I genuinely did not think I'd be able to write this post. Even as I bought my film festival tickets, I was thinking what a pointless exercise it was, that there's almost certainly be a Covid outbreak and the festival would be cancelled. Every day, I'd look at the announcement of new infection numbers with anxiety over whether they would affect the festival. Auckland had already been cancelled, then Christchurch was postponed a week after a case emerged in that city, and then a couple of days into our festival the Hamilton leg was cancelled. But while we had a short scare with one case that had travelled to Wellington, we made it through the festival unaffected.
One of the defining elements of the film festival experience is the fact that it's in the middle of winter - you're used to walking out of a cinema in the late hours into a bitterly cold and miserable night - and so the idea of a festival in November, in late spring, just a handful of weeks away from the start of summer, seemed wrong. But apparently it's the festival that brings that weather out - as soon as the festival began, we started getting really harsh winds, we started getting frequent rain, and in the last few days it even started being stormy. And then the festival ended, and the weather went back to normal.
It was a weird festival experience - with social distancing requirements, I'd find myself sitting in the Embassy, a cinema that normally holds 700 people, in a "sold out" session of 270. But still, after the let-down of last year's mostly-online festival, which (except for the small number of cinema screenings) didn't feel any different to any other night watching streaming movies, it was exciting to get back to the cinema for a proper experience of 2 1/2 weeks of intense and engaging movie viewing.
So, as always, here are my reactions, my responses to the films I saw, taken from my Facebook posts. These are not reviews, these are just attempts to record my thoughts about the films, and sometimes even just to try to process what I feel about them, in the immediate aftermath of watching something. And that's a big part of why I write these - the festival is so overwhelming that otherwise it would be too easy to just forget about most of these films, so this is a way of capturing that initial response. That means they're written mainly for myself, although they're also written with an awareness that others may read them, so I generally try to avoid giving too many spoilers. They were all written within two days of watching a film, so the films were all still very fresh in my memory. But that also means they're written in a rush, so the writing is often quite rough; I also use voice recognition to prepare them (I speak faster than I type), and while I try to catch all of the misinterpreted text, it's very possible the odd word may have slipped through that voice recognition incorrectly identified.
With the 2021 film festival starting tonight (with a screening of The Power of the Dog that I couldn't get tickets for), I find myself reflecting on last year's festival, and how that was a strange anticlimax of a festival. While New Zealand was fully open by the time the 2020 festival took place (certainly much more so then we are now at the time of the 2021 festival), the festival organisers did not know that when they had to put in place the plans for a Covid-affected festival. Which is why, rather than the massive number of screenings in packed cinemas, we instead had a festival that was largely driven by online screenings at home, with only a small number of cinema screenings at (with one exception) a single cinema, the Roxy. And I love the Roxy, I'm there at least once every weekend, but there is something special about the big screen at the Embassy and sitting in a packed crowd of 700 people in that cinema. And so it was disappointing that I wouldn't be able to have that experience at last year's festival.
The thing is, I get excited about the festival as an event. I love spending the weekend before tickets go on sale constructing spreadsheets to track all of my films and figure out the best way to maximise my viewings. I get excited by the experience of buying tickets, whether it's queuing in the cold for hours on end (as I used to do), or the frustration of fighting with the festival website to get the tickets I want - that's all part of the thrill knowing that the festival is about to happen. It makes it feel like an event.
But there was no sense of the event in the festival last year. For those films that I was seeing in cinema, the screenings just dropped on the cinema's website like any other movie - no mad rush to get my seats. And even with the smaller cinema size (200 seats at the Roxy vs 700 at the Embassy), I don't think any of the films I attended were sold out, not even the "big event" films that always sell out quickly. And for those screenings that weren't in cinema and were only available online - well, there was no need for haste to secure tickets; I just rented the movies online as they became available. And my film numbers this year were well down on usual - only 21 films, when most festivals I'd be doing over 30, up to 40 films.
