Now I'm Really Getting MIFFed (part three)

It's been a bit of a slower second week to the Film Festival, with a couple of (gasp!) movie-less days while I made a swift trip back to Wangaratta for a mate's 30th.

The highlight of my last few days was an utterly charming Belgian film called On the Sly. Cathy, maybe six or seven years old, is the neglected only child of a wealthy Parisian professional couple with a magnificent holiday home in the country. After a weekend trip in which her parents have basically left her to fend for herself, Cathy gives up on them; when the family's getting in the car to leave, she opens the back door and closes it again without hopping in. Her parents don't notice, and Cathy's left watching them drive away. The majority of the film then follows Cathy as she tries to survive in the woods on the estate and avoid the eventual search parties that come looking for her.

Though there's very little dialogue between characters, a voice-over narration of Cathy's thoughts runs across basically the entire film. It's a striking stylistic decision and a brave one: it meant that the whole film would succeed or fail on the basis of a child actor's performance. Luckily Wynona Ringer (the director's daughter) is so winning in the lead role that the film just clicks. She manages to be precocious without being annoying and sweet without being saccharine, and the script nails a pretty authentic child's eye view of the world.

Also a lot of fun was Submarine, a quirky British indie coming-of-age tale. I've heard people criticise it for being a lot like other quirky indie coming-of-age movies, and it's true that at times it was a bit self-conscious (a wacky neighbour who's a sad, slightly mad, motivational speaker is a weak point) and the main character is perhaps just one step too detached and ironic. However, those minor quibbles can be easily brushed aside when a film makes me laugh as heartily (and as regularly) as this one does. Yeah, it's like a lot of other films but, y'know, I like all those other films. I'll be keeping an eye out for it on DVD ... and not just to use the subtitles to figure out some of the more impenetrable Welsh accents. 

Top Floor Left Wing and The Yellow Sea were both action movies shot through with strong elements of farce, both of which came close to excellence but narrowly missed the mark. 

Top Floor Left Wing chronicles an escalating hostage situation in a flat in a French housing estate as an Algerian father and son barricade their door for very different reasons. The son is a petty hood who is babysitting some cocaine for a local dealer; the father has been running for years from a dark secret. Their hostage turns from comic relief (for the first part of the film he continually says exactly the wrong thing) to sympathiser, to radical; he ends the film trying to lead the apartment block's other residents in a riot against his own police force. The first half of the film had a lot of promise, but ultimately the points that it made were fairly simplistic and (common problem at this year's festival) it ended ten minutes too soon. 

The Yellow Sea is incredibly violent. In this grungy gangster flick Gunam, a Joseonjok (an ethnic Korean living in China), is indebted to some gangsters. To pay off what he owes, he's smuggled into Seoul to do a hit for them.

Interesting fact: Korean gangsters don't use guns ... well, not according to this movie anyway. There are a lot of killings in this film, but they're all done with knives and hatchets, which gives them a visceral immediacy that is missing from a lot of action movies these days. Blood goes ... everywhere. And it's kind of awesome.

Killer violence aside, The Yellow Sea also takes the time during its intricate set-up to make us really care about Gunam: the reason he's in debt is that he borrowed money to send his wife to South Korea to find work. She was supposed to be sending money back to him but it never came, so at the same time as he's figuring out the details of the hit, he's also trying to track her down. When everything turns sour, we really really want things to work out for the guy.

After showing such restraint during the build-up, however, the director Hong-jin Na loses control of the film during the last third. Too many action sequences pile on top of one another, too many times Gunam is able to miraculously escape from seemingly impossible situations and, after a rigidly realist approach for most of the film, suddenly Na begins to resort to trite, absurdist gags. While it's still way better than most of the computer generated shit sandwiches Hollywood serves up, The Yellow Sea could have been one of the truly great action movies if it had just held its nerve.

