Do You Hear That, Mr Andersen?

With my ongoing sleep debt, my sleep credit rating must be terrible. I’ve certainly had trouble with my eyes foreclosing.

Foreclosing? Okay, well, it seemed hilarious when I thought it up. 🙂

Film #73: Maidentrip (& Strongman)

The short was a not-so-young intellectually disabled man who we see striding into the water, and starting to swim; we’re gradually lead to understand why. I thought that it was well done.

The documentary was about the young woman Laura Dekker, who decided to become the youngest person to sail around the world. After fighting a court case to prevent Child Services from making her a ward of the state (on the grounds that her father was negligent to allow her to sail off by herself), she sets out in the boat that she and her father restored from scratch. She deliberately builds in time to explore the places that she is going to visit along the way – she dismissing Holland as “boring” in that absolute way that teens can, and a large part of the voyage for her is the exploration of the new.

(There are a number of times where she makes sweeping, absolute statements, like saying her mum never came to anything for her. And we see her argue with her dad, which makes you realise how young she is. But she’s also determined, resourceful, and resilient, and she absolutely deserved the chance to try to do this.)

It is interesting to contrast her attitude to that of the teens in The Bling Ring. They crave the attention of their peers and the media, are excited by the label names, and see tiny setbacks as huge dramas; while this young woman is sometimes obviously annoyed by the media attention, comes to enjoy the solitude of the sea, and laughs at a kitchen accident that spreads ravioli all over the mess (and her).

I don’t trust the sea, and the idea that you could go to sleep and leave the boat to sail itself is crazy to me. And given the choice of pirates or storm waves bigger than my boat, I would choose to be at home in my armchair. 🙂 I know that she got sponsorship for this voyage, as well as working her butt off, but I don’t know how she’s going to support herself if she wants to keep sailing. But I hope she manages it.

Film #74: He Toki Huna: New Zealand in Afganistan

It’s good to see a journalist annoying the government enough to get the prime minister to call him a liar (that isn’t Nicky Hagar, bless him). Basically, the New Zealand public has been told that our army is there for “reconstruction”, which conjures images of the sort of disaster relief that we’ve done in the Pacific; but people aren’t shooting at us in Samoa or the Cook Islands, and we aren’t conducting patrols and handing over people we capture to groups that we know may well torture prisoners, as Job Stephenson has revealed we’ve done in Afghanistan.

This film is not, as some politicians have alleged, an attack on the integrity of the armed forces. In fact, it is because our armed forces have moral issues with orders that they have been given that we know many of these things. There are echoes of The Gatekeepers in this film, with an unclear and expanding mandate leading those on the ground into an untenable position.

(One weird thing about the Q&A afterwards – the person who introduced them basically asked them six or seven questions in a row, making it less a Q&A and more an interview. Then again, many of the questions asked weren’t much cop, being of the “I’ve got the mike now, so I’ll thank the film-makers and then give my vitally important views to this captive audience, without actually asking a question” variety.)

I hope that Stephenson stays safe, and continues to reveal annoying truths; and that these film-makers keep making films.

Film #75: Gideon’s Army

This film’s title refers to the man Earl Gideon, who was forced to defend himself because the state of Florida refused to provide him with the attorney that he couldn’t afford. His subsequent actions got the Supreme Court to rule that a defence lawyer must be provided for all cases, not just capital cases or cases where the defendant was intellectually disabled.

There are a number of things that this documentary makes clear. Firstly, these lawyers have ridiculous case-loads and pitiful pay – one of them talked about having $20 discretionary spending a month, after rent and gas.

Secondly, the system is biased towards pushing those arrested to plead out, because it takes so long for cases to go to trial, and the bails are set so high. Pleading a lesser charge is less of a risk than a jury trial, and results in a known outcome for the defendant… and most of the time, the performance appraisal for the DA and police rest on number of convictions, not the type of conviction, so they have an incentive to offer the plea. And bureaucrats like it, because it’s cheaper than a jury trial; and politicians like it, because it improves the statistics.