My waning enthusiasm even fed through to the usual Facebook posts where I reflect on each film. I found it a struggle motivating myself to write about each film, and indeed I eventually gave up without ever recording my responses to my final two films of the festival. But, for what it's worth, here are the posts that I wrote responding to almost all of the films I saw at last year's festival.
[Comments on a number of the 2020 film festival movies, after the jump.]
For as long as I've been going, the film festival has always been a fixture of the July calendar. So many of my memories of the festival are marked by walking out of a film into a bitterly cold Wellington winter wind. So it was a surprise when it was announced that this year the festival would be taking place in November. The theory was that the delay would allow time for the population to be vaccinated, in order to minimise the likelihood of the festival being affected by a lockdown. After the disappointment of last year's largely online festival, the hope was that this year we could enjoy a fully in-person festival with packed cinemas.
Yeah, that didn't happen.
Ironically, had the festival taken place at the normal time, it would have run unaffected - at least in the main centres. In July, the entire country was open, with no limitation on numbers (indeed, that month, I was in Auckland for a sold-out performance of The Lion King with thousands of other people). However, a few weeks later, a Covid outbreak in Auckland saw the entire country go into lockdown, and while most of the country is now open-ish, the continuing lockdown in Auckland has seen their film festival cancelled, while the festival for the rest of us is severely affected by number limitations and the need for social distancing. And frankly, I'm still skeptical that the festival will take place at all - we do still have a couple of weeks where things could change and force the cancellation of the festival. But at the moment, I'm hoping that won't happen - and so on that basis, on Wednesday I got ready as usual to buy my festival tickets.
They were due to go on sale at 10am, so at 9:30 I load up the webpage so that I can be ready. To my surprise tickets were already available for purchase. So, I hurriedly select all of my films, at which point the system tells me that it can't process my order because I'm purchasing more than 20 tickets. OK, that's fine, I break it up into two orders, using two different browsers. The browser purchasing the first half of my order got hung up on one title, sticking at "19 out of 20", but the browser processing the second half of my order went fine, and I even got past the stage of making payment, before the system told me that it had closed. OK, that's fine, I knew I was being a bit cheeky, and the tickets weren't supposed to be on sale yet; I'll need a refund, but they'll be busy right now, so I will talk to them about that later in the day.
Meanwhile, the clock ticks past 10, 10.15, and then finally they put a banner on the screen advising that there's been a delay, and tickets will be on sale as soon as possible. After a while, someone calls me about my refund, and happens to mention that tickets will go on sale at 11am.
Sure enough, tickets go on sale shortly after 11, and I started frantically ordering again. And the second half of my order went through seamlessly - although a big part of the seamlessness is probably due to my decision to not bother with using seat selection, since the number of seats was so limited that I decided I had to just accept what they gave me for fear of missing out. But once again, the front half of my order kept hanging on one film, and I didn't know which film. So I decide to divide the remaining films in half and go again. By this point, the opening night film, The Power of the Dog, was sold out - that was probably the cause of the problem. (The loss of that film wasn't a big deal for me - it is due to go on general release during the festival, so I'll get to see it elsewhere.) But once again, the back half of my order goes through, while the front half gets stuck on one film. By this point, I start ordering my remaining movies one day at a time, and once I discover the problem lies with one of the films on the opening Saturday, buying tickets movie-by-movie.
Which is how I realised that the cause of my ordering problems was a film called After Love. The system just would not let me purchase that ticket. (Indeed, its now been five days since tickets went on sale, and they've now simply shut off website bookings to that session because they cannot fix the issue.) The annoying thing is that that was one of my marginal titles to begin with, and had I not selected it, my ordering process would probably have been fairly smooth and straightforward. As it is, it probably stopped me from getting tickets to that opening night film, and definitely meant I got much worse seats to some of the more popular films then I would otherwise have had. Oh well; such is life.
It's a comparatively light festival for me this year, only 34 films - and that's assuming I gets tickets to the film I haven't yet been able to get tickets for - although as usual there were a lot of films I had to abandon any hope of seeing due to irreconcilable clashes with other screenings.