And lastly comes the trippy Canadian You Are Here, a positively infuriating experience. Taking five great short films and five 'meh' short films and throwing them in a blender does not a great feature film make, but that's seemingly what the makers of this pretentious dud believe. Disconnected and surreal events happen to a bunch of people, and then ... the film ends. I'm probably so annoyed by this film because it showed so much promise. Many of the ideas it contains are lovely, and the whole thing was put together with such assurance that I really believed that there was going to be a clear purpose to all the random goings on. But there wasn't. It was a bummer.

I'm going to be finishing MIFF with a bang --- seven films in three days! Wish me luck, and I'll see you on the flipside ...

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser
books to go: 100

Getting more than a tad MIFFed (part two)

I continued on my merry, MIFFy way with four more movies spread over Monday and Tuesday.

Give Up Tomorrow is a stunning documentary about a horrifying miscarriage of justice in the Phillipines. When two girls go missing and are presumed dead, seven kids are accused of the crime, including a teenager named Paco Larrañega who can prove he was 350 miles away at the time. There are his school enrolment records, more than two dozen eye-witnesses, and even photographs! The twists and turns of his increasingly desperate attempts to win his freedom from the hopelessly corrupt Fillipino justice system form the substance of this amazing movie.

I can't say much about Give Up Tomorrow, except this: see it, if you get the chance. About twenty minutes into the film, the filmmaker had already set up Paco's obvious innocence and the conspiracy to frame him, and I found myself wondering where else the movie could possibly go? The answer, horrifyingly, is further. And further, until each new revelation is like a fresh stab in the gut. It's an incredible story, and a truly remarkable film.

Another doco, Armadillo, is just as remarkable in its own way. Portraying the six month tour of duty of a Danish squad in Afghanistan, Armadillo does a great job of getting inside the heads of the young soldiers. They must have become incredibly comfortable with the presence of the camera, because they let their guards down completely: to the point where, in one disturbing moment, a couple of the more boorish among them make jokes about (what seems to me to be) a war crime they've just committed. It's truly amazing footage, and I'd be fascinated to know what became of these guys once the film was shown in Denmark.

 

On the whole, Armadillo didn't quite live up to its best moments. There were a number of strange choices the filmmakers had made (including structuring the whole film in such a way as to infer a very particular 'something' about one of the soldiers, but never in any way confirming that it was true ... so the whole unspoken 'accusation' felt unjust) which held it back from being sublime. Still, being pretty great is still pretty great, know what I mean?

Veteran Japanese provocateur Takashi Miike returns to MIFF with 13 Assassins, which is easily the most accessible film of his that I've ever seen. Essentially a stock-standard Dirty Dozen-style story --- the head samurai dispatches his protege to take out an evil lord in a clandestine operation, said protege gathers a small team, they train for a while, then they go kick arse --- there's not a lot about 13 Assassins that isn't pretty predictable. But it doesn't matter a whit, because it's done with such assured style, and with such blood-spattering, flaming-bison-stampeding, severed-head-rolling zeal. It's a "Check your mind at the door and just have a friggin' blast" movie, and on those terms, it succeeds perfectly.

The muted Korean end of the world flick End of Animal was another film that had some really interesting elements, but wasn't able to maximise them. After a great first scene (in which a cabbie and his fare, a pregnant university student, pick up a psychic hitchhiker who informs them the world will end in five minutes time ... and it does), the film tailed off, its deadly slow pace quashing our interest in the post-apocalyptic setting and the random plot slipping out of the directors grasp and never adding up to any cohesive whole.

I've got a bunch more films tomorrow and on Friday, but before then I should give a shout out to Josh Nelson and Thomas Caldwell. They're both acquaintances from my Uni days (Josh took one of my film studies tutes, and Thomas and I acted together in an amateur stage production of Catch-22 --- it was awesome), neither of whom I've seen in about ten years, until suddenly at MIFF 2011 we seem to be sitting together and chatting in every single session. I can't quite figure out if I'm stalking them or they're stalking me. Regardless, they both write about movies in a far more considered, intelligent way than I do, Josh at Philmology and Thomas at Cinema Autopsy, where he's taking part in MIFF's blog-a-thon ... and, I suspect, swiftly going mad.

