Despite being significantly shortened, I thought the 2024 Film Festival really was terribly strong. And now, with the 2025 festival starting in a few days, it's time to finally post my thoughts about last year's films.
The usual disclaimers - these comments were written within a day or so of seeing the films, so they reflect my immediate responses to seeing the films. (Certainly the me who wrote about The Substance would not have expected that film to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar!) They were also written very quickly without much opportunity for finessing my words, so a lot of the writing is fairly rough.
[Comments on the 22 films I saw at the 2024 film festival after the jump...]
Last year I commented that, after three years of interrupted, delayed, shortened film festivals, we were finally out of that period, and hopefully back to enjoying the full film festival that I love so much. We all knew the COVID years must have taken a real financial blow, but it seemed as though the festival was back.
Sadly, it seems my optimism may have been misplaced. The first hint to its ongoing issues came earlier in the year when we learned that the festival was ending its nearly-20-year-long relationships with both the Square Eyes Film Foundation and with Ant Timpson (who programmed the Incredibly Strange strand). This was explained when it was reported that the festival is in worse condition that we may have realised. And so this year once again it's a stripped-back festival, running over just 11 days, with a smaller selection of movies (just 87 titles) and a smaller number of cinema venues. (The number of regions getting festival screenings also have reduced, from 17 down to 10 - unfortunate for film lovers in those areas affected.)
And so we just have to do what we can to support the festival as it seeks to rebuild back to the position of strength it once had. I'm trying to play my part - it's not quite as crammed as it might usually be, since the limited number of films and of venues mean that it's much harder to have the options to fill gaps, but I'm still seeing 22 films. So the films I'll be seeing this year will be:
The first thing that strikes me about this year's schedule is just how great the retro screenings are. Days of Heaven, Heavenly Creatures, Peeping Tom, and Paris, Texas are all great films, and I am very excited to see them all - especially the first two, which I have never seen on the big screen before.
A couple of years ago, the festival screened two films by Ryusuke Hamaguchi - both films I was interested in seeing, but was unable to fit either into my schedule. But I got to see and love Drive My Car after it was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, and then followed it up with the similarly great Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, so I'm definitely excited for his new work, Evil Does Not Exist.
I've been hearing how good The Teachers' Lounge is for close to a year at this point, and it was one of the first titles I looked for when the schedule came out, so I'm excited to finally see it. Similarly, in the past few months, I've been hearing raves about The Beast and Janet Planet, although I've managed to avoid knowing too much about those films, so I look forward to being able to engage with the conversation.
There's some good music documentaries here. I'm very excited about a 3 1/2 hour film about Paul Simon, since that should give enough time to get into some depth exploring his work. And while Ryuichi Sakamoto is a composer whose work I've never really sought out, whenever I'm watching a film he composed I tend to enjoy his work, so it will be interesting to see this documentary shot shortly before he passed away.
Sasquatch Sunset was a marginal call for me - it has built a reputation for being a challenging film to watch, and while some people love it, some people really hate it. Ultimately the thing that made my decision to see it was just timing - there was nothing else I could see at that time that held any interest to me. So I'll just hope to be in the "love it" camp.
And then there's just a bunch of films that sound intriguing and that will hopefully yield some real highlights.
The festival starts in a couple of days, and I am very excited.
As we get to the 2024 film festival in a couple of days, it's time I get around to posting my reflections on the films from the 2023 festival. Usual disclaimers - written in great haste shortly after the film, not a "review", just an attempt to capture my response and reflections, written primarily for myself to help me remember each film given the mass of movies I'll be seeing in a short space of time.
