MIFF: Dopey grins, and the last Redux of 2025

As I type this, MIFF still has nine days of the festival remaining.

I still have no days remaining. 

It's the earliest I've finished the festival when the remainder of the festival didn't present an actual scheduling conflict for me. I actually only have a direct conflict with the final three days, and could even see some movies next Friday afternoon if I weren't working. But Friday night? Well it's time I finally told you.

My family will be in Europe for six weeks, leaving next Friday night.

It's a trip we first started planning in Vietnam in April of 2023. (I know this sounds like we're world travellers. I guess we are, a bit. But not in an obnoxious way.) I sprung the idea on my wife in the big pool at our resort -- again, I know, this sounds shitty, but we had just lost a close family member from the older generation, which I won't get into right now, so hopefully that makes it sound less shitty, and more of a "remember to live life while we can" thing.

Anyway, we hash-tagged it #europe2025 so we would not lose sight of it, and indeed we're making it happen. There were various incarnations of this trip where it would already be over, as we had once thought of going in May and June, and April was even on the table. The late August-early October timeframe ultimately worked better -- fewer tourists, we hope, since many will be due back in school -- and Friday it finally starts.

I can share the itinerary with you as we go, as I hope I'll still be blogging with some regularity. The device I'll have with me remains to be seen, as I have a tablet I'm currently locked out of, one of the things on my growing to do list before we leave. 

I'm able to do this trip -- well, not really "able," our bank account will be recovering for years -- because of something in Australia called "long service leave." Once you've been working for the same job for seven years, you are entitled to an additional seven weeks of leave on top of your normal leave. I believe it happens again another seven years after that, though I'm only brushed up on the initial seven-year requirement. My seven years as permanent staff at my job, as opposed to the contractor role I fulfilled for four years before that, just came in March. I'm spending it quickly, and all in one place. (Actually, I technically have one other week available, which just gets banked.)

So because all of our attentions have been geared toward this for several months now, the final week before we leave is a period of intense finalising and general worrying. I correctly determined that it would be best for me not to be gallivanting around town seeing festival films for the final week before we left.

But I did a lot of "gallivanting" before that, if you are talking about total steps. I do a lot of walking on the days I see movies at MIFF, in addition to enjoying some of my favorite eateries around the central business district, and if you want to know my step counts on the four days I attended movies, here they are:

Friday 8/8 - 16,166
Sunday 8/10 - 13,740
Tuesday 8/12 - 15,618
Thursday 8/14 - 13,965

I've already told you about the movies of 8/8, 8/10 and 8/12, so it's finally time to finish with the movies of 8/14.

When I wrote my not-yet-published review of James Griffiths' The Ballad of Wallis Island, I called it a "dopey grin movie."

There as now, I then went on to explain that this is not an insult, but rather, an acknowledgement of the pleased trance the movie puts you in, such when you finally notice things like your own facial expression -- feeling it through your muscles rather than seeing yourself, of course -- you realize you've been wearing a dopey grin for, oh, 15 minutes? 30 minutes? You don't know for sure.

Indeed this was my experience of Ballad, which was also the only film I saw that I'd already heard of before the festival started. Without doing a thorough check now, I believe that every MIFF so far has included at least one film I was anticipating before the festival started. I suppose the exception to that could be 2022, the year we missed the festival proper and got back only in time for the streaming portion, but like I said, I'm not checking now.

Usually I like this film to be something I'd heard buzz about but wouldn't be available in theaters for some time -- the example I always think of for this, which is basically the example I use any time I need an example of something good about MIFF, is Toni Erdmann. 

Well, there's no scarcity when it comes to The Ballad of Wallis Island. It's been out since April in the U.S., meaning I can probably already rent it through my U.S. iTunes, and opens in Australian theaters on August 28th. Though as you now know, I'll be out of the country then. So, I guess, this was the only way for me to see it in the theater.

And I'm certainly glad I did, as it immediately became one of my favorite films of the year. Not the festival, where it's the favorite, just edging out 1001 Frames. The year. 

Because it involves two harmonizing singers and hails from the greater United Kingdom, TBOWI put me in mind of Once, which is a high compliment, as Once remains one of my favorite movies of the first decade of this century. I'm not sure whether it will go down as one of my favorites of the third decade, but let's just say it's not out of the realm of possibility. 

I won't give you a lot of plot right now. My review does that if you can wait a couple days for the link to go up. (This will be my last MIFF review in 2025, so I wanted to kick it forward to the second week, even though I'd written it in time to publish it yesterday. It actually makes an ideal MIFF review because it's playing at regional cinemas on the final weekend of the festival, meaning I'm not reviewing something that's already sold out for its final in-city sessions.)

But as a quick logline, the movie entails the unwitting reunion of an indie folk rock duo who were big around 2010, but had since disbanded, both personally and professionally. That's Tom Basden and Carey Mulligan. Their reunion comes on a small island off Britain, with a population of less than 100, and the show is actually for their biggest fan, played by Tim Key, who will be the only one in the audience, little do they know beforehand. 

Anyway, yeah, I had stars in my eyes for this one. Funny and sweet. 

I had one slight reservation about the movie that I didn't see fit to put in my review, but I'll include it here in this more informal setting, where I don't have the confusing double duty of sort of also promoting the festival. (They gave me free tickets, which does at least make me feel more inclined to choose to review my more positive experiences. Which didn't stop me from also reviewing Good Boy.) 

Mulligan's character is currently married to an American black guy, played by (I have to copy and paste this from IMDB) Akemnji Ndifornyen. Don't worry, there aren't any ugly stereotypes about his character -- he's a bird watcher and a confirmed intellectual. But he's immediately telegraphed as "the wrong love interest" and I'm not sure if the movie gives him a fair shake, in part because he demonstrates emotional cruelty on a couple occasions. And yes, you do notice it a little more because he's the only non-white person in the cast. However, to the movie's credit, the resolution of his character can't necessarily be predicted.

My MIFF finished one movie later on a less good note. It might have been nice if the time slots could have been flipped between these two, and the light current of air under my heels from Ballad could have carried me home. Instead, I had to finish with a mid revenge filler involving the multiverse.

The high concept did get me in the door for Redux Redux, which means that despite the things I'm about to say about it, I am still susceptible to multiverse ideas. It's just this one doesn't really work.

The film is directed by a pair of brothers, Kevin and Matthew McManus, who I thought I might be familiar with previously, but it turns out no. Just because brothers are directing a film doesn't mean that they've already directed another film you know, though it certainly feels like that with all the pairs of brothers directing films who are out there. 

The story involves a woman (Michaela McManus, so I guess this one is all in the family) who is trying to get revenge for her daughter, who was kidnapped and apparently murdered. She knows who the kidnapper and murderer is -- despite the body not having been found, so it's unclear how she knows her daughter is even dead -- and because she has a piece of machinery the size and shape of a coffin, she has the ability to keep killing him and killing him again and again. 

No, it's not a time machine, allowing her to relive the same day to feed her blood lust. It's a machine that allows her to switch between universes in a multiverse, hoping she'll still find one where her daughter is alive, and to kill this monster while she's there.

Good idea for a film, you'd think, but the execution here is so basic. The three McManuses (McMani?) don't give us any particularly clever demonstrations of multiverse logic, and they certainly don't give us anything in the way of subtle dialogue. This is pretty broad, containing all the standard fretting you'd get in a movie about a fridged daughter and the monster who fridged her, without any of the nuance or specific character details. It's all just very generic, even while it obviously feels it has something to say about monsters who kidnap and kill young women. (Like this is a topic that needs to be specifically championed.) 

One area where the film flirts with specificity is in the casting of indie filmmaker and actor Jim Cummings as a man the protagonist meets in every multiverse and with whom she has a tryst. Cummings might be known to you from such films as Thunder Road, The Wolf of Snow Hollow and The Beta Test, and his presence definitely signifies something with a distinct perspective. Unfortunately, he's used poorly here, almost arbitrarily, as he doesn't demonstrate his knack for confrontational black humor, isn't woven into the story in a meaningful way, and is basically forgotten. 

Okay that puts the wraps on another MIFF. We now return to another week of regular programming, followed by six weeks of travel programming, whose exact nature remains to be seen. 

MIFF: ACMI-centric, or maybe not

My third night at MIFF was entirely comprised of films at ACMI.

And maybe this is a good time to mention a disappointment I have about MIFF 2025, which is not MIFF 2025's fault.

The films I selected are entirely in cinemas that I already visit for other reasons. 

My two favorite MIFF venues, The Capitol and The Forum, are both distinguished by their beautiful architecture, design, and old-world theatrical touches. I don't ever get to see movies in them if not for MIFF, so I try to hit both each year, and usually succeed. 

This year, when I'd made my big spreadsheet, lined up good times against my other weekly obligations, and let the algorithm spit out what I'd see, the films were all at ACMI, Hoyts Melbourne Central or Cinema Kino, the cinema that's downstairs from where I used to work. And though I do miss working upstairs from a movie theater, and have not seen nearly as many movies at Kino lately, I've probably seen 100 movies there overall, so there's no novelty.

Hoyts? It's just a multiplex. It was a surprise when it got involved with MIFF at all a couple years ago, but now it's a central venue. (No pun intended.)

ACMI is the one that's a little bit different, but still not great. ACMI is The Australian Centre for the Moving Image, which contains a free museum dedicated to lots of things related to, well, the moving image. Including a lot of movie stuff. It's a good public resource and it's great that it's free, but I liked it better before they reconfigured it about four years ago. 

