A Crown prequel, a prequel to where I live

On Tuesday night I was miraculously without any August movie-watching obligations.

Of the 25 movies I had watched in August -- 21 new, four rewatches -- 16 of them could be described as "obligations" in some sense of that word. I watched 12 movies at MIFF, and then I watched four others for various series I am doing on this blog and elsewhere. That's one each for my recurring bi-monthly series King Darren and Baz Jazz Hands, one for my monthly series Audient Classics, and one for my external series Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, which is also monthly.

So fishing for something random to watch on the third-to-last day of the month, I came across something that had a lot more relevance to me than I would have ever expected. 

Netflix was the streamer of choice that night, and after a fair bit of scrolling and mentally noting a couple of reasonable contenders, I decided on Jean-Marc Vallee's The Young Victoria. Having recently watched so many new releases via MIFF, I didn't want to just find the next up 2023 movie I needed to see, and a movie from 2009 fit the bill quite nicely.

I was going along fine with it, feeling somewhat indifferent toward it despite my stated affection for its star (Emily Blunt), until I realized a couple ways it added context to things relevant to my life.

The first thing I noticed was what an interesting companion piece it made to the Netflix series The Crown (which could be one of the reasons they are streaming it, to capture the same audience). We've been watching The Crown in my household from the start, though my wife gave up on it when she decided she didn't need to relive the woe and misery of Princess Diana. I stuck with it and I actually found this past season to be one of its most compelling.

The thing that really interested me about The Young Victoria in relationship to The Crown, though, was not the fact that the woman who was the longest reigning monarch before Elizabeth gets mentioned from time to time on the show, she being Elizabeth's great-great-grandmother. No, it was the fact that some of the traditions we see on The Crown -- in fact, one of the show's most commonly recurring sequences throughout the series history -- was pioneered in Victoria's time if not earlier.

There's a scene in The Young Victoria when Victoria, newly crowned, has a meeting with the then-prime minister, whose name I am not going to look up right now. (The internet tells me there were 33 prime ministers during her reign, which seems like a lot, even for 63 years.) It had the same familiar aspects of the scene we see so many times in The Crown, when Elizabeth sits down with Winston Churchill or Margaret Thatcher or John Major, and the PM has to participate in the customary signs of deference to her majesty. There was almost a sense of deja vu watching this scene.

Then the character played by Paul Bettany also had relevance. Bettany plays Lord Melbourne, one of Victoria's most trusted advisors, who himself served a stint as prime minister during her reign -- and who, you might have guessed, is the namesake for the very city in which I live. (He didn't seem like such an exceptional fellow in this film, though we could probably say that about a lot of people who had cities named after them.) Interestingly, the naming of our fair city predates the beginning of Victoria's reign by about two months, as both things occurred in the first half of 1837.

Then of course Victoria herself gives her name to the state where I live, of which Melbourne is the capital. If watching Australia was somehow appropriate to mark ten years living in Australia, then so, in a way, was this.

A last thing that sent me to the internets during the movie was the name of Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, who was also her cousin, played by Rupert Friend. I don't know much about him, but I have heard that joke "Do you have Prince Albert in a can? Well then you better let him out!" Yes indeed that joke is based on this man, and the play on words comes from the fact that Prince Albert also had a tobacco named after him.

Okay, on to my September viewing obligations. 

Baz Jazz Hands: Australia

This is the fourth in my 2023 bi-monthly series rewatching the films of Baz Luhrmann.

I was at a disadvantage when I saw Australia in January of 2009. Several, actually:

1) I had not yet lived in Australia.

2) I was not yet a parent.

3) I heard it was bad.

Yes I had a fair number of preconceived notions about the poor quality of Australia when coming in. The film was received with howls in certain critical corners in late 2008 when it was released, and according to the date Letterboxd shows me I saw it, I only just barely crammed it in before my 2008 list closed. I metaphorically had my arms crossed before I even entered the theater, despite loving Luhrmann's previous film, Moulin Rouge. (Which I watched for about the fifth time for this series in June, you will recall.)

Then I liked the movie. Maybe I didn't love it, but I liked it plenty. And considerably more than my wife, an actual Australian, if memory serves. Another hurdle for Australia to overcome in terms of its enduring legacy in my mind.

I checked the retroactive star rating I gave it on Letterboxd, and was pleasantly surprised to see that when I entered all my films in Letterboxd in early 2012, I was feeling generously enough toward Australia to give it 3.5 stars. The Flickchart ranking is also fair, 2145 out of 6353 films ranked, good for 66%.

So you can imagine I was pretty surprised to nearly be in tears at the end of the movie on this viewing.

Yes I am a sap. We know this about me. It's one of the main reasons I (generally) swoon for Luhrmann's work. But I'd thought Australia was an exception.

Instead I watched -- across last Friday night and Saturday morning -- a grand, sweeping, 2-hour-and-45-minute epic in the old school style of big spectacles, with brave heroes and hissable villains, and damsels in distress who, it should be said, get plenty of their own agency in a manner more befitting the 21st century in which the film was made. With a storyline about surrogate parents and their surrogate child that really put a lump in my throat.

I think one of the criticisms Luhrmann receives is that he doesn't draw his characters very finely. There are things they represent, but they don't have the detail or the nuance that we believe -- correctly in most instances -- is the meat and potatoes of good character writing.

One example of this, which caused a lot of guffaws at the time, is that Hugh Jackman's character never receives a name other than "the Drover." (Because he's a cattle drover.) I admit I thought this was funny at the time too.

Now I realize that giving us inordinately complex characters is not one of Luhrmann's interests, and that does not necessarily detract from the quality of his films. I'd argue that we do get some complexity in other Luhrmann characters, often as a result of the performer's individual gifts. Some, for example, think that's what we get in the lead performance in Elvis, though I'd have to think more about that to decide if it deviates from my thesis. 

Which is this: Luhrmann is more interested in exploring archetypes, not specific people.

The Drover is perhaps the prime example, though that doesn't take even a little bit away from Jackman's performance. He's heroic and sexy and has incredible chemistry with Nicole Kidman. Did I say he was sexy? Boy is he sexy. But you can't pull off those things if you are wooden, if you are only fulfilling the needs of an archetype.

Yet even if he were, so what? It's becoming clear to me after four Luhrmann films that his films are in conversation with the very history of narrative, beyond existing as narratives themselves. Few writer-directors conjure more detestable villains. Richard Roxburgh's duke in Moulin Rouge may be at the top of that list, but David Wenham's Fletcher gives him a run for his money here. Luhrmann is exceptional at getting a sneer from an actor.

When you are watching a Luhrmann movie, you need to be going in with the expectation that he's going to paint with broad strokes, on purpose, to bring out what makes certain character types appear over and over in the history of storytelling. Some people may not like that project. I love it.

And did I love Australia on this viewing?

Maybe. Maybe I did.

The epic scope of the outback in the film's opening 90 minutes or so is perhaps something I wouldn't have appreciated as much before I lived here. Not that I've spent a huge amount of time in the outback. But I did actually visit the part of the world in which this is set in 2017. The city of Darwin and the Aboriginal territory of Arnhem Land are both places I visited, though the latter only with the accompaniment of an indigenous guide, and only just inside the boundary. See, only indigenous people are allowed to set foot in Arnhem Land unless specifically approved for a visit. 

I found these scenes glorious in scope and subject matter. In 2008 (early 2009) I also did not have the context of coming to understand the indigenous experience a little better as I have in the ten years I've lived here. I would never pretend that I understand the experience well -- that's not something I have any right to claim -- but I certainly have consumed a fair amount of art about the indigenous experience, each of which improves my overall ability to empathize with their history of suffering. At first I thought Luhrmann's handling of the indigenous themes would read as cringey or appropriative to me, but I actually think he does a pretty good job with it. It's always great to see Australian treasure David Gulpilil, who just passed in the past two years, in the role of King George.