[Comments on the 39 films I saw during the 2023 film festival, after the jump]
The film festival starts tomorrow, and it seems weird to realise it's been four years since we had a proper traditional film festival. 2020 of course was the year of the deeply unsatisfying mostly online festival with just a handful of in-person sessions. In 2021 the festival left its traditional mid-winter positioning and moved to November, and then the screenings were all socially distanced due to a COVID outbreak, so the entire festival just felt empty. In 2022, we returned to our usual mid-winter timing, but it was a shorter festival - just 10 days rather than the traditional 17 days. But now, in 2023, we return to a complete 17-day festival, in its traditional time of year spanning July and August, with full screenings that are actually full. I cannot wait.
I've been enjoying this recent run of "Who, me? I'm not making movies!" documentary-style movies that Jafar Panahi has been making ever since Iran banned him from making movies, but the recent lifting of his travel ban is hopefully a sign that he can get back to making more traditional films if he wants to, and No Bears will be his last film that has to filmed in this way.
I'm bracing myself for the documentary filmed at a Paris hospital, De Humani Corporis Fabrica - I normally don't enjoy even the mildest of medical detail, so I'm nervous about what I'll see. But I've heard such a strong response to the film that I've decided to give it a shot.
Wim Wenders is clearly having a big year. A film about a toilet cleaner in Japan seems like a strange subject for a a German filmmaker, but Perfect Days is apparently pretty good. Meanwhile, remembering how effectively he used the extra dimension in his 3D documentary Pina makes me intrigued to see him working in that medium for another documentary about an artist in Anselm 3D.
You can usually rely on there being an interesting select of films about film. As a fan of both Hitchcock and the cinema documentaries by Mark Cousins, I'm interested to see what he does when approaching the Master of Suspense, while as a lover of film scores I'm excited to see a documentary celebrating the work of the maestro Ennio Morricone, arguably the greatest film composer of all time. And, as someone who is passionate about physical media, I'm intrigued by Kim's Video, telling the story of what happened to a massive collection of movies after the closure of the titular video store .
There's a mini-theme of people trapped and trying to escape, with Inside about a thief trapped in an apartment, and the annoyingly titled #Manhole about someone trapped in a manhole. Similarly, I'll be seeing two different dramas taking place within the French legal system(Anatomy of a Fall and Saint Omer). There's also a weird theme of films about teens being groomed into sexual relationships with adults - as someone who remembers the news in the mid-90s, I'm intrigued by the new Todd Haynes film May December apparently inspired by the Mary Kay Letourneau case, while I've had Palm Trees and Power Lines noted as a film to look out for the past 18 months, ever since reading strong reviews when it premiered at Sundance last year.
The "classic" strand is interesting this year - it's almost entirely filled with films I've never even heard of, let along seen - The Munekata Sisters, Chocolat, as well as Detour (which I could not fit into my schedule. Only The Innocents was a title I was familiar with, and I'm excited to finally be crossing that one off my list.
Finally, I've heard great things about the new Kelly Reichardt film (Showing Up), the new adaptation of Judy Blume's most famous novel (Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret.), and the heartwarming movie about the journey of an escaped donkey (EO). I also hear Past Lives, the first film from playwright Celene Song, apparently inspired by her own experience reflecting on what might have been with her childhood friend, is supposed to be quite something.
So that's this years festival. It's exciting to see it back to normal, where hopefully it will remain in place for many years.
About seven years ago, filmmaking duo the Daniels released their first film, Swiss Army Man. And there was a lot that I really liked in the film - it was a fascinating exploration of friendship, loneliness, love, and regret, anchored by a fantastic central performance by Daniel Radcliffe. But there was a lot in the film that I genuinely hated - after all, Daniel Radcliffe was playing a corpse that farts all the time and has an erection that works as a compass. The almost non-stop juvenile fascination with toilet humour made the film feel as though it was made by young teenagers rather than two adult men. So while there was a lot of potential in that film, if you had told me that the second film from that duo would be frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar, I think my brain might have broken at that idea.
[Thoughts on Everything Everywhere All At Once, and all nine other Best Picture nominees - The Fabelmans, The Banshees of Inisherin, Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar: The Way of Water, Elvis, Triangle of Sadness, Tár, Women Talking, and All Quiet on the Western Front - after the jump]
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.]