Anyway.

They do have theaters upstairs, but the theaters have all the charm of two giant lecture halls. They are like multiplex theaters in some respects, but more ... academic. 

They are, however, a novelty within my current viewing habits, so I tried to embrace it.

I'd planned out a whole evening around ACMI. Between the very short 1001 Frames at 6 p.m. and the very short Death Does Not Exist at 9 p.m., I was going to have about 90 minutes to kill. I'd spend the first 45 or so reading. ACMI has these funky couches in the foyer that look pretty comfortable, and are raised up on landings, so you're kind of nestled up in there under the staircase above. A great place to make a dent in my book, which I hope to finish before my big trip next Friday. (I haven't told you about the big trip. I will.)

Then, although I certainly didn't need this long, I'd have 45 minutes at the festival hub, where the ads for Campari negronis I'd been watching before MIFF movies could finally get their outlet. I might even get to my seat early, rather than habitually almost-late as I have been doing. 

Well the couch area was closed off. I guess the ACMI foyer is extricable from the theater portion upstairs, and on a Tuesday night, they didn't need to be playing host to 51-year-old men who wanted to read a book for 45 minutes. So that was out. 

Then the festival hub was closed to a private party. This always happens with the festival hub. They tantalize you with its glamour and then they always close the velvet rope on you just when you really want to go. 

The place playing backup duty to the festival hub was a pop-up bar, still glamorous but slightly less so, run by Penfolds, the wine maker. I should know. I had a glass of wine there Friday night. But it was only wine, and I wanted that negroni.

But ... 

One of the MIFF staff suggested that he thought they did do cocktails there, but was easily dissuaded from his conviction when I insisted that they didn't. He was probably just being polite. Well of course he was right, as I noted walking by the place and seeing a guy with an empty negroni tumbler. Stupidly, I confirmed that he had indeed purchased it in the bar where he was sitting. He confirmed he had.

So I got my negroni. It was good.

And ... 

Before that I walked up to San Churro Chocolateria, needing more steps by this point like I needed a hole in the head, and had a hot chocolate to drink with a significantly smaller amount of book reading. On a rainy night, it paired nicely with the early ramen dinner I'd had at my favorite ramen bar before the first movie.

And ...

The first movie I saw was my new favorite of the festival.

Chosen specifically because it was foreign -- and I suppose, even more specifically because it was Iranian, and I love Iranian movies -- was 1001 Frames. I'll give you the premise.

We see a montage of about a dozen Iranian actresses, whose stories are woven together throughout the narrative and move forward at the same pace, auditioning for the role of Scheherazade in an upcoming film. They're all nervous because the director they're auditioning for -- the only person in the room they're auditioning for -- is famous, his work beloved, though not necessarily his behaviour. There's a wariness in them beyond their nervousness.

This wariness is warranted. In each audition, which involves very little actual auditioning, his words are becoming uncomfortable, crossing lines, giving lie to the notion that they might be here for an actual job. His comments become unmistakeably lascivious, suggesting quid pro quos, and he becomes too physically intimate with them. Some think it's a test to see what sort of reaction he can elicit in them, which might say something about their fitness for the role, but others see it as the last director unworried about getting #metoo'd. And then he becomes threatening.

Did I mention we don't actually see him? We only hear his voice from the other side of the camera?

I don't want to tell you any more. I'll just say that the really wonderful thing shared by much Iranian cinema is that it contains layers of meaning. No, that's too pedestrian. It contains layers of reality, layers upon which to interpret what we're seeing. 

I should tell you the director: Mehrnoush Alia. Never heard of him. But he shares an approach to cinema with such countrymen and cinematic luminaries Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi. And that is most certainly a good thing. 

I don't actually think it was shot in Iran. For one, it spends the entire time on a sound stage, which could be anywhere. For another, there were references to New York film commissions and the like in the credits. (I could look this up but I prefer the primary source evidence.) And I also happened to notice that Ramin Bahrani was thanked in the credits, and he's based purely in the U.S., to the extent that he's still making movies at all. (He made one in 2022 for Showtime. That's not that long ago. And I really liked The White Tiger in 2021.)

Anyway, the spirit of the unfortunately not yet dead Harvey Weinstein hangs over this thing big time, and you really feel for these poor, vulnerable women, who can be described as such even when they spit fire and defend themselves. Underneath we can see they are scared, and who wouldn't be. 

After the hot chocolate and the negroni -- a less good pairing than the hot chocolate and the ramen -- it was this year's entry into my unofficial MIFF "outsider animation" category. That's right, every MIFF I try to see an animated movie made outside the animation mainstream, and I think my streak in this case is unbroken. 

The movie is called Death Does Not Exist, and it's French. So that makes three of my five MIFF movies so far originating in other countries, which is not bad. 

I won't really try to describe the animation style, because if you want to know the truth, I'm on the bus riding home from the movie as I write this, and my creativity for the day is pretty much exhausted. (Yes, buses are replacing trains on my route. Buses are always replacing trains on my route at night.) You can get some sense of it from the poster above. 

The story is a fairly simple one, with room for a lot of dream logic and radical philosophizing in the middle. It's told from the perspective of Helene, a somewhat reluctant revolutionary who has signed up with five other friends to try to assassinate some corporate bigwig at his sylvan home. Their act is to be in the name of left-wing change, but at the crucial moment, of course some of them are overcome by the enormity of actually taking another person's life, to say nothing of the fact that they will then be on the run.

The attack of the compound is a total balls-up, and Helene flees. She then spends the rest of the movie wrestling with her conscience about whether she should have left them, even though by that point it was already hopeless. Her conscience takes the form of various figures who travel through the woods with her, some known and some unknown, and a contemplation of the Big Issues -- death among them -- comes to pass.

If the way I'm writing about Death Does Not Exist sounds a little dismissive, I did like the movie. But I also found my mind wandering at some points, and then increasingly more points. For a movie that was only 72 minutes long -- the same length as the dog horror movie I saw on Friday night, Good Boy, which also felt too long -- DDNE started trying my patience more than I wanted for a movie I knew I basically liked. So then that made me wonder how much I actually did like it. 

When we were coming out of the theater I heard someone say that it was very earnest, and I think that was the problem. There are a lot of platitudes presented quite earnestly in this film, and it hasn't much of a sense of humor at all. Not that every film needs a sense of humor; this one probably doesn't. But the point is, you do get weighed down eventually by a film that takes itself a little too seriously, and this may have prevented DDNE from being more of an unqualified success, majestic as it is in parts.

And I'm glad I got my negroni now, because that's it for ACMI in 2025. I might be able to squeeze in another one between the two movies that close out the festival for me on Thursday night, which are (sadly) at Hoyts and Cinema Kino. 

Even when you don't get to go to your favorite venues, though, it's still MIFF. And there's always the promise of excellent movies, two of which I've seen out of my five. 

MIFF: Further lust for inanimate objects

If you recall this post from six years ago -- and really, which among you doesn't?? -- you'll know I have a MIFF habit of seeing films in which characters have an unusual fixation on inanimate objects. And by "habit" I mean it happened twice, on the same night, six years ago, when both of the films I watched had to do with characters under the hypnotic sway of a particular garment in their wardrobe. 

We can now add a chair to this group.

By Design was the only MIFF movie I saw on Sunday night, the only of my four nights where I'm seeing only one movie. But so as not to waste a train ride into the city just for a single 90-minute chunk of weirdness, I followed it up with Zach Cregger's follow-up to Barbarian, called Weapons, which won't comprise any meaningful chunk of this post. In fact, its single mention has now passed, and you should not view that as any commentary on its worthiness for discussion or lack thereof.

By Design falls about halfway between Peter Strickland's In Fabric and Quentin Dupieux's Deerskin -- the two films in the above-linked post, if you didn't click on it (how dare you) -- in terms of my ability to connect with it, sharing a titular structure with Strickland's film and an absurd comedic sensibility with Dupieux's. 

In short, it's the story of a woman who wants to become a chair, and then succeeds in this goal. 

They actually swap bodies, in a playful skewering of the time-worn formula that currently has its latest example in movie theaters now with Freakier Friday. 

The woman, played by Juliette Lewis, does not initially want to become the chair, though she does see some of the inherent pleasures of that lifestyle. Initially she just wants to purchase it to add to the existing furniture in her house. But oh how strong wishes can be fulfilled in strange ways in the magic of the movies.

It's a fairly ordinary chair. I think you're supposed to think this from the start, just how the red dress is pretty ordinary in In Fabric and the deerskin jacket is pretty ordinary in Deerskin. Here, I'll give you a look at it:

Oh no wait, I can't. There has not yet been enough published online about this movie, which played Sundance but does not yet have a release date (or a distributor? maybe? it doesn't yet have a proper poster), for there to be a solo shot of the chair available for me to show you. But trust me, it's fairly ordinary. There's some grace to the looping of its wooden armrests, part of an entire wooden structure to comprises the entirety of the chair. But really, it's just a chair.

And yet any number of people in this film -- first Lewis' character, then the man (Mamoudou Athie) who is gifted the chair as a breakup present from his ex -- are absolutely besotted with it, losing all composure when matters of the chair come up. Affected to a far lesser extent by this are Lewis' two besties, who verge on frenemies, played by Robin Tunney and Samantha Mathis. (Side note: I dated Samantha Mathis' half sister nearly 25 years ago.) 

