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2010 Film Festival, Day 16

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

My first film was at 10am in Te Papa with C. In The Attic: Who Has A Birthday Today is told with a mixture of stop-motion and normal film (with a touch of hand-drawn animation), and is about a society of discarded toys in the attic of a Hungarian home – but a forgotten Communist bust, served by a mixture of deformed toys, insects and a villainous cat, has decided to kidnap the doll Buttercup for himself.

There were many very cool bits, such as the pillows drifting out of drawers and floating as clouds (complete with feathers falling as snow), or when the foot of one of the toys accidentally catches on fire, and he hops around and then jumps on a mirror (which sizzles like a pool of water, and puts his foot out). Or how, when people go inside things like train cars (made of suitcases), we see drawn representations of them through the windows pasted on the side. The film manages to give quite distinct personalities to all the creatures, and I would be quite happy to revisit that world.

There were a couple of puzzling things that were never explained, but I don’t care – I liked this movie a lot.

* * *

After a quick, surprisingly good lunch at the Te Papa cafe, C abandoned me to the next movie: Alamar, the story of a boy going from Rome (where he lives with his mother) to live with his father and grandfather for a bit; his grandfather being a fisherman living in a house on poles on a coral reef in Mexico.

Some scenes were obviously staged, since there was only one camera-man – to get shots from multiple angles while they’re climbing up a pylon, they would need to wait while the camera-man clambered up past them, for example. But I doubt that the film-makers lured the alligator that lurked outside the house, waiting for scraps, or trained a cattle-egret to come and eat cockroaches from the walls.

There was very little explanation of what we were seeing – it wasn’t clear whether the father did this for a living, or was just visiting, though we did show him teaching his son the names for plants and animals, and scaling and gutting fish. We also saw a little of the boy’s life before and after in Rome.

Women were strangely absent on the islands and boats, and it was never explained why; and I would have liked to hear a bit of what the boy thought about the different ways of life. But I enjoyed the movie.

* * *

Then it was off to the Film Archive to see Secrets of the Tribe. There is an Amazonian tribe, the Yanomani, which is famous in Western anthropological circles as being the prototypical “untouched” society, and which has been heavily studied from the 60s onwards – but the title of the film refers to the the anthropologists, and the highly questionable things that some of them have done, both in describing the Yanomani, and to them.

I’m a bit conflicted about this film. I strongly feel that you cannot approach a field of science by saying, “This result would mean something horrible about humanity, so we can’t accept it.” In Freakonomics, Steven Levitt says that the evidence persuasively suggests that making abortions freely available is what led to the downturn in crime a generation later in American cities, rather than the innovative policing programmes it’s normally attiributed to: this wouldn’t be a pleasant truth, but the fact that it isn’t pleasant doesn’t speak to its truthfulness.

But – there’s strong evidence that the leading proponent of the idea that humans are animals too, and that biology needs to be strongly considered in anthropology (Napoleon Chagnon) was also involved in the Atomic Energy Commission research that, deliberately or not, seemed to make the measles epidemic among the Yanomani substantially worse; and he was an ally of Jacques Lizot (disciple of Levi-Strauss), who compiled a Yanomani dictionary… and brought in plane-loads of trade goods which he used to get tribesmen to masturbate him and allow him to have anal sex, and who had a small encampment of young boys near his research camp whom he exploited.

And on the other side… Chagnon’s thesis (that the Yanomani are a fierce people who compete because of competition for women) was challenged by various people, including Kenneth Good, who claimed that they were actually peaceful innocents. Good was then accused of paedophilia, because he married a Yanomani girl (who was of age in the tribe, but not by Western standards), but his books were very popular.

Anthropology and sociology do not come off very well here. Chagnon trumpets the need for statistics over opinion, but Good points out that many of the statistics he relied on to make some of his arguments are flawed (doing a nutritional study on a group so much in contact with the outside world that they had a store you could buy canned meat, for example). On the other hand, even flawed statistics can sometimes tell us something interesting.

The overwhelming impression is that both the Yanomami and the scientific community have not been well served by the antics of many of these people; and that many of them are more interested in justifying their actions than examining them.

It was a good documentary.

* * *

Then it was off to the Embassy for When You’re Strange, a documentary on the Doors. I hadn’t realised how much the Doors frontman Jim Morrison dominated my perception of the band; that is, I hadn’t known how talented the other musicians were, how many of the songs were written by them, and how much they were able to cover for his lapses. It makes me wonder what would have happened if they had been paired with someone who didn’t have such a destructive relationship with drugs and alcohol.

I enjoyed watching this, and felt that I came away knowing more than I did before; and it inclined me towards listening to more.

* * *

Next was Bill Cunningham New York with Jenni at Te Papa, the story of a a fashion photographer deeply embedded in the fabric of New York, yet curiously apart from it. He covers gala events, dinners and parties of the rich and famous; but he will not accept so much as a glass of water while he’s there, since he doesn’t want to feel beholden to anyone. He haunts the streets of New York, riding his bicycle in his blue street-sweeper smock, seeing what catches his eye, and what might be the next big thing. He goes to fashion shows, but sits on the side, because he wants to see what the outfits look like from all angles, and won’t take photos of what he doesn’t think people would actually wear. (He’ll also show when a designer is “inspired” by other creators, showing them side-by-side.)

He seems to be a genuinely nice man – frugal, modest, cheerful, funny, and smart. He doesn’t seem to care much what he eats, or where he sleeps, much to the despair of the estate agent tasked with finding him an apartment by the city (to replace the Carnegie Hall one filled with filing cabinets that he has lived in for decades, since they want to swap the resident artists for telemarketers). There was a moment of darkness, or perhaps sadness, when they asked him why he still went to church every Sunday; it wasn’t fully explained, but that’s as it should be.

I really liked this documentary.

* * *

Jenni & I ambled over to the Paramount for American: The Bill Hicks Story, which was about the career of the outspoken US comedian. It was interesting to see the arc of his work, from goofy character stuff as a teen, to the anger of his drinking and drug days, through the time when people came to see him as a spectacle rather than an entertainer, and then out the other side as a smart, angry and funny comic who was rather more successful in Britain than in his homeland, and who was frustrated that his country didn’t live up to its potential.

It felt like it was fairly honest about his limitations, and his family came across as good people; it is a real shame he died so young.

* * *

I only had one seven-movie day, so I was quite tired by the time I got to Triangle, a horror movie. It is hard to talk about the movie without giving too much away; I’m torn, because there are some bits that work pretty well at giving you a creepy feeling, but I felt that you had to work hard at it to make what people did make sense; and even now, I’m not sure I can make the world shown in the movie consistent with itself, and I think I’m pretty flexible-minded. It’s also quite gory.

