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2010 Film Festival, Day 14

Friday, July 30, 2010

I have mixed feelings about Carlos. I mean, I enjoyed it – it was split into three two-hour parts, so I had two perfectly good chances to walk out if I didn’t – but it had a strange structure for a movie, presumably because they wanted to stick as closely to history as they could.

A few things stood out for me with this film. One (which might not be true in real life, but seems consistent across various depictions) was how often self-styled revolutionaries would accuse people who annoyed them or didn’t accept their whims as “petit-bourgeois”, and yet seemed to be just as attached to the material markers of success as those they condemned, making seem more like parasites than society-changers. There was also a certain amount of authoritarianism, with plenty of talk about being a revolutionary soldier and following orders – though it always seems to be the one talking about the need for discipline that is doing the ordering. I wonder whether, in the case of Carlos, “machismo” had anything to do with this? He certainly didn’t treat the women in his life very well, and didn’t seem to trust them in the same way.

I suppose that this might make his testicular problems later in life an ironic comment on his gradual fading from the international scene. This was one of the weirdest things for me, I think – I tend to associate this sort of terrorism, the sort of Baader-Meinhof stuff, as being part of the seventies, but Carlos was active in the eighties, and wasn’t caught until 1994.

I certainly feel like I have more of an idea of who he was, what he was doing, and the world he was doing it in; but I kind of wish I had a better idea of how everything fits together. I liked that they showed the diversity of opinion within the movement, with one of the group (who later breaks away) expressing disgust at two Germans separating out the Jews in a hostage situation – he was opposed to Zionism as well, but on the basis of politics, not race.

(I wonder whether this is why the police and our political masters got so anxious about our own “terrorist training camp”; the seventies feel like a long time ago, but they probably left a lasting impression on those who were young adults at the time. And except for the people who blew up a rail bridge in the 50s at Huntly, Wikipedia tells me all our bombings were in the early 80s, when those people would have been coming into power. This isn’t to excuse them; but it’s easy for me to forget how different the world was when those making decisions were learning how things work. And it makes me wonder what the post-Cold War generation will think about these things, and us.)

As to the movie – as I said, I enjoyed it, but I don’t think I’ll be watching it again soon.

* * *

I then went to The Strange Case of Angelica, which was… odd. It was kind of a ghost story, I suppose; but it had a stage-play feel, with people delivering their lines one after the other at a measured pace. This feeling was enhanced by the camera-work: often we’d have one long wide shot of a scene, rather than a sequence of shots to tell the same story, and there was very little camera movement other than the occasional slow pan. And I don’t know whether it’s the translator or the dialogue, but some of the scenes had a strange, Waiting For Godot quality. There’s also a weird mix of old and new technologies – modern cars, but old film cameras, for example.

(Basic story: a recently married woman dies, and a young Sephardic man is summoned by her mother to take some pictures of her that night; he thinks he sees her smile at him through the viewfinder, and falls in love. Then he becomes more and more withdrawn and strange, as he sees various apparitions…)

I found it interesting but slow. Most of the interest was in the odd way they chose to film the story, rather than the story itself, however. I’m glad I watched it, but I don’t think I’d watch it again.

* * *

My final film, which I got to watch with C, was Nostalgia For The Light, a movie about… well, history and Chile, really. It was set in the Atacama desert, and focused on three groups – the astronomers who use its thin air and zero humidity to study the stars; the archaeologists who use its dry conditions to study the remains of Pre-Colombian civilizations; and the women who search for the remains of those “disappeared” by the Pinochet regime. They are all looking for answers from the past, but only the last group has to battle society’s desire to actively forget.

I hadn’t realised how much the military regime tried to hide what happened – they dug up buried bodies and hid them again, for example. They also dismantled the concentration camp up there, but one of the prisoners was an architect who deliberately paced out the grounds of all the camps he was put in, and who drew them from memory when he was exiled to Denmark. And this legacy touches unexpected aspects of Chile – one of the organisers of the country’s astronomical society was grabbed with her grandparents when she was one, and the grandparents were told that they had to give the location of her parents, or this one year-old would be “disappeared”. They gave the parents address, and then had to raise their grand-daughter themselves.

The pace is contemplative, but it felt respectful of the people who’ve gone. It made me wish that the women searching for remains on the plateau could be given satellite imagery, since any activity is likely to have left a mark.

I enjoyed it, though it did feel long.

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2010 Film Festival, Day 13

Thursday, July 29, 2010

My first movie wa GasLand, a rather depressing documentary about drilling for natural gas in the US. One of the key points is that the main reason things have reached such a state is that Dick Cheney, as Vice President, managed to get natural gas companies exempted from a variety of acts that would have regulated their environmental impact, and the EPA was directed to ignore them. The fact that some people now have water coming out of their taps that can be set on fire should come as no surprise to anyone. Nor should images of workers covered in toxic chemicals (which their work supervisors assume are fine), or carcinogenic fumes streaming off containers towards schools, or… good grief, just general environmental irresponsibility, caused by the companies knowing that people have to wait until something bad happens before they can sue, and then they have to prove that something bad happened, and most will eventually run out of money or fortitude, and those that don’t can be hit with non-disclosure agreements as part of a settlement if they look like they’re too close to winning; and by the time that any of this even starts to make it’s way through the courts, the people making these decisions inside the company will have already gotten their bonuses for increased profits from their irresponsibility… argh.

I’m actually surprised that there’s a profit in these wells… and perhaps, if the people running them were made to pay for them properly, there wouldn’t be. The film goes into some detail about how much water is used in each well, how much needs to be processed once it’s used, how it’s stored in pits (some of which are unlined) and is sprayed in the air to help evaporation (which also helps evaporate the hundreds of toxic chemicals, but hey, they’re exempt from the Clean Air Act). It also talks about how many truckloads are needed to set up a well, how they’re scattered, untended, throughout public land near Yellowstone Park, and show a congressman who openly admits to being funded by the petroleum industry going into bat for them during a hearing.

