Review: and another THING!

Did you ever wonder just what went on before the opening scene of John Carpenter's 1982 remake of The Thing? Nor did I. It's really pretty well explained in the first act of that film and the ensuing acts demonstrate it. The dogs, the search through Norwegian station, the icebound spacecraft, the mayhem back at base. It's all there.

So, someone caught the now popular meme that the only two movies that have survived the remake treatment with honour are Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (twice!) and The Thing. Like a lot of people to whom that thought occured I believed I'd discovered it. It's a strong demonstration of exception proving rule. So what's to lose by taking that one up? Read on.

Ok, plot. Fade in to the great white Antarctic, sweeping strings whose tonality bears a striking resemblance to ... you get the idea. Three Norwegians are travelling o'er the ice in a truck with tracks. You know they're Norwegian because their unsubtitled dialogue sounds like the chef from the Muppets. But the guy in front is telling a joke to the driver and the guy in the back is getting worried about some readings on an instrument that we don't need identified. The truck suddenly falls through a thin stretch of ice and lodges between the walls of a huge fissure, through which we see a spacecraft the size of Greater Geelong. A light suddenly gleams from its centre.

Cut to a lab at McMurdo Station, home of the good guys, the people who speak 'mer'can. A young woman in Antarctic fatigues listens to a year-marking Men at Work track on her walkman headphones. Enter a clean, ash blonde, humourless and so immediately suspect older man who speaks in an accent which casts him far from the safety of 'mer'ca (ie he's the baddie and shall be hoist on his own petar in due course). He's one of the Norwegians and he's looking for a paleantologist. He's found one. Right! Everybody in the chopper!

Back at the Norwegian camp they find a creature, dig it up and suffer the consequences finding out along the way that it can replicate any living thing it comes across. This offers an opportunity for this film to replicate the earlier version's powerful blood test scene but wait, there's something clever they're doing with it. But it isn't really, it's just a way of acknowledging the source material and claiming a smidge of originality to keep the meme about remake-able films hale and hearty. End of original stamp. Everything else you see on screen in this outing was done in Carpenter's version. The SFX are superior but expectably so that they just run by. Oh that's happening. Oh that's happening. Right. There's a famous moment in the 1982 version where a character witnesses something bizarre and speaks for the audience when he intones: "you gotta be fucking kidding me!" No chance of that here.

There are two aspects of Carpenter's version that are notably absent here: he honed in on one theme, trust, and steered through it with an unflinching hand, knowing its potential to create situations of tension and horror; Carpenter was working with his first sizeable budget but still thought like an indy director, allowing for nothing that didn't serve to squeeze the narrative to claustrophobic tightness until the climax which blazed gigantically by comparison. This prequel, already hampered by its audience's guaranteed awareness of the groundbreaking earlier version, makes the mistake of both trying to extend the '82 one backwards as well as provide something new. It was doomed to fail on both accounts and does. Worse, it provides none of the suspense of the earlier film, keeping its unmanageably large cast muddling the waters until in desperation it has to remove them just to clear the stage for the great drama hiding at its centre. Trouble is when that happens there's nothing left but routine. The final scene of Carpenter's film is funny, unsettling and despairing all at once, an intimate and inesacpable truth delivered as a kind of joke. The ending of this one has already been told in the beginning of that one. I know that's the idea but I also know that when it happens it just ... happens.

I hate claiming expertise in what movies should be rather than what they present themselves to be but I can't help but feel that if anything it might have benefited from the weary found footage approach which can effectively withhold information until its potential matures. Not here.

The Thing's hold on the title of repeatable films (owner of said title since the 2000's remake of Bodysnatchers dropped the pod)  has loosened. Not forever perhaps but the only reason that Carpenter's is on a par with the Hawks/Nyby original is the further originality he poured into it. That's just not present here.

Oh (this time for real) and another thing! There's a great fact about the '82 version: finally having enough money to hire a great composer for the score he got Ennio Morricone on board who delivered exactly the kind of music Carpenter himself might have written for the movie. Morricone had been a fan of Carpenter's movie music for years (understandably, it's brilliant). The score to the 2011 film is like none of that ever happened. Someone picked it off a shelf at Woolies and gave it to an orchestra. It sounds like there's an old school action movie happening in the next soundstage. New approach? Nope, same damn Thing!

