OMG, the films, they're everywhere!
Jun. 3rd, 2007 10:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tiggymalvern
Two more Friday, and two more yesterday - a couple of documentaries, a Korean gay film and YAY ZOMBIES!!!
On Friday afternoon, I went to see Crazy Love, a film I'm not linking to at imdb for reasons of unavoidable right-in-your-face spoilers. It's not something I would ever have chosen to go and see were it not for a very strong rec from the ever-reliable![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mamishka, who caught it as a SIFF preview. She said it was best to go in there knowing nothing, and she was absolutely right. This documentary is crafted entirely with the assumption that its audience doesn't know the story - it plays its history out as drama, with tight timing of 'end of act' reveals and interviews filmed deliberately in a way that ensures the 'future' remains a mystery. It's a complex, shocking drama of desperation and people and what they'll do, with twist after twist that leaves you boggling at human nature, where a viewer who knew the outcome in advance would see only a parade of freaks.
Friday evening's outing was No Regret. 18-year-old Su-min leaves the orphanage for Seoul, where he finds it difficult to keep a steady job in a climate of lay-offs. He eventually finds himself working in a host club, where the only man he won't 'entertain' is the one he's attracted to.
The story develops slowly around the themes of love and obsession, responsibility and friendship and heartbreak - and then twenty minutes from the end it takes a bizarre left turn that sends it hurtling off a cliff, only to actually resolve nothing and leave you thinking 'Huh?' It's like the writer suddenly realised, 'Damn, I'm running out of time here, and oh, a film's supposed to have a dramatic plot, right?' Uh, no, not in this case, I'd say.
Good things about the film - very cute Korean guys, in some charming relationships both sexual and not, and some lovely cinematography. Bad points about the film (ignoring that WTF ending) - 'atmospheric' sometimes devolves into 'slow'. Some of the plot developments could have been too easily avoided by two people sitting down and having a normal conversation instead of an over-emotional reaction (admittedly, the director has done a good job of establishing that these two men don't talk, but that just means I grow annoyed at the characters instead of the scriptwriter). An interesting film, but mediocre rather than anything stand-out, so I scored it 3/5.
The second documentary I saw was Bajo Juarez, about the mass murders of women in an industrial Mexican border town - always a charming way to start a Saturday morning.... The film opens with an interview of grieving relatives describing the disappearance of a 17-year-old girl followed by footage of her memorial service, at which people start to recite the names of other girls missing or dead. And the names go on and on and on....
When the statistics come out, they're utterly shocking. Between 1993 and the 2005 of filming, 423 young women and teenaged girls from this city of 1.5 million people (2005 figure) were sexually assaulted, murdered and dumped around the metropolitan area. The police say this figure is too high, that it includes victims of domestic violence and cases which are unclassifiable because the bodies have never been found - the official police statistic is 356 women, which they claim to be nothing unusual, because there are other places in Mexico with a similar murder rate 0_0 The police also say that 70% of the murders have been solved, that people are in jail for these crimes - and indeed they are, but the murders continue.
Enter the police pathologist who was in charge when the bodies of eight women murdered over a period of six months were found in one field. Forty-eight hours after the discovery, he was told that the case was closed, no autopsies or forensics were needed because two bus drivers had confessed. One of those men is now dead, the other serving a fifty year jail term. There is no physical evidence linking him to the crime, nothing to convict him except the confession, and the only hard documented facts in the entire case are the photos and video footage of burns from cigarettes and electricity on the man's body at the time of his confession. The pathologist promptly resigned. Other murdered women have been investigated for a month and then the cases closed for lack of evidence.
The documentary includes interviews with some of the men jailed for these murders and their relatives, as well as the relatives of the dead girls, spokespeople for the relatives' groups and several police representatives. The general incompetence and obvious corruption within the investigating authorities has led to conspiracy theories that the corruption goes deeper, that the killers are rich local businessmen or factory owners (up to and including friends of the President) and the police are actively covering for them. The film-makers don't impose any of their own views onto the film - they simply let the various groups of people say whatever they feel and present the facts that lie behind it, tenuous as they often are.