This reminded me, in part, of NZ’s recent mining sideshow, although that was at the beginning of this process, rather than an end result such as this film examined. They share the presumption that resources must be used immediately, even though they’re going to become more valuable the longer they sit there, and might never be worth what is destroyed to get them; and the confused thinking that profits are profits, and if there are millions to be made it doesn’t matter who makes them, since money trickles down… except that it doesn’t. The difference in the NZ story is that here they have to make a show of scaling back, so they asked for the moon and then say, okay, we’re listening, we’ll only do the stuff we were going to do anyway, but now you think we’re compromising, and that we listen to you instead of blatantly manipulate you.

One of the problems is that the side that wants to make money already has a bunch of money to spend on making their interests sound like your interests, whereas the people who are passionate enough to care make us uncomfortable, since who knows what a passionate person might do? And anyway, some of them also hold ideas that are obviously bananas, probably go around healing their ferns with macramé crystals, and if one of the gets one thing wrong, there’s obviously something off about anything any of them believe – it stands to reason, or at least to comfortable prejudice.

It’s easy to think that we wouldn’t stand for a Cheney-level of chicanery with our environmental laws; but it’s not as if we don’t have our fair share of toxic sites ourselves, and awkward questions about who should be cleaning them up…

Bah. Anyway, the documentary was pretty good, although you could tell that they didn’t have much of a budget, since there wasn’t the polished graphics, helicopter shots and expensive soundtrack of, say, Inside Job. But the problem that they looked at is a problem that may spread, and I think that it’s really good that it was made, so that communities that this sort of drilling might affect can use it to educate and alert people about what might happen, regardless of the dollars that the drilling companies might dangle.

* * *

I had a nice break (as you can tell from how much I wrote), and then it was off to The Runaways, the mildly fictionalized rock biopic of the aforementioned band. It was bursting with energy – though with the amount of drugs they were shown consuming, I did wonder how they were able to stand up, let alone perform. Their manager was wonderful, prowling around like a hungry velociraptor, dropping pearls of rock wisdom and blatantly ripping off anyone who would stand still long enough for him to get his claws in. The film did a good job in showing the different attitudes that the two leads had towards the music, and if it wasn’t entirely factual, it at least felt true – though you felt by the end that it was a crying shame that Joan Jett never attained the success of, say, Debbie Harry.

(One thing that I regret was that we never got much of an idea of the other three members of the band, since I spotted some actors that I’ve enjoyed watching before; but you’ve only got a certain amount of time, which means you can only fit in so much story. Also, I read somewhere that one of them had was a replacement character, since there were potential legal issues about depicting the real one.)

I enjoyed the film, and I’m thinking about looking around for some of the original music.

* * *

24 Carat was an enjoyable crime film, with the action centred around the capable car-jacking daughter of a fence with big dreams and bad luck, and a debt-collecting former boxer with a son and trouble from his bosses wife. Together, They Fight Crime! No, wait…

It had tension, and plenty of places where I wasn’t sure which way things would go.  Essentially, it was about trust and betrayal — who you trusted, and whether you deserved trust given to you.  I enjoyed it.

* * *

My last film was also in the Paramount Bergman theatre, which gets quite stuffy if there’s a full house. The oppressive atmosphere was appropriate for Ajami, a gritty Middle Eastern street-level movie which starts with a boy being killed by two men riding by on a motorcycle. It turns out that they thought he was the nephew of a cafe owner, who killed someone from their clan when they came in shooting an AK47 trying to extort protection money. There is a lot of this in the movie, quite cleverly done – they will show something happening, usually violent, and then show the reason that it happened, jumping back and forth in time as necessary. And when the story gets back to the event you’ve already seen, seeing it from a different angle sometimes shows something different about the event.

In some cases, you can tell the actors are non-professional, but the culture is alien enough that this generally doesn’t matter; in fact, it adds to the documentary feeling. I didn’t spot that one of the families involved was Christian until it was stated outright quite late in the film, but it’s possible I missed something.

The fact that family is intrinsic here, and that bad luck or bad judgement on the part of one member of the family can result in tragedy for any or all other family members is a strong message. Another is that you act according to the information you have, filtered by your prejudices and assumptions, and amplified by the emotion you feel, so in an atmosphere of racial hatred, revenge, fear, and a culture of not backing down, tragedies won’t just occur, they’ll tend to multiply.

(Also, the problem with having a system where feuds can be settled with blood money means that there’s a perverse incentive to provoke and escalate, if you’re a large enough family in a strong position, but that’s a minor point.)

Anyway, despite some flaws, I enjoyed it. Possibly not enough to seek it out again, though.

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2010 Film Festival, Day 12

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Tuesday did not start auspiciously. I had done a lot less of yesterday’s review than I thought, so I didn’t manage to do the second and third read-through that I prefer, to limit how much of an idiot I appear (like leaving in a whole lot of question-marks where I had intended to go back and look up names); and then I dashed down to the bus-stop, only to be told by a passing cab-driver that the busses were on strike; and then I somehow managed to leave my Snapper card in the cab, which made it a pretty expensive ride. Thank goodness I enjoyed Teenage Papparazzo, or I’d be in a pretty bad mood now.

I haven’t seen Entourage, so the resonance between Adrian Grenier’s role and his life wasn’t as striking for me, but he was engaging and likeable. In fact, all the celebrities that were interviewed came across well, particularly Paris Hilton… she didn’t appear to be particularly insightful or anything, but she seemed perfectly pleasant. Of course, it’s tempting to wonder how much of that is in the editing – Charlie Brooker’s excellent Screenwipe underlined how much narrative can be created in the editing booth, and Grenier would be crazy to alienate people on either side of the paparazzi divide – but the fact that Grenier shows and admits to his mistakes gives him some slack.

