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tiggymalvern
So here I am again momentarily, running something close to a week behind. And a very long post behind the cuts for the few people who probably bother to read all this waffle.
Last Thursday was Shinobi, which the SIFF website helpfully described as 'Romeo and Juliet goes blissfully chop-socky gonzo, featuring ninjas as far as the eye can see'.
With a description like that, who was going to resist? Not many people, apparently - a sold out film, with more passholders lined up than I've seen attend any one showing. The plot of this will give a drastic sense of deja vu to anyone who's ever seen the anime 'Basilisk' - two enemy clans of magical ninjas under an enforced peace, two rival members in love when the peace is revoked. Same characters, same ninja talents. (One of those freaky coincidence things - I'd had the first ep of Basilisk on my HD for six months or so with no clue what it was about, just because someone had mentioned I might like it. I'd been busy watching other stuff, but having finished Gankutsuou last week, I sat down to watch it the day after I saw Shinobi. Animated recap time!)
The film opened amazingly - the pre-credits sequence was beautifully shot, utterly evocative and perfect, and set the most incredible mood, and I was completely wowed. If the whole film was like this, it was going to be fantastic. And then came the opening credits - and some of the ugliest, clumsiest CGI I've seen in a film in many years. I almost cringed - if the whole film looked like that, it was going to stink. The bit after the credits wasn't so promising either - too much plodding exposition as various characters sat around and recited the plot they already knew to one another, but in a fairy-tale-like setting, I will allow that sort of thing more leeway, and fortunately it stopped before too long.
The film never did regain the heights of the pre-credits, but it never went back to the depths of the credits either, thankfully. Some of the fights and fighting styles worked visually better than others, but overall it was pretty good. The main flaw of the film was much the same as in X - too many characters around, and they all start dying off before you've had time to get to know them or care about them. In many cases, that doesn't matter, but there's one pivotal death that changes the whole direction of the movie - it has such an emotional impact on the characters, but it really doesn't work because the audience doesn't feel any of that depth. A big missed moment.
The resolution could have been handled better - the two lovers didn't seem to try the obvious things in a couple of places, but I'm assuming that's a flaw in the original novel that the film can't really be blamed for. It was fun to watch, with some great moments, but it was no 'Hero'. But then I guess not a lot of films can be Hero....
Friday evening I went to see The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear, originally a three-part BBC documentary, and here shown straight through. It follows the rise of Islamic militism and the US Christian Right in parallel, back to their origins in the 40s and 50s, both offshoots from the idea that the west was too liberal and godless - particularly interesting for me, since a lot of that background was new, where it might be less so to Americans.
I didn't realise, for instance, just how long Rumsfeld and his same bunch of sympathisers had been around - that he was right there back in Reagan's time, saying that the Soviet Union were breaking weapons treaties and inventing new anti-submarine technologies over CIA objections that they were doing no such thing. The main theme of the film is the idea that politicians find it easier to retain power when they can look strong against a threat - whether the Cold War Soviet Union or potential terrorists. At the same time, the radical Islamists attempt to gain power through fear, by attacking less extreme Muslims even more than non-Muslims.
The documentary has a very definite agenda, which it makes no effort to hide, and there were places I felt a more balanced approach would have benefitted it - most of the time, there was some space given to opposing views, but there seemed to be a couple of omissions. Not that it's a complete anti-Republican bashing - the film is surprisingly sympathetic to Reagan, reserving its ire for certain of his advisers. The documentary was definitely at its strongest in the historical sections - interviews with many of the relevant people who were making the decisions at the time, including ex-CIA people and members of the political machinery. There's a lot of humour in these sections, both from the interviewees and the documentary's editing, which is needed to lift things a little. It was also fascinating when it was looking into recent civil rights abuses in both the US and UK over suspected terrorists, and the collapse of many of these cases - including attempts to portray a home video of a group of friends at Disneyland as evidence they were scoping for places to put bombs. In other places, the documentary-maker had some valid points, but tended to take them a little further than I was willing to follow on the evidence presented.
Fascinating stuff in large parts, particularlywhen it sticks to facts rather than excessive speculation. It got a bit much as a three-hour marathon till after midnight, though!
Saturday evening, we took a SIFF respite, and went to see the Cirque du Soleil with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
king_chiron and darthhellokitty.
