MIFF Day 17

This would have to be my spottiest MIFF ever. Three days skipped, yesterday for my aunt's 60th. Happy birthday Aunty Ali! MIFF is 60 too. :)

BEN LEE: CATCH MY DISEASE

12 years in the making, this is a remarkably complete document about the life and times of Ben Lee, famously described by Bernard Fanning as a "precocious little c#nt". That quote is put in the context of Ben beating Powderfinger to a number one spot on the charts, but there's no denying he provoked it. He speaks freely about the awful headspace of having fans scream in adoration while having fairly low self-esteem and the things it did to him. He also talks about wanting to tackle the cultural cringe/tall poppy syndrome of Australia, where nobody seems comfortable with success. It's very much a warts and all documentary, and Ben is amazingly self-aware and articulate about himself and the environment he moves through. It doesn't dig into why he and Claire Danes broke up, but it does look at what the did to him as a person, his move to India and getting a guru, etc. In the end, it serves to give a deeper understanding to a kid who liked to shitstir and then grew up. I found I thought better of him after watching it, which suggests it's a very successful documentary.

ANOTHER EARTH

A girl, Rhoda, is driving while listening to the radio. It announces that an Earth-like planet has just been discovered and if you look up you can see it. She looks and dreams, and crashes into another car. A child and a woman are killed, and a man is put into a coma. Four years later, Rhoda is released from prison and gets a job as a cleaner at a high school. She tracks down John, the man whose family she killed, and goes to apologise. But she loses her nerve, and pretends to be from a cleaning service instead. He lets her in and she cleans the house. The rest of the story is paint by numbers, his life gets back on track as she brings order to his house, they fall in love, and then finally she confesses and he kicks her out, devastated for a second time. The difference with this story is that they discover the Earth-like planet is actually a parallel Earth, and everyone on Earth 2 is a parallel version of the person Earth 1. So maybe, on that other Earth, things didn't work out the same way, and maybe that offers a way to undo some of the damage of the past. It's not exactly mind-blowingly original science fiction, but its aware of that fact and is simply an interesting story told without pretension or any sense of self-importance. It's a bit of a disappointment given some of the hype that surrounded it, but taken on its own merits its a solid little film that doesn't fully exploit its material but is still enjoyable to watch.

JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI

My final film of the festival, and a fitting one given I've been more or less disappointed overall with the standard of films this year. This is a great film about one man's pursuit of perfection. Jiro Ono is the oldest man to be awarded 3 Michelin stars, and also for the smallest restaurant. It only seats 10, doesn't even have a bathroom on site, but you need to book a month in advance to get in. Jiro speaks candidly about his belief in innovation, and also in repetition. His son Yoshikazu points out that they don't do anything particularly extraordinary, but they bring focus to their task to make their sushi the best it can be, and they don't accept anything less. It's a tough environment to work in, one of the apprentices speaks of learning how to make Egg Sushi, and having his first 200 or so attempts rejected. But once he nails it, the satisfaction is enormous. The dedication to craft, the enormous effort and the unwillingness to accept anything less than the best, that is what makes Jiro and those he trains stand out. The shadow he casts is long, and his sons Yoshikazu and Takashi (who runs his own restaurant), while equally as skilled, must deal with the fact that they will never measure up to their father in the eyes of customers. Though interestingly, it's revealed that it was Yoshikazu who prepared the sushi that garnered the restaurant its 3 Michelin stars. In a festival where I've become somewhat cranky at the lack of care, craft or innovation on display in a few too many of the films I saw, this hymn to the pursuit of perfection was the antidote I needed. A lovely way to close out the festival.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

You know what, it doesn't suck. Actually, it's pretty fun. Surprising given it's a prequel that seemed to be a cash-in on a franchise. Read the review here.

MIFF Day 15

A detective story with no resolution and a crime thriller with no clue.