You could see Austin, the kid paparazzo, progressing from someone who is exhilarated about what he’s doing to someone who is a bit of a self-absorbed dick; how much of that is the transition from tweens to teens, how much is him getting used to (and thus blasé about) the presence of Grenier, and how much of it was the fame… it’s hard to say. But one of the better bits of the film was when Austin and his mother were shown an early cut of the film, and we got their reactions; and then when Grenier went back a year later.

There was also a lot of meat in the rest of the film – the aggressive defensiveness of the paparazzi, the obvious adrenaline rush from chasing people, the talk about how they get lauded for breaking rules to get the shot, for example… some of their attitudes reminded me of the Stanford prison experiment, though not directly. Or Alec Baldwin pointing out the the same group that owns the company that makes his movie also owns the show that he goes on to promote his movie, and the channel that tears down both him and his movie. Or the academics that appeared, talking about parasocial relationships, and the way that everyone was celebrity when we lived in tribes, and how gossip was generally less about the subject of the gossip, and more about affirming social bonds.

(There was also a suggestion that the modern world makes people very conscious of themselves, because there is so much media around, and it’s the nature of media to address you directly, in a way that a natural object, like a tree, doesn’t.)

I think that there’s something interesting going on about the star actor/character actor divide, and I wonder whether things will change as stars are shown to have less of an effect on the box-office than they have in the past. I’m also aware that I have an ambiguous relationship to celebrity gossip; I dislike that sort of women’s magazine, but I’ll occasionally visit Go Fug Yourself, and I went to (and enjoyed) the Joan Rivers movie. Eh, I’m out of time; I’ll think about this more later.

* * *

A Prophet, at the Embassy, was a pretty straight-up prison story – guy with no skills goes into prison for a minor offence, ends up a hardened criminal organising drug smuggling and killing people. The interplay of the different nationalities was interesting, but nothing particularly surprising happened, apart from the main character having some minor visions (seeing the first guy he killed, and deer running away). That’s not to say it was bad; everything that needed to happen, happened. It was just pretty good.

* * *

If I was going to sum up The Wind Journeys, I think it would be: deliberate pacing. Not slow, precisely, but deliberate. Also, accordion-based rap battles, where the current champion is winning because of a sorcerous talisman… but all in a low-key way. (Nothing overtly supernatural happens.)

It’s the story of a travelling musician who has just buried his wife, and is going back to his master to return his accordion, a great black beast with horns on the front. A boy, who may or may not be his son, stubbornly follows him out of the village and joins him on his quest.

It was quite stylized, with lots of set pieces where weathered men sit or stand, eyeing each other up. And quite a bit of music, too. I think you’d have to be in the right mood to see it, but I quite enjoyed it.

* * *

Wah Do Dem wasn’t quite what I was expecting, possibly because I expected most of it. A hipster wins a cruise to Jamaica, but his girlfriend pulls out two days before they’re meant to leave. He drifts through the middle-aged and elderly crowds like a tousled refugee, and then makes a number of mistakes that are either dumb or fortuitous, depending on how his life turns out after the movie ends. The review on the Film Festival website called it “unpredictable”, but I don’t know whether that’s quite what I’d call it… while there are a few times where things could go multiple ways, but when a bus breaks down and you go off to play soccer, it’ll leave without you – that’s just the way things work.

I liked it, but didn’t love it; it was fine.

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2010 Film Festival, Day 11

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Monday started at the Paramount, and the enjoyable Waste Land. This film was about those who make a living by picking out recyclables from one of the world’s biggest, fastest-growing garbage dumps (Rio de Janeiro’s Jardim Gramacho), and the Brazilian artist Vik Muniz, who went there to work with these people and produce artworks from the material they collect. His idea was that the profits from the works they made could be given back to this community, helping them pull themselves out of poverty.

This was an excellent, enjoyable doco; you got a feel for the lives of the people from the dump before the art project started, and it showed the joy they took from being involved. One of the best things was that it showed that these were not ignorant people – the head of their newly-formed union talked about the books that he had read (books pulled out of the garbage), and mentioned how helpful he had found Machiavelli’s The Prince in understanding the little fiefdoms that the favelas represented for the local gangs, explicitly comparing it to the situation in Machiavelli’s Italy. It was also good to see the people around the artist worrying about whether they are doing the garbage pickers a disservice, gving them unrealistic dreams or expectations; but the artist decided that showing them that bigger dreams are possible wasn’t a bad thing. Thankfully, the follow-up implied that most of the people involved did manage to make a start towards what they had wanted to do.

To hare off on a complete tangent for a minute – photography, particularly art photography, is kind of weird to me. I mean, it’s sort of like music composition, in that it could theoretically be infinitely replicated; but it’s treated like… well, not quite like painting, but perhaps like lithographs, where only a few copies can exist. I think the root of it is that I’m a bit weirded out by value created by artificial shortages, that’s all.

Uh, anyway – the artist’s work (both what he did before the film, and what was created during the film) seemed interesting and accessible to me, and the people that he photographed (and then turned into montage) were strong and interesting. I liked this film.

* * *

Unfortunately, the next film was Police, Adjective… which was good at evoking the tedium of a police stakeout, and made a good point about the meaning of words, and the role we allow discretion to play in policing. But it was SOOOO SLOOOOOOOOW. I mean, not quite The Man From London slow, since I managed to stay awake; but pretty damn slow, nonetheless. Apparently some reviewers thought that it was a humorous commentary on I-don’t-care-because-I’m-bored.

Not a film for the tired.

