Auckland International Film Festival 2003

Metropolis, dir. Fritz Lang
This is the newly recut redux version. Hoberman suggests this is " the greatest of all pulp fantasies" – is this true? Putting aside all the politically dodgy stuff (the entire screenplay), let’s see if we can find enough to show that it is. It’s tempting to argue that Lang’s strength are more apparent the more people there are on the screen – thus, as often stated, the Tower of Babel parable and the workers’ revolt and its consequences are brilliant examples of mass movement as an art form. But there are smaller scenes which make an impact as well – not just the showy Expressionist stuff like Freder going nuts or the Frankensteining of Der Machine-Mensch, but also quieter scenes like Rotwang stalking Maria, which is perhaps more typically Lang in its sustaining of tension through lighting. The faux-architecture is wonderful, although, with due respect to causality, it’s not Blade Runner. But though New Babel is genuinely made to look huge, I prefer the comic-strip hugeness to belong to the characters, and the acting is only good enough to provide two – Rotwang is pretty good: you could argue that it’s always easier to play the bad guy, but then look at how Brigitte Helm’s initially sensitive performance falls apart when she steps into the incomprehensible role of Fake Maria. As Freder, Gustav Frohlich is squibby, incapable of overcoming what we must inevitably return to – all the politically dodgy stuff. Answer to the initial question: only if you grew up before 1977. Grade on the modified Xgau scale: A

A Mighty Wind, dir. Christopher Guest
The fact that a Guest movie relies heavily on improvisation means that there aren’t as many lines as there could be (though Jennifer Coolidge’s model trains line is classic). Rather, it’s a comedy of detail and character. Since the details are always there (here ranging from the fake album covers to the dress sense), what makes a superior Guest movie is the performances – the ability of the actors to expand their roles beyond their initial jokes – and there are some doozies here. Co-writer Eugene Levy has the best opportunity, and he steps up, portraying Mickey’s bewilderment with great control, refusing to explode over-the-top. Not that over-the-top can’t be funny, as the horrifically unrefined Fred Willard shows. A

Sweet Sweetback’s BaadAsssss Song, dir. Melvin van Peebles
A sweet first ten minutes, as we see young Sweetback earn his name, grow up and take genderfucking literally. It’s hardly sexist – here and throughout black women are portrayed as strong, as initiators – it’s just that Sweetback at this point consists entirely of virility (the audience’s ideal). If, when van Peebles adds solidarity (his ideal) to Sweetback’s persona five minutes later, the focus disappears, never to return (except in the plot-gluing, crowd-pleasing violence scenes), we still get to enjoy meeting a, um, colourful mix of Sweetback supporters, who vary in wit and lucidity (the most memorable being the preacher who promises to say a black Ave Maria for him). Worth sitting through, if only for the priceless scene where they try to ID Sweetback’s corpse. B

Correction: I got Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara mixed up, easy to do.

Theme for today: who needs dialogue?

Jour de fete, dir. Jacques Tati
This is the colour version, sadly unsubtitled, and it’s hard to guess how much is lost; I doubt many gags are. Most of them seem familiar (even if through the Simpsons or the Beatles), and the execution of all the ones Tati’s involved with is spot on. But it seems the jokes are intended to be taken one step further by their relationship with the minor characters – which is where the subtitles become important. Thus the pacing seems wrong and the voice in my head saying “this rules” had to compete with the voice saying “I’m tired”. B, but it probably deserves more.

Friday Night, dir. Claire Denis
Comparisons to Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, despite the reasonably similar subject matter and stature, fall apart quickly, as one is clearly intended to be taken as fantasy, the other is intended to be taken realistically (but which one?). Anyway, Denis has always proven her Frenchness by double-helixing her style and her subject matter. Where I think a lot of crits go wrong with her is where they emphasise her visual elements at the expense of the other senses. This seems to me to be a pretty straight-up-and-down movie about touch, in the same way that Lucinda Williams’s album Essence was. Though cinematographer Agnes Godard deserves all the credit she gets (the opening rooftop shots are superb), the key element is the sound – partly the music but more importantly the matching of effects to the actions; when we hear masking tape coming off the roll near the beginning we can feel it. Over-amplifying not the background buzz but the personal sounds your brain’s trained to block out – simply being able to hear the characters chew – gives a solidity that’s most notable for allowing the most physical sex I’ve seen on camera. Not sure which sound guy to credit, so I’ll take a stab: Jean-Louis Ughetto, I salute you. A

Morvern Callar, dir. Lynne Ramsey
The aforementioned sound trick is pulled off with gusto here on one occasion – Morvern Callar typing her name becomes a statement of intent with the force of the punk no one in this movie listens to. Nothing else in the film’s this strong – before this it’s all deserved close-ups for the blank-slating Sam Morton, and setting up the motifs (the most successful one being the cigarette lighter; my favourite one being the bathtub); after this the closest we get is a comparatively wussy dissection. And then we’re off to the Mediterranean, and we see what Morvern rejects (munters and suicide, basically), but we’re never sure what she accepts. Which is possibly the point, but still… A MINUS

(thanx from the cash-strapped peanut gallery goons currently out of pocket)
(haha, only question raised - you ushering, or etc?)
(other question raised (by absence?) - is Metropolis as good as that Madonna video?)

Ushering at the Academy, get to see those for free and a bunch of others as well. Oh, and can't for the life of me work out which Madonna video you mean.

