The Lumière Reader

The Lumière Reader » Film http://lumiere.net.nz/reader/ New Zealand's only online journal dedicated to film criticism and review en-us Nucleus CMS v3.2 Weblog http://backend.userland.com/rss http://lumiere.net.nz/reader//nucleus/nucleus2.gif The Lumière Reader » Film http://lumiere.net.nz/reader/ <![CDATA[*Batteries Not Included: CJ7]]> http://lumiere.net.nz/reader//item/1804 Stephen Chow delivers warm fuzzies in his extra-terrestrial new film. By JOE SHEPPARD.

IT’S A SHAME that kids generally don’t dig reading subtitles, otherwise the latest ingenious romp from Hong Kong jester Stephen Chow – complete with free stuffed toy! – would have been just the ticket to enliven a dreary Saturday morning. To be sure there were children at the Paramount, but I’ll wager the majority of the audience paid the full ticket price, and I caught a few of them wiping their eyes after enjoying a very funny and clever little tale with a surprisingly touching final act.Once again Chow hammers home the worthy life of the penniless but honest man: little Dicky and his poor solo dad go without any creature comforts in their impossibly dilapidated hovel so that they can afford the opportunities that come with the most expensive private school in town. While all the kids gleefully play with their CJ1s – the latest in robotic dog toys – Dicky is lucky if his lunch isn’t rotten each day. But the father and son manage to make their own fun, bonding over simple pleasures like squashing cockroaches or window-shopping. When Dad finds Dicky a strange green toy while scavenging at the tip one day, could it have anything to do with the reported UFO sighting they saw on television that afternoon?

The name CJ7 obviously recalls ET, but that’s where the similarities end between Stephens Chow and Spielberg. The action centrepiece of CJ7 is a stunning and hilarious dream sequence that captures Dicky’s overactive imagination when he realises that his new best friend has supernatural powers of regeneration. The Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer shenanigans are obviously used more sparingly, but instead Chow has a lot of fun with the CGI of Dicky’s animated pet, and once more there is certainly no shortage of farce and slapstick.

And this might just be the fanciful projection of a Western mindset, but there seems to be something more complex behind the simplistic values and use-power-wisely moralising of the central plot. The cost of a human life is as cheap as the paper the building codes are written on when an horrific accident befalls Dicky’s Dad at the world’s most terrifyingly shonky construction site. And Dicky’s cover story – that his pet alien is only the latest kids’ toy – perhaps comments on the increasing technology and expectations of Chinese consumers, if not the growing gap between rich and poor.

There are clearly a lot of cultural differences – smacking children and torturing pets don’t go down so well in Aotearoa – but this is exactly the sort of film I wish they had shown us during AV time in Standard 3.

» CJ7 [Akld/Wgtn/Chch/Dun]
Stephen Chow | Hong Kong/China | 2008 | 88 min | Featuring: Stephen Chow, Xu Jiao, Kitty Zhang, Lee Sheung-ching, Fun Min-hun, Huang Lee, Yao Wenxue, Han Yong-wua, Lam Tze-chung, Hu Qianlin. In Cantonese, with English subtitles.

]]> Film Festivals http://lumiere.net.nz/reader/index.php?itemid=1804 Thu, 24 Jul 2008 05:42:00 +1200 <![CDATA[Endgame: Hunger <img src="http://www.lumiere.net.nz/reader/media/images/logo_rec.gif">]]> http://lumiere.net.nz/reader//item/1803 Steve McQueen’s devastating depiction of martyrdom. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

I REELED when I clambered onto the sunlit Wellington streets after watching Steve McQueen’s version of the Bobby Sands’ hunger strike. It’s rare to see a film so visceral or gruelling, it felt like the film had wrung me dry. Hunger was immersive filmmaking, a piece of formal brilliance: the hypnotic sound design, the sets which veered from staid to horrifying, the camerawork, everything. The astonishing thing was such an assured piece of work was done by a first time director, although McQueen has a Turner Prize and a feted art career already behind him.Of course, the film’s view of Sands might be quite provocative (given the word the “terrorist” used to be applied to a different ethnicity), but McQueen manages to avoid romanticising Sands’ ordeal. Though those without much knowledge of the Northern Ireland Troubles might want to visit wikipedia first. Indeed, McQueen avoids showing Sands for some time – the elliptical narrative opens by focusing on a prison guard, moving to a new prisoner finding out about the no-wash and blanket protest, to finally settling on Sands half-way through. This approach sets up Sands’ background in the prison quite well, but also allows for Sands’ first main introduction – a washing scene – to be particularly chilling. The camera opens up, characters intersect, and the physicality of the scene was breathtaking.

From then on, the film moves to virtuosity. A horrific beating scene, portrayed in one expertly choreographed shot, was one of more sense-jarring scenes of sadism I’ve ever seen. This is followed up by a twenty minute (again in one shot) discussion between Sands and a priest about Sands’ plan, and is a masterpiece in acting and dialogue. The scene muddies up the morality of the action, and adds considerable complexity to the images shown. Sands eventual decline is captured by a horrifying looking Michael Fassbender, whose performance is intensely compelling. The film is largely dialogue-free (except for the lengthy discussion scene), yet the sound design is so memorable that you barely notice. McQueen picks up some startling imagery too, such as the shit-covered walls, the cleaning of the urine that is spilled out into the main corridor, the thumping of riot gear by the batons. This is a devastating depiction of martyrdom, suffering and death, a religious sufferance tale that is felt, rather than simply watched, by the audience.

» Hunger [Akld/Wgtn/Chch/Dun]
Steve McQueen | UK | 2006 | 96 min | Featuring: Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham, Stuart Graham, Brian Milligan, Liam McMahon.

]]> Film Festivals http://lumiere.net.nz/reader/index.php?itemid=1803 Thu, 24 Jul 2008 05:32:00 +1200 <![CDATA[Sisters Strike Back: Teeth, Fighter]]> http://lumiere.net.nz/reader//item/1800 Warning: may cause female audience members to leave with a dangerous sense of empowerment. By ROSEANNE LIANG.