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.]
I've been a fan of director Bong Joon-Ho for over 10 years, ever since the one-two punch of seeing his first film, the hilarious Barking Dogs Never Bite (about a man driven to consider killing his neighbour's incessantly barking dog), and then shortly after seeing his then-newest film, Mother (about a woman trying to prove her son's innocence of murder). I didn't immediately realise that these films were from the same director, but as soon as I put that information together, I became a committed fan. He's one of the most fascinating, unexpected filmmakers working today, and when I saw his newest film had won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, that set very high expectations, and I was excited to see whether could live up to them. I've seen it twice now, and as great as his other films are, it's pretty clear that Parasite is his greatest film, at least to date, and it's a perfect display of his skill and his quirks as a film-maker, and his particular thematic obsessions.
[Thoughts on all nine Best Picture nominees – Parasite, 1917, Once Upon A Time In… Hollywood, The Irishman, Marriage Story, Joker, Little Women, Jojo Rabbit, and Ford v Ferrari – after the jump.]
As usual, here is a post collecting my responses to the films of this year's film festival. They were written rather quickly, and posted to my Facebook within a day or two of each film, so I certainly wouldn't call them "reviews". They're just a reflection of my response to the film - how did I feel about them, what did I find myself thinking about when I reflected on the film.
[My thoughts on all 38 of my festival films, after the jump.]
So here's the thing, I have this annoying tendency to put a great deal of effort into writing things for this blog and then, having done all the hard work of actually writing close to 10,000 words, never actually posting the thing because the comparatively easy work of rereading my writing, formatting it, and adding pictures and links, just seems like too much work. (Witness the way I always wait an entire year before posting my reflections on the previous year's film festival films, even though those are literally just reposts of Facebook posts that I had already written.) So this is a post that I finished writing over a year ago, about an event that took place in April 2018. But, having written it all that time ago, I'm only getting around to sharing it now. In posting this I've proofread it, and tweaked a couple of confusing sentences to clarify my point, but otherwise this is exactly the post I would have shared a year ago, had I gone to the effort of sharing this post a year ago. Sorry about the delay.
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So here’s the thing,
A couple of months ago we had a fantastic event running in Wellington – The Jim Henson Retrospectacle, a celebration of the work of Jim Henson with cinema screenings, talks and panel discussions, all centred around a big concert. I was always going to go to the concert (I bought my ticket at the earliest opportunity), and as a movie person I was definitely looking forward to the movie screenings, but I never really considered going to any of the panel discussions until after the screening of The Muppet Movie. Original Muppet Show performer Dave Goelz (who most notably originated and still plays The Great Gonzo) was there, and after the movie he gave a Q&A with the actual Gonzo puppet. As someone whose favourite muppet was Gonzo it was a thrill to actually see this character I’ve loved for as long as I can remember, but I also found Goelz himself to be a fascinating and engaging speaker, and I suddenly realised what a fantastic opportunity this was and how much I would kick myself if I missed out on it. Which is how I found myself unexpectedly spending hundreds of dollars buying tickets to every panel discussion possible. And it was worth every cent.
On the last day, a friend asked if I was going to write a blog post about my experiences. I hadn’t planned to, but the more I thought about it the more I thought it was a good idea – if only to try to capture some of my memories of the event for myself before they fade away into time. So to be clear, these are my recollections. I wasn’t taking notes during the talks, so if I say that someone said something, I mean that I’m paraphrasing what I remember them saying, but memory is unreliable and I could certainly be wrong about what they said. But, to the best of my ability, here is a incomplete record of the Jim Henson Retrospectacle as I experienced it.