* * *

Then I walked over to the Film Archive for Collapse, which was a mix of an interview with Michael Ruppert (done in a single session) with archival footage to illustrate the interview. It sprang from quite a different film – they were trying to make a film about the CIA’s involvement with the drug trade, and were interviewing him in connection with his claim that the CIA approached him in the early 70s, while he was in the LAPD, to help them move drugs. But that wasn’t what he wanted to talk about – he wanted to talk about how civilization was going to collapse, and why.

They had archival footage of him pointing at the mortgage-backed derivatives as the likely source of the collapse, and warning of the crunch in credit, which is certainly something he got right; and you could feel the passion he had when he warned of the dangers introduced by fiat currency, compound interest and… er, I can’t remember the term, but it’s when the bank can lend out more money than it has, because people aren’t all going to ask for it at once.

But… I don’t know. He was talking about the need to hoard physical gold against the coming apocalypse, which seemed weird to me. I mean – he argued against paper currency because you couldn’t eat it or use it to run your car, but that’s equally true of gold, and at least paper is lighter. I think that he’s right that there are shenanigans going on with the money supply, but I’m more worried about how convinced he is that he’s got the answers, rather than the questions he’s asking.

An interesting film that asks worrying questions, but gives unsatisfying answers.

* * *

I stayed at the Film Archive for A Film Unfinished, which was based on a piece of unfinished Nazi propaganda, filmed in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942, just before people were shipped off to the camps. The film-maker combined the original footage with diary entries from the leader of the Ghetto, reports by the local SS commander, an interview which had been done with a Nazi cameraman after the war, and filming a handful of people who had survived from the ghetto as they watched the original film. They had also found a reel of out-takes, various practice runs where they showed how many of the shots were set up – for example, scenes where starving beggars come up to shop windows full of meat.

I was reminded of “Visions of the Past” by Robert Rosenstone: “For we can always see and feel much that the people in old photos and newsreels could not: that their clothing and automobiles were old-fashioned, that their landscape lacked skyscrapers and other contemporary buildings, that their world was black and white, and haunting, and gone.”

This was a hard film to watch, especially the gauntness of most of the faces, and the mass graves of those who starved; but I’m glad I did.

* * *

Then it was off to the Paramount and Lebabnon, the film of four young Israeli soldiers in a tank as the Lebanon war kicks off. There is a stencilled slogan in the tank that says something like, “The tank is only iron, the man is steel”; we get to see how much of a lie that is.

It is claustrophobic and intense; we only see the outside through the restricted sights of the gunner, and inside of the tank is grimy and grim. While the tank itself survives a large amount of punishment, you understand how terrifying it is to be one of the largest targets on the battlefield, and how hard it is to pull the trigger when you can see faces instead of barrels.

I’m not sure I’m ready to watch this again any time soon.

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2010 Film Festival, Day 10

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

I keenly resent paying for parking during the weekend, but I ended up parting with $6 to park near Te Papa for Howl. (I could claim that I was trying to make some post-modern point about the mundanity of the bourgeoisie in the face of Art, but no, I’m just cheap about parking.) My knowledge of modern American writers is minimal (unless you include genre or pulp writers), and I’ve not read On The Road or Howl, so I wasn’t quite sure what I was letting myself in for, but I enjoyed it.

There were some oddities, like Mary-Louise Parker being credited, and then appearing very briefly as an expert witness for the prosecution in the Howl obscenity trial; but they make the case against censorship very eloquently, the animation was beautiful, and the actor playing Allen Ginsberg is great.

There was also an old television with a burn-in that looked like an eye that was muy creepy, and there was a point during the “interview” with Ginsberg where the golden light and the almost marionette-like movements of the actors arms made my brain go, “The animation on that model is pretty well done”, sort of climbing down the other side of the Uncanny Valley – I think that’s just work creeping up on me, rather than any reflection on the film.

I’m not sure I’ll read the poem; but I’m much more likely to now than I was.

* * *

Next, I drove home to pick up C, and then we went up to the Penthouse for His & Hers, an Irish documentary about … well, women, and their relationship with men, moving from girls just able to speak to a woman in her 90s. It started with the Irish proverb, “A man loves his girlfriend the most, his wide the best, but his mother the longest.”

In some ways, it reminded me of Babies, in that none of the hard things were really touched on – all the girls seemed to be in stable homes, all the teens were interested in boys, the clashes of wills the wives went through were verbal rather than physical, and the mothers and grandmothers were all still in touch with their kids.

On the other hand – given that this sort of documentary would normally focus on the extreme and the shocking, seeking out pathos or drama, it was kind of nice to see someone taking a different tack, showing the norm rather than the confrontational.

It was nice to watch, and I could imagine sitting through it again if it came on TV.

* * *

C stayed for Farewell, which was a Cold War spy story about the French Embassy official (an engineer) that was approached by a colonel in Russian Intelligence. This officer had decided that the USSR had become ossified, in part because they had become too reliant on stealing research from the West (as a result of becoming so good at it). In order to shake things apart so his homeland could grow, as well as decreasing the chance of war by making clear to the West how unprepared they were, he wanted to give pass on information; but the Americans were closely watched. The Frenchman he chose had only loose links to the Intelligence community – his boss knew someone at the DSE (the French equivalent of the FBI or our SIS, I think), which was ignored by the KGB because they were only meant to operate inside France. But this lack of training, which made him so useful (because he wasn’t suspected), meant that he felt the pressure more acutely – and his wife and family never signed up for such high stakes.

This film was very good at evoking the feel of the time, and managed to have you on the edge of your seat whenever a truck appeared. It wasn’t extremely fast-paced, but it was good, and I’d happily watch it again.