As impressed as I was with the vistas in the film's first 90 minutes, I was equally impressed with Luhrmann's shift to the upper-class social gatherings of Darwin, which is where we see some of his most familiar interests -- romantic scenes of people dressed up in fancy outfits, dancing. We get this in almost every Luhrmann film -- possibly ever one, full stop. The attack by Japanese aircraft is then also done really well. 

I was enthusiastic enough about Australia on this viewing that I could probably continue to list things. But there was only one more funny detail I wanted to mention before I wrap up with thoughts on why the film's possible deepest resonance for me this time around.

That last detail relates to how Luhrmann establishes his villains. One thing is, of course, the sneering. Another is the conniving, murder, etc. But something I found common to both Wenham's Fletcher and a lesser villain, King Carney, played by Bryan Brown -- who ends up having something of a heart -- is that they both swig directly from the bottle when they're drinking at a fancy party. In one character detail it shows both their sense of entitlement, and how uncouth they are -- the latter a real sin in Luhrmann's world of passionate kisses in tuxedos and ball gowns.

My final thought has to do with the third lead beyond Kidman and Jackman, a young Aboriginal boy named Nullah, played by Brandon Walters.

For starters, I was overcome by how radiant a presence this boy is. Let it never be said that Luhrmann doesn't have a knack for casting. I'm not sure where he found Walters -- I could probably look it up on the internet if I could be bothered -- but there are not a lot of characters I have seen on screen in whom I have found it easier to poor my heart. Those eyes! The kid is such a natural that I'm sorry to see he has only appeared in three other projects, and only in the past few years -- unless of course that was his choice. If it was because Australia was received poorly, then I think that's truly a shame.

My reaction to both Walters and the character has something to do with what I mentioned up top, about how I was not a parent in 2009. 

I was really touched by the story of the makeshift family that develops between Drover, Sarah Ashley and Nullah. I suppose today it would read more as a white savior narrative, but just as Luhrmann avoids the most pernicious pitfalls of depicting the Aboriginal experience on screen, he also avoids them in this regard. The conditions at the time -- when so-called "half caste" indigenous children were being taken from their families to become "civilized" in white homes -- makes it inevitable that the two white heroes of this film would have to play this role toward him. However, the understanding of the importance of him going on walkabout with his grandfather, Gulpilil's King George, keeps the optics pretty good on this one.

And dammit if I didn't get emotional when a) this makeshift family is reunited, and b) this makeshift family has to send their adoptive son out into the world, to learn the ways of his ancestors, to discover how to follow the songlines that they have sung out for navigating the great outback. When you are a parent, narratives in which parents are separated from children suddenly strike you more deeply -- and I discovered on this viewing that Australia is a particularly good example of this sort of emotional manipulation, a term I use in its very best sense. 

(Yeah, I never expected to write this many words on Australia either.)

One final, final thought. I watched Australia close to what was the tenth anniversary of me living in this country. August 20, 2013 was the date I left America; August 22nd was the day I arrived in Australia, because you lose that day flying in that direction. I thought about posting about this landmark date here on this blog, but since it isn't directly related to the movies, I never did. However, I thought watching Australia for reasons other than celebrating this anniversary, and rather only because it was the next scheduled movie in this series, was pretty felicitous. 

We're up to Luhrmann's second-most-recent release in October with The Great Gatsby, which will be my third viewing.

Wrapping my most international Melbourne International Film Festival

When I was in the early, sadly lethargic stages of picking out movies to watch for MIFF 2023 -- maybe the luster was just gone after a couple years of COVID -- I worried that I was selecting a very thin slice of the international movie market. It seemed like most of my movies were from the United States, and those that weren't were from New Zealand.

In the end, the 12 films I did watch represented some of the best international diversity I have ever had on my slate of films. 

But before I get to that, let me wrap the last week of watching movies at home through MIFFPlay, the nine additional days during which approximately 35 films were made available to stream, for "only" $15 as opposed to the $26.50 they cost you to see in the cinema.

After my final theatrical screening last Saturday night, I took Sunday night off but then got right back to it on Monday, knowing I had to use three more free passes for streaming films before they would expire the following Sunday. As it turned out, the movie my wife wanted to watch wasn't among the three I had identified for myself, so I purchased a fourth. 

The movie that wasn't 75 minutes

Despite being particularly tired that day, I opted to watch a movie because it was only 75 minutes long. Unfortunately, about 20 minutes into Art Talent Show, I noticed it was actually 105 minutes long. That's a pretty significant error by MIFF.

Fortunately, I did get into it and ultimately found it a pretty potent snapshot of what it means to be an artist in present-day Prague and whether this is something we should celebrate or a source for despair.

The documentary shows us a bunch of hopefuls auditioning for acceptance at a prestigious art institute in Prague. Their prospective teachers put them through a gauntlet of interview challenges that test their mettle as artists, and we get to hear their sometimes insightful but usually vapid or insipid thoughts as creative types in the modern world. Their teachers privately scoff at some of their attempts at art and some of the gaps in their knowledge. In one particularly cringey scene, the teachers run through a series of important Czech artists and the candidate is not familiar with a single one.

This film isn't just about making fun of today's young people, though -- if that's a fair way to characterize what it is about at any point. Rather, it's a captivating look at these gatekeepers of the art world and how their own thinking needs to shift in order to incorporate the work of today's artists into their overall framework for thinking about the local art scene. And it ends on one of my favorite shots I've seen this year.

The movie that was actually 75 minutes

When I put on The Face of the Jellyfish on Tuesday night, I realized I'd gotten confused, and this was actually the 75-minute movie, not Art Talent Show. That's a pretty significant error by Vance.

I possibly would have enjoyed 105 minutes of this beguiling Argentinian film that I watched on Tuesday night, about a woman who awakens one day to find that her face has changed. She still looks normal, in fact possibly more beautiful than she did before. But it's not her. It's someone else's face.

I already wrote about this film as my final of four MIFF reviews for 2023, and I think you can tell I ran out of steam a bit as I was doing it. But because I've already written about, I'll just link to that review here and move on. 

Really good film, though, if you can ever track it down, which I doubt you will as it will probably not have a very conventional release. 

My wife's choice

The movie my wife wanted to see on Thursday night was described to me as a horror involving witchcraft, which sounded good to me. (Having seen Robert Eggers' The Witch at MIFF in 2015.)

Staying in South America but moving from Argentina to a remote island off Chile, Sorcery tells the story of a 19th century village where natives, second- and third-generation people of Spanish descent and the more newly arrived Germans -- not sure if I have all my times correct on that -- live together under an abusive power dynamic, with the Germans treating the natives in sub-human ways. When one particularly cruel man thinks his servant's family has caused the death of their cattle through black magic, he sics two dogs on the girl's father, killing him in a shocking scene. This begins a cycle of revenge in which the girl learns to wield the very black magic she was falsely accused of using.

Sorcery is a great setup for a film, but it moves very slowly and relies a lot more on suggestion than any actual witchcraft pyrotechnics. In fact, so modest are its supernatural bona fides that it's probably more useful as a study of the uneasy sociopolitical landscape on this island than it is as a film with particularly strong genre components. In the end my feelings toward it were a bit muted, and its slow pace made it a bit of a struggle for me to get through. Which is a shame because the kind of thing you want to do in a marriage, if at all possible, is endorse your partner's choice of a movie to watch.

I realized that the biggest issue with Sorcery wasn't that it was slow, or that it did anything it was trying to do less well than it should have for the kind of movie it wanted to be. The issue is that when I'm watching a movie by myself these days, I almost always pause for a nap at some point while watching, which (sometimes) gives me a little boost of energy to continue. While watching with my wife, I couldn't pause it, so the struggle to get through had more to do with needing my nap than with any deficiencies in the storytelling. 