IF THERE’s one lesson to be learned from Mitchell Lichtenstein’s black-comedy-horror Teeth, it’s that deep down all men are pigs. If evolution, toxin-induced mutation, or indeed intelligent design were to equip a girl with the means to combat this unfortunate fact of life, then, like the rattle snake, she should be able to take the advantage and run with it. Set in the kind of all-American town that censors the vagina page (but not the penis page) of high school anatomy textbooks, this is a squirmy coming-of-age fable from feminist heaven (or hell, if you’re not into the whole cautionary castration thing).Lichtenstein overcomes predictability with a perfect pitch of creeping humour, inspired lead casting and shrewd navigation of feminist theory and horror subtext. Without falling for patriarchal bullshit like ‘the hero must conquer the vagina dentata and make a woman of her’, he packs in the politics and symbolism with a wicked wink, from heroine Dawn’s girly wardrobe to the dripping ‘lovers’ cave’ complete with labia-like recesses and furnished with homely quilts. Dawn is played with career-defining charm by Jess Weixler, as she transforms from preachy pure youth spokesvirgin for an abstinence-ring movement called ‘The Promise’ to a dangerously self-aware woman. One-note characters and ad hoc story coincidences are forgiven as the appendage toll rises deliciously to its so-wrong-but-oh-so-righteous end. That the lone reprieve eventuates from a prolonged session of foreplay (involving the most sublimely absurd finger-mounted clit-tickler to be committed to celluloid) teaches all viewers the next most important lesson – you’d better treat her right. Or else.

A little less Women’s Studies and more The Next Karate Kid meets Bend It Like Beckman, Fighter continues on the ‘girls can do anything’ riff with a classic inter-generational immigrant drama. When young Turkish-born, Danish-bred Aicha (played with admirable restraint by real-life kung fu champion, Semra Turan) neglects her academic studies for a mixed gender kung fu club, she upsets her working-class father’s medical school dreams for her and scandalises the tight-knit Turkish community, ruining her older brother’s engagement to the uptown Turkish girl he loves. Working its way through a familiar path of cross-cultural romance and web of lies, it deals in the typical diasporic struggle between being true to one’s family, or oneself.

From the over-simplified rhetoric about being true to yourself and fighting your demons (gasp! The masked ninja she fights in her dreams is actually herself!) to the often gratuitous photography (yes, it is wonderful that Turan is doing her own stunts, but there’s only so much slow-mo-impact even a kung fu enthusiast can take), there is much to irk in this film. Do we really need to see another montage of her running again (we get it, she has nice hair!)? Does the camera have to do the NYPD Blue, Boston Legal shake to make it look ‘cutting edge’? However. Just when you’re about to dismiss this movie as naïve and predictable, it surprises with unexpected flourishes of brilliance. The kitchen food fight with Aicha’s nemesis explodes from nowhere and dazzles choreographically while walking the smouldering line between violence and seduction – a depth that Jackie Chan never achieved in any of his similar set pieces. Questions around multiculturalism and identity politics are dealt with swiftly and smartly, while the scenes between Aicha and her father pack an emotional punch while avoiding the cheese. With a climax reminiscent of Rocky, Fighter manages to keep it real without reducing all that passion and promise to a kiss. This isn’t a film about true love – it’s about a girl coming into her own. All power to her.

» Teeth [Akld/Wgtn]
Mitchell Lichtenstein | USA | 2007 | 88 min | Featuring: Jess Weixler, John Hensley, Josh Pais, Hale Appleman, Ashley Springer.

» Fighter [Akld/Wgtn/Chch/Dun]
Natasha Arthy | Denmark | 2007 | 97 min | Featuring: Semra Turan, Nima Nabipour, Cyron Melville, Molly Blixt Egelind, Behruz Banissi, Gao Xian. In Danish and Turkish, with English subtitles.

]]> Film Festivals http://lumiere.net.nz/reader/index.php?itemid=1800 Wed, 23 Jul 2008 06:46:00 +1200 <![CDATA[North Country: Welcome to the Sticks]]> http://lumiere.net.nz/reader//item/1801 Dany Boon reconciles the North/South divide in this French box-office success. By KATE BLACKHURST.

SOMETIMES the short film that precedes the main feature can give you a clue what to expect. Noise Control is a charming animated documentary based upon the true story of a rooster at Raumati South kindergarten who fell foul (sorry!) of his neighbours due to the noise he made. It is a light-hearted look at how we could all just get along better if we recognised our differences, told through cartoon characters and ending with a song: ‘Rock-a-doodle-do’.A similar plot synopsis could be used for Welcome to the Sticks, which is apparently the most-seen film in the history of French cinema. Philippe Abrams (Kad Merad) manages a post office in Provence while attempting to secure a cushy job in the coveted Riviera. It looks as though this may descend into a sick farce as he pretends to be handicapped to secure this sinecure, but when his ruse is rumbled he is sent to the dreaded North (the Pas-de-Calais region) as punishment.

The North/South divide prejudice is alive and well in France as much as anywhere, and the assumption by one side that everyone who lives in the other is an ignorant buffoon is nothing new. People from this area are known as Ch’timi and they speak with a distinctive and unintelligible dialect, leading to semantic jokes which are a subtitler’s nightmare. The subtitles are very good and make much of the use of a lisp, but it is slightly confusing if you are trying to read them while translating the French.

Philippe and his wife Julie (Zoe Felix) are convinced that the northerners are pale, simple, socially inept, smelly cheese eating, alcoholics who live with their mothers until they’re 40, work in coalmines and have frostbitten toes. Julie says she is not strong enough to accompany her husband and so he works there during the week, returning to Provence at the weekends.

Naturally (in the same vein as Seducing Dr Lewis; Local Hero) he finds himself falling for the allure of the village of Bergues and the welcoming locals who adopt him, inviting him to al fresco meals from the pie cart and football matches. He becomes friends with his colleagues, especially Antoine (Dany Boon, the director) with whom he goes on a drinking spree on a mail bike. This drunk and disorderly escapade is gentle and amusing – far from the public opprobrium that meets mates having one too many in this country.

Bergues really is beautiful and when the Carillion bells, played by Antoine, peal out over the countryside, you wonder what the snobbish scorn is all about. It was devastated by bombardment in World War I, and again in 1940 during the Battle of Dunkirk. It has many monuments which are reminders of a rich past, and tourism has been developed in recent years, particularly since the release of this film. Antoine tells Philippe that every southerner cries twice when they come here – once when they arrive, and once when they leave. Of course it is a prophecy that will come true.

The problem is that Julie, the temperamental wife, is never happy with what she’s got. When she believes her husband is miserable, she rises to the occasion and becomes affectionate, revelling in her nurturing wifely duty and proud of the sacrifice she deems he is making for her and the family. Not wanting to spoil this new ‘tendress’, he plays along, but façade is threatened when she pays him a visit, resulting in an excellent set piece of reinforced stereotypes. Wondering how to save the ensuing debacle he turns to Antoine who informs him, “We all make mistakes – what matters is how you fix it”.

