The Case for Filmfest 2014

I suppose it is a bit late in the piece to be reviewing the films I saw as part of the 2014 film fest, but almost no one reads blogs these days, so I suppose its not going to matter much to anyone else other than me, who likes to keep these as a record of my own movie history!

First off, Alphabet was a documentary about how kids are taught and was convinced that the current system was failing and there had to be a better way through encouraging children to learn their own way at their own pace and in their own fields of interests.  Was it convincing?  Not in the slightest.

The examples given did not help the argument at all:

·         One injured boxer’s poor job prospects were not necessarily because of a poor education, but more of a commentary on German employment practices – plus he was fit and good looking enough to be a manwh0re so he could have gone into business for himself.

·         One inspirational man with Downs Syndrome was successfully using the education system to gain his post doctoral qualification

·         One self taught man who spoke fluent German (“learned from tapes”) and made guitars and two stay at home parents, one a teacher, one who spoke German, and all living a life of relative wealth and comfort in a large house in the French countryside

·         And in China, students are encouraged to excel at maths etc to get into business.  Arts are less encouraged.  Parents want their kids to succeed and put huge amounts of pressure on them.  This is all true.  And?

Verdict: Alphabet was completely a mess and, worse, was a bit boring to boot (I almost fell asleep in the middle).  I saw another German doco a while ago which was similarly slow and a bit random, but nowhere near as annoying.  3 face palms out of 10

Second on the show was The Rover, a Mad Max style post apocalyptic film starring Guy Pearce as an Australian man on the edge and Robert Pattinson as an American man passing through Australia and bringing trouble along with him.  

The film started off bleak, stark and as mildly bonkers as if you had been left out in the Australian desert sun for too long.  Not much was said, but much was driven.  It seemed a bit all over the place and then Robert Pattinson shows up playing a mildly retarded guy (well, skirting quite near Tropic Thunder’s“full retard” category) and it settles into a more standard, if still quite bleak, narrative.  It is a shame the early bonkersness, which was almost Lynchian in its depiction of circus performers mixed with elderly knowing sphinxes who don’t fear guns but don’t welcome death was ditched in favour of a more awkward buddy film, but it all came to a fairly neat conclusion, even if the interesting world in which the whole movie was set was unfortunately never really explained.

Verdict: The Rover was good but a bit too scattered to be great.  This very much felt like a low budget Mad Max, despite the impressive cast.  Australia’s countryside was at its best and harshest, and everyone is gritty and manly, but it seemed like it wasn’t quite sure how it got where it was going even if the end wraps up part of the story super-satisfyingly.

Michael Fassbender starring Frank was bonkers.  And a huge amount of fun.  All about an alternative band whose founder and lead singer wears a giant… well, head over his own, the film follows a budding musician who is determined to make the band popular and mainstream, no matter the cost.  

Maggie Gyllenhaal is awesome in her awfulness and the whole cast seem to be having a huge amount of fun as musical visionaries who have not had their genius recognised.  For me, it went from delightfully mental to a bit irritating when the band members go to a festival in the US and the tensions brewing in the group reach a fairly contrived breaking point.

Still, my overall impression of the film was positive, and I think I haven’t laughed so much for a while.

Verdict:  Frank was unconventional fun and well worth the discomfort at the end.  7.5 heads out of 10.

My “event” film for the Festival (i.e., in the main cinema at the Embassy) was Snowpiercer, a South Korean science fiction movie based on a French graphic novel.  The film is set on a train and follows an un-Captain America Chris Evans as he battles Tilda Swinton and her hordes to get to the front of the train and beat the bad guy.  There are lots of familiar faces in there as well (John Hurt, Jamie Bell) and some Asian stars who I am sure are huge in Korea but who mean little to philistinian me. 

The movie moves along well, and there are many surprises going forward (as it were), though I have to admit the concept didn’t really gel for me.  There are some mild attempts to show how the people on board the train actually survive (its one thing to show a “hydroponics” carriage or a “meat” carriage) but there is no convincing explanation of how this feeds the masses at either end of the train, carriages turning into metaphors for a depraved society rather than places people can actually live.

I have seen this kind of “racing to get to the end overcoming obstacles” before, especially in post apocalyptic science fiction, and the final resolution felt very pedestrian and nowhere near as gripping as the beginning had been.  Its not the fault of the actors, more the story runs out of steam (puns galore!) and resolves itself in a very unconvincing way – to my way of thinking at least.

Verdict: Dashing through the snow, Snowpiercer does a really great job of providing a tense, cramped thriller, helped by a fairly brilliant cast.  Personally, the story is the main failing, with the initial promise losing itself around the time the people from the bottom of the rung hit the sushi train.  7 loops out of 10.

