I Blame The Baby

Oh, and while I'm in a bit of a blogging frenzy, I'd just like to take the opportunity to say how sad I am to not have been to the Zurich Film Fest this year. This is the first year this century (!) that I haven't been an extreme attendee of at least one film festival, and sadly it's also the year that there was a bit of an Australiana theme at the Zurich fest. On the bright side, I did miss out on all that Zurich-and-back public transport tedium, the aggravating ticketing system and eating far too many (delicious) pretzels when I didn't have enough time for a proper meal.

Forgotten News

Annoying festy things I forgot to mention:

The man who made an introductory speech before one of the films I saw and told us that the movie had a happy ending. Great. Just what everyone who's about to watch a movie wants to hear.

The time I left a very crowded Q&A after a movie, snuck out the convenient exit just near where I was sitting, only to find that the door at the end of it, which opened into the lane beside the cinema, was unopenable because some moron had parked their car in front of it. A security guard got the car owner to come and move it and so I was freed, but never mind the fact that these emergency exits (which I think was what this was) are there for a reason. I was pleased that when I tried to open the door I shoved it the 7cm or so that it would go before it ran into the car and that I was responsible for making a bit of a dent in the side of the car, and for getting some door paint off the door and onto the car. Idiot.

Festy Round-Up

I've spent the last week hard at work going to the Zurich Film Festival every day and watching a lot of movies. Nineteen of them, to be precise, and I'm surprisingly glad it's all over now. High points, low points and points of note include:

My undoubted favourite movie of the fest was Sergio, a documentary about the all-round impressive (unless you were his wife) UN dude who was killed in Iraq in 2003. Apparently the rest of the festy-goers didn't agree with me, because it didn't win the audience prize for a documentary, but had I been the only voter it definitely would have. Someone in my screening even gave it a standing ovation, so maybe he would have been allowed to vote too.

Feature-film wise, my favourite was a really grim Romanian/English movie called Katalin Varga which also didn't win the audience prize, but had far more charm than the really grim Russian flick that did.

I patriotically went and saw the only Australian movie on offer, Samson and Delilah, and it was also pretty grim. And dialogue-lite. And sort of slow moving, at least for the first half, but definitely worth it in the end. Plus I think we all took away a clear message from it - sniffing petrol is bad. In case you didn't already know.

The festy people really need to work on their ticketing skillz. Buying my festypass involved being sent to the wrong place twice, having gone to the right place in the first place and been told authoritatively that I was in the wrong place. I eventually got hold of my festival pass (which let me see all the films at the festival without having to pay more for anything), but then I still had to get individual tickets for the films I wanted to see, and I was never allowed to get a ticket for anything more than a day in advance. Which meant that every day I had to queue up and get tickets, and really, of the 7 times I did that, only once or twice did I manage to be given the right tickets without any drama. People gave me tickets to screenings on the wrong day, they told me it was impossible to reserve tickets for that movie (which was never true!), they told me that my pass only let me see one movie a day, they gave me ticket reservations instead of actual tickets (which meant I had to queue up again and get the actual tickets later). None of it was a real problem, but it was all very annoying.

All the movies (bar one) had english subtitles. Oh, and maybe another one which was partially in english and partially in russian and had french and german subtitles the whole way through. That is great, in my english-speaking opinion. It was also a very pleasant surprise when we stumbled upon the Lisbon film fest in May this year and found that everything had english subtitles there too.

I hate reserved seating and the Swiss mania for sitting in your reserved seat. And also the enthusiasm of the ticket sellers for allocating you a seat in the middle of everyone else (behind/in front of/next to people, even when 90% of the theatre is empty). Which meant I rarely sat in my allocated seat and lived in fear of someone coming and telling me to go away. Which they never did.

Some people are nuts. Reto came with me to one of the films I saw, a reasonably full screening of somethingorother, and our seats weren't next to each other because I hadn't bought the two tickets at the same time. There was a woman sitting between us. Reto asked her if she wouldn't mind swapping seats with him, and she said "okay, since they're only showing a DVD [as opposed to reels, I suppose] I guess it doesn't matter if I'm not exactly in the middle", and then she looked sort of grim-faced, as though it really did matter. Quite a bit.

Those chocolates that Globus gives you with your coffee are great. And I have a new-found respect for Brezelkönig as a meal-substitute, although if you buy their pretzels at 11pm as you're rushing for the last train home, they tend to be kind of old and dry and blergh (but still better than nothing).