About the only people who don’t like it is people who want those who actually committed the crime to be captured and punished.

Thirdly, the job of a public defender is hard, hard work. Leaving aside the case-load, there’s the emotional involvement with the clients whose innocence they believe, but cannot prove (for example, because they lack the resources to do lab tests, or because associates have implicated their client as part of a plea deal). And worse, there the clients who are guilty, and admit that they’re guilty, but insist on a jury trial, and whom the public defender is morally required to represent to the best of their ability.

I kind of prefer the French inquisitorial system to the combative one that the Anglo-Saxon world has ended up with. But while we’re under this model, the public defenders are important people.

I thought that this was a really good film about really good people.

Film #76: Fantail

This film has the best use of the phrase “Physical challenge!” in any movie I’ve seen, hands-down.

Anyway, a petrol attendant who works the night shift (and then goes home to look after her mum) feels very strongly about her Maori heritage, even though she looks much more European than her brother, who is falling in with the wrong crowd. The siblings are making plans to go to Surfers to see their absent father; it is clear fairly early on that there is some issue in the relationship between the girl and this man. (We see him in the film, reading the story of Maui’s attempt to defeat death; the piwakawaka that causes the plan to fail provides that title for the film.)

As well as family issues, there’s also an audit going on at the petrol station, with a young, slightly awkward guy fresh out of university trying to assess the performance of the girl and her boss. There is a contrast between his casual disregard for his Maori heritage, and the girl’s defiant claim of hers.

This film is occasionally funny, but fundamentally sad. It started life as a dramatic monologue, and was made by a first time writer (who starred) and a first-time director. I enjoyed it, but there were a few Chekhov’s Guns put in place that were never fired (including what seemed to be an obvious Doomed Supermarket Display), and emotionally it was hard work.

Film #77: Which Way To The Front Line From Here

In contrast to He Toki Huna above, while Afghanistan did feature, this film was focused on the character of a journalist, rather than exploring a particular situation. The fact that he died while documenting a war is a low hum in the background throughout the movie, and his background means that there are plenty of images to go along with the narration.

There are plenty of graphic images of death, but he seemed to be more interested in capturing people’s lives. Accompanying the rebels in Liberia, he took photographs of the graffiti scrawled by these young soldiers, filled with drawings of AK47s and pleas that the reader “pray for this young man”. He was also involved in the documentary Restrepo, where he was embedded in an American outpost.

One of the features that he became interested in was the bonds that form between men in times of war; the man that he made Restrepo with claimed that it was the only situation where men are allowed to truly love one another, which I think is a very sad (and incorrect) belief.

It was well put together, and the humour and passion of the man came through. I don’t agree with all of it, but I did like it.

Film #78: You’re Next

A well-off family gather at an enormous remote house that the father bought as a hobby for his retirement. There are strong conflicts between the siblings (witnessed uncomfortably by the sibling’s partners), but that falls to the wayside when ruthless killers start eliminating people one-by-one. Actually, no, that’s a complete lie – even when they are terrified and people are dying, the brothers find opportunities to argue about things.

This is a messy horror film, with plenty of jump-scares, plenty of blood, a fair number of laughs, and some nice tension. There are some plot holes, but everything goes along at such a clip that you’re prepared to accept everything, and it’s a lot cleverer than the first section suggests.

While horror movies (especially gory ones) are very much something I only watch occasionally, I did like this one, though the more ridiculous deaths did tend to distance me. I thought it was pretty good.

Is there some sort of prestige associated with having the wrong time on your clock if you’re a Wellington bus driver? Is it like young folks who like having a cracked screen on their iPhone? I think I’ve only had one bus that had the right time in all the rides I’ve had during the Festival.

Film #63: Village at the End of the World

This was a documentary about a small Inuit community in Greenland. The fish processing factory closed, and the people are slowly draining away. One of the people that the film focused on was a 17 year-old who has been raised by his grandparents – his mother lived in a nearby house, and his father… well, he believed he knew who he was, but the man refused to talk to him about it. Given that there were only about a dozen houses, that’s pretty impressive, in a sad way.