MIFF 2011 Summary

That's it for 2011. It was a richer experience than  the past few. Highlights? I've already reviewed each film I saw so I'll start with something phsyical and trivial. I all but gave up queueing this year. Over last few years I've obviated something that used to make me gnaw things. I sit at the front. Third from is best but if that's gone the very front row is fine, too. As long as it's central. At that short distance your position gets very important.

It took me years to realise and relax about the fact that most people choose the middle rows and many even prefer the back. Now I only have to count every occasion when I've lined up around the corner on Russell St for a film at the Forum, standing for forty-five minutes in the cold and rain only to get the exact seat I wanted. I never failed to get my ideal seat this year only this year I only queued for three films. The rest I was able to swan in close to the screening time and take up my post.

This means that the sole attraction of membership has now disappeared. On those few occasions when I stood in queues outside the Russell and saw the members gathered at ease around a blazing privilege I thought I probably should have .... but no... Also, this year there was a lot more avoiding long unmoving queues by allowing people in a little ahead of time.

I've read on other blogs and heard in conversation with fellow punters of some atrocities of scale among audiences. I'm happy to say I didn't witness any. Some vague growls at the behaviour of the kind of goose who cannot tell cinema from loungeroom, perhaps but nothing egregious. Oh, well there was that guy with the dark ages body odour which made me find another seat but apart from that not even feet on the backs of seats. Are people getting used to cinema etiquette again or is it just old and/or gentle people like me who sit at the front?

I should also point out here that crowd control has not only got more efficient this year but that they seem to be a much nicer bunch. I hope that whoever did the recruiting for the misanthropes of previous years had a chance to catch some flix at this years' turnout. Eyes open.

The range was good for me, including two new ones from a favourite director, an exhilarating gut punch of a horror film that might suggest that the country that both consolidated and castrated the genre can still produce serious and powerful examples of it. The Woman is my pick of the bunch with its unironic embrace of tough eviscerating horror. Anyone who knows me personally knows that I don't have to elaborate on that statement to suggest why it might be my best of the fest. Maybe the way o' the future? End of Animal delighted both with its courage of its central conceit and faith renewal in what South Korea has brought to the table of imaginative and grotesque cinema. A debut feature I'll be hunting down and then seeking further work from the same. Attenberg provided a quite beautiful last movement to the festival. Was it really from the same team that produced the scarifying Dogtooth?

Even the middling entries had some merit. I didn't hate anything outright though I was increasingly unamused at Morgan Spurlock's new self promotion and wince at the extra luggage Errol Morris added to his otherwise tight story of scandal and elusive truth, Tabloid. Innocent Saturday worked a street level view of a major disaster and made some sly points about the society that allowed the disaster to escalate. The Silence of Joan struck me as Kubrick's lessons learned and applied.  Play, The Solitude of Prime Numbers and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia all show enough promise for me to follow the careers of their creators at least beyond the toe test. The urban folk of A Stoker passed easily, keeping within its welcome with a brief running time and plain rather than dull script.

Strange to see Sion Sono straightening up with two classical three act narratives. Both Cold Fish and Guilty of Romance played out in more or less linear fashion developing their themes efficiently along with their stories' momentum. Both good, engaging works but I was missing the weird flamboyant blend of grotesque and often anti narrative style of Strange Circus or Noriko's Dinner Table. I know, I should stop being such a fanboy, grow up and realise that every artist needs room to breathe and develop and this can often necessitate some relief time from the very thing that brought attention to them in the first place.

These two films reminded me of another occasion at a long gone MIFF when I was disappointed at Takeshi Miike's One Missed Call. I did my damnedest to imbue the film with great irony as the shock meister's take on J-horror. But really, it was just him trying it out. Good film but he came from and continued to better and more original. See also Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Loft and Doppelganger. Both disappointments I actually felt embarrrassed by. Gone was the singular grip on horror that he used on Kairo, Cure and Kourei and here were goofy winks that put distance between him and what had made his career.

A reversal of this directed my choice away from seeing Bela Tarr's The Turin Horse. Yes, I go on about how much I appreciate filmmakers who can reduce or abandon narrative structure and forge strong works of fiction. But it was seeing the water-treading Man From London a few years back and then the seven plus hours of his more acclaimed Satantango that had me finally nixing the new one as a choice (right up to the hour of its first, reportedly disastrous, screening). My somewhat uncharacteristic circuit breaker was a preemptive zombified boredom at two and a half hours of worthy nothing. I know better than this. Uncle Boonmee which does very similar things is a favourite of mine from the past few years and Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies is one of my favourites from the last two decades. Both of those have what most of Tarr's films lack, and it ain't long takes and careful studies of landscape and human behaviour however still it can get (I love seeing that work); they have warmth and whimsy to enrich what is already rich but never fulsome. So, no Turin Horse for this bum on seat.