I thought they had a pretty nifty idea, but it felt like it needed something.

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2010 Film Festival, Day 15

Saturday, July 31, 2010

I’m going to abandon my normal procedure, and talk about the last film I saw first. This was Presumed Guilty, and their website is http://www.presuntoculpable.org/en/. It was about a particular prisoner in Mexico, who was picked up off the street for shooting a man dead, despite not resembling the police sketches (which were conveniently lost from the file), having no gunpowder residue, not being named or even mentioned in witness reports until after being picked up, and being at work 40 minutes walk away (in the street, in full view of dozens of witnesses, all ignored) at the time of the shooting. He was never shown an arrest warrant, he never saw a judge (his verdict was signed by a court clerk), and the only reason they were able to get the case revisted a second time (in front of the judge who’s signature convicted him) is because it turns out that the defence lawyer who handled the case wasn’t actually a lawyer – he had a poorly forged photocopy of a law certificate. (At the end, the film reveals that this lawyer is still in practice.)

The Mexican justice system seems outrageous and shocking. No presumption of innocence, police (with their face concealed) that they sometimes exaggerate or make up evidence in order to ensure a conviction, a 97% conviction rate even though the majority of cases have no physical evidence, over two-thirds of the prisoners fed by their families, stories of prison guards feeling up the prisoner’s girlfriend before they’ll let her in to cook for him… it’s incredible that this is happening today, in a fairly modern country.

The sad thing is, you can kind of see how it’s meant to work – the police should only present people they’re convinced are guilty, and then those people should have to show that it’s reasonable that they’re not. But when police (and judges) are promoted on the basis of conviction rate, then it’s not surprising that you’ll get someone grabbed off the street; the most surprising thing is how much they didn’t care about making him look guilty. I mean, it would presumably be just as easy to change the file to show that he had gunpowder residue (or fire a gun next to them), or to include a sketch done after they picked him up; my worry would be that the only result of this movie would be police would start faking physical evidence.

This is a good movie, and made me angry about the situation. Their website is mounting a campaign to make filming of all interrogations and criminal trials mandatory, to give defendants a fighting chance.

I now return to the beginning of the day.

* * *

Towards the end of Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould, one of the people interviewed said that he would be remembered five hundred years from now. I don’t know if it’s any indicator, but I didn’t have any idea who he was – I mean, I’d heard the name, but wouldn’t have been able to tell you that he was an exceedingly famous and controversial classical pianist, who broke onto the world scene with a electrifying version of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations”. I mean, I like what gets grouped into “classical music” well enough, and can tell a bad performance when I hear one, but I’m no connoisseur. However, this didn’t matter – they did a good job demonstrating what was different about him, and even showed the fingering technique he learned.

This was a good documentary about a man who was talented enough that his oddities and ticks were allowed to grow unchecked, which may have contributed to his relatively early death – for example, his hypochondria meant that he would see three or four doctors without telling them about each other, and then take all the pills they each gave him. They talked about how the ‘eccentric genius’ card was played up in the early years, but how he got odder and more controlling as he got older, wanting to script both questions and answers for interviews in his later life, for example. But he also did a bunch of interesting early stuff with recording equipment, and documentaries for the CBC.

I liked the film, and thought it was well done.

* * *

I only had ten minutes to dash from Te Papa to the Embassy, but made it in plenty of time to see I Am Love. It opened like a European film from the fifties, and had a weird, operatic feel to it. I liked Tilda Swinton as the wife, the daughter looked uncannily likely as a blood relative, and the gorgeous colours and sets were wonderful to look at. I wasn’t so keen on the music, which I found somewhat intrusive at times, and the movie itself was slightly slow. But there were plenty of neat bits: for example, I found the main character’s reversion (or re-flowering) to her Russian roots to be handled really effectively.

I’m not sure how I feel about the one of the main story elements, however. The heart wants what the heart wants, as they say, and they do a good job of making the husband look bad; but the way the wife handles the situation felt essentially selfish.

I enjoyed watching the movie, but I don’t think I’d seek it out again.

* * *

I hadn’t read the The Killer Inside Me was misogynistic, but I can see where that accusation comes from – the violence towards men tends to be distanced, either mediated by a gun or off-screen, whereas the camera shows us the beatings given to the two women. And the fact that one of them seems to accept and forgive it… well, that ranks up there with the song “He Hit Me, And It Felt Like A Kiss” on my creepy wrong-o-meter. But the first really nasty violence is up-close, personal, and directed towards a man… so I don’t know, there’s something going wrong, but it’s not misogyny (or at least, not just that).

Quite apart from the general unease with the events in the story, there were some characters that didn’t make any sense to me. Like the union boss, who seemed to be needlessly needling someone who he knows is a killer: what is he trying to achieve? And why did they allow him to go back to his house at the end?

It was certainly a visceral film, and if their message was something along the lines of “outward rectitude does not indicate inner goodness”, then they certainly managed it. And it was really weird watching Casey Affleck in this kind of role, which I’m guessing was the point. Oh, and it had very clever nod to the fact that it was a film towards the denouement; I wonder whether this was there originally, or added later to release tension before ramping it up again?

So… a good film, but I’m not sure I liked it.

* * *

Then it was off once again to the Film Archive to see the Homegrown mixed-bag: in this case, Homegrown: Quirky Stories. This was a fairly good batch, with only one film that fell into the “film scratches and free jazz” tedium (Tentacles of Dimensions, which apparently was based on a bunch of interviews). There were a variety of good to very good films, though there were some that were frustrating because they could have been better with just a little bit of story-tweaking – for example, The Witch And The Woodsman, which was a well-done fairy-tale (though perhaps too scary for the audience most likely to enjoy it). They did a good job setting up the rules of the world, and then using them cleverly; but toward the end they used a subtitle to indicate the passage of time, which felt really clunky. There was no reason that I could see that you couldn’t put a bit of grey at the male lead’s temples, have an older girl called by the same name as one of the young girls, and then you don’t need to read.

Empty Swan Song felt like someone’s (not particularly well thought out) fantasy of other teens paying attention to a classical pianist at a teen talent quest. Rock Paper Sissors was a odd dialogue where the three characters mentioned explained why they thought they were fighting, and negotiated an odd sort of truce… with a bonkers ending that I won’t spoil. Fruitless Journey was Scott’s Artic expedition told from the point of view of a banana with a belief in destiny… which I thought was very well done, though I’m a little uncomfortable mining that particular tragedy for humour. Tide was a really clever piece – just narration over the top of a shot of the back of a ferry as it scoots across a harbour, really well done.