It's not just a circus, it's a stunning sound and light show, with a theme and a story running on through the various acts, which are all linked together in a continuous flow. I'd seen various groups from the Cirque du Soleil on TV before, and I knew they pulled together some pretty spectacular acts, but again wow. It's a complete given I've never before seen so many stunningly athletic, flexible people at one time before, but that's the bare minimum of what it's about. Everything's in the detail, in the awe-inspiring costumes, in the sheer creative innovation of it. All the elements of conventional non-animal circus acts are there, but twisted in the most spectacular ways into something jaw-dropping. From the opening trapeze-style act of a fallen Icarus stripped of his wings and captured in a net, which he proceeds to wind himself around and into in every conceivable way, right through to the finale which does things with swinging platforms that boggle the brain, it's designed to be not just a demonstration of skill, but something more like art. Every time you think you've seen the limits of what a human being can do, they do something even crazier. And half the time, there's so much going on on stage that you simply can't follow it all. I really haven't the ability to describe it, at all.
If you get the chance, holy crap, just go. Yeah, the tickets are expensive, but pay it anyway. This has to be one of the most incredible things I've ever seen.
Monday was back to SIFF, and Go West, a film about a gay couple in the disintegrating and war-torn former Yugoslavia, one (Milan) a Serb, the other (Kenan) a Bosnian Muslim.
As the war starts in earnest, and there's a massacre in Kenan's home town, the two flee from Sarajevo. The Serb soldiers are checking men to see if they're circumcised and killing the Muslims, so Kenan disguises himself as a woman. They know the war will end eventually, but they also know as homosexuals they'll still be just as hated by both sides. They go to Milan's home village in rural Serbia, where Milan knows a man who can get false papers, and Milan introduces Kenan to his family as his 'bride'. As the two await the papers, they dream of a future life in Holland, but then Milan is called up into the army, and Kenan is left alone with his lover's family, pretending to be everything he's not.
This film started off really, really well - I loved the first half, and thought it was going to be one of the rare and elusive five scores. It was brilliantly scripted and shot, not shying away from the brutality of the war, but not getting too in-your-face about it either, with black and white footage of bodies and smoking ruins. The attitudes and behaviour of the rural Serbs covered the whole range, life in their village harsh, with no school for the kids because of the war and their water supply lost. But as the film progressed, the plot veered a bit too much into melodrama for my tastes, with the actions of one character in particular seeming just too bizarre so that I lost my sense of disbelief, and lost sympathy for characters at key points. I wish it had kept its subtlety and lived up to that early promise.
OMG, nearly there! But Tuesday was a two-film day, my one and only of the festival, with showings of Small Town Gay Bar and Boffo! Tinseltown's Bombs and Blockbusters.
Small Town Gay Bar was fantastic. What can I say? Documentary as it should be - deeply thought-provoking, entertaining, letting the people speak for themselves with a variety of views and a minimum of whitewash. It focusses initially on 'Rumors', a gay bar in northern Mississippi in a town of 1600 people, and the only one in the county. And it started brilliantly by going to the bar two blocks down the road, and asking the patrons of that bar what they thought of Rumors, with a fascinating variety of answers XD (But it still shocks me that not only can you find people who will stand and say 'I hate niggers', but you can find people willing to knowingly say it on camera, with absolutely no sense of shame about their views. Yowch.)
There are a lot of interviews with the patrons, drag queens and the owner of the bar, with the sheer relief of these people at having one place they can go and not have to pretend or hold back in public coming through so strongly over and over. Some half of the patrons are closeted outside the club - the owner himself isn't out to his family, they know only that he runs a bar. The tales of everyday prejudice outside the club that come creeping through are common and cover all of the spectrum - from the truly nasty, to the appallingly well-meaning patronising by idiots who tell the gay man that they'll pray for him.
The film also tells the stories of several gay bars in Mississippi that closed down for a variety of reasons, and interviews ex-patrons, with the real sense of loss of self that went with the bars repeated over and over, many of these people having to travel 100 miles or so to find another gay-friendly bar. The documentary-maker also interviewed the fire-and-brimstone preacher Fred Phelps who believes that God hates a sinner ('It's not the sins He sends to Hell, its the sinner. God hates people.') and runs the website godhatesfags.com. Frankly, some of the things he said were so outrageous that you couldn't do anything but laugh, but god, that man and his followers are just completely sick. Less fanatically (apparently), there were interviews with someone from the American Family Association in Mississippi, who stated that it wasn't individual gays they had anything against, just the organised promotion of the gay agenda. Except that when the ex-patrons of a local ex-gay club were interviewed, they reported members of that organisation writing down license plate numbers outside on Saturday nights, and then broadcasting them on the religious radio station the following day.
