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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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