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.]