Even if Deerskin did not exist, Dupieux would make a solid comparison for what writer-director Amanda Kramer is doing here. The undercurrent of absurdity prompts bouts of surprised giggling with some frequency. For a while, I thought I might like By Design as much as my favorite Dupieux movies. (Rubber has the edge there over Deerskin.) Particularly funny are the scenes where other characters interact with Lewis -- motionless while inhabited by the soul of the chair -- as though she were actually present and not completely comatose. There's some light commentary in there about solipsism, our indifference to noticing whether others are present or not as we are so obsessed with our own personal concerns. You know, the kind of thing Weekend at Bernie's once poked fun at. Lewis' ability to stay as still as she does, with only a slightly rising and falling of her chest to show that she's breathing, is pretty impressive.

Where the movie lost me a little was in these discordant digressions -- I suppose you could say all digressions are discordant -- about side characters whose presence within the story didn't exactly make sense to me. Clifton Collins Jr. plays this stalker who is introduced fairly late in the story, and he gets this three- or four-minute soliloquy that isn't funny and that doesn't seem to have any place here, especially since it's primarily sad and not funny. That happened one too many times for me to give By Design a full-throated endorsement.

But it's definitely a thumbs up overall, and I really like the way it speaks to other films in my MIFF history -- even if they both happened on the same night six years ago.

MIFF: Hearing impaired, bowel impaired

Something happened to me during the first few minutes of the first film of this year's Melbourne International Film Festival that hasn't happened to me in 24 years:

I had to leave the movie to go take a shit.

Sorry, I should have better prepared you for that, but you likely had some idea from the title of this post where I was about to go.

That's right, it was 2001 the last time I can remember having to do this -- which is also the only time I can remember having to do this. Considering that my stats show I've seen 1784 movies in the theater, that's crazy.

It likely would have been late October/early November, since that lines up with the release date of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. A friend of mine and I went to see it after a Mexican lunch, though I can't remember if the specific food I ate had anything to do with it. Anyway, I joke that the reason I didn't understand Mulholland Drive was due to this unscheduled pit stop. As if any missed five-minute portion of that movie could unlock the whole movie.

The next time I got the uncontrollable urge to defecate while watching a movie, it was last night, in a movie called, humorously enough, Sex. 

It's funny enough alone to call a movie Sex, then funnier still that this is the movie that stimulated my bowels beyond my ability to delay. Oh I tried to delay for a while, maybe as long as five minutes, but this was at the very beginning of the movie, and I knew it was a losing battle. 

Sex is a Norwegian film written and directed by Dag Johan Haugerud, and it's the first of a trio of generically named films on similar themes, all of which have already been released. The other two are called Dreams and Love, and I'd really like to see them. (They're both also playing at this year's festival, but it wasn't something I had any idea I'd want to prioritize.)

But for a time, I thought my unexpected departure from Sex, about ten minutes into its running time, might be a fatal blow to seeing any of them, including the one I was currently seeing. 

I was standing in the wrong line at Cinema Kino, waiting for another session, apparently, that was starting later than my 6:15 session of Sex. I'd chosen that line only because I'd seen the woman ahead of me holding a MIFF brochure, but of course this cinema is doing double or triple duty on MIFF films, in addition to its usual slate, so it would have behoved me to actually check.

My session had already been let in, but all this really meant was that the pickings were slim for seats by the time I entered the theater. And I did still want to use the bathroom -- just #1 at this point -- before the movie started, so I had to carefully pick through all the other legs in my row, nearly falling into the row in front of me, to deposit my bag and jacket, then return from whence I came to use the bathroom before finally returning again.

And then, about ten minutes later, pick back through those same legs again. 

See I started to feel a little sweaty, started cramping in my gut in that way we're all familiar with. It means The Time Is Nigh.

"But wait," I thought. "This never happens to me. Maybe I can suppress it."

Fat chance.

I've often considered how cooperative the human body is when it comes to matters of holding it. One of the first times I noticed this happening was when I went away for the weekend for the first time with my new girlfriend, now my wife, in 2005. Literally ten seconds after I'd dropped her off at her house at the end of the weekend, my body said "Okay, you gotta get to a gas station pronto." Before that exact moment, I didn't even know I had to go.

My body knows movies are important enough to me that it also squelches the need to go in that situation -- at least I assume it must be doing this, since it's been nearly a quarter century since it's happened, and I'm certainly not consciously planning any method of avoiding it. But there are certain biological imperatives where mind over matter just doesn't work, and one of those is food poisoning.

Now, I don't know if I actually had food poisoning last night. I really hope not, as the Indian place I ate beforehand is one of my favorites, and very rarely visited, and it was especially yummy last night. But the symptoms were unmistakeable, starting with the sweating. And the main reason I thought the movie could be ruined is that if this was food poisoning, it was not going to end after a single session in the bathroom.

But there were twin social considerations here as well:

1) I had already pushed past these people's legs three times. I already got a mild sense that they thought it was inefficient of me to drop my bag and then go to the toilet, rather than taking care of that before I selected my seat.

2) I didn't want them to think I was a homophobe.

I'll have to explain that last one, which will get us into what Sex is about.

The film features two men who work inspecting chimneys to make sure they're up to to code. That leads to a lot of time atop roofs, which is what you're seeing in that poster. They are both -- as far as they know -- happily married. 

In their first conversation, in a film that is filled with stimulating conversations, the first thinks he's confessing something shocking when he reveals he's been having dreams where David Bowie is there, and Bowie looks at him with this beatific pure love, as he'd never been looked at before. In fact, it felt as though Bowie was looking at him as he would look at a woman.

Not to be outdone, the second confesses to the first that he just had sex with a man the day before, on a lark, for reasons he cannot figure out, when the opportunity presented itself.

It was just after the second confession that I could no longer deny what was happening inside my person.

But if I left right now, would the people I had pushed through, and almost tripped over, three different times, think that I was so offended by the subject matter that I had to leave?

If you can believe it, as I was eating two antacids and calculating the likelihood that I could succeed in a battle to delay the inevitable for another hour and 45 minutes, this was a real consideration for me.

Never mind the fact that I'd be leaving my backpack and jacket, meaning I was not storming out. (The other option, I suppose, was that I was so aroused by the subject matter that I was leaving to do a different thing. But that did not worry me as much.)

Anyway, I'm glad to say that it took only a single five-minute session in the toilet to pass whatever was ailing me, and I watched the rest of the movie in total biological comfort. And because I'd been there when the movie's key plot points were both introduced, and because this is a movie reliant on lots of long and interesting conversations, it was easy to pick back up with the story without having missed anything truly important. 

The movie reminded me of other Scandinavian movies I've seen, maybe most specifically Force Majeure, as both movies are essentially structured around one long conversation about an event that occurred. There's also maybe a bit of The Worst Person in the World and even my beloved Toni Erdmann, though I know Erdmann is not technically Scandinavian. 

And it struck me just how absorbing a movie can be when its plot is basically limited to the fallout from two different events that occur off-screen -- the other guy doesn't have an event as such, but seems to be questioning his gender identity -- and are comprised of just one conversation between a couple people after another. The movie is funny and poignant and kept me interested throughout.

The same cannot be said for Good Boy, a horror movie directed by Ben Leonberg, which has a delightful premise, but which I found very boring -- even though it's barely 70 minutes long.

Good Boy has a logline that immediately encapsulates what should be great about it: "A horror movie from the perspective of a dog." I don't even know if that's a proper logline, but it communicates what should be a unique approach to filmmaking and possibly a real hoot.

The thing is, Good Boy is not funny -- despite your expectations, it's not trying to be -- and it turns out, there's a reason horror movies are not made with dogs as their main characters.

But first, the thing I'm talking about in the subject of this post. 

After a pinot noir at the pop-up wine bar hosted by Penfolds, I reported to cinema 1 at ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) for my second movie, which started at 9:45.

And noticed something straight away that was portentous: the opening MIFF ads, which I get to know well during the festival and just saw for the first time at Sex, had closed captioning with them.

Had they had closed captioning in my previous film? I didn't think so. I would have remembered that.

And sure enough, when Good Boy started, the closed captioning continued.

I was vaguely aware that certain MIFF sessions are tailored to hearing impaired individuals, but I had never yet attended one. It was not something I'd thought I had to check, before now. 

And though I'd just watched a movie with text on its screen throughout the run time, it's not the same when the text is mandatory for you to understand the film. And it's quite detrimental when you're watching the sort of film that relies on its mood to scare you, yet is constantly breaking that mood by telling you that ominous music is currently playing. 

I tried to ignore the text. I really did. But you know your eye is constantly drawn down to it. Even though I should know a) I understand the words being spoken on screen, and b) if there are no words being spoken, it's just music or noises that I can hear perfectly well with my own ears, it's still difficult not to check that text with some regularity. (And I checked often enough to notice some sloppy typos, such as when the word "echoes" was written as "echose.")

Do I think this really impacted my enjoyment of the film? 

Not really. I think the film impacted my enjoyment of the film.

I should start, though, by saying the dog is awesome.

The golden retriever in this film may be one of the best dog actors I have ever seen. 