All up a fun fest, catching up with folk o'er a hot flick and quenching it with an ale at the Forum lounge (always a pleasure). Oh, kudos, too, to the makers of this year's festival promos which proved well conceived and actually funny (and after more than one viewing). For once I didn't dread the next iteration of the inspired by committee promo after the still ads. The MIFF Tales 60th anniversary vignettes were also good but usually screened when the audience was still gobbling and texting. I only heard the audio of these on about two occasions. Start times were pretty much observed (memories of being full-bladdered in the queue for INLAND EMPIRE while the previous session's Q&A dragged on ... then there was the three hour film to get through). I did notice the lack of shorts before features this year but if that means that screening times were easier to organise then I'll put up with that. Still...

I initially frowned at the uncharacteristically high number of US indies in the program but then remembered that without a real arthouse scene in this city even these will probably plummet into obscurity without festival support, as much as any Armenian noir or Peruvian ghost tale.

Joke of the festival goes to my friend Tatiana who texted from the mangled screening of The Turin Horse that the endless long takes were like "waiting for Godard". I'm ashamed to report that I, Godard fan, Beckett fan and mashup fan, didn't think of that myself.

MIFF session 13 (final): Attenberg

A white wall. Seconds later the same white wall. Its texture of plaster pocks and flaking paint becomes interesting. Bela Tarr's idea about long takes and the creativity of the audience comes to the fore. Then, just as I was going to happily meditate on time and entropy two young women approach each other from each side of the screen. They stop short of an intimate space and gingerly crane their necks to bring their faces together in a kiss. But it is the kind of kiss two gekos might give each other. They are working out the process. Their dialogue has the naive lilt of absurdism. Unsuccessful, they assume the roles of fighting cats, snarling and clawing.

The blonde woman, Marina, waits at her father's side in hospital and at home, as he goes through treatment for a condition that, while undisclosed, appears to be terminal. Their continued dalogue soon becomes the focus of the film. What a relief it was to witness the examination of developing grief enacted in a perfectly functional father daughter bond. Their conversations touch on all that concerns them in the light of his impending death and are a realistic blend of grimness, fear and humour.

The third strain of this film is Marina's growing experimetation with sex and love. She works as a chauffeur for the local mining company and strikes up a relationship with a young visiting contractor. Step by step the awkward pair travel to their consumation which, though unerotic to the eye, is trauma free.

The first strain, which gives the film its title, develops into a series of odd dance duets which look like a mix of chrorus line routines and animal behaviour seen on David Attenborough documentaries (Bella, the brunette, misprononounces the name as Attenberg).

If all this sounds like Ingmar Bergman does Wes Anderson allow me to disabuse. The central relationship between father and daughter gathers a quiet but powerful momentum and while humour and whimsy trade time in their talk with the details of cremation (currently illegal in the film's native Greece necessitating complicated organisation to effect. The mounting gravity of this and its effect on Marina managed to bring me ust short of tears with its quiet and dignified intensity.

Marina's odd friendship with Bella, mostly the dances but also a number of dialogues that while funny reveal strong differences between the two. Quirky exchanges, often funny but never cloyingly cute, they place Marina in her self-limited social realm. This strain coalesces with a gentle power with the main, providing the finale with a reinforced sense of transition.

This is low-narrative filmmaking that prefers emtional movement over character motivation or the three acts. It is still fiction, though and yet more proof that fiction can play without narrative and still engage its audience. Because of this, Attenberg must take longer to settle into its rhythms and carefully guide its viewers away from the expectation of narrative and allow them to savour the work of a sturdy cast and some individualistic writing. Seldom has grief felt so light and yet so like grief.

An easy and fitting farewell to the festival.