One of the first films announced for the festival was one of the titles I was most hoping for: Zola. the adaptation of a viral Twitter thread in which a stripper told the story of how her working trip to Florida went bad. After the film was announced, I read the thread out of curiosity, and it's quite a story, and given the high praise the film has elicited, I'm hoping for a great movie. And it has Riley Keough as one of the leads, which is always a plus.
In the same way that I didn't need to worry too much about missing out on The Power of the Dog, I probably didn't need to worry too much about catching The French Dispatch, since that is also due for release during the festival period. But I love Wes Anderson, and this is one title that has been delayed a year, so I just need to see it as soon as possible.
As I was looking through the programme, I saw a single image from About Endlessness, instantly realised "Oh, I guess Roy Andersson has a new film," and that made me excited. Andersson has aninstantlyrecognisablevisualstyle, possibly even more distinctive than Wes Anderson, so much so that a single frame can identify his work. But it's not that I'm excited by drab grey photography - I enjoy the way he sets up these little scenes that play out in front of the camera with a minimum of intervention, and them uses them for absurdist and melancholic humour.
I adored Julia Ducournau's first film Raw, an impressive horror film about a vegetarian veterinary student who develops a taste for human flesh, so was intrigued when her follow-up Titane won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Every time I heard anyone mention the film, they always started by saying to not know anything about the film, so I've deliberately avoided reading anything about it, not even the write-up in the programme. I have no idea what to expect from the film, but I am expecting it to be something.
I'm not expecting to enjoy Mass, a four-hander about a meeting between two sets of parents where one son killed the others', but it has an excellent cast, and the critical response has been strong, so I'm hoping for something thoughtful and challenging.
A number of critics I respect have heavily praised Censor, a horror film revolving around the UK video nasties of the 1980s, which does sound like a great idea for a film.
It's always a thrill to see a new Zhang Yimou film at the Embassy - the man is a master of visual artistry. I've been keeping an eye on the news of One Second ever since China pulled it just before its premiere, and while the film we'll be getting will no doubt have been subject to censorship by the country, any Yimou is exciting.
While I had issues with the most recent films of Christian Petzold and Paulo Sorrentino, they are significant cinematic figures, so I'm certainly excited to give Undine and The Hand of God a chance.
The work of Jafar Panahi is always a must-see, and so I was intrigued to hear Hit the Road, the first film from his son Panah Panahi, was so well received. Hopefully he's inherited some of his father's mastery.
The classic film selection allows me to tick off a number of titles I've heard about but have never seen and probably would never have got around to otherwise - Beau Trevail, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Flowers of Shanghai, and Written on the Wind.
And then there are just the titles that sound intriguing. I'm always a sucker for a Korean thriller, and the idea of a serial killer hunting a deaf girl (Midnight) seems fun. Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, a one-take film with a guy getting video messages from two minutes in the future, sounds like a delight. A bunch of Iranian street children teaming together to steal from a charity (Sun Children); a revenge thriller starring Mads Mikkelsen (Riders of Justice); a world experiencing a pandemic of amnesia (Apples) - these all sound like fascinating films that I might otherwise never get to see.
All in all, despite my reduced number of movies this year compared to the past few years, it still looks like a very promising festival, and I'm excited for it.
There's a basic pattern with David Fincher films. His even-numbered films are good, great, iconic even - Se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac, The Social Network, Gone Girl; these are the films that people talk about when they talk about Fincher. His odd-numbered films are at best fine, sometimes actively bad - Alien3, The Game, Panic Room, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; I can't imagine ever feeling any pressing need to rewatch any of these films.
Mank is an odd-numbered Fincher film.
[Comments on Mank, and the other seven nominees - Nomadland, Minari, Promising Young Woman, The Trial of the Chicago 7, Judas and the Black Messiah, The Father, and Sound of Metal - after the jump.]