THE BENGALI DETECTIVE

Rajesh Ji is a fascinating guy. He runs a private detective firm in Kolkata (Calcutta) specialising mainly in brand protection, but also covering affairs and murders. And in this hugely entertaining documentary, we get to see all three types of investigation. Rajesh is also a huge dance nut, and enters his entire detective team into a television dance competition, so in between investigations they turn up to the dance studio to practice with their choreographer. This really is a one of a kind story, and it doesn't flinch from showing the state of crime in Bengal. The police are disinterested in pursuing the murder case they're covering, so that runs into a dead end. The wife has her suspicions confirmed and is left trying to decide what to do about a broken marriage. And the brand protection is possibly the saddest of all. Rajesh is quite candid about the fact that carrying out raids on people selling counterfeit goods doesn't do anything except hurt the poor, the people selling the goods. But he's stuck in the middle, with no way out besides going out of business. It's a broadly comic story peppered with sad moments and genuine tragedies, and it's really worth a look.

KILL LIST

Umm, yeah. In short, first half is a bit dull, second half is just weird. It begins as a domestic drama about a former soldier (or mercenary, it's never made clear) whose marriage is falling apart as he hasn't worked in eight months and the bills are piling up. Then his mate shows up with a job offer, assassinate a bunch of people. He takes the job with his wife's blessing, and off they go killing what turns out to be a paedophile ring. But there's something weird about the whole thing, they were chosen for the job for a reason, and then a bunch of satanists get thrown into the mix and it turns into a weirdarse horror flick that clearly wants to be a modern version of The Wicker Man. I can't say it's a good film, because it really isn't, but I didn't hate it. I'm just nonplussed by the whole experience. It's a nothing story that's sort of entertaining most of the time, but it never feels like anyone has a clue what they're doing. Mystery can work if it intrigues, but when it's as bloody-minded and pointless as this, it smacks more of ineptitude.

MIFF Day 14

Curiosity is good, it leads you to excellent films...

BEING ELMO

Have you ever heard of Kevin Clash? No? He's the puppeteer behind Elmo, so you might want to punch him in the face. But probably not after you've watched this excellent documentary. Fascinated by puppets from an early age, he'd sit close to the television to try and work out how they made the puppets on shows like Captain Kangaroo and Sesame Street. And his passion paid off, ending up working on both shows and now being a major player behind the scenes on Sesame Street. His passion is infectious, and he's a really likeable guy. The doco skips over the impact his workaholism had on his family, with an ex-wife and a daughter who had to email him to point out that she's only got a few years until college and then his chances to see her will be gone. That side of things is glossed, as it's meant to be a happy film about the man who makes children the world over smile. And it succeeds at that. A little more balance would have been good, but it's an energetic and informative doco about a guy who went from watching Sesame Street as a kid to actually turning down his idol, Jim Henson, when he asked him to work on The Dark Crystal. Luckily he got to work on Labyrinth, and from there the rest is history. If you've ever wondered what makes a great puppeteer great, this is the doco that will spell it out for you.

THE MILL AND THE CROSS

Normally, people adapt books or comics to the screen. This is the first time I can think of a painting being adapted. Based on Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Way to Calvary, it features Rutger Hauer as Bruegel travelling through his painting and explaining how he's going to render the scene. It's an immersive art tour, as the 500 characters of the painting are brought to life and their stories played out across the screen. The way the history of the time and the intentions of the work come together in the composition and detail are brilliantly explicated. It's a fascinating film that will no doubt feature in art history curriculums for years to come.

MIFF Day 13

After missing a day thanks to a car accident and a brief stay in hospital, I'm back. (And I can now verify that those facing the ceiling POV shots in films are an accurate depiction of the experience of being wheeled around on a stretcher.)

ESSENTIAL KILLING

I picked this film on the basis that it stars Vincent Gallo. He's an interesting guy, not as successful as some other actors, but it's a shame since he's a talented guy. Sadly, he doesn't get to do much in this film except look confused and afraid. It starts off promisingly enough, with Gallo as an Arab guerrilla fighter who blows up three Americans with an RPG and is captured, tortured and transported to Poland for some reason. It's there the vehicle he's in rolls off a cliff and he escapes. The whole film up to here is beautifully handled, mostly dialogue free, and packed with clever and interesting action. Unfortunately it starts to unravel once he's on the run through the snow. I was initially thinking it was a thinking man's First Blood, an arthouse survivalist movie, but it quickly peters out and starts to bore. There are no characters, we never learn anything about this guy, we just watch him run and try to survive. And close to the end he meets a mute girl who helps him for reasons unknown and then she packs him off on a horse where he promptly coughs up blood and dies. I imagine the filmmakers thought they were making some profound statement on war, or something like that, but they forgot to let the audience in on it. Much like The Hunter in last year's MIFF, this is a film that fails its promise. It's a shame too, because the first half is exceptionally well made and full of potential.