Is there a serial killer, or more than one, in Ciudad Juarez? Obviously. There have been multiple instances of multiple bodies discovered. Are some of these women simply victims of domestic violence or crimes of passion, as the police claim? Probably. After all, if you lived in Ciudad Juarez and wanted to murder your young wife, there's a very obvious way to go about it and avoid any risk of detection. It's equally obvious that there are innocent men in jail for some of these crimes. And it's even more obvious that there is now simply no way to sort the entire mess out. The cases have never been properly studied, the forensics ignored and long lost - nobody can know for sure which women were the victims of the same killer, and which cases differed. Who's to know which of the 70 men currently in jail for killing these women are innocent and which are not? As the mother of that dead 17-year-old at the start of the film says, even if the police now found out who murdered her daughter, they would never be able to secure a conviction - at least, not one with any legal grounding.
It's not an easy film to watch, but it contains a lot of powerful footage, and does exactly what a documentary is supposed to do. The attitude of that first police spokeswoman as she calmly implies that 356 women raped and murdered in 12 years is insignificant, just something to live with, is possibly the most horrendous thing to be seen in the whole film - the gasps went all round the cinema. She makes it all too clear that nothing is changing in Ciudad Juarez. Women are still dying, and the official indifference continues.
And finally, to end the day on a considerably less depressing note, our Saturday evening highlight with friends was Fido, a Canadian comedy about a boy and his zombie. It's the 1950s, the zombie invasion has been suppressed, and the remaining zombies are integrated into white picket fence suburbia as menial labour. Wickedly dark satire with Billy Connolly as the titular zombie. What more could you possibly need to know before you book your tickets? Only that Carrie-Anne Moss grows impossibly more gorgeous with every film.
On Friday afternoon, I went to see Crazy Love, a film I'm not linking to at imdb for reasons of unavoidable right-in-your-face spoilers. It's not something I would ever have chosen to go and see were it not for a very strong rec from the ever-reliable
mamishka, who caught it as a SIFF preview. She said it was best to go in there knowing nothing, and she was absolutely right. This documentary is crafted entirely with the assumption that its audience doesn't know the story - it plays its history out as drama, with tight timing of 'end of act' reveals and interviews filmed deliberately in a way that ensures the 'future' remains a mystery. It's a complex, shocking drama of desperation and people and what they'll do, with twist after twist that leaves you boggling at human nature, where a viewer who knew the outcome in advance would see only a parade of freaks. Friday evening's outing was No Regret. 18-year-old Su-min leaves the orphanage for Seoul, where he finds it difficult to keep a steady job in a climate of lay-offs. He eventually finds himself working in a host club, where the only man he won't 'entertain' is the one he's attracted to.
The story develops slowly around the themes of love and obsession, responsibility and friendship and heartbreak - and then twenty minutes from the end it takes a bizarre left turn that sends it hurtling off a cliff, only to actually resolve nothing and leave you thinking 'Huh?' It's like the writer suddenly realised, 'Damn, I'm running out of time here, and oh, a film's supposed to have a dramatic plot, right?' Uh, no, not in this case, I'd say.
Good things about the film - very cute Korean guys, in some charming relationships both sexual and not, and some lovely cinematography. Bad points about the film (ignoring that WTF ending) - 'atmospheric' sometimes devolves into 'slow'. Some of the plot developments could have been too easily avoided by two people sitting down and having a normal conversation instead of an over-emotional reaction (admittedly, the director has done a good job of establishing that these two men don't talk, but that just means I grow annoyed at the characters instead of the scriptwriter). An interesting film, but mediocre rather than anything stand-out, so I scored it 3/5.
The second documentary I saw was Bajo Juarez, about the mass murders of women in an industrial Mexican border town - always a charming way to start a Saturday morning.... The film opens with an interview of grieving relatives describing the disappearance of a 17-year-old girl followed by footage of her memorial service, at which people start to recite the names of other girls missing or dead. And the names go on and on and on....
When the statistics come out, they're utterly shocking. Between 1993 and the 2005 of filming, 423 young women and teenaged girls from this city of 1.5 million people (2005 figure) were sexually assaulted, murdered and dumped around the metropolitan area. The police say this figure is too high, that it includes victims of domestic violence and cases which are unclassifiable because the bodies have never been found - the official police statistic is 356 women, which they claim to be nothing unusual, because there are other places in Mexico with a similar murder rate 0_0 The police also say that 70% of the murders have been solved, that people are in jail for these crimes - and indeed they are, but the murders continue.