Oh, and all that Roman Polanski bizzo - whatever. I find it sort of odd that so many people went so bonkers about saying how he deserves his freedom and he has paid his debt to society because .. well, look how good his movies have been. Whatever high profile guests the fest invites next year might be well-advised to look into any outstanding international warrants against them before booking their flights, though.

Festy cont..

These Switzies, they're so foreign.

Going to the movies here is weird enough what with the allocated seating, different ticket price for different areas in the theatre, intermissions, and outrageous enthusiasm for dubbing instead of subtitling. Actually, I've found that only the dubbing part of that is relevant lately (maybe I'm just going to the right movie theatres, but I haven't had an intermission in ages), but I think all the years of indoctrination with allocated seating might have had a permanent effect on the movie-going habits of many Swiss folk. In my experience, ticket-sellers at Swiss cinemas, when they have to allocate seats, tend to allocate everyone into the smallest space possible. Even if there are only 10 of you in the whole theatre, you'll all be wedged into the middle, nary a spare seat between you, and your Charming Swiss Companion will be surprisingly hesitant to agree to move with you to other seats so that you can have some elbow room. If, unlikely as it is, you do happen to use your initiative and move to a seat other than your allocated one, you can be sure that someone will come in and say "excuse me, you're in my seat". Everyone cares that much about being where they're supposed to be.

Even now, in the brave new world of "sit where you like! All the tickets cost the same!" a lot of people can't bear to see a seat in the middle go to waste. At pretty much every movie I've seen in the last few days (which is about 10) I've seen people come into the (usually mostly-empty) theatre just as the lights are going down, spot a single reasonably-central spare seat (usually with coats/scarves/bags on it) between groups of other people, and squish past everyone else in the row to ask "is that seat free?" rather than just taking a slightly less central seat that perhaps has spare seats around it. I'd rather sit at the end of the row and have a bit of room to myself and be able to whisper annoying commentary to my Charming Swiss Companion (that's Reto, by the way, not some Mystery Swiss Companion) without annoying other people as well, than have the "best" seat in the house. Apparently no one agrees with me.

Festy

The Fribourg film festival started yesterday! It's an annual thing, with a general theme of movies from asia and south america and africa. Last year, while anticipating this year's festival and when I was much crappier at french than I am these days, I was a bit worried that it might all be a bit french (language) and inaccessible for me, but happily I have discovered that pretty much all the movies are shown in their original languages and sub-titled into english. Wackily enough, there is also the offer of simultaneous translation into french for many films, which involves a translator sitting in the back row of the theatre, and her french translation of it all being available on headphones that you can get upon your entry to the theatre. Which is something I've never seen before at the movies, and no doubt extremely handy. And also kind of annoying, because in quieter moments (like when there is text on the screen and no sound) you can hear her muttering away in the background.

So far we've seen Terminal Island (an american flick from the 70s or so, which is in the festival under a "revanches de femmes" theme, although I'm not really sure if the women in the film were actually the agents of their own revenge or if they were there more to take their clothes off a lot and be rescued by their menfolk (rescued from the other menfolk, whose intentions were nowhere near as gallant).

And then we saw Garapa, a doco about malnutrition and starvation in the slums of Fortaleza (a town in northeast Brazil). Which was relentlessly depressing, as you'd imagine, and really interesting. "Garapa" is the name of the sugar water that people give their children to drink when they have no other food available, which seems to be an awful lot of the time, in spite of the government's "zero hunger" programme which seems to involve giving money for food and/or milk for children under a certain age. While the lack of work/money/food is obviously a major problem, one of the more interesting bits of the doco for me was near the end when the filmmaker asked his subjects if they wanted to have more children (more than the 11 that one family already had!). Some of them sort of said "no", but overall the mood was more one of resignation; that there's nothing you can do to prevent it, that you're equally likely to have another baby whether or not you use contraception, and that if you do have more children, you will always find a way to feed them. But of course that way is frequently with nothing more than sugar and water, which really isn't doing anyone any good. Lordy it was depressing.

Yay! Boo!

Hurray, it's over! And also, boo, it's over! The film fest, that is, and although it's not actually true, because the fest doesn't finish until Sunday and I still have one flick to see tomorrow, it feels like it is.