As usual, as we come up to this year's film festival (less than a week to go!), I remember that I never got around to posting my responses to last year's festival films. So here they are. These were originally posts on Facebook that I wrote after watching each of the films at the film festival, recording my immediate thoughts on each of the films I saw. These are not reviews - although I admit that in posting them I certainly hope that my comments on the films I liked will encourage people to seek them out - but are more an attempt to try to capture my responses to the film, so that in future years when I remember a particular film I can have something to refer to to recall how I felt about it at the time. It also forces me to actively reflect on each film, rather than just going from film to film without really engaging with each of them.
Please bear in mind, these are not crafted, but rather impulsively written. Seeing them all collected together, I can see the writing tics that I resort to far too much.
[My reactions to all 40 films I saw at the 2018 festival come after the jump.]
Thursday morning, I posted a comment on Facebook: “Preparing myself for the most stressful day of the year.” Film Festival tickets were going on sale, and remembering the last few years fighting with a website that was constantly crashing or failing in one way or another, I was resigned to another few hours of frustration as I tried to secure my tickets.
It wasn’t a promising start. As in the past few years, I broke my purchases up into smaller groups, in order to minimise the risk of the website crashing right as I was finishing a massive purchase. I selected my first group of films, went through to the page where I told them how many tickets I wanted for each film, went to progress, and... nothing. Just a screen with three dots cycling around. I was sitting there waiting for several minutes until I remembered that last year there had been some advice about not using Internet Explorer on the site. I pulled up the site on Chrome, and it actually worked. Yay!
That is, until I tried to select my seats, to avoid the automatic seat allocation (which is always rubbish). My first seat selection worked perfectly. But my second seat selection actually changed my first, so I was sitting in the same seat for both films, even though the second film was already selling well and my seat was much worse for that film than the first. I tried to fix the seat for the first film, but just got caught in a cycle where I would select a seat, click OK, and return to the same seat selection screen. I closed out of it, and went back in. Same result – getting the tickets was perfect, selecting the seats was non-functional. Then when I closed out, I found myself logged out of the festival website. Memories of past years, of the site logging me out and not letting me back in, flooded my memory. But I was surprised to be able to log back in quite easily. By now I could see the major setpiece screenings were already selling well, even though tickets had only been on sale for 10 or 15 minutes, so I decided to abandon the seat selection and just take what they give me. It worked; half an hour after tickets went on sale, I had all of my tickets purchased. I’m not happy with some of my seats, particularly in the smallest screens – I prefer to be centred to the screen, and most of my films in those smallest screens find me sitting quite sharply to one side or the other, making the angle to the screen quite bad – but I can live with it, especially since the purchasing experience was otherwise really smooth.
Good work, film festival website people. While there’s still work to allow people to decide for themselves where they would prefer to sit, the preparation for the peak demand when tickets went on sale was finally perfect. And for that I am grateful.
[EDIT - And a week later they announced a screening of Midsommar, the new horror film from Ari Aster, director of Hereditary. Midsommar has been getting a lot of fantastic buzz, so I was very excited by the announcement. It should be a fun experience with a full Embassy crowd.]
Last week my favourite podcast, Battleship Pretention, released an episode covering the work of the late Agnes Varda. Listening to the episode, I realised I've never seen any of her films, so it was a wonderful surprise to open the festival programme two days later to find they had scheduled a retrospective of five of her films, including two films (Daguerreotypes and Le Bonheur) cited by one of the show's hosts as his favourite Varda films. (Add to that the film society's upcoming screening of Faces Places, and I'm going to rapidly become a Varda expert.)
The classic film selection this year is quite exciting.
* I rewatched Kind Hearts and Coronets only a few months ago, but it's such a gloriously fun and funny film, with an incredible performance by Alec Guinness, that I'm not going to complain about watching it again on the big screen.
* I'm also excited by the screening of Apocalypse Now: Final Cut. I saw Apocalypse Now Redux at the film festival in 2002, and while it's a wonderful cinematic experience, the Redux version is just too long and bloated, with the French Plantation scene in particular just feeling prolonged and aimless at exactly the wrong time in the film. Hopefully this Final Cut will be a good middle-ground between the too-short original cut and the too-long Redux edit.
