I’m the last person on the internet to fall in love with Book Worship. Regardless, I’m totally inspired to start taking home the beautiful paperbacks I find in op shops and secondhand book stores, even if I’m never going to read them.
Yes, I know, the film festival ended on Sunday and it’s Thursday now, but I was totally overloaded by moving images and needed a few days to read materialist feminist theory and misuse the word ‘imbricate’ and say hello to my thesis again. Also, I had to teach. I decided to just combine the last three films I saw into one uber-post. I actually saw four films this weekend, but I really haven’t got much to say about ‘10 Conditions of Love.’ I mean, I can praise Rebiya Kadeer’s bravery, and comment on the denial of service attacks on the MIFF website, and maybe describe the rather tame Chinese protesters outside the Town Hall. Truth is I didn’t pay too much attention to the film as I was in the literal nosebleed section of the Town Hall, in an uncomfortably steep section of seating, and it gave me full-on vertigo. I had to keep my eyes shut through the whole thing to stop the room spinning. In retrospect I should have left the theatre, but I didn’t want to be That Person who walked out of ‘10 Conditions of Love.’
So here are the films that didn’t give me vertigo.
Thirst
completely boss Twilight picture via Videogum.
I went to ‘Thirst’ not because of Park Chan-wook, but because there were vampires. As I’ve mentioned before, I have a patience for the vampire genre (trope?) that I simply don’t for other cinematic supernatural creatures. How was it? It was darkly funny and legitimately sexy, with Sang Kang-ho overcome by lust and Kim Ok-vin radiantly unhinged. That said, the plot had major, glaring holes, something I don’t always complain about, but why did the priest go to some mysterious Caribbean (??) island to take part in a clinical trial for a vaccine or medicine or something? How come the guy with the cancer is in hospital one day, playing mah jong at home with his family the next? What was it that made priestguy a vampire?
Bran Nue Dae
This musical was cute as balls and completely sincere and quite lovely to look at. Go see it when it gets a theatrical release.
The Girlfriend Experience
Steven Soderbergh’s film about a high-end escort, her personal trainer boyfriend and their clients doesn’t so much unfold as sediment, a series of disconnected, often repeated scenes settling on top of each other to form an impression of these interconnected lives. Sasha Grey is beautiful and guarded as Chelsea, the exquisitely dressed, deeply expensive escort at the centre of the film. This film seems to be about two things – precariousness, in work, finance and relationships, and the traffic in pleasure. Chelsea’s clients, paying exorbitantly for the pleasure of her company and for her tasteful wardrobe and expensive underwear, complain endlessly about the financial crisis. Her boyfriend tries to find extra work, pleads with his clients to buy more sessions. Both are, in their own way, luxury items, expendable in times of crisis. It was very good.
‘Get in the fookin’ sack.’ Lub. Via BoingBoing.
Too many movies. SIGH.
As I mentioned earlier, I really expected to hate John H-O, the titular guest of Cindy Sherman, mostly because, from the sounds of it, there are few ways a doco about someone’s ex can be anything other than a dick move. I was very pleasantly surprised. ‘Guest of Cindy Sherman’ is a lot of things, but in the end it’s about an aimless, frantically charming, fizzingly energetic man and the woman he loves but lost himself to.
H-O was a struggling, half-assed artist in New York in the ’90s when he bought a video camera and decided to start a public access TV show about the art world. From the outset H-O presents himself in a decidedly unflattering light, interviewing friends and family who describe him as always more invested in the art world than art itself. There’s plenty of footage from the TV show, ‘Gallery Beat,’ where he and a few nebbish friends frolicked about the city’s gallery openings, and the show was amateurish, poorly shot and fun. Much of the film is video shot by H-O; indeed the camera rarely seems to leave his hand. The rest are interviews with people close to him and to Sherman, so the film ultimately feels like a long, gossipy wake for a relationship, where everyone gives their pop-psych analysis of what happened.
The film was startingly intimate, especially during H-O’s earliest interviews with Sherman. The two met at a gallery opening, which H-O filmed. A year or two later she agreed to be interviewed, and those interviews, of the two of them sweetly, awkwardly lingering around her studio, flirting and talking, are really lovely. There’s no nastiness at all towards Sherman in this film. Rather, through interviews with her college friends, the endless video of their trips to the beach, meetings with the family, even a thrilling segment where H-O films her taking pictures of herself, a portrait comes together of a remarkable and guarded woman. I came away with the sense that, even though their relationship had ended, H-O still really loves her.
It was sweet, and cringey, and a fascinating look into the ridiculousness of the art world. Well done, embittered ex-boyfriend, well done.
I don’t really play video games, and whenever I try I’m so incompetent I can barely move the character around and it feels like I have a motor neuron disorder. I did watch my friend (ex, really, but ‘ex’ sounds so harsh and he’s my friend now) play a lot of video games, though, which sounds alienating but it was more fun for me to watch than to embarassingly struggle through. Which is why I can say that ‘Eden Log’ reminded me of a game cut scene. A bad, intentionally obtuse, painfully pretentious cut scene.
I only stayed an hour, partly because after an hour the film appeared to have no intention of going anywhere or doing anything, partly because I was deliriously over-tired. As I have mentioned, over and over again, I managed to get a head cold right in the middle of the film festival, and the night before I went to see ‘Eden Log’ I failed to sleep. And I mean completely, totally failed. I did not sleep at all, which happens to everyone but is still really unpleasant. I knew I was written off before I even left the house to go to the cinema, but still I went because I felt some obligation to my Minipass.