I understand, of course, that a dog cannot really give a performance, so I guess I'm saying that his trainers are amazing in what they are able to coax from him. This dog had a different facial expression for every moment. The amount of time he spent looking concerned in slightly different ways ... well I just hope they didn't have to really torment this poor dog, though I suppose there had to be some of that. You can't tell a dog to act stressed, so you actually have to stress him out, and let's just hope you do it responsibly.

But seriously. If this movie had relied only on the performance of the dog, it might have been great.

But the human actors -- whose faces you never see clearly -- are not good, and their dialogue is quite poor. Plus, this thing drags, big time. 

As soon as you realize this movie is not a joke -- or if so, a very subtle joke with almost nothing constructed as traditional humor -- it becomes a waiting game for you to start to be scared.

And you wait. And you wait. And you wait. 

I'm sorry, but as much as dogs are awesome, it must just not be possible to feel a large amount of fear for what's about to befall a dog. Maybe we can't relate to it enough, since feeling scared in a horror movie relies on a certain amount of empathy with the characters. Plus the fact that you know the dog is going to survive the movie, because of course he is. 

Because of the gimmick and because it is very difficult to have a dog carry a whole movie -- especially if it's not a talking dog -- the director feels he must move things along relatively slowly, just to get to something approaching feature length. (Maybe this should have been a short film.) But each scene meant to build tension just doesn't do it. Even with some okay horror imagery, we just don't get there, and I think it is actually a disappointment on our expectations to make a movie with this premise, and make it with a straight face. You are promising a horror comedy, and you are not delivering.

I'll be seeing a single MIFF movie on Sunday night, where I will be sure to eat a sensible meal beforehand. 

Gone MIFFing

That's a dozen MIFFs for me.

The Melbourne International Film Festival has existed in many forms for me over the years. There was the tentative first year in 2014, when I saw only four films. There was the late-teens peak when I saw as many as 13. There were the COVID years, when MIFF existed purely in streaming form. And there was the year in 2022 when I was out of the country for the entirety of the theatrical screenings, but got back in time for the streaming portion.

This year, I'm going out of the country again, but not until the last weekend. So the defining trait of this year's may be that I'm seeing all of my film's within the first week of the festival, jamming in seven films in seven days on four nights, spaced out a night apart from each other, beginning tonight.

In theory, I could keep seeing films right up until the night before we leave on August 22nd. But my wife would not like that.

That's no shade on her. We are going to Europe for six weeks, and the last week before we leave is a sacred time during which we must do nothing but fret about the enormity of the undertaking ahead of us.

Okay that sounds like I am throwing her under the bus again. But I get it. If I'm out on the town in the days leading up to our departure, she will inevitably have to do tasks herself that I should be helping with. 

As it turns out it doesn't matter, as there isn't all that much I want to see in this year's festival anyway, and nothing that I'm not able to see because of the time it's playing.

It's been a pattern with MIFF, or maybe just with me. Am I less in-the-know about new films coming out? Maybe a little. I'm less of a movie forward thinker than I used to be. 

But you've probably heard me wax nostalgic specifically about the year 2016, when two directors I loved (Asghar Farhadi and Cristian Mungiu) had new films playing, and I saw my favorite film of the year in Toni Erdmann. Perhaps especially important in my nostalgia is that these were all foreign language films, and in recent years, the "international" portion of the Melbourne International Film Festival has fallen off a bit, simply because I'm either not seeing these names to the same extent, or I'm seeing names but they don't mean anything to me.

I think there was a sweet spot in our larger cinematic landscape, about a decade ago, when foreign directors achieved a visibility such that we knew their names, and their films were also distributed with a prominence that made them a big part of the general discussion among cinephiles.

I'm just not seeing that to the same extent. I pride myself on the fact that I have periodically named a foreign language film my #1 of the year -- only five times overall, but still -- but it's now been since 2019, and I fret about the likelihood of it happening again any time soon, due to a combination of the relative paucity of these name directors and the likelihood of getting their films within the necessary year to rank them.

It's not my biggest gap without a foreign language film as my #1. There were 12 years between naming Run Lola Run my #1 of 1999 (despite a 1998 German release) and naming A Separation my #1 of 2011. In fact, coincidentally, you could pack my entire MIFF career, consisting of more than a hundred films (see this post), into that gap. 

But A Separation kicked off a period of prosperity with #1 foreign language films, as it happened again in 2013, in 2016 and in 2019. This also coincides with my time in Australia and my time going to MIFF, and MIFF once demonstrably contributed in that I wouldn't have seen Toni Erdmann in time if not for the festival. (MIFF gave me another #1, First Reformed, in 2018, but they only speak English in that one.)

I'm getting a little off track of the original point of the post.

Which is: Tonight it all starts, and I'm seeing seven films that are all slightly above shrug-worthy in my anticipation for seeing them. It is what it is.

However, I will say that three of them are foreign language films, if I remember correctly, starting with the first one tonight. I don't see a future #1 in any of them, but you never know.

I mean, that's why you watch the movies, right? 

Closing out MIFF from the balcony

It was possible I was going to see two movies on the final night of MIFF. One of them was going to start at 11:45.

After a day of drinking, I realized that was ridiculous.

"A day of drinking" is a little misleading and makes me sound like someone 30 years younger than I am. (Or possibly an alcoholic.) College students engage in "a day of drinking."

But it's true that I had three beers while watching my friend play baseball on a beautiful afternoon. I used to play with him a few years ago, and his new team had made what they call "finals" here -- otherwise known as "the playoffs." A win would put them in the "grand final" (which we know of as "the finals"). Left to my own devices, I would have had only two beers, but my other friend who was watching with me convinced me to have one more after the game ended, as it was our first chance to catch up with the guy who had been playing. This was okay because I Ubered to the game in both directions (my wife needed the car), but also left me a little wobbly even from the mid-afternoon. 

I had only about 45 minutes at home before leaving again for an evening that would culminate in actress Noemie Merlant's second directorial feature, The Balconettes. The movie didn't start until 9:15, but my wife and I had to catch the five o'clock train into the city in order to make a six o'clock dinner reservation. 

The dinner was at a fancy restaurant called Supernormal, and it was fancy enough that the more ideal reservation times -- particularly if you are trying to match it up with a 9:15 movie -- were all taken. It ended up working out, though, because this was what was called "The Ultimate Supernormal Experience for 2 guests - Our premium banquet menu, guided beverage with our Sommelier, and the Supernormal cook book." So it took almost two hours to complete.

Why were we doing this particular dinner on this particular night, other than having a date night?

Well this was a present from my oldest friend for my 50th birthday last year. My wife and I were actually going to use it earlier this year, but had to cancel. There's a small part of my brain devoted to worrying over the potential expiration of an unused gift card, and though this one wasn't going to expire until 2026, that part of the brain receives a measure of relief when the gift card finally gets used. 

I won't linger on the dinner except to say that the food was amazing and there was a lot of it. And the guided beverage included four more drinks, bringing my daily total up to seven.

At the time we left the house, I had not technically ruled out the idea of going to see my final MIFF film at 11:45 p.m., after The Balconettes ended, while my wife went home to relieve the babysitter (my sister-in-law). But the first of these four additional beverages ruled out the possibility that I would have the stamina for a midnight movie, meaning Vulcanizadora -- the latest from Buzzard director Joel Potrykus -- will remain a tantalizing mystery to me for now.

In truth, I didn't even have what it took to make it through The Balconettes.

Because there was still some time to kill between the end of dinner and the beginning of the movie, we went for yet another drink -- which would be eight for me over a period of eight hours. That's not totally unmanageable -- I wasn't sloppy or anything -- but you can imagine exhaustion was setting in by now. When you also factor in my son's soccer practice in the morning, I had spent a total of about three waking hours in my house that day, the rest of the time being out and about. 

It didn't help, of course, that the film was in French.

Finally seeing a foreign film in MIFF 2024 was a much desired outcome. Not a single MIFF has ever gone by without me seeing a movie entirely in a foreign language, but this one had the chance. See, there was about five minutes when we thought we might have to cancel both the dinner and the movie on Saturday night because my wife had a friend visiting from abroad and this might be her only chance to see her. That ended up getting otherwise resolved, meaning that the tickets we'd gotten for The Balconettes would give us one movie in French. (Give me one movie, I should say. My wife has seen two movies in Chinese, one in Turkish, and I don't remember what all else.)

Whether that was a good thing or not, I was now questioning.

Despite getting the largest Pepsi you've ever seen at Hoyts Melbourne Central -- like, I don't know if they could even make it larger in the U.S. -- I spent a total of at least five to ten minutes of The Balconettes fully asleep. The rest of it felt like it took an eternity to get through, and I still had more than half my Pepsi left when it was over.

Because I was not at my best, it's hard to trust my own assessment of The Balconettes. It is, however, a lot easier to trust my wife's assessment. She had had half as many drinks as I had -- one fewer at dinner, and none at the baseball game, since she wasn't there. And she didn't much care for it either.

If you don't know the name Noemie Merlant, you probably know the face. She was the co-star of Celine Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire, my #2 movie of 2019 and #25 movie of the whole decade. And she accounted for my second straight MIFF movie directed by a French woman known primarily as an actress, after Ariane Labed's September Says on Wednesday night.

I think this movie has good aspirations and intentions. Described in the program as sort of a #metoo revenge fantasy, the story involves three women who spend a lot of time on their balconies -- the title in French is Les Femmes Au Balcon, which I believe translates to The Women of the Balcony -- during an awful heat wave in Marseilles. Merlant plays one of the women. At least one of them is an exhibitionist, as the actress Souheila Yacoub almost always has her breasts out -- which is nothing compared to the nudity Merlant herself gives us. So yes, if you have prurient interests, you might want to see this movie.