Many reviewers claim that this film won’t work outside France but to anyone who speaks the same language but with a different accent (‘fush and chups’ anyone?), it will have resonance. The message is that just because people don’t speak with Received Pronunciation, it doesn’t mean they’re all bad – people from Essex, Gore and Toowoomba, rejoice! I’m not sure this is the best French film ever, but it is a charming proponent of an old theory: Vive le difference!

» Welcome to the Sticks [Akld/Wgtn/Chch/Dun]
Dany Boon | France | 2008 | 106 min | Featuring: Kad Merad, Dany Boon, Zoé Félix, Anne Marivin, Philippe Duquesne, Patrick Bosso, Jérôme Commandeur, Line Renaud, Michel Galabru, Stéphane Freiss. In French and Picard, with English subtitles

]]> Film Festivals http://lumiere.net.nz/reader/index.php?itemid=1801 Wed, 23 Jul 2008 05:46:00 +1200 <![CDATA[Opening Shots: The Counterfeiters, To Each His Own Cinema <img src="http://www.lumiere.net.nz/reader/media/images/logo_rec.gif">]]> http://lumiere.net.nz/reader//item/1799 The 37th Wellington Film Festival began with a bang last Friday and the first day took no prisoners. By JOE SHEPPARD.

HAVING won the coveted Oscar for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film, The Counterfeiters was the first of the heavy hitters at the Festival and certainly did not disappoint. The opening scenes of heady decadence in 1930s Berlin and outrageous affluence at Monte Carlo contrast sharply with the dark backdrop looming heavily over the film’s story: the famine and filth of the concentration camps and the attempted annihilation of Europe’s Jews. When war breaks out, convicted Jewish forger Salamon ‘Sally’ Sorowitsch manages to walk a middle path, first as unofficial camp portraitist and propaganda artist, and then as the ringleader of the largest counterfeiting operation ever. (Apparently Himmler very nearly pulled off this radical plan to flood the Allied economies into collapse.)A new take on old subject matter, The Counterfeiters breathes fresh life into many of the worn themes and clichés of the Second World War and the Holocaust, exposing ironies at every turn. For once the Nazis encourage Jewish people to make money and the captives are fed and shod well, yet many of these forgers actually deserved imprisonment for their crimes. When printer Adolf Burger – whose memoir The Devil’s Workshop inspired the screenplay – refuses to compromise his communist principles and prefers to sabotage the operation rather than collude with the German war machine, the boundary between Nazi and Jew is blurred as his colleagues desperately bully him to save their own skins.

Sturmbarnführer Herzog, the overseer of the operation, comes across as a canny manager when he attempts to goad the counterfeiters with admittedly ludicrous incentives – a carnival show and ping-pong table – before resorting to intimidation and blackmail. And Karl Markovics gives a commanding performance as the singular Sally – both petty crook and perfectionist, a streetwise survivor with artistic pretensions.

Of course it has long been de rigueur for filmmakers to communicate the horrific realities of war visually by focussing on the dirt, destruction and deprivation, but here the five senses are transformed into a key theme for the forgers, who overload on the purity of the soft, white bedsheets on their cots, and who need to identify every sound and smell around the camp. Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky stalks the prisoners with a blurry camera before leering claustrophobically into sharp focus, scrutinising everyone for contamination as keenly as Sally monitors the quality control of the banknotes through the lens of his own magnifying glass.

Sally and his band of criminals ultimately search for integrity – not in the ink-and-linen forgeries that fool even the Bank of England, but in their own moral fibre, as each prisoner comes to terms with the appalling consequences of their predicament. The same dilemma (Jewish self-preservation through Nazi collaboration) had been posed in the controversial German comedy Mein Führer, but here Ruzowitzky pulls no punches in presenting the full range of bleak options. There may be no honour among thieves and few jailbirds can afford to lose face, but there’s something universal and powerful about the camaraderie of these Kumpel or ‘mates’.

And speaking of the antipodean vernacular, Jane Campion represented the local neighbourhood in To Each His Own Cinema, thirty-six three-minute love letters to the movies by some of the festival circuit’s most celebrated auteurs. Campion was unfortunately the only exception to that glaring masculine pronoun in the title, and while other demographics were also under-represented – Wim Wenders, for example, had to provide the voice of Africa, and there was no animation to speak of – a barrage of idiosyncratic ideas showcased the range and scope of possible responses to the common international experience of going to the movies.

Three minutes is just enough for a tightly structured story, a dramatic monologue, an impressionist landscape or a political statement. For my money the films that worked best were the simple, whimsical sketches from the likes of Kitano Takeshi, Lars von Trier, Roman Polanski or Walter Salles. A few directors were probably guilty of taking it all a bit too seriously, but when the Cannes Festival commissions such a piece for the 60th anniversary celebrations, you can understand why people might wheel out The Big Guns.

Cleverly, the last word is left to Ken Loach, whose characters renounce the formulaic films and common crowd at the local multiplex in favour of the next bus to the football. Now there’s an idea – a sequel dedicated to the thirty-odd snapsnots of the beautiful game might be a way to bridge the continents once more with an equally male, visual flurry of brief representations about another of our more sublime pastimes.

» The Counterfeiters [Akld/Wgtn/Chch/Dun]
Stefan Ruzowitzky | Germany/Austria | 2007 | 98 min | Featuring: Karl Markovics, August Diehl, Devid Striesow, Dolores Chaplin, August Zirner, Marie Bäumer. In German and Russian, with English subtitles.

» To Each His Own Cinema [Akld/Wgtn/Chch/Dun]
Raymond Depardon, Kitano Takeshi, Theo Angelopoulos, Nanni Moretti, Andrei Konchalovsky, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne, David Lynch, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Zhang Yimou, Amos Gitai, Jane Campion, Atom Egoyan, Aki Kaurismaki, Olivier Assayas, Youssef Chahine, Tsai Ming-liang, Lars von Trier, Raoul Ruiz, Claude Lelouche, Gus Van Sant, David Cronenberg, Roman Polanski, Michael Cimino, Wong Kar-wai, Abbas Kiarostami, Elia Suleiman, Bille August, Manoel de Oliveira, Walter Salles, Wim Wenders, Chen Kaige, Ken Loach | France | 2007 | 110 min | In French, English, Mandarin, Italian, Yiddish, Hebrew, Arabic, Danish, Russian, Japanese, Finnish and Portuguese, with English subtitles.