I've seen 16 or so movies. I've spent about 25 hours on the train travelling between Fribourg and Zurich (including last Friday night when something stupid went wrong with the train signalling or something and I spent 3 hours on the train instead of 1.5 getting home again, grr). I've spent a lot of time embracing the awfulness of being a refugee or hoping to be recognised as one, of being stalked by psychopaths in the dwindling hours of life on earth, of being in flailing relationships, of having mentally unstable family members, of being in comas, of being a Dutch teenager stuck between cultures (that one was really crappy), of being a Norwegian train driver (there was no awfulness in that one. It was charmingly bizarro and pleasantly familiar, what with having spent so much time on Norwegian trains lately), of being kinda nutso and prone to bursting inappropriately into song, of getting too involved with other people's lives of crime, and now I'm looking forward to getting back to the non-horror of my life.

Which sadly means getting back into all-day french lessons and becoming paranoid about this stoopid exam thing I've signed myself up for. Sigh.

I miss the film fest.

Festy

Festiness has begun! Yesterday I saw Ballast (a relentlessly depressing American movie about dysfunctional relationships and crime and poverty and so on. Incidentally, the programme seems to be full of relentlessly depressing movies, and also heavily concerned with suicide bombers. I think it's going to be an arduous week), and then Das Herz ist ein Dunkler Wald, which was also kind of relentlessly depressing but in a much more charming a wacky way. It was nice, too, to see a foreign (ie. non-english-language) movie for a change.

After the second movie, we were all hustled out a side door and into some crappy alley (nb. much less crappy than the State Theatre's alley) because there was a red carpet thing going on out the front of the theatre. Apparently Sylvester Stallone was there (because the fest is having some sort of Sylvester Stallone flashback retrospective) and they didn't want us rabble getting in his way. Flattering.

Sunlight? Overrated!

Good news!

I was having some sort of crisis of personality, where I was doubting whether I really wanted to watch that many movies, and whether I would be able to cope with going to Lausanne every morning and Zurich every afternoon, missing half my french lessons and not getting enough sleep, but ... happily I have now read the Zurich Film Festival programme in english (instead of struggling through the stupid german version that I found at the airport), and am REALLY EXCITED about lots of films, and I don't care at all that it will involve sitting on a train for something like 4 hours a day! Yay for me!

And in other funny festy news, there's a movie on at this fest (Beaufort) that I saw at the Sydney Film Fest last year. That's slow.

Oh SFF, How I Pine For Thee

Oh, and in other sad news, the Sydney Film Festival is on and I'm not there. For the first time since last century I'll be missing the festival, and I won't be spending a good solid 2 weeks in the dark watching movie after movie after movie. Instead, I'll be over here with all the sport nuts. Sigh.

Yay For Friday

Yesterday one of my favourite things happened - Reto and I went to the movies and we were the only people there! This hasn't happened to me for aaaaages*, and apparently it has never happened to Reto before, so we both enjoyed all the loud talking and coughing and canoodling and so on enormously.

The downside, of course, is that we had to see a fairly crappy movie (Definitely, Maybe, which was just as full of precocious-yet-adorable kiddies and nauseating romance as those movies always are, and yet which still managed to be relatively endearing), but happily we needn't feel as gypped as the people in the previous screening that was held in that cinema, who had the place to themselves as well but were forced to endure the relentless tosh that is Fool's Gold.




* not the most recent, but one of the more memorable times that this happened to me, and when I was actually on my own as in all alone, I had gone to see a late-ish evening screening of one of the Scream movies. It was so scary!

RSWB's Creche - Places Available!

Yelling at other people's children - is it okay? As an avid movie-goer and a non child-owner, I say yes.

Reto and I went to the movies this arvo. We saw I Am Legend, which is rated M (15 years and over) and was really quite grisly in a postapocalyptic/mutant killing machines/every man for himself kinda way. What's more, you really didn't have to see the movie to know that that was what it was going to be like (I believe the subtitle for the movie is something about the last man on earth not being alone, which is undeniably portentously creepy).

You would think it would be clear - don't take your gaggle of tiny wee under-10s to see this movie. I don't care how bored you are sitting around with them on a rainy summer holiday, this is not a movie for little girls in yellow dresses and their tiny little siblings.

