Do You Hear That, Mr Andersen?

Getting up today, the radio was talking about the increasing Ebola death toll.  When I got out of the shower, the news had moved on to talk about doctors working when they’re sick, so as not to put pressure on their colleagues.

If this is foreshadowing, they’re being pretty heavy-handed about it.

* * *

Oli Missen was a short about a NZ youth ambassador for World Vision. He’s grown through the work, his family is proud, people need our help, wealth is distributed unequally, done.  I’m not sure that I learned anything much.

On the other hand, the film about Human Rights Watch, E-Team, felt much more informative and interesting.  People going into incredibly dangerous areas while the crimes they’re investigating are still going on, gathering documentation and witness statements, trying to be very cautious about how much they claim and what actions they call for — but still prepared to go to Russia to have a press conference about the Syria situation, and point out that Putin’s op-ed in the New York Times (that the rebels used sarin on their own people to gain sympathy) was rubbish, unless he had a way for those rebels to have stolen the shells and launchers used from the army, and then somehow acquire the hundred tonne of gas that was used. (That’s setting aside the number of people who would have to act in concert to make that work, and convincing all those people that killing their own mothers and children on that scale was a better idea than trying to kill the soldiers trying to kill them.)

I mean, I don’t doubt that the KGB could do something like that, which is why Putin keeps saying that people are doing it (like his pointing at the Ukranians when the Russian-backed rebels shooting down the Malaysian Airlines plane).  If you are a crook, you expect other people to believe people are crooks.

The investigators are brave in ways that I am not, and I hope that they continue to do this important work.  I kinda wish, in addition, that the International Criminal Court had investigators; and I hope that organisations like BellingCat can help to keep governments slightly more honest.

The film ended with a plea for one of the cinematographers to be freed from Syria.

* * *

When you make something into a policy, and put a bureaucracy around it, weird things happen. Mothers is about the way villages are required to find a quota of women to sterilize, a quota set by the local town.  If the village falls below quota, there’s a fine; if a woman with a child doesn’t agree to the surgery, that family must pay a fine each year they’re of childbearing age.  Perverse incentives, indeed.

We saw a number of the sort of cult-of-personality ceremonies that Chairman Mao apparently still gets — you get the impression that the Communist party is still strong out in the country, though how sincere the devotion is, who knows.  What is sincere, though, is how strongly people want to keep their job, and how willing they are to browbeat people into obeying rules that they don’t necessarily believe in.

The one-child policy dates from the 80’s.  Coupled with urban flight, who knows what will happen to China’s rural population?  Or their aged population, come to that?

* * *

Person in seat K-14 for the 4:15pm showing of Locke – you are an unpleasant man-child.  I do not need your vapid commentary during the movie, and if anyone else hadn’t picked up on the fact that, for example, a wife telling off a husband is annoyed with him, they’re not going to follow the rest of the movie either.  I enjoyed the movie far more once I moved far, far away from you.  I hope someone accidentally cuts your power in the middle of a game that you’re enjoying, or someone puts a poo in your letterbox.  And/or, in fact.

Ironically, Locke is a film all about taking responsibility for the consequences of your actions, even if it’s disastrous for you personally.  It all takes place in a car, with one character on the phone (or occasionally monologuing to the empty seat behind him as if it was his dead father, and isn’t it symbolic that he wasn’t imagined in the passenger seat).  Something has happened, and the Ivan Locke of the title has to try and deal with it, along with everything that was already happening in his life.  He’s passionate about his job, and loves his wife and kids, but he has to do the right thing; ideally, all the right things.

I wish that it hadn’t been spoiled by the guy who thought that his mates definitely needed all his thoughts on the movie right that second.  But even with that, it was a good movie.

* * *

I enjoyed The Green Prince immensely, even though I’m not sure whether I believed it.   The documentary was about the son of a founder of Hamas, how he was persuaded to work for Israel, and his relationship with his handler.

The film itself was very well made, and the footage they used was compelling; but it was extremely unclear how much was real, and how much recreation. And the interviews were well done, well shot and well edited… but it was just the guy and his handler, so smoothly put together that I wondered whether they’d got actors in to replace them.

I liked the film, and I enjoyed the film; but I don’t think I trust the film.

