MIFF Day 13
Unlucky 13, some good and some bad today. But the Korean's seem to have jumped the shark. I really hope Mother is awesome, everything else has been a bit disappointing on that front...
Members of the Funeral
I'd like to like this film, but its too smug and clever by half. The story of a funeral where a father, mother and daughter all turn out to have a relationship with the deceased. A boy who killed himself. Narrated by the dead boy, we learn that the father is a repressed homosexual with paedophilic tendencies who wanted to be like a father to the dead boy because it got him off. The mother was his teacher who wanted to crush his literary ambition as hers were crushed by her grandfather, a literary professor. And the daughter was his friend, who enjoyed going and photographing dead things with him when she wasn't working at a mortuary. It's full of allusion and smartaleck dialogue, like a scene where the boy talks about his novel, about a middle-aged gay man, a teacher and a girl who works in a mortuary, but he can't find a way to get them all to meet and create a denoument. It's sometimes funny, oftentimes pretentious, and to give credit where it's due, handsomely photographed. But it's a wank, and winds up far too confident of its own cleverness to be likeable, and commits too many of the literary sins it mocks to even be admirable.
Sell Out!
The first ever "Manglish" musical, which means it's in English, but as spoken by Malaysians. It starts with an hysterical parody of self-indulgent festival films, as a director who has won an obscure festival award is asked about why his films are so boring. His defence is that life is boring, if people weren't so busy they'd notice it, so his films let them do that. Also funny is the fact that there's a 5 hour director's cut of the short film. It mocks pretension heavily and had the audience in stitches. Then it shifts into the film proper, a story about an ambitious television host who jumps on the reality show bandwagon with a program interviewing people just as they die. She crosses paths with a poor engineer who's built an 8 in 1 soyabean machine. It makes soy sauce, soya milk, tofu, etc, all in the one machine. He's a dreamer, and his bosses aren't happy, so they have him exorcised. Unfortunately the dreamer side of his personality doesn't vanish, but hangs around, so suddenly there are two of the guy. A dreamer and a pragmatist. It all culminates in a reality show advertisement for the machine, with the audience voting whether the dreamer or the pragmatist should die on television. It's weird, it's fun, it has a song asking money why it likes rich people more than poor people, and it's very very silly. Fun.
The Bastards
A film you admire more than like, this is a slow burn thriller filmed in long uninterrupted takes. Two illegal immigrant Mexicans break into a house toting a shotgun. A single mother lives there, her son out at his friends. She's addicted to crack or ice. The men arrive, force her to cook for them, go swimming with them, etc. Apparently an ex-boyfriend has paid them to kill her. It's a deeply uncomfortable film with a moment of violence so shocking and graphic the entire audience was in shock. It's the first time in ages I can remember being so disturbed by a moment of violence. The Q&A afterwards was very instructional too. I asked a question for the first time ever at MIFF, because the director spoke of the film as being about immigrant workers, but I only saw it as a home invasion story. He said the home invasion being an allegory for crossing the border, and the messed up state of the woman showing how life on the other side isn't necessarily all that great either. And the cost to the two men, they leave with less than what they started with. It's kinda obvious when you think about it, but the style of the film draws you so into the moment, there's no chance for reflection. I think the film is incredible, but I wouldn't recommend it necessarily. It shook me up quite a bit.
Breathless
Another Korean misfire. This time it's cycles of violence as abusive parents pass on their violence to their children. And gangsters pass it on to their underlings, and their violence affects the lives of others who become violent, etc. It's the story of an incredibly violent gangster who is slowly transformed by a schoolgirl who isn't intimidated by his violence, he punches her unconscious and when she wakes up she yells at him. Slowly they become close to each other, but the film hints, and then finally confirms, that he's the man who killed her mother. Meanwhile her brother starts to work for him, and as he comes to understand the monster he's become, the monsters he's bred rise up against him. There's nothing original in this story, but the performances are solid. It ends about five times before actually concluding, another frustration as it tries to work out the story it wants to tell, but the final image of the girl seeing brother attack a foodstand, as the gangster did when their mother was killed, is poignant.
