Reichardt during MIFF, if not actually at MIFF

If I had watched every Kelly Reichardt movie MIFF had offered me over the years -- her last four, and probably more than that, but that covers the ten years I've been in Australia -- then Reichardt would hold the record for the director I'd seen most at the Melbourne International Film Festival.

As it stands, I have two official, and two unofficial ... the most recent of which is probably not even unofficial. 

My very first MIFF in 2014 saw me attend Night Moves, which was at the time my second favorite Reichardt film only to Meek's Cutoff. (Still is, I think.) Two years later it was her next film, Certain Women, that earned one of my slightly less precious quantity of tickets, as that was the first year I got a pass and really went all out (watching 11 films total).

I tried to make it 3-for-3 in 2020 with First Cow, but that was the first year of COVID, and a funny thing happened: They actually restricted the number of available tickets to watch the festival's opening night film, even though it was streaming, where there are no seat limits. Something about keeping it an exclusive event and not eating into whatever theatrical release it may have gotten in the future. First Cow was one of the first films really taken down by COVID, as it came out in the U.S. just before everything closed down. I'm not sure if it did actually ever get an Australian theatrical release. (Wait, of course it did -- I wrote about it here.) 

But because it had been released so many months earlier in the U.S., and because they were hopeful of recouping the lost theatrical dollars in any way they could, the movie was available for me to rent through my U.S. iTunes. So instead of watching an official MIFF stream of First Cow on opening night, my wife and I watched the version I rented from iTunes in the exact same time slot, joining in on the collective experience in our own way.

Because I knew Reichardt's latest, Showing Up, was released similarly long ago in the U.S., and also already available on iTunes, I didn't consider it as one of my MIFF tickets this year. But last night I did consider it a good time to watch the movie, with MIFF in the air and all. This time I won't count it among my MIFF films, even unofficially. 

And unfortunately, I think I have a new least favorite Kelly Reichardt film.

I guess it's been diminishing returns for me on Reichardt since Night Moves, as I liked Certain Women a decent amount less than that, and First Cow a decent amount less than Certain Women. Now Showing Up shows up, and gets a full star less than First Cow's three stars -- making it the first Reichardt movie I have actually given a thumbs down. 

I'm not sure I understood what the point of Showing Up was supposed to be, but I assume it was not for us to be punked by Reichardt. That's how I felt during this very boring movie in which nothing happens. Sorry, yes, things do happen -- Michelle Williams complains to her feckless landlord (Hong Chau) that her hot water doesn't work, they collectively nurse a pigeon back to health, and Williams' character looks in on her mentally unstable father (Judd Hirsch) and brother (Mr. Independent John Magaro) as he she prepares for a showing of her very bad sculptures of women. But those things were very boring.

Was the art supposed to be bad? A friend and I disagreed on this slightly in discussing it today. He thought it was just another failing of the movie that we were supposed to think the art was good, but it's not. I give Reichardt more credit than that, but then I wonder why she is showing us a bunch of boring people making mediocre art. (Williams is the central character, but she's one of only a number of artists we see laboring over art that only a mother could love.)

I realize I should probably clarify my use of the word "boring," which is an inherently anti-intellectual judgment about a movie that has a purposefully slow pace. I hope you understand that there's boring and then there's boring. It's the second one I mean here, which is not a comment on a lack of action in the story, but a comment on a lack of caring about the characters or the story because the writer-director has not given us anything to sink our teeth into. That's the case with Showing Up.

I guess that makes it pretty consistent with the MIFF experience so far in 2023, of which Showing Up is tangentially a part. Out of five movies so far, only one was really good -- and even that one, Past Lives, was not as good as I thought it was going to be.

I don't know if my final three are going to significantly improve the overall experience, but the last film I'm seeing on Saturday at least has the potential to -- and it will make that director the actual record holder for the most official MIFF movies I've seen.

But first, one tomorrow night and one Friday night.

First Cow, last Cow, and all the Cows in between

Kelly Reichardt's First Cow has truly spanned the pandemic.

Thirteen months ago, it became the poster boy for sacrificial lambs -- to mix metaphors -- among movies caught betwixt and between by the shutting down of the world economy due to COVID. Its March 6th U.S. release date left barely anyone to see it before people stopped going to the movies. Barely anyone also saw it, of course, because it was only released in four U.S. theaters on that date, part of a staggered release not unusual with independent films, but a release that ultimately became more hobbled than staggered. 

That theatrical run was of course shot, though there was talk of trying to release it theatrically again later in the year. Of course, it's still "later in the year" as many cinemas in the U.S. are only just now trying to return to regular operations.

Here in Australia, it played at MIFF in August -- which was, of course, also a virtual experience. That's where I watched it, or rather, when I watched it. The MIFF screening, which was an opening night screening, was "sold out" -- yeah, they limit availability even with streaming, in order to create urgency I guess. So instead we just rented it from U.S. iTunes, which was possible starting July 21st, 11 days after it premiered on VOD. 

At this point, First Cow seems like ancient history. Although critics fell all over themselves lauding it -- I was more mixed -- it didn't get any Oscar nominations and seems to have been kind of relegated to an unfortunate footnote in pandemic-era cinematic history. (I don't think Oscar nominations would have necessarily been expected, but several of my movie podcasts thought it could be a frontrunner for best picture if the Oscars limited themselves only to what was released theatrically.)

So you can imagine my surprise when I got an email to my ReelGood account this week with the subject "Master filmmaker Kelly Reichardt is back."

My first thought was "Wait, Kelly Reichardt has a new movie already?"

Well, no. I click into the email to find the following: 

"First Cow is in cinemas tomorrow."

