Film Festival 2008: Day 2
Before we start into comments about today's movies, I'd like to mention a few other matters.
Firstly, a package arrived from darkest Ireland, with pretty Canadian stickers. It was a present from the lovely Giffy and the great and terrible Erik, and both C and I think the books that they gave us are flipping great.
Secondly, all this blogging goodness is brought to you courtesy of my newest toy - a tiny, tiny laptop. It's a HP 2133, and it's around the same size as an Asus EEPC, but designed so it can have a keyboard that is much closer to full-sized (92%), which makes it a lot easier to type on. It also has a screen with a decent resolution, and it feels more solid than the white plastic of the other box. I'm not necessarily saying that everyone should rush out and buy one (especially since they'll bring out a new range when the Atom processors come out), but it's a lot handier than lugging my full-sized laptop around, like I did last festival. Weirdly, I've had a bunch of strangers comment on it and ask me questions about it while I've been using it; not geek boys either, but normal citizens.
(I've not mentioned to them how I managed to completely lock it up by trying to install anti-virus software that didn't play nicely with it. At least Avast seems to be working okay.)
And finally, one thing that I didn't mention in the last post about the CSNY movie was that one of the shock jocks the movie interviewed drew a distinction between the actions of that group and the Dixie Chicks. Apparently, one of the things that most outraged the sensibilities of God-fearing Americans(tm) was that the Dixie Chicks slammed Bush to a London audience, which they felt was pandering to that group while running down people who brought their music back home; he respected CSNY for actually saying this stuff to American faces, so that people could actually respond. I thought it was an interesting point of view.
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For my first film, I was running a bit late. You know the feeling when you're running in the rain, and you step in a puddle, and you know you're going to have a wet sock for the rest of the day? Well, it's bad enough when you're going into the office, and can theoretically take off your shoes and let your socks dry; but it's an even worse start to a day of watching movies, where taking off your shoes would definitely mark you as a weirdo. (Though it turned out not to be as bad as I thought it would be - hurrah for leather shoes!)
My Winnipeg was interesting - more of a poem than a documentary. Unfortunately, I didn't find it as clever as the person making it thought it was, and the mixing of fact and fiction annoyed rather than intrigued me. I would like to visit Winnipeg, though... so, net win for the filmmaker? Maybe not; it might just be because of Kate Beaton being from Manitoba, and because we've been watching Slings & Arrows. (Which I would thoroughly recommend, BTW.)
My assessment? Kinda interesting, but I'm not sure I would have watched it to the end if it had been on YouTube.
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Next was La Corona, about a beauty pageant in Brazil's largest women's prison. There was plenty of detail about the pagent, but I didn't feel like we really got to know any of the contestants, or the context of the pageants, or their normal lives as prisoners, or how and why the prison differed from, say, a British or American prison... there were hints, like the brief description of the crimes that the contestants were incarcerated for, or the fact that the prisoners weren't in uniform, but it felt like we were just being shown the event, rather than being given any insight into what it meant.
While the same could be said for the short that preceded it, the fact that it was so short meant that it was easier to forgive these shortcomings in The Fighting Cholitas. This was a documentary about four Bolivian Indian women who are in a professional wrestling league where the hook is that they fight in the traditional layered dress of the cholita. I think that reading TVTropes.org has given me some idea about what the world of the luchadore is about, and seeing this very different take on a semi-familiar idea was quite neat.
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Next was the film I've liked the best in the Festival so far, Stranded: I've Just Come From A Plane That Crashed On The Mountain. I saw this with C, and the fact that they talked to the actual survivors (and two of their fathers, and people involved in their eventual rescue), walking step by step through what happened, with photos from the time they were trapped, and footage taken from the time they were found - it showed how they had to wrestle with their consciences before they could even think about using the bodies of these people who had been their friends as food, even though it was the only way they could possibly survive. Since I've only ever really heard about their situation as a punchline, rather than having any idea about what really happened, this film was exactly the kind of thing I like in a documentary.
A group of the survivors, along with their children, and the children of some who didn't survive, came out to the site of the crash, and we saw some of them talking to their children about their experiences out where it had happened - one of them said that only sixteen had survived, but their friends' sacrifice in sustaining them meant that now over a hundred had survived (meaning the children and grandchildren). The film also mentioned that everyone on the plane was from the same neighborhood, and that the survivors still lived there.
It was a good film, and I recommend it.
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I then said goodbye to C, moved my car in order to avoid an unpleasant parking fine (finding a handy park in a sneaky place in Mt Vic, that I chose not to reveal in case I can use it again), and then it was off to Ira Sach's Married Life. This is about a married man who has fallen in love with someone else, but he doesn't want his wife to suffer when he leaves her - so he decides that the kindest thing to do is to kill her. It's set in the 40s, and very consciously draws on the tropes of the movies of the time - there were voice-overs, for example, and someone in the Q&A session noted that it wasn't in wide-screen, and the director/writer confirmed that this was a deliberate choice, since it was more about the intimate observation of people, rather than sweeping vistas.
I thought that the people that the film evoked were well-realized, and that the point about people not necessarily really understanding or even truly knowing the people that they were most intimate with was well presented. Pierce Brosnan does a very convincing turn as the ladies' man who's the best friend of the main character. And I was really impressed about what a good job they did of keep our sympathy with the guy who is basically planning a murder, for what he believes are the best of reasons. The director also mentioned that the ending of the film differs from the book, and that they filmed the ending a bunch of different ways before settling on what we saw on-screen, which sounds like an awesome DVD extra in the offing. It's a neat movie, though definitely not the comedy that I would have guessed from the festival write-up; it's much more than that. I might well watch it again - not immediately, but sometime.
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Then it was popping into SMK to say hi to Kate and friends, and then off to Te Papa for The Duchess of Langeais, which was a very French period costume drama film. (That is, Society is hypocritical and cause people to sacrifice their happiness on the altar of Standards and Manners, the costumes and sets are gorgeous, and love caused people to do stupid things and, eventually, die.)
(For some reason, I can't help thinking of The Critic, who once said, "I like French fims, pretentious boring French films, I like French films, two tickets si vous plait.")
Actually, while that is often true for me, in this case the film never really drew me in; perhaps it was because I found it very hard to read the emotions of the main actress, and never really empathized with the lead actor. It was beautiful as all get out, but ultimately I wouldn't recommend it.
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And then I met up with C to watch Vexille. Afterwards, she compared it to the Final Fantasy movie, and unfortunately she makes a good point. There were many pretty scenes, some of the crowd scenes were impressive, and I liked the way the confrontation in the laboratory played out; but the love triangle was a bit clumsily done, the moral message was a bit simplistic, and the faces were way too deep in the plastic corpse-land of Uncanny Valley to bear the burden of the emotions that they were meant to be expressing. As an anime film, it's fine, but certainly not great; I don't imagine I'd rewatch it.
(And a link to the other version of the blog.)