But sometimes you set expectations for your readers, like you are going to regularly update them on your viewings from a film festival, and when it comes time to produce those missives, you just aren't feeling it.
Which is why I've now watched four more MIFF movies that I haven't told you about yet, including a double feature last night.
It's really okay, I know this. You'll read what I choose to write here, or not, depending on how busy you are that day, and whether it seems to be about something you're interested in. Most likely you won't have heard of any of these four movies, so your interest will be academic anyway, or just because you like me.
Still, I think it's worth catching you up on what I've been watching, even if it comes with no cute stories or overarching themes. (There would have been an overarching theme to the post I was going to write on Sunday, but now it's Wednesday.)
Saturday night brought the Chilean film associated with the poster you see above, La Veronica, which was my wife's choice, not mine. So I have her to thank for my favorite of the eight movies I've seen at this year's MIFF so far, if you count Zola on Friday night as a "MIFF movie," which it technically isn't. (The theatrical screening got cancelled so I rented it from U.S. iTunes on the same night we were scheduled to see it.)
It's a movie about a social media influencer and wife of a soccer star who is trying to get enough Instagram followers to become the face of a cosmetics company. She's also being investigated for the death of her infant daughter some ten years earlier. The nifty trick about this one is actress Mariana Di Girolamo is in the center of the frame for every single shot of the entire film, which run back to back with her in different settings, with different people, under different emotional circumstances. It's an incredibly engrossing look at the solipsism of social media but also how a person can be cracking up under that glossy surface, and the central performance is simply astonishing -- especially as it relies on unbroken takes that sometimes run for three or four minutes at a time. You can read my full review here.
Sunday night was The Nowhere Inn, a film that was on my radar due to my love for Portlandia alum Carrie Brownstein. (She's also in Sleater-Kinney but I have no relationship with that band.) In this film, Brownstein, playing a fictionalised version of herself, is trying to make a rock documentary about a fictionalised version of St. Vincent, nee Annie Clark, whose music was also unfamiliar to me. (But I am more likely to check out St. Vincent's music than Sleater-Kinney's.) In this movie as probably also in real life, Brownstein and Clark are best friends -- which is clearly a relationship that's going to be tested when Brownstein finds the footage of the off-stage St. Vincent too boring for a rock documentary. She suggests "enhancements" to Clark's real-world persona to more closely approximate her savage stage persona, and well, things predictably devolve from there.
In fact, the form itself devolves as this goes from a rock mockumentary to something far more existential and experimental. But I'm repeating my review now, so I should probably just point you to that to read for yourself. Anyway, this was another big win for me.
The most recent two are films I have not reviewed yet, and may not, considering that I only plan to write two more reviews at most, and have films to watch tonight, tomorrow night, Friday night and Saturday night. (Though only the next two will be contenders to be reviewed, since I don't post reviews on the weekend.)
Since I am off work today (hence a chance to catch up on my writing), I scheduled two movies for last night. I don't usually watch two movies in a single night anymore -- especially when I'm drinking beers -- but the first being only 80 minutes made it a bit easier. Making it a bit harder, especially with the beers, was that both films were in another language. Before starting to watch, I didn't consciously realize either was.
The first was We are the Thousand, an Italian documentary featuring the Foo Fighters. You may already be familiar with this story from its viral video six years ago, but I was not. An organizer in Cesena, Italy decided to get one thousand musicians together -- singers, drummers, guitarists and bass guitarists -- to orchestrate a simultaneous playing of the Foo Fighter song "Learn to Fly," in order to record a video and use it as a plea to get the band to play in Cesena. The outcome of the seemingly impossible task -- requiring untold amounts of perfect timing and other coordination -- was a thrilling viral video, one that obviously came to Dave Grohl's attention. And because Dave Grohl is a good guy (and savvy enough to avoid negative publicity), he and his fellow Foos did indeed come to play a local concert.
The documentary was pretty enthralling, but what kept me from embracing it quite as much as I possibly could have was the structure. The logical way to divide up this film is the preparations for the big song recording and the Foo Fighters playing, but the film ends with another 20 minutes of what the musicians did a year later that feels like a bit of an anticlimax. Of course, the film redeemed itself in the very end as we get to see one thousand musicians begin to play The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony," which gets me every time.
The second half of the double feature was the Norwegian comedy? I guess? Ninjababy. It features a promiscuous but otherwise nice young Norwegian woman who doesn't realize she's pregnant until long past the point where abortion is still an option, because she ignores certain warning signs and doesn't get the distended belly that most pregnant women get. She's an aspiring comic book artist who draws an imaginary version of her fetus that looks like a masked ninja, and speaks to her while hopping around between the various flat surfaces of her environment. She really doesn't want to be a mother, and she really doesn't want to have a child with the father (nicknamed "Dick Jesus"), in part because he's a dickhead and in part because she's falling for her aikido instructor ... who was also considered a possible biological father of the baby.
Enjoyed this one a lot as well, though maybe just a touch less than the others. One thing that I appreciated about it was that it allowed me to continue my streak of what I can loosely consider outsider animation films at MIFF. I've been seeing animated films at MIFF for something like five straight years now, but this year's candidates (the top one was called Cryptozoo) all failed to migrate to streaming when the theatrical screenings had to be cancelled. Ninjababy is 90% live action but I'll take the 10% of it that's animated as my last port in the storm for animation in 2021.
As another indication of how behind I am on my writing, I started writing this 11 hours ago now. It's almost time for my Wednesday night movie.
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