* * *

C and I ate together, and then she disappeared and I went back to Please Give, a quiet character study set in New York about a couple who buy vintage furniture from the dead and sell it at a mark-up; the wife feels guilt and gives money to the homeless (or, more embarrassingly, to those who appear homeless to her), but the husband seems more blasé about everything, though events suggest that he may be affected, too. They have a daughter, who is dealing with bad skin and a mother who will give a homeless man who they don’t even know a $20, but won’t pay for her daughter to get really cute jeans that are only $200.

There’s also an old woman that the couple are waiting for to die, so they can buy her apartment and expand theirs into it; she’s looked after by one of her grand-daughters (who works in a breast-cancer screening clinic, and is nice), and ignored by her other grand-daughter (who works in a beauty clinic, and isn’t). And then… things happen that illustrate their characters, and why they act the way they do.

I quite liked it.

* * *

Finally, I saw Double Hour, an Italian thriller that did something very interesting that I don’t want to talk about, because I wouldn’t want to spoil it for people who haven’t seen it. There isn’t much in the way of slam-bang action, more of a dawning realisation of what is going on as the film progresses. I enjoyed it, and I’m tempted to watch it a second time to see if my impression is different if I know various things from the beginning.

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2010 Film Festival, Day 9

Monday, July 26, 2010

The first movie was Babies at the Embassy with Jenni and C. It was the documentary equivalent of a light romantic comedy – they didn’t show anything hard, tragic, or grim. It was just four babies, in four different countries, being adorable and loved. That’s not to say it was content-free, but I suspect that the information lies more in our reactions to what we see: the palpable concern for for Namibian baby as it crawls through puddle-deep running water (proving how deeply engrained the “children can drown in a teaspoon of water” message is), for example, or the equally palpable cringe when the white San Franciscans sat around in a group singing about the Earth Mother, hey-ya!

The African and Mongolian children definitely stole the show near the beginning, possibly because they were allowed more opportunities to express themselves – the parents were shown as being much more hands-off, whereas the Japanese and American babies seemed more closely supervised. But they all had an opportunity to shine, though the most memorable moment for the Japanese baby was the great trauma when she is unable to push a stick though a hole in the disc, which causes such great frustration that she has to throw herself backwards and wail… and then pick up a book, look at a page, and then remember she’s frustrated, and wail some more..

Like a meringue animal, it was cute and sweet and probably fine for you in moderation, but wasn’t particularly nutritious. I might watch it again if it were on TV, but I don’t think I’d buy it.

* * *

Next, C stuck around for Agora, the film about the life of Hypatia, the female philosopher and mathematician who lived through the burning of the Library of Alexandria (where her father was the last director). The background was essentially the power-play of those in charge in the newly legitimate Christian church, saved from persecution thanks to a Christian Emperor. (The game-player in me couldn’t help thinking – if one were the governor, what steps could you take to hold power? You’d need to eliminate the local bishop as a force, to start…)

I thought it was well done, and there were some things (like the presentation to an unwanted suitor with a cloth with menstrual blood) that were strange enough that they could only be drawn from history. But… I felt worried that people were too… easy to understand, maybe? I mean, given how alien their culture is, I was surprised that none of the people’s motivations made me go, “Buh?” Although… maybe that’s a tribute to the writers, or to the fact that love doesn’t change much? I did like that they did retain some of the philosophy, though I’d be interested to know if there’s any evidence that Hypatia actually noticed that bodies in motion tend to stay in motion.

It was good, but I’m not sure I’d watch it again.

* * *

I then ran all the way to Te Papa to see The Arbour, which did a bunch of interesting things, stylistically. It was telling the story around Andrea Dunbar, who wrote three plays at 19, and went on to write a movie of one of her plays, based on her sometimes brutal experience of life in a council estate in Britain in the 1970s. (She died ten years later, but she was survived by three children, one of whom experienced a similarly traumatic life.) But it wasn’t a straight documentary; instead, there was some television interview footage of the playwright and her family; some excerpts from her plays (done on the green of the estate where she lived, with slightly bemused inhabitants looking on); and some actors lip-syncing to interviews that the film-maker had done with the members of the family.

This was really effective in drawing you into the story – the lip-syncing portions must have been weird for the actors, but they really sold it, and allowed the film-maker to show some things that would have been very difficult to stage with a normal interview (such as using focus to direct attention back and forth between two people talking). I thought it worked well, and was very interesting to watch, though very sad.

* * *

Then it was back to the Embassy for Gainsbourg.

The film itself was good – I liked what the actors did, the giant puppet that represented Gainsbourg’s ambition was both really well done and did a good job advancing the story, and it showed that the film wasn’t afraid to break away from reality. The man himself seems… like a bit of a dick: talented and charming, but spoiled, and happy to outrage people in order to be the centre of attention. How much of that is because of the weird experience of being a talented Jewish kid in France during the Nazi occupation, and the only surviving boy in his family… I don’t know. But explanation isn’t the same as excuse, and writing a song about a former lover about her being a hippopotamus is a dick move, plain and simple.

However… the film does a good job of making you empathise with him, and you never quite stop being hurt for him when he does something stupid and is rejected. I enjoyed watching it, and could imagine watching it again.

* * *

Finally, Ghost Writer, a straight-up Hitchcockian political thriller about a man (never named in the film) hired to write the memoirs of a thinly disguised Tony Blair character. There are a few elements where fridge logic reveals that they don’t make too much sense, but it barrels along at a good clip, and the actors (particularly Olivia Williams) were so enjoyable to watch that I didn’t care. I’ll definitely be getting C to watch it, even though I’m reluctant to put money in Polanski’s pocket.

And I hope Olivia Williams gets tonnes more work, because I’ve enjoyed her in everything I’ve seen her in so far.