Anyway, we got to the cinema and some huge man with enormous hair sat down in front of me (grr) and then a few adults with about 800 (well, maybe 5) little kids sat in the row behind us. I slouched and scrunched and sat up straight and twisted to see past the curly-headed tall-y, and the kiddies crinkled and crunched and slurped their way through their chips and icecream and popcorn and (most likely) vast quantities of red cordial*. Then the previews ended and almost instantly the movie theatre was ringing out with kiddy voices saying "where are all the people?", "what's happened?", "why is that hideous monster attacking the nice doggy?", "I don't want to watch any more!", "mummy, can we go home now?" etc.

Sigh. Once their attention was gone, the kiddies spent all their time either hiding their faces in the backs of their seats and whimpering in fear, or crawling on the ground under the pretext of allegedly looking for lollies that they had dropped on the ground. Actually, that's not true, sometimes they climbed over the backs of other chairs rather than going under them.

None of that was actually so bad (the movie really wasn't that good. We went to see it because it was on rather than because we really wanted to see it) but cumulatively it was kind of annoying and so the final straw for me was one little boy who spent a ridiculously long time crawling around on the floor under my seat, and who then sat on the floor a few seats down from me but in the same row and started stomping his heels onto the ground. He was wearing these shoes that lit up whenever he thumped them, so the effect was kind of like being in some sort of bizarro nightclub with a mini strobe and extremely bass-heavy music (plus of course very little dancing and images of post-apocalyptic hideousness being projected on the wall which would certainly make for a point of difference for a nightclub). I looked at the kid, who was engrossed in his shoe-based fun and I whispered "hey!" and him to get his attention. Mid-stomp he looked over at me with his big, wide, already pre-terrified eyes and I hissed at him "stop it!" in what I now look back on as a rather threatening manner (at the time I just thought I was being quite quiet) and suddenly his stomp turned into a gentle placing of his foot on the ground, and he sort of cringed a bit and his eyes got a little bit wider, and he crawled back under the seat and over to his mother.

The mother (or whoever she was) had been yelling at these kids all through the movie to absolutely no avail. I am not scary at all, and what I said was hardly controversial or mean, but this kiddy was terrified of me and the effect on his behaviour was instantaneous. I'm sure when I was a youngster myself I would have been much more effected by total strangers having a go at me than by my own parents doing it.

And so - I say that it's up to everyone to control the wayward kiddies of other people. Obviously this is a completely insane idea that would no doubt be appalling in reality and is probably overstepping all sorts of boundaries of common decency and what have you and no doubt if I had children and someone else told them what to do I would be outraged, but all that stuff aside I say go for it. There's nothing like the brisk and efficient disapproval of a total stranger to make someone who is too young to realise that they don't have to stand for it behave better.





* Red cordial being strongly associated with hyperactive kiddies. I doubt they actually sell it at the movies, but if they do I bet it costs about $5.

Movies n Music

Well, yesterday was an excellent day of loafing and culture. Reto finished this big hideous exam that he has spent the past zillion years studying for on Thursday, so he spent the first half of Sunday being sort of hung over and vile, but by the afternoon everything was shipshape again (relatively).

We went to Zurich and availed ourselves of some more of the Film Fest. We saw this Spanish film called La Caja (aka The Wooden Box, although I do wonder if that should really have been "The Coffin"or similar, which seems more likely. Apparently I don't wonder enough to go and look at a spanglish dictionary though), which was really great and dark and full of secrets and grimness. There was a question and answer thing afterwards with the director, not something I normally enjoy much, but at this screening there were only about 50 people and so the whole thing had a really intimate feel. People were asking questions in all sorts of languages (well, spanish and german and english) and it all had a really informal, friendly, funny vibe, which is really pretty different from the Q&As I am used to at the Sydney Film Fest, which are often more about people pontificating and showing off. Interestingly, the movie only had english subtitles, and it was all in spanish. No german in sight.

After that we had some dinner and then went and saw a Crowded House concert with my Australian Zurich friends, Sarah and Kathryn, which was really fun. It was a nice change to be surrounded by english-speakers (let alone english-speakers with Australian and New Zealandy accents!) and to be able to eavesdrop on people with ease (not that anyone was saying much worth eavesdropping on). We stood behind the sound desk for the concert, which I always enjoy because it usually makes it easy to see the stage, and also because I enjoy spying on the set list (or whatever it's called) and spoiling the surprise for myself. As you would expect, they played some new stuff (which no one knew), lots of old stuff (which everyone knew), and the odd bit of this and that. Interestingly, Davey Lane was part of the band.