They are dependent on a government subsidy to ship goods out to keep living out there, but their young people are slipping away to the larger towns and cities. During the film, they are trying to set up a collective to buy the factory from the company that shut it down, but that company is being uncooperative. And the ice is getting thinner, and coming later in the winter, making some of the hunting more difficult.

They talk to the rubbish collector, who also collects the nightsoil from large buckets in each house; he’s an outsider from southern Greenland, who met his wife over the internet. Because he’s was the only one who speaks Danish and English, he’s also ended up being the guide for the tour groups that occasionally come from visiting cruise ships. There was that weird vibe that you get when people show traditional ways of life as theatre for tourists, who go away thankful that there is this corner of the world unspoiled by modernity, while around the corner a child checks her Facebook profile on a pink laptop.

I’m not sure whether these places can last; but while they do, I wish them well.

Film #64: Like Father, Like Son

A high-flying architect and his wife discover that their six year-old son, who they’ve been grooming to get into a good primary school, is not their biological child. Instead, their son is living as the oldest of three with a couple in a slightly run-down electronics shop; the wife works part-time at a take-away food place. The architect’s house is clean, orderly, quiet, and focused; the rooms behind the electronic shop are jumbled, raucous and fun. The parents must decide – should they leave things as they are, swap, or do something else?

The hospital staff in the film say that most parents in this situation choose to swap, which just boggles my mind. By the time a child is six, they’ve been a person for a while, a person who you have hopefully grown to love – I cannot imagine any circumstances that would induce me to swap. I mean, I can imagine offering to help with a scholarship for the blood relative, and I don’t think I’d exclude them from my life if they wanted to know me; but I can’t imagine handing someone who I’d been responsible for to strangers like that. Then again, there are the legal isssues, and I understand feeling a sense of responsibility to your biological child, and that the other parent might feel the same. And it’s a different culture, so priorities might be different.

The movie itself is fairly spare and quiet, without much in the way of flashy emotional display (although the emotions are definitely there). The architect’s gradual growth as a person that this event prompts is believably gradual – he doesn’t leave architecture to become a clown or write children’s books or anything, he just… thaws slightly. And the kids, while mostly pleasant, are not as pliant as they might first appear.

I enjoyed it.

Film #65: Valentine Road

This film made me very angry.

One fifteen year-old asked a fourteen year-old to be their valentine. This severely embarrassed the one being asked, and all their friends hassled them; so the next day, they bought a gun to school, and shot the other kid in the back of the head, paused, and shot them again. The basic argument of the defence was that the kid who shot their classmate in class hadn’t gotten in trouble before, that they had been provoked, and that it was at most manslaughter, not murder; and that they should definitely be tried as a juvenile, not an adult.

The kid who was shot was a small male half-Latino who had fought for his right to wear makeup at school; the kid who shot him was a white male associated with a white pride gang.

Now, I have a certain amount of sympathy for the proposal that he should have been tried as a juvenile rather than an adult, since the reason there was legislation allowing them to charge him as an adult was introduced to prevent gangs from using minors to commit murder – he was not being used by adults in that way. On the other hand, there was no question that this was not premeditated, since he had to return home after he headed out to retrieve his gun. His defence claims that he was considering not to kill the boy, until he heard that the boy had decided he wanted to be called by a female name. It was the defence that brought that up, mind you, not the prosecution.

I guess the key for me is – what if it was a girl who had been embarrassed by an unacceptable guy in front of her peers. Would anyone try for a provocation defence then? Or a Hispanic girl asking a guy in front of his white power friends? And yet the jury hung the judgement, and five of them turned up on national television with “Free Brandon” wristbands, along with the sort of “well, dressing like that meant she was asking to be raped” victim-blaming that is incredibly frustrating.

After the trial dragging on for three years, he plea-bargained out to get 21 years without parole. His victim, of course, still got life.