And finally, keeping alive my outsider animation tradition

Every year at MIFF since 2016 I have watched some form of what I've referred to as "outsider animation," and it took until my 12th and final viewing of 2023 for me to keep that tradition alive. Speaking of naps, I started watching on Saturday night, and the length of one of these naps made it so I had no hope of finishing it until today, which I did, about four-and-a-half hours before the window to watch it would have expired.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman also sort of perfectly encapsulates the very international MIFF I've had this year. It was made by a French director about Japan -- it's based on the short stories of Haruki Marakumi -- but as far as I can tell, the spoken language was always English. In any case, all the credits are in English and all the signs in the movie are in English. IMDB says the spoken language of the film was French, but MIFF had no opportunity to choose an original language and have subtitles, so I just decided that maybe English was the original language after all.

I used the word "beguiling" on The Face of the Jellyfish and I'd say it applies here too. Although the film is separated into chapters, it's not a series of unrelated short stories, as I'd originally assumed, and more a case of about three interweaving narratives, the characters from which we revisit throughout the film. It takes place in the wake of the earthquake in 2011 that cause the Fukashima nuclear plant meltdown, and follows a handful of characters indirectly impacted by it as they take stock of their lives. Really this earthquake is just background, but there are seismic shifts with these characters. A woman leaves her husband after staring at the news for five days. That husband goes adrift after he's offered a severance package from his work. And an older employee at the same company is recruited by a talking frog to fight the worms under the city of Tokyo that threaten to cause another disaster.

Yes, as realistic as the film seems at points, it does have a talking frog. Its elliptical nature made it pretty enchanting.

Okay I am definitely out of steam on MIFF 2023 -- also it's 10:30 on Sunday night -- but I did want to get back to what I told you about this being my most international MIFF.

Here are the films I saw and the countries they either are set in, originate from or otherwise deal with thematically:

1) Past Lives - Canada, U.S., South Korea
2) The Bird With the Crystal Plumage - Italy
3) It Lives Inside - U.S., India
4) Anselm - Germany
5) Shut Eye - New Zealand
6) Bad Behaviour - U.S., New Zealand
7) Banel & Adama - France, Senegal
8) Monster - Japan
9) Art Talent Show - Czech Republic
10) The Face of the Jellyfish - Argentina
11) Sorcery - Chile
12) Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - France, Japan

That's at least one movie from every continent, if you consider Australia and New Zealand to be part of a continent called Oceania. (I don't really, but for these purposes it works for me.) I've certainly never been had that kind of wide reach in my MIFF viewings.

Well, time to wrap up shop here for another year. Speaking of continents, I'll be back soon, possibly as soon as tomorrow, with a write-up of my viewing of Australia as part of my Baz Jazz Hands series.

No one's favorite movie

Flickchart is a very large place.

One of the things that always fascinates me about the movie dueling site is how many users it has, considering that I don't usually hear people talk about it outside of the actual Flickchart groups I participate in on Facebook. I assume a lot of people tried it once and maybe a sizeable percentage never went back, leaving the account created and contributing to the site's stats, but with no new activity in a dozen years. I also assume that the diehards like me, still ranking nearly 15 years after first discovering the site, are comparatively few.

But just how many actually tried it at one point is still pretty astonishing.

I don't have the actual numbers, but I can make general determinations of size through the circumstantial evidence of how many people have a particular movie as their #1.

On each Flickchart movie page, it shows how many users have this movie ranked #1. There are some really weird results. Recently I was adding 80 for Brady, and I noticed that one user had the movie as their #1 of all time. I later discovered that this person had only 20 movies, all 2023 releases, and 80 for Brady was actually their #5.

So there may be some glitching going on here. But for the purposes of this post I'm going to assume that most of the stats I'm about to give you are legit. 

On Friday I was really bored at work -- it was really slow -- and I decided to see how far I had to go on my own personal chart before I found a film that no other Flickcharters had ranked #1. It took me longer than I thought, all the way down at #51.

Here are my top 50, with the number of Flickchart users who have the movie as their #1 listed afterwards in parenthesis:

1. Raising Arizona (49)
2. Back to the Future (2140)
3. Pulp Fiction (3227)
4. Raiders of the Lost Ark (2121)
5. Citizen Kane (521)
6. Star Wars (3478)
7. Toy Story (1328)
8. Fargo (900)
9. This is Spinal Tap (55)
10. The Iron Giant (66)
11. The Princess Bride (1372)
12. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1357)
13. Goodfellas (1612)
14. Tangled (62)
15. Jesus Christ Superstar (1)
16. The Cable Guy (14)
17. Children of Men (203)
18. Say Anything ... (20)
19. Bound (5)
20. Do the Right Thing (32)
21. Run Lola Run (108)
22. WarGames (11)
23. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (50)
24. Donnie Darko (885)
25. Unforgiven (205)
26. When Harry Met Sally (73)
27. The Shawshank Redemption (3382)
28. Defending Your Life (3)
29. Time Bandits (5)
30. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1023)
31. A Fish Called Wanda (26)
32. Ghost (24)
33. Big (190)
34. Vanilla Sky (111)
35. Four Weddings and a Funeral (13)
36. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (10)
37. Die Hard (1038)
38. Lost in Translation (691)
39. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (1647)
40. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1025)
41. The Empire Strikes Back (3748)
42. Adaptation (108)
43. Galaxy Quest (47)
44. The Exorcist (511)
45. Elf (244)
46. Dumb and Dumber (583)
47. Election (16)
48. Starship Troopers (321)
49. Schindler's List (959)
50. Rabbit Hole (2)

And finally ...

51. Flirting With Disaster (0)

I did not continue to see when I'd get the next zero.

In case you weren't doing the math, that's the #1s of 35,622 Flickchart users crammed just into my personal top 50.

And this isn't even considering all the Flickcharters who have beloved films like Casablanca, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Wizard of Oz, Sunset Boulevard, Gone With the Wind and countless others as their #1. (Two of these come shortly after the top 50 on my chart. The rest are farther down.)

Simply put, there are a lot of Flickchart users out there. 

Now I know I have some popular choices in my top 50. Thirteen of these movies appear as the #1 movie for more than one thousand Flickcharters. But this top 50 is not just chalk. Bound, for example, is nothing like a household name, yet a full five Flickcharters consider it their favorite movie of all time.

Why no love for Flirting With Disaster, when so much other love is being spread around?

Helpfully, the page for each movie shows how many users have it in their top 20, and there are 18 of those for David O. Russell's 1996 film. (I mean, who am I to complain -- they have it higher than I do.)

But it's just interesting that when so many different movies are someone's favorite -- even 80 for Brady, or so it would appear to someone who wasn't investigating too closely -- that any movie as good as Flirting With Disaster would have no ultimate champion out there in the Flickchart community.

I don't know what point I really have with this post or the observations within. I think I was just bored on a slow Friday. 

MIFF: Kore-eda's record

My final in-cinema viewing for the 2023 Melbourne International Film Festival set a record for its director.

I talked earlier this week about how I had seen four Kelly Reichardt films during MIFF, but only two of them were official MIFF viewings. The other two were iTunes rentals, and I sort of counted First Cow as a MIFF viewing because I watched it the same night it was the festival's opening night film in 2020, when the whole thing was online.

But on Saturday, Hirokazu Kore-eda became my first director with three official MIFF viewings, meaning he has this one to himself.

The first of these viewings came in 2016, when I flocked to After the Storm after Like Father, Like Son had blown me away a few years earlier, ending up as the #2 movie of its year and ultimately my #6 for the whole decade: After the Storm was a four-star experience for me and finished about #30 for the year. I followed that up two years later with Shoplifters, which finished just outside my top ten of 2018 and earned 4.5 stars on Letterboxd.

