MIFF 2017 - Day 17

Loving Vincent

Made up of 63,000 oil paintings, this is a rotoscoped animated feature exploring the life and final days of Vincent Van Gogh. It's framed as a bit of a murder mystery, and generally works pretty well. The art varies between the excellent and the awful. The black and white flashbacks look like bad video, they chose a particularly poor art style for those scenes. But it's absolutely worth seeing, when it's working its spectacular.

Austerlitz

People watching: The movie. A series of locked off shots observing tourists visiting Auschwitz. It's slow, but yields interesting moments. Especially listening to the different tour guides providing conflicting information on the camp, or using it as a platform for their own views. It also invites judgement as you see some of the incredibly tasteless posing for photos. A hard watch, but worthwhile.

The Ornithologist

A gay, surrealist version of the life of Saint Anthony of Padua. Fernando is an ornithologist who gets trapped in rapids while kayaking, is found by two Chinese pilgrims walking the path of Saint James, except they're lost. They attempt to kidnap Fernando to protect them from tengu, and it gets progressively weirder from there. It's not a film I'm in a hurry to rewatch, but I really enjoyed the experience.