* * *

There are some actors that tell you nothing about the quality of the film that you’re about to watch, but you can depend on to take what they’re doing seriously.  Nicholas Cage is one of those actors — he’ll bring an intense energy to the role, and whether or not that works will depend on the script or the director.

For Joe, it works.  Joe is running a work gang poisoning trees (so that the land owner can cut them down and replace them with pine). He drinks too much, tries to avoid fights because he enjoys them to much, has trouble accepting the law’s authority (though he seems to get on fine with the ones who aren’t telling him what to do), and we see him try to do what he thinks is right most of the time. He meets a boy with a drunk father, and the boy works hard; Joe befriends him, and tries to help him.

(There is a sequence at the beginning that I assumed was a flash-forward, but I now assume I simply didn’t understand.)

I quite liked it.  One of the villains is almost pantomimish, with his scars and posturing, but that works in the context of the film.  I wouldn’t call it the deepest film I’ve seen at the festival, but I enjoyed watching it.

I’m going to Diplomacy on the 1st with C.  Unfortunately, the automatic seating did not seat us together. Fortunately, someone noticed, and put us together.  Unfortunately, they put us together for Dior and I at the Roxy on the same day, instead of Diplomacy at the Paramount.

Fortunately, I was able to come into the box-office, and got the new tickets.  Unfortunately, they weren’t that great.  Fortunately, someone in the back office also noticed that we were originally not seated together, and sent me an email saying that they’d fixed it.  Unfortunately, that meant that it wasn’t clear which tickets were the valid ones — the ones they “fixed”, or the ones I organized.  Fortunately, the ones in the email (which are much better seats) turn out to be the valid ones, and I was able to collect them yesterday.

And I hope that this is the end of that particular story.

* * *

The universe may
Be as great as they say;
But it wouldn’t be missed
If it didn’t exist.

That is a poem called “Nothing Is Indispensable : Grook to warn the universe against megalomania” by Piet Hein, and is one of the most pithy summaries I’ve ever seen of the Anthropic Principle — basically, the idea that if you’re examining the universe, then you must be in a universe that has settings that mean that you can exist to examine it, otherwise you wouldn’t be there examining it.

The worry in physics, of course, is that asking, “Why are the fundamental constants set up the way they are?” is the same kind of question as asking a lottery winner, “What did you do to win the lottery?”  If there are innumerable universes that don’t support intelligent life, then they’re like the millions who don’t win the lottery — and we won’t see any deep reason for why things are set up the way they are, because there is no deep reason.

This is the story of Particle Fever — CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, and the experiments designed to find some of the properties of the Higgs boson, to see whether there’s likely to be a deep underlying reason for the  fundamental constants (like supersymetry) or there’s no actual pattern (like the multiverse interpretations).

The film makes the very sensible decision to focus on the people, and the things they are looking for, and the consequences for those people, rather than the underlying reasons why the different theories expect the different values.  It was also good at showing how much the Large Hadron Collider is a feat of engineering, and a feat of human organization, as well as a physics experiment.

I liked it, even the bit where it went “full Peggle” at the end. (Thanks to the Crate & Crowbar podcast for that particular term.)

As an aside — in case you thought the “physics rap” was a new thing, according to this article the first photo ever put on the World Wide Web was of an all-girl doo-wop band called “Les Horribles Cernettes” that sang songs inspired by particle physics.  It’s good to know that the web started as they meant to go on.

* * *

I don’t know why the central conceit of Patema Inverted worked for me, where The Light Harvester didn’t.  Maybe being animated grants a certain amount of poetic license to a depicted world’s reality for me?

There’s not much to say — it’s a good, but not overly surprising, anime.  It didn’t pass the Bechel test, but it didn’t have gratuitous panty shots.  It sort of reminded me of 50s sci-fi, in the way that the world felt, and the belief in the inherent decency of people (and the cartoonish-ness of the villain), though you probably wouldn’t get such a complex female character in a 50s film. I enjoyed it.

* * *

“Cinema of Unease” is how some people describe that thread of NZ film that often stars Sam Neil or Bruno Lawrence – the sort of thing where you can see that things are going to go horribly wrong, but (if the film is working) you don’t want to look away.