Monster, his newest film, which debuted (as most Kore-eda films do) at Cannes earlier this summer, gives him a third official MIFF viewing and breaks a tie with a half-dozen other directors, among them Reichardt, Asghar Farhadi, Yorgos Lanthimos and Peter Strickland. 

If I'd been around for MIFF 2022, Kore-eda probably would have set this record last year, since Broker played at last year's festival. (Yes, Kore-eda is prolific.) I still haven't seen that one, as it wasn't released anywhere in time to rank it with my 2022 films, at which point it ceased to be a priority for me -- though I do think of myself as a Kore-eda completist, so I'll get to it soon. (A completist who has about half the Kore-eda filmography complete. Ha.)

It wasn't a particularly glamorous ending to the festival in terms of the theater that was hosting the movie, that being the Hoyts multiplex in the middle of Melbourne Central, a high-end shopping center. But I follow the movie, not the theater, and Monster was obviously a hot ticket as they were playing it on two screens in adjacent auditoriums. After a few slices of pizza in the food court I found my way to a very good seat in the middle.

This was a bit of a slow burn for me. For the first 15 minutes or so I was a little disoriented, until I realized that was part of the film's design. Monster is a bit indebted to Kore-eda's fellow countryman Akira Kurosawa, whose Rashomon is always a point of reference when a story shows the same event through the perspectives of multiple characters. But I say it's "always" a point of reference to indicate that it doesn't bother me, that lots of films do a similar thing and Rashomon merely got there first. I think it's a really interesting style of helping us empathize with multiple characters -- thereby fulfilling Roger Ebert's idealized notion of movies being a machine for creating empathy. 

If we're already using the problematic word "indebted," I'll say that Kore-eda is also here indebted to the films of the aforementioned MIFF alum Asghar Farhadi, inasmuch as Farhadi has any trademark on his own approach to filmmaking. I've often called Farhadi's films "domestic whodunnits," in that they present complex social mysteries driven by misunderstandings, whose details only steadily reveal themselves over the course of the narrative, and which tend to paint all the characters in lights that are varying degrees of sympathetic. If someone does something bad in a Farhadi film, it is usual inspired by their own hopeless circumstances, and not a reflection of the nastiness of their soul.

In Monster, there are multiple central events in question: a mysterious fire at a so-called "hostess bar;" an accusation of violence by a teacher toward a student; the possibility that that student is also bullying another student; a terrible accident involving the school's principal and her grandchild. We see multiple characters' versions of these events in slightly adjusted form, though the way I'm describing it actually sounds more high concept than it really is. This isn't one of those Groundhog Day ripoffs where you watch the same footage over and over again, because Kore-eda is a skilled enough filmmaker to entrust us with intuiting how events we haven't seen before relate to events we have. 

Anyway, my initial difficulty getting my bearings in the story were rewarded quickly enough and fully enough, with a story of great humanism and nuance, that Monster rapidly rose for me to the best of the festival and one of the best so far of 2023. I won't go into a huge number of details since these MIFF posts aren't meant to be proper reviews of the films, but I do want you to know that you should make it a priority to see Monster when it comes to a theater near you.

And speaking of MIFF posts, that's the last one for theatrical screenings in 2023. 

But wait there's more!

MIFF shifts online now, where a smaller selection of less prominent films continue to be available until the 27th. And this week I expect to see at least three and possibly as many as four before they finally cut us off for good next Sunday. I've written enough MIFF this year that I may talk recap them all in one post at the end of the week ... unless one of them inspires me to write sooner.

MIFF: Not the next Tanna, but close

The 2016 film Tanna was not something I saw at MIFF, but I tend to lump it in together with the Melbourne festival experience on the whole. That's because I helped select it to play at the Human Rights & Arts Film Festival (HRAFF) during my two years acting as one of the curators for that festival. Plus the directors are Australian, even if the story they tell is set in Vanuatu among tribal people living in the traditional ways. I love Tanna so much that I've seen it four times and it was my #5 movie of the entire decade. 

When having to cancel my second MIFF film on Saturday required me to pick a second film on Wednesday night, which then ultimately got changed to Friday night due to the soccer, I reverse-engineered a reason for my interest in Ramata-Toulaye Sy's Banel & Adama, set in Senegal. Given I could tell (from the title and the synopsis) that it was a love story, likely a tragic love story, set among people living in the traditional ways, I hoped it might be the next Tanna.

It got closer than I ever thought it would.

I went into the city to work for the second Friday in a row, both for MIFF reasons, though this time it would be only the one movie, unlike the three I'd caught the previous Friday. After a very slow day at work (which I'll mention in a post I've written but not yet published), I got my steps in by walking up to North Melbourne to buy these bike lights I like from a bike shop there. Alas, upon arrival, I found the place swept away, presumably by the pandemic. It was actually the second venerable institution I passed, the other being a kitchen appliance store, that had shuttered sometime in recent history. We've bounced back, healthwise, enough from the pandemic that I tend to forget that its economic repercussions are still rearing their heads.

I still had time to go to my favorite Indian restaurant for a quick dinner before reporting to the Capitol Theatre for the 6 p.m. show.

The Capitol was really the experience I was trying to capture when I first signed up for the cancelled Saturday night movie Mercy Road, and when I selected Banel & Adama for Wednesday. Fortunately, the latter's Friday show was also at the Capitol, so it looks like I was destined to in fact visit this theater in 2023.

Why is the Capitol so great? Well, I've shown you the picture below, or some variation, before, but it was ages ago, so I might as well post again the picture I took last night:

They shut the colors off once the movie starts, but it's really the crazy architecture of the ceiling that I find so pleasing. It's a bold art deco design that you just don't see around anymore, and it makes the Capitol a desirable MIFF destination regardless of what movie is playing.

And this was quite a good one.

Banel & Adama is, quite astonishingly, Sy's filmmaking debut. She was present for the screening, and it prompted me to finally stay for my first Q&A of the festival, despite having an opportunity to do so at almost all of my previous screenings.

Banel (Khady Mane) is a young woman in a Senegalese village who is desperately in love with her husband, Adama (Mamadou Diallo), the son of the deceased tribal chief. It's Adama's birthright to become the next chieftain, but he's only 19 years old and another tribal elder has been serving the function while he comes of age. Adama rejects this opportunity, partially out of a genuine desire not to do the job but partly because Banel wants him all to herself. She's got an idea that they will move out of the village and live in an abandoned house that is buried in sand. If they have the initiative to dig the house out, they can live there -- but the locals all worry that the house is cursed. And Adama's rejection of the chieftainship may be making the curse worse, because the village is in severe drought and the cattle begin dying.

I won't talk too much more about the direction this goes, but it deviates from the Tanna template in a number of ways that make it a pretty imperfect comparison. Just because two films are both set in tribal communities and involve romances does not make them worth stacking up next to each other, though I don't think you're going to blame me if one reminded me of the other on the surface. We movie people are wired to see such similarities in determining our potential interest in any given film. 

However, this movie's direction appealed to a different side of my cinephile brain, one that responds to portrayals of psychological disturbance and approaching apocalypse. Sy is extraordinarily gifted in all the aspects required of a filmmaker, from framing to visual camera distortions to sound design -- to say nothing of her ability to get adequate performances out of her novice actors. I say "adequate" because only one or two roles require much range, one of which is Mane in the title role, who gives a truly accomplished performance for a first-timer. The film even required light use of visual effects and other practical effects with some degree of difficulty. 

The accomplishment of Banel & Adama is as impressive as it is because it both comes from a part of the world where we don't see a lot of cinema, and is from someone who is directing her first feature. She did go to film school, as I learned in the Q&A afterward, and I believe she also grew up in France, so it's not like she's just some local Senegalese phenom who picked up a camera one day and started filming.

The totality of this experience was one of feeling immersed in all the tools of cinema, and it's a good reminder not to disregard cinema from particular corners of the world due to a regrettable assumption that they're going to be unsophisticated in some way. 

