be synonymous with the racing world - just a bunch of guys (and it was mostly guys) who are passionate about horses and racing. This was all about the personalities, and the races - getting the audience on the edge of their seats as we see these horses and trainers on the racecourse, and feel their tension and anxiety as the trainers watch a situation which they can't do anything, trying through sheer willpower to get their horse into a position that will let them compete in the Holy Grail of racing, the Kentucky Derby.

There were a lot of good little moments - a kid putting up a "Get Well Soon" sign and a bag full of carrots on the fence outside an ailing horse's stable, for example. Or the contrast of the fancy hats in one part of the Kentucky Derby, and the guys with beer bongs in the other parts. Or all the family stories, with the New York stable-guy interacting with his son, or the three sons of another manager demanding new skateboards if their horse wins. The documentary did a really good job of helping you keep track of the various horses, stables and jockeys, and is definitely one worth watching to see how to make sure a story with a large number of characters can remain distinct from each other.

I don't need to see it again, but it's a fine example of a "feel-good" doco.

* * *

And then, the Embassy, a live orchestra, and The Freshman, a black-and-white silent comedy lampooning the then-current passion for all things related to university life. As you might expect, a fairly straight-forward story, and the occasional clash with modern mores; but some classic slapstick that works just as well now as it did then made it well worth seeing for me.

The music was especially well suited, and once you got past the initial oddness of having it all come from one place (i.e. the orchestra) rather than from the sound system, it was actually quite fun to be able to glance down and see them beavering away at the score.

* * *

And then my final film of the Festival, Not Quite Hollywood - a documentary about the "Oz-sploitation" genre films of the 70s and 80s. Quentin Tarantino is apparently a huge fan of these films, and for all I've ragged on him in the past here, he is a guy who can convey his passion for things well.

There was plenty of interest going on - they interviewed one of the film critics who lambasted the films at the time (and still doesn't like them), as well as many of the actors and actresses, and the people who actually made the movies; to give you an idea of the sort of guy one of the directors was, they had him sitting in an animal-print chair with a stripper gyrating in the background.

A lot of these movies were about nudity, violence and occasionally gore. There was a definite group of films that took a moderately affectionate poke at the "Ocker" stereotype (and it was implied that the film-makers were sometimes a bit annoyed when the people they were making fun of saw the characters as a tribute, and something to aspire to). And there was definitely a bit of grumpiness that the modern Australian film has to be a historical outback story in order to get funding. And the stunt work that they talked about was recklessly dangerous, pure and simple - they were ridiculously luck that more people weren't killed on the sets.

All in all, an interesting look into a set of films I really don't know very well.

* * *

So, how is it to be back at work? Sadly, I think it's actually less stressful to be at work then to be on leave; while I was away, the spectre of a fatal phone-call was ever-present, and it is several orders of magnitude easier to diagnose and fix problems in person than over the phone. There's also the fact that being at work forced Support to work out what was wrong with my machines, so that I could actually log into various systems; and I'm earning money again, as opposed to spending it on delicious icecreams. Dammit, now I want that yummy Kapiti pear icecream. :)

My team has been moved to one of the satellite sites, which means that the walk to work is a manageable sub-20 minutes, rather than 40+; I've walked to and from work every day bar one, so far. (It would have been every day, but I needed the car to get somewhere after work once.) Being away from the hub makes everyone more mellow, and I'm seeing a bunch of people that I haven't seen since I worked at Rongotai; but on the other hand, you can't pop downstairs and hold the hand (or watch over the shoulder) of someone who is having problems. So far, this hasn't been a huge issue; but I can see that it's going to come up.

Also, it puts me in the same building as someone who keeps finding things that are broken or messy, and who comes and wants me to clean it up; or who just has this question about a database schema; or who would like us to track this, or that, or the other... I mean, he's made plenty of neat tools, and he's a really smart guy, but I think he's popped in every day since he's found out we moved over to his building, which tends to interrupt the flow of whatever you're doing.

Of course, at least once what he interrupted was "watching a online video of little girl climb inside one of those grabber machines to lie on all the stuffed toys inside the case", but he didn't know that when he decided to pop by my desk, instead of sending an email! ;)

Anyway, we don't have much light, but we do have windows, which is more than many of the people in our building can say; and on the whole, it's not too bad to be back at work.