Notes to Eternity was my second to last film, a documentary by a New Zealand director who was actually at our screening.  It got off to a bad start when the film failed to start, so we had a half hour wait while the technical boffins sorted things out, and one person got on his phone and spoke very loudly, refusing the get off his phone when the director got up briefly to introduce the film and earning much tutting, even if he didn’t really seem to care what we thought.

The film had apparently been edited the last couple of weeks, and I am sure it ran over the already lengthy time allocated, meaning one of my fellow viewing companions had to depart before the conclusion. 

The film followed a few noted thinkers, mainly Jews, on the state of Israel and its relationship with Palestinian people and the world.  Foremost amongst these are Noam Chomsky, as charming and engrossing as ever, and Robert Fisk, being incredibly passionate and lending his arguments even more authority. 

The film unfolded at an unnecessarily glacial pace, with images from Israel and the West Bank mixing with visits to the US and elsewhere to sometimes add some amusing interludes but little by way of argument.  There were some interesting animated sections that, for me, were attempts for the film to manipulate the viewer into feeling a certain way by illustrating what the speakers had said (or what they appeared to have meant) that I also felt were superfluous, though in the Q&A session after the film, another audience member said he found them fascinating and insightful, so obviously not everyone agreed with me.

The story is also told almost exclusively from the “anti Israel policy” side, with little rebuttal or defence of the current Israeli policy towards the occupied territories and the Palestinian state.  While I personally find Chomsky refreshing and “balanced” (as much as possible), it is an obvious issue with the film in that it is a biased account of what is going on, which means those on the opposite side of the discussion will probably not go and see it as a matter of course.

Come the end of the film, about an hour after expected, the director stood up to answer questions, though with the film running so late, about a half of the audience up and left before she had taken up her position.  The Q&A got off to a silent start when she quipped in partial jest that the film could probably have done with a bit more editing, a sentiment no one in this audience was evidently going to disagree with.  But it was otherwise quite a positive session (I kept to myself my criticism about the animations and a strange section where they go to the US in midwinter to see an outdoor miniature “model map” of the Middle East which they can’t see as its completely covered in snow) and we left the film, late and exhausted but interested.

Verdict: Notes to Eternity aims to be a long movie giving a lot of time to some interesting thinkers on their perspective on the issues in Israel/Palestine, and it certainly goes on for long enough.  It could probably do with a bit more focus, a lot less scene setting, perhaps one “thinker” less as well, but the topic is well worth discussing, even if Noam Chomsky does hate America because he refuses to pledge allegiance to the flag when a person realises his 10 page speech does not actually contain a question.  6 doves out of 10.

The final movie was another documentary, though this time I knew how it would end.  The Armstrong Lie follows Lance Armstrong, from before he went on Oprah when the director thought Armstrong was a misunderstood superman, to after he revealed he had taken a lot of drugs to win his many Tour de France victories, when the confidence and single minded determination was revealed to also hide a liar and a cheat who destroyed all those who opposed or criticised him, even when they were completely in the right.

It was a packed session at the Penthouse’s main cinema, though one person left after half an hour for reasons that utterly baffled me (was this not what she had expected to see?).  Everyone seemed gripped as Armstrong showed his determination and spirit following his cancer, stood up to his critics citing his never having failed a drug test, and with varying shades of humour (good to bad) tolerated the random doping tests.  Armstrong’s battling spirit then turned from something admirable to something reprehensible, when he admitted, boldly and unashamedly, to having lied to his sponsors and his fans, and then carried on, expecting nothing to have changed.  When Oprah asked him specifically about testimony from former colleagues that he had refuted and asked whether he had lied under oath about that, Armstrong casually refused to answer the question, earning a stern, furrowed brow from the talk show queen and more disgust around the world.  The Oprah interview, it turned out, was a public relations disaster.  And this documentary added fuel to that image-destroying fire.

The film was fascinating, showing the admiration Armstrong inspired in others when no one could prove his doping, and then the sense of shock and gullibility by those self same people when Armstrong admitted he had been lying all along.  The filmmaker was one such person, and his recutting of the original “glowing” documentary into one showing the post-Oprah truth is littered with small references to how he had bought into Armstrong’s story, and how he was betrayed for that faith.

It also highlighted (though didn’t go into too much depth into) some of those complicit in Armstrong’s rise: his drug coaches, teammates, and even those at the upper echelons of the cycling keen to let Armstrong win so he could foster American (and thus big business) interest in the sport. 

As to Armstrong himself, it all seemed like his lying wasn’t such a big deal.  He was still a champion in his own mind, and the narratives he constructed for himself both before and after Oprah showed him always as the battler and the hero, and the victor, no matter what anybody else might say. 

Verdict: The Armstrong Lie was everything I expected it would be, and was done remarkably well.  Armstrong himself is a fascinating subject, both fiercely intelligent and incredibly unaware.  A follow up documentary, charting his battles with former sponsors and dealing with the fall out of the scandal, would be most welcome.  8 injections out of 10.