The Q&A moderator didn't select my question from among the ones sent in to her on Slido -- this is the first MIFF where they've used that technology rather than a roving MIFF volunteer with a microphone -- but I loved listening to Sy talk, and was sympathetically amused to hear her final answer to the question of what comes next for her. She's been on the festival circuit since the film debuted at Cannes, so she laughed and said she just wanted to get some sleep. 

Tonight is my final MIFF movie in the theater, before MIFF shifts online for a final week involving a limited selection of the festival's films. 

Things you've never seen

I'm going to risk spoiling a movie you probably wouldn't otherwise think to watch, so that you might consider watching it. However, if you don't want spoilers for Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead, you should probably not read this post.

It's getting harder and harder for a movie to really show us something we haven't seen before, especially when sharks are involved. How many Sharknado movies have there been? Eleven?

Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead, a new Japanese film on Netflix directed by Yusuke Ishida, manages this feat in a totally surprising and delightful way.

It's proceeding along in a likeable enough way, the kind of zombie movie that feels upbeat due to its humor and the cleverness of its conceit. Basically, a hard-done-by office worker named Akira (Eiji Akaso) discovers the zombie apocalypse is occurring, as you do, but instead of despairing over the end of the world as he knows it, he rejoices that he no longer has to go to work. And henceforth creates a bucket list of things he wants to do -- it's supposed to be 100, but he can't think of much more than about 15 -- before he is inevitably transformed into a flesh eater himself. 

The zombie effects are pretty good for what is probably a fairly cheaply budgeted film, and you might get a Zombieland vibe here and there, especially at the start, when Akira narrates and when Ishida uses freeze-frame to rewind and tell us how we got here. However, it proceeds pretty straightforwardly, hokey in a pleasing way, until Akira and his small group hole up at an aquarium, where they fend off the zombies in a Walking Dead-in-the-prison-season sort of way, and have a good supply of untainted food.

Except when zombies fall into the shark tank, and the shark of course sees them as food, the shark quickly turns into a zombie himself. 

The zombie shark is not the thing you haven't seen before. I'm sure Sharknado has done that at least once.

No, it's the way the zombie shark becomes a land threat that is really memorable.

The giant shark bursts forth onto dry land, swallowing the closest human whole. The others around are frightened, but they soon realize that a shark out of water can flop about all it wants, but all you have to do is give it a berth of about ten feet and you'll be just fine. 

Not exactly.

This comforting logic has barely had time to sink in when the shark sprouts legs. How does it sprout legs? Well, the zombies in its stomach burst their legs through the now rotten skin and proceed to walk the shark around. Deprived of its need for water since it's, you know, no longer alive, the shark is now a full-fledged menace on eight human legs.

Since I've explained it, I might as well show it to you:

What was already a nice enough zombie movie with some decent effects, good characters and a good story has now become something gonzo, something genuinely worth seeking out.

I'm sorry if I ruined what was a wonderful surprise for me, but hey, I did warn you.

MIFF or soccer?

Both, it turns out.

I was originally scheduled for a MIFF double feature on Wednesday night, but that was before I became a soccer fan. 

Actually, I was originally originally only scheduled for one movie, Alice Englert's Bad Behaviour, playing at 6 p.m. at the Comedy Theatre, after I finished my workday in the city. I had actually planned to make it a double feature, but with the second movie being a regular movie in theaters -- remember those?

But then it became clear that my originally scheduled MIFF double feature to close the festival on Saturday night was going to create a conflict at home, so I switched the second Saturday night movie -- sorry, Mercy Road -- to a second MIFF movie on Wednesday night, the African film Banel & Adama.

But then a funny thing happened: I started to like soccer.

I won't go into detail here on my whole history with soccer. But I played for a number of years as a kid, not because I particularly liked it but because it's what every kid in my town did. I was never any good and by the time I was in junior high, it was ancient history. 

I wasn't a fan of professional or world cup soccer then, and I've never become one as an adult. But then, about six months ago, my younger son got super into the sport. That didn't change my opinion of watching professionals play, but I did start a semi-regular routine of playing soccer with my son in the back yard, taking turns playing goalie on our small net.

Then the women's world cup started, hosted in our very country. There was a chance we'd have taken my son to some games played here in Melbourne, but he opted against it, since he's not so sure how he feels about big crowds and loud noises. But we watched the Australian women, the Matildas, in the group stage at home, and I started to get some of the spectator appeal of the sport.

And then the Matildas kept winning.

When they dispatched France in a thrilling game over the weekend that was decided after an unfathomable 20 penalty kicks, I realized the next game -- the game that could punch their ticket to the championship -- was the same time as my MIFF double feature. 

Given that I had actually grown to love this team, I knew Banel & Adama was out. For another $1 transaction fee, I could shift this ticket again -- and as it turned out, the very same movie in the very same venue worked as a replacement on Friday after work.

I decided to still go to Bad Behaviour, since it would get out just before 8, and if I hightailed it home -- which I did thanks to Uber -- I wouldn't miss that much of the first half, and would be able to join my family as they sat nervously on the couch watching.

Turns out, I would have been better off skipping both movies.

After a yummy Chinese dinner -- a little tradition I like to do when I have time after work before a movie -- I made it up to the Comedy Theatre 20 minutes before the movie was set to start. They were already letting people in, so I didn't even have to/get to participate in the MIFF tradition of standing and waiting outside the theater. And since the movie was only probably three-quarters sold, I got a seat of my choosing, on an aisle so I could survive some of the normal discomfort of their terrible seats. 

Even in my position of relative comfort by Comedy Theatre standards, I found this a pretty torturous experience.

The movie was made in New Zealand, and the director, a Kiwi, is also one of the film's stars. The bigger stars, though, are Jennifer Connelly and Ben Whishaw, she a former child actress who is now an awful mother, he a wellness guru. Her portion of the film takes place at a wellness retreat in Oregon, while her daughter's portion -- that's the director -- is set in New Zealand, where the daughter is working on an effects heavy fantasy film that is probably meant to make us think of Lord of the Rings.

Before I get into the actual problems with the film, I want to mention one thing that bothered me, which was that they used Kiwi actors in the Oregon scenes. One, a big Maori guy, was at least doing an American accent. The other may have actually leaned into her native accent, if anything. I know there are some casting realities when you are making a movie in New Zealand and pretending it is set somewhere else, but I just couldn't get past the idea that a Kiwi was working at the front desk of a wellness retreat in Oregon. 

The actual problem with the film, though, is that the characters are unsympathetic and the spoofing a wellness retreat did not land with me at all. Maybe I need to have actually been to one of those things to get it, but that shouldn't be a prerequisite for laughing. Movies are all about introducing us to scenarios we are not familiar with and still enabling us to understand them and get what is funny and/or tragic about them, Bad Behaviour containing a bit of both.

But I just wasn't laughing like the people around me -- so maybe it was a me issue. I sat there stone-faced for most of the movie. Plus I kept having logistics questions about the plot. It isn't spoiling anything to say that the daughter gets dismissed from the movie after an incident where she is accidentally punched out by a fellow actor and tumbles down a hill. It wasn't clear to me why this incident, in which she was a victim, led to her being fired from the movie, and Bad Behaviour just doesn't hold itself accountable to explaining such things. 

We are supposed to be seeing these toxic people who have become what they are because of past trauma, but we don't get enough of the past trauma to understand them or to justify any of their behavior. (Sorry, behaviour.) I found the movie mean, but also not clever, and ultimately a waste of my time.

The director was present at the screening -- maybe that's why the audience was offering so many guffaws, because she seemed really nice -- but more interesting to me was the other special guest, who introduced the director at the beginning. This person was none other than the chief editor at Letterboxd, the site I use to track my films and give them star ratings. 