* I've never seen the other two classic films showing. I've heard great things about Koyaanisqatsi, which pairs documentary footage from around the world with a legendary score by Philip Glass to form a film that abandons any type of storytelling and that is primarily about being an experience for the audience, so seeing this on the big screen should be ideal. And then there's Andrei Rublev. This will be my fifth film by Andrei Tarkovsky, and I haven't really cared for any of his other works that I've seen (including Stalker, which screened in the festival back in 2017), but I always live in hope of discovering something I've never seen before and understanding why a filmmaker like Tarkovsky is so revered.
Usually there are a few films that I was hoping the festival would be showing but that never make it onto the schedule. However this year, I can't think of anything missing; every film I looked for makes an appearance in the programme.
* I was most excited to see the Japanese film We Are Little Zombies listed, even if only for a single screening. It's supposed to be an utterly joyous experience about teen orphans forming a pop band, and was literally the first film I checked for when I got my programme.
* I was pleased when Under the Silver Lake was one of the first announcements. The reviews have mostly been mixed-to-negative, but some people really like it, and there's something appealing to me about a film that can be so divisive (plus I loved It Follows). I'm curious to see which way I fall.
* There's an Aretha Franklin concert film called Amazing Grace, with footage shot close to 50 years ago but unavailable for all this time because of technical problems that could only now be resolved. It's supposed to be an incredible experience, and I'm excited to hear it with a fantastic cinema sound system.
* I've been hearing great things about High Life, an introspective science-fiction film that is the first English-language movie from Claire Denis. It sounds like a strange, fragmented story that has been compared to 2001 (which I love) and Solaris (which I don't). Should be interesting.
* As a fan of both the Victor Hugo book and the musical, I'm curious about Les Misérables, a film that is apparently not a retelling of the original story, but that instead tells a wholly new story exploring the same themes as the original but in a modern context.
* I was fascinated by the previous films of Peter Strickland (the horror film Berberian Sound Studio, in which the gore was kept off screen while we watch the sound effects artist creating the sound of people being torn apart, and the lesbian BDSM-inflected chamber drama The Duke of Burgundy). Peter Strickland makes bizarre, fascinating, personal films; had any other filmmaker made a film about a demonic dress I probably would have dismissed it, but when Strickland makes In Fabric, I'm curious.
* I was a bit uncertain whether to add The Nightingale to my schedule. It's supposed to be really good, and I did love Jennifer Kent's previous film The Babadook, but the stories about walkouts due to the number of rape scenes gave me pause. I've decided to trust that the fact it was written and directed by a woman means that there's care and consideration in the inclusion of those scenes.
* I'm glad to finally see Apollo 11, a documentary about the moon landing compiled from footage that was shot at the time on large format 70mm film and was then misplaced and lost, kept in pristine condition. It's a shame I won't get to see it on the IMAX screen, since that was apparently an incredible experience, but it will still be exciting to see the film on the big screen.
* People seem to really love the Awkwafina comedy The Farewell. I'm yet to get the Awkwafina thing, since I've found her annoying when I've seen her in other films, but this film seems to call for more nuance and subtlety than her usual oversized characters, and I'm hoping she can deliver that.
It's going to be a rough film festival. After the Paramount closed 18 months ago, it seemed like the festival would be badly affected by the loss of one of its main central city venues, so it was fantastic when Reading Courtenay made itself available as a venue, significantly adding to the number of screens within walking distance of each other. But now Reading Courtenay is closed as an earthquake risk, and they've had to spread the festival out even wider to find venues. I was glad to see them add the Lighthouse Cuba as a centre city venue. I have no idea what the City Gallery is like as a movie theatre, but I'm going to find out. They're even having screenings in Porirua; I have a couple of days where I have to rush from work all the way out to Porirua (in rush hour) for an early evening screening, before driving back into town to catch my second film of the night. That will be stressful, and exhausting. But hopefully it will be worth it.