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2010 Film Festival, Day 8

Saturday, July 24, 2010

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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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2010 Film Festival, Day 7

Friday, July 23, 2010

My movie-watching day got off to a somewhat surreal start. I was worried that I was going to arrive late to Extraordinary Stories, but I got there quarter of an hour early; unfortunately, no-one mentioned that it was in the Paramount Bergman rather than the Paramount when I bought the ticket, so I ended up slightly late anyway. Even more unfortunately, they accidentally put the third reel on first, so I really, really didn’t know what is going on – however, they apologised for this, and gave us a refund and free pass to another movie. Even more more unfortunately, I had neglected to account for the two quarter-hour intervals that spaced out the four hours worth of film on the three reels, and so arrived at the Embassy far too late to go to my next movie (which was meant to be Cell 211). But the Film Festival website makes the same mistake, and C had got me the first John Le Carre novel to read, so I’m not that disappointed.

So, what can I say about the film that I did manage to see? If it had been in the right order, I think I would have enjoyed it more; there was a certain amount of trying to work out what was going on when I was watching the last reel, and trying to remember what was going to happened in the end (when you didn’t know what was important) with the other thirds. Also, it was a little slow in places – I could feel myself drifting off.

On the other hand, the film I saw was pretty interesting, even if it wasn’t the film that the director intended me to see. The film was narrated, sometimes describing what was seen, sometimes anticipating it, sometimes telling us about people’s internal landscapes, and sometimes explaining what is going on. One of the reasons that this worked quite well is because it was used to surprise us – for example, it explained an elaborate theory that one of the characters had built up about a newspaper story, linking it to another story he was concerned with; and then saying no, actually, that character was completely wrong, and the two stories had nothing in common; and then went on to explain what was actually going on with that other news story.

I enjoyed the various stories, anecdotes, and tangents – there were three main stories, about three virtual ciphers (who were only referred to as X, Z and H), but the story would branch off without warning into tributaries about the various people they met, or influenced, or who had influenced them. And the film was unafraid to abandon stories, letting your imagination fill in where the lives you’ve briefly glimpsed might go.

I don’t know if I’d be up to watching all four hours again; but I’m glad I did.

Now… I have a couple of hours to fill.

* * *

After spending some pleasant time in the company of George Smiley and co., I was ready for the unashamedly political film Strange Birds In Paradise: A West Papuan Story. The basic premise was that an Australian (who had lived in Indonesia) went on a tramping tour of Western Papua, and slowly realised that something was wrong – whispered stories of people disappearing in the night, missing husbands and sons. He gradually worked out that he was in, as he put it, an undeclared war zone.

This film makes no attempt to disguise where its sympathies lie, though he does show dissenting voices, as well as the reasons why popular Indonesian opinion sees no reason why West Papua should be allowed to break away. It also places the film-maker front-and-centre, which I think was the right call, since understanding why he made the documentary explains the the choices that he’s made. However, there were a few things that I was a little uncomfortable about – for example, some of the narration about war atrocities carried out by the Indonesian military were delivered in voice-over, without any sort of attribution. The film-maker hadn’t seen it, so… I would have been more convinced, or at least more comfortable, if he’d been able to say, “Amnesty International reported” or “United Nations peacekeepers said”, or something. I don’t doubt that the West Indonesian army has done and is doing terrible things, and that it’s using West Papua as it’s own personal piggy-bank; but there’s a part of me that wants the film-makers to show their working.

It was certainly an interesting take on how Indonesia works as a country – I had heard complaints about Muslim domination before, but hadn’t realised that West Papua had been groomed for independence by the Dutch, for example. And it’s not as if the people involved are monolithic: the attitude of one of the women in the refugee village in Papua New Guinea towards student protesters who arrived after walking for six weeks through the trackless jungle was basically, “If they want to talk politics, go into the jungle, go out of the village – we’re sick of it here.” And you can understand her frustration: basically, they aren’t strong enough to make it too expensive for the Indonesians to stay, and there’s too much money at stake. East Timor wasn’t a literal goldmine – it will be a lot harder getting them to let go.

I don’t think I’ll try and see this film again.

* * *

From Poverty Bay to Broadway was my next film, at the Film Archive. I thought that it worked well as a documentary, insofar as I felt more informed about Irish immigration (especially in New Zealand), why Gisbourne produced so many boxing champions, and the world of international boxing in the 1920s. But as far as the star of the show, Tom Heeney, goes… it’s weird, but I feel like I know a lot about what happened to him, and what he did, but I don’t feel I know who he was. There are little glimpses – he was able to get out of the boxing business and succeed (instead of succumbing to booze or depression), he stayed with his wife (who he met well before his championship match), and he volunteered for both World Wars… but still, it all feels like it’s on the surface.

In the end, that’s an extremely small niggle in a very good documentary. I’m glad that I saw it.

* * *

My final movie was Dream Home, a gory Hong Kong horror about a woman obsessed with getting an apartment with a sea view. The story was well done, with flashbacks showing the development of the woman’s character and situation intercut with a gory bloodbath. There were weird resonances with Love In A Puff (with the smokers conspiring around an ashtray outside), and less-weird resonances with The Housemaid; but where The Housemaid‘s violence is mostly considered and precise, Dream Home is full of spontaneous mayhem.

Storywise, the movie was well done, with some neat touches (like the kid deciding that “asshole” isn’t a swearword, because his Dad always uses it to describe property developers). But I’m just not the right audience for the blood-soaked violence – there were scenes that made me squeamish enough to close or avert my eyes. I won’t be seeking it out again.

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2010 Film Festival, Day 6

Thursday, July 22, 2010

I wish I knew why I keep going to documentaries on modern artists. I mean, my feelings toward modern art are similar to my feelings towards trees – they’re all right, and I recognise some species, but I have no real interest in learning to appreciate them properly. That said, most of the documentaries are the stories of the lives of the artists, rather than the stories of their art. From that point of view, Gordon Crook served admirably – a artist living in New Zealand, and responsible for the banners in the Michael Fowler Centre, but not a New Zealand artist, he seems an interesting fellow. I think we got an idea of the sort of person he is, why he makes the sort of art he makes, and even some idea of some of the prejudices that float around the art world.