She told us that when she first saw this film at Sundance in January, she went right to her site and "smashed five stars" for the movie. That immediately gave me expectations for the film -- expectations that the film was destined to sorely disappoint. In the Uber ride home, I "smashed" 1.5 stars for the movie. Woof.

I didn't miss any of the scoring in the Matildas game, but my arrival about 30 minutes in was bad luck for the team, apparently. Only a minute or two after I'd sat down, England scored its first goal -- first of an eventual three. And even non-soccer fans currently reading this probably know that three goals is pretty difficult for any team to overcome.

The Matildas gave it their best shot. Star player Sam Kerr had an amazing goal from way out midway through the second half, temporarily tying the game. But England answered less than five minutes later and added a goal in the final ten minutes of regulation to slam the door on this loveable upstart team from Australia who was never meant to get this far.

And weirdly, after a full adult life of shrugging my shoulders about soccer, I am now counting the days until the next world cup four years from now. 

Audient Classics: The Great Dictator

This is the eighth in my 2023 series Audient Classics, in which I'm rewatching movies from before I was born that I loved but that I've only seen once.

For a couple months in a row, I've had a candidate for this series rise up into my consciousness of its own accord, and that's been the movie I watched. That didn't happen for August, so I just decided to pick a movie that was already in my Kanopy watchlist, that being Charlie Chaplin's 1940 Hitler spoof with a strident and righteous conclusion, The Great Dictator. 

The funny thing was, it was in German.

I don't know how Kanopy goes about sourcing the movies that are available to us to watch for free, but let's just say there's some eccentricity to it. 

At first I asked myself: "Was this film actually released in German at the time? I don't think Chaplin speaks German." But the fact that he does the Mel Brooks version of German, speaking German gibberish using some real German words and then just a bunch of nonsense that sounds German, in the way Brooks would do it a couple decades later, did make me question my own memory of this film, which I saw for the first time in 2015.

But then I noticed that the mouths weren't matching up, and then I realized definitively that this was a dubbed version of the film. 

I thought at first there might be a way to turn it off. I could turn on the English subtitles, and watched about five minutes of the film that way. But actually changing the spoken language was not an option.

For a moment I considered watching the whole movie this way. It would be appropriate, given that Chaplin made this movie to first lampoon fascism and then to shout it down in no uncertain terms with his closing speech. Germans scolded in their own language would be rich.

But then I decided that I don't want to watch a foreign film dubbed into English any more than I want to watch an English film dubbed into a foreign language. In either case it is a lesser version of the original art.

So I went to what has quickly become a go-to site for me, called Internet Archive.

If you are not familiar with this, it's an apparently free and legal site that has all sorts of old films saved on it, which you are apparently allowed to watch any time you want. I watched my last two films for Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta this way, those being Judgment at Nuremberg and Mildred Pierce, after I couldn't find Nuremberg available for streaming or rental anywhere, and one of the others in the group made me aware of it. The Great Dictator made it 3-for-3.

In another example of the Kanopy-style catch-as-catch-can model, though, the Internet Archive version of The Great Dictator was hilarious in that it was listed as "FULL VHS: The Great Dictator (1940) [Playhouse Video] (1985)." So yes, I watched a VHS copy of Chaplin's classic, uploaded to the internet, telltale VCR screen distortions and all.

It was quaint and a bit hilarious, and better than watching the whole film in German.

Knowing the movie was more than two hours, I started in on it before dinner, but only got to watch about 15 minutes due to having to change sources. I still didn't finish until almost 1:30 in the morning, as the living room heat and my spot lying on the couch made me sleepy, and many short (long) naps ensued.

I think I might have liked the film a little bit less than the first time, but its strengths still shone through for me -- this time in a more episodic way. I think I remembered it having a bit more of a rigidity to its narrative structure the first time, though in reality it's more of a collection of bits and set pieces that come from Chaplin's always creative mind. These set pieces reflect his instincts for physical comedy, but also his burgeoning political awareness. I'm not going to assume Chaplin had never been political, and many of his films skewered the fat cats and the system. But in The Great Dictator he sets aside the narrative entirely to address the audience at the end, stepping outside of the character of Adenoid Hynkel, the dictator of Tomainia, to address any fascists in the audience and inspire the rest of us to stand up to them. (Of course, it's actually Chaplin's Jewish barber character dressed as Hynkel, but the effect is the same.)

It occurred to me as I was watching this famous speech that this is what Spike Lee does at the end of his movies, and what he would have done if he were making movies 83 years ago. It may be an obvious takeaway that Lee would have taken inspiration from The Great Dictator, although a googling of relevant search terms does not return any results. I have to think it was fairly unusual at that time and that audiences would have been taken aback by it, pleasantly so I would hope. His call to tolerance and anti-fascism is simply stirring.

I think what makes it so stirring is that, even preceded by a few moments of the sort of melodrama that might appear in Chaplin's silent films, it was so tonally unexpected. Even moments before this speech, Chaplin is doing a bit about Hynkel sitting in a chair and breaking it, and then the remaining chairs getting shuffled at high speed among several potential sitters, including Jack Oakie's Benzino Napoloni. Scarcely a minute before this speech we are still laughing at this sort of thing, to the extent that it would be considered the film's primary mode.

I was also struck again by the guts it took to make this, and by that I don't mean the potential loss of the German box office. It's not that Hitler was really a risky target in that he had a chance to meaningfully retaliate, or that there were any reasonable percentage of the audience who would jump to his defense. It's more that it felt like a risk in terms of what audiences would find funny or what they felt Chaplin would be equipped to handle sensitively. Remember that this is well before the world learned of the murders of six million Jews in the concentration camps, but even then it might not have seemed possible that a film about Hitler could be funny, or that it would be the right mode to strike. 

I won't go through the individual set pieces that made me chuckle aloud again just as they did in 2015, with the exception of one that I had forgotten. The other character Chaplin plays, the Jewish barber in the ghetto, shaves a customer to the tune of Brahms' "Hungarian Dance No. 5," his movements of the blade and dashes of shaving cream perfectly aligning to the pace of the song and the changing of instruments. It's a short master class in what Chaplin did best.

Okay, just four more months of this series, and nearly 90 more potential candidates that I originally identified in a Letterboxd list back at the start of the year. Maybe I'll need to start making more purposeful choices. Then again, there's nothing to keep me from continuing to rewatch these older films in 2024, just for my own pleasure ... of which they have been providing me quite a lot. 

Reichardt during MIFF, if not actually at MIFF

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But first, one tomorrow night and one Friday night.

MIFF in 3D, ASMR, and Wes Anderson squeezed in

My third night of MIFF, which included MIFF viewings four and five for this year, was stretched into a triple feature thanks to some clever schedule cramming on my part.

One of the challenges a critic faces each year is to keep up with new theatrical releases while the Melbourne International Film Festival is in progress, a task complicated by trying not to trample on the good graces of the critic's wife. And there was a movie dropping during MIFF this year that I felt like I just had to review on ReelGood, because our readers would ask after it if I didn't.

So yes, I caught one train early to work on Friday and left in time to see the 4 o'clock showing of Asteroid City downstairs from my office, before the 6:30 start of my MIFF double feature.

It worked out unexpectedly well, with no desperate rushing. The only thing I couldn't do was walk from Cinema Kino at the end of Collins Street to the Hoyts at Melbourne Central between the 6 p.m. ending of Asteroid City and the 6:30 p.m. start of Anselm. So I just took a free tram instead, and arrived with plenty of time to get my 3D glasses and find a good seat.

Yes, I said 3D glasses. And yes, I'm skipping over discussing Asteroid City -- I'll have a review up in a day or two -- to get to the first actual MIFF film.

And in a festival where I always make note of firsts when they occur, this was definitely my first MIFF film in 3D.