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser
books to go: 100

Getting a tad MIFFed (part one)

Well, it's that time of year again. Open your eyes, gird your loins, trawl through the program and stock up on emergency jelly beans (more on these later), it's the Melbourne International Film Festival.

As I do every year, I had the vague thought months ago that I should take time off from The Avenue while the festival's on, and then never got around to organising it. So I'm left fitting in as many movies as I can around work, cheering on Cadel in the Tour de France (done and dusted after tonight, thank God), fitful bursts of sleep, bi-daily showers and reading Marie Antoinette. Rather than clutter up my by-now-kinda-traditional Itty-Bitty Film Reviews with meditative Finnish documentaries about goats (joking, joking ... but only just), I thought I'd review my MIFF experience as a whole.

Easily the highlight of my cluttered first couple of days (I saw six films on Friday and Saturday) was Jean Cocteau's classic Beauty and the Beast. This being the sixieth anniversary of MIFF, they're showing a select group of films from earlier editions of the festival, and I jumped at the chance to see Cocteau's gothic romance on the big screen. I saw his version of Orpheus back at Uni but, being the diligent student I am not, all I remember about it is being stunned by the visuals. I was probably half asleep in the screening: that tended to happen a lot.

I don't particularly want to use the word 'ravishing' to describe Beauty and the Beast, but I don't think anything else will do. The sets, costumes, make-up and photography are magnificent in every detail, and together they spirit us into the heightened world of Cocteau's macabre dream. We never question the magic that is present in the plot, because we can see that magic at work in every sumptuous detail. As often happens with old movies, there are elements that will seem twee to a modern viewer (Beauty faints dead away when she first spies the Beast, a moment that is almost its own parody), but if you're willing to go with it, you'll come away utterly enchanted. It's a classic for a reason. And look, any film that includes the line 'May the Devil spatter you with dung' is just fine by me.

Finisterrae is a completely bonkers Spanish film and, though it has grave faults, it's the kind of movie that makes me love MIFF: you'll never get another chance to see it, and you'll never see anything like it. Two doleful Russian ghosts (played by men under sheets) decide that they don't like being dead, and want to be re-animated. An oracle (who is a circle of flame) sends them on the famous pilgrimage across Spain to the Santiago de Compostela. Along the way they befriend some reindeer, consult a sarcastic owl, look into a knot on a tree and discover some Catalan video art from the late 1980's, and kill a histrionic hippie. When they reach their destination, one of them wimps out and stays a ghost, while the other turns into a frog.

That brief synopsis sounds brilliant to me, and Finisterrae was so close to being awesome but unfortunately, when it's not making use of its bizarre tone of deadpan surrealism, it's knitted together by long, boring sequences of the ghosts trudging across the landscape. From one side of a very wide shot to the other. Slowly. It's a hopelessly dual-natured film: just when I was falling asleep, something hilarious would happen. Then they'd start walking again, and I'd start nodding off. If only they'd cut the great stuff into a twenty minute short, it could have been a hilarious and, at times, weirdly moving little movie --- the coda, in which an adult reindeer with amazing antlers wanders around an empty mansion, is beguiling, haunting and beautiful. There's just not enough there for a feature-length film.

That last sentence could apply to three of the other films I've seen as well. Footnote, a dark Israeli dramedy about a father and son who are rival scholars working in an obscure branch of Jewish history, Pink Saris, a documentary about the leader of a militant feminist group in the far north of India, and Boxing Gym, a fly-on-the-wall style doco that paints a multi-faceted portrait of a working class gym in Texas all contain great elements. It's just ... none of them are great films. Footnote suffers from pointless arty affectations and mysterious plot threads that lead nowhere. Pink Saris is undeniably fascinating, but is a bit episodic and repetitive. Boxing Gym is even moreso; large swathes of the film pass by with no dialogue at all, and there's only so much 'watching random amaeur boxers train' that I can take.