Enter the police pathologist who was in charge when the bodies of eight women murdered over a period of six months were found in one field. Forty-eight hours after the discovery, he was told that the case was closed, no autopsies or forensics were needed because two bus drivers had confessed. One of those men is now dead, the other serving a fifty year jail term. There is no physical evidence linking him to the crime, nothing to convict him except the confession, and the only hard documented facts in the entire case are the photos and video footage of burns from cigarettes and electricity on the man's body at the time of his confession. The pathologist promptly resigned. Other murdered women have been investigated for a month and then the cases closed for lack of evidence.
The documentary includes interviews with some of the men jailed for these murders and their relatives, as well as the relatives of the dead girls, spokespeople for the relatives' groups and several police representatives. The general incompetence and obvious corruption within the investigating authorities has led to conspiracy theories that the corruption goes deeper, that the killers are rich local businessmen or factory owners (up to and including friends of the President) and the police are actively covering for them. The film-makers don't impose any of their own views onto the film - they simply let the various groups of people say whatever they feel and present the facts that lie behind it, tenuous as they often are.
Is there a serial killer, or more than one, in Ciudad Juarez? Obviously. There have been multiple instances of multiple bodies discovered. Are some of these women simply victims of domestic violence or crimes of passion, as the police claim? Probably. After all, if you lived in Ciudad Juarez and wanted to murder your young wife, there's a very obvious way to go about it and avoid any risk of detection. It's equally obvious that there are innocent men in jail for some of these crimes. And it's even more obvious that there is now simply no way to sort the entire mess out. The cases have never been properly studied, the forensics ignored and long lost - nobody can know for sure which women were the victims of the same killer, and which cases differed. Who's to know which of the 70 men currently in jail for killing these women are innocent and which are not? As the mother of that dead 17-year-old at the start of the film says, even if the police now found out who murdered her daughter, they would never be able to secure a conviction - at least, not one with any legal grounding.
It's not an easy film to watch, but it contains a lot of powerful footage, and does exactly what a documentary is supposed to do. The attitude of that first police spokeswoman as she calmly implies that 356 women raped and murdered in 12 years is insignificant, just something to live with, is possibly the most horrendous thing to be seen in the whole film - the gasps went all round the cinema. She makes it all too clear that nothing is changing in Ciudad Juarez. Women are still dying, and the official indifference continues.
And finally, to end the day on a considerably less depressing note, our Saturday evening highlight with friends was Fido, a Canadian comedy about a boy and his zombie. It's the 1950s, the zombie invasion has been suppressed, and the remaining zombies are integrated into white picket fence suburbia as menial labour. Wickedly dark satire with Billy Connolly as the titular zombie. What more could you possibly need to know before you book your tickets? Only that Carrie-Anne Moss grows impossibly more gorgeous with every film.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-06-03 05:46 pm (UTC)You're absolutely right about Carrie-Ann Moss! She's amazing in this, and very sexy.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-03 07:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-03 06:00 pm (UTC)Fido sounds awesome. Like a weird sequel to Shaun of the Dead.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-03 07:10 pm (UTC)The only 'evidence' the documentary could dig up even faintly implicating the businessmen angle was that some of the bodies have been dumped on their private land. But the whole point of the accusation that the police are protecting them is that these guys own half the city, so yeah.... Other than that, one girl working as a hostess at a private party has come forward to say she gang-raped by a rich guy and his bodyguards, but she's notably still alive to tell of it.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-03 08:13 pm (UTC)Doesn't Tori have a song on everything by now? XD What's the title, I may have to investigate.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-04 06:24 am (UTC)Thanks for this - I agree with what she says in the quotes, there's no way you could do a song on this subject with conventional instrumentation and vocals. The deeply mechanical, artificial feel to it is very cold and eerie, and really works. It's a good track.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-05 03:50 am (UTC)And don't we all love you for it ;-)
I'm a sucker for dark and twisted music as much as I am for dark and twisted fandoms. There are very few Tori sings I consider keepers and this is definitely one - she's done a great job in a style I would never have considered *her*.