We tend to think of 3D as being reserved for your Avatars or your Marvels or for some other big-canvas film that was obviously designed with the most methods of upselling the customer in mind, but 3D does occasionally make its appearances in the arthouse as well. One example that comes to mind was when Gaspar Noe made his film Love in 3D. I didn't see it that way, but the experience of watching a penis ejaculate off the screen at me would have probably been worth the price of admission.

Anselm doesn't have any ejaculating penises, but it couldn't get any more arthouse, being a documentary about an artist as it is. The artist is Anselm Kiefer, about whom I had never heard prior to this film, despite a career in the public eye that dates all the way back to the 1960s. The German sculptor and painter uses a variety of forms to confront the viewer as well as to interrogate German history, particularly the Holocaust. One memorable installation of his, which is somewhat the centerpiece of this film, involves fancy 19th century dresses posed on armature, but instead of a head coming out of the top, there's a stack of bricks, or a sundial, or some other blossoming feature that gives them an alien quality. We also see his process of covering a large canvas in straw, igniting it in flame, dousing the flames with water and then painting over the charred remains of the surface of the canvas. 

Watching the film -- which was directed by Wim Wenders, I should say -- was overall impressive, despite periods when I thought it was becoming tedious and was waiting for it to end. As a documentary, it leaves you disoriented for quite some time, as it introduces Kiefer through his works and the poetry of Paul Celan more than any narrative about his life or career reliant on talking heads. We do get a clear sense of his influences and the phases of his career over the course of the film, and it wouldn't be accurate to say Anselm is difficult to follow, to the extent that you are trying to follow it -- it's more like a walk through one of his installations, in a glorious third dimension that makes you feel like you are really there. However, that also made it feel more like something I would watch in a museum than in a movie theater. So while I didn't love it, I respected it enough that it will make for a good next MIFF review on ReelGood, well in advance of its final showing next Saturday afternoon.

Unlike my third movie of the night, the Kiwi film Shut Eye, directed by Tom Levesque. He and star Sarah May were both in attendance, so I made sure to hightail it out of there before the Q&A session began. As the film was going on, I tried to think of a decent question to ask them, since I hate that awkwardness of no one asking the filmmakers anything about their film that they are obviously very proud of. When I decided I couldn't think of anything I could legitimately ask where I actually cared about the answer, I decided just to get out of there so I wouldn't have to witness it, if indeed that was what was about to go down.

To be fair, I might have been in a better mood for Shut Eye if a) I'd liked Anselm a little bit better, b) I'd had enough time after the movie to get the wantons I wanted to get (I think the place I used to go has shut down, and I didn't really have the time anyway) instead of the lukewarm pizza slices I ended up buying from one of those places that sells them by the slice, or c) it weren't my third film of the day. 

The film concerns a woman named Sierra (Millie Van Kol) who has insomnia and severe wallflower tendencies, who becomes obsessed with an ASMR live streamer (May). I'd found myself interested in the film for two reasons. For one, it was giving me Ingrid Goes West vibes, that having also been a film I saw (and loved) at MIFF. Then there's the fact that I find ASMR fascinating. A couple years ago I thought I was going to get into ASMR and even subscribed to a channel on YouTube, though ultimately, I only watched one or two videos back at that time.

The movie is curiously ambiguous about what it actually wants to be. Yes I suppose Sierra does become obsessed with May's Kate, but only because the streamer originally reaches out to her to ask if she wants to hang out. This seems like strange behavior for the internet's version of a public figure to reach out to a rando in her viewing audience, when the rando has only posted some shallow ALL CAPS thoughts with every word abbreviated to the point of being nearly unintelligible. Why pick out this one person on what appears to be a healthy stream of other comments? And why confuse us about who is obsessed with whom?

And these AMSR videos bothered me to no end due to a failure by the filmmakers to notice a particular design detail. You know how when you are watching a livestream, there's that little icon that shows you how many others are also watching? I noticed that this ASMR streamer had 506 other viewers in the first stream Sierra attends, which I thought seemed like a decent amount and made it all the more unlikely that she would pick Sierra out for personal engagement. And then I noticed that through perhaps four other distinct streams, each time she has exactly 506 viewers. I can't believe no one noticed this at any point in the editing process.

I'll stop dunking on this small film from New Zealand, I promise, but I did want to say that its biggest missed opportunity was how it used, or rather failed to use, ASMR. The fact that the ASMR helps Sierra get to sleep creates the opportunity for some really interesting sound design and the chance to explore other themes related specifically to ASMR and in what way this comforts Sierra. Unfortunately, ASMR ultimately has very little to do with anything else in the story -- this person could have been playing with her electric train set just as easily as she could have been crinkling candy wrappers into microphones for all it ultimately has to do with the true themes of the film, which arrive rather suddenly at the end and without sufficient preparation within the dialogue.

Okay, my next MIFF outing is on Wednesday.

Lots of stray Strays

Cinema history is littered with the same ideas coming to the screen at the same time in two or more different movies. A less common phenomenon, though one we do see on occasion, is movies with the same title coming to the screen at the same time. Just two years ago I had two movies called Swan Song that both made my top 20 of the year.

I'm not sure I remember, though, an occasion where two movies had (almost) the same title and came out in the same year, where it would be this much of a grave mistake to confuse one for the other.

One of the first movies I saw this year was called The Strays. It's a Netflix original directed by Nathaniel Martello-White, and it's a button-pushing psychological drama involving shame over racial identity, a home invasion, and threats of violence, some of which tips over into actual violence.

Next week, I will likely not be seeing a movie called Strays, which is about talking dogs.

I would hope that a parent looking for entertainment for their child on Netflix would not get very far into The Strays before realizing the mistake. This poster, or whatever artwork accompanies it on Netflix, would likely be enough.

Then again, we often see examples of the world's dumber people doing things that beggar belief, so we can't be sure of this. 

It's not actually a very popular title overall, though there is also a currently running TV show called Strays. Vin Diesel made a movie in 1997 called Strays, and there's also a 1991 TV movie and a 2011 short. 

I hope at least that parents turn off The Strays before one character forces another character to hold a massive weight above his chest in bench press form, a weight the second person cannot hold forever, leading to the off-screen crunching noise of a rib cage caving in. That probably won't help make any children in the audience much more likely to want a pet. 

Wait a second hold on here ...

As I was just getting the art for this post, I noticed that Strays -- the one about the talking dogs -- is rated R. It apparently contains "pervasive language, crude and sexual content, and drug use." Wow, I had no idea.

So I guess maybe parents shouldn't be showing their kids either of these movies ... and I am now slightly more likely to see the one of the two I haven't yet seen.

MIFF: Mid

My children have recently introduced me to a bit of slang they say to each other, sometimes about each other if they're being nasty: "mid."

According to Urban Dictionary, it's synonymous with the words/phrases "low quality," "trashy," "not so good" and "bad."

However, in my own understanding, it's more like "mediocre" in the most pejorative sense of that word. Something that's "mid" is somehow worse than something that's bad, in my way of thinking, because its very mediocrity makes it boring, whereas something bad at least holds your interest.

The word "mid" immediately occurred to me after my Sunday night viewing, my third viewing overall, at this year's Melbourne International Film Festival. Before I could even say it, though, my wife came out with another synonym, saying "That was very medium."

Indeed.

It Lives Inside interested us because it seemed like kind of a mix of something recognizable (a horror genre film) and something a bit unfamiliar (seen through the eyes of an Indian-American teenager and using some of her cultural heritage for its themes and imagery). As I started watching I realized that Megan Suri, recently of Never Have I Ever, was the lead, and Betty Gabriel, not so recently of Get Out, appeared in a supporting role, both positives in terms of the film's potential.

Potential it did not live up to.

It was a rare MIFF screening for my wife and me, who most often go to films separately. In fact, had we ever been to a MIFF screening together, outside of the premiere of the film she worked on back in 2019? Possibly not. 