It was a fairly well-done documentary, though I didn’t understand why one of the women who figured prominently was in it – I mean, she was obviously an important and dear friend to him, but I didn’t understand her significance to the documentary. It might have been explained in a subtitle I missed.

* * *

Avoiding the All Whites crowds, I made my way to My Dog Tulip, an animated version of J.R. Ackerley’s book about an Englishman’s love affair with his dog.

Er, in an agape sense, you understand.

The story is told from the point of view of a unmarried, educated English gentleman who fought in the First World War, and who acquired his dog (an Alsatian bitch) in his fifties. The accounts of the battle of wills with his sister when she moves in with them, the talk of “marrying” Tulip to various suitors, his interactions with others in the context of his dog, and his frank account of his dog’s bowel movements and urination felt very set in the time and place of the story, in the best possible way.

If you didn’t mind your child seeing (drawn) naked ladies riding a bull through the waves to an island (there’s a certain amount of illustrating of asides and divergences), then I think that kids would find it very entertaining; I certainly found it touching, and would consider watching it again.

* * *

The Embassy was very crowded for Exit Through The Gift Shop, the movie where guerilla artist Banksy invites you to decide how much of what you see is real in an ostensible documentary about a man making a documentary about street art, who becomes a street artist himself… except that he produces none of the art, and decides to break into the art scene with a big show, where he simply tells others the concept, and gets them to create it.

The material about the other artists seems real enough, and it was certainly interesting to see some of the art being made, and to meet some of the people behind the art. But I would have actually liked to see a bit more about the idea behind public art in public spaces, like the “Astoria Scum River Bridge”.

That said – does it matter if the ostensible subject of the documentary, “Mr Brain-Wash”, is real, or a construct of a collective of artists, a public face which, among other things, makes it easier to sell the art, and thus make a living? I guess it all comes down to provenance again – like the movie My Kid Could Paint That, the art world feels that who made the painting and how is important. I don’t share that concern; but I also don’t buy paintings.

(Also, most of the art that we saw was… well, you could look at it, and you got the idea, and then you could move on – which is exactly what you want for art that people are passing in the street, but not necessarily for something you’re hanging on your wall and seeing every day.)

I liked it, but would have liked a straight-up doco about public spaces and our relationship to art in them more, I think.

* * *

Off to Te Papa I traipsed, to see Senso, a movie saved from oblivion by the wonders of digital technology – and it did look beautiful. While the pacing of the story was a little slow, and everything that was going to happen was telegraphed well in advance, in some ways this worked to the film’s advantage: since you knew that so-and-so was a cad, watching the heroine slowly sink further and further into his clutches was agonizing, since you could see that there was no way for things to end well.

I enjoyed it, but I don’t think I’d need to see it again.

* * *

Finally, I saw Cooking History. Unfortunately, I saw it at Te Papa as well – as I’ve noted before, seeing one film in those seats is fine, but seeing two tends to end up agonizing, and it’s hard to be drawn into the movie when your knees hurt.

That said – I really enjoyed the film, and the people it introduced you to; the Germans reminiscing about how good the bread was for soldiers during the war, the Russian woman who had made pancakes for aviators (and who talked about how the dinner for downed airmen was set aside until their death was confirmed, and then taken to the graveyard for them), and the Frenchmen talking about “monkey meat” (corned beef) in Algeria.

One of the most interesting places was former Czechoslovakia – they talked to Tito’s cook (who had to taste-test for poisons), and how even the meals served with the talks were nationalistic; and the Croatian army cook who had refused to become an instructor because he didn’t want to teach Serbs, and who complained that the army cookbook had used Serbian names for dishes, and said that he wouldn’t cook with a Serbian for the film “for all the money in the world”.

And the Russian at the beginning, talking about the lack of supplies in Chechnya, and how the more experienced soldiers stole from the new recruits… I had read elsewhere about how large parts of the Russian army functions more like prison gangs than soldiers, but I hadn’t realised how bad it was.

One of the Russian women who had come with the Soviet army, who were there to stomp on… the Hungarian revolt? The Czech one? I can’t remember… anyway, she said, “Life is not porridge; there are no easy recipes.”

Even though watching various animals being slaughtered (a cow, a pig and a rooster, if I recall correctly) was a bit gruesome, I would watch this again.

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2010 Film Festival, Day 5

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

After finishing off yesterday’s write-up (and faffing about a bit), I had to dash for the bus; but my luck with public transport held, and I was only a minute or so late for Love, Lust and Lies, the latest instalment of a 44 year documentary. This project wasn’t started with the same systematic intent as the Seven Up series – towards the end, the documentary maker said that the reason that the three women (who were 14 at the time) were chosen was because they were lively, and decided to tell the truth. The film-maker returned to these women four times; this is the fifth.

The women had some things in common – they all regret how early they left school, for instance, and they all have children. But their lives have gone very different ways, too – one had been married once and it had stuck, the others had married multiple times, for example. And we got to see a bit of the lives of some of their kids.

You wouldn’t necessarily want to be best friends with all of them, but you do wish the best for them, and the documentary itself was engaging and interesting; I think I might try and track down a copy, since I think that my parents might enjoy watching it.

* * *

Countryside 35×45 was the first thing that I’ve seen at the City Gallery since they’ve reopened, and the theatre is impressive, with a screen wide enough to show This Is New Zealand as originally filmed (three screens wide), and mysterious vents under all the seats.