Perhaps the most telling interviews were with straight family members - the sister of one of the Rumors drag queens, whose main concern was that the gay community would start to feel too secure, get too open and complacent, until someone targeted them. She felt it was only a matter of time before something became very ugly. The brother of a murdered gay teenager, saying how he gets comments and insults in the aisles in the supermarkets, how his brother's funeral was attended by placard-waving bigots saying he got what he deserved and would burn in hell. It became very easy to see how one of the gay men said he stayed in the closet not for himself, but to protect his family. But for all of that, Small Town Gay Bar wasn't a downbeat film. The gay community speaking up for themselves and hitting back with attitude came across with so much force that you just had to cheer some of the interviewees :-) Utterly wonderful stuff.
Boffo! was a real change of mood - no deep and meaningfuls here, just a bunch of long-term Hollywood actors, writers, directors and producers talking about why they think films hit or miss, and the difficulty in predicting it. It's a really entertaining documentary - many of the interviewees are highly personable, witty, entertaining people who could talk about the way that paint streaks and changes texture as it dries on the wall and still hold me rapt. (On a not exactly distant note, the more I see George Clooney interviewed, the more I love him. He's just as cheerful and idiotic talking about how awful he was in Batman and Robin as he is talking about the successes XD And if he and Soderbergh continue to make a Solaris or a Syriana for every Ocean's 12, I'll just love them both more.) Morgan Freeman desperately trying to be diplomatic about why Bonfire of the Vanities flopped, a film with the then biggest star (Tom Hanks) and from a best-selling novel, is just too funny. And Brian Grazer - OMG, Londo Mollari hair! There was some fun stuff in there I didn't know - like how Disney saw the final edit of The Sixth Sense and sold most of their stake in it just weeks before release. I bet someone was popular for that decision.
The whole film's a delight to watch, but it misses some opportunities to really delve into film-making. People talk about the established rules, and the films that broke them and succeeded, but without talking about why, about the fact that you have to know why you're breaking the rules for it to work. There has to be a specific aim in mind, like when you toss out the rules of grammar in writing - it only works if you know why, not if you don't know the rules in the first place. I would have liked to have seen more of that sort of discussion, but what we got was highly entertaining fluff. Which I'm really not knocking, in the end, because I like entertaining fluff.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, we made our acquaintance with U-Haul and moved house. We are currently suffering a nasty infestation of boxes. Comments on fics I missed will be trickling out slowly, probably not on much else for a while. And anyone who tagged me for memes is onto a complete loser there, sorry....
Last Thursday was Shinobi, which the SIFF website helpfully described as 'Romeo and Juliet goes blissfully chop-socky gonzo, featuring ninjas as far as the eye can see'.
With a description like that, who was going to resist? Not many people, apparently - a sold out film, with more passholders lined up than I've seen attend any one showing. The plot of this will give a drastic sense of deja vu to anyone who's ever seen the anime 'Basilisk' - two enemy clans of magical ninjas under an enforced peace, two rival members in love when the peace is revoked. Same characters, same ninja talents. (One of those freaky coincidence things - I'd had the first ep of Basilisk on my HD for six months or so with no clue what it was about, just because someone had mentioned I might like it. I'd been busy watching other stuff, but having finished Gankutsuou last week, I sat down to watch it the day after I saw Shinobi. Animated recap time!)
The film opened amazingly - the pre-credits sequence was beautifully shot, utterly evocative and perfect, and set the most incredible mood, and I was completely wowed. If the whole film was like this, it was going to be fantastic. And then came the opening credits - and some of the ugliest, clumsiest CGI I've seen in a film in many years. I almost cringed - if the whole film looked like that, it was going to stink. The bit after the credits wasn't so promising either - too much plodding exposition as various characters sat around and recited the plot they already knew to one another, but in a fairy-tale-like setting, I will allow that sort of thing more leeway, and fortunately it stopped before too long.
The film never did regain the heights of the pre-credits, but it never went back to the depths of the credits either, thankfully. Some of the fights and fighting styles worked visually better than others, but overall it was pretty good. The main flaw of the film was much the same as in X - too many characters around, and they all start dying off before you've had time to get to know them or care about them. In many cases, that doesn't matter, but there's one pivotal death that changes the whole direction of the movie - it has such an emotional impact on the characters, but it really doesn't work because the audience doesn't feel any of that depth. A big missed moment.
The resolution could have been handled better - the two lovers didn't seem to try the obvious things in a couple of places, but I'm assuming that's a flaw in the original novel that the film can't really be blamed for. It was fun to watch, with some great moments, but it was no 'Hero'. But then I guess not a lot of films can be Hero....
Friday evening I went to see The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear, originally a three-part BBC documentary, and here shown straight through. It follows the rise of Islamic militism and the US Christian Right in parallel, back to their origins in the 40s and 50s, both offshoots from the idea that the west was too liberal and godless - particularly interesting for me, since a lot of that background was new, where it might be less so to Americans.