Once it is obvious what is going on in Everything We Loved, it is also obvious that things are going to end badly. The question is only how badly, and in what ways.

I liked the details of the main characters’ lives that are revealing in passing (like the tape of old Dutch pop), and a bunch of little touches. But if I had been randomly watching it on television, I’m not sure I would have made it to the end; and I can’t imagine watching it again for fun.  It was good, but hard.

* * *

How do you fix corruption?

I mean, NZ is consistently rated as relatively free of corruption — but as an example, when my neighbor organized the fence to be put up between our two properties, the builder he found insisted on being paid in cash, and did not want to give an invoice.

Big Men examined two different situations — the maneuvering between Kosmos, the American company who financed the discovery of off-shore oil deposits in Ghana, and the government of Ghana; and the situation in Nigeria.  This was made more interesting by the fact that filming started during the bull market, went through the global financial crisis, and ended up around last year.

(I suspect Ghana is much better off dealing with Kosmos than with a large conglomerate, if they’re going to deal with an American company, since Kosmos probably doesn’t have enough clout to influence the American government; I would not be super-shocked to discover that the U.S. legal miasma that hung around Kosmos during the middle of the film was in part encouraged by Exxon-Mobile to drive the price down, for example.)

Many of the people in Nigeria that the documentary maker interviewed said, “Of course I want lots of money!  Everyone does!  You do too, don’t you?”  (Which makes me suspect that they don’t know the typical ROI for a independent documentary film.)

I was very surprised at the level of access that the documentary had with various people; the film-makers didn’t narrate, but sometimes made their attitude towards various speakers clear by what they chose to focus on (the flashy gold and diamond rings of the Nigerian energy minister, for example).  And how they got the Nigerian rebels to talk to them, I do not know.  And the Ghanian governmental officials said all the right things, but… let the money come in, and then let’s see how things go.

I thought it was a really good documentary, and I wish Ghana well, and I also wish there was an easy way to fix corruption.

* * *

There’s a saying about secrets: “Three people can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”

In Night Moves, we see a eco-activist cell making gestures at the sort of compartmentalization that you need for a successful conspiracy, but they don’t seem as serious about it as they need to be — they cut corners, and reveal things about themselves to to each other, and generally show that the kind of discipline that you’d need to be properly invisible is very, very hard.

We see them conspire; but that’s just the first part.  The main meat of the film is not the act, but the consequences of the act — how do you deal with unintended side-effects of your actions, how do you act in a way that’s not suspicious, can you trust the people that you thought you could trust?

The film isn’t dismissive of the ecological concerns, but it is dismissive of “eco-terror as theater”, which agrees with my already existing prejudices.  I enjoyed it, but it was tense.

I don’t really like Courtney Place after midnight on a Saturday, but worse is bumping into herds of young people on the outskirts — without other mobs to moo at and posture towards, they try and amuse each other with whatever’s about, which generally means you. I mean, I’m sure most of them mean no harm — but how can you tell the difference between the group that tried shouting out random men’s names at me to get a reaction, and the one that beat up that couple some time ago near the Basin Reserve?

I don’t begrudge the young and drunk taking over the town at night on the weekend; but I kind of wish that I didn’t have to run the gauntlet that they pose, either.

* * *

As expected, Animation For Kids was much better than Toons For Tots — in fact, I’d say that the worst of them was nearly on par with the best of the latter.  It started with the music video Apache, which I think I’d seen before, but was still pretty great.  Prince Ki-Ki-Do and the One Hundred Unhappy Mushrooms was about a small yellow chick with a crown, a spear, and two guardsmen tiger mosquitos (who we meet fencing each other) — they fly about righting wrongs.  It looks like a series, but I can’t find it online, which is a pity, since he had a great action pose. Ki-Ki-Do!

Snapshot was an excellent short about not seeing animals when you’re more intent on hunting them out than patiently waiting and looking (another one that I wish I could link to), and The Numberlys actually thanked Fritz Lang for inspiring their visual style (link is just a promo, sadly).