Swiss people, as it turns out, are strange in crowd situations. They have this mysterious mock mexican wave thing that they do that involves holding both arms out in front of you and waggling your fingers in a "spirit fingers" kinda way while simultaneously humming a constant note (ie. making you look like a zombie having a fit), and then ideally I think someone at the front sort of takes charge so everyone knows when they can then wave their arms in the air in a more traditional mexican wave type style (except not around in a circle as in an arena, but more of a front to back thing). I have seen this a few times (at the schwinging, and at this concert we went to in Baden a while ago), and people sort of tried to do it last night at the concert, but it was evidently confusing for the Crowdies. The first time it happened the humming was much more prominent than the hand wobbling (I think the lights were down) and Neil Finn dealt with it admirably by assuming we were giving him a note and then he turned it into "Friday I'm In Love", which was funny. The second time the hands were everywhere and the humming was nowhere and Neil looked confused for a while, then he tried to join in a bit as well and started waving his fingers in more of a "black and white minstrel" (or at least black-and-white-minstrel-as-featured-on-The-Goodies) sort of way. Then everyone sort of gave up (which we surmised might have had something to do with the fact that the audience was probably less Switzies and more antipodeans). Katherine, who is quite the veteran of Zurich living (7 years!), says it's always interesting to see how foreign bands deal with the zombie wave. I think the Crowdies coped admirably. Hopefully the next chance I have to see will be in November, when the Cat Empire are touring Yay!

Zurich Film Fest

Last night Reto and I inadvertently went to the Zurich Film Festival. I hadn't realised it had started yet or I'm sure we would have gone deliberately, but we had actually gone to Zurich to see another movie (and to waste time, because Reto has this exam of his on Monday and he is looking around for excuses not to study any more). Anyway, the film we had meant to see was only on dubbed into german, blahblahblah, so when we happened upon a ZFF programme we decided to go to the next thing that was on at that instead, which was (the world premiere of) this Austrian movie called Freundschaft. It was about a father and son discussing family and national politics relentlessly for an hour and a half (based on a play, which you could really tell from the intense wordiness of it all, the absence of other characters and action, and the total lack of importance of scenery), and which was all quite charming (although possibly better if you know more about Austrian politics).

Several things are worth noting. Firstly, the tickets were ludicrously expensive (21 francs each!), which is not really surprising but still worth being horrified by. Secondly, english really seems to be the main language of the ZFF, which I appreciate but I am still sort of outraged on behalf of Switzies. Freundschaft was obviously in german (with english subtitles), but the short film before it (which was this extremely explicit and funny cartoon about one girl's sexual (mis)adventures) was in english and had no subtitles. Reto saw a few things at the Fest last year and he says that one of the features he saw (as opposed to the short film before it) then was also in english and had no subtitles at all. Which, as I said, is appalling. And speaking of appalling, the subtitles were weird. The word "snafu" featured, as did "perdu". Pardon?

Thirdly, the movie theatre we were in had a flat floor (which has nothing to do with the Fest, but still). The seats were absolutely enormous (so much so that you couldn't really see the head of the person in front of you) and the screen was a fair way up in the air, so it was no problem seeing the screen, but it was still peculiar to be in a flat movie theatre. The only other times I can think of this happening were in places that aren't really movie theatres (such as the State Theatre in Sydney (although only if you sit in the Stalls, and even then the floor is gently slopy), or at the Inverell town hall when I was a kiddy and they used to show movies there once a fortnight because there was no movie theatre in town. Although, archaically enough, there was a drive-in. Which also had a flat floor). Weird.

There was no intermission (hurray). We did still have allocated seats, and ticket prices that depend on which seats you want, which I totally disapprove of, but the lack of intermission was good.

Possibly the funniest thing that happened was the entry of the festival jury (who were all sitting in the row in front of us), which involved them all turning up a bit late and the last one, who was sort of old and a bit unsteady on his feet, and who was still walking in as they turned the lights down so he probably couldn't see anything, inadvertently sitting on Dieter Meier (who seems to have done everything, including being a member of Yello, the only Swiss band you have ever heard of). Fortunately it seemed they had already been introduced and so it wasn't as awkward as it could have been, and the man took his own seat, not on top of Dieter Meier.