We had a drink beforehand at bar in the midst of the Yarra River, which you get to by bridge. It's one of our favorite spots for a drink, but unfortunately, only I made a good choice. Considering how brisk it was, mulled wine felt like it would hit the spot, and did. However, she got something with mezcal, whose smoky flavor was entirely incongruous with its translucent appearance, and in all ways unappetizing. 

We also grabbed a slice of pizza before showing up at ACMI, which has some of the largest seating capacities of any venue at MIFF. Unfortunately, in this case that tended to emphasize how comparatively undersold the film was. Maybe that's not unexpected, especially if people had been MIFFing all weekend and felt that Sunday at 6:45 was time enough to be winding down.

And really this isn't the sort of movie you need to see at MIFF. It has such standard-issue horror components that anything potentially interesting about the heritage of its lead character was lost. In my mind I was likening it to the really good Iranian horror Under the Shadow, which does use aspects of Islam in its portrayal of the spirit haunting a Tehran apartment building. The creature here has multiple incarnations, as if the filmmakers were restlessly searching for a consistent visual scheme, and none of them really have anything to do with Hindu culture, as far as I could tell. 

Plus, the most interesting scenes always involved the character waking up in bed, revealing that it had just been a dream. And once they even do the "dream within a dream" bit, which is desperate at best.

I'll be desperate -- well, at least "mid" desperate -- to get back on track at MIFF when I resume with a double feature on Friday.

King Darren: Noah

This is the fourth in my 2023 bi-monthly series revisiting the films of Darren Aronofsky, in the year after he became the first director to direct two of my year-end #1s.

I've always sort of though of Noah (2014) as the exception in Darren Aronofsky's career, the film you can't quite account for, except that's not really right for two reasons:

1) I don't think it's really possible to pin down what makes a Darren Aronofsky film. The two films I'm not rewatching for this series, because I already rewatched them in the past two years for other reasons, are The Fountain and The Wrestler, and I don't think two films could be more different from one another. And those are two consecutive films in his filmography.

2) The familiar ingredients you can identify in Aronofsky's films are certainly present in Noah.

That might be even more the case now that I've seen mother! -- not once, not twice, but three times, with a fourth coming in October for this series. Famously, you can interpret mother! multiple ways. Some people think it's a metaphor for the artist's creative process. Some people think it's an environmental parable. And then of course, most obviously -- to me, anyway -- it is a representation of The Bible, or at least certain parts of it anyway.

It strikes me that if Aronofsky was frustrated by the end product of Noah, probably his least acclaimed film, it might have been because it was just too literal. Biblical epics tend to be so. I don't have any evidence that Aronofsky does think this, but mother! is a good indication that he yearned to be more inscrutable than a fairly straightforward retelling of a Bible story allows you to be. 

Some of what we see in mother!, though, has its origins right there in Noah. (And these two are also consecutive films, which makes more sense than The Fountain and The Wrestler.) In the scene where Russell Crowe's title character goes to the city to find wives for his sons, and is so horrified by the exact level of misery and degradation and moral pestilence that exists there, he sees an innocent lamb raised high by the teeming masses, who proceed to tear it to pieces. That same thing happens -- mostly off screen, thankfully -- to an infant in mother!

Destruction and rebirth is a big theme in mother!, and naturally that's also a big part of any story involving the flood that destroyed all land-based creatures on earth except for two of each. 

(Now what will I have to discuss two months from now, when I actually watch mother!?)

But you can also look back to Aronofsky's earlier efforts when you watch Noah. The original sin montage -- snake, apple, Cain killing Abel -- is basically his updated version of the drug-taking montage in Requiem for a Dream. Plus, you can't see the flowering garden of Eden and not thinking of the tree of life in The Fountain.

So while I do think this fits in Aronofsky's career better than I once did, I'm not sure if I like it all that much better.

I was thinking that this movie basically has three visual modes, only one of which I actually like. I'll go with that one first:

1) Trippy conceptual shit. The aforementioned original sin montage fits into that, as does the conception of Adam and Eve as glowing white figures in the conclusion of Noah's story to his family about creation. The fast-growing flower is part of that as well. All this stuff works and it has an enviable crispness.

2) Digital effects. The arrival of the animals, and of course, the giant rock creatures that help Noah build the arc. I guess they're fallen angels turned into protectors? Right, they call them Watchers (just looked it up). I'm not sure if this is actually from The Bible (probably), but it reminded me of something that should have been in a Lord of the Rings movie ... but wouldn't have been great there either.

3) Drab scenes of humans glumly fighting and arguing with each other.

I'm not sure if it would have been possible to see through the first visual scheme all the way. But the digital effects -- which are fine, but suffer from the same essential problems as most digital effects -- and the people playing dress-up in a Bible epic don't serve the part of the movie that I think most had Aronofsky's heart in it.

Not as a complaint about this film in particular, but I also found myself asking all sorts of questions about the logistics of this whole Bible story, such as:

1) How are the descendants of Cain so plentiful yet the descendants of Seth so few? I get the basic premise that the Cain descendants sinfully spread their seed and multiplied beyond any sense of what God would have found decent -- kind of how the dumb people flourish in Idiocracy due to their unrestrained baby-making, while the prudent smart people die off due to their desire to wait until "the perfect time" to have kids. But are the Seth descendants so prudish that there is literally only one family of them remaining -- after ten generations? And if that's not a correct reading, and there are other Seth descendants around, what's God's explanation for wantonly killing them off in the flood as well?

2) And speaking of people God wantonly kills off, if the animals are innocent, how come he doesn't save all the animals? He keeps the minimum sample necessary for procreation of all species, including humans, regardless of whether they are saintly or sinful. It seems like a rather cruel treatment of the innocent ones, but perhaps more importantly, it represents no distinction made between humans and animals -- even though the humans are the ones he wants to purge. I guess God's hatred for humans was so great that sacrificing 99.9% of the earth's land-based animals was worth killing 99.9% of its humans.

3) I also found myself wondering how much of this is Aronofsky's interpretation of The Bible and how much is actually in there. Not wondering enough about it to look it up, apparently, but I did wonder: Was there really a Cain stowaway on the ark who tried to turn one of Noah's son's against him? Did Noah really plan to have humans die out because that was his interpretation of what God was doing, even if it meant killing his own granddaughters because they had wombs? (Beware religious fundamentalists, then as now.) If Noah's sons didn't have wives -- except for the suddenly not barren one played by Emma Watson -- how was there supposed to be enough biological diversity to prevent extreme forms of mental and physical deformity resulting from incest? When Watson gives birth to twin girls -- meaning each one can be a wife to Noah's two other sons -- is that any way to build a society full of healthy offspring? To say nothing of it being really icky to have to marry your nieces. 

It strikes me that God should have picked about four Noahs and had them make about four arcs and then had them all meet up to repopulate the earth with babies that didn't have a third ear growing out of their foreheads.

Let's end on a positive note.

One of my favorite scenes in the movie was still one of my favorite scenes, and it's really just a throwaway. When the flood waters have risen above people's ability to survive them -- conveniently, with blasts of water gushing from the earth, which is probably more dramatic and narratively efficient than weeks of unending rain -- earth's final survivors all cling, screaming, to what must be the only remaining crags of dry land, which would also be the world's highest mountains. (Did Mt. Everest exist in Biblical times?) The image of the ark floating mercilessly in the background as these little specks of people scrabble for purchase and emit their blood-curdling despair is something that really stuck with me in 2014, and still does.

I knew I had written about this already on The Audient, and only after writing the above did I go back to read that post from 2014. It's funny how little the things I thought were worth highlighting about the movie have changed in the nine years since I first saw it. You can read that post here if you are really curious and if this is not already enough coverage of one of Darren Aronofsky's lesser films. 

Alright, I previewed it already -- in October I watch mother!, for the fourth time (but first in about four years).