There were some moments that were odd because I am an adult watching, not a child — for example, my previous narrative experience meant that I immediately assumed Borrowed Light was about an impending catastrophe, rather than a desire to share something beautiful.  And Sausage (link to trailer) had the weird disconnect for me with linking “pure/genuine” and “sausage”, where sausages are the meat products most likely to contain… just about anything other than meat, actually.   And I was sad that the scientist in The New Species (Facebook page, best I could do) was dismissive, rather than, “I dunno, try this stuff.”

Anyway, don’t bother with Pohyper, Portlandia: Zero Rats was funny enough but didn’t feel complete in itself, and 5 Meters 80 was okay, but felt more like an animation demo than a story.  Snowflake reminded me of Charlie and Lola’s Snow Is My Favorite And My Best, except wordless and in Africa (these are all good things), and I wonder whether kids will pick up on the tics that the titular Mr Hublot exhibits (another good one).

So, a satisfying showing.  Maybe nibblings should go to this one next year.

* * *

Someone pointed out that the message of FEMEN, who are the subject of Ukraine Is Not A Brothel, is better summed up in the title of the film than by the film itself.  That’s kind of true, but the film isn’t trying to promote the organization; it is trying to understand it (or at least, how it was when the film was made).  How can you promote feminism and female empowerment by pushing out members not prepared to go topless, or who are not pretty enough; what does it mean when all your photographers are men, when the person running the organization is a man?  How do you reconcile protesting the exploitation of women with working in a nightclub as an “exotic dancer” to put bread on the table?

The women are serious, and committed, and took risks (sometimes foolish risks); but that doesn’t mean that people weren’t exploiting them.  There appeared to be a bunch of weird things going on in the Ukraine with attitudes to women, some of which were simply shown, rather than commented on.  For example, there was some old home-movie footage of the women in the movement, showing them as little girls; one clip was obviously of the family moving into a new house, with the father saying, “there’s the tv, there’s the wardrobe”.  And while his daughter is clamouring for him to film her box of toys, he casually pans over the pin-ups of bare-breasted women in cheesecake poses on the walls of their new home.

The filmmaker was asked what the people in the film thought of it.  She said that it wasn’t their favorite — that they preferred some of the more propaganda-oriented films — but that they understood that it was more of a history than a promotion tool.

I don’t know how I feel about organizations that are primarily about protest, about “getting the message out” over getting stuff done.  I mean, I see how it is important, but it feels like they are likely to attract people who are more interested in the noise than the solution… but how do you convince people of the need for a solution without noise?

The organization has since kicked out the Svengali-like “Victor”, and is mainly based in Paris.  I wish them luck, but I don’t think I’ll be donating money to them any time soon.

* * *

Apparently the booklet compares In Order of Disappearance to Fargo.  That seems a fair comparison — both are set in cold, polite, slightly parochial communities.  And there’s quite a bit of humour, and quite a bit of blood.

Basically, it’s a revenge thriller, and while it has some minor problems (why does the wife shut him out so quickly and irrevocably?  Why are the only three speaking female roles all wives?), it’s grim but good.  And I think I now know the symbol that you’d put on your gravestone if you were Norwegian and an atheist.

I might see if C wants to watch it.

* * *

Then it was back to Te Papa for Faith Connections, a documentary on the Hindu festival Kumbh Mela.  Children featured in a number of different contexts – for one, the film is made because the film-maker’s dad asks him to go to the festival to get him some water from the confluence of the three holy rivers during this festival.  But also, younger kids — a Hindu holy man raising an abandoned baby, a family desperately searching for their three year-old boy who may have been abducted for adoption, or for organ harvesting, and a runaway boy who swans about the festival charming policemen and sadhu (and the film-maker) with his cheeky daring.  There were Sashu showing their dedication and holiness by wandering around naked and covered in chalk, and by… er… suspending bricks from things not designed to hang bricks from.  And there was a guy wandering around in street clothes, who felt that was the way that he could best serve the community.

There were people working to get people who had lost each other back together, and give rides home to people who couldn’t get home, and distributing food and money to those in need (and marijuana to those wanting to empty their minds); but it was strongly hinted that soldiers on duty might have been at least complicit in the kidnapping of the young boy (given how he was eventually found).

This was a documentary where the filmmaker didn’t hide his presence, while never appearing on-screen; he says at the beginning of the film that the is going to the festival to get water for his father, and we occasionally hear him asking questions. But that just makes it feel like we are are travelling with him, rather than having it be his story.