TROLL HUNTER

I groaned inwardly when the first title card came up on this, claiming it was found footage that had been verified. I know it's a gag, but it's 2011, aren't we all a bit too old for this? But then the film began, and the technique works perfectly for the material. It's not a gimmick, it's a storytelling device. A trio of film students out to make a documentary on the licensed bear hunters hired by the government to keep populations in check hear about a poacher in the area. The hunters all bitch about him, though nobody has seen him. Their interest piqued, they track the man down and start following him. Finally, they catch him at work and he tells them he's no poacher. He's the field agent of the Troll Security Service, a government department that controls Troll numbers and kills them when they break out of their territory. Unlike other found footage films, this one doesn't dick you around with obscured shots and cameras pointed at running feet. You get to see all kinds of Trolls, Forest and Mountain breeds both, and they're nasty and big. It's a thrilling and incredibly funny film, with great performances and a really smart script. An absolute winner of a film.

MIFF Day 11

Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me...

POLISSE

Starting off my annual round of birthday movies, Polisse is based around actual cases from the Paris Child Protection Unit. How do you make an entertaining film about a unit that arrests paedophiles, pimps and other child abusers? The answer is to make the film about the police themselves, and focus less on the crimes and more on the black humour they use to cope, as well as the ways in which the job has screwed them up. And it works. It's a surprisingly fun film about some pretty awful stuff, and I'm amazed that it managed to do so without trivialising its subject matter. The end is out of left field and fairly pointless, but everything that comes before it is really engaging. Somehow it manages to maintain a hopeful tone despite the awfulness that the officers are combating.

THE FUTURE

Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know hit me out of left field a number of years ago and was one of the standout films of MIFF that year. I'm not sure The Future sits with me in the same way, though I think it's a lot smarter than it initially appears. Covered in oddball whimsy and narrated by a cat in an animal shelter, it's the story of Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater), two 35 year olds who realise that they're close to middle age and have done nothing with their lives. Given I turned 35 today, there's a certain resonance for me in it all. Quitting their jobs, they go to seek meaning in their lives, but while Jason manages to go and enjoy life, Sophie is paralysed. She wants to create a dance video for youtube that will give her a small amount of fame, but she can't really dance. So she ends up having an affair and leaving Jason instead. The joy of attention versus the responsibility to someone you love is teased at more than explored, but there's some very wise words said about struggling through the awful things we can do to each other, as well as looking at the false pressures we place on ourselves and the ways we waste our time. Being a film by a performance artist, narrative isn't exactly it's strong point, and the end jars tonally with the rest of the film, but reflecting on it I find a lot to appreciate. It's at once more mature and less focused than Me and You and Everyone We Know, so I'm still unable to decide on it completely. But for all its faults, I liked it. I just didn't love it the way I immediately did her first film.

OUTRAGE

Takeshi Kitano returns to the Yakuza thriller genre he pretty much owned throughout the 90s and 2000s. And he's bored. Outrage is a fun film, and the audience I saw it with filled the cinema with plenty of gasps, laughs and cheers as several warring factions of Yakuza screw each other over and kill each other in a mad scramble to the top of the pile, but it's only good, not great. It's nowhere near the same level as Kitano's earlier films, and even Brother was better than this. The problem lies in the fact that there's nobody to root for, or hate, we just watch as people kill each other and do gangster things like stand over businesses, blackmail government officials, cut off their fingers and bash each other. It's more of a fishbowl experience, looking in but completely removed. You could maybe argue it's about the pointlessness of it all, but that point was made far better back in Sonatine and with a great deal more elan. Even Kitano's usually careful framing of shots is missing. After a trilogy of experimental films (Takeshis, Glory to the Filmmaker and Achilles and the Tortoise) I wonder if he just needed to turn a profit on a film. It's good fun, and entertaining enough, but from a master of the genre, this is much less than expected.