Which has brought me, in descending order, to the first (and please God, the only) fucking terrible film of my 2011 MIFF watching. If you ever get the chance to watch The Silence of Joan, run screaming in the opposite direction. It's appalling. To sum up, it's a version of the story of Joan of Arc that doesn't tell her story from her point of view, instead choosing to swap between a bunch of random men who briefly enter her story in positions of power, project their own bullshit onto her (for most of the film Joan is giving the whole world the silent treatment), then bugger off again. Shot through with stilted performances, ridiculous trying-to-be-meaningful slo-mo, and static shots of poorly-photographed nature, there's really nothing to recommend this movie. At least in Finisterrae there were ghost wandering around the over-long landscape shots; in The Silence of Joan there's nothing at all.

I've learned from previous MIFF experiences to always have on hand a bag of lollies to crack open for a jolt of energy, for use in those films when I'm truly in danger of falling asleep. The Silence of Joan forced me to delve into my bag of emergency jelly beans. At four in the afternoon. Of the first day. Seriously, it was that boring.

Ah well, onward and upward. I've got two movies tomorrow ...

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser
books to go: 100

A Dance with Dragons (#101b)

A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin.

What I said a few days ago:

Uh-oh, this is the second time in a row that I've used my 'I get to get a book!' to buy the new entry in an epic fantasy series. My geek is showing. But it's nothing to be ashamed of: Martin is a master of narrative and, with the HBO show winning raves and garnering him new fans, the whole world's beginning to realise it.

What I say now:

Okay, this is the fifth book in a series, so I figure it'll be more useful to Martin newbies to kind of review the series as a whole.

Put bluntly, George R.R. Martin kicks arse, and I am completely addicted to his books. I'm not a downloader, so I haven't had a chance to check out the pretty well-reviewed (and popular)  HBO series that is being adapted from his works, but I'll be buying it on DVD at the first possible moment. I am somebody who's more fantasy-inclined than most, but this guy stands above his genre to a ridiculous degree. He's like the Don Bradman of fantasy writing.

What is it about his books that gets me all hot and bothered like this? He is, simply, one of the best pure story-tellers I've ever come across. He has a genius for narrative that is unmatched in the entirety of my reading.

The series is mostly set in the fictional continent of Westeros, where seven former kingdoms have, through centuries of warfare, been joined into one large, uneasy realm. The land is rife with bitter factionalism and Machiavellian politicking. Very, very, very unusually for fantasy novels, those fantasy elements that are present are much less important than the complicated interactions between the human characters. Even his tiny characters, insignificant though they might seem, have their own motivations, desires, and plans.

Martin writes from many different characters' viewpoints, alternating with every chapter, which allows him to view every event from both sides (I say 'both sides' as if there's only two, but it's normally more complicated than that!). In the third book, he suddenly takes us into the viewpoint of a character who, to that point, we've found utterly repugnant, and humanises him. It's a brilliant way of making his central point: nobody in Westeros is wholly good or wholly bad, everybody is some kind of shade of grey. Again, how unusual is that for a fantasy novel, the genre that simplifies character more than any other (except maybe romance): the naive protagonist destined to defeat evil, the dark lord who wants to crush the whole world beneath his yoke, the pristine princess whose love is pure. None of these characters appear in Martin's work, and if they did, they'd be eaten alive.

Buy A Game of Thrones, the first in the series, and read it ... and then thank me.

