MIFF Day 13
Everything is Fine
A story about a teenager who finds all his friends dead due to a suicide pact. Apparently the way to cope is to sleep with your dead best mate's ex in every public place you can imagine. It's a well done film, but you spend most of the film waiting for it to pay off on something you've known from the beginning if you paid attention. And it becomes an exercise in frustration as you become less and less sympathetic towards this screwed up kid. But that's probably because he gets more and more unlikeable as he gets more and more screwed up. A decent addition to the "suicide is bad" genre.
The Desert Within
A stark and devastating portrait of selfish superstition masquerading as faith. During the Mexican revolution, a priest is exiled from his town. A man, Elias, is unwilling to join the fight against this, but when faced with his wife potentially miscarrying kidnaps the priest back to bless his unborn child. The Federal Army learns of this and believes the priest is organising an uprising. They attack the town and in the massacre that follows Elias survives, but his son is killed along with the priest. Believing himself cursed he goes to the desert with his remaining children to build a new church to replace the one just destroyed by the army. He believes if this is done, God will forgive him his sins. Instead, his children die one by one as they suffer for his madness. It's a really confronting story about religious madness, one that shows that an obsession with signs and superstitions masks an emptiness that sucks everyone into its darkness. The desert is the place ancient monks went to discover God, but it's also the place that Christ faced the Devil.
A story about a teenager who finds all his friends dead due to a suicide pact. Apparently the way to cope is to sleep with your dead best mate's ex in every public place you can imagine. It's a well done film, but you spend most of the film waiting for it to pay off on something you've known from the beginning if you paid attention. And it becomes an exercise in frustration as you become less and less sympathetic towards this screwed up kid. But that's probably because he gets more and more unlikeable as he gets more and more screwed up. A decent addition to the "suicide is bad" genre.
The Desert Within
A stark and devastating portrait of selfish superstition masquerading as faith. During the Mexican revolution, a priest is exiled from his town. A man, Elias, is unwilling to join the fight against this, but when faced with his wife potentially miscarrying kidnaps the priest back to bless his unborn child. The Federal Army learns of this and believes the priest is organising an uprising. They attack the town and in the massacre that follows Elias survives, but his son is killed along with the priest. Believing himself cursed he goes to the desert with his remaining children to build a new church to replace the one just destroyed by the army. He believes if this is done, God will forgive him his sins. Instead, his children die one by one as they suffer for his madness. It's a really confronting story about religious madness, one that shows that an obsession with signs and superstitions masks an emptiness that sucks everyone into its darkness. The desert is the place ancient monks went to discover God, but it's also the place that Christ faced the Devil.
posted by Andrew Lee at 12:23 AM
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