Members of the Funeral
I'd like to like this film, but its too smug and clever by half. The story of a funeral where a father, mother and daughter all turn out to have a relationship with the deceased. A boy who killed himself. Narrated by the dead boy, we learn that the father is a repressed homosexual with paedophilic tendencies who wanted to be like a father to the dead boy because it got him off. The mother was his teacher who wanted to crush his literary ambition as hers were crushed by her grandfather, a literary professor. And the daughter was his friend, who enjoyed going and photographing dead things with him when she wasn't working at a mortuary. It's full of allusion and smartaleck dialogue, like a scene where the boy talks about his novel, about a middle-aged gay man, a teacher and a girl who works in a mortuary, but he can't find a way to get them all to meet and create a denoument. It's sometimes funny, oftentimes pretentious, and to give credit where it's due, handsomely photographed. But it's a wank, and winds up far too confident of its own cleverness to be likeable, and commits too many of the literary sins it mocks to even be admirable.
Sell Out!
The first ever "Manglish" musical, which means it's in English, but as spoken by Malaysians. It starts with an hysterical parody of self-indulgent festival films, as a director who has won an obscure festival award is asked about why his films are so boring. His defence is that life is boring, if people weren't so busy they'd notice it, so his films let them do that. Also funny is the fact that there's a 5 hour director's cut of the short film. It mocks pretension heavily and had the audience in stitches. Then it shifts into the film proper, a story about an ambitious television host who jumps on the reality show bandwagon with a program interviewing people just as they die. She crosses paths with a poor engineer who's built an 8 in 1 soyabean machine. It makes soy sauce, soya milk, tofu, etc, all in the one machine. He's a dreamer, and his bosses aren't happy, so they have him exorcised. Unfortunately the dreamer side of his personality doesn't vanish, but hangs around, so suddenly there are two of the guy. A dreamer and a pragmatist. It all culminates in a reality show advertisement for the machine, with the audience voting whether the dreamer or the pragmatist should die on television. It's weird, it's fun, it has a song asking money why it likes rich people more than poor people, and it's very very silly. Fun.
The Bastards
A film you admire more than like, this is a slow burn thriller filmed in long uninterrupted takes. Two illegal immigrant Mexicans break into a house toting a shotgun. A single mother lives there, her son out at his friends. She's addicted to crack or ice. The men arrive, force her to cook for them, go swimming with them, etc. Apparently an ex-boyfriend has paid them to kill her. It's a deeply uncomfortable film with a moment of violence so shocking and graphic the entire audience was in shock. It's the first time in ages I can remember being so disturbed by a moment of violence. The Q&A afterwards was very instructional too. I asked a question for the first time ever at MIFF, because the director spoke of the film as being about immigrant workers, but I only saw it as a home invasion story. He said the home invasion being an allegory for crossing the border, and the messed up state of the woman showing how life on the other side isn't necessarily all that great either. And the cost to the two men, they leave with less than what they started with. It's kinda obvious when you think about it, but the style of the film draws you so into the moment, there's no chance for reflection. I think the film is incredible, but I wouldn't recommend it necessarily. It shook me up quite a bit.
Breathless
Another Korean misfire. This time it's cycles of violence as abusive parents pass on their violence to their children. And gangsters pass it on to their underlings, and their violence affects the lives of others who become violent, etc. It's the story of an incredibly violent gangster who is slowly transformed by a schoolgirl who isn't intimidated by his violence, he punches her unconscious and when she wakes up she yells at him. Slowly they become close to each other, but the film hints, and then finally confirms, that he's the man who killed her mother. Meanwhile her brother starts to work for him, and as he comes to understand the monster he's become, the monsters he's bred rise up against him. There's nothing original in this story, but the performances are solid. It ends about five times before actually concluding, another frustration as it tries to work out the story it wants to tell, but the final image of the girl seeing brother attack a foodstand, as the gangster did when their mother was killed, is poignant.
posted by Andrew Lee at 12:38 AM
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