But then, you might also be one of its targets. There are a number of men behaving awfully in this movie -- at least three, though I may have slept through another one or two -- and the movie involves the revenge, intentional or otherwise, that these women get against these men. It isn't spoiling anything to tell you that people die, and the plot revolves around what to do with bodies and the like.

There's a bit of an awkward line being walked here though. On the one hand, there is a serious message about the casual malevolence and sexual violence men perpetrate on women. On the other, this is a madcap farce at times, and "loud" in the way I find a lot of French comedy to be loud. The combination doesn't really work, and the volume these characters are turned up to did not make me laugh.

Also, I quibbled with a lot of choices about how Merlant shoots this. I didn't like the quality of the images, but more than that, Merlant is guilty of holding her camera way too close the faces of her subjects, in a way I found almost grotesque. If it was the men, that might be the point. But it's the women, and I felt that it made it harder for me to sympathize with them, this shoving of the camera in their faces.

The film is very French, in that it is constantly confronting us with everybody's sexuality and wearing that as a badge of honor. I felt this was showy for the sake of being showy, and it wore thin on me very quickly.

But also, I was really, really tired.

I wouldn't have traded seeing my friend play baseball and having a lovely dinner with my wife -- and the drinking that went along with both -- for potentially liking my final MIFF film of 2024 a little better, and I'm not sure that would have been the outcome anyway.

So this brings another MIFF to a close.

I'm tempted to do a little recap, but it was only seven films I saw this year, and I did just do a recap of the 100 films I've seen over 11 years in my last MIFF post. So I might be a bit capped out.

I do want to acknowledge, though, that MIFF constitutes the time on the calendar each year when my attentions fully turn to current-year films, which will probably make up a good three quarters of my viewing from here until mid-January. And at least one film I saw at this year's festival -- Grand Theft Hamlet -- has already started to help shape the conversation around the top ten I'll be revealing five months from now. 

My 100th MIFF movie, plus my top and bottom five

This is one of those times that keeping lists really comes in handy.

A while back -- though not from the start -- I began keeping a list of all the movies I've seen at the Melbourne International Film Festival, which includes the date and the venue. Once I started, it was easy to go back and fill in the ones I'd missed, thanks to other lists I keep. No star ratings, though I could probably go back and retroactively add them if I wanted, since they're all logged in Letterboxd.

And this was useful, because in my 11th MIFF, I have now hit triple digits.

My 100th MIFF movie was Ariane Labed's September Says, another scheduling-related convenience on Tuesday night -- and originally, a hoped for first 2024 MIFF film entirely in a language other than English. Of course, even though it is directed by a French actress who you'd know from such films as Assassin's Creed and Flux Gourmet, it's an English language film.

I didn't plan it this way, but my 100th film was at the Forum -- the same location as my first film back on August 2, 2014. That was White God, a film that left me a little flummoxed -- just like September Says left me a little flummoxed. (Not confused about what happened, but confused about what I assume is a fair amount of praise for the film.)

The Forum is a symbolic venue for my 100th film for other reasons. Although it is not my favorite MIFF venue -- that's the Capitol -- it is, in a way, the most iconic MIFF venue. If I were a better architecture student, I could tell you more about its design, but with my limited language, suffice it to say that it is an old theater that has some gothic stylings. The prior theater space has been subdivided into two spaces, but curiously, it's the upstairs portion of the previous audience that is the theater now, where the downstairs part hosts gala events, and has previously served as a festival hub where you can get cocktails and light food items. It's not doing that this year as this function has shifted to a bar at Federation Square, but I have lots of memories of coming here for a drink, sometimes meeting a friend.

To give you an idea of its grandeur, allow me to attach a couple photos.

No, Naomi Watts was not in my movie. (September Says does resemble a movie Watts appeared in, though I won't tell you which one because that would contain spoilers for September Says.) This was from the ads beforehand. I suspect you would know I would not have my phone out during the movie proper.

So before I get to reflecting on a hundred movies at MIFF, first a bit on #100.

September Says was actually my second movie of Wednesday night, though the first was not a MIFF movie. Just a week after saying I never had watched the bonus movie first and the MIFF movie second -- never to my recollection, in any case -- I did it again, catching a 6:15 show of Alien: Romulus before the 9:45 September Says. Quick thoughts on Alien: Really enjoyed, a few nitpicky plot reservations, and a couple standout scenes that felt really new within the context of a series that now consists of seven films.

After killing more than an hour between the two movies, I reported to the surprisingly sparsely attended September Says. It was so sparsely attended, in fact, that on approach I wasn't sure if I had the venue right. (The Forum also currently has scaffolding out front, contributing to its sense of desolation.) But no, it was the right place, and even though the available seating was less than a third full, we were given allocated (a.k.a. assigned) seats. That may have been the first time I've ever had that at MIFF. I could have of course moved from my assigning seating, but it turned out to be fine, quite central though farther back than I would have chosen. The way they have had to use this preexisting space, all the seats are quite far back from the screen. 

The film focuses on a pair of teenage sisters, July (Mia Tharia) and September (Pascale Kann), with the third significant character being their mother (Rakhree Thakrar). The sisters are close enough in age that they were dressed in matching outfits and photographed by their artist mother when they were younger. However, they have subsequently become outcasts and are dealing with the bullying of fellow high school students in the film's rural Ireland setting. (One of the bullies is a girl in a wheelchair, which I thought was an interesting way to expand our ideas of which types can/should play which roles.)

In their personal relationship, September is domineering yet fiercely protective. She often gets her sister to do outrageous things (the title is a variation on Simon Says), but perhaps more problematically, gets her to promise to do other things as a means of proving her devotion. It's devotion July gladly gives to her, but agreeing to kill herself if her sister dies is, um, not healthy. 

This film has some interesting moments and explorations of its central themes, but there are long slow patches between these moments, and then some tangents -- such as a one-night stand for the mother in which we randomly hear the mother's voiceover -- that didn't work for the thrust of the film at all. I was trending toward a marginal thumbs down but eventually ended up with a marginal thumbs up, committing a three-star rating to Letterboxd. 

Okay, so, 100 MIFF movies. Since I have it, I thought I would include the total list for you to either peruse carefully, or zip right through, barely glancing at a title. 