It was an interesting glimpse into a world very different from mine.  I enjoyed it.

* * *

And then finally, Black Coal, Thin Ice, a Chinese detective noir.  I don’t know whether it’s differences in culture, but this didn’t work for me particularly well.  I mean, I followed it, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would — there were a number of parts that felt like they were meant to be symbolic, but just felt lumpen.  And that’s a shame, since I liked some of the plot (revolving, classically, around a sad young widow with secrets, and a down-on-his-luck ex-cop with a drinking problem).  Some sequences worked really well, like the confrontation with the initial suspects, back when the main protagonist was a cop; but some didn’t.

I like liking movies, and I’m sad that I didn’t like this one.

I cut it very fine indeed this morning, running across the road to the Embassy and sliding into my seat seconds before the lights went down. That’s not the fault of Wellington’s public transport; it’s just because I underestimated how long it takes to do the dishes. We should really get around to getting a dishwasher…

* * *

The Lunchbox was billed as a comedy, as I recall, which is… um… not exactly true. I mean, it certainly had funny moments, and I enjoyed it a lot, but the tone as a whole was more… wistful? Hopeful? In many ways, it was people who think that they’re trapped in situations, finding hope by communicating to other people.

The eponymous lunchbox is part of an enormous network that transports the hot meals that wives and small restaurants cook every day to the appropriate worker, via scooter, train and trolley, which hardly ever delivers the wrong meal to the wrong person… but, as a number of the characters say, “Sometimes the wrong train can take you to the right station.” The main characters, quite by accident, are given someone to hear them when they need it; and that makes them better, braver people. And it finished in the right place.

It was a good film, with excellent actors, and I might watch it again if it was on television; but I don’t think I will get it out of the video store just so that C can watch it.

* * *

It certainly wasn’t a deliberate plan on my part for my first couple of movies to have strong themes about older men who are valued at work, but haven’t quite found their place. I don’t think it’s an especially resonant theme for me — I’m annoyingly comfortable with my life, and am unlikely to feel the need to sneak away from my job to meet an idol. Actually, I don’t really like the idea of meeting famous people – what are you going to get out of it, beyond making someone you theoretically like vaguely uncomfortable? Actually, that’s also my attitude to meeting the good looking… or people in general, more or less.

But that’s at least part of the plot of Living Is Easy With Eyes Closed — the older main character, an English teacher who uses the Beatles lyrics for lessons, is driving to ask John Lennon (filming How I Won The War nearby) to include lyrics in the liner notes, as well as wanting to just talk to him for a bit. While on the road, he picks up a girl who is escaping the home for pregnant teens, and a boy who runs away, ostensibly because he doesn’t want to cut his hair, but more because he’s reacting to a controlling father.

Unlike the first movie, where the world seemed largely benign-to-indifferent to the protagonists, Franco’s Spain is, if not hostile, grumpily spiteful — lots of slapping, ear pulling, and instances of the strong bullying the weak. But although there’s plenty of darkness, and it’s sprinkled with hopes you know are likely to be dashed some time in the limbo of after-the-movie, there are also glimpses of freedoms, and it was basically a hopeful film.

Again, I liked it, would probably watch it again, but wouldn’t seek it out.

* * *

Okay, now that I have seen Kumiko the Treasure Hunter, maybe the theme that I’ve actually got is, “Being a woman often sucks.” The wife in The Lunchbox, the pregnant teen in Living is Easy With Eyes Closed, and now the main character Kumiko, all have their lives constrained by the choices those around them make for them..

Kumiko is an Office Lady, and 29. There’s a cruel Japanese term, “christmas cake”, which refers to women over a certain (ridiculously young) age — I will let TVTropes explain it. In the movie, this manifests as her mother constantly harassing her on the phone to either get a boyfriend or move home, and her boss basically telling her to quit so he can hire someone younger and prettier. But she’s convinced that she has discovered a way out – the money buried at the end of the movie Fargo.

The film is very good at communicating how disorienting the world is for Kumiko – she is often the only thing in focus, and the soundtrack grows overwhelming and dissonant. And she is brave, though often in ways that are self-destructive; and people are helpful, even when it would have probably been better for her in the end if they hadn’t.