Eat Your Cake; I’m a Vietnamese Refugee told it’s story effectively with folded paper and animation, overcoming the woodenness of it’s child actor. Nell the Narcoleptic was straight-up slapstick, though I was surprised at how little narrative it had. And finally, Michael and His Dragon was a short sketch of an Iraqi war veteran, which was effective, but felt a little shallow.

All in all, I’m glad I saw them.

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2010 Film Festival, Day 14

Friday, July 30, 2010

I have mixed feelings about Carlos. I mean, I enjoyed it – it was split into three two-hour parts, so I had two perfectly good chances to walk out if I didn’t – but it had a strange structure for a movie, presumably because they wanted to stick as closely to history as they could.

A few things stood out for me with this film. One (which might not be true in real life, but seems consistent across various depictions) was how often self-styled revolutionaries would accuse people who annoyed them or didn’t accept their whims as “petit-bourgeois”, and yet seemed to be just as attached to the material markers of success as those they condemned, making seem more like parasites than society-changers. There was also a certain amount of authoritarianism, with plenty of talk about being a revolutionary soldier and following orders – though it always seems to be the one talking about the need for discipline that is doing the ordering. I wonder whether, in the case of Carlos, “machismo” had anything to do with this? He certainly didn’t treat the women in his life very well, and didn’t seem to trust them in the same way.

I suppose that this might make his testicular problems later in life an ironic comment on his gradual fading from the international scene. This was one of the weirdest things for me, I think – I tend to associate this sort of terrorism, the sort of Baader-Meinhof stuff, as being part of the seventies, but Carlos was active in the eighties, and wasn’t caught until 1994.

I certainly feel like I have more of an idea of who he was, what he was doing, and the world he was doing it in; but I kind of wish I had a better idea of how everything fits together. I liked that they showed the diversity of opinion within the movement, with one of the group (who later breaks away) expressing disgust at two Germans separating out the Jews in a hostage situation – he was opposed to Zionism as well, but on the basis of politics, not race.

(I wonder whether this is why the police and our political masters got so anxious about our own “terrorist training camp”; the seventies feel like a long time ago, but they probably left a lasting impression on those who were young adults at the time. And except for the people who blew up a rail bridge in the 50s at Huntly, Wikipedia tells me all our bombings were in the early 80s, when those people would have been coming into power. This isn’t to excuse them; but it’s easy for me to forget how different the world was when those making decisions were learning how things work. And it makes me wonder what the post-Cold War generation will think about these things, and us.)

As to the movie – as I said, I enjoyed it, but I don’t think I’ll be watching it again soon.

* * *

I then went to The Strange Case of Angelica, which was… odd. It was kind of a ghost story, I suppose; but it had a stage-play feel, with people delivering their lines one after the other at a measured pace. This feeling was enhanced by the camera-work: often we’d have one long wide shot of a scene, rather than a sequence of shots to tell the same story, and there was very little camera movement other than the occasional slow pan. And I don’t know whether it’s the translator or the dialogue, but some of the scenes had a strange, Waiting For Godot quality. There’s also a weird mix of old and new technologies – modern cars, but old film cameras, for example.

(Basic story: a recently married woman dies, and a young Sephardic man is summoned by her mother to take some pictures of her that night; he thinks he sees her smile at him through the viewfinder, and falls in love. Then he becomes more and more withdrawn and strange, as he sees various apparitions…)

I found it interesting but slow. Most of the interest was in the odd way they chose to film the story, rather than the story itself, however. I’m glad I watched it, but I don’t think I’d watch it again.

* * *

My final film, which I got to watch with C, was Nostalgia For The Light, a movie about… well, history and Chile, really. It was set in the Atacama desert, and focused on three groups – the astronomers who use its thin air and zero humidity to study the stars; the archaeologists who use its dry conditions to study the remains of Pre-Colombian civilizations; and the women who search for the remains of those “disappeared” by the Pinochet regime. They are all looking for answers from the past, but only the last group has to battle society’s desire to actively forget.

I hadn’t realised how much the military regime tried to hide what happened – they dug up buried bodies and hid them again, for example. They also dismantled the concentration camp up there, but one of the prisoners was an architect who deliberately paced out the grounds of all the camps he was put in, and who drew them from memory when he was exiled to Denmark. And this legacy touches unexpected aspects of Chile – one of the organisers of the country’s astronomical society was grabbed with her grandparents when she was one, and the grandparents were told that they had to give the location of her parents, or this one year-old would be “disappeared”. They gave the parents address, and then had to raise their grand-daughter themselves.

The pace is contemplative, but it felt respectful of the people who’ve gone. It made me wish that the women searching for remains on the plateau could be given satellite imagery, since any activity is likely to have left a mark.

I enjoyed it, though it did feel long.

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2010 Film Festival, Day 13

Thursday, July 29, 2010

My first movie wa GasLand, a rather depressing documentary about drilling for natural gas in the US. One of the key points is that the main reason things have reached such a state is that Dick Cheney, as Vice President, managed to get natural gas companies exempted from a variety of acts that would have regulated their environmental impact, and the EPA was directed to ignore them. The fact that some people now have water coming out of their taps that can be set on fire should come as no surprise to anyone. Nor should images of workers covered in toxic chemicals (which their work supervisors assume are fine), or carcinogenic fumes streaming off containers towards schools, or… good grief, just general environmental irresponsibility, caused by the companies knowing that people have to wait until something bad happens before they can sue, and then they have to prove that something bad happened, and most will eventually run out of money or fortitude, and those that don’t can be hit with non-disclosure agreements as part of a settlement if they look like they’re too close to winning; and by the time that any of this even starts to make it’s way through the courts, the people making these decisions inside the company will have already gotten their bonuses for increased profits from their irresponsibility… argh.

I’m actually surprised that there’s a profit in these wells… and perhaps, if the people running them were made to pay for them properly, there wouldn’t be. The film goes into some detail about how much water is used in each well, how much needs to be processed once it’s used, how it’s stored in pits (some of which are unlined) and is sprayed in the air to help evaporation (which also helps evaporate the hundreds of toxic chemicals, but hey, they’re exempt from the Clean Air Act). It also talks about how many truckloads are needed to set up a well, how they’re scattered, untended, throughout public land near Yellowstone Park, and show a congressman who openly admits to being funded by the petroleum industry going into bat for them during a hearing.