Film #66: Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia

He was a witty, incisive man who knew what he wished America would be, and was constantly disappointed when it failed to live up to what he saw as its potential. I don’t agree with everything that he said or thought – for example, while I doubt Cheney was a Machiavellian genius, I’m not sure that he was as bumbling as Gore suggested.

I liked that they let their subject speak a lot, and that they let some of those that disagreed with him speak, and I enjoyed both. Oh, and by showing a bunch of archival footage, they got to relive some of his best, most cutting moments – for example, his debates with William Buckley, and the crack about Reagan’s presidential library (that there was a tragic fire, and both books were lost; and the second one he hadn’t finished colouring in).

But I think they also succeeded in showing more than just the acerbic humour and intellect; that he was something of a shy man, who used humour to defend himself as much as to attack those that he felt needed attacking.

I enjoyed this film.

Film #67: Blood Brother

A slightly aimless American called “Rocky” goes to India, visits an HIV orphanage on a whim, goes away… and is drawn back. The film is the result of his best friend visiting after Rocky’s second visitor’s visa is granted, and filming what he saw.

He is completely unworried about dealing with the kid’s cuts and bruises, and the kids are exuberant. They’re naughty sometimes, since they’re kids, but they do seem to genuinely love him, and he loves them back. It is very far from easy, and he talks about the kids that he has lost, and we see him at the hospital bedside of one of the children we’ve previously met, who is very near death.  We also hear him when he is trying to deal with some of the things that he sees, when he’s not sure he can handle it.

He is a lot braver than I think I could be, and while there’s a certain amount of weird cultural stuff going on (with the villagers ranging from mildly friendly to openly hostile), he desperately does not want to let these kids down, no matter how hard things are for him to deal with. So he doesn’t. (Or at least, he hadn’t by the time the movie was finished.)

I liked it.

I just came out of a film where someone appeared to have had a critical skittles accident — a pool of them were sitting in the middle of a seat, as if the Easter bunny had gotten a very nasty fright.  But let’s focus on the films I saw yesterday.

Film #52: Romeo and Juliet: A Love Song

I had a bit of trepidation about this – the classic Shakespearian tragedy as a musical, retaining much of the language, and set in an Auckland holiday park?

In actual fact, it worked well more often than not. I didn’t come out humming any of the tunes, but I thought that they worked in the classic lines pretty well. The main problem that I had was understanding the lines at all – I found that the combination of archaic language sung in a rock style with a Kiwi accent meant that I really wanted to be able to turn on the subtitles. I mean, I followed the plot without problems, but it was sometimes hard to make out exactly what was being said. Maybe it was the audio in the theatre?

I liked the costuming and the sets, and the over-the-top style worked for me.  And I think they made the right call in dubbing all the actors, so they could pick the best faces for the roles without worrying about their singing chops — we don’t have a big enough pool of actors for that to be viable.

I was worried that it would be high-concept, but better described than actually seen; I’m glad I was wrong.

Film #53: A Touch of Sin

A extremely loosely connected set of vignettes about various people deciding to kill other people for one reason or another – though they can mostly be traced back to greed and/or sense of entitlement. It shows a China deeply uncomfortable with the way it is modernising, and with who is benefiting from these changes.

A little slow, very violent… it was all right.

Film #54: Terms and Conditions May Apply (with #Postmodem)

Okay, the short at the beginning felt very self-consciously weird. There was a some slightly uncertain laughter from the audience, and a bunch of live footage mixed with what looked like crappy Second Life graphics, with an implied story about augmentation to interact with the virtual world better, followed by renunciation of that path. I’m not sure that it achieved what it set out to do.

The main documentary was about the relatively rapid eroding of consumer’s rights to privacy in the digital world. There was a certain amount of slightly overblown rhetoric about the death of privacy by people who appear to have forgotten that not everyone lives in a city and has a smart-phone, but it’s certainly true that things like the ability to track phone locations mean that it’s gotten harder for whistle-blowers to hide, even as it’s gotten easier to get more data to whistle-blow.