It was a nice evening. The film wasn't so great (Reto liked it far more than I did. I like the fact that I had no idea what it was going to be about before we went and saw it. Oh, and the short film was excellent) but I always enjoy a film fest experience, and this one didn't let me down. I think there will definitely be more of it next week...

Vale

Ingmar Bergman died today.

Once, in an effort to fulfill my dream of becoming Australia's premier authority on the cinema of Scandinavia, I went to a course thing on the films of Ingmar Bergman. It was run by David Stratton (who as it turns out is just in real life as he is on telly. Margaret was always my favourite, though), who told a bizarre story about being naked in a sauna in Finland with Harriet Andersson* in the 1970s or something, and who made me realise that my dream may never be realised as long as he, David Stratton, lives**.



* Sometime lover and leading lady of Ingmar.
** Fortunately for David Stratton, I have since decided that becoming Australia's premier authority on the films of Scandinavia might be a bit of a big ask, so he need fear me no longer. That being said, I may have my eye on being Australia's (or possibly Switzerland's) premier expert on Danish cinema instead now, and I can think of at least one person who might be standing in my way. Hmm***.
*** Just in case you are getting the wrong message here, rest assured that I'm not insane. Or murderous.

Hurting Technology

Reto and I watched a DVD of Dogville last night. Well, I watched it and he fell asleep. I really enjoyed it (although perhaps it was a bit slow-moving. 3 hours really is too long), and I thought the whole thing with it all being done on a stage with no walls or anything was great for creating an atmosphere of oppressive proximity and interdependence between the characters and so on.

Sadly, though, when I say that I watched the movie, what I really mean is that I watched the first two hours, then moved slightly to make myself more comfortable and dropped the DVD player thing (I was watching it on my laptop, lying in bed, and none of our cords and things are long enough so the DVD drive thing, which I guess would be actually in the computer if it wasn't a laptop, was perched precariously on a pile of junk. Until I yoincked the laptop across a bit and knocked the DVD thing over, anyway. Oh, and in case you were wondering, I do have a DVD thing in my laptop, but it's set to Australia and so wouldn't have played this DVD, which is from here) and then about 5 minutes later the DVD froze. Further inspection showed that the DVD had some enormous scratches in it. Which apparently I am being blamed for.

The up-side is that I don't know that I could have stayed awake for another hour of the movie. It really is kind of grim and awful, and according to ruinedendings.com, it didn't really get a whole lot more cheerful. The other up-side was that I then saw most of this adorable French animated movie (with very little dialogue, happily) about a cyclist who was kidnapped and his grandmother who went to save him, and these three old ladies who made wacky music using vacuum cleaners and fridge shelves, and who favoured the dynamite-assisted version of fishing. Which was lovely, and quite the antidote to all the rape and oppression.

Thorpey Crash - may contain spoilers

Today Thorpey told me that buying vintage fashion (aka 'second hand' if you only speak 90s and earlier fashion lingo) will save the planet.

Last night I saw Oil Crash, or Crude Awakening as it's called here, apparently (which is all about how we, and specifically Americans with their fondness for Hummers and so on, no offence to all you Americans out there or anything, or at least none more than is your due, are wasting away all the oil in the world and how life as we know it, which in every aspect is heavily reliant on oil, is going to fall apart quick smart when we have no more oil and we will all suddenly turn into farmers and then die, because we don't know anything about being farmers and even if we do we don't really know about being farmers without fertiliser and machinery and so on. I mean really, it's worse than the Great Corn Threat), so I'm a bit sceptical that some aging, bug-infested polyester dresses, regardless of how fun they are, are going to save me. Reto and I were thinking of seeing Oil Crash in Switzy a while ago, but we saw Edmond instead, thinking it would be more cheerful. Edmond was the horrible story of a man who leaves his wife and then goes wandering the streets for a night and is attacked and robbed and generally treated quite poorly and then murders Julia Stiles in a hideous, blood-soaked stabbing frenzy and goes to prison and is raped by other men (although eventually he forms a loving relationship with his former rapist, so the ending was actually quite happy, really). And as it turns out that we made the right decision. It was still more cheerful than Oil Crash.

Festy Roundup - Spoiler Alert

Well. Two weeks, 80 hours (of work) and 29 movies (that I actually watched) later, it's all over. I really like movies. It always takes me a while after the Fest is over to see what I enjoyed the most, and what stays with me the longest, but at the moment I have a short list.