This reminded me, in part, of NZ’s recent mining sideshow, although that was at the beginning of this process, rather than an end result such as this film examined. They share the presumption that resources must be used immediately, even though they’re going to become more valuable the longer they sit there, and might never be worth what is destroyed to get them; and the confused thinking that profits are profits, and if there are millions to be made it doesn’t matter who makes them, since money trickles down… except that it doesn’t. The difference in the NZ story is that here they have to make a show of scaling back, so they asked for the moon and then say, okay, we’re listening, we’ll only do the stuff we were going to do anyway, but now you think we’re compromising, and that we listen to you instead of blatantly manipulate you.

One of the problems is that the side that wants to make money already has a bunch of money to spend on making their interests sound like your interests, whereas the people who are passionate enough to care make us uncomfortable, since who knows what a passionate person might do? And anyway, some of them also hold ideas that are obviously bananas, probably go around healing their ferns with macramé crystals, and if one of the gets one thing wrong, there’s obviously something off about anything any of them believe – it stands to reason, or at least to comfortable prejudice.

It’s easy to think that we wouldn’t stand for a Cheney-level of chicanery with our environmental laws; but it’s not as if we don’t have our fair share of toxic sites ourselves, and awkward questions about who should be cleaning them up…

Bah. Anyway, the documentary was pretty good, although you could tell that they didn’t have much of a budget, since there wasn’t the polished graphics, helicopter shots and expensive soundtrack of, say, Inside Job. But the problem that they looked at is a problem that may spread, and I think that it’s really good that it was made, so that communities that this sort of drilling might affect can use it to educate and alert people about what might happen, regardless of the dollars that the drilling companies might dangle.

* * *

I had a nice break (as you can tell from how much I wrote), and then it was off to The Runaways, the mildly fictionalized rock biopic of the aforementioned band. It was bursting with energy – though with the amount of drugs they were shown consuming, I did wonder how they were able to stand up, let alone perform. Their manager was wonderful, prowling around like a hungry velociraptor, dropping pearls of rock wisdom and blatantly ripping off anyone who would stand still long enough for him to get his claws in. The film did a good job in showing the different attitudes that the two leads had towards the music, and if it wasn’t entirely factual, it at least felt true – though you felt by the end that it was a crying shame that Joan Jett never attained the success of, say, Debbie Harry.

(One thing that I regret was that we never got much of an idea of the other three members of the band, since I spotted some actors that I’ve enjoyed watching before; but you’ve only got a certain amount of time, which means you can only fit in so much story. Also, I read somewhere that one of them had was a replacement character, since there were potential legal issues about depicting the real one.)

I enjoyed the film, and I’m thinking about looking around for some of the original music.

* * *

24 Carat was an enjoyable crime film, with the action centred around the capable car-jacking daughter of a fence with big dreams and bad luck, and a debt-collecting former boxer with a son and trouble from his bosses wife. Together, They Fight Crime! No, wait…

It had tension, and plenty of places where I wasn’t sure which way things would go.  Essentially, it was about trust and betrayal — who you trusted, and whether you deserved trust given to you.  I enjoyed it.

* * *

My last film was also in the Paramount Bergman theatre, which gets quite stuffy if there’s a full house. The oppressive atmosphere was appropriate for Ajami, a gritty Middle Eastern street-level movie which starts with a boy being killed by two men riding by on a motorcycle. It turns out that they thought he was the nephew of a cafe owner, who killed someone from their clan when they came in shooting an AK47 trying to extort protection money. There is a lot of this in the movie, quite cleverly done – they will show something happening, usually violent, and then show the reason that it happened, jumping back and forth in time as necessary. And when the story gets back to the event you’ve already seen, seeing it from a different angle sometimes shows something different about the event.

In some cases, you can tell the actors are non-professional, but the culture is alien enough that this generally doesn’t matter; in fact, it adds to the documentary feeling. I didn’t spot that one of the families involved was Christian until it was stated outright quite late in the film, but it’s possible I missed something.

The fact that family is intrinsic here, and that bad luck or bad judgement on the part of one member of the family can result in tragedy for any or all other family members is a strong message. Another is that you act according to the information you have, filtered by your prejudices and assumptions, and amplified by the emotion you feel, so in an atmosphere of racial hatred, revenge, fear, and a culture of not backing down, tragedies won’t just occur, they’ll tend to multiply.

(Also, the problem with having a system where feuds can be settled with blood money means that there’s a perverse incentive to provoke and escalate, if you’re a large enough family in a strong position, but that’s a minor point.)

Anyway, despite some flaws, I enjoyed it. Possibly not enough to seek it out again, though.

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2010 Film Festival, Day 12

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Tuesday did not start auspiciously. I had done a lot less of yesterday’s review than I thought, so I didn’t manage to do the second and third read-through that I prefer, to limit how much of an idiot I appear (like leaving in a whole lot of question-marks where I had intended to go back and look up names); and then I dashed down to the bus-stop, only to be told by a passing cab-driver that the busses were on strike; and then I somehow managed to leave my Snapper card in the cab, which made it a pretty expensive ride. Thank goodness I enjoyed Teenage Papparazzo, or I’d be in a pretty bad mood now.

I haven’t seen Entourage, so the resonance between Adrian Grenier’s role and his life wasn’t as striking for me, but he was engaging and likeable. In fact, all the celebrities that were interviewed came across well, particularly Paris Hilton… she didn’t appear to be particularly insightful or anything, but she seemed perfectly pleasant. Of course, it’s tempting to wonder how much of that is in the editing – Charlie Brooker’s excellent Screenwipe underlined how much narrative can be created in the editing booth, and Grenier would be crazy to alienate people on either side of the paparazzi divide – but the fact that Grenier shows and admits to his mistakes gives him some slack.

You could see Austin, the kid paparazzo, progressing from someone who is exhilarated about what he’s doing to someone who is a bit of a self-absorbed dick; how much of that is the transition from tweens to teens, how much is him getting used to (and thus blasé about) the presence of Grenier, and how much of it was the fame… it’s hard to say. But one of the better bits of the film was when Austin and his mother were shown an early cut of the film, and we got their reactions; and then when Grenier went back a year later.

There was also a lot of meat in the rest of the film – the aggressive defensiveness of the paparazzi, the obvious adrenaline rush from chasing people, the talk about how they get lauded for breaking rules to get the shot, for example… some of their attitudes reminded me of the Stanford prison experiment, though not directly. Or Alec Baldwin pointing out the the same group that owns the company that makes his movie also owns the show that he goes on to promote his movie, and the channel that tears down both him and his movie. Or the academics that appeared, talking about parasocial relationships, and the way that everyone was celebrity when we lived in tribes, and how gossip was generally less about the subject of the gossip, and more about affirming social bonds.