I didn't realise, for instance, just how long Rumsfeld and his same bunch of sympathisers had been around - that he was right there back in Reagan's time, saying that the Soviet Union were breaking weapons treaties and inventing new anti-submarine technologies over CIA objections that they were doing no such thing. The main theme of the film is the idea that politicians find it easier to retain power when they can look strong against a threat - whether the Cold War Soviet Union or potential terrorists. At the same time, the radical Islamists attempt to gain power through fear, by attacking less extreme Muslims even more than non-Muslims.
The documentary has a very definite agenda, which it makes no effort to hide, and there were places I felt a more balanced approach would have benefitted it - most of the time, there was some space given to opposing views, but there seemed to be a couple of omissions. Not that it's a complete anti-Republican bashing - the film is surprisingly sympathetic to Reagan, reserving its ire for certain of his advisers. The documentary was definitely at its strongest in the historical sections - interviews with many of the relevant people who were making the decisions at the time, including ex-CIA people and members of the political machinery. There's a lot of humour in these sections, both from the interviewees and the documentary's editing, which is needed to lift things a little. It was also fascinating when it was looking into recent civil rights abuses in both the US and UK over suspected terrorists, and the collapse of many of these cases - including attempts to portray a home video of a group of friends at Disneyland as evidence they were scoping for places to put bombs. In other places, the documentary-maker had some valid points, but tended to take them a little further than I was willing to follow on the evidence presented.
Fascinating stuff in large parts, particularlywhen it sticks to facts rather than excessive speculation. It got a bit much as a three-hour marathon till after midnight, though!
Saturday evening, we took a SIFF respite, and went to see the Cirque du Soleil with
king_chiron and darthhellokitty.It's not just a circus, it's a stunning sound and light show, with a theme and a story running on through the various acts, which are all linked together in a continuous flow. I'd seen various groups from the Cirque du Soleil on TV before, and I knew they pulled together some pretty spectacular acts, but again wow. It's a complete given I've never before seen so many stunningly athletic, flexible people at one time before, but that's the bare minimum of what it's about. Everything's in the detail, in the awe-inspiring costumes, in the sheer creative innovation of it. All the elements of conventional non-animal circus acts are there, but twisted in the most spectacular ways into something jaw-dropping. From the opening trapeze-style act of a fallen Icarus stripped of his wings and captured in a net, which he proceeds to wind himself around and into in every conceivable way, right through to the finale which does things with swinging platforms that boggle the brain, it's designed to be not just a demonstration of skill, but something more like art. Every time you think you've seen the limits of what a human being can do, they do something even crazier. And half the time, there's so much going on on stage that you simply can't follow it all. I really haven't the ability to describe it, at all.
If you get the chance, holy crap, just go. Yeah, the tickets are expensive, but pay it anyway. This has to be one of the most incredible things I've ever seen.
Monday was back to SIFF, and Go West, a film about a gay couple in the disintegrating and war-torn former Yugoslavia, one (Milan) a Serb, the other (Kenan) a Bosnian Muslim.
As the war starts in earnest, and there's a massacre in Kenan's home town, the two flee from Sarajevo. The Serb soldiers are checking men to see if they're circumcised and killing the Muslims, so Kenan disguises himself as a woman. They know the war will end eventually, but they also know as homosexuals they'll still be just as hated by both sides. They go to Milan's home village in rural Serbia, where Milan knows a man who can get false papers, and Milan introduces Kenan to his family as his 'bride'. As the two await the papers, they dream of a future life in Holland, but then Milan is called up into the army, and Kenan is left alone with his lover's family, pretending to be everything he's not.
This film started off really, really well - I loved the first half, and thought it was going to be one of the rare and elusive five scores. It was brilliantly scripted and shot, not shying away from the brutality of the war, but not getting too in-your-face about it either, with black and white footage of bodies and smoking ruins. The attitudes and behaviour of the rural Serbs covered the whole range, life in their village harsh, with no school for the kids because of the war and their water supply lost. But as the film progressed, the plot veered a bit too much into melodrama for my tastes, with the actions of one character in particular seeming just too bizarre so that I lost my sense of disbelief, and lost sympathy for characters at key points. I wish it had kept its subtlety and lived up to that early promise.
OMG, nearly there! But Tuesday was a two-film day, my one and only of the festival, with showings of Small Town Gay Bar and Boffo! Tinseltown's Bombs and Blockbusters.
