Apologies and more reviews

Appar­ently my nat­ural exuber­ance has once again had unex­pec­ted con­sequences. Apo­lo­gies to those concerned.

MIFF Day 2

The Graf­fiti Artist:
An inter­est­ing little film with hardly any dia­logue. The film fol­lows a doe-eyed boy named Nick through the streets of Port­land and then Seattle where he steals and graf­fitis his way through his ennui. He hooks up with another boy who gets money from his mother. Together, although with dif­fer­ent causes behind their lack of interest in the world, they explore their emo­tions for each other. But it’s all in the stil­ted phys­ical lan­guage of teen­aged boys, angled awk­ward looks and power-plays. I found it uncom­fort­able to watch at times, but it’s well done.

The Sad­dest Music in the World:
Utterly bizarre film that’s beau­ti­ful to look at, pushed into hyper-con­trast so that the black and white has almost no grays. Set in the Depres­sion, during Pro­hib­i­tion, Isa­bella Ros­sellini is a double amputee with a for­tune-making beer empire who decides to run a com­pet­i­tion to find the sad­dest music in the world. People come from around the world to com­pete for the $25,000 includ­ing the love-sick alcholic doctor who acci­dent­ally sawed her legs off in the first place (rep­res­ent­ing Canada), his son, with whom she was having an affair at the time (rep­res­ent­ing the US) and his other son, mourn­ing the death of his son and loss of his wife, rep­res­ent­ing Serbia. Win­ners of each round slide down a chute into a vat of beer. Suf­fice to say that once we get around to pros­thetic glass legs filled with beer, it’s “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” meets The Sound of Music.

I won’t give a full review for At Five in the After­noon. It was some­what pre­dict­able. I have no idea why anyone ever settled in Afgh­anistan in the first place. It’s so damn barren.

Azumi:
I found this one a tad pre­dict­able too. There were some inter­est­ing touches in the first sec­tion of the film, but then the char­ac­ters seem to have little emo­tional motiv­a­tion to con­tinue. The set­ting and sword fights were great though, with epic poses and flow­ing capes and of course a single female fighter in very short skirts and long white socks.

MIFF Day 3

The Cat Returns:
Beau­ti­ful animé from Studio Ghibli, the folks who brought us Spir­ited Away. Haru is a young girl who saves a cat. The cat turns out to be the son of the King of Cats who kid­naps her and tries to marry her to the prince as a “reward”. How­ever, she does­n’t want to become a cat and with the help of the reneg­ades Baron and Muta (also cats) she must find her true nature and escape. High­lights include the gor­geous anim­a­tion of the CIA cats (all black with white bibs) walk­ing on their hind legs around the King’s car­riage and peer­ing around, at once per­fectly cat-like and per­fectly security-agent-like.

Sound Class/Five Sides of a Coin:
Two docos, the first about reggae and the second about hip-hop. Both quite good with many of the usual sus­pects (both inter­viewed Herc Kool and Afrika Bam­baataa). The second had Michael Franti and QBert and gave me a little start when DJ Spooky appeared on screen (he’s the guy I spent some time with in Linz… my inter­view with him here).

Human Touch
Abso­lutely per­fect film from Paul Cox. Another great Aus­tralian film, in a long line of recent suc­cesses as far as I’m con­cerned. Anna and David are having prob­lems in their rela­tion­ship. Anna meets a man who may be able to help fund her choir and he asks her to pose nude for pho­to­graphs. She agrees and dis­cov­ers a sen­su­al­ity about her­self she didn’t know exis­ted. We then see the reper­cus­sions this has on her rela­tion­ship with David. One superb sequence involves a day where, on a trip to a villa in France, paid for by the other man, David and Anna agree to spend a day without speak­ing. The sen­su­al­ity of the film-making, the actors, the light, the sub­tleties… glor­i­ous. There are also a number of superb art­works and install­a­tions that are lov­ingly filmed, visu­ally rich, and a gor­geous score and slow choral soundtrack with the lovely touch of being a work by Catullus.