]]> Film Festivals http://lumiere.net.nz/reader/index.php?itemid=1799 Wed, 23 Jul 2008 05:42:00 +1200 <![CDATA[Politics Gone Bad: The Hollow Men]]> http://lumiere.net.nz/reader//item/1798 One part comedy, two parts horror as Nicky Hager’s controversial expose takes to the big screen. By NINA FOWLER.

BLENDING an astonishing array of archived footage with excerpts from leaked emails and reports, The Hollow Men follows Don Brash and his campaign team as they seduce and are in turn seduced by big business, big money and big political marketing guns from Australia and the US. Viewers who have developed an allergy to the political documentary genre in recent years need not fear: veteran documentary maker Alister Barry (Someone Else’s Country, In a Land of Plenty) has created a visually stimulating adaptation of Hager’s book without lapsing into sensationalism a la Michael Moore. Less happily, the political deception uncovered in the film is not safely ensconced in Washington but lurking around the corridors of our very own Beehive.Barry is familiar with his subject matter, having previously released three films dealing with the continued legacy of the New Right revolution. His latest collaboration with Nicky Hager began with a frantic call to secure the film rights, in that turbulent week that saw Don Brash lift the injunction preventing the book’s release and step down as National Party leader. Much of the twenty months since appears to have been spent trawling the TVNZ archives for the rough and unaired footage that makes up the bulk of the film’s visuals. Brash being groomed by his minders and interacting with media personnel prior to press releases comes as a refreshing antidote to sound byte political media coverage, and is supplemented with re-enactments and retrospective interviews with political commentators as needed.

A sly sense of humour guides the first half of the film. While the smirking voice-overs to some of the leaked emails read as excessive, the live footage cannot be dismissed as artistic license. When told by a virulent Kim Hill that his campaign is “right wing populism... to be frank, [your] supporters are right wing rednecks”, Brash meekly admits “that may be right.” The enthusiastic opening-night laughter that followed such gaffes suggested that in this case The Hollow Men had the luxury of preaching to the converted.

Laughs are off, however, as the narrative hits Orewa. The leaked discussions of “dog whistle” tactics and instructions to “massage the message... tell ‘em what they want to hear” will shock the politically naïve, while Brash’s repetition of a stock party line in response to media questioning is as ridiculous as it is appalling.

Sure, it is election year, but The Hollow Men should not be sideswiped with accusations of political bias. Those who have not read Hager’s book will find the film adaptation an entertaining and revealing insight into modern New Zealand politics.

» The Hollow Men [Akld/Wgtn/Chch/Dun]
Alister Barry | NZ | 2008 | 98 min

]]> Film Festivals http://lumiere.net.nz/reader/index.php?itemid=1798 Tue, 22 Jul 2008 23:50:00 +1200 <![CDATA[Nice Guys Finish Fast: The King of Kong <img src="http://www.lumiere.net.nz/reader/media/images/logo_rec.gif">]]> http://lumiere.net.nz/reader//item/1797 An epic contest between good and evil. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

I DOUBT IF there has ever been a more electric group gathered at a Festival documentary. The potpourri of freaks and geeks, scene kids, television people and curious others were congregated to watch arcade game exposé The King of Kong. The premise might sound bewildering, but as the torrents of laughter and applause would attest, this crowd-pleasing film has universal appeal.The King of Kong is ostensibly the examination of a fiercely contested Donkey Kong rivalry. However, the film transcends its immediate subject matter to depict an epic battle of good versus evil; a documentary with the sort of heroes and villains Hollywood screenwriters can only dream of creating. On the one side there’s sleazy Billy Mitchell, hot sauce-making restaurant profiteer, whose Donkey Kong record hasn’t been beaten since 1982. Mitchell’s position as sovereign of the arcade universe is suddenly threatened when a videotape surfaces revealing Steve Wiebe, disarming Middle American science teacher and family man, setting a new high score.

What follows is a grand Wagner-esque opera of plot twists and emotional turns. Wiebe’s tape is inexplicably invalidated by self-proclaimed governing body Twin Galaxies, compelling him to step up and perform the feat again in a public forum, only to be cut-down by the dubious tactics of Mitchell and his band of minions. When Guinness Book of Records enters the fray and challenges both men to a public duel, things really start to get interesting.

Director Seth Gordon’s documentary conspicuously ratchets up the tension as it asks us to root for underdog, although it’s hard not identify with the affable Wiebe. One almost feels a measure of sympathy for Mitchell – so socially awkward he’s entirely unaware of his own conceit.

King of Kong is a well crafted, edge-of-your-seat documentary. And it’s no small feat to make an arcade game training montage so instantly appealing. Gordon is no doubt assisted by his choice of 1980s power-pop anthems. Eye of the Tiger anyone? If accompanying Festival documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster* seeks to deconstruct the American Dream, then The King of Kong is here to tell us nice guys don’t have to finish last. Hopefully this film finds some sort of theatrical re-release. In the meantime, catch this enthralling indulgence while you can.

» The King of Kong [Akld/Wgtn/Chch/Dun]
Seth Gordon | USA | 2007 | 80 min | Featuring: Steve Wiebe, Billy Mitchell, Walter Day, Nicole Wiebe, Steve Sanders, Robert Mruczek, Brian Kuh, Mike Thompson.

]]> Film Festivals http://lumiere.net.nz/reader/index.php?itemid=1797 Tue, 22 Jul 2008 23:00:00 +1200 <![CDATA[Adam Wingard on Pop Skull]]> http://lumiere.net.nz/reader//item/1796 BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM talks cough medicine and making movies for thousands with Adam Wingard, the resourceful, sure-to-be-prolific director of Pop Skull.

“WE KNEW we only had one chance, we’re getting older, any day now we’re probably going to accidentally get somebody pregnant and everything’s going to come to a stop.” It’s not very common to hear a twenty-five year old speak like this, especially a twenty-five year old with two feature films and a number of short films already to his credit. Especially given that film directors are generally typified by their advanced state of age. However, Adam Wingard is a filmmaker in a hurry: he’s just released his second feature Pop Skull, made for the minuscule sum of $3,000, and he’s keen to turn his overwhelming passion into something bigger. And Pop Skull is a film made by a filmmaker with no inhibitions: psychedelic visuals, dissonant soundtracks and frequent tonal shifts. It’s the type of film that will win over indie and horror fans, and Wingard in co-writing, co-producing, shooting, lighting, directing and editing the film, seems to typify the possibility that digital filmmaking has allowed.