(There was also a suggestion that the modern world makes people very conscious of themselves, because there is so much media around, and it’s the nature of media to address you directly, in a way that a natural object, like a tree, doesn’t.)

I think that there’s something interesting going on about the star actor/character actor divide, and I wonder whether things will change as stars are shown to have less of an effect on the box-office than they have in the past. I’m also aware that I have an ambiguous relationship to celebrity gossip; I dislike that sort of women’s magazine, but I’ll occasionally visit Go Fug Yourself, and I went to (and enjoyed) the Joan Rivers movie. Eh, I’m out of time; I’ll think about this more later.

* * *

A Prophet, at the Embassy, was a pretty straight-up prison story – guy with no skills goes into prison for a minor offence, ends up a hardened criminal organising drug smuggling and killing people. The interplay of the different nationalities was interesting, but nothing particularly surprising happened, apart from the main character having some minor visions (seeing the first guy he killed, and deer running away). That’s not to say it was bad; everything that needed to happen, happened. It was just pretty good.

* * *

If I was going to sum up The Wind Journeys, I think it would be: deliberate pacing. Not slow, precisely, but deliberate. Also, accordion-based rap battles, where the current champion is winning because of a sorcerous talisman… but all in a low-key way. (Nothing overtly supernatural happens.)

It’s the story of a travelling musician who has just buried his wife, and is going back to his master to return his accordion, a great black beast with horns on the front. A boy, who may or may not be his son, stubbornly follows him out of the village and joins him on his quest.

It was quite stylized, with lots of set pieces where weathered men sit or stand, eyeing each other up. And quite a bit of music, too. I think you’d have to be in the right mood to see it, but I quite enjoyed it.

* * *

Wah Do Dem wasn’t quite what I was expecting, possibly because I expected most of it. A hipster wins a cruise to Jamaica, but his girlfriend pulls out two days before they’re meant to leave. He drifts through the middle-aged and elderly crowds like a tousled refugee, and then makes a number of mistakes that are either dumb or fortuitous, depending on how his life turns out after the movie ends. The review on the Film Festival website called it “unpredictable”, but I don’t know whether that’s quite what I’d call it… while there are a few times where things could go multiple ways, but when a bus breaks down and you go off to play soccer, it’ll leave without you – that’s just the way things work.

I liked it, but didn’t love it; it was fine.

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2010 Film Festival, Day 11

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Monday started at the Paramount, and the enjoyable Waste Land. This film was about those who make a living by picking out recyclables from one of the world’s biggest, fastest-growing garbage dumps (Rio de Janeiro’s Jardim Gramacho), and the Brazilian artist Vik Muniz, who went there to work with these people and produce artworks from the material they collect. His idea was that the profits from the works they made could be given back to this community, helping them pull themselves out of poverty.

This was an excellent, enjoyable doco; you got a feel for the lives of the people from the dump before the art project started, and it showed the joy they took from being involved. One of the best things was that it showed that these were not ignorant people – the head of their newly-formed union talked about the books that he had read (books pulled out of the garbage), and mentioned how helpful he had found Machiavelli’s The Prince in understanding the little fiefdoms that the favelas represented for the local gangs, explicitly comparing it to the situation in Machiavelli’s Italy. It was also good to see the people around the artist worrying about whether they are doing the garbage pickers a disservice, gving them unrealistic dreams or expectations; but the artist decided that showing them that bigger dreams are possible wasn’t a bad thing. Thankfully, the follow-up implied that most of the people involved did manage to make a start towards what they had wanted to do.

To hare off on a complete tangent for a minute – photography, particularly art photography, is kind of weird to me. I mean, it’s sort of like music composition, in that it could theoretically be infinitely replicated; but it’s treated like… well, not quite like painting, but perhaps like lithographs, where only a few copies can exist. I think the root of it is that I’m a bit weirded out by value created by artificial shortages, that’s all.

Uh, anyway – the artist’s work (both what he did before the film, and what was created during the film) seemed interesting and accessible to me, and the people that he photographed (and then turned into montage) were strong and interesting. I liked this film.

* * *

Unfortunately, the next film was Police, Adjective… which was good at evoking the tedium of a police stakeout, and made a good point about the meaning of words, and the role we allow discretion to play in policing. But it was SOOOO SLOOOOOOOOW. I mean, not quite The Man From London slow, since I managed to stay awake; but pretty damn slow, nonetheless. Apparently some reviewers thought that it was a humorous commentary on I-don’t-care-because-I’m-bored.

Not a film for the tired.

* * *

Then I walked over to the Film Archive for Collapse, which was a mix of an interview with Michael Ruppert (done in a single session) with archival footage to illustrate the interview. It sprang from quite a different film – they were trying to make a film about the CIA’s involvement with the drug trade, and were interviewing him in connection with his claim that the CIA approached him in the early 70s, while he was in the LAPD, to help them move drugs. But that wasn’t what he wanted to talk about – he wanted to talk about how civilization was going to collapse, and why.

They had archival footage of him pointing at the mortgage-backed derivatives as the likely source of the collapse, and warning of the crunch in credit, which is certainly something he got right; and you could feel the passion he had when he warned of the dangers introduced by fiat currency, compound interest and… er, I can’t remember the term, but it’s when the bank can lend out more money than it has, because people aren’t all going to ask for it at once.

But… I don’t know. He was talking about the need to hoard physical gold against the coming apocalypse, which seemed weird to me. I mean – he argued against paper currency because you couldn’t eat it or use it to run your car, but that’s equally true of gold, and at least paper is lighter. I think that he’s right that there are shenanigans going on with the money supply, but I’m more worried about how convinced he is that he’s got the answers, rather than the questions he’s asking.

An interesting film that asks worrying questions, but gives unsatisfying answers.

* * *

I stayed at the Film Archive for A Film Unfinished, which was based on a piece of unfinished Nazi propaganda, filmed in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942, just before people were shipped off to the camps. The film-maker combined the original footage with diary entries from the leader of the Ghetto, reports by the local SS commander, an interview which had been done with a Nazi cameraman after the war, and filming a handful of people who had survived from the ghetto as they watched the original film. They had also found a reel of out-takes, various practice runs where they showed how many of the shots were set up – for example, scenes where starving beggars come up to shop windows full of meat.

I was reminded of “Visions of the Past” by Robert Rosenstone: “For we can always see and feel much that the people in old photos and newsreels could not: that their clothing and automobiles were old-fashioned, that their landscape lacked skyscrapers and other contemporary buildings, that their world was black and white, and haunting, and gone.”