They did a good job of graphically presenting the changes in privacy over time, both figuratively and literally – the diagram of Facebook’s increasingly public defaults in all its categories over time is a good example. The fact that all the consumer privacy protection legislation got derailed by the 2001 terrorist attacks is a little worrying, but it’s not what concerns me most.

Instead, my main worry has three prongs. The first was illustrated by the people digging through the AOL search logs, who found a set of searches that showed someone was looking up “how to murder your wife” repeatedly. The web immediately concluded that whoever was behind that ID was obviously a wife-murderer (or a potential one); instead, it appears that it was a writer for the show Cold Case. Or there’s the nine year-old kid who tweeted that Obama should be careful now that Osama had been killed (because he was worried), who got a visit from the Secret Service about his threat towards the President.

The second was the apparent move towards “pre-crime” arrests, where people like the street-theatre troupe that were planning to perform in protest of the royal wedding, or the group of people who were going to stage a zombie wedding miles from the celebration were arrested as at their homes. That sort of pre-emptive arrest seems a little like stifling legitimate protest, and likely to be a big problem when combined with the first prong.

The third prong is that the retention rules and cheaper storage mean that stuff can be (and is) stored for longer, so if one person gets in trouble, all the people even marginally associated with that person will be examined in unsympathetic detail. And everyone knows about the Echelon programme by now, which is as elegant a bit of sophistry as ever normalised something previously forbidden, which means that they’ll have been gathering this stuff for a while..

All that said – you know how it’s part of the humour Zeitgeist that Facebook was created by intelligence agencies to allow people to inform on themselves? For example, there have been offhand comments in Persons of Interest, and various Onion articles. But what if the NSA explicitly offered a service? What if they said, “Our spies and other intelligence agencies are going to be looking at this stuff, and we might hand stuff on to the police, but random people won’t get to look at it, and in return you get free unlimited storage, with revision history going back five years, access anywhere in the world, and excellent automatic indexing and search capability. And we won’t sell your details to WalMart.” In a situation like that… I can imagine a bunch of people taking them up on their offer.

Heck, I might take them up on it. I use Gmail, don’t I?

But I still don’t put most details on Facebook, or link stuff between accounts, or put my real birthday in things that ask for it. Because none of that is any of their business. 🙂

Even though I didn’t completely agree with all the points the film made, I enjoyed it.

Film #55: The Human Scale (with The Mobile Meat Processing Unit)

It was obvious that the short preceding the movie was inspired by the nursery rhyme “Mary had a little lamb” – basically, a girl goes to school (followed by the lamb), and the eponymous processing truck pulls up and lowers its ramp, offering “fabulous prizes” based on weight of meat processed. All the animals (including the cat, dog and wife) and foliage are offered up to machine; the girl is only saved by the fact that the lamb (which should have been towing a big “symbolism” sign at this stage) had followed her, and so was able to tip the scales for the prize-hungry father.

It deliberately had the bare minimum of animation it needed to be to get its point across, with some film, some 3D models, and some jointed pictures. One of the points that they were making was that gambling, or even the semblance of gambling, is a powerful motivator – hence the rise of the free-to-play “random chest”, some types of which some countries have had to ban based on the harm they do.

However, the message was very much front-and-centre, with little or nothing in the way of layers; I would have liked a little more depth. So… I dunno. It was only okay.

The movie itself was about the need for city planning to think about how what it measures influences what it improves – if it only measures traffic flow, then that’s what will drive its decisions. And cars are a lot more expensive to cater for than pedestrians, and it’s a lot harder to make an impulse purchase or window-shop from inside a car. And there are things that make surprising differences – building height is a public health issue, for example, because the further up a building you work, the less likely you are to go out during your lunch break.

It featured a section on the Christchurch rebuild, and the National government’s grabbing of control did not come across particularly sympathetically. It also talked about the resistance to the “Eurofication” of New York as streets were converted to pedestrian-only, as well as the programme’s apparent successes.

