As usual, I sought to keep track of my feelings of the films I saw during this year's film festival by posting some comments about each film on Facebook, before collecting those posts here. These were written pretty much within a day, maybe two, of the screenings so they really do record my immediate response, and they were written in a bit of a rush, with all the rough drafting that implies. And my usual disclaimer - these are not "reviews"; they are just reflections, an attempt to record how I felt about each film. They're mainly written for myself - they allow me to process my feelings about each movie, and also ensure that I don't finish the festival having forgotten about half the films I saw. That said, I'm also aware that other people may read these posts, and I would love if my comments would make someone want to see a film that I loved, so I do try to take this external audience into account when I'm writing.
Anyway, here are my initial responses to the films of this year's festival.
The last two years for the film festival were tough. Between the inevitable but anticlimactic shift to a largely online festival in 2020 and the frustration of cancelled legs and mandatory half-full cinemas in cities where the 2021 festival was able to take place, it's understandable that it's apparently not in strong health. Which is why they've described this year's festival as a "year of rebuilding", with a programme that is dramatically cut down - it's only a 10-day festival (rather than the usual 17 days), and whereas last year about 170 films screened, this year, it's only 70. And the number of venues is also reduced - last year we had seven venues, stretching all the way from Miramar out to Porirua, while this year we only have three venues (which does make the inter-film dashes much less stressful - I will not miss the mad 30km drives).
So tickets went on sale a couple of weeks ago on Monday, supposedly at 10am. Which is why I was surprised to find tickets already on sale when I went to the site at about 9am. I started the process of buying tickets, nervously remembering last year when tickets were briefly available and I actually made payment before the ticket sales were closed. But this time, no such issues. Sure, the seat selection still doesn't seem to work - the system freaked out and froze when I tried to select my first seat, so I decided to just accept whatever seat the system allocated me (sigh). But after that, I don't know whether it was the fact that there were fewer people buying tickets because of the early ticket open, or because there were fewer tickets being purchased because of the smaller number of films, or because they've got the system working with sufficient capacity for opening day, but it actually worked pretty smoothly.
It was a frustrating festival to schedule. The reduced number of films means that there wasn't as much opportunity to find unexpected intriguing options to plug gaps in my schedule. Meanwhile many of the films have only one screening outside of work hours, so if I had a clash in screening times I simply had to make the decision which to see and accept that there's just no way to catch the other. This means that my schedule is not quite as packed as it might normally be, even allowing for the shortened festival length.
But despite that, it's still a promising-looking festival. The official programme launch was held at a film society screening of Summer 1993, which reminded me just how much I was delighted by that film and which alerted me to Carla Simón's new film Alcarràs. My experience with David Cronenberg is sadly limited to a handful of films, but after Crimes of the Future, his return to body horror after two decades, received such acclaim at Cannes I'm interested to what he's doing. I'm intrigued to see Decision to Leave, the new film from Park Chan-Wook seemingly working in a less-extreme mode than I usually expect of from him. I hadn't heard that Peter Strickland (the man who gave us the gleeful "evil dress" film In Fabric) had made a new film, but when I saw his name connected to Flux Gourmet I had to see it. Having really enjoyed Ruben Östlund's twoprevious movies, his new satire, Triangle of Sadness, would have been a must-see even before it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. I was extremely impressed by Ana Lily Amirpour's debut film A Girl Walks Home At Night, a wonderfully stylish Iranian-set vampire film, so I was excited to discover she made Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon. And I've heard great things about Dual, Ali & Ava, Watcher, Fire of Love, My Old School, Speak No Evil, and The Humans.
The film festival opening night is tonight, but like last year, the opening night is dedicated to a single screening of a single film. For all intents and purposes, the film festival proper starts tomorrow. So for the next 10 days, I may be busy.
A few weeks ago, there was a small controversy in the film world after filmmaker and comic book fan Kevin Smith (who really should have known better) criticised the Academy Awards for not nominating Spider-Man: No Way Home for Best Picture.
They got 10 slots, they can’t give one to the biggest f***ing movie of, like, the last three years? ... Like f***ing make a populist choice, f***, man.
But I've seen Spider-Man: No Way Home, I've seen it twice even, I really enjoy the movie, and I really do love the way that film engages with the past 20 years of cinematic portrayals of that character. It's a lot of fun, but there is no way that film deserves an Oscar nomination.
But the thing that is particularly bizarre about that criticism is that, while the Academy may not have nominated the sixth-highest-grossing-film-of-all-time, the Academy actually did make the populist choice. See, as I write this post, I've just returned from a brief holiday in Australia, where I discovered the Melbourne IMAX cinema was still showing the Denis Villeneuve film Dune three months after that film was released. I obviously couldn't pass up that opportunity, which is why I spent the evening watching the film - for the third time in an IMAX cinema, and my sixth screening in total. And what was particularly exciting about the screening, other than the fact that I was once again watching Dune at an IMAX, was the fact that the movie was still really busy - close to half the seats had been sold (many more than were sold for the screening of Uncharted, the opening-weekend film which was #1 at the box office, that immediately followed). At a time when Spider-Man had been and gone from cinemas, people were still turning up to see Dune, and they wanted to see it on the biggest screen possible. Dune is a genuinely remarkable piece of filmmaking, one that is also incredibly popular, and it's the film I was most excited to see listed in the Best Picture nominees.
[Comments on Dune, and the other nine nominees - The Power of the Dog, CODA, Belfast, Drive My Car, Licorice Pizza, Nightmare Alley, West Side Story, King Richard, and Don't Look Up - after the jump.]
