Saturday brought an early-morning start with Animation for Kids, which was my first film with company. This was reliably good – only one that made us go, “Huh?” (Red Riding Hood, where a little girl riding an abused hobby-horse steals a riding dog from a little boy, and then rides happily on an adult). Most were straight-up slapstick (Ormie — a pig tries to get cookies from a jar on top of a fridge), funny narrative (Tally Ho, Pancake: a flying pancake inspires a variety of people to chase it, waving toppings of varying probability), or educational – Night Club is the example I’m thinking of, which had various nocturnal birds shown as urban clubbers, with the kiwi in a bright yellow bucket hat. I liked the idea and the graphics, but I wish they’d spent more time on the lyrics – I would like to be trying to remember them now, rather than just thinking, “Oh yes, they’re serviceable.”
Mushrooms in the Storm taught us we should buy mushroom hats, or we’ll be chased by angry villagers who don’t like the fact we saved them with annoying music; Garbage Angels taught us that chainsaws and hedge-trimmers will cull the weak high-chair from the herd of chairs (it was pretty nifty); and The Lost Thing gets a pass for encouraging people to trust cthuloid tentacle machines by being charming and cool.
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Next was The Woman With Five Elephants, about a Russian who is best known for translating the classics of Russian literature into German. It turns out that her father was swept up in one of the first of Stalin’s purges, and at fifteen she ended up looking after him when he was unexpectedly released (one of the rare few to be); he died of injuries sustained at the time six months later. There was a sad parallel with her son of fifty or so, who was hospitalised during the filming of the documentary, and later died; hearing her talk about how to deal with that sort of loss was hard but good.
There was an appreciative audience for her thoughts on how translation should be approached, and the crowd laughed at the interactions between the woman and her collaborators – the increasingly sour look of the musician as he waits for her to sharpen her pencils, the arguments about punctuation, the routine of starting work after the second cup of tea, etc. And the story of how a Russian came to retreat from Kiev with the Germans (without being a fascist herself) was very interesting – they didn’t shy away from the slaughter of the Jews that happened at Kiev, either.
It almost ( but not quite) makes me think that I might read these classics at some point.
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Then I met C for Kapai (chilli chicken & a choco-chai), and then we went to The Illusionist, which was pretty and sad; a marginally employed stage magician ends up looking after a girl who follows him from a performance in the Highlands to Edinburgh. There were plenty of images of the various vaudeville performers fading, each in their own way – some using their skills in other jobs, some selling up and moving on, and some selling up and slipping through the cracks. I think there’s something about the fact that they’re so public, so dependent on public sentiment, that makes out of work vaudeville performers, comedians or actors a more immediately tragic figure than, say, workers in a disappearing industry, like high-rise advertising painting.
They did a good job evoking Edinburgh, at least for me. But I can wish for a happy ending, even if it wouldn’t have been as strong a movie.
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It was back to the Film Archive for Asylum Pieces. When we watched a man mopping the floor in the foreground for thirty seconds, I realised that this is a film that I shouldn’t have seen tired; I don’t know whether it was this or muddy audio, but I found it hard to follow some of the dialogue. I know I ended up drifting off in places, on account of how refreshed I felt afterwards.
So – given those limitations, what did I think? I think… that it felt like the person making the film was very angry at Big Pharma for encouraging the medical profession to over-prescribe, and for putting out anti-depression medication that can increase suicide risk, and at the medical profession for not properly warning the friends and family about those risks. I felt bad for the person, but not compelled by their… well, they were statements rather than arguments.
There was some very interesting information about the history of mental asylums in New Zealand, and the way that most of the buildings were substandard and/or on unsuitable land. It felt like there were two films here, and I was only in the target audience of one of them.
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I had to jog smartly to get to the Paramount to see Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, but I’m glad I did. I think I grew up in the “Joan Rivers as a punch-line” era, and there’s certainly plenty that is ridiculous – for example, she claims she and her daughter reconciled after her husband’s death during the filming of a made-for-TV movie about them reconciling after her husband’s death, in which they played themselves. But while she came across as self-centred as a cat, she also came across as hard-working, shrewd and smart. And when she says, during the end-credits, that the film crew must be hoping she dies, because it would make great film – she’s not calling them vultures, she’s just thinking about what sells, because being a star is a business.
There were some interesting asides about how the comedy business has changed – she showed her filing draws full of jokes, and talked about how she prepared, but while she was worrying about being part of a show with a bunch of current big-name comics, she talked about the number of writers that each has. And because they started filming at a low, we got to see some of the dives that she was prepared to perform at to keep working – because she feels she has to always be working.
A good documentary, where I was entertained, and felt I knew more about stuff when I left.
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Dinner, and then off to the Embassy for Animal Kingdom. Not much to say about this one – an enjoyable Australian crime film. Well, “enjoyable” may be to fluffy a word, since it was violent and grim, with a truly evil mother figure… write-ups I’d read gave the impression that she was a godfather-like figure, but in actual fact she is more reactive than that; but she was cold as a spider once she decided the right thing to do. Not a happy film, but a good one.
I was too tired to stick around for the director’s talk, and so went to get my car… which apparently has a leak, since I had to mop out a bucket-full of dirty water out of the passenger-side once I got home, so it will be garaged until I can get it fixed. Thank goodness C has a car.
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