Film for Wingard was an escape from small-town Alabama. “Film in general to me has always just been my main focus in life. I’ve always loved watching movies, growing up in Alabama was so far removed from everyone else. I always felt like I couldn’t really relate with people in the town. We lived in a town of about a thousand people. There weren’t a lot of people into the geeky stuff. I never really had anybody I could relate to on a personal level. Movies were always something I could consistently depend on, turn to and enjoy. It just became an obvious choice.”

Wingard jumped onto filmmaking as soon as he possibly could. He couldn’t really be bothered waiting. “Even with film school, I went to the quickest film school I could find and it was a thirteen month course. I dropped out of high school to go there.” Part of this comes from a drive to release as much as possible as quickly as possible. “I kinda envy musicians and painters, those kind of artforms where you have a little bit more of an immediate release. My way of dealing with that is that I do forty-eight hour film festival shorts and just shorts in general, I love to be working in the medium. The crappy thing about [being a] filmmaker is how long it takes to get a film going, and set up and everything.”

Pop Skull came from initially working with Lane Hughes (plus E.L. Katz who he met at Film School), who was writing for a ‘zine and interviewed Wingard about his debut feature Home Sick. “He would call me occasionally just asking filmmaking questions, because he was interested in doing some short films himself. Somehow we ended up, started talking about some of his problems he was having with his ex-girlfriend, he’d just broken up, they’d been together a bunch of years, high-school sweethearts, and I realised he was dealing with it really badly. In the same way my long-term first girlfriend thing fell through, and I dealt with it similarly. We had a lot in common. Just like him, we both had supernatural encounters that we’d had in our houses and then he started telling me about this thing he was into right when his girlfriend broke up with him which was getting into over-the-counter pharmaceuticals. Things like robotripping, taking too much cough medicine. In America that sort of thing is very popular, especially among younger kids.”

The fact that neither of them had too much to do proved highly beneficial. “Lane had all the time in the world on his hands, and that’s really what you need when you don’t have any money, you need somebody else who doesn’t have a job and can put in that time. I just told Lane, this is what we’re going to do, we’re going to use your life as the structure and we’re going to go off with the three main elements: supernatural haunting of your house, trying to get over a break-up and not being able to, and doing drugs while this going on, specifically over the counter pharmaceuticals. That was the framework going into it. We probably couldn’t have done an outline movie if we didn’t have that framework.”

This meant the script wasn’t written beforehand, and it was predominantly improvised. “I was trying to write a feature and nothing was coming together, I was never going to get anything done on my own if I didn’t force myself, so what I decided on was I going to take the Wong Kar Wai approach, so just do something immediately without a script and jump head first into it. We had these general scene outlines that we’d come up with, and it was really day-to-day on the set.” He also had the time to shoot exactly where and when he wanted – sunsets and sunrises, a particular patch of road that was particularly foggy. However digital technology played a huge role in assisting this. “Filmmaking is really at the point where you don’t really need a crew, you may need someone to hold your microphone but beyond that, you don’t need a lot of people running around. My biggest advice to other filmmakers out there, is to just pick up a camera, learn how to shoot the film, edit the film, learn how to do everything and be self-sufficient. Hopefully we’re at a point right now, we’re going to get a lot of movies like Pop Skull, because why not? It’s definitely something that can be done.”

The lack of a budget also meant that Wingard didn’t have to be worried about restraining his visual or aural construction. “That was what was great about it because we didn’t have anyone telling us what we could or couldn’t do. I knew that this could be a one in a lifetime opportunity, so we decided to pull out all of the stops. That’s why we have things like these tripping sequences, that you don’t normally see in American films, especially American narrative films. It was important to get into that world while I still could and make my name for myself, so the next one, I have a lot of room to scale back if I want to.”

“To me reality has this sinister side to it at all times. If you acknowledge that you’re showing more of the truth. Just like a Francis Bacon painting. Everybody calls his paintings dark and violent, but as Francis Bacon says, he’s just showing reality as it is. So horror really touches on those aspects of reality that I really like.”

This also meant Wingard was able to rely on some, er, unorthodox editing techniques. “I did about a twenty minute rough cut, and I realised the film wasn’t working as a whole. I’d never done any type of drugs, and I never experienced in drugs before, so what I decided to do was roll the dice a little bit and I experimented with a bit of cough medicine, the drugs that the lead character are taking in the film. So I got a first hand point of view doing the specific drug, which is quite a crazy trip and I adapted that for the film. That changed the whole visual styling and probably my whole outlook on reality. It definitely created that new point of view for the film. The film is such that it follows the protagonist around in every scene, so the film’s definitely from his state of mind.” This also meant that Wingard completely altered the visuals in the editing and experimented more and the end result was the distinctive visual style. “It made me whenever I watched that footage back, I could see all the problems for the first time and I realised a lot of it was pacing and there wasn’t a lot of ingenuity in terms of my editing. Every-time I would edit more of the film I would a take a bunch of cough medicine, watch the movie, and be able to judge at that point and judge where I was going. While we were experimenting with the cough medicines, we realised that we wanted something to watch when we were doing it. I realised the strobbing effects were something that would really set you off if you were robotripping. The pills he was taking in the film, specifically DXM, if you’re on DXM while watching the film, DXM sort of becomes the 3-d glasses for the movie and you get more of an interactive experience. ” He jokingly responds to a question of whether drugs therefore assist in the Pop Skull-watching experience. “Legally I probably can’t recommend that, but if you’re already doing it, then you should put on our film and you’ll definitely enjoy yourself that much more. If you already enjoy the film, then you don’t need to be inebriated at all to enjoy the film.”

Another key component of the film is music, and the film is full of noise, classical music and also includes music from the likes of the Liars, and Xiu Xiu. Japanese noise provocateur Merzbow was particular influential in shaping Wingard’s outlook. “Noise is music, just because something may on the surface sound unpleasant, doesn’t mean you can’t find some way to listen to it. I remember when I was in film school and I first found out about Merzbow. I was confused at first, it was just piercing static, I didn’t know what to make of it. ‘Maybe if I keep listen to it, I’ll discover there’s a rhythm or something’. While I was doing that, I’d put it as loud as possible, the attack the sound had on your frontal lobes was the pleasure of listening to it, that opened a lot of doors to me, there’s no such thing as an ugly noise. What could be screeching and unbearable to one person could be something someone listens to like it’s The Beach Boys.” As a result, Pop Skull understands the sheer corrosive power of noise and effect it can have on tone and mood. “The point of view that we’re showing is one of harsh landscapes, and noises and piercing sounds and so forth.” Wingard is keen to credit Justin Leigh, Kyle McKinnon, and DCLXVI for designing this soundscape.