This was a documentary about giving a robots a sense of presence - trying to make humanoid robots less creepy, and therapeutic animal-like companion robots for people in resting homes and the like. There were a lot of interesting points - for example, the animal robots were shaped like baby seals, because most people knew what baby seals looked like, and they were cute, but very few people had actually interacted with one; people were much more critical of cat-shaped robots, because they knew how cats were meant to react. They showed a number of older people interacting with "Paro", as the seal was called, and some of them were very favourable indeed, even though there was some disapproval from other residents and caregivers. In fact, we saw an administrative meeting where some of the caregivers expressed a concern that people would be giving love to something that could not love them back. But others basically said - if it makes them happy, more active and more sociable, where's the harm? But it would be better if the families came more instead, said one of the objectors. The advocate shrugged and agreed.

Given that people can lavish quite a bit of love on plants without these flags being raised (and I'm dubious about any claim of plants loving a person) I think that the whole "loving back" thing is a red herring. I'll admit that I felt a bit weird watching an elderly woman cuddling and crooning to this robot; but I think I felt more awkward and sad by watching a shot of another woman weeping into the shoulder of a rag doll. I think I'm with the more tolerant caretaker - if it helps, where's the harm?

There was also a large chunk of the documentary devoted to Japanese researcher Professor Ishiguro Hiroshi, who has been trying to create a convincing human-like robot - that is, one that gives you a sense that someone is there. This is both an engineering and psychological problem; and I think the engineering part has a way to go yet. When at rest, the robot (or "geminoid", as he wanted to call it, because it was a copy of a real person) looked like a corpse; but in motion, it was even more unnerving, looking at best like someone who had suffered a severe stroke. He had a trial where he got his daughter to come in and have an interview while he controlled the robot; she was initially intrigued, but it was obvious she soon moved to being severely creeped out. His wife had fewer problems with it, but it was heavily implied that they didn't see very much of each other, which Jenni and I both found a bit sad.

I think that if I were involved in this sort of research, I'd probably do video-generated characters, since it would be much easier to get a good range of movement, and people's expectations are lower for video conferencing than for a person sitting in front of them. Then I'd find out what elements are essential in this context for people to be accepted, then use this to guide my engineering efforts.

Interesting stuff from deep in the Uncanny Valley.

* * *

I then went back to Jenni's to say hi to Lee and have a cup of tea, and then went off to the Embassy for Tom Thumb, the old technicolour extravaganza. There were a number of things that wouldn't make the cut today; the Queen of the Forest trying to get her love to kiss her by coyly trying to extract a promise not to kiss her, for example, would quite rightly be re-written to remove the "No means Yes" subtext. And the golliwogs and fat Chinese scholar toy named "Confusion" might well be altered too, though with far less justification; while the Chinese accent was pretty terrible, the toy's role was actually to be a wise adviser.

The actor playing the titular role was surprisingly acrobatic, as well as having quite a bit of dancing to do. I was momentarily thrown by the Boston Brahmin accent of his supposedly dirt-poor mother, and there seemed to be no reason for his toys to come to life other than to give him the opportunity for a couple of song-and-dance numbers; but the villains were suitably theatrically villainous, the fight scene was nicely done, the effects were really impressive for the time (and it was kind of fun to spot some of the artifacts of the techniques they had to use), and I think that children would still enjoy it, though some of the songs might drag for them.

Overall, I'm glad that I went to this.

* * *

I noticed that The Romance of Astrea and Celadon finished half an hour into Shadow of the Holy Book, and I decided that I was more interested in the documentary, so the ticket went to Lee. I'm kinda annoyed at myself, but looking at the schedule, this was probably the hardest day to fit things into.

I'm not convinced I made the right decision. C and I went into Shadow with high hopes, but I should have been warned by the allusion to Michael Moore in the write-up. The documentary was about Turkmenistan, and Morgue's brother's favourite dictator, Saparmurat Niyazov, King of All Turkmen, and the extent to which companies attempt to curry favour with this repressive regime, either by translating the dictator's holy book, the Ruhnama, into other languages, or otherwise making it seem like there is favourable commentary in the international community about the dictator and his holy book.

I did learn a fair bit; but I found I was watching the main reporter's abrasive approach to companies and politicians, and thinking to myself that it was no wonder no-one wants to talk to this guy - saying things along the lines of, "How do you justify translating a book and thus supporting a brutal dictator" does not convey an interest in opening up a dialogue, and I can't imagine that many PR people are enthusiastic about being harangued by some Finnish documentary makers that they'd never heard of.