1. White God – August 2, 2014 – The Forum 
2. Black Coal, Thin Ice – August 8, 2014 – Hoyts Melbourne Central
3. Night Moves – August 11, 2014 – Capitol Theatre
4. Why Don’t You Play in Hell? – August 12, 2014 – Capitol Theatre
5. The Skeleton Twins – August 16, 2014 – Capitol Theatre
6. The Lobster – July 31, 2015 – The Forum
7. One Floor Below – August 7, 2015 – Cinema Kino
8. The End of the Tour – August 11, 2015 – Comedy Theatre
9. The Witch – August 14, 2015 – The Forum
10. The Salesman – July 30, 2016 – Comedy Theatre
11. Certain Women – July 31, 2016 – Comedy Theatre
12. Toni Erdmann – August 3, 2016 – The Forum
13. I, Olga Hepnarova – August 3, 2016 – ACMI
14. After the Storm – August 5, 2016 – The Forum
15. The Lure – August 5, 2016 – Hoyts Melbourne Central
16. Christine – August 6, 2016 – Hoyts Melbourne Central
17. Baskin – August 7, 2016 – ACMI
18. Seoul Station – August 9, 2016 – Cinema Kino
19. Paterson – August 10, 2016 – Comedy Theatre
20. Graduation – August 10, 2016 – The Forum
21. Ingrid Goes West – August 6, 2017 – Comedy Theatre
22. The Ornithologist – August 8, 2017 – ACMI
23. Fantastic Planet – August 10, 2017 – Comedy Theatre
24. My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea – August 10, 2017 – Cinema Kino
25. Let the Sunshine In – August 12, 2017 – Comedy Theatre
26. The Killing of a Sacred Deer – August 12, 2017 – Comedy Theatre
27. Golden Exits – August 16, 2017 – The Forum
28. The Square – August 17, 2017 – Comedy Theatre
29. The Lovers – August 19, 2017 – The Forum
30. Strange Days – August 19, 2017 – ACMI
31. Mandy – August 3, 2018 – Hoyts Melbourne Central
32. The Night Eats the World – August 4, 2018 – ACMI
33. Wildlife – August 4, 2018 – ACMI
34. Climax – August 4, 2018 – Comedy Theatre
35. Euthanizer – August 8, 2018 – Cinema Kino
36. Shoplifters – August 10, 2018 – Comedy Theatre
37. People’s Republic of Desire – August 10, 2018 – Cinema Kino
38. Cold War – August 12, 2018 – Comedy Theatre
39. Everybody Knows – August 14, 2018 – Comedy Theatre
40. Profile – August 14, 2018 – ACMI
41. Chris the Swiss – August 15, 2018 – The Forum
42. First Reformed – August 15, 2018 – The Forum
43. The Australian Dream – August 1, 2019 – The Plenary @ Melbourne Exhibition Centre
44. In Fabric – August 3, 2019 – The Plenary @ Melbourne Exhibition Centre
45. Deerskin – August 3, 2019 – Capitol Theatre
46. Vivarium – August 4, 2019 – Hoyts Melbourne Central
47. Matthias et Maxime – August 4, 2019 – The Plenary @ Melbourne Exhibition Centre
48. The Day Shall Come – August 6, 2019 – Capitol Theatre
49. Brittany Runs a Marathon – August 7, 2019 – Hoyts Melbourne Central
50. Berberian Sound Studio – August 7, 2019 – Hoyts Melbourne Central
51. A Family – August 8, 2019 – Hoyts Melbourne Central
52. Baby – August 10, 2019 – Hoyts Melbourne Central
53. Extra Ordinary – August 10, 2019 – Hoyts Melbourne Central
54. I Lost My Body – August 15, 2019 – Sofitel Theatre on Collins
55. The Lodge – August 15, 2019 – The Forum
56. First Cow – August 6, 2020 – Our living room
57. Marona’s Fantastic Tale – August 8, 2020 – Our living room
58. Kala Azar – August 9, 2020 – Our bedroom
59. Shiva Baby – August 12, 2020 – Our garage
60. Black Bear – August 12, 2020 – Our living room
61. The Killing of Two Lovers – August 15, 2020 – Our bedroom
62. Wendy – August 15, 2020 – Our living room
63. Prayer for a Lost Mitten – August 16, 2020 – Our bedroom
64. Just 6.5 – August 18, 2020 – Our living room
65. La Llorona – August 20, 2020 – Our living room
66. Freshman Year – August 8, 2021 – Our living room
67. Ballad of a White Cow – August 10, 2021 – Our bedroom
68. All Light, Everywhere – August 12, 2021 – Our living room
69. Zola – August 13, 2021 – Our living room
70. La Veronica – August 14, 2021 – Our living room
71. The Nowhere Inn – August 15, 2021 – Our living room
72. We Are the Thousand – August 17, 2021 – Our living room
73. Ninjababy – August 17, 2021 – Our living room
74. Night of the Kings – August 18, 2021 – Our living room
75. Riders of Justice – August 19, 2021 – Our living room
76. The Night – August 20, 2021 – Our living room
77. Language Lessons – August 21, 2021 – Our living room
78. Hit the Road – August 21, 2022 – Our living room
79. Plan 75 – August 24, 2022 – Our living room
80. My Sunny Maad – August 25, 2022 – Our living room
81. The Integrity of Joseph Chambers – August 26, 2022 – Our living room
82. Neptune Frost – August 27, 2022 – Our living room
83. Past Lives – August 5, 2023 – Comedy Theatre
84. The Bird With the Crystal Plumage – August 5, 2023 – Cinema Kino
85. It Lives Inside – August 6, 2023 – ACMI
86. Anselm – August 11, 2023 – Hoyts
87. Shut Eye – August 11, 2023 – Cinema Kino
88. Bad Behaviour – August 16, 2023 – Comedy Theatre
89. Banel & Adama – August 18, 2023 – Capitol Theatre
90. Monster – August 19, 2023 – Hoyts
91. Art Talent Show – August 21, 2023 – Our living room
92. The Face of the Jellyfish – August 22, 2023 – Our living room
93. Sorcery – August 24, 2023 – Our living room
94. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman – August 27, 2023 – Our living room/our garage
95. La Cocina – August 9, 2024 – Capitol Theatre
96. I Saw the TV Glow – August 9, 2024 – IMAX Melbourne
97. My Old Ass – August 10, 2024 – Hoyts Melbourne Central
98. Grand Theft Hamlet – August 10, 2024 – Capitol Theatre
99. Matt and Mara – August 13, 2024 – Cinema Kino
100. September Says – August 21, 2024 – The Forum

You'll note that the venue for the films where MIFF was streaming, or at least had a streaming portion, are listed as the room in my house where I watched them.

You'll also note that some of the films are films that were not released in the year I saw them, and some of them are actually repeat viewings for me. So the hundred viewings does not include all new or new-to-me viewings. I've excluded these films from the top and bottom five I'll be including in just a moment.

A few stats about these viewings:

Venue I've seen the most films: The Comedy Theatre (15). The funny thing about this is that the Comedy Theatre has not actually been a venue in operation for a number of these years, including this year. It regularly has a stage production playing, and I think they've decided it is just too disruptive to try to factor MIFF viewings into the stage schedule -- to say nothing of a lot less financially rewarding. It also has legendarily uncomfortable seats, which did not prevent a large number of movies I wanted to see from playing there. I guess technically I saw more than 15 films at my previous house in North Melbourne, but I hardly think that counts.

Year I saw the most films: 2018 and 2021 (12). Twenty sixteen was the year I expanded my MIFF viewings from three or four each year to as many as I could reasonably see, and I saw double digits in each of those first three years, capped off with the most in 2018. However, given that streaming from home can be done virtually any night, even if it isn't quite the same experience, I did get up to 12 again in 2021. 

Year I saw the least films: 2015 (4). In part because I had a friend visiting that year, though he did attend one screening (The Witch) with me. 

Films seen in a public venue with other people: 69

Films seen at home: 31

Now on to my top and bottom five.

I struggled with whether to make this a top five of all films, or just films that I was not likely to see unless I'd picked them up at MIFF. However, I decided that for this landmark, hidden gems was not really what I was going for -- and then I decided maybe I'd just include five hidden gems as well.

I also decided not to rank them from best to fifth best, or worst to fifth worst. I'll just list the five best and five worst in alphabetical order. And because I've been consistent about writing about them, I might as well link to when they were discussed on The Audient. 

Top five:

Climax (2018, Gaspar Noe) - A film subdivided into a joyous celebration of dance and a Boschian nightmare. I've seen it twice more in the six years since then. Audient link here. 

First Reformed (2018, Paul Schraeder) - The first (alphabetically in this list, not chronologically) of two MIFF films that have gone on to be my #1 of the year -- so far. Audient link here. 

The Killing of Two Lovers (2020, Robert Machoian) - This could have easily fallen into the aforementioned hidden gems category, but I have such fond memories of it had that I had to include it in the regular top five. Only one of the top five I saw on streaming. Audient link here. 

Toni Erdmann (2016, Maren Ade) - The first time at MIFF my mind was truly blown, and also the hardest I have ever heard any audience laugh at a movie (nude brunch). The other MIFF movie that was my #1 for its year. Audient link here. 

Vivarium (2019, Lorcan Finnegan) - I have also watched this twice more since seeing it and it's been out for three fewer years than Climax. Chef's kiss for head trip movies with an undercurrent of social satire. Audient link here. 

Honorable mentions: Ingrid Goes West, Shoplifters, The Skeleton Twins

Now, the five that I really did not like:

Bad Behaviour (2023, Alice Englert) - It's the right adjective for this misanthropic story of a former child star behaving badly at a wellness retreat. Audient link here. 

La Cocina (2024, Alonso Ruizpalacios) - Yes, one of the five most irritated I've been at MIFF came just a couple weeks ago with this pretentious black-and-white movie about kitchen workers in a Times Square restaurant. Audient link here. 

Shithouse (2020, Cooper Raiff) - You'll see this listed as Freshman Year in the list above, because that's how it was released in Australia, but most people know it is as Shithouse, and it is. Audient link here. 

Shut Eye (2023, Tom Levesque) - If I had ranked these movies, this would have been the least bad in the bottom five, and there were about four other candidates that could have taken its place. This New Zealand movie about a woman who becomes obsessed with an AMSR star just wasn't well made, nor did it deliver on examining that distinct world. Audient link here. 

Wildlife (2018, Paul Dano) - I have no idea how this movie was selected as the opening night film that year, because it somehow manages to be both overwrought and inert at the same time. Just a misfire. Audient link here. 

Dishonorable mentions: Baskin, The Lodge, Wendy

And now five hidden gems. These are all movies I hadn't heard of before I saw them in the program, nor was I familiar with the talent involved. Some of them may have gone on to acclaim, but they were hidden from me at the time I selected them for viewing: 

Grand Theft Hamlet (2024, Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls) - I loved the concept of Shakespeare performed within the world of Grand Theft Auto, but until I saw it I couldn't have guessed that it would be profound in addition to funny. (I have since learned it won a big award at SXSW, but that doesn't mean I'd ever heard of it.) Audient link here.

I Lost My Body (2019, Jeremy Clapin) - Another one that became acclaimed, but after MIFF, as this went on to be nominated for an Oscar. But at the time I picked it, it was just an animated French movie about a disembodied hand trying to find its owner again.  Audient link here.

La Llorona (2019, Jayro Bustamante) - There was a bad Hollywood movie about La Llorona. This was not it. Blew me away with its filmmaking. Audient link here.

The Lure (2016, Agnieszka Smoczynska) - Who knew the Poles could make a movie about murderous mermaids in the 1980s? I certainly didn't when I picked this. Audient link here.

La Veronica (2021, Leonardo Madel) - In perhaps the most formally intriguing film I've ever seen at MIFF (or almost anywhere else), a soccer wife and social media star is at the center of every single frame of the film, with only her background changing. A real deep dive into navel gazing and encroaching personality dissolution. Audient link here.

Honorable mentions: The Face of the Jellyfish, Seoul Station, Shiva Baby 

Okay, that's enough of that.

But it's not quite enough of MIFF 2024. I will finish with at least one more film, but probably two more films, on Saturday. 

MIFF: "Bonus" movie first, MIFF movie second

But I'll put the MIFF poster first because this is, after all, a post about MIFF.