MIFF session 12: Guilty of Romance

Two detectives find a bizarrely arranged body in a rainy alley in Tokyo's red light district. What at first looks like the corpse of a murdered prostitute becomes sections of  a woman's body with parts of a mannequin replacing what has been taken from the body. Another corpse, identically arranged is found in a nearby low rent apartment. The two complete a single body ... almost. The head, hands and genitalia have not been recovered.
Izumi is a young housewife who perfects the details of her husband's domestic life. Her constant rearrangement of his house slippers in the moments before his entrance looks like OCD at first but when he comes through the door and inserts his feet into them he congratulates her on their positioning. "You're improving," he tells her. She blushes and bows, delighted. The evening passes from the silence that accompanies his reading, through a sexless marriage bed, to the morning's parting ritual which will be reversed at the end of the day.

He is a writer of popular but trashy sex novels which we see him reading before adoring fans. She is allowed a career at the local supermarket pushing rubbish from the frozen goods section on to listless shoppers (you know her from your own supermarket whenever you politely refuse the satay chilli egg solutions sizzling on the grill as a host of cold ones lie scattered on a paper plate....anyway....) Here she is spotted by a pinku agent who coaxes her into a more lucrative career which occasions what seems to be her life's first orgasm.

Radient (everyone is saying so) with a new taste for the nasty and flavoursome she ventures into the realm of the Love Hotel and there meets a pimp who at first seems to be a street performer and, through him, Mitsuko, a wild and ageing beauty who promises an even more lucrative career than before. These two get on from the word go. Just as she had radiated admiration at her husband's readings she now does as much at her new mentor and friend's daytime work, lecturing in poetry at the local elite university.

The journey from here to the corpse of the opening is intriguing and pacey. As always with a Sion Sono film, for each splash of hedonism we get some extra depth as a counterweight. The everpresent theme of identity returns but here is given new faces as these two women's lives and wishes twine with increasing tightness. Central to this is the notion of women empowering themselves through sexual allure: is it buying in or playing strings?

Sono is often described as a transgressive filmmaker but I think that does him a disservice. As his control over his medium has visibly increased so has his power to metre his content. What once was shock value is now more firmly contextualised and so more powerful  (the violence of this and Cold Fish bear witness). If he was a bad boy once his excesses have led him to become a wise man.

MIFF session 11: Innocent Saturday

Dark blue night. Young Valery, an industrial trainer, walks nervously along a walkway in a gigantic industrial complex. He is recognised by someone in a passing car. They exchange urgent but fragmented information. Valery is taken through part of the interior of the complex by a colleague who warns him against panic. He stumbles into a meeting of men variously dressed industrially or in business suits. The talk is apocalyptic. One says it will be worse than Hiroshima. Another rejoins that what they need is another Nagasaki. Ukraine, spring 1986, welcome to Chernobyl.

A particularly  bullish apparatchik shouts his way into control of the talk and, seeing the lowly instructor, makes him swear an oath of silence. He is then free to go. He walks back to town as dawn breaks and is accosted by another colleague who seems to have been hit with the medieval martyr stick. He has been to the core, seen the great power slowly waking through exposure. It was so beautiful and humbling that he felt like diving in. Valery leaves him on the road. The inspired man starts coughing. We won't see him again.

A little later, Valery bustles his way into his girlfriend Vera's worker's dorm, pulling her by the elbow from the line of them as they file out. He explains the situation hurriedly and begs her to dress and go with him to the train station. Their run to the station, using shaky cam and it wayward focus is strong visualisation of a panic kept secret in a crowd. It's spring, labour day and everyone is happily in short sleeves in the sunshine. Only two people among them know that the sunshine and fresh air will soon turn to poison. They reach the station in time to see what will surely be the last train pull out and leave them there, sentenced to either cataclysm or decades of slow death. We linger on their faces. We need to.

What follows is a number of small circumstances that contrive to get Vera and Valery into a wedding party and keep them there. He fights through the rejoicing crowd the same way he might have to fight through another very soon. This drunken one is no better than the imaginable survivalist one as both are large groups of people continually colliding in celebration of life but condemned to death.

This party is where the majority of the film takes place and while it can drag the sense of hopelessness that its claustrophobia grinds soon becomes the central point of the film. These people have nowhere to go that will free them from their doom. This might be enough but as Valery rejoins his old cronies in the wedding band and plays part of their gig with them, another theme emerges which touches on the use made by the Soviet system of fear and personal gain achieved through betrayal. Valery, like the machine he's bolted himself into, uses his knowledge now the same way he once did. Much of the film sees him trying to undo the opportunism of his past through good  works but he also knows, as one of his old bandmates points out, he might be executed for inciting a panic. The final sequence is a compression of freedom and despair and features an extraordinary fadeout device that should be in flimmaking textbooks for its simplicity and power.