I wanted to see La Vie En Rose and After The Wedding (ah how I love the films of Denmark) when I was in Switzerland, but I didn't because the language barrier got in my way. Sadly (for Reto) they were both on at the Fest and so now I have seen them and he (who kindly didn't go so as not to leave me out of the loop) has not. I really enjoyed both of them, but then again I expected to, so they don't really seem that exciting.

King Corn was super, as I have already said.

I watched a moody, dialogue-light movie from Russia (The Island) about a man who was forced to shoot his captain (or someone) during WW2 and then spent the rest of his life being a monk and feeling repentant and kind of insane, which was a bit arduous at the time but in retrospect it was great. It was full of grim symbolism,or something, and I really felt that every scene added some atmosphere and emotion to the movie. Which is odd, because it's not at all the sort of thing I normally think.

The other thing that stands out at the moment is the latest from my favourite Czech director (because doesn't everyone have a favourite Czech director? This dude, Jan Hrebejk, also made Cosy Dens and Divided We Fall, the latter having been nominated for an Oscar a few years ago). It was a movie called Beauty In Trouble, and sadly the blurb in the festival brochure totally ruined the plot (a woman leaves her deadbeaty husband and finds a man who is rich and kind and can offer her everything she has ever wanted, but she just can't stop having sex with her ex, never mind the fact that she didn't have sex with her ex until the last 15 or so minutes of the movie). It was a nice movie, the characters were likeable and believable, it wasn't smarty-pantsy or confusing, and it was fun. As opposed to The Island, which was not fun at all.

It will be interesting to see how I feel about it all in another week or so.

Was It On Screen Or Did It Really Happen?

Yesterday I turned up 10 minutes or so late for a movie I wanted to see (Beaufort, about Israeli soldiers in a fort on the border with, or possibly in, Lebanon). Before I went to see it I didn't really remember what the movie was about (more than a week earlier I had read the programme and marked what I wanted to see, and since then I have just been mindlessly turning up to watch things). When I arrived there was a man on screen who was there to defuse a bomb, and he seemed to be the centre of all the action, so I assumed he was the main character and that I should become emotionally attached to him. And so I did. About 10 minutes later he was killed by the bomb that he apparently failed to defuse.

It was kind of more like real life than a movie (not that my life is packed full of mines and soldiers and international unrest). I was missing all those clues that you normally get in a film as to who is important and interesting and who is expendable. I was shocked by his death, and spent the rest of the film thinking that he had been hardly-done-by because he was mourned so little.

Corn Shock

In another long and arduous day at the Sydney Film Festival, today I became outraged about corn. I watched a doco called King Corn (so unheard of it doesn't seem to even have a spot on imdb) and I wasn't really planning to enjoy it that much, but I did and now I am revelling in my outrage. Americans eat so much corn that they are practically made of it. They kill cows with it. No doubt they destroy biodiversity and therefore entire ecosystems by growing so much of it. They poison themselves by eating it relentlessly. It's all fertiliser/pesticide laden and genetically modified. It's economically and nutritionally unsustainable.

Now I want to see the same thing but about soy. I'm sure I could get angry about that, too.

Movies (part one of seven million)

I suspect that any posts I post in the next 2 weeks are going to be relentlessly boring and badly written. I had my first proper day of film festing today (for that is what I am doing, in case I haven't explained it. The Sydney Film Festival is on). Last night I saw La Vie en Rose, which was the opening night film, which was handy because I had wanted to see it in Switz but didn't because the french/german thing (as in, with no english subtitles) held me back. As it turned out it was super. Today I watched a relentless stream of movies about dysfunctional families, and about being an immigrant (illegal or otherwise), and also about the downfall of communism. Oh, and there was something about bread and revenge, but I missed half of it because I was eating lunch. All of which was excellent, if somewhat depressing and tiring. Still, only the first day of 14 or something, so I am bracing myself.

The down side (apart from being tired and depressed) is that people keep phoning me and I miss their phone calls and am unlikely to ever call them back because I am constantly watching movies and also, I have no credit on my phone (which I am about to remedy). So rest assured, people. If you have tried to phone me it's not that I'm ignoring you. Or at least, it's fairly unlikely. Maybe I'll call you back in 2 weeks or something.