This was a hard film to watch, especially the gauntness of most of the faces, and the mass graves of those who starved; but I’m glad I did.

* * *

Then it was off to the Paramount and Lebabnon, the film of four young Israeli soldiers in a tank as the Lebanon war kicks off. There is a stencilled slogan in the tank that says something like, “The tank is only iron, the man is steel”; we get to see how much of a lie that is.

It is claustrophobic and intense; we only see the outside through the restricted sights of the gunner, and inside of the tank is grimy and grim. While the tank itself survives a large amount of punishment, you understand how terrifying it is to be one of the largest targets on the battlefield, and how hard it is to pull the trigger when you can see faces instead of barrels.

I’m not sure I’m ready to watch this again any time soon.

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2010 Film Festival, Day 10

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

I keenly resent paying for parking during the weekend, but I ended up parting with $6 to park near Te Papa for Howl. (I could claim that I was trying to make some post-modern point about the mundanity of the bourgeoisie in the face of Art, but no, I’m just cheap about parking.) My knowledge of modern American writers is minimal (unless you include genre or pulp writers), and I’ve not read On The Road or Howl, so I wasn’t quite sure what I was letting myself in for, but I enjoyed it.

There were some oddities, like Mary-Louise Parker being credited, and then appearing very briefly as an expert witness for the prosecution in the Howl obscenity trial; but they make the case against censorship very eloquently, the animation was beautiful, and the actor playing Allen Ginsberg is great.

There was also an old television with a burn-in that looked like an eye that was muy creepy, and there was a point during the “interview” with Ginsberg where the golden light and the almost marionette-like movements of the actors arms made my brain go, “The animation on that model is pretty well done”, sort of climbing down the other side of the Uncanny Valley – I think that’s just work creeping up on me, rather than any reflection on the film.

I’m not sure I’ll read the poem; but I’m much more likely to now than I was.

* * *

Next, I drove home to pick up C, and then we went up to the Penthouse for His & Hers, an Irish documentary about … well, women, and their relationship with men, moving from girls just able to speak to a woman in her 90s. It started with the Irish proverb, “A man loves his girlfriend the most, his wide the best, but his mother the longest.”

In some ways, it reminded me of Babies, in that none of the hard things were really touched on – all the girls seemed to be in stable homes, all the teens were interested in boys, the clashes of wills the wives went through were verbal rather than physical, and the mothers and grandmothers were all still in touch with their kids.

On the other hand – given that this sort of documentary would normally focus on the extreme and the shocking, seeking out pathos or drama, it was kind of nice to see someone taking a different tack, showing the norm rather than the confrontational.

It was nice to watch, and I could imagine sitting through it again if it came on TV.

* * *

C stayed for Farewell, which was a Cold War spy story about the French Embassy official (an engineer) that was approached by a colonel in Russian Intelligence. This officer had decided that the USSR had become ossified, in part because they had become too reliant on stealing research from the West (as a result of becoming so good at it). In order to shake things apart so his homeland could grow, as well as decreasing the chance of war by making clear to the West how unprepared they were, he wanted to give pass on information; but the Americans were closely watched. The Frenchman he chose had only loose links to the Intelligence community – his boss knew someone at the DSE (the French equivalent of the FBI or our SIS, I think), which was ignored by the KGB because they were only meant to operate inside France. But this lack of training, which made him so useful (because he wasn’t suspected), meant that he felt the pressure more acutely – and his wife and family never signed up for such high stakes.

This film was very good at evoking the feel of the time, and managed to have you on the edge of your seat whenever a truck appeared. It wasn’t extremely fast-paced, but it was good, and I’d happily watch it again.

* * *

C and I ate together, and then she disappeared and I went back to Please Give, a quiet character study set in New York about a couple who buy vintage furniture from the dead and sell it at a mark-up; the wife feels guilt and gives money to the homeless (or, more embarrassingly, to those who appear homeless to her), but the husband seems more blasé about everything, though events suggest that he may be affected, too. They have a daughter, who is dealing with bad skin and a mother who will give a homeless man who they don’t even know a $20, but won’t pay for her daughter to get really cute jeans that are only $200.

There’s also an old woman that the couple are waiting for to die, so they can buy her apartment and expand theirs into it; she’s looked after by one of her grand-daughters (who works in a breast-cancer screening clinic, and is nice), and ignored by her other grand-daughter (who works in a beauty clinic, and isn’t). And then… things happen that illustrate their characters, and why they act the way they do.

I quite liked it.

* * *

Finally, I saw Double Hour, an Italian thriller that did something very interesting that I don’t want to talk about, because I wouldn’t want to spoil it for people who haven’t seen it. There isn’t much in the way of slam-bang action, more of a dawning realisation of what is going on as the film progresses. I enjoyed it, and I’m tempted to watch it a second time to see if my impression is different if I know various things from the beginning.

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2010 Film Festival, Day 9

Monday, July 26, 2010

The first movie was Babies at the Embassy with Jenni and C. It was the documentary equivalent of a light romantic comedy – they didn’t show anything hard, tragic, or grim. It was just four babies, in four different countries, being adorable and loved. That’s not to say it was content-free, but I suspect that the information lies more in our reactions to what we see: the palpable concern for for Namibian baby as it crawls through puddle-deep running water (proving how deeply engrained the “children can drown in a teaspoon of water” message is), for example, or the equally palpable cringe when the white San Franciscans sat around in a group singing about the Earth Mother, hey-ya!

The African and Mongolian children definitely stole the show near the beginning, possibly because they were allowed more opportunities to express themselves – the parents were shown as being much more hands-off, whereas the Japanese and American babies seemed more closely supervised. But they all had an opportunity to shine, though the most memorable moment for the Japanese baby was the great trauma when she is unable to push a stick though a hole in the disc, which causes such great frustration that she has to throw herself backwards and wail… and then pick up a book, look at a page, and then remember she’s frustrated, and wail some more..

Like a meringue animal, it was cute and sweet and probably fine for you in moderation, but wasn’t particularly nutritious. I might watch it again if it were on TV, but I don’t think I’d buy it.

