The first movie was An Inside Job, about the origin of the financial crisis. It did a good job at gathering all the information together, and presenting a unified “here is why things went wrong”. Which is basically – people had big incentives to do bad things, and the freedom to shield themselves from the consequences of their actions. And then they got to write the rules, to make sure that this state of affairs to continue.
One of the most interesting points was how academia has been coopted, to a large degree, by the people they’re meant to be critically commenting on. The film implied that there were financial reasons why they might do that, but I suspect that there may be other factors in play as well: you tend to want to please those around you, and you sometimes give undue weight to what important people say. Another interesting fact they mentioned was that bond traders used to earn so little in the 60s that to support a family of three kids, one took a second job as a train conductor; and they spelled out how very old-guard the Obama financial administration is.
It’s kind of a scarey film, because I doubt anything will change, which means another, bigger meltdown is just a matter of time. At least it’ll cut carbon emissions, I guess.
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Next was The Marvellous Corricks, a collection of silent shorts made from 1901 to 1911, which a family group of performers bought and showed in between their other vaudville acts while they toured. In our showing, there was a narrator to give the films a bit of context, as well as a pianist – one of the points that narrator made was that there was a wide variety of practice before cinema settled down, where one theatre would show a film silent, another would have an accompanist, and another would have actors behind the screen lip-synching to the action – and the same reel might be playing simultaneously in theatres across the street to each other, in completely different ways.
The shorts varied in content – part of a “this is London”-style travel film; a sort of dance thing about a chicken laying golden eggs; and a man who is served beef from a bull, puts on horns and goes crazy (thinking he’s a bull), charging people and knocking them over. There was a very clever sequence in that last one where they went to the telegraph office to send a request to Spain for a matador: we see wires strung everywhere (because it is a telegraph office), and then, as the message is being sent, the letters of the message get pulled into view along the wires up the top of the screen (presumably like winching out clothes on a washing line). It was effective, simple, and fit in with the scene; it would be awesome to come up with something like that.
I’m glad I saw these.
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Next, I realised that my last film had taken rather longer than I thought, and so I made a dash from Te Papa to in front of the Embassy, where I was meant to meet my brother – luckily, C had saved my bacon once again, and was chatting with him inside.
After a quick talk with him, it was into the theatre for Lourdes, and a look at faith, miracles, and permanence, and the weird conflation of miracles and fame. The envy that a possible miracle produced reminded me of the story The Same To You, Doubled, about the Devil giving a man three wishes, but telling him that his worst enemy would get twice whatever the man got… and then ensured that this person was the worst enemy by naming a friend of the man who was doing just a little better than him already.
The problem of suffering is harder, to me, than the problem of evil, in terms of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent being… just as the story about the man and the disguised angel who kept on doing things that seemed malevolent (throwing a widow’s son off a bridge, stealing from a kind man and burning his house while giving to a miser) which actually had hidden benefits is a hard one to accept. I’m very much a “may this cup pass me by” guy, I’m afraid.
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Then I had to run, since I had five minutes to get from the Embassy to the Film Archive to see The Peddler — which I very much enjoyed. It was a documentary about a man who goes from village to village in Argentina, making films starring the locals. He only asks for food and board while making the film, and makes the money to go on working off the tickets and selling copies of the film. He used to make a new script every time, but has boiled it down to four or five scripts, and talked about (IIRC) making five movies in four months; he’ll sometimes go to nearby, slightly bigger villages if he needs, for example, firemen, and the village he’s in is too small to support a fire brigade, but the locals are the stars.
This is an impressive man – he gets a lot out of his actors, and though he’s in his 60s he’s not afraid to ride a bicycle while filming, or climb a power pylon, or build a trick coffin with a bottom that can fall out. He makes changes to the script on the fly, hands his precious camera over to someone local who has some experience using their own handy-cam, and he edits on video! What he’d be able to do with a bit of experience with Final Cut or Premier, I can’t imagine.
This kind of reminds me of the Nigerian film industry – local people making local stories with local jokes and plots. But the way this film-maker operates is almost like a itinerant playwright/director getting local people to put on a play; I wonder whether we’ll get to a stage where we can have the equivalent of the Porrirua Little Theatre players making films for the (very) local market… which I guess was the direction that Be Kind, Rewind was exploring.
Anyway, a good movie about an interesting man. I’d watch it again.
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After dinner, I went to the Paramount to see the Australian horror The Loved Ones. It was well done, in that it was horrific – there were a number of nice pieces of set-up and reveal, and some good use of humour to draw out the tension. There were a few tiny continuity niggles, but they only really emerged afterwards; and there was a lot of blood and a fair amount of vicious violence, which means it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea.
I didn’t find it as good and unsettling as Dogtooth; but it was a good horror film, and I think that the people I know who like horror and don’t mind gore would enjoy it.
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