[EDIT - And sadly, something came up last minute that meant that I had to cancel one night's screenings. I didn't mind missing Le Bonheur too much, since it is an classic film and therefore easily accessible elsewhere. I was more disappointed about missing Long Day's Journey into Night, since it seems like a title unlikely to get a theatrical release, and since it's a 3D film watching it at home won't have the same effect without a 3D TV.]
A few years ago, I saw a screening of the 1954 Judy Garland/James Mason version of A Star Is Born. And I thought the film, a story of a drunk Hollywood star on the decline who meets a young talented woman and helps her start her career only to see her stardom eclipse his, was great. Then last year, when the buzz around the new Bradley Cooper/Lady Gaga version started, I decided it would be an interesting exercise to actually sit down and watch all of the previous Star Is Borns to prepare for the new version. And it is genuinely fascinating to see how this one story grows and changes over time, reflecting changes in cultural tastes and in societal views, while remaining recognisably the same.
In the original 1937 film with Janet Gaynor and Frederic March (and which I understand bears heavy similarity to 1932’s What Price Hollywood?), the core plot is established, and it’s surprising how largely untouched that plotting goes throughout the different versions. The main difference is the absence of music, which is a big issue – instead she’s just an actor, and we’re supposed to believe that Norman Maine sees her star appeal and talent as an actress based solely on her serving at a party, which doesn’t play very believably (and which seems even more of a contrivance when you remember that the film actually makes a joke out of her trying to serve people in a way that shows her acting skills). The 1954 remake with Judy Garland and James Mason introduced music to the story, which was the thing that revolutionised these films; it may be hard to see someone’s acting ability or star appeal from watching them serve food, but anyone who hears Judy Garland sing would instantly know she has genuine talent even if she is an unknown. With this film, she’s still an film star, but since this is the period of big-budget Hollywood musicals, that’s the type of film she makes, and this becomes a vehicle to include song-and-dance sequences from all of the films she makes. But other than that, the film is pretty damned close to the original; it seemed to me that many scenes in the '54 would play out with near-identical dialogue as in the '37. By the 70s the era of major movie musicals is over, and so the 1976 version with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson adopts the idea of her being a recording star instead, an approach that gives the story sufficient flexibility that it can change with the time and styles; I’d be shocked if any future Star Is Borns return to a Hollywood movie star setting. But while the 1976 version may have arrived at the ultmate form of the story, it is a flawed film – it is better than its poor reputation, but it is easily the least of the films.
And now we have the 2018 version with Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga. There was a lot of buzz around the film, and for a long time it was widely viewed as the frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar; that buzz died down, and at this point it seems certain that it will be one of the Best Picture nominees that come up short.
[Comments on the 2018 A Star Is Born, and the seven other Best Picture nominees – Roma, The Favourite, Black Panther, BlacKkKlansman, Vice, Green Book, and Bohemian Rhapsody – after the jump]
As happens each year, the upcoming arrival of this year's film festival has finally prompted me to post my responses to the films I saw at last year's festival. As always, these were my initial responses, many of them written very quickly on my phone while waiting for my next screening, and all of them written within a day or two of seeing the film. So these are very rough and immediate reflections that I have left essentially as they were.
Film festival tickets went on sale today and, as in the past two years, I decided to not stand in the cold for four hours waiting, instead trying to book my tickets online. After last year’s mess, I made the decision to book tickets ten at a time, in the hope that a ten-film order might be faster and easier to process, and in the knowledge that having the ticket system crash on you on your ninth film is less frustrating than having it crash on your thirtieth film.
