It’s all good

Another great night last night. My first two films at MIFF were both excellent.

The Party’s Over con­cerns the last 6 months of the *last* US pres­id­en­tial elec­tion. Phil­lip Sey­mour Hoff­man satrts the film by saying he agreed to host it because he felt ignor­ant. He goes on to inter­view all the usual sus­pects (Noam Chom­sky, Ralph Nader, Tim Rob­bins, Susan Saran­don) and goes to both parties’ con­ven­tions and the Shadow Con­ven­tion. It has some light-hearted moments and a great pace, man­ages to delve into some of the whys and where­fores but does­n’t give a lot of solu­tions… When we get to the way the Flor­ida scan­dal made the whole pro­cess a farce, it’s just so clear that there is no way for­ward here. When 500,000 more people voted for Gore but Bush got in because of 500 more votes in Flor­ida, how can the US pos­sibly go out there tout­ing this as the best and fairest way to choose the lead­ers of a nation?

Anyhow, my favour­ite line was from a former US Sur­geon-Gen­eral at a protest quot­ing Yehuda Bauer: There are three other com­mand­ments. 1) Thou shalt not be a victim.
2) Thou shalt not be a per­pet­rator 3) And above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.

The scar­i­est moment was the guy from the Chris­tian group where they re-orient queers saying he had found him­self attrac­ted to guys in high school but there he was work­ing for this group with a photo on his mantlepiece of him and a bride in white kiss­ing, and him saying that the only reason people help each other is Chris­tian­ity. he firmly believed that no other reli­gion in the world had ideas of char­ity and love for one’s neighbour.

Con­trol Room was abso­lutely bril­liant. It showed the Al Jaz­eera tele­vi­sion team during the bomb­ing of Bagh­dad and inter­viewed the US Army press spokes­per­son and vari­ous BBC and NBC people. It examined notions of impar­ti­al­ity and truth and was very well craf­ted. The moments where Rums­feld talked about truth and how lies will out was so ironic it was pain­ful and we just had to laugh. See it. It screens again during the fest­ival and it will be get­ting a main­stream release.

And then I went to Q&A and spent the night dan­cing with sleazemon­key and steam_punk and Nat and gen­er­ally surf­ing on the intensely superb energy.