We are then treated to a mercifuly few consequential titles of the fate of the people of Chernobyl which are less than necessary in light of the abstracted account of it we have just seen. If that fade had given to a few seconds silent blackness before the credits rolled, its power would have said more than the words on the screen. A small pick but a pick nonetheless.

MIFF session 10: Once Upon a Time In Anatolia

A perfectly serviceable episode of Law and Order just directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Three cars roll through a softly undulating landscape that by day would look verdant and lush but now at night looks like the setting for a nightmare. They stop and frogmarch a young bearded man to an ancient looking drinking fountain. Is it here, they ask him. No, he says, I was wrong the tree was rounder. Everybody back in. Again and again, eah wild goose chase taking about fifteen minutes. Finally they stop for the night at a local inn and take in a meal along with a huge dollop of local history. Morning. The next sortee to find the buried victim of the killer in their care hits paydirt. The next half hour is given to a real time field police report of the crime scene. And then on to.... you get the idea.

If you were playing the Tarkovsky drinking game with this one you would be a casualty by the end of the first thirty minutes. This extremely long police procedural goes at its own pace and will neither be hurried nor suffer the illusion of hurry through nervous editing. The body is located, examined. End.

No, you don't get out of it that easy. Throughout all the waiting you do with these characters (and there is more waiting than anything outside of a Bela Tarr film) a dialogue strikes up and develops between the doctor who needs to be present and the chief prosecutor. It is about the unfortunate death of a beautiful woman. The conversation, taken up and put down repeatedly, becomes the real story of what we are seeing and as soon as that is understood, you are watching an interesting film. A film too long, for certain, but an interesting film with good characters fleshed out well with fine performances.

But at 157 minutes this tests the patience of the blessed and the canonised. Beautiful lensing over landscapes that scream cinema, faces lingeredon which time has carved with lessons and hardship. A constant and believably serious underburn. But so long and so shiftless that the arrival of the subtle denoument plays like a moment of inspiration and the final and finally arriving, at last, please make it the last, amen of a funeral service. Strong effort and modest payout but curiously satisfying.

MIFF session 8: Play

A gang of five black boys in a Stockholm shopping centre. Two snow pale Swedish boys stroll down a walkway, innocently flaunting their affluence. The gang take in every syllable and after a voting game make their move, crowding in on the white kids and conning them out of their mobile phone. Cut to two white kids with their Asian friend, being sent off by their parents on a spending trip. The gang moves in. This time we follow them from stalking to the move and far, far beyond. Bullying at its finest.

As frustrating and angering the gang's behaviour gets (I'm talking white knuckle fury in the auditorium, here) it soon becomes clear how deliberate it is. This is paramilitary bullying and it works a hair short of the Stockholm Syndrome (association intended by me and the filmmakers). This gang knows the power of its numbers and the effect its ethnicity has on its victims down to the youngest and most childlike member (the eldest couldn't be more than fifteen). It is this effortless calculation that carriesboth the narrative and our wish for its momentum. These boys are monstrous. Their victims are increasingly pliant. Where can this end?

But the gang is a group of boys. They defend themselves against a blustering but ineffectual attack by a group of men while on a tram but lift their feet at a train platform when the cleaner trying to mop the foor asks them. There is no contradiction here. Adults who act like adults carry authority for them, be they ever so humble. Adults who act like schoolyard brigands are met with force. But, again, it is the victims and their continued subserviance that creates a mounting anxiety. They aren't constantly compliant but the few acts of defiance they are capable of only lead them further into the gang's control.

This is presented in a series of long takes by someone who knows how to use them. This is not Bela Tarr or Tarkovsky whose still canvases absorb you into a new cosmos; the camera is set up to record variously with a roving eye or a stubbornly held stare, at all times delivering narrative information (yes, if you've seen it, the Native American busker shots, as well). The opening scene of the initial scam is a single shot from a camera mounted on a mezzanine, expertly taking us to whichever point of attention we need. This is not shaky cam it is a Kubrickian determination that requires an expert hand with the coreography of extras and speaking parts alike.

