Booking online for the Festival was great; the seats I was assigned are the very definition of the parson’s egg. Admittedly, some of this is due to the fact that I prefer the front row of the Paramount, which no algorithm can be expected to discern; but I booked pretty early, and in the first week was consistently being put in the seats above the entrance, which does no favors to the Paramount’s relatively small screen. \u00a0And there are weird things going on with the Te Papa seating, where they seem to fill up rows L and M, rather than clustering people in the middle of the theater.<\/p>\n
Oh, woe is me.<\/p>\n
But seriously,\u00a0I hope they do something about the seating stuff next year.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
What do you do when someone you love believes or does things that you think are terrible? \u00a0In Reaching for the Moon<\/a>,\u00a0<\/i>Elizabeth Bishop, the American poet, faces this a number of times when\u00a0she moves to 50’s Brazil after falling for her university friend’s lesbian lover, architect Lota de Macedo Soares. \u00a0From their different opinions on how to deal with the love triangle to their different attitudes to the 1964 coup d’etat, the two personalities are strong in different ways, and fragile in different ways — for example, Elizabeth’s alcoholism, and Lota’s later depression.<\/p>\n The poet’s great friend Robert Lowell (a noted poet in his own right) criticizes while he feels is a fragment of a poem at the beginning of the movie, saying that it is simply observations broken up into sentences. \u00a0This movie, like good poetry, is more than observations broken up into scenes. \u00a0That poem becomes\u00a0One Art<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n I enjoyed it. (Both the poem, and the movie.)<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n The lawyer is the bad guy, and that’s disappointing.<\/p>\n I hope that I am not a critic – I enjoy enjoying movies. \u00a0Unfortunately, I did not enjoy REALITi<\/a>,<\/i> because it was bad. \u00a0Not the grandiose The Room <\/i>bad, or the somewhat cynical Sharknado <\/i>bad — the type of bad where you can see the nugget of good trying to get out, but it is swamped by many little things that would be easy to fix, combined with bigger problems that do not have obvious solutions. \u00a0The kind of bad where you wish they had spent more time early on, so that they didn’t have these problems in the end.<\/p>\n The little things seem trivial when enumerated. \u00a0For example, if a company is drugging the water supply, they are involved in a “conspiracy”, not <\/i>in a “conspiracy theory”; and if one character says that they are, then it’s a mistake the character makes, but when another character repeats it back to them, then it’s a mistake that the world is making.<\/p>\n Or if you’re showing us the Advertisement Of Evil for the first time, and the clip has music, you don’t have your soundtrack fighting with the diegetic music — you signal the character’s concentration by dropping away all sound except the click and whir of the machine, and the sudden noise of the clip acts as a “pay attention to this” cue.\u00a0 Once we’ve started absorbing the ad, then you can decide to start to swamp it with the soundtrack, if you’re wanting to signal that the character is drawing back from what they’re watching to consider the larger implications or whatever.<\/p>\n The thing is, they also made some clever small choices — shining lights into the actors faces and keeping the displays\u00a0off-screen instead of trying to make snazzy interface designs that will look dated in six months, for example. \u00a0And not trying too hard to future-up the cars and sets. \u00a0And the comment about the news and stock footage, it seemed like you could do something interesting with that.<\/p>\n But it felt like a 48-Hour Film writ large – chunks of\u00a0unpolished, clunky, first pass writing and plotting married to chunks of\u00a0unpolished, clunky, first pass acting and camera work. \u00a0And given the amount of slog\u00a0and passion that any film takes, it is heartbreaking that it isn’t better.<\/p>\n It was interesting to watch, in that it made you think how to make it better. \u00a0But I wouldn’t suggest watching it for fun.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n Fish and Cat <\/i><\/a>is two and a quarter hour Iranian film done in one long tracking shot. \u00a0If that sounds like it could drag a little at times… I wouldn’t disagree with you. But it was very, very cleverly done; and they manage to present multiple points of view by simply tracking various people\u00a0around the forest and campsite where the film is set, and letting the actors do the same scene again, filmed from a different angle, and focusing on a different person or part of the action. They also use voice-over to expand the scenes in time and importance, and start the film with the ominous mention of three restaurant workers arrested for serving human flesh, which\u00a0gives an ominous edge to many periods that would otherwise simply be someone walking on a forest path. \u00a0It felt a little bit like a play, and I could imagine that you could stage something very interesting along the same lines.<\/p>\n Most of the characters are university students who have come to the campsite to participate in a kite-flying contest. \u00a0This is another smart move – the complicated relationships, weirdness and talky-ness of people that age works well in the movie.<\/p>\n I am not sure whether I can recommend it – it’s the first movie so far that has made me check my phone for the time – but I am glad I saw it.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n One of the\u00a0things that struck me about Jodorowsky’s\u00a0<\/i><\/a>Dune<\/a>\u00a0<\/i>was how few people involved had read the book before signing up for it – the artists, the writer\/filmmaker, the actors. \u00a0Jodorowsky said that the name came to him, and he could have just as easily have said\u00a0Don Quixote<\/em>, or something else.<\/p>\n I hadn’t realized how close the film was to being made… and what they could have actually accomplished at the budget that they were looking for. \u00a0What would Star Wars<\/em> have been like if they were being compared to whatever this film actually looked like, rather than simply being able to steal from its filming bible? \u00a0Would it have had an impact in the mainstream, or would it have sat in the midnight arthouses? \u00a0Would I have enjoyed it?<\/p>\n In some ways, it gets to be as great as the director imagined it would be, because it never had to be nailed to celluloid. \u00a0I don’t see any way that it couldn’t have ultimately disappointed him if it had been filmed – if only because it wouldn’t have raised the world’s consciousness the way he wanted. \u00a0But… Dali as a mad space emperor, with a soundtrack by Pink Floyd and the director’s own son, who trained at martial arts for two years, in the main role! \u00a0With Giger and Moebius and Chris Foss designing, and Dan O’Bannon doing the effects!<\/p>\n It was a fun film about an interesting subject.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n