* * *

Next, C stuck around for Agora, the film about the life of Hypatia, the female philosopher and mathematician who lived through the burning of the Library of Alexandria (where her father was the last director). The background was essentially the power-play of those in charge in the newly legitimate Christian church, saved from persecution thanks to a Christian Emperor. (The game-player in me couldn’t help thinking – if one were the governor, what steps could you take to hold power? You’d need to eliminate the local bishop as a force, to start…)

I thought it was well done, and there were some things (like the presentation to an unwanted suitor with a cloth with menstrual blood) that were strange enough that they could only be drawn from history. But… I felt worried that people were too… easy to understand, maybe? I mean, given how alien their culture is, I was surprised that none of the people’s motivations made me go, “Buh?” Although… maybe that’s a tribute to the writers, or to the fact that love doesn’t change much? I did like that they did retain some of the philosophy, though I’d be interested to know if there’s any evidence that Hypatia actually noticed that bodies in motion tend to stay in motion.

It was good, but I’m not sure I’d watch it again.

* * *

I then ran all the way to Te Papa to see The Arbour, which did a bunch of interesting things, stylistically. It was telling the story around Andrea Dunbar, who wrote three plays at 19, and went on to write a movie of one of her plays, based on her sometimes brutal experience of life in a council estate in Britain in the 1970s. (She died ten years later, but she was survived by three children, one of whom experienced a similarly traumatic life.) But it wasn’t a straight documentary; instead, there was some television interview footage of the playwright and her family; some excerpts from her plays (done on the green of the estate where she lived, with slightly bemused inhabitants looking on); and some actors lip-syncing to interviews that the film-maker had done with the members of the family.

This was really effective in drawing you into the story – the lip-syncing portions must have been weird for the actors, but they really sold it, and allowed the film-maker to show some things that would have been very difficult to stage with a normal interview (such as using focus to direct attention back and forth between two people talking). I thought it worked well, and was very interesting to watch, though very sad.

* * *

Then it was back to the Embassy for Gainsbourg.

The film itself was good – I liked what the actors did, the giant puppet that represented Gainsbourg’s ambition was both really well done and did a good job advancing the story, and it showed that the film wasn’t afraid to break away from reality. The man himself seems… like a bit of a dick: talented and charming, but spoiled, and happy to outrage people in order to be the centre of attention. How much of that is because of the weird experience of being a talented Jewish kid in France during the Nazi occupation, and the only surviving boy in his family… I don’t know. But explanation isn’t the same as excuse, and writing a song about a former lover about her being a hippopotamus is a dick move, plain and simple.

However… the film does a good job of making you empathise with him, and you never quite stop being hurt for him when he does something stupid and is rejected. I enjoyed watching it, and could imagine watching it again.

* * *

Finally, Ghost Writer, a straight-up Hitchcockian political thriller about a man (never named in the film) hired to write the memoirs of a thinly disguised Tony Blair character. There are a few elements where fridge logic reveals that they don’t make too much sense, but it barrels along at a good clip, and the actors (particularly Olivia Williams) were so enjoyable to watch that I didn’t care. I’ll definitely be getting C to watch it, even though I’m reluctant to put money in Polanski’s pocket.

And I hope Olivia Williams gets tonnes more work, because I’ve enjoyed her in everything I’ve seen her in so far.

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2010 Film Festival, Day 8

Saturday, July 24, 2010

After a pretty disappointing ham and cheese croissant from Clarkes, I started the day with I Wanna Be Boss at the City Gallery, an hour-long documentary about the pressure that Chinese students undergo in their last year at school. This is the year that determines which university they can get into, if any, and is made up of cramming and tests. It’s not only the students that were under pressure, however: the teachers had bonuses that they would only be paid if a sufficient number of students got into the top universities (with higher bonuses for going over quota), and were being told to focus on grooming the best students (as well as watching out for signs of them cracking under the pressure).

My first thought was, what happens to the okay students, or the bad ones? My second thought was that the classes were crazily big; and then I was caught up in people’s stories, and hoping that they would succeed, even though that would mean that someone else, possibly equally deserving, would fail. But the one-child policy seemed to mean that the parents were even more anxious than, say, Japanese parents for their kids to do well.

It was good, but I suspect that there was probably a bit of sanitizing going on – after all, everyone we followed had a chance of going to university. Still, a well made piece.

* * *

I then hurried off to meet C at Te Papa for a quick lunch and The Most Dangerous Man in America. This was a documentary on Daniel Ellsberg, the man who released the Pentagon Papers which revealed that a series of Presidents had knowingly and deliberately lied to Congress, the Senate and the public in order to start and continue the war in Vietnam.

There were many things that I didn’t know about this story – that Ellsberg had been a Marine, for example, and had gone to Vietnam as a civilian to study the situation on the ground, going out with troops and trying to find how much of what was reported was real. Or that he had distributed copies of this report, on the origins and conduct of the war, to a large number of senators and congressmen, in an effort to get the war ended sooner – but they weren’t willing to make public what they had read (though it may have strengthened the resolve of some of them). And it was only after trying to get politicians to do the right thing, and apparently getting nowhere, that he went to the newspapers.

I also hadn’t realised how important it was in terms of the legal aspects, and how much it solidified the freedom of the press; or that Ellsberg was still active in peace issues.

This was a good documentary – thorough, engaging, and I felt I knew more going out than I did going in.

* * *

I only had ten minutes to dash to I Love You, Philip Morris, which I enjoyed; but there was something weird about it. Possibly it was because there were some threads that were introduced and then dropped, like the scene with the main character’s birth mother; possibly because the people he duped out of money were given no redeeming features; or maybe it was because he was shown dreading jail, and then we see him having adapted without problems.

I mean, this is a fun movie, with some good twists, some believable emotional responses, and clever caper scenes. But I might be holding it up to a higher standard because it’s a Hollywood movie in a Festival setting, and perhaps that what is making me waver on it a bit.

* * *

I went and grabbed some dinner, and then I saw Trinity Roots: Music Is Choice. This was the only Wellington screening, and the film-maker and band were there. I really enjoyed this movie, and felt that they had done an excellent job of putting together a wide variety of different material to form a coherent whole – the documentary-maker mentioned that she was working from a wide variety of formats, from Super-8 to HD, but I thought that this actually gave the film… something. Perhaps it evoked various good historical documentaries for me, implying that they weren’t just drawing from one source? And the little touches, like the man involved with making the video for “Little Things” having his baby in his arms while being interviewed, gave it a touch of intimacy and informality.

A slight disclaimer may be in order – I really like this music, and that may have influenced my perception of the film. If this sort of roots/dub/close-harmony/polyrhythm/jazz stuff leaves you cold, you’re unlikely to be converted; but if you enjoy the music, there was plenty to watch.

I will probably look at getting a copy of the DVD, and they mentioned that the live recording of their final concert (for tsunami relief) would be being released soon… and they hinted at doing something else together in the near future, as well.