The colour palete is rich and the image has a sheen and depth that adds a shiver of veracity to us observing. Stanley Kubrick would have loved the Red Camera. From genteel innercity Stockholm, through industrial sites to the forests and wastes, we are shown a setting that seems to offer the victims less and less hope. If you go in knowing that the Swedish colours are blue and yellow you will see a lot of that combination. A running gag of a wooden cradle abandoned in a subruban train provides some light relief but also suggests a lack of care that might have created the central situation. The cradle comes into play later and poignantly.

I've been mentioning Kubrick a few times in this review even though I think his name is over-called whenever extraordinary cinema is discussed. I'm not a huge fan of him but admire much of his output and ideas. One of the latter is his notion that a film should be made up of six or so non-submersible units, blocks of the world through the screen where the events seemingly must happen, keeping well shy of stepping in himself to help out, leaving that to his audience. Well, that's what happens here. A few large blocks of this reality (including a kind of denoument that Michael Haneke or Gaspar Noe might approve of) and a coda.

A film's coda ought to both provide a final flourish of what we have seen but also add something mysterious or uncontrollable, a little wafer-thin mint on the pillow that tastes of salt and vinegar. Well, that happens here, too.

I pick MIFF films from the copy in the guide. Often I'll charge into a favourite director (there are two Sion Sono films this year!!!). I'll always try to find a film that I fear to see (eg The Woman from this year or Dream Home from last year). And then I'll go looking for outside chances. These simply have something in their descriptions that appeal to me, no depth needed, just enough salt or sugar in the presentation and they're on the list. These have the highest miss rate, almost destined to disappoint. Play didn't.

MIFF session 7: The Woman

Chris is middle America. In his early 40s he has everything in the list David Byrne makes in Once in a Lifetime; clean cut and confidently in control of his life and those he is responsible for. He even has a woman he found in the woods tethered up in his cellar. Oh, the rest of the family know about it, too. They are going to civilise her. She's a family project.

That's the sum of the plot information I'm going to give. The rest of it is best experienced fresh and without peeping at the imdb. That might be hard to do for awhile if you don't see it at the festival but I urge you to wait until a cinema release (unlikely now our arthouse scene has been cremated) or on an optical format snared from o'erseas. If you have any genuine love for what cinema can achieve at its wildest and yet most intentional then you need to see this film. Simple as that.

I have seen gorier films and films more unrelentingly violent than this but not since Martyrs and Irreversible before it have I been so exhilarated by relinquishing my control over a film and letting it force its way into me like this.

I am unaware if director and co-writer Lucky Mckee has made any statement to this effect but this film, even more than Martyrs (for which the claim was made) this is an anti-torture-porn film. Where Martyrs takes a kind of Kubrick approach to the use of pain in art The Woman chooses a linear assault on its audience as brutal as the actions and motives of its characters. There is no luxuriating in the means of pain and, crucially, no path of identification with the perpetrator. The person who can empathise with Chris and his very scary son will require immediate and terrifying psychiatric attention. There is similarly no sleaze or covert invitation to fellow travel. We are meant to be appalled by what we are seeing. If the silence of the full house at the Russell this evening is anything to go by, I think we won't be hearing of any copycat cases any time soon in this neighbourhood.

The film's great strength is the shift in ethical position. An impossibly oppressive situation presented to the family reveals a range of responses that for the most part must be kept secret from the family autocrat. The results of dissent to the latter are horrifying. The real achievement of the film lies in its management of this complex interrelationship. The morality here is front and centre but also protean, self-preserving as well as righteous.

There is something else that impresses me about this film (note that I haven't even mentioned any performances yet: they are uniformly strong): the music. It starts out with a winceable reliance on the kind of American indy rock that parties like it's 1974 and punk is never going to happen, a robotic constant replay of old man's music presented as new. Then when things start getting very very serious it is temporarily binned in favour of some old style synthesiser grind that really does sound fresh by contrast. Why? Because its violence is entirely appropriate to the atrocity happening on screen. No coy, winking irony, no reprieving levity, just a big ugly noise that matches the pictures. Then it's back to the robot rock and the sense that this America is culturally on borrowed time. Morally, as well.

I should stop gushing and let you get on the case of tracking it down or booking yourself any session left.

Other things that occurred to me:  rather than the resolutely ok Life During Wartime, this is exactly the kind of thing Todd Solondz should have developed from his masterful Happiness. Chris with his violence with a smile and unrestrained colonising of other human life reminded me of Dubbya and his delivery of US foreign policy in the 2000s. The power of the woman is solid and punishing in this tale that, while it might in fact preach, practices practices practices....