Travelling Birds, dir. Jacques Perrin
(Presumably retitled because Winged Migration was too complex for NZ audiences.) The airborne shots are undeniable. You get a sense not only of flying, but of different types of flight – I wish they had found more than one eagle; its effortless dominance of the air is the highlight of the movie. The rest is just anthropomorphism like they do on the Discovery Channel, enlivened by occasional worked scenes (Combine harvester! Oh no!) This was enough for most of the large audience; I just think a movie which disclaims that it used no special effects in filming the birds, and lists a special effects crew of forty, is being a little disingenuous. C

Marooned in Iraq, dir. Bahman Ghobadi
In setting and feeling, this reminds me of two of my very favourites – the first half of The Wind Will Carry Us, the second of Grand Illusion. This doesn’t have the formal perfection of those two masterpieces (an unreasonable expectation), nor does it have the social detail (a slightly more reasonable one). But the three main actors, who I think are Shahab Ebrahimi, Faegh Mohammadi and Allah-Morad Rashtiani, all non-pros, each get a first-rate comic moment – milking information from a guy buried alive, protecting one’s gold teeth from robbers, or simply shouting at the other two – and when they finally get to Iraq, each gets a first-rate straight scene as well. The best of these belongs to the clownish Audeh, seven-wived and still heirless, who’s not sure how seriously to take the question “Why have you made so many women unhappy?” A MINUS

Spider, dir. David Cronenberg
For sheer Holy Shit! value it beats either Matrix – I can’t think of another film since the New Wave that’s seemed so new in its deployment of narrative tricks. That’s enough, of course, but personally I think it seems like an opportunity lost to go further still. Perhaps it’s just that Spider, for all the Agatha Christie concentric circles he draws around himself, isn’t that interesting – that’s the thing about mental illness. To put it another way, I think Time Out was a masterpiece because it totally gets inside a character – here, if you take away Ralph Fiennes, there’s no character to get inside. Inasmuch as it continues to be gripping after you work out what the hell's going on, Fiennes, in a career performance, deserves as much of the credit as Cronenberg or novelist/screenwriter Patrick McGrath. He should’ve got an Oscar; Miranda Richardson merely deserves to be nominated, and only get one nomination at that.A

Intacto, dir. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
It might be because I’m about to start a doctorate in probability, or it might be because I saw the “luck virus” episode of Red Dwarf, but I had trouble taking the premise here – that luck can be transferred from one person to another – seriously to any extent (and if you were 237 million to one lucky, you wouldn’t be in a plane crash in the first place). So yeah, the blindfolded guys running into trees was funny. C

Bloody Sunday, dir. Paul Greengrass
Not that I was naïve enough to think it would be impartial; I just thought the bias wouldn’t matter – the British deserve what they get. However, it does affect the political persuasiveness. You don’t need to believe that paratroopers gunned down an older guy clearly waving a white flag to believe that the Army went way too far, and if your beliefs run counter to this, it’s not gonna change your mind. The narrow timeframe, too, is limiting – the idea that this day set back the peace process years and therefore cost who knows how many lives is strong, but not as strong as could be (while the more worrying question about the efficacy of non-violent protest is dodged). But if it fails on an intellectual level, it succeeds on an emotional one – unlike Black Hawk Down or any other “realistic” war film you can name, you feel it every time a bullet hits flesh. And though Greengrass should be hailed for the intimacy of his camera, the fundamental reason for this intensity is that we’re not watching a war, but a massacre. B

Lost in La Mancha, dir. Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe
You may laugh or you may cringe at Terry Gilliam’s misfortune. Gilliam himself keeps laughing for a long time, which dooms him – by the time he realises that the situation calls for difficult decisions and drastic action, it’s too late. And then cringing is understandable because the shots of the giants and the puppet army belong to a classic movie. Whether Gilliam would’ve made that movie is another matter. B

Cave in the Snow, dir. Liz Thompson
Buddhist nun lives in a cave in the Himalayas for 12 years, and the film’s barely interested in this, preferring to concentrate on her feminism. Sadly, it’s the right decision. D

Stone Reader, dir. Mark Moskowitz *
It’s not about literature or The Stones of Summer, it’s about writers and especially readers. We get a consistently interesting group of interviewees, the best-known being Leslie Fiedler and the most entertaining being reviewer John Seeyle, talking about reading rather than criticism for a change. Like Moskowitz, they’re all fanboys at heart. A MINUS

The True Meaning of Pictures, dir. Jennifer Baichwal
The subject is hicksploitation photographer Shelby Lee Adams. That he’s irresponsible is something we’re used to forgiving in artists. That his photographs look too staged, too stiff, too stylised to work as documentary, poetry, or anything in between, means we might not want to forgive him. D

Power Trip, dir.Paul Devlin
The Virginia-based power supply company AES buys the electricity distribution network in Georgia (the former Soviet republic). The backbone of the film consists of a small group of likable, smug, occasionally hapless Westerners trying firstly to supply enough power to meet demand, and then to increase the proportion of customers who pay beyond the initial 10% rate. It’s first rate when showing the implications of bringing American beliefs (and management techniques) to an underdeveloped country, and only drops off slightly when it moves its focus the sort of corruption we’re rapidly becoming desensitised to. B

Common Ground, dir. Adolfo Aristarain *
Your typical “old man learns lessons about life and love” flick, the only edge given by making the guy a sort-of Marxist. They try to get some father-son conflict out of it but it flies way out of character. Saving grace: the performances, especially Mercedes Sampietro in the thankless role of His Wife, although this is mitigated by the length (112 minutes). C

Woodenhead, dir. Florian Habicht
The only NZ film I’m planning on seeing, this fractured fairy tale is a work of impressive imagination, kneecapped by a lack of any money at all – the decision to only occasionally synchronise the sound is cool for about five minutes, but it steals a dimension. Still, there’s force to the imagery, snot in noses and bottle-feedings, which could be genuinely disturbing for another 50 grand. C

* indicates that I missed about 10 mins of these films (on lunch break).