MIFF 2016 - Day 6

Monster with a Thousand Heads

I disliked Rodrigo Pia's previous film, The Desert Within, but I'm impressed with his new thriller. Coming in at a taut 1 hour and 15 minutes, it's a lean story about a desperate wife trying to get a medical insurance company to pay for her husband's treatment. They've refused the claim, and when they try to fob her off she pulls a gun and begins an odyssey into the corrupt world of claim denial targets and bonuses. Coming on the heels of recent local scandals, it's a topical film showing the human cost of only caring about the bottom line.

Heart of a Dog

So, it's Laurie Anderson, so it's not going to be your typical documentary. And it's not really even that. A filmic essay on her dog Lolabelle evolves into a meditation on meditating on death and memory. Thoughts on the US surveillance state recording everything morph into digressions about Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and how we understand life and our own remembrances. It's odd, but provoking and enjoyable.

Gimme Danger

Jim Jarmusch has given us a gift, a music documentary about a band, told by the band, and only about the band. In this case, it's The Stooges, the iconic band fronted by Iggy Pop. Mostly narrated by his reminiscences, with interviews with the other surviving members, their family and their manager filling in gaps and adding flavour, it's a great insight into a group that burned brightly and then burnt out. As my friend Stu observed, the usual go-to in music documentaries is to pull in a bunch of randoms to talk about how influential the band was, how important they were, etc. Jarmusch doesn't really pull that stunt here. The closest is a montage of albums from all the bands who were influenced by them. And it doesn't detour into Iggy's solo career or work with David Bowie. Instead, while Iggy is in London the story is about how he managed to get the label to fly out the rest of the band and the writing and recording of Raw Power. The story of Iggy could easily overpower the story of the other members, and Jarmusch wisely avoids the temptation and gives everyone their due. By far the most interesting thing is to learn what happened to the various band members after The Stooges shut down. One guy ends up driving taxis and playing as a session musician. Another studies electronic engineering and ends up an executive at Sony. It's a weird and wild story, about a weird and wild band. Highly recommended.