Unfortunately, the seats themselves were… well they aren’t as bad as the worst of the Paramount, and might be slightly better than the Film Archive; but that’s setting the bar pretty low.

The film itself was about the changeover from CCCP passports to Russian Republic ones; people had to provide new pictures, 35mm by 45mm, for these passports, and the film followed a photographer around as he took these photos (as well as doing a bit of other work, like a wedding). There were plenty of older people complaining about the fact that they were going to die soon, why do they have to bother with new passports? And others complaining that they hadn’t been paid for years, where would they travel to?

Actuall…

Wait, I’m sitting in the Embassy with a cup of tea, and they’ve decided to play YMCA over the speakers. What the heck?

Where was I? Oh yes, I was going to wonder whether complaining fulfils the same social function in Russian culture that English humour does, and speculate that it might have been an artefact of translation. Even working with a fair number of foreigners at work, it’s occasionally odd to be reminded that “mustn’t grumble” isn’t a universal truth.

The film was shot in black & white (I nearly said “greyscale”, for which I apologise), and at an odd aspect ratio – I suspect it will have been the same ratio as the photos. (I think they might have digitally aged the film as well, but I suppose it’s possible they just had dirty film-stock.) The shape of the film made me think of paintings as well as photographs, and there were a number of times that I thought you could take a frame and have something you could quite happily put on the wall.

It was surprising how sad the sight of the old passports being shovelled into the fire was – all the pictures from decades ago, curling up in the furnace. A weird little piece, but I’m glad that I saw it.

* * *

I had a bit of a gap, but my spontaneous “let’s drop in on C” fell through when I couldn’t find her, so I fell back on my “go to a cafe and start writing to summon people who know me”, which worked flawlessly; one even generously helped me with my curly fries (hi Soph!).

Then it was off to Draquila – Italy Trembles, a documentary about how the corrupt Italian Prime-minister Berlusconi used the tragedy of an earthquake to boost his polls, and then made sure cronies profited while building a new, needlessly complicated development (and using the army to ban people from the old town). It was as if Hurricane Katrina had been dealt with by corrupt gangsters with construction connections, rather than just by indifferent incompetents.

The film was quite visually dense, which sometimes hurt it when your eye kept being drawn away from the translations by flashy graphics; but it did a good job of explaining how Berlusconi has managed to get away with everything, showing how adding a word here and there to legislation can pervert it’s intent – changing “emergency” to “emergency or big event”, for example, so that the Civil Protection Agency can ignore all laws when constructing swimming pools for an international swimming event; and then changing “public” to “public and private” when people complain that the two pools and 50 “guest rooms” aren’t public, and that it has been converted, in fact, to a hotel.

Berlusconi reminds me a bit of a more successful Winston Peters, insofar as they both seem to get around scandal by twinkling a bit and saying, “Yes, aren’t I so naughty!” and carrying on as before. The power of lacking shame shouldn’t be underestimated. And the way that the opposition has been browbeaten into virtual impotence was sad, as well – the image of the abandoned Democratic Party info tent, that was never manned, was disheartening in the extreme.

In any case, I thought that the film-maker did an excellent job of presenting a complicated situation, and I hope that she goes on to make a lot more… though I suspect that she may have to work outside Italy for a while.

* * *

Then it was out of the Paramount and off to the Embassy for I Killed My Mother, in which a mother and teenage son manage to constantly hit each other’s raw patches and push each other’s buttons, moderately wittily and in French. The write-up in the booklet mentions the exchange where the mother says, “We used to talk!”, and the son says, “I was four, and had no-one else!”

While the son is definitely a bit self-centred (well, as self-centred as a spinning top, really, as is typical for teenagers), the mother also manages to be unreasonable at times, withdrawing permission once its given and overriding social plans that she’s been told about. But they both manage to show that they’re reasonable people, and the son admits that they would probably get on fine if they met as strangers.

It is this kind of story that makes me worry what I would be like as a parent. I remember being a trial for my parents at some points in my teenage years – I suspect all my siblings had our moments – but in general I think we got on alright. Does the fact that I don’t think any of us were particularly spoiled mean that I was the spoiled one, in a sort of inverse to the “if you can’t spot the sucker at the poker table, it’s you” sort of rule? Actually, I think that I’ll be happiest if I leave this line of enquiry alone.

Getting back to the film; it was well made, with some clever shots (they liked the “fill half of the screen with the face and leave the other side empty, to emphasise how separated the people talking are” shot), and a good film, but I feel no need to see it again.

* * *

Finally, it was back to the Embassy for Scheherazade, Tell Me A Story, where the partner of a female presenter is angling to be made editor of the state newspaper, and asks her to back off political stories – so she starts interviewing various women, getting them to tell their stories instead. Unfortunately, everything is political…

At first, something about the movie felt a bit off for me. Then I realised – the problem wasn’t with the movie, the problem was with how I was watching it. Everything was vivid contrasts and melodrama; but that made it an above average blaxploitation movie (except that the minority was Arabic women, rather than Afro-Americans). Or if you prefer, the criteria that they were using to decide on story felt closer to Bollywood movies than Arthouse ones, even though the worldview that they were promoting was very… I’m not sure whether “feminist” is the right word. “Egalitarian”, maybe? Pointing out that having to pay for all the furniture, give up control of their money and having a car, and run the household (while submitting all decisions for the husband’s approval) isn’t fair… well, it feels like common-sense. But as a friend pointed out while we were waiting for the bus, it’s not like things like this don’t happen in the West, even today.

Anyway, I don’t know that I’d call this a “good” movie – there were some really quite clever shots (with the face and reaction of the interviewer hovering on a screen behind the person talking), but some of the sub-stories were quite long and had quite hokey elements. For example, I’d be tempted to shorten the story of the three sisters, and some of the fight scenes could have been better staged. But overall, I am glad I watched it.

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