So I went, and the film began with a man gaspingly struggling his way out of a puddle of mud. He seems to have woken in some vast, forgotten machine, a mine or a spaceship or something else full of metal and cables, all rusty and dripping and creaking, and as he stumbles around he trips old mechanisms originally built, apparently, to move the plot forward. A turnstile triggers solemn, holographic ladies who talk cryptically about a plant and workers and citizenship and junk. He clambers into a weird perspex box (??), apparently an old-school elevator or something. He comes across an incoherent botanist in some kind of Ridley Scott hazmat suit, who says a lot but tells mudguy, and the audience, nothing.
It was lame, so I left, and I felt dissociative and panicky as you often do when you’re too tired and worried you might be in for another sleepless night. When I got home I remembered something Judd Apatow said in an interview on Fresh Air, about going to bed with an earbud in one ear, listening to a talky public radio podcast, letting the radio talk you to sleep. I tried it, and it worked. So while I can’t really comment on ‘Eden Log,’ I will say that going to sleep with an earbud in one ear, listening to NPR, gets two thumbs up.
After I saw this film, I had a conversation with a friend about how he picked his MIFF films. He researched them, he said. He went through Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB to find the best ones. I didn’t do that. I chose the ones that appeared to hit my cinematic g-spots. Blood? There must be blood. Explosions? I like explosions. Food? I’m hungry all the time. Cowboys and injuns? Why not, but only if there are monsters.
Next time, I’ll pay attention to the reviews.
To get to the point, ‘The Burrowers’ is dreamy around the edges, ambitious in its scope, and hopelessly schlocky by the end. I went to an 11.30 screening, right at the apex of what’s turned into an upsetting, protracted and mucousy headcold, so it’s yet another MIFF film I fell asleep in. I didn’t miss much. Set in the old west, this is a film about one man’s quest for the barely-sketched girl of his dreams, and his battle against the blobby, insect-like creatures that took her.
DreamGirl’s family (I think they called her Mary? Sarah? Something old-timey) was attacked in their homestead in the opening scene. The family takes shelter in the root shelter, but then something unseen takes them. The protagonist, who I will call Protagonist as I can’t remember his name, gathers a posse to find the native Americans* they assume took the family. There’s a lot of talk of rape and death, of a ‘good Christian woman’ preferring death to capture, and there’s a fairly hideous scene where a soldier tortures a native American man for information.
In the end it’s all about the monsters, monsters transparently based on ants and spiders. Here is where the film went from merely dull to B-grade. While I’ve heard comparisons to ‘The Descent,’ another creature-driven horror film, and one of the best films I’ve ever seen, the reveal of the monsters predictably killed whatever tension had built in the first act. The creatures themselves looked like grasshoppers, grasshoppers with big, bulbous, penis-shaped heads, penis-headed grasshoppers dripping with so much mucous I thought for a moment that something had climbed from my infected sinuses and leaped on to the screen. They kill people by scratching their neck, spitting some kind of viscous substance into the cut, waiting for their victim to become paralysed but – HERE IS TEH HORROR – awake!, then burying said victim alive. Here the writers pile TEH HORROR on thick. The penis-hoppers, apparently, can only eat soft, liquefied flesh, so they wait until their victims are appropriately mouldy and aged but still, HORROR, alive and awake. Which is… gross, but unconvincing.
DreamGirl dies in the end, Protagonist realises he’s fighting a losing battle, some pig intestines and fake blood is flung around and the film ends unceremoniously. I left wishing I’d spent that night in bed with a Lemsip and some crosswords. Next year I will look at reviews before I pick my films.
* ‘Indian’ sticks in my overeducated, feminist throat.
I fell asleep. Twice. It wasn’t just because I was tired and starting to come down with a cold. It was because this doco about North Korea was shithouse. I went in hoping for insight into the insanity that is North Korea – how the Kim dynasty came to power, how and why they do those crazy-go-nuts Olympic opening ceremony style operas, what’s the deal with the giant, shiny statue. Instead I got disjointed interviews from escapees about the cruelties they endured, mildly interesting animation, and a whole bunch of swirly contemporary dance. Which is not to say that escapees’ stories aren’t important; I was just hoping for something with more depth than ‘BAD THINGS! BAD THINGS HAPPEN THERE!’
It was like something you’d see on SBS at 8pm on a Tuesday. Disappointing.
Explosions! Great, thumping, percussive explosions, all black and dirty and frightening and awesome. There were lots of them, as you’d expect in a film about a bomb squad in Iraq. ‘Hurt Locker’ is loosely about explosives expert Sgt William James, a classic rebellious action hero, compulsively making out cheques his body can’t cash. He and his ragtag bunch of army pals go around defusing bombs, wrestling, drinking, and punching each other in the solar plexus in a scene that was, to once more quote from Patton Oswalt, gayer than eight guys blowing nine guys.
And it was… okay. Fun, enjoyable, surprisingly and wryly funny. The action was convincing and suspenseful. Ralph Fiennes’ chiselled forearms were a pleasant surprise, as was his amazing (and rapidly dispatched) late capitalist Lawrence of Arabia mercenary character. But this film is ultimately, in a way, about men who thrive off the peak experiences of wartime, and Kathryn Bigelow was rather heavy-handed in conveying just how Dreary and Meaningless life outside of war is. James is, masochistically or otherwise, compelled to put himself into dangerous situations again and again, tossing aside his Stay Puft marshmallow man anti-blowup suit when faced with a car full of bombs, heading out on a one-man mission for vengeance following the death of an Iraqi child, dragging the other guys he works/wrestles/drinks with to find those danged insurgents. In the end it’s a little unconvincing and tiresome.
Still, it was fun. I didn’t fall asleep. I can’t say that for at least two other films I’ve seen this festival.
Edited to add: my friend (and newly-minted Doctor of Philosophy) Saige directed me to this excellent review. See also: I suck at film writing.