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.