In some ways, it was good that the film-maker's intentions were obvious, front and centre, so that you could see where their biases lay. But I think I would have found simple white text saying something like, "After 85 phone calls over two years, Daimler-Chrysler refused to comment", rather than hearing four or five inconclusive telephone interviews. I would have also been interested in more information - they told us how big these companies are, but gave us no estimation of the worth of the work that they got in Turkmenistan as a result of stroking the dictator's ego. And they talked a lot about the human rights violations, and talked to a large number of exiles; but I don't recall seeing any figures, like "percentage of the population estimated in prison" or "political prisoners versus those who'd be considered criminals in other states", or interviews with distinguished talking heads about the situation, or information about how this guy managed to seize and hold onto power.

It felt shallow; and it was a shame, because it also felt like there was an important story to be told. I'm not a particular fan of the Michael Moore documentary style, so maybe it would work better for someone who was; but I'm left wanting the documentary that this wasn't, and hoping that film I missed was really terrible. ;)

* * *

Finally that night, I watched I Think We're Alone Now, a documentary about two people who are obsessed with Tiffany, in a stalkerish way. One was a guy who had actually gotten a restraining order at one time against him, because he turned up wanting to give her nine white chrysanthemums and a katana as a gesture of honour - her bodyguards weren't that keen on letting the guy near her with a sharp blade. He read the news story about the incident to the camera as if it were a big joke, which was kind of scary in itself; though not as worrying as when he wore the helmet with crystals strapped to it in order to commune telepathically with Tiffany, or when he started talking about how her Playboy photo-shoot was actually her way of telling the world that she was in love with him. One of his friends (who is also a sufferer) mentioned that he has Asperger's Syndrome, and his inability to monitor people's reactions to him as he talked, and talked, and talked certainly bore that out. He certainly didn't come across as a bad man, or at all dangerous; the worst he could be accused of being was tedious, and completely unaware of other's feelings, and you very quickly felt sorry for him.

The other was an intersexed person from a broken home, brought up as female by their mother, and male by their father; they had been male through college (where they claimed they were "the most popular guy in the school"), but had chosen to be female, and conceived of their "inevitable" eventual union with Tiffany as a lesbian one. She had become obsessed after a bike accident where she was in a coma for three days; she claimed that she saw Tiffany in a vision, though she hadn't known who she was, and when the first thing her sister played for her on her walkman was... something by Tiffany, I can't remember, she asked to see a picture of the singer, and then knew that they were destined for each other. There was definitely an element of the "please watch me and be impressed!" that you get with pre-teen kids anxious to be liked; for example, getting the camera to watch her run maybe 30 meters and back, and pantingly claim that this was only maybe 37% of how fast she could go. Her friend also noted that she had a drinking problem and was struggling with depression.

The film-makers allowed the two of them to contact each other, which was nice and awkward, and then they met up in Las Vegas to see a Tiffany concert, which appeared to be in some sort of gay bar. They were both on disability payments, though the first guy seemed to manage his money better; he could afford a car, and to drive there, whereas the other person had to bus. We then saw some information about how the two of them had progressed; the woman seemed to be doing slightly better, and the man... well, he had accepted that he probably wouldn't ever marry Tiffany, but it was less a move forward than a move sideways.

The Lovely Kate was in the audience, and we had a bit of a chat afterwards; she is a teacher, and so talked a bit about her experience with children with Asperger's, how they're bang alongside rote learning (which means that they can pass things if they're appropriately guided), but how some things they find really hard. And we talked a little bit about whether what the film-makers had done was exploitative. In the end, I don't think so - there was no indication that the documentary team were disguising what they were trying to do, and the impression that I get was that the people who were the focus of the documentary would have been satisfied with how they were portrayed.

I guess it comes down to - can it be exploitative if the people affected don't think they're being exploited?

Kate, ever reliable in this regard, asked whether I saw any of myself in the people in the film. I guess an honest answer would be - the reason it was such an uncomfortable documentary was because they kept doing the things that many shy or uncertain people fear they're doing all the time, for example that they're making inappropriate jokes that make others uncomfortable, or that our enthusiasms bore other people, or that we're obviously showing off and look ridiculous, or that the people we think are our bosom buddies are, in their eyes, at best nodding acquaintances. And I guess the fear is not so much that this is true, since I know it'll be true sometimes; it's more that it'll be true, and I won't realise it and be able to stop.

I devoutly hope that it's only true sometimes. :)

Definitely not action-packed, but a good character piece.

* * *

From Street To Sky is a documentary about Tigilau Ness, front-man for Unity Pacific, rastafarian, former member of the Polynesian Panthers, jailed for protesting the Springbok tour during the Apartheid years, born in NZ of Niuean parents, and father of Che Fu. I like his music, and I liked this documentary, which has plenty of music, and plenty of history. If anything, my only complaint is that it is too short.

