For unto you this day, a lamb is born

As I continue to cram movies before my 2021 list closes in a couple weeks, there's only one reason I take a night off: total cumulative exhaustion. That means there's a movie all other nights, even Christmas Eve -- or Christmas itself, when you start watching the movie at 11:15 and don't finish until nearly 3 a.m. (I think Santa tiptoed through the living room while I was sleeping on a bean bag on the floor, my movie paused with about 20 minutes remaining.)

Christmas Eve was actually a two-movie night, considering that we did watch Elf -- again a big hit as it always is. That properly put us in the Christmas spirit that loaned an additional frisson of excitement to our remaining annual Christmas Eve traditions before the kids went to bed.

The goal for the second movie, on this holiest of nights (note my playful sarcasm), is to watch something that's compatible with Christmas -- or at least, not incompatible with it.

I took a gamble on Vladimar Johannsson's Lamb, knowing it had been chattered about joyously by cinephiles, knowing it might be batshit crazy, knowing it would push the limits of "not incompatible."

As it turns out, this is a lot more of a Christmas movie than you would ever guess.

LAMB SPOILERS TO FOLLOW

For starters, the very first image you see is wild horses trotting through a snow-swept Icelandic landscape. Snow is something I desperately need to be reminded of here in Australia, where it was hot enough yesterday for the kids to go swimming in our pool -- the fifth consecutive day of doing so since we arrived on Monday. And the horses? They easily reminded me of reindeer.

Then we go to sheep in a barn, surrounded by straw. It was very manger-like.

The icicles hanging from the barn continued that necessary dose of winter chill. 

Then we go to the house, to a man and a woman. She's wearing a festive red outfit and carrying a roast. There are candles lit and hymns playing. The movie doesn't specifically say so, but this could actually be Christmas night itself. The woman looks sad, though, so it's a melancholy Christmas, for reasons we will soon discover, related to the loss of a child.

Fast forward to what appears to be that spring. The man and the woman are delivering baby lambs. One particular baby is "special," possibly due to some sort of "immaculate conception," though we don't immediately learn what her special attributes are. We just know the man and the woman look at each other with a certain gravity leavened by hope, and begin taking care of the lamb in their own home, swaddling her, sleeping her in a cradle, feeding her bottles of milk.

It may be another ten or 15 minutes before we finally see that while this creature has the head of a lamb, it has the body of a human girl. 

"Immaculate conception" indeed. I mean, neither of them had sex with a sheep, did they? I suppose it would have to have been him. It wasn't an immaculate conception, but we go through much of the movie thinking it might have been before another batshit crazy reveal.

It wasn't boredom with Lamb that caused me to take naps during its second half, and, as I learned from reading the plot synopsis afterward, to sleep through about ten minutes of the action. No, the movie just succumbed to the same fate as every other movie I've watched during this epic week of moving into our new house and preparing for Christmas. I pressed on despite massive evidence of the "cumulative physical exhaustion" I mentioned earlier as a reason not to watch a movie, only yielding to that sensible advice on December 23rd, when I just couldn't fool myself into the attempt. 

But after today, after we host local relatives for a big Christmas lunch, and show them our new house for the first time, I can finally relax -- and maybe get through a movie without a half-dozen naps and finally retreating to my bed closer to breakfast than dinner. 

Merry Christmas all, and a lamby new year. 

A breakdown in methods of distinguishing

HRAFF is upon us again -- you know, that's the Human Rights Arts & Film Festival, which I have been helping curate for two years now. Opening night was last Thursday night with The Opposition, followed by much drunkenness on free wine. Sunday night was the first of two regular sessions I'm attending before closing night on May 18th.

That was the lovely Ethiopian movie Lamb, directed by an Ethiopian named Yared Zeleke. It's a feature that I did not see in the course of helping select the films, and it is the second movie named Lamb I've seen with a release year of 2015.

The first was directed by Ross Partridge, an American who also stars in the film.

Both posters appear here.

The seeing of this second movie, lovely though it was, has thrown my lists into disarray.

Normally, when I see two movies with the same name, I distinguish them in my lists by including the release year in parentheses afterward. But this is the first time in my long history of watching movies -- exactly 4,800 with my Sunday night viewing of Get Out -- that I have seen two movies released in the same year with the same name.

So to fix it, I wrote them as Lamb (2015, Ross Partridge) and Lamb (2015, Yared Zeleke), though I did not like doing so.

It may seem like a small point, but ... well, it is a small point. There is no "but."

Wikipedia handles the distinction slightly differently, calling them Lamb (2015, American film) and Lamb (2015, Ethiopian film). Wikipedia does not consider its readers to know or care who Ross Patridge and Yared Zeleke are, or more to the point, does not consider the director of a film to be its most salient distinguishing characteristic. And they're probably right, that country of origin is a more universal distinguishing method.

Me? Country's not such a great idea, but I now know that I will accept director as a secondary distinguishing characteristic, if release year fails. And the actual way of writing it has precedent as that's how I display the titles, release years and directors of films in my Most Recently Seen lists to the right on this blog.

If there are ever two films directed by the same director in the same year, I don't know what I'll do -- though I can only imagine that happening if a director was so successful with a short film that someone immediately handed him or her the money to make it into a feature, and somehow that feature was released in the same calendar year.

The Lamb/Lamb problem could have been resolved if only release year were determined by theatrical release date, as part of me argues it should be. But I suppose it was hard to really consider Partridge's version a 2016 film when it played at South by Southwest in March of 2015, only finally attaining a limited release in January of 2016 after playing countless other festivals. (Okay, I counted them -- there were only six.)

Zeleke's film is a bit more definitively a 2015 film, having premiered at Cannes that year and having not to this date attained a U.S. release date (because come on, the U.S. is really what we're talking here, isn't it? Even though I live in Australia). Though it did get a theatrical release in Frances, Germany, Denmark, Spain and Mexico, of all places. And, of course, Ethiopia. I suppose going by the logic of theatrical release dates, Lamb could actually be a 2017 or even 2018 film, if it ever does get that U.S. release. Its Australian release is certainly in 2017, if we are going to count HRAFF, its Australian premiere.

So I guess I have seen either two or zero films named Lamb released in the year 2015.

That really clears things up.