It all seemed to start out well – I got through the initial screen cleanly, I selected my first ten films, went through, and got a Creating Order screen, which stayed cycling for 15 or 20 minutes. At that point I figured it wasn’t going to happen, tried again, and again, several times, each time getting stuck on that one screen. Then I discovered the tickets were down full-stop – the festival tweeted that they’d paused online bookings for the next 15 minutes to try to fix things. And then at noon, just over an hour after the “15 minute pause” started, they were finally back online. And from that point, it was smooth sailing – I was able to purchase all of my tickets pretty easily. (Hopefully the improvement wasn’t just because people just gave up trying, and that the fixes they put in place worked and can be implemented next year.)
But considering it took 2½ hours for me to make my purchases, the whole experience was weirdly stress-free. Unlike last year, where the system kept making me think I was getting somewhere in purchasing my tickets and then would drop out causing me to have wasted all that effort, this year because I kept finding myself stuck on the early screens before I could even get through to my seat selections I never had that all-that-time-wasted experience I had last year. And when they actually took ticketing down, that was even better – at least if no-one is able to buy tickets then I don’t need to stress about the good seats selling out. Plus I was able to actually do some work while I was waiting, which was satisfying. So unlike last year where I was just a bundle of nerves by the end of the process, this year I was pretty much fine.
[EDIT - After the festival started, they had a late confirmation of another film, Prince: Sign O' The Times, which pushes me up to 40 films, a nice round number and far above my previous record of 36.]
Until a couple of years ago, I kept having clashes that stopped me from seeing the Hirokazu Kore-eda films, until I finally saw Our Little Sister a few years ago and decided I need to never miss his film ever again. This year, the festival has two films from him; another one of his slice-of-life family dramas, the Palme d’Or winner Shoplifters, as well as the legal thriller The Third Murder. Shoplifters should be great – it seems perfectly in line with the type of film he makes so incredibly well – but I’m almost more curious about The Third Murder, since that’s a type of film that really demands a lot of tension and suspense and that’s not really something I’ve seen in any of the Kore-eda films I’ve seen to date. I’m excited to see how he does.
The other film I’m most anticipating is the new film from Paul Schrader, First Reformed. Looking at his filmography, I realised that I’ve never actually seen any of his directorial efforts, although I am a fan of his work writing for Scorsese. He’s probably best known for writing Taxi Driver, so I’m intrigued by the fact that pretty much every time I hear the film referenced they always compare it to that film, suggesting it’s as though Travis Bickle were a Protestant minister. A lot of people I respect have rated the film very highly, so I’m anticipating something special.
I’m also really excited by You Were Never Really Here, the new film from Lynne Ramsey with Joaquin Phoenix as a veteran hired to rescue a kidnapped girl. I’d been extremely impressed by Ramsey’s previous film We Need To Talk About Kevin – that film demanded she navigate very delicately around a lot of sensitive and devastating issues, and she managed to explore that film’s central incident of violence while staying true to the horrific act that it was – and so I’m curious to see her exploring what seems to be the space occupied by films like Taken.
I’ve consciously chosen to avoid knowing anything about Leave No Trace, the new Debra Granik film. Winter’s Bone was my favourite film of 2010, an absolute masterpiece, and so I was just satisfied to hear that the response to her new work has been strongly positive as well. It’s been hard to avoid knowing anything about the film – especially since New Zealand actress Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie is one of the leads, which means every Kiwi media outlet is publishing articles announcing how she will break out in the same way Jennifer Lawrence did after Winter’s Bone – but I’ve achieved it. I’m excited to sit down and discover what the film actually is.
As someone whose favourite film is Vertigo, I’m curious about The Green Fog, the new film from Guy Madden (whose work is a real blind spot for me) that apparently uses footage from various movies shot in San Francisco to create what sounds almost like a constructed remake of Hitchcock's greatest film. I don’t know what that will be like, but I’m curious.