This was not a hopeful film, and it was quite slow. I liked it, but I probably wouldn’t watch it again.

* * *

Considerably more upbeat is We Are The Best, about a couple of tweens who decide to start a band, more on a whim than anything… and then befriend a lonely girl who can actually play, so that she can teach them. It is a period film, and they are passionate about punk in a world that’s more interested in disco or the New Romantics. In fact, “passionate” is what they’re all about — why are their teachers making them play basketball when there are starving people in Africa? And obviously, their parents are terrible embarrassments, even though their friends think they’re pretty cool.

I’ve never been a teenage girl, and I’m sure that a lot of their antics would be a lot less endearing if I had to clean up after them. But the self-confidence and loyalty is plenty endearing, and It was nice to go to an upbeat film. (Though if they had the same attitudes and were in their early twenties, on the other hand, they’d be insufferable.) I’m tempted to watch it with C, just to get her take on it.

* * *

Finally, Why Don’t You Play In Hell was fun, but it felt like it didn’t cohere — like there were two different ideas for a film competing.

I would have happily watched a film where a film crew willing to die recruits a street punk and transforms him into an action star, then have the street punk be disillusioned by their lack of success, and then have him face a crisis, get the band back together, and have some sort of huge fight scene where they resolve the crisis.

I would also have enjoyed a film where a Yakuza boss decides to honour his wife’s sacrifice and support his daughter’s desire to be an action film start by filming his assault on a rival gang.

The two plotlines together… well, they work okay, but I just feel like they would have worked better separately.

That said, there’s plenty to like in the film, if you like this sort of film. It certainly doesn’t take itself seriously, and there’s plenty of blood and body parts scattered around. There’s some film meta-humour, including the yakuza crews, and a budgeting discussion between the Yakuza boss and the ostensible “director”, and I liked that the “queen of the hand-held shots” (one of the film crew) wasn’t sexed up.

But… I can’t help but feel that it would have been better if the film just focused on one storyline.

So, all in all — fun, but could have been better.

This is it — the write-up of my final day of the Film Festival..  I saw 88 films, which is about one under par for me.

(I went to Pacific Rim last night, which is why I’m still lagging behind with my write-ups.)

Something that I forgot to mention in my write-up of Computer Chess was how annoyed I was at the programmer who, when asked how many squares there are on a chess-board, answered “64”.  No wonder you’re having problems with your program if you can’t answer a simple question like that correctly; “squares” and “places a piece can occupy” are not synonymous.  “204” is a slightly better answer, since the whole board is a square, as is each of the four seven by seven squares, the nine six-by-six squares, etc.  But the best answer, in my opinion, would be to explain the ambiguity of the question, and ask what kind of answer is most useful to the person asking.

These are the things I think about when watching movies.  Sorry, guys.

Film #84: Cutie & the Boxer (and Butterflies)

The stop-motion short was about how much artists suffer, and how evil the people who give them jobs are.  Okay, no, that’s not fair at all — there’s a certainly a risk that doing a stifling version of something you are passionate about can end up killing that passion.  But… I don’t know.  There was something about this story that rubbed me the wrong way a little.

The feature did not hide where its sympathies lay; or perhaps it’s more fair to say that they the facts of the matter speak for themselves.  The “boxer”, Ushio Shinohara (I think they used the anglicized name order?) and the “cutie”, his wife Noriko, are two struggling  New York artists — in fact, Ushio has been a struggling artist since he arrived there from Japan in the 60s.  He specializes in giant cardboard sculptures of motorbikes, and canvases that he punches with paint-filled sponges tied to his boxing gloves.  She is 20 years younger than him, and also came to New York to become an artist; he charmed her, knocked her up, and then she stopped doing art for a while to raise their son… who, it is implied, has a drinking problem, like his father before him.

We see Ushio making new art for an exhibition — and their rent and utilities bills are such that they really need to make a sale.  The Guggenheim is interested in purchasing one of his paintings, in particular one that had been featured in journals… but it turned out that he’d given that away to a friend while drunk.  But someone in Japan is interested in buying a sculpture, so off he flies  to Japan…

Noriko, on the other hand, has started painting again — a semi-autobiographical series of pictures, almost comics, telling the story of her life since she came to New York through the characters “Cutie” and “Bully”.