* * *

I wish I'd watched Fear(s) of the Dark late at night, or at least in a state of mind more conducive to being creeped out. This was a collection of a number of shorts illustrating things about the dark that four or five authors found scary, animated in a bunch of different styles. Some of them were narrated histories, some were pretty straight ghost stories, some were just creepy sequences with a grinning courtier loosing a vicious dog-pack one by one on various victims, and some were a bunch of abstract shapes with people talking about their fears, anything from death to the fear of becoming bourgeois and conservative.

I liked it, and would like to watch it again when I'm in the right mood for it.

* * *

My third film at the Film Archive was The Cool School, a documentary about the emergence of a Los Angeles art scene during the fifties and sixties. I found it very interesting, even though I don't actually like very much of what is classified as modern art, though some pop art is pretty cool. (I don't think that they're hoodwinking people, or that they're wicked; I'm just don't get pleasure or interest from most of these pieces, and I've got plenty of other things that do interest and please me.) The way that the personalities interacted, the galleries and cliques emerged, and the prejudices of the New York art scene were gradually overcome (or not) were all quite interesting, perhaps moreso because all of the aesthetic judgements were received wisdom for me.

I don't think that I would watch this again, but I don't regret that I saw it.

* * *

Lake Tahoe was by the same person who did Duck Season, so I had a fairly good idea of what I was getting into - lots of long shots, people sitting around and filling time, conversations where important stuff is implied rather than said, and slightly quirky people and situations. In this case, a young man has crashed his family's car, so he walks around town trying to find a garage that's open to help him.

This film is definitely not put together in a standard way, and I could see it being really boring in another person's hands. For example, the camera will often linger on a shot after the character has left the shot; this means that sometimes (but only sometimes) they can come back into shot, with evidence of stuff that's happened out of sight in what they look like or are doing, and other times just serves to emphasise the passing of time. The shot will often fade to black, while the background noise continues, and then it'll fade back up to show the characters in different positions, to indicate time has past; and then do it again another couple of times, to show that they're stuck there for ages.

Another thing that makes the film enjoyable is the humour - the girl in the auto-parts shop hands her baby over, then asks him to hold the baby until it falls asleep, and then gets out her tape deck; she promises to keep the volume down low, but another fade to black and we come back to her rocking out to a pop/punk ballad. Or the kung-fu obsessed young mechanical whizz, or the ageing garage owner who listens to the description of the problem, describes the part that the boy needs, and then sends him to hunt through the junk pile while he goes to lie in his hammock.

While there might not be enough action for some people, I'd happily watch this again.

* * *

I was prepared to be disappointed by Fighter, which Jenni had described to me as Bend It Like Beckham, but with martial arts instead of soccer, and no humour. I agree that it was less fun, but I'm not sure that I agree that made it a worse film. I think that the relationship between the girl and her sifu was good, and I liked the way that the issue of race and religion was there, but not overplayed - the friendship between the main girl (a Muslim of Turkish descent) and the Danish girl felt quite natural, and the scene where a bunch of Scandinavian girls are sitting around, drinking and talking about boyfriends felt a lot more like gentle teasing than prejudice.

Did I enjoy Bend It more? Sure; but I really liked this movie, too.

* * *

Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone was another film I was a bit nervous about - most of what I knew about it was that it eventually has a downer ending, and that it is chock-full of What Do You Mean It's Not Symbolic. I thought it was very good looking, as you'd expect for a movie remake, and was fine as a setting-up film, though it would have been nice if something had been resolved.

I will almost certainly go and see the next one.

One of the soldiers, who must be in his seventies (but still can't sleep with his wife because of the nightmares) talked about being a policeman in the 50s, after he came back - an old woman invited him in for a cup of tea, and showed him a picture of her son that she kept in a drawer. She couldn't hang it up, because she cried every time she saw it; he had died in an ambush overseas, and she was wracked with guilt over whether he had suffered terribly before he died. The next day, the ex-soldier came back with pictures; he had been in that ambush, had known her son, and told her that he'd been hit in the head and died instantly (which was a lie, since they'd been shot in the lower half to disable them first). This comforted her, and she was able to hang the picture in pride of place. But what affected the man the most was that she was too poor for carpets, and the contents of the house wouldn't be worth four quid; and the army had taken her son away.