Small Town Gay Bar was fantastic. What can I say? Documentary as it should be - deeply thought-provoking, entertaining, letting the people speak for themselves with a variety of views and a minimum of whitewash. It focusses initially on 'Rumors', a gay bar in northern Mississippi in a town of 1600 people, and the only one in the county. And it started brilliantly by going to the bar two blocks down the road, and asking the patrons of that bar what they thought of Rumors, with a fascinating variety of answers XD (But it still shocks me that not only can you find people who will stand and say 'I hate niggers', but you can find people willing to knowingly say it on camera, with absolutely no sense of shame about their views. Yowch.)
There are a lot of interviews with the patrons, drag queens and the owner of the bar, with the sheer relief of these people at having one place they can go and not have to pretend or hold back in public coming through so strongly over and over. Some half of the patrons are closeted outside the club - the owner himself isn't out to his family, they know only that he runs a bar. The tales of everyday prejudice outside the club that come creeping through are common and cover all of the spectrum - from the truly nasty, to the appallingly well-meaning patronising by idiots who tell the gay man that they'll pray for him.
The film also tells the stories of several gay bars in Mississippi that closed down for a variety of reasons, and interviews ex-patrons, with the real sense of loss of self that went with the bars repeated over and over, many of these people having to travel 100 miles or so to find another gay-friendly bar. The documentary-maker also interviewed the fire-and-brimstone preacher Fred Phelps who believes that God hates a sinner ('It's not the sins He sends to Hell, its the sinner. God hates people.') and runs the website godhatesfags.com. Frankly, some of the things he said were so outrageous that you couldn't do anything but laugh, but god, that man and his followers are just completely sick. Less fanatically (apparently), there were interviews with someone from the American Family Association in Mississippi, who stated that it wasn't individual gays they had anything against, just the organised promotion of the gay agenda. Except that when the ex-patrons of a local ex-gay club were interviewed, they reported members of that organisation writing down license plate numbers outside on Saturday nights, and then broadcasting them on the religious radio station the following day.
Perhaps the most telling interviews were with straight family members - the sister of one of the Rumors drag queens, whose main concern was that the gay community would start to feel too secure, get too open and complacent, until someone targeted them. She felt it was only a matter of time before something became very ugly. The brother of a murdered gay teenager, saying how he gets comments and insults in the aisles in the supermarkets, how his brother's funeral was attended by placard-waving bigots saying he got what he deserved and would burn in hell. It became very easy to see how one of the gay men said he stayed in the closet not for himself, but to protect his family. But for all of that, Small Town Gay Bar wasn't a downbeat film. The gay community speaking up for themselves and hitting back with attitude came across with so much force that you just had to cheer some of the interviewees :-) Utterly wonderful stuff.
Boffo! was a real change of mood - no deep and meaningfuls here, just a bunch of long-term Hollywood actors, writers, directors and producers talking about why they think films hit or miss, and the difficulty in predicting it. It's a really entertaining documentary - many of the interviewees are highly personable, witty, entertaining people who could talk about the way that paint streaks and changes texture as it dries on the wall and still hold me rapt. (On a not exactly distant note, the more I see George Clooney interviewed, the more I love him. He's just as cheerful and idiotic talking about how awful he was in Batman and Robin as he is talking about the successes XD And if he and Soderbergh continue to make a Solaris or a Syriana for every Ocean's 12, I'll just love them both more.) Morgan Freeman desperately trying to be diplomatic about why Bonfire of the Vanities flopped, a film with the then biggest star (Tom Hanks) and from a best-selling novel, is just too funny. And Brian Grazer - OMG, Londo Mollari hair! There was some fun stuff in there I didn't know - like how Disney saw the final edit of The Sixth Sense and sold most of their stake in it just weeks before release. I bet someone was popular for that decision.
The whole film's a delight to watch, but it misses some opportunities to really delve into film-making. People talk about the established rules, and the films that broke them and succeeded, but without talking about why, about the fact that you have to know why you're breaking the rules for it to work. There has to be a specific aim in mind, like when you toss out the rules of grammar in writing - it only works if you know why, not if you don't know the rules in the first place. I would have liked to have seen more of that sort of discussion, but what we got was highly entertaining fluff. Which I'm really not knocking, in the end, because I like entertaining fluff.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, we made our acquaintance with U-Haul and moved house. We are currently suffering a nasty infestation of boxes. Comments on fics I missed will be trickling out slowly, probably not on much else for a while. And anyone who tagged me for memes is onto a complete loser there, sorry....
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-06-15 12:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-15 03:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-15 05:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-15 09:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-16 04:09 pm (UTC)Sounds like you're having a great time at the film festival- what an interesting selection of films! You're right, the description for Shinobi is very cute!
no subject
Date: 2006-06-17 01:41 am (UTC)