There are quite a few documentaries that I’ve heard very good things about. I’m particularly excited about Filmworker, the documentary about Leon Vitali. I’ve known about Vitali for years – he’s a former actor who, after working with Kubrick on Barry Lyndon, decided to leave acting and dedicate his life to being Kubrick’s assistant, doing everything from checking film prints to being acting coach to Danny Lloyd on The Shining, and he’s continued to represent Kubrick’s wishes long after the man died – but he’s someone I don’t really know much about, so that should be fascinating. Similarly, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story – telling the life story of one of the woman who, in addition to being one of the great beautifies of classic Hollywood, was a genius inventor whose work was vital as a precursor to technologies like wifi – is supposed to be excellent. I’ve heard good things about Three Identical Strangers, about three triplets separated at birth who learn of each other’s existence. Science Fair is supposed to be nicely heartwarming, with obvious comparisons to the spelling bee documentary Spellbound. Ian McKellan is an engaging and entertaining speaker, so his interview-documentary will hopefully be fun. And while it’s not a documentary, American Animals apparently does some interesting work incorporating the remembrances of the actual people involved in the true story into the dramatisation; reviews have been mixed, but I liked Bart Layton’s earlier documentary The Imposter, so I’m willing to be hopeful.
Weirdly there are a couple of horse films that feature prominently in my schedule. It’s not really something that would ordinarily appeal to me, but the reviews have been so overwhelmingly positive for both Lean On Pete (a boy-and-his-horse type of story) and The Rider (about a rodeo rider who suffers serious head injuries) that I decided I had to see them both. Indeed, there was a significant amount of effort juggling all of my screenings around to find a way to make a screening of The Rider fit.
I’m generally not a big music person, and wouldn’t ordinarily seek out concert documentaries, but I did really enjoy seeing Woodstock at the Embassy a couple of years ago – seeing a music film like that in the cinema, with not just the big screen but also the big sound, is the best way to experience those movies – so seeing Monterey Pop was an easy choice.
And then there are all the films that just seem interesting. Jafar Panahi continues to thumb his nose at the Iranian authorities that tried to ban him from making movies with his latest “this isn’t actual movie” movie 3 Faces. A documentary about a fireworks festival (Brimstone & Glory) should at least be a nice spectacle on the big screen. I probably would have overlooked Woman at War, but a few weeks ago the film society screened the director’s earlier film Of Horses and Men, which was so fantastic that the need to see his new film became pressing. And The Guilty sounds like it could be fun – a thriller that takes place entirely in an emergency call centre with our hero trying to help one of his callers.
Once again the classic film section is disappointing, with only one film that really holds any interest for me at all. But that one film is Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, which is fantastic. I’ve only seen it once, a number of years ago when it had a Saturday afternoon screening at the film archive. It’s a great film, but that was not the best environment to see the film, so I’m excited to see it at the Embassy. My big disappointment in the retro section was that Raise the Red Lantern, screening in Auckland, isn’t going to be shown down here; when I’d heard that Yimou’s film was screening in the festival I was thrilled as I’d never seen it, so was understandably disappointed to realise the screening was from a 35mm print, as we no longer have any 35mm projectors in Wellington to show the film.
I feel like it’s a pretty strong festival this year. I’m very happy with my film selections, although as always there are a few films I’m gutted I couldn’t make fit (most notably Lucky, the final film starring Harry Dean Stanton). The big thing to me is that pretty much every film I was hoping would be in the festival is in the festival – unlike past years where I’ve been disappointed by just how many films I’ve thought might make the festival but that never screened, this year there are really only two films I had thought might make it. I guess I knew The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was never going to screen – the middling reviews from Cannes and the legal action killed any hope of that happening – but it would have been nice to see the finalised film in the festival since Lost In La Mancha, the documentary about Gilliam’s earlier effort to film the story, was part of the festival 15 years ago. And I’d seen such a strong response to Anton Yelchin’s final film Thoroughbreds, the comedy about two teenage girls planning to murder one of their stepfathers, that I thought that had a good chance of making it as well. Oh well – hopefully I’ll get a chance to see these films on the big screen later.
But those few disappointments aside, it looks like it should be a good festival. Less than three weeks to go.