This was a very affecting doco, for all the right reasons. It emphasised to me the need for soldiers to be able to rely on their leaders, not just to put them in harm's way for the right reasons, but to look after them when they come back. I can't imagine what they've gone through and how strong those around them have had to be; we heard about one wife, but actually met the other, and they talked about how traumatic simple things like a child's birthday party could be.

I'm not sure I could watch it again, but I'm glad I watched it then.

* * *

The Orphanage was at the Embassy an hour later, so I grabbed some lunch at Cha, and then headed in. It was basically a ghost story, with a couple and their seven year-old boy coming to set up a small home for special-needs children in a house that was the orphanage that the woman had grown up in. A little gore, but not very much; a number of leap-out scares, and some extended creepiness. I guess whether you believe that it's a happy or sad ending depends on how seriously you take the supernatural elements.

I thought it was quite cool, and given a while I might watch it again.

* * *

I was a bit worried about Waltz With Bashir; I thought there was the distinct potential that I'd either hate it or be bored to tears. As it turned out, it was very good. It echoed some of the themes of The Not Dead in that it dealt with the guilt of surviving soldiers - in this case, Israeli soldiers in the war in Lebanon, with a focus on a massacre of Palestinian civilians by Lebanese Christians, in retaliation for the assassination of their leader.

It was animated until the very end, which meant that they could blend the contemporary images with the reminisces seamlessly, indicating the transition mainly by colour scheme. The main narrator realises that he can't remember certain events, though he has the image of him and a colleague floating naked in the water, flares going up, and returning to the shore to get dressed. He talks to other people in his unit, journalists, and psychologists, to try and get an idea of what happened, why he can't remember, what memories he's created, and what he forgot.

One of his friends tells him - you don't remember these camps from Beirut, you remember them from Auschwitz. (Or something along those lines; I'm not up to quoting directly. :)

I thought it was a good film. I don't think I'd watch it again.

* * *

Frozen River is a nice "unlikely buddy" movie, between a woman with two kids (five and fifteen) whose gambling-addicted husband has just disappeared with the money they need to pay for their new home, and a Mohawk woman whose husband died smuggling people in from Canada, and had her baby taken away from her by her husband's mother. It was a fairly gritty movie; one of the advantages to seeing stuff in the Festival is that, unlike a Hollywood film, there's a chance that the most horrible thing might actually happen, so there is actual tension while you're watching.

I liked it; it wasn't stupendous, but it was well done, and I'd watch it again.

* * *

I then got the slowest fast-food in the known universe (i.e. Burger King), and then met up with C to go to The Wave. Semi-ironically, given that this is a retelling of a high-school social studies experiment in fascism gone horribly awry, there was a Film Society member telling people that they needed to make sure that there weren't any gaps in seating (which was fine) which progressed to telling people where to sit (to the extent that was kinda unnecessary).

I remember reading the original American book in secondary school, and I believe that it's been made into a film before, so there weren't many surprises. They do a good job of showing a bunch of different responses - the rich kid who leaves, but drifts back when he sees it's an opportunity to control people; the people trapped in social roles that find that they can change how people see them; the bored who find direction, and the outcast who finds people defending them because they're part of the group. And they make it clear how swiftly things can get out of control.

One of the advantages to setting the film in Germany is that they got to compare and contrast them with the Anarchists, who were depicted as basically just another punk gang, happy to use violence against those who appeared weaker and/or challenged them. The film heavily implied that this wasn't a better solution.

I think that one of the interesting things that they touched on, but didn't really answer, is the positive aspects of autocracy/fascism. One of the unfortunate truths is that not only the leaders, but followers get things out of these kind of groups - a sense of unity, mutual support, the joy of being in a group all pointed in the same direction. But the problem with creating an "in" group is you automatically create an "out" group.

But... what about the people who, when they think for themselves, think just of themselves? There's probably no good answer for that.

I guess that fascism gives you fast results - very much like a sugar rush. But just like a sugar rush, it's not something that sustains - you either have to keep on dosing (which leads to a bunch of regrettable side-effects), or you crash. True consensus-building might be slow and sometimes frustrating, but it's much more likely to give you long-term sustained enthusiasm and momentum, even when the "leaders" aren't pushing. Like, er, brown rice? I seem to have lost track of my metaphor.

Anyway, as a movie, it wasn't revelatory, nor as shocking as I was actually expecting. But I think it's a movie that's worth remaking every so often, so that the message of how easy it is to drift into this sort of behaviour gets reiterated.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. :)

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.

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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.

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C then headed home, and I headed into The Counterfeiters, a film about