You do have to wonder if the whole three thousand dollar thing tends to overshadow the film itself. “I grew up reading Robert Rodriguez’s Rebel Without a Crew – in that sense I knew that it would be a publicity tool. It never bothered me, because the more people pushed that, the more it captures attention on a certain level that other elements of the film might not.” He also cannily chose horror, a genre which has made many a big name from small beginnings. “Horror has more of a definite fanbase. Doing Pop Skull, I knew I wanted to do something deeply personal but I knew if it was just about a kid moping around and doing drugs it wouldn’t have its initial audience. I’m completely fascinated with the supernatural and ghosts, for me it was simple throwing that in, but in the back of my head that horror side of it was going help sell the film.” However there were aesthetic choices in horror too. “I just love the darkness of what a horror film is. To me reality has this sinister side to it at all times. If you acknowledge that you’re showing more of the truth. Just like a Francis Bacon painting. Everybody calls his paintings dark and violent, but as Francis Bacon says, he’s just showing reality as it is. So horror really touches on those aspects of reality that I really like.”

It’s no surprise that Wingard comes with a lot of ambition. And filmmaking is definitely something that will drive his future artistic output. “I don’t want to be one of those kind of guys where filmmaking is a hobby for them. To me it’s all I want to do. So in a sense I have to figure a way to make a living but at the same time I would rather be doing low budget films. My ideal budget would be literally three hundred to five hundred thousand dollars doing lower key cinema which for me, five hundred thousand, I could make a epic for that. Obviously I couldn’t do a war epic, but a small scale epic, more like a Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. I’m always disappointed when a filmmaker hits the scene, and they do something for a modest size and even the movie itself was modest, and then they graduate to the Hollywood thing and they start doing big budget movies, instead of making their money and then going back and doing their passion projects.” And he’s clearly drawn the line with Pop Skull, a dizzying, hallucinogenic trip of a film, that’s suggests a filmmaker who’s set himself a hard act to follow, but also sets himself up as a filmmaker of a lot of promise.

“Pop Skull” screens at the New Zealand International Film Festivals in Wellington (July 21-22). Adam Wingard will be in attendance.

]]> Film Festivals http://lumiere.net.nz/reader/index.php?itemid=1796 Tue, 22 Jul 2008 20:10:00 +1200 <![CDATA[Yung Chang on Up the Yangtze]]> http://lumiere.net.nz/reader//item/1795 Yung Chang’s documentary Up the Yangtze, on two young cruise staff recruits in the shadow of the Three Gorges Dam, humanises an ever-expanding sub-genre on the effects of China’s industrial and commercial growth. He discusses with BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM the cost of change, river metaphors, and Renoir’s Rules of the Game.

THE CONCEPT of progress can never be simply described in a black and white way, yet it’s hard to deny that for every benefit, there’s often something lost. Canadian filmmaker Yung Chang’s documentary Up the Yangtze looks at the human cost of the Three Gorges Dam project in China, a project which symbolises a lot about China’s growing industrial and commercial power, but also shows how the individuals can get caught underneath the machinations of modernity. Chang’s documentary is set on river cruise, a microcosm which distils the point between the haves and have-nots and between modernity and traditionalism. Chang captures the astonishing transformation undergoing China with more than a touch of wisdom, sadness and wit.

Chang moved into documentary filmmaking, partly because of the funding and support documentary filmmakers receive from the National Film Board of Canada. “Initially I’d studied fiction filmmaking, but I’d always had this sort of keen eye to make documentaries even when I was studying in high school. I was making sort of observational films without even being aware of it.” This fiction background helped however in the construction of Up the Yangtze. “The initial concept of the movie went through different transformations. One way I like to make a movie is to think about it fictionally and how to create it in a narrative structure. Initially the story was about tourists who were going to be actors on this cruise ship and below deck, that sort of interconnected world with this upstairs/downstairs environment. It became very clear the documentary medium would suit the production.”

The concept for the film came from a trip Chang took with his parents and his grandfather, where boat cruises went up and down the Yangtze to show tourists what the river was like before the Three Gorges Dam would come into full effect. “I went in with the knowledge that this could be this surreal experience and it really was. To me it was like The Love Boat meeting Apocalypse Now.” The considerable contrasts were evident too. “Everywhere in the world there are issues of poverty and extreme poverty but I think in China in particular, especially now, those issues of wealth and poverty, capitalism and consumerism and all these issues really do become a little more stark.”

Chang realised the potential of the metaphor he had with the boat and its inhabitants, and consequently spent four years researching the film. “On this boat you have the entire world contained. It’s very layered in that world, you had the Three Gorges Dam which for me represented this symbol of modernisation at the end of this journey on the river of life. The Yangtze River is really considered the lifeline of China. I wanted to build this connection between the onshore life and the cruise-ship so you will have this parallel storytelling going on, and that connection was through the workers. I managed to find a couple of subjects through the recruitment process and through that, have that connection from the home life before working to following these kids getting on the cruise ship to work.”

“I went in with the knowledge that this could be this surreal experience and it really was. To me it was like The Love Boat meeting Apocalypse Now.”

He benefited from having a good relationship with the cruise company “who are an American managed cruise-boat. They allowed me full access, unrestricted, and through them I was able to go on these river tours looking for new employees with the managers and people like Yu Shui and Chen Bo Yu would sign up for the interview. They were hired in the winter and they didn’t have to get on the boat until the summer so I had that extended period of time to build up the home life leading up to the point they had to leave.” This also meant that Chang had two hundred hours of footage to wade through for the final product.

I asked if it was hard winning trust with the subjects, especially given that they were young, working in a stressful environment and away from home for the first time. “That is always a tricky process, as a documentary filmmaker one must spend time with your subject, build that level of trust, that relationship. For me it was primarily built around the fact that I wasn’t going to walk away at the end of the production and disappear. Even to this day, I’m in touch with all the subjects, I’ve begun a fund, a charity to help the family in the film. One important aspect was that the Yu family, had a feeling that I’d be a mentor for Yu Shui as she left home for the first time, sixteen years old, leaving home for the first time, that I’d be there, sort of like a big brother.”

I ask if it was difficult disentangling a Western or even Orientalist perspective from a story about a particular aspect of China. “I was really conscious of not wanting to do that. For me, the Western perspectives are the tourists on the boat and they for me represent the way one as an outsider interprets another culture. In that film there is that element of perception, how one perceives that other culture and vice versa. I wanted to be sensitive to both sides. Especially the Chinese perspective. I suppose being that sort of hyphenated perspective that I am, being both Chinese and Canadian, and not really identifying with both cultures but somewhere in the middle, that helped me to make this film. It allowed me to be Chinese when I had to be and it allowed me to be an outsider when I had to be. I think that conflict was important.”