One thing that it only really talked about in passing was public transport, but it had plenty of interesting detail, and I quite enjoyed it.

Film #56: Mud

What did this film teach me? Well, it turns out that 14 year-old boys in the American South still say, “Yes sir” and “Yes maam” to their parents; and that if you find a strange man camping out in a boat washed into a tree on an island by a recent storm, he’ll like the Teeny Weenies that you buy from the Piggly Wiggly more than the tin of pumpkin pie filling you swipe from your mum’s cupboard; and a boy can only really rely on other relationships with other males, or his mother.

Oh, and if you’re a Kiwi watching a movie and thinking, “Why are the kids so worried about a creek-bed full of eels?”, it’s probably because they’re not eels at all, but highly poisonous cottonmouth snakes.

Okay, that’s not all completely accurate, but it’s close enough. A couple of boys end up helping a man they find hiding out on an island in the delta; one of the boys, Mitch, helps because he wants to believe in love (because his parents are having problems), the other, “Neckbone”, helps because he’s been promised the stranger’s pistol (because, hey, pistol). This help ends up being a lot more dangerous than it appeared at the beginning.

I enjoyed it.

Why do I have blended ice drinks, when they seem almost guaranteed to give me a temporary headache? Curse you, frozen tastiness!

Film #42: Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel With The World

This was a documentary made in the 1960s, with parts taken from lectures and seminars that Robert Frost was doing at the time. He would have been in his 80s, and they panned around the audience looking at all the university students intent on his every word. I hadn’t realised that his father had been closely involved with the running of the Democratic party, and that he’d been there rather than at school – that would probably give you an education on the public and the democratic process that is something like a butcher’s education on cows. He was also clearly pro-military and pro-America, which can’t have hurt his chances to be embraced by the establishment.

But he also seemed to have a sense of humour about people who wanted to over-analyse his work, seeing avatars of doom in images of crows and hemlock trees (which, to him, evoked his local environment rather than dark portents and Socrates’ suicide). And many of his poems have a nice melody, shape and feel. The images of him pottering around his old house, making himself coffee from crystals out of a jar and packing a battered suitcase, and wandering about doing the gardening made me think of someone’s grandfather.

I kind of wish for a more modern version of this film, but it was nice to hear so much of him in his own words, and interesting to try and put yourself in the tenor of the time. For example, he mentioned talking to men that he saw with a copy of his book, who apparently invariably said, “Oh yes, my wife is a great fan of your work.” 🙂

Not great, but good.

Film #43: Ilo Ilo

Set in Singapore, a boy has been acting out since his grandfather died, and his heavily pregnant mother (who is still working) dictates to his father (who is secretly in trouble, work-wise) to hire a Filipino maid to help out around the house and keep an eye on him. We see the mother locking up the valuables before the maid arrives, and taking the maid’s passport off her as soon as she walks through the door (so she won’t run off, the mother explains). The maid is then shown where she is to sleep – on a trundle bed in the boy’s room.

It was interesting to see how this kind of family lives. (Or possibly, lived – the movie was set in the economic downturn in the 90s, but the Tamagochi that the child plays with is one of the few things that suggest that it couldn’t be set during today’s shrinking economy.) The maids have only one day a month off, and will often take another job illegally during that time; the maid is advised to sneak out during the day and work, as well. But none of the characters are saints or villains. Even the mum, who is bossy and sometimes mean to the maid when she’s feeling insecure about her relationship with the boy, is mostly just worried rather than actively malicious, and does not (for example) confront the maid over the little touches of lipstick that she has stolen.

Ultimately, the story is a little sad, but not tragic. I quite liked it.