* * *

Finally, A Town Called Panic, a children’s Belgian stop-motion animation comedy. I tried to describe the plot to C, and broke her brain around the time where the heroes are able to escape the giant mechanical penguin because the scientists who have enslaved Cowboy, Indian, Horse and the fish-man are outside beating up a woolly mammoth that they accidentally ran over, and so there’s no-one to stop our heroes using the giant snowball-thrower.

Basically, it was funny, but not hilarious; some of the humour derived from the fact that most of the characters were obviously just moulded toys plucked straight out of a $2-shop bag (so the farmer’s wife was a couple of heads bigger than him, and carried a bucket everywhere), and some was from the models – there was a female horse who was a music teacher, so there was a piano for horses that had all it’s keys close to the ground. But there was also a lot of escalation, with problems being given ridiculous solutions, which introduced more problems, and so on.

Actually, that might be part of the problem: there wasn’t a narrative, so much as a series of things that happened, one after the other. I wanted it to be hilarious, and it could have been; but it wasn’t, quite. It was just pretty good.

That said: I can find an English dub, I might give a copy to my youngest sister.

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2010 Film Festival, Day 7

Friday, July 23, 2010

My movie-watching day got off to a somewhat surreal start. I was worried that I was going to arrive late to Extraordinary Stories, but I got there quarter of an hour early; unfortunately, no-one mentioned that it was in the Paramount Bergman rather than the Paramount when I bought the ticket, so I ended up slightly late anyway. Even more unfortunately, they accidentally put the third reel on first, so I really, really didn’t know what is going on – however, they apologised for this, and gave us a refund and free pass to another movie. Even more more unfortunately, I had neglected to account for the two quarter-hour intervals that spaced out the four hours worth of film on the three reels, and so arrived at the Embassy far too late to go to my next movie (which was meant to be Cell 211). But the Film Festival website makes the same mistake, and C had got me the first John Le Carre novel to read, so I’m not that disappointed.

So, what can I say about the film that I did manage to see? If it had been in the right order, I think I would have enjoyed it more; there was a certain amount of trying to work out what was going on when I was watching the last reel, and trying to remember what was going to happened in the end (when you didn’t know what was important) with the other thirds. Also, it was a little slow in places – I could feel myself drifting off.

On the other hand, the film I saw was pretty interesting, even if it wasn’t the film that the director intended me to see. The film was narrated, sometimes describing what was seen, sometimes anticipating it, sometimes telling us about people’s internal landscapes, and sometimes explaining what is going on. One of the reasons that this worked quite well is because it was used to surprise us – for example, it explained an elaborate theory that one of the characters had built up about a newspaper story, linking it to another story he was concerned with; and then saying no, actually, that character was completely wrong, and the two stories had nothing in common; and then went on to explain what was actually going on with that other news story.

I enjoyed the various stories, anecdotes, and tangents – there were three main stories, about three virtual ciphers (who were only referred to as X, Z and H), but the story would branch off without warning into tributaries about the various people they met, or influenced, or who had influenced them. And the film was unafraid to abandon stories, letting your imagination fill in where the lives you’ve briefly glimpsed might go.

I don’t know if I’d be up to watching all four hours again; but I’m glad I did.

Now… I have a couple of hours to fill.

* * *

After spending some pleasant time in the company of George Smiley and co., I was ready for the unashamedly political film Strange Birds In Paradise: A West Papuan Story. The basic premise was that an Australian (who had lived in Indonesia) went on a tramping tour of Western Papua, and slowly realised that something was wrong – whispered stories of people disappearing in the night, missing husbands and sons. He gradually worked out that he was in, as he put it, an undeclared war zone.

This film makes no attempt to disguise where its sympathies lie, though he does show dissenting voices, as well as the reasons why popular Indonesian opinion sees no reason why West Papua should be allowed to break away. It also places the film-maker front-and-centre, which I think was the right call, since understanding why he made the documentary explains the the choices that he’s made. However, there were a few things that I was a little uncomfortable about – for example, some of the narration about war atrocities carried out by the Indonesian military were delivered in voice-over, without any sort of attribution. The film-maker hadn’t seen it, so… I would have been more convinced, or at least more comfortable, if he’d been able to say, “Amnesty International reported” or “United Nations peacekeepers said”, or something. I don’t doubt that the West Indonesian army has done and is doing terrible things, and that it’s using West Papua as it’s own personal piggy-bank; but there’s a part of me that wants the film-makers to show their working.

It was certainly an interesting take on how Indonesia works as a country – I had heard complaints about Muslim domination before, but hadn’t realised that West Papua had been groomed for independence by the Dutch, for example. And it’s not as if the people involved are monolithic: the attitude of one of the women in the refugee village in Papua New Guinea towards student protesters who arrived after walking for six weeks through the trackless jungle was basically, “If they want to talk politics, go into the jungle, go out of the village – we’re sick of it here.” And you can understand her frustration: basically, they aren’t strong enough to make it too expensive for the Indonesians to stay, and there’s too much money at stake. East Timor wasn’t a literal goldmine – it will be a lot harder getting them to let go.

I don’t think I’ll try and see this film again.

* * *

From Poverty Bay to Broadway was my next film, at the Film Archive. I thought that it worked well as a documentary, insofar as I felt more informed about Irish immigration (especially in New Zealand), why Gisbourne produced so many boxing champions, and the world of international boxing in the 1920s. But as far as the star of the show, Tom Heeney, goes… it’s weird, but I feel like I know a lot about what happened to him, and what he did, but I don’t feel I know who he was. There are little glimpses – he was able to get out of the boxing business and succeed (instead of succumbing to booze or depression), he stayed with his wife (who he met well before his championship match), and he volunteered for both World Wars… but still, it all feels like it’s on the surface.

In the end, that’s an extremely small niggle in a very good documentary. I’m glad that I saw it.

* * *

My final movie was Dream Home, a gory Hong Kong horror about a woman obsessed with getting an apartment with a sea view. The story was well done, with flashbacks showing the development of the woman’s character and situation intercut with a gory bloodbath. There were weird resonances with Love In A Puff (with the smokers conspiring around an ashtray outside), and less-weird resonances with The Housemaid; but where The Housemaid‘s violence is mostly considered and precise, Dream Home is full of spontaneous mayhem.

Storywise, the movie was well done, with some neat touches (like the kid deciding that “asshole” isn’t a swearword, because his Dad always uses it to describe property developers). But I’m just not the right audience for the blood-soaked violence – there were scenes that made me squeamish enough to close or avert my eyes. I won’t be seeking it out again.

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