But that stark description simplfies the relationship in a way the movie doesn’t.  It’s clear that they both still have strong feelings for each other, and Noriko credits Ushio for mentoring her, and pushing her in her art.

I have no real interest in this sort of art — I’m not offended that it exists, I’m just not moved by it.  But I’m glad that they are still going, and don’t seem likely to starve; and I enjoyed the film.

Film #85: Twenty Feet From Stardom

What’s the main thing that this film reminded me about?  It would have to be the douchebaggery of Phil Spector — taking the recording of “He’s a Rebel” sung by Darlene Love, and attributing it to The Crystals, for example.

This was a film about backup singers, and how some of them want to be stars in their own right.  All of the women (and handful of men) shown sounded amazing… but you also heard some of their solo work, and that was much more varied in quality.  It showed, sadly, that just having a good voice (and being pretty) isn’t enough — getting good songs is important too.

But it made a bunch of interesting points — for example, that the backup often get the hook of the song, so when people sing along to a pop song, it is often the backup singers they’re singing along with.  And people also talked about how that sound has gone out of vogue, and that many artists just get cheaper people in and tune them electronically, rather than paying for expensive professionals.  On the other hand, there were no shortage of stars willing to sing the praises of some of these singers.

I enjoyed the film, and there were plenty of good tunes; I’ll probably look up some of the artists (like Lisa Fischer) to see what their independent stuff is like.  But I’m not sure I feel that bad for people who never become as famous as they wanted to be.

Film #86: The Crowd

This was the silent film with an orchestra.  A young man comes to New York city, meets a girl, marries, has kids… but his life never quite gets the breaks that he’s sure are coming, and he never has quite the amount of elbow-room for bad choices that he thinks he has.

This was quite a sad film, for all that it ended on an upbeat note.  I was impressed by some of the effects that they managed to do at the time (for example, showing his internal state by superimposing images on his forehead).  And a live orchestra is always fun… some people play The Dark Side of the Moon over the top of The Wizard of Oz, so maybe it would be possible to write a score to be played over something like The Room?

It was an interesting film, but I don’t think I’ll seek it out to watch again.

Film #87: Museum Hours

A slow film that I quite enjoyed.  He is an older Viennese museum guard with a varied past; she is a relatively skint middle-aged Canadian pulled to the city by a relative in a coma.  Sadly, they do not fight crime.  Instead, we hear him commenting on his job, and on the people he watches, and about the art that he sees; and we see her talking to a cousin, a woman that she’s not seen since she was young, but for whom she has flown half-way around the world on borrowed money.  The two protagonists meet by chance, and he helps her, because… why not?

This is not an action-packed film.  It is not romantic, or sexy.  But… there’s an art historian that the man overhears, who talks about how the the Bruegel’s painting The Procession to Calvary might not be about Christ’s carrying of the cross; it might be about the little boy in blue running about in the background.  There’s a texture to the world, detail all around us, and it can as beautiful and meaningful as any carefully posed piece of art.

And it made me want to see more of Bruegel’s art, so there’s that, too.

So… definitely not for everyone, and maybe not something I need to rewatch, but I liked it.

Film #88: The Only Lovers Left Alive

This was my last movie of the festival.  A Jim Jarmusch film about vampires, starring Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston sounded like my idea of a good time, and I wasn’t wrong.

Tilda Swinton is always intense, but she also gets to be playful here as Eve; Hiddleston is brooding and dark as her lover Adam.  They get to be the kind of cool that people around them want to be like, and we get to see the tension between making art that you want others to respond to, and the need for anonymity.

It looks gorgeous, and is frequently funny without making fun of itself.  It is sad about the wastefulness of people, and makes good use of decaying Detroit to make its points and set its mood.  The vampiric powers are there, but they’re more evident in how much Adam and Eve know and have seen than anything particularly flashy; but that makes the small glimpses of supernatural power we see all the more effective.

Random things from the screening: when one of the cool old guitars was broken, I heard a couple of people in the audience make an involuntary sad noise.  And when the two leads talked about Eve’s “sister” turning up, I thought we were going to get a Lilith reference, but it went in a different direction instead.

I liked it.