Film #44: Three Sisters

I felt every one of the 153 minutes. Actually, that’s a lie – I’m pretty sure I nodded off briefly during it. This documentary watches three girls who start the film living by themselves in a small house in a rural village in northern China – the eldest is 10, the youngest is 4. Their father is in the city, trying to earn money; their mother is… just absent. They eat at home, or at their auntie’s, or with their grandfather. The houses are hazy with smoke in the evenings from the pine and turf that they burn (as well as the tobacco from any adults); many of the kids, particularly the eldest, are continually coughing. And we watch them herd sheep, and make a mash for the pigs, and squabble among themselves, and generally live life.

The documentary style they used was to just have the camera there, and shoot what happens – no questions, no commentary, and no context. I often find this style to be a bit frustrating, since it provides a lot of flavour, but unless the subjects are particularly talkative, there’s usually not as much substance as I’d like. It felt like you saw some of the bits of how this life worked, but it was just not what I was hoping for.

Film #45: The Selfish Giant

The original Oscar Wilde story has a happy ending.

This one didn’t.

It was probably more powerful for it; but I don’t know whether I’d watch it again any time soon.

The main character is a hyperactive kid from a broken home, whose medications are stolen by an older druggie brother, and who can’t stay still or stop talking. He and his best friend see thieves pulling up cable from beside a railroad and laying it on the tracks, using a passing train to cut it. While the thieves are distracted by a guard, the kids run off with the cable, and sell it to a scrap merchant… which starts the main character’s obsession with finding scrap (including stealing more cabling) and making money.

I really dislike people who steal from public spaces and infrastructure. Lead from church roofs, telecommunications cables, public artworks – they’re basically saying, “I am more important than all the other people who use this put together.” And the fact that they’re basically wrecking something more valuable (e.g. working cabling) in order to make something less valuable (wire scrap), that adds to my dislike. It’s no different to large companies coming in and poisoning rivers with mercury in order to extract gold more cheaply, or knocking down historic buildings to build shoddy new ones (with shell companies that can conveniently declare bankruptcy when problems arise).

Anyway, rant aside, this film was very good at showing a slice society that felt real, and that I was very glad that I don’t live in.

Of course, the next film made my dislike of thieves seem really petty.

Film #46: Silence in the House of God

This was a film that I didn’t want to see. I knew it was going to be hard to watch, and that I would not leave the theatre happy. But it felt hypocritical and disrespectful to the victims to go to Gardening With Soul, and not go to this.

It was well made, if a bit focused on America – but given that it was made by HBO that’s not terribly surprising. It set out the steps taken by a group of deaf men who had been systematically abused by a particular priest while at a school for the deaf that he ran, and the stonewalling they received from the Vatican hierarchy. The film did a good job of talking about some of the internal politics that have made the situation worse – while the Vatican prefers to present itself as a monolithic entity, there has always been a tension between the pontiff, the Vatican bureaucracy and the College of Cardinals. And there is always a temptation, when you’re inside an organization, to look at how things will affect that organization, rather than looking for the right thing to do for everyone involved.

There were some things that made me a little uncomfortable about the film itself – for example, using the words “young zealots” to describe one of the Catholic societies that one of the guilty priests formed is not a neutral way to describe that organization; though to be fair, I’m not a big fan of the Opus Dei crowd, and those guys sounded similar. Or the claim that the Vatican state was an invention by Mussolini, ignoring the long existence of the papal states in “the Italies”. And there was a weird thing going on where winning compensation from the Church was somehow a measure of success, which might be an American thing? (I would have thought that putting those people responsible in prison or the psychiatric ward would be more of a success.) But it is hard to criticize this film without feeling like you’re in the same camp as Men’s Rights activists who try to claim that lower funding for prostate cancer is equivalent to (or worse than) the many inequalities faced by women. Not every documentary has to give equal time to “both sides” – sometimes one side is demonstrably in the wrong.

The people who did these things should be punished and prevented from hurting anyone else; those who protected them and failed the victims should be made accountable; and the victims should be acknowledged, and helped.

I hope that things get better.