No, It Ends With Us was not playing at the Melbourne International Film Festival, and never in a million years would it.

But I have a tradition, on days when I have only a single MIFF movie on the schedule, of using the evening's second viewing time slot to watch a regular old theatrical release. I'd say it makes the viewing of that theatrical release more memorable, but as I sit here and force myself to think of examples, the only one I can remember was watching the film that involved Hamlet reimagined from the perspective of his love interest, and retrofitted to have her not kill herself, Ophelia. I thought of reviewing my records for other examples, which would be easy enough to do, but resisted the temptation to sidetrack this post.

In all of those instances, it was a MIFF movie I saw in the 6 p.m. time slot and the "bonus" movie in the 9 p.m. time slot. Given the way the festival has been selling out this year, though, the only Tuesday movie I could find that I had some interest in seeing was in the 9 p.m. slot. So I scheduled to see It Ends With Us in the first slot, and then top it off with the MIFF movie.

Why was I even seeing It Ends With Us at all, and in fact, working out my schedule around that viewing rather than the other way around?

Well I'll tell you, though I hope my writer doesn't read this post.

One of my writers at my review site accepted an advanced screening for two -- though I think he went by himself -- to It Ends With Us last Tuesday, or maybe it was Wednesday. He wasn't sure he'd be able to make it due to a conflict, but then he did make it. I had given a moment's thought to replacing him at the screening, but then thought that if neither of us made it, I'd just tell the publicist that we had to cancel at the last moment. "We" being me because it's my name on the tickets, and if another writer goes, they have to pretend they're me. This always works, though I do wonder why they don't notice the disconnect between the name of the person who writes the review and the name of the person who attended the screening. The tickets are supposed to be "strictly non-transferable," after all.

But the fact is, it's my name on it, so it is officially me who attended. Therefore, it is my name that gets dragged through the mud if we don't write a review. Which was this writer's plan, or rather, what ended up happening when he said he couldn't find a good way in to review the movie. He said maybe he would just skip reviewing this one.

Okay, but that's not really how it works. This is a quid pro quo arrangement. I give you something (an advanced movie screening) and you give me something (a review, no matter how terrible it might be). 

I guess something about the subject matter, which is intended for a female audience, made him hesitate to write a terrible review. One factor in that was he didn't actually think the movie was terrible. (I had told him I hoped it was "non-terrible" and he confirmed that it was.) But also he didn't know what to say about it. One of the responsibilities of writing film reviews is that you can find a way to review anything, but this guy only writes me a half-dozen reviews a year and I get that he doesn't have the years of professional experience that has given me this ability.

In any case, because it was me who supposedly attended -- and therefore, because it was me who would not be writing a review -- I had to swoop in and see the movie in order to review it. Which I did. You can find that review here. I actually liked it a lot better than I thought I would. Maybe it was the belly full of yummy Thai dinner. (Incidentally, I don't know if they actually check if you wrote the review, and hold it against you if you don't. But I come from a generation where people pride themselves on fulfilling their obligations, which is something that has fallen away a bit with the younger folk.)

In fact, I might not have been going to MIFF at all on Tuesday if not for the need to see It Ends With Us and get up a review while it was still within a week of the film's release. As you may recall, my mild disappointment with the MIFF schedule this year meant that I only secured tickets for four movies over the first weekend, so I could review some of them before their second screening -- again fulfilling an implied, if not actual, reviewing obligation. I decided to leave my remaining two free tickets, plus any others I might purchase, up to the whims of fate. Which, as mentioned earlier, were not particularly kind, as a lot of movies -- a lot more than I remembered from other years -- are selling out this year.

Which is how I ended up at my fifth of five 2024 MIFF movies whose primary language was English. 

But, if we're thinking purely in terms of countries and their borders, at least it was somewhat international by being filmed and set in Canada.

Matt and Mara was, in truth, more than just a desperation play to make Tuesday night work out. One of the two titular characters is played by Matt Johnson, the actor-director who has appeared in each of the three features he's directed, most recently last year's BlackBerry, which also played MIFF but which I had already seen through U.S. iTunes by the time the festival started. (Which allowed me to review it as part of last year's MIFF preview on my site.) I was also a big fan of The Dirties and Operation Avalanche, though BlackBerry was the true favorite for me, ending up as my #5 film of 2023. Suffice it to say that at this point, I welcome anything Johnson does.

Plus there was the added benefit of Matt and Mara screening in the same venue as It Ends With Us, as Cinema Kino, the theater downstairs from where I used to work, is doing double duty with regular theatrical releases and MIFF films. After some low-level stress over the weekend in getting to and between venues, this was welcome.

Matt and Mara is vaguely in the mumblecore tradition, which is adjacent to Johnson's most familiar mode of faux documentary. Both forms rely heavily on naturalism, and that's probably a big reason why audiences like or don't like them.

Me, I like them. Matt and Mara is the sort of film that used to be plentiful but which doesn't get made as much anymore. It's a short (80-minute) feature that relies on seemingly improvisatory dialogue between Johnson and actress Deragh Campbell, whose name and face both felt familiar, but with whom it turns out I have no experience. 

He's a big success, seemingly playing a version of himself as the character is named Matt Johnson, and is famous for having written a bestselling memoir of sorts (bestselling within the sphere of Canadian literature, at least). She's teaching literature at a Toronto university and has a child and likable musician husband. He's back in Toronto (from where, we don't know) for a couple weeks and pops in on her, hoping to rekindle a friendship that was once characterized by them being inseparable. Obviously something must have happened between them, because at first she finds his arrival jarring, before quickly falling into the old habits. These include walking around the city and having alternately deep and whimsical conversations in cafes.

There is a narrative spine here, as Mara is planning to take a trip to Ithaca in New York for a conference where she'll be a speaker, and at the last minute her husband can't drive her. (Mara apparently does not have a license.) So of course Matt fills in, and complications ensue.

Matt and Mara is brief enough that when it reaches the end, you feel like it stopped short of really saying anything. I guess that's why we rarely see films that are this short, because you can do just that much more in 90 minutes than you can in 80. However, I also felt a pretty high level of fondness for this movie, as these two actors are wonderfully charming presences with whom to spend this time, and their rapport is that of two old friends. I would not be surprised to learn that in real life, Campbell and Johnson are just that.

Incidentally, this makes for the second movie I've seen at MIFF that has a character named Matt, or some derivation of Matt, in the title. In 2019 I saw Matthias et Maxime, directed by Xavier Dolan -- also a Canadian, but from the French-speaking part. 

Okay, as of this writing, I again don't have my next MIFF tickets secured, but the festival goes for another week and I am sure to get out once if not twice more.

MIFF: My old ass ran, and Shakespeare profound

For the second night in a row on Saturday, I trained into the city for MIFF, though this time it wasn't a workday. That might have been a key factor in why I casually took the 5:42 train, for a movie that started at 6:30, when I clearly should have taken the 5:22.

Forty-eight minutes might seem like plenty of time to get there, if you didn't know where "there" was. I take a 7:42 am. train on the mornings I go into work to get there at 8:30, but I'm usually walking in the door right at 8:30 -- or was, before my office moved. Now it's more like 8:37.

And getting to Hoyts Melbourne Central requires as much hoofing, if not more, than getting to my old office. What the hell was I thinking?

So instead of enjoying a casual trip into the city, I anxiously watched the minutes count down and stressed over every perceived delay in service. When we finally arrived at Flinders Street around 6:12, I knew I would probably make it, but I also knew that the next decision was key. Do I take a tram up Elizabeth Street to Melbourne Central, or do I just walk? The former held the promise of a (potentially) faster arrival time, but the latter left the speed I got there within my own control, and the control of the traffic lights.

Well, I chose to ride the tram for those three stops -- and immediately regretted my decision. Because the intersection of Flinders Street and Elizabeth Street is a terminus point for all trams travelling down Elizabeth Street, that also means the tram operator can take an indeterminate amount of time -- up to a schedule or up to his or her own whims? -- before deciding that as many people who intended to board had boarded before leaving. And in this case, that was an interminable three minutes or so. 

When we were only at the second stop by about 6:24, I decided to bail. I got out and raced the tram up Elizabeth Street, now at a full run -- or at least a full jog. 

I did beat the tram there, but only just, or should I say, it was a tie, except I was already on the correct side of the road and didn't have to wait for others disembarking the tram with a lot less deliberation that I would have intended. In short, it was the right decision, but an even better decision would have been to walk the whole way. (But considering that this day already included the steps from the end of my MIFF outing the night before, several thousand of which occurred after midnight, I ended up with more than 19,000 steps for the day, so the short break on the tram was welcome in some respects.)

Scampering around people and up escalators, I actually made it before the MIFF pre-show advertising even began. I guess I was more worried about not scoring a decent seat than actually missing the start of the movie, but that turned out fine as well. 

Oh, the movie was called My Old Ass, hence the subject of this post.

And it was a charmer. The premise is pretty delightful: Aubrey Plaza plays the 39-year-old version of approximately 19-year-old Maisy Stella, an actress I'd never seen before who I found radiant with charisma. Both play Elliott, but we're in the younger one's current time. She's a lesbian -- or so she thinks, more on that in a moment -- who is meant to inherit the Canadian cranberry farm that has been in her family for generations, but would rather leave that to her keen brother and move to the big city (Toronto). She's enjoying a final three weeks of summer before this move with some friends around the lake, and when they take mushrooms one night, she is visited by, or possibly conjures, the version of herself 20 years in the future.