In New Zealand at least, the focus in the media on the Three Gorges Dam was on the environmental damage, and quite frequently the human cost was ignored. “Given that there may be benefits with the Three Gorges Dam project, the scope of it is so huge that upwards of four million people have to be relocated. That is the population of New Zealand. You find in the media and you find on documentaries, emphasis on the engineering project itself, but I wanted to put a human face on the story of this dam project. In the film the engineering project exists as an abstract entity in the film. None of the subjects really identify with it. It’s affecting their lives, and yet it’s so removed from their everyday life.” There’s now almost a sub-genre of Three Gorges films such as Dong, Still Life and Manufactured Landscapes. Chang also mentions a new film called Bing Ai, which he describes as a “very intense, very detailed film” about a woman’s quest for compensation from corrupt officials. “I’m inspired by Chinese filmmakers – Jia Zhang-Ke, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang. Even documentary filmmakers like Jiang Yue. He made this great documentary called This Happy Life that showed to me you can be poetic and beautiful in your cinematography, and create a film that is composed in a sense, yet maintain this documentary process.”

“I would arrive in villages and towns, and we would pull out the camera and people would come up and talk to us about issues of local corruption, environmental issues, anything about the Three Gorges Dam because it’s not illegal to talk about these things. It’s very different from what I’d gone into thinking about what it’d be like. I think for a lot of Westerners and outsiders, one thinks it’s this really totalitarian state. My experience proved to be quite opposite to that.”

A trust in progress and technology must also be particularly strong in a country which is rapidly industrialising. “In China there’s a saying, and the saying goes ‘nations come and go, kingdoms rise and fall’. I like that. That’s sort of how China lives, you’re always moving forward, the past is much less in a physical sense, but much more in that internal sense. That’s sort of the way Chinese history has always been, that idea of re-shaping and it’s sort of circular in the way history works in China. I would say that’s really prevalent, in a lot of people, especially in the younger generation. They want to move forward like anywhere in the world. That was one of the conflicts that came out. As an outsider you can look upon progress and see it from an outsider perspective as a negative thing. Of course in the West they had two hundred and seventy-five years of environmental havoc and industrialisation. China’s doing that in a much shorter period of time and are dealing with those lessons learned and those pressures. The conflict would be who could deny people the opportunities that people are having now in China that they never had during Western industrialisation?”

For a film that examines the Three Gorges Dam from not necessarily a celebratory point of view, one wonders if there were any problems with authorities. However Chang says, “actually no, not at all. What was interesting was that upon the advice of my crew who were all Chinese filmmakers from Beijing – and I worked very closely with them, we lived together, I moved to China for a year to shot the movie – they advised me not to get permission, to actually shoot under the radar as many filmmakers do in China, especially documentary filmmakers. There’s a real movement in documentary observational filmmaking and it began in the mid-90s. With their advice I proceeded in that direction to avoid any sort of authority, in fact, we didn’t encounter any problems. I would arrive in villages and towns, and we would pull out the camera and people would come up and talk to us about issues of local corruption, environmental issues, anything about the Three Gorges Dam because it’s not illegal to talk about these things. It’s very different from what I’d gone into thinking about what it’d be like. I think for a lot of Westerners and outsiders, one thinks it’s this really totalitarian state. My experience proved to be quite opposite to that. Of course there are limitations on freedom of speech – you can’t talk about Tibet or Tiananmen Square, it’s not a daily conversation in that world anyway. I think in China people live in the moment, things that are affecting their lives in the immediate are what concerns people.”

However, the film is not only about China. China is hardly the only society that places trust in technology and progress. “The whole idea of the culture of tourism and the tourism of culture was the initial interest in film. It’s so easy to label things in terms of black and white terminology. When you got to China you realise it’s such a complex society and so is the culture. For me it was about exploring the shades of grey, and the nuances, the complexities of progress.” It helped with having the metaphor of the river, a nod to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. “There was a lot going into that idea of a river journey, whether it was like Fitzcarraldo or any sort of river. There’s something mythical, something romanticised about river journeys. For me I had this notion of a Mississippi cruise ship roly-poly on this “third world environment”. As you travel along the river, along the shoreline, there are these apocalyptic visions of cities abandoned and torn down, and it’s very misty. And there is that world of the apocalyptic. And what’s really interesting is that the subjects of my film come from the ghost city.”

But a closer link to Up the Yangtze would be Renoir’s masterpiece Rules of the Game, where the house symbolised the haves and the have-nots, the rich and poor, the lucky and the unlucky, in essence French society. Chang found a similar, powerful motif with the boat, the river, the workers and the tourists, their successes and the failures, their hopes and dreams, and in the process he was able to comment not only on China, but comment sharply on modernity and capitalism the world over. “I’m lucky that I had that microcosm. But you’re right Renoir’s film and even Altman’s Gosford Park and these sort of movies have this sort of effect on me. You can deal with specifics and talk about the bigger picture through that.”

“Up the Yangtze” screens at the New Zealand International Film Festivals in Auckland (July 25, 27), Wellington (July 22, 24), Dunedun (July 30; August 2-3), Christchurch (August 7-10), and the remainder of the country thereafter. Yung Chang will be in attendance at the Wellington screenings.

]]> Film Festivals http://lumiere.net.nz/reader/index.php?itemid=1795 Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:39:00 +1200 <![CDATA[Mixed Bag: Animation Now!]]> http://lumiere.net.nz/reader//item/1794 A sack of presents for the eye, covering a wide range of techniques and narrative structures. By ROSEANNE LIANG.

HAND-MADE animation is the purest form of cinema when it comes to the auteur. When you make things frame by frame without any dilution from actors, crew, or production executives, the result can be astonishingly, remarkably, and sometimes disturbingly unique. Innovation within a traditional framework is alive and well in this year’s selection, with everything from blue painted blobs to an extraordinary live action/puppet hybrid used to sublime effect in this year’s Oscar-nominated finale piece, Madame Tutli-Putli.Whether due to curation or the limited number of filmmakers dabbling in such a niche form, this year’s programme has its share of visually interesting, but conceptually meandering and narratively empty art films. For those looking for more substance to their animation programme than just eye-candy, having to sit through the blah-blah beauty to find the gems can get a little trying.