 Film #30: Wadja

Filmed in Saudi Arabia, which has no cinemas. It’s about a smart, independent young girl who decides that she needs a bike so that she can race a boy that she’s friends with… so she decides to win a religious club contest to earn the money. (Women, of course, aren’t allowed to ride bikes; they’re also not allowed to drive, aren’t listed in the family tree, and have to go inside if workmen can see into their playground.) And while things aren’t going as well for the Mum (who can’t have more kids) as for the daughter, the film is mostly upbeat.

A neat film. I hope that none of them get in trouble for it.

Film #31: This Ain’t No Mouse Music

Chris Strachwitz founded Arhoolie Records in order to get to record the music that he enjoys listening to. Escaping East Germany as a teen ahead of the Russians, on coming to America he heard Lightning Hopkins and was hooked.  And once he was hooked on the blues, he didn’t stop there, spreading out into zydeco, bluegrass, polka, tex-mex, country, rhythm and blues, and all sorts of other branches of the American musical tree that people get together and dance to. He wasn’t interested in collecting history; instead, he was interested in collecting music that moved him.  What he actively despises is “mouse music”, music that doesn’t have conviction.

As I may have mentioned in the past, I have been accused of having musical taste that’s “eclectic, in a bad way”. I am sure that a lot of the music that I enjoy would fall into what Strachwitz would label “mouse music”; but I’m glad that he collected what he did, and may be ordering a few discs…

Actually, I’ve been thinking about that. Most of the time, I’ll be listening to music at work, and that almost always ends up meaning that I’m listing to something on Bandcamp. (Which I will then buy if I find I listen to it more than once, even though I am still likely to stream it.) Sadly, I seem to have passed the event horizon where I cannot read, listen to, watch or play all the cool stuff that is out there; I seem to end up buying it as a promise to myself, that I’ll come back to it. But one day…

This film was finished with Kickstarter money; I’ve contributed to a bunch of Kickstarters, and I hope that this continues to act as another source of funding for films like this.

Film #32: Blue Ruin

A wild-haired man living out of a rusting car finds out that his parents killer is released. Events ensue.

The lead was believably “average guy, driven to extremes”. And while it was violent and showed a lot of blood, you could tell that it didn’t think it was sexy or slapstick like Cheap Tricks – violence meant something, and I think I preferred this film because of that. The situation was believably drawn, and things rolled along with a kind of inevitability. The main character isn’t portrayed as heroic; he is just doing what he thinks he has to, without bravado or particular flair.

I liked it.

Film #33: Dirty Wars

Basically, a US journalist gradually uncovering how JSOC (the Joint Special Operations Committee) have expanded their power and influence, and how the seductive simplicity of kill lists have replaced the tedious process of judicial hearings and diplomatic pressure. The reporter was especially outraged that one of the people targeted for assassination was an American citizen, which I felt a little uncomfortable with; but his basic point seems valid.

I guess my main problems with all this is twofold.  Firstly, the “kill them all, and God will know his own” approach is morally abhorrent, plain and simple.  But secondly, the tactical mindset appears to have overwhelmed the strategic one. Some of those interviewed mentioned that the lists of deadly enemies are not getting any shorter, and the relatives of those killed unjustly are just going to add to those lists. Part of this will be due to perverse incentives – those ordering the killings are charged with eliminating the people on the list, not eliminating the existence of a list.

There’s a weird resonance with Blue Ruin in this, as well as Utu.

It was all right, but I kind of wish there was more detail.

Film #34: The Past

A woman gets her husband to come back after a four-year separation to sign the divorce papers in person. The man she wants to marry isn’t in the house, but his son is, as well as the two daughters from previous marriages (one of whom is dead-set against the new man). The woman appears to be ready to fight with any of them at the drop of a hat, but the pressures on the all of them gradually emerge over the course of the film.

The writer and director have done a very good job of slowly building up a picture of what has happened for us, revealing the ex-couples’ past through confrontations between the wife and boyfriend; and what has happened since the husband left four years ago as he learns it. And there are several times where we find that we, like those in the film, only have an incomplete picture of events.

I liked it, but don’t think I’d watch it again.