Does it make sense to buy a chaise lounge? Does it make sense to consider buying a larger home so that I would have a big enough library that a chaise lounge would be a sensible piece of furniture? Is it possible to build a library that big? (I may have availed myself of the Embassy’s chaise lounge at some point.)
Film #52: Monsieur Lazhar
The short before, Lambs, was well shot, and had plenty of good performances; but the story, “teen has to decide whether to continue to stick around and protect his siblings from the gang life that surrounds them, or head off to stay with his mate in the promised land of Auckland”, didn’t feel like it told me anything new, if you know what I mean.
On the other hand, I enjoyed Monsieur Lazhar immensely. The kids were really good, and the teachers seemed likeable and real. I wanted things to end up better than they did, emotionally, but it’s probably a better film because they didn’t. There’s a little hint of “the old ways of teaching were better”, with the main character using the old terms for grammar, using Balzac for dictation and changing the desks from a comradely semi-circle to regimented rows; but he also seems to listen to them, and is genuinely concerned. There’s also some remarks made about the strict rules banning teachers from touching students – the gym teacher talks about having to handle them like toxic waste. It makes me wonder what weird things we might be setting up by making “no touching” so important.
Anyway, the kids were cute, the performances good, and I enjoyed it.
Film #53: Existence
Hmm.
I am really glad that this got made, and thought that they worked around their budget constraints really creatively, and that it looked really good.
But.
I don’t think that I agree with how they hose to write the dialogue. It was quite formal, and didn’t feel like it fitted with the situation that the people were in. In fact, I think it would have worked a lot better, at least for me, if they had swapped things around – if they had made the main group of actors speak in dialect, and the antagonists speak (just as formally) in English. They wouldn’t have had to change a word, in essence – the dialect/translation would have distanced things enough that the formality wouldn’t have seemed as odd as it did, and would have played up the immigrant status of the people outside the fence.
It also felt a little slow; I think that this was a deliberate choice, but again, it distanced me from the film.
There was a lot to like about this film, and I hope more get made. But I wish I liked it more.
Film #54: Dreams of a Life
The short, Long Distance, was excellent; a young man rings home for Christmas, and… hmm. I’ll see if I can find a copy top point you at.
The feature was sad; very sad, as you’d expect from the story of the life of a woman who died in her flat, and was found three years later by the council, the TV still going. (The part of me that whistles past the graveyard wonders about the brand of the television.)
One of the reasons that the film is interesting, of course, is that the woman who died wasn’t a recluse – she was relatively young, with many boyfriends and an active social life. She had aspirations as a singer (though there are conflicting stories about how realistic those were), and met various famous people, including Nelson Mandela.
But she apparently lived her life in a way that let her slip away whenever she felt she had to – she didn’t keep in contact with her sisters, and her friends were whoever her boyfriends’ friends were; and she’d been changing jobs for a while, falling from financial/office work to cleaning (while trying to maintain her image to those who knew her). I guess I usually think of downward mobility as being something that happens to families, but that’s a bit daft of me – of course it can just as easily happen to individuals.
It also seems like there were weird race things going on, including a weird “acting posh” == “acting white”, which is all kinds of weird when you think about it.
Anyway, while some of the re-enactments were a bit manipulative for my tastes, I thought it was good.
Film #55: Animation Now 2012
I was delighted when there were almost no “swirling painted colours to the sound of free jazz” pieces this year. Indeed, there were some quite impressive shorts, such as the NZ-made Abiogenesis. I enjoyed Mulvar is the Correct Candidate, though it was fairly light; Swarming, though well done, was a bit too body horror for me. Yonalure: Moment to Moment made me think of animism, and Nobilis; En Parties made me worried for a woman rendered in primary colours and broad cubist strokes. Belly was weird and nifty, Moxiewas the sort of thing that would have turned up in the old Sick & Twisted compilations, Wild Life onwas a neat historically-inspired short about an Englishman on the Canadian prairie at the time of Haley’s comet, and The Lumberjack was a sad tale of madness. Lots of things worth seeing.
Film #56: Sleepless Night
Well, I didn’t have to worry about caffeine to keep me awake for this one. It started with a car chase through Paris (using the trick of keeping the camera low to the ground, as seen in this famous footage), and went on from there. The way that they dealt with injury reminded me of Die Hard – you were in no doubt that people were in pain, even as they kept on going. A very enjoyable action crime film.
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