My Old Ass is not meant to be super high concept, as it toys with some of the possible conundrums of whether this is real or not and if so, how learning about things that happen in the future will affect the space-time continuum. Megan Park's movie is more of a coming-of-age story than anything else, and Plaza is not in that much of it -- only three scenes by my count. Which makes sense for an in-demand actress who was likely doing a favor for this small production. (There are actually a couple other recognizable actors, one being Maria Dizzia -- who I often confuse with Elizabeth Reaser -- and one being Maddie Zeigler, apparently still able to get work after her performance in Sia's Music was widely panned because she was playing a character with intellectual disabilities.) 

The movie has a light spirit, a lot of humor and some touching moments, but I have to say there was one thing about it that bothered me. I suppose this qualifies as a mild spoiler, but the central romantic relationship in the movie is not between Elliott and a woman. It turns out she is discovering she might not be gay, or that at least she might be bi. While I suppose that would certainly be some people's journey, I had to wonder if there was something about it that was a step in the wrong direction.

After My Old Ass I got a sort-of disappointing chicken burger from Oporto and made my way back to my favorite MIFF venue, The Capitol, for the second night in a row. This was a much shorter and much more easily travelled distance, and I arrived in plenty of time.

And here was where I had my first major MIFF discovery of 2024, my first of those moments that I've managed to find every year, even when I don't feel like the program is particularly great: The reminder of why I love MIFF to begin with.

I don't know what kind of exposure or release Grand Theft Hamlet is going to get, and in fact, there is a good chance I would never have come across it if not for MIFF. And it has quickly jumped to become among my handful of favorite films so far in 2024. 

In the subject of this post I teased "Shakespeare profound," which may seem like an obvious statement. I mean, it's Shakespeare, so of course it's profound, right? (Or whoever wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare. A discussion for another time.)

But those of us who have lived to a certain age have seen so much Shakespeare that after a while, it might feel more banal than profound.

Enter Grand Theft Hamlet, which places the staging of Shakespeare's most famous? (maybe Romeo & Juliet is more famous) play within the world of one of the most popular and enduring online gaming communities.

I won't go into too much detail here, but rather, link my already-posted review here. But in case you don't want to follow that link, I'll briefly say that two out-of-work British actors (Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen) were playing too much Grand Theft Auto at the beginning of 2021, during Britain's third lockdown, when they got the idea that they could try to put on a performance of Hamlet within the game space, using other interested gamers who happen to have an interest in Shakespeare. (There's a funny moment when they acknowledge that the Venn diagram of online gamers and Shakespeare enthusiasts yields a fairly small result.) Without conventional stages being available, all this world could be their stage.

And in a similar mix of the funny and the poignant to what I experienced at MIFF with my #1 film of 2016, Toni Erdmann, Grand Theft Hamlet knocks this concept out of the park. The game mechanics themselves result in moments that left our audience screaming with laughter, but underlying the obvious humor was the profound undercurrent of sadness and dislocation -- both of the GTA world itself, where people are constantly killing each other, and of the real world at that time, when COVID and racial strife were tearing us apart. And then there is the profound of seeing these famous speeches from Hamlet set against this immaculately designed game space.

But now I'm starting to repeat my review, so I will just leave off there. Simply put: Seek this one out.

MIFF: I saw the IMAX screen glow, and sparkler cake double feature

There were a couple of firsts in my first two MIFF movies of 2024, other than obviously being the first of the year:

1) The first time I had ever gone into the city on a weekday to see MIFF movies, rather than working in the city and then staying for my movies;

2) The first time I had ever seen a MIFF movie on an IMAX screen.

That second isn't so surprising, given that I don't believe MIFF has ever had a partnership, before this year, with the Melbourne Museum, where one of the world's largest IMAX screens is housed. 

And because all my past IMAX experiences have involved $200 million blockbusters, that makes I Saw the TV Glow definitely the lowest budgeted film I've ever seen on an IMAX screen.

Jane Schoenbrun's film was actually the second I watched on Friday, so let's start at the beginning.

Which was that morning, when I toured the campus of a high school where my son might want to transfer. That was the reason I couldn't go into work on Friday, though I'd already worked three days in the office this week while backfilling for my manager, so I can't say I minded. He wouldn't be transferring there until the start of 2026, but I kind of hope he never does as it is really too expensive for us, and I wasn't all that impressed by the facilities. (And I promise that was not just my wallet talking.)

So when the workday did come to a close, blissfully ending two weeks in which I was doing two different jobs, I took the train in to the city in time for my 6 p.m. showing of La Cocina at my favorite MIFF venue, The Capitol. 

The 139-minute black and white film by director Alonzo Ruizpalacios was welcome in at least one regard. In my previous post, I bemoaned the fact that none of the first four films I'd picked for MIFF 2024 was a foreign film. Set in New York City, La Cocina certainly isn't "foreign" in that sense, but I'd say that more than half the dialogue is in Spanish, so that's something at least. 

In most other regards, this movie did not work for me. It reminded me of a mode of independent film we haven't seen much of in the past 20 years, the one that invites the word "pretentious" with a capital P. Not only is there the black and white photography, but there are a lot of off-center shots and dialogue that is ten to 20 percent more poetic than it should be. Plus everybody is smoking in nearly ever scene, though I suppose it's possible this film is set in the past. (It isn't specified, and the production design is timeless enough that you wouldn't know for sure, though it does appear to be at a time where touch-screen point-of-sales might be relatively new technology, since we see characters perplexed by trying to work them.)

It follows a day in the kitchen and front of house of what appears to be a touristy restaurant in Times Square, a bit in an upstairs-downstairs mode, though mostly downstairs. A manager is conducting a series of interviews with staff because more than $800 went missing from the till. It's one of those movies where so much happens in a single day that it beggars belief, from a broken water main that floods the kitchen, to a beef between two workers escalating into violence, to a new starter being shown the ropes, to a particular hothead exhausting all three of the strikes the chef gives him in one day. Its origins as a play are pretty obvious, and somehow in among all this, the characters seem to have more time when they are on a break than anything else.

I had been hopeful about the movie because Rooney Mara is the one recognizable star, but I guess Mara isn't quite the guarantee of quality she once was for me. I guess that's not quite saying it right. This movie is "quality" in the sense that it is made with a high level of technical competence and has good artistic instincts, even if they are the instincts of a slightly different era. The conception and execution are both heavy-handed to the point of rolling the eyeballs, though. Since the action is restricted to the restaurant, La Cocina reminds me a bit of how those who didn't like Birdman must have felt about it.

Incidentally, now that I have seen La Cocina, my 2024 movie list contains both movies called La Cocina and The Kitchen. 

After La Cocina, I picked up some not-very-good Asian fast food and meandered my way over to the Melbourne Museum, a walk of about 20 minutes. I arrived with ten minutes to spare, which I quickly discovered was the wrong tack when you're talking about an IMAX screen.

I sit closer to the screen than your average person, subscribing to the notion that a movie screen should fill as much of your field of vision as possible. Forced to sit in the fourth row, I think it was, of an IMAX screen is taking that a bit to an extreme. So while this was a good sort of movie to be overwhelmed by, I would have preferred to be overwhelmed from about two rows back from where I was.

I had purposely prevented myself from learning too much about I Saw the TV Glow before coming in, even going so far as to avoid its discussion entirely on two of my regular podcasts. So I didn't know it was a Buffy-like TV show the characters were obsessed with. I was expecting something more inherently supernatural in nature like the central conceit of Schoenbrun's We're All Going to the World's Fair. 

Although this is a better movie than that, my core assessment of the film's strengths and weaknesses is very similar. Both movies have some excellent visual moments that chill you to the bone, and the overall mood is hard to beat. And both movies come in at only a percentage as successful as I thought they could have been, in part because both fail to stick the ending -- or even really have much of an ending to speak of.

But rest assured, I do feel quite positively about I Saw the TV Glow. Because of how it fizzles out -- pretty much the entire final 10 to 15 minutes didn't work for me -- I can't give it any higher than a 3.5 out of 5, though interestingly, I've slotted it in higher on my year-end rankings in progress than some films I've given a four. I Saw the TV Glow is better than those films in most ways, though still leaves me fundamentally unsatisfied in a manner that prevents me from going to four stars. A film that is a better version of itself than I Saw the TV Glow might get four stars, and still not be the film that I Saw the TV Glow is.

I did appreciate a lot of the thoughts by Schoenbrun, who I believe considers themselves a trans woman with they/them pronouns, on gender fluidity. Much of the movie operates as a metaphor for feeling trapped inside a body that doesn't feel like yours, and not being understood by anybody so seeking to dream yourself away into the popular culture that becomes more of a family to you than your own. And some of those images -- man, I won't soon forget them. Those strange dancing twins whose hair and chin gives them the appearance of crescent moons, and the moon monster himself, Mr. Melancholy, lasciviously licking the face of one of the characters in one of the film's haunting signature images ... I'll rewatch I Saw the TV Glow for them alone.

I promised you a sparkler cake double feature. And true enough, both of these films contains a scene where somebody carries out a birthday cake with a sparkler on top of it, and all the restaurant workers gather to sing happy birthday to a customer. Doesn't get a lot more specific than that.

As I write this I have already attended my second MIFF double feature on Saturday night, but it's too much to cover in this one post so I'll get to it as soon as I can.