Musicotherapie (A.Isnard, M.Javelle, C.Picon/France/2007/6 mins)
What starts out as an whimsically empty conceptual film that wouldn’t look out of place on an afternoon kids cartoon line-up suddenly takes on a macabre and cheerfully perverse turn that justifies its placement in this programme rather than Animation for Kids. The cast of crazy bug-eyed animals and caricatured personalities (the noise-hating monkey is particularly cliché, which makes his messy end a relief) bop along a series of predictable setups to pleasing-enough rhythmic electronica before descending into frenetic and innard-rich madness.

Procrastination (Johnny Kelly/UK/2007/5 mins)
This conceptually sound stream-of-consciousness about defining procrastination through its specific manifestations is a mish-mash of stop motion and hand drawn techniques. From shifting books (procrastination is colour coordinating your shelf) to whirling lines of colour on black (procrastination is spending 30 minutes finding the right pen, 10 minutes getting the right pen to work), it is an idea well-executed and guiltily familiar to all.

Beton (Michael Faust, Ariel Belinco/Israel/006/7 mins)
Helmets hiding their faces, soldiers in green kill time in front of a huge grey wall until a black kite appears on its edge, from the other side. Clearly put out, they start by trying to block people from seeing it, but when that doesn’t work, they decide to shoot the crap out of it. While beautiful to look at, the ‘deep’ symbolism in this painted animation about the wiles of war feels overwrought.

The Old, Old, Very Old Man (Elisabeth Hobbs/UK/2007/5 mins)
Told from ye olde autopsy room, blotchy blue paint on white characterises this tale from England circa 1635 when a king was brought out of his “I’m so old” funk by the presence of a 152-year-old subject. The party thrown to celebrate his longevity eventuated in his ironic end. While the animation is crude and the story simple, one could simply answer the question “why turn this into an animation?” with “why not?”.

Running in Darkness (Alan Jennings/USA/2006/2 mins)
Pairing documentary audio with paint-on-glass abstractions, this illustration of people dealing with dementia in loved ones is worthy and poignant, but unfortunately, not engaging. Whether it’s the monotone of the subjects, or the experimental nature of the visual, or even the placing of the piece in the programme as a whole, I ironically found my mind wandering, even within two minutes.

Sailor Dogs (Joana Toste/Portugal/2007/8 mins)
Making sense of this hand-drawn animation about two dogs and their pet sailor is difficult at the best of times, but the immersion into Toste’s surreality is definitely pleasurable. Creating pathos for a little old captain pining for the sea is no mean feat, and the otherwise obvious switch-around of man and pet is rendered disarmingly poignant.

A Painful Glimpse into My Writing Process (Chel White/USA/2006/2 mins)
This film is less than 60 seconds long, with the credits running almost as long as the film itself. Similar to Procrastination (above), it illustrates a frustrated and keenly-written stream-of-consciousness voiceover that neatly packages the title into a frenetic barrage of well-made images.

Time Is Running Out (Marc Reisbig/UK/2007/6 mins)
A slow and unsettling pan across a dreary pre-apocalyptic landscape with recurring characters in various stages of undoing builds a palpable atmosphere of foreboding. Complemented with a grinding, eerie soundtrack and a narrowing field of vision that creeps up on the viewer, it is a successful exercise in on-the-brink disquiet.

Herr Bar (Clemens Kogler/Austria/2007/3 mins)
On closer inspection, this slick journey through a surreal landscape built entirely from (female) human body parts is actually an electronica music video. It’s great to look at, but it’s eye and ear candy, and nothing much more.

Herzurbeltzak, a Common Grave (Izibene Onederra/Spain/2007/4 mins)
Probably the most disturbing offering in this programme, Onederra animates a unique style of hand-drawn characters abstract enough, yet recognisable enough to cause a series of perturbing questions. Who is that lady and why are her legs wide open all the time? Why does she have that crazed grin on her face? What on earth is that dog-wolf thing doing to her nether regions? Is that Mickey Mouse doing… no! One is sure there is a message to the film, but what it actually is is overshadowed by the urge to shake those images out of one’s head.

Changing Evan (Steven Woloshen/Canada/2006/1 min)
Another handpainted, colourful abstraction that is reminiscent of Len Lye with its repetitive, rhythmic Count Basie riff. If one were taking the write-up at face value – apparently the film is about the filmmaker’s daughter getting chicken pox – one would be confused by the actual blotches, lines and squares that dance across the screen - but at a jaunty 1 minute, it doesn’t have time to get boring.

Sleeping Betty (Claude Cloutier/Canada/2007/10 mins)
This slick, more traditional 2D animation is essentially a punchline film that takes a fairytale and populates it with an eclectic cast of royalty past and present (Henry VIII, Queen Victoria) and the odd 12-eyed alien. Why? Well, because it can. ‘Fun’ seems a good all-round description for the film, with gibberish dialogue breaking the language barriers and popular culture puns being thrown left and right, from traffic signs to superheroes. It’s not particularly deep, but it’s pleasing all the same.

I Met the Walrus (Josh Rashkin/Canada/2007/5 mins)
Once again, the illustration of a stream-of-consciousness dialogue – this time from the late great John Lennon, as interviewed by an idealistic (and probably star-struck) 14-year-old – provides a cohesive slice of life. Lennon’s meandering views on peace are given both the literal and cynical present-day treatment, and while his oft-held-aloft ideals still feel fervent and true, the rushed opportunistic nature of the interview, and Lennon’s tone of distracted celebrity (evidenced when talk of changing the world turns instead to his luggage) betrays a sneaking boredom, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Well-crafted visuals with a collage of live action and clean retro style round out an interesting film.

Madame Tutli-Putli (Chris Lavis, Maciel Szcerbowski/Canada/2007/17 mins)
As usual, the best is left until last with this fittingly jaw-dropping tale of a woman on a mystery train. The technique of marrying live action eyes with beautifully hand-crafted puppet stop-motion is astounding both in logistics and effect – eyes are indeed windows to the soul, and once we look deep into the ones of Madame Tutli-Putli, we are lost in the narrative, and forget to ask ‘how on earth did they create such an extraordinary visual technique?’. On researching the film afterwards, the pioneering and seamless mixture of natural movement and stop motion is achieved through ‘every trick in the book’, thrown in to benefit every aspect of the spooky story, from the rising panic to the bird-like survival instinct of the main character. It’s a pity that the form of the film means that less people will see it – it is an unparalleled audiovisual triumph.

» Animation Now! [Akld/Wgtn/Chch/Dun]
Various | 2008 | 80 min

]]> Film Festivals http://lumiere.net.nz/reader/index.php?itemid=1794 Mon, 21 Jul 2008 07:09:00 +1200