I am trying to decide whether I just started the festival with a lot of slow films, or if my policy of caffeine in every break between films is paying off. This is harder than it sounds, since there is something in me that rebels at paying $4 for boiling water, a teabag, and a wee skerrick of milk at the Embassy, when I can have the same thing for $3.10 at the Paramount. I’m not quite at the stage of bringing in a Thermos from home, though it has crossed my mind… before being dismissed as the thoughts of a crazy person.
Film #26: I Wish
One noticeable difference between Asian horror and American flavour is that kids are fair game in Asian films, and I’ve seen plenty of films from Japan where kids have had a rough time of it (from Grave of Fireflies to a previous film by this director, Nobody Knows). Fortunately, this film is set in the Japan where kids can roam unattended, and will be taken in by random old people. The story starts with an urban legend that a wish made when two bullet-trains pass will come true, and a pair of boys (played by real-life siblings) whose parents have split up.
There’s a lot that I found interesting in this film, and a lot to like, The kid actors were good, and I liked the brother’s interactions, and the child-logic of wishing that the volcano erupt so that the family will have to move back to Osaka, and his parents will then have to get back together. But it was how the bullet-trains were treated as totems or natural phenomena that I found really nifty – the trains that the brothers caught were slow, provincial trains, and there was never any hint that they would think of riding the bullet-trains themselves.
I enjoyed it, and can imagine watching it again.
Film #27: Marley
This was a good documentary, with a fair sampling of excellent music, and it didn’t shy away from some of the less stellar aspects of Bob Marley’s history (his womanising, his poor choices about who to support in Africa); the only really annoying thing was that they presented all interviews without subtitles – which was okay for the patois, but quite hard going when trying to understand the French and German that turned up.
I learned a lot of things that I hadn’t known (for example, that they opened for The Commodores in an attempt to break into the black music market in the US), and unlearned the occasional myth (that he refused surgery on the cancer in his toe because his Rastafarian beliefs said that he had to be unmutilated, and that killed him; in fact, he had part of the toe removed). It is a real shame he died so young – if he had lived, I doubt that I would have agreed with everything he did, but I bet there would have been some glorious music.
Film #28: Beasts of the Southern Wild
Another child-centred film, but this time about a six year-old motherless girl called Hushpuppy through whose eyes we get to see life on the islands beyond the levees of New Orleans. Something is wrong with her hard-drinking father, though he won’t tell her what; and then most of the people flee as the river rises and the islands flood. We see the world as Hushpuppy imagines it to be, with water spontaneously boiling as her mother walks past (from her father’s description), and giant prehistoric horned boar, thawed from the melting ice, marauding across the countryside. It was pretty neat; I think I’d need a while before I’d want to watch it again, though.
Film #29: The Boy Who Was King
The thing about popular movements, I suspect, is that they’ll always seem a bit picayune when examined close up, since they’re made up of people, normal people, who will express themselves in ways that seem reasonable to them, and I doubt any movement in New Zealand would look any better under such a lens. But looking at the faded glory of a Communist party cell, as well as the woman who made her returned king a coat of many pockets, you get a feeling for how much the returned former monarch was made to stand in for people’s hopes and fears, rather than being seen for himself. This was why he was doomed as a politician, of course – people voted for him in order to bring back the old days of prosperity that they remembered, but that never existed, and would always be angry when he failed to deliver their dream.
He seemed a decent enough fellow – a Nazi collaborator, to be sure, but since he was six at the time, it’s hard to assign too much blame. I’m glad that I saw the documentary, but it felt too slow to want to see it again.
Film #30: The Minister
This wasn’t the film I expected to see. It was a character study about a politician, and did that well; the acting was good, and I never felt confused about what was going on. But it didn’t feel structured to me; it felt like I was watching a series of events, rather than a narrative. I mean, I wanted the main character to make good choices, and felt bad when he was making bad ones, so I certainly felt some connection; but I didn’t feel like there was a story that I was watching unfold. It might be my expectations about a political story should feel like that is leading me astray here.
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