Yeah we get movies late in Australia sometimes -- I've blogged about some especially egregious examples -- but this seemed ridiculous. Not because 13 months -- actually, closer to 14 months -- after the U.S. release date would be the longest delay I've ever witnessed between a U.S. and an Australian release, but because it seems impossible that they are still trying to make First Cow happen.

And yet because First Cow did never have that Australian theatrical release, it also isn't available for rental yet here -- something I tend not to pay much attention to because I do most of my renting through the aforementioned U.S. iTunes.

I mean, it's great that people get to see this on the big screen. Reichardt composes her shots thoughtfully and even is fond of using a square aspect ratio, as she's done here. The movie should be seen on a big screen even if she does not use the full rectangular capacity of that screen.

It just seems weird that after all this has been through, it's only still just trying to claw its way into existence here in the Australian film market.

And presumably it will get a fair number of eyeballs in local arthouse cinemas. After a brief boom at the start of March when a handful of high-profile releases came out, things have dried up again, such that it's been two weeks now since I've been to a movie theater. That's extremely rare for me in times when my access to movie theaters is not being limited by a pandemic. In fact, I don't know how far back I'd have to go to find an occurrence of this in "normal" times.

It may not be a cash cow -- ha ha -- but perhaps it will at last find an adoring audience that can actually watch it in a cinema. 

MIFF: Not really MIFF (really not really MIFF)

MIFF started last night. Sort of.

When I say it was "not really MIFF," that's no direspect to the Melbourne International Film Festival. MIFF itself would say that an online film festival is only a small fraction of what they usually offer, but they've chosen a reasonably large fraction, officially, labeling this MIFF 68 1/2 -- not quite the 69th annual version of the festival I have been attending religiously since moving to Melbourne seven years ago. (It's only my seventh rather than eighth MIFF, though, because I missed the 2013 festival by mere days.)

When I say it's "really not really MIFF," though, that's because we had to cheat to even watch the opening night film.

I'll explain.

Kelly Reichardt's First Cow was chosen as the opening night film of the festival, and as luck would have it, I haven't seen it yet, even though it's been available for rental from U.S. iTunes for a good three weeks now. And I was given codes to watch five free MIFF films as part of my role with ReelGood, so all good there.

What I didn't realize was that First Cow would actually sell out.

How does an online film sell out, you ask? Shouldn't the "seating capacity" be unlimited?

Well, you would think so. But my wife explained it to me this way. If they let everyone who wanted to see First Cow actually see it, it would cannibalize the film's eventual performance at the Australian box office, once it does one day open. So the "seating capacity" is a limitation placed by the distributor, not by MIFF itself. Plus, having a limited number of seats creates a sense of urgency to help sell the other seats -- which worked, apparently.

At first I thought I'd blown it, since my wife and I had talked about using one of my passes to purchase First Cow. It would be our second straight opening night MIFF film, though last year we attended in person.

But then I realized: I'll just rent it from iTunes and it'll be basically the same thing.

So yeah, on the opening night of MIFF, we watching the MIFF opening night film, just not actually through MIFF.

"Basically the same thing" is not the same as the same thing. We had multiple technical difficulties during the viewing. I will list them in order of their annoyance.

1) We noticed that the lighting was flickering during the night scenes. At first we didn't realize it was only the night scenes, and actually, it was only some of the night scenes. But my wife attributed it to a failure of the image to project the correct number of megahertz, which sounds like a real thing. Restarting iTunes and restarting my computer did not fix the issue, though it did seem to happen less as the movie went on.

2) There was something weird going on with the way my computer screen was displaying when connected through the HDMI cable. The outermost ten percent of the screen on all sides was missing, like it was blown up too close. This didn't impact our ability to perceive the content of the movie, but any time you are not seeing the exact aspect ratio intended by the director, you are not getting the full experience of the movie. We thought it was something going on with my display setting and I checked that, to no avail. Only after the movie did we discover that it was a problem with this particular HDMI cable. Never seen that before.

3) My computer crashed at one point. It does that. When it crashes, the screen freezes and you can't see the cursor anywhere, and the only choice is to restart. Unfortunately, when it crashes while hooked up to HDMI, it also makes this incredibly obnoxious buzzing sound. So another five minutes while I restarted and got us back to where we were (becaue the abrupt nature of the closure prevented iTunes from marking where we had left off in the movie).

4) Lastly, there was a little bit of drag on the streaming, even though I had no other programs open on my computer. This seems to happen with my iTunes but only for the first five or so minutes of the movie. In this case, it happened like 30 minutes in, for no apparent reason, before sorting itself out. So yes, it happened after we had already had the other three technical problems, pushing us just a little bit closer to deciding that the universe was trying to tell us something about this viewing. Were we somehow "stealing" this viewing the way the main character steals milk from the titular cow?

We never gave up on it. But you can see where the "really not really MIFF" comes in.

As for the movie itself, well, it left me a bit disappointed too. I've seen Reichardt's last two features, Certain Women and Night Moves, at MIFF, so seeing First Cow felt like a very good start to making this year feel MIFFier than it otherwise would.

But the movie?

Well ...

Look, I really loved the first half. The second just kind of ... petered out into a resolution that did not seem in keeping with the rest of the movie. My wife said it best afterward: "I don't know what she was trying to say in that movie." I'll have a review up shortly to the right, if I don't already by the time you read this.

Well, from here on out, things should get a bit more "really MIFF." I have tickets to the mid-festival centrepiece, Benh Zeitlin's Wendy, as well as the closing night film, Pablo Larrain's Ema. (Not to be confused with Emma from earlier this year.) Like First Cow, those two are available only at that one specific time. My other three passes will be used on movies that I haven't yet chosen, as those movies can be streamed at any time during the run of the festival, until August 22nd.

And considering that my wife may purchase a package as well, it'll leave us with close to my usual MIFF slate.

Onward and upward ... really.