On A Dance with Dragons specifically, I'm a little less enthusiastic. Where the first three books in the series are pretty nearly perfect in my view, four and five have been slightly less satisfying. So many characters, subplots and viewpoints have been introduced that events have slowed down a bit, making us wait a long time for any gratification. In A Dance with Dragons there are two specific plot-threads where we spend a lot of time, but never reach any satisfactory resolution. Martin has proven himself so adept at balancing his story that I remain hopeful that the series, when completed, will work as a whole but I can't deny that right now I found the most recent entry a slight disappointment; we did a lot of travelling, but very little arriving. Still, when your main issue with a thousand page book is that it was too short, the author must be doing a hell of a lot right.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser
books to go: 100

Mr Darwin's Shooter (#101a)

Mr Darwin's Shooter by Roger McDonald 

What I said then:

One of those Australian historical novels that looks duller than words can describe. Hopefully it’s better than I expect.

What I say now:

When I was a kid, one of the big traditions in my family was that we'd all get a big pile of books as one of our presents on our birthdays, and another big pile at Christmas. It was Mum who made the choices, and while I was still living at home she used to hit the nail on the head every single year. 

(I'm particularly thankful for the haul I got on my sixteenth birthday. At the time I was still into Stephen King, John Grisham and Jeffrey Archer, but that year Mum decided it was time to move me on from thrillers to 'literature.' Amongst other things, I got Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and The Magus by John Fowles. Collectively those three books made my head explode, in the best possible way. Suddenly books could be more than entertainment, they could be art. They were amazing, perfect choices. Thanks, Mum.)

But once I was at uni, my Mum's idea of my taste in books began to slip away from the reality. Suddenly my book-gifts weren't always things I liked, or even things I was interested in. Things came to a head when, just as I was discovering J.G. Ballard and Bret Easton Ellis, I was given a batch of Australian historical novels that looked duller than words can describe. Which brings me to Mr Darwin's Shooter, a birthday or Christmas present that has stayed on my shelves, unread, for about a decade. Which isn't really fair to either Roger McDonald or my Mum, because it actually wasn't too bad.

The novel is split into two intersecting story threads. In one half, a young boy named Syms Covington leaves his home in rural England for a life at sea, eventually finding himself on the HMS Beagle, working as Charles Darwin's steward for the length of their voyage. These sea-going, nature-observing, bird-skinning scenes alternate with passages in which Covington, in middle-age, waits in his new Australian home for the first copies of Darwin's Origin of Species to arrive. In the intervening years, he and Darwin have kept up a correspondence, and he is aware of what the book will contain; as a Christian, he is torn between pride at Darwin's achievements and horror at the heresy he has been a part of. Covington really existed; much of the book is based on his diaries, which are kept at a library in Sydney.

I'm a bit of a fool for a sea-going tale (hell, I even tried to write one.), so I was naturally drawn to the Beagle sequences. The background information on the collecting of samples was fascinating, and the byplay between the rough-and-tumble Covington and the truth-seeking Darwin was fun. The Sydney-set chapters were less successful: Covington's spiritual discombobulation is buried beneath a rather annoying plot-thread about an annoying neighbour's attempts to get to know him (and seduce his daughter!). I could have done without that character altogether, and I thought those sections would have benefited enormously from a tighter focus on Covington himself.

I was disappointed by the last third of this book: ultimately the two strands of the story didn't connect in any satisfying way. I was left feeling that I'd learned a lot, but not feeling moved. And hey, if I wanted to know about Darwin, I could go read Origin of Species and Voyage of the Beagle myself, y'know?

We ended up ditching the book-giving tradition, probably due in some part to the unimpressed look on my face when I unwrapped Mr Darwin's Shooter. But now I've read it, and there's no way that it deserved a decade on the shelf. I should've trusted my Mum.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: A Dance With Dragons by George R.R. Martin. Uh-oh, this is the second time in a row that I've used my 'I get to get a book!' to buy the new entry in an epic fantasy series. My geek is showing. But it's nothing to be ashamed of: Martin is a master of narrative and, with the HBO show winning raves and garnering him new fans, the whole world's beginning to realise it.
books to go: still 101