MIFF session 6: Cold Fish

WOOO HOO! Now we're cookin'
"You think of the earth as a small blue dot. I think of it as a cluster of rocks"
So screams Murata San to Shamoto San as the former stands over the film's first murder victim who is still choking to death. Here endeth the lesson. Well, not quite.

(Shamoto, who runs a) LITTLE (tropical) FISH (shop) MEETS (Murata who runs a) BIG (tropical) FISH (emporium). Shamoto's life is small and low on function. His daughter is a tearaway and hates his new wife who has grown cold on him. Called in one night to a supermarket to represent the daughter who has been caught shoplifting, the couple are desolate and expect the worst in this latest of minor atrocities enacted by her. Then Mr Murata influences his way into the scene and charms the supermarket manager out of pressing charges. He then charms the unglued family to see his bigger and better shop. It's the big business version of their own dowdy place and they are humbled and excited by it. Mr Murata suggests giving Mitsuko (daughter) a job to keep her honest and start her earning.

Things already aren't looking quite right with the appearence of the burningly sexual Taiko (Murata's wife). Mitsuko goes to work in the Murata uniform and when her father goes to check on her and visit the family saviour he is treated to the scene I started with above. One step and he's an accomplice. The corpse is dismembered (in more senses than one, though it's offscreen) and rendered ...elemental and cast to nature. Mr Shamoto didn't know he was weak until he met Mr Murata. Now he does, how will he cope with the knowledge and what can he do about it?

This is a non-Yakuza gangster story based on a much smaller story from the news. Sono, as he did with Suicide Circle, Noriko's Dinner Table and Strange Circus, brings his own vision to the table. This outing is visually restrained (as Noriko was) by comparison. These are the deep waters of a character study and would only be muddied by the flamboyance of Suicide Circle or Strange Circus. Sono uses 35 mm filmstock and sticks with it, favouring a plain optical tone until the setpieces towards the climax demand more. As usual, he draws strong perfomances from his cast and takes his audience to the far side of crazy to the point where even those chortling nervously are equally in the spirit as those who gasp in horror. At some points the only response entirely individual. Seeing it at a packed Greater Union tonight, this phenomenon was both disconcerting and thrilling.
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As with all his films, however far into gaspingly violent mayhem he can take us, Sono never loses sight of morality and doesn't mind showing how ghastly its face can get. This story of a weak man who finds his strength when forced is pushed far beyond the shadows on a multiplex screen, however strong they might be. Morality bends, warps and acts like it's on the same acid that Hendrix took at Woodstock but, unlike the Tarrantino or Ritchie gangster comedies, it never surrenders to nihilism, however close it comes. This is exhilarating cinema!

Screening note: I sat in my usual third from front row centre. At the point of the feature starting, as those around me cool talked into their moblies, saving seats and closing off anodyne chats, a huge guy sat a knight's move away from me. The moment he removed his jacket I caught a gust of the worst B.O. I've ever smelt outside of a friend of mine who went for weeks at a time claiming that nature was its own soap. A thick, almost staining acrid stench. He managed to clear a near perfect circle of seats around him and reminded me of photographs of the devastation of the forests at Tunguska.

MIFF session 5: Tabloid

Joyce Mckinney, a poster girl for southern U.S. clean livin' tells the story of her life's great love and how she snatched him from the clutches of the Mormons who then snatched him right back. Between claim and counter reclaim is a tale of forced sex (she upon him) and cultism that ignited the gutter press and resulted in a police investigation and trial, forests fell for the next days' fish and chip paper.

As one tabloid got the exclusive rights first they followed her version of events. Its rival in chief dug for dirt and found a continent's worth of it. Far from the wronged southern belle her version held as essence, she was a thoroughly experienced sex worker, offering myriad services for the gentleman half of the great unwashed including, crucially, a lot of role play.

Ok ... if that's true why did she drag a licenced pilot and bodyguard to accompany her to the UK (where the Mormons had sent him), financing the entire jaunt. Publicity? She didn't want for clients back home. Doesn't gel unless the part of her story about her life's great love is actually true. Alright, call it psychotic obssession, her motives here are not entirely impure. There's more to come which you will NOT expect but for that you'll have to see the movie.

Errol Morris pioneered a technique whereby his subjects are lined up to look him and his camera in the eye, allowing for a conversational warmth and relaxation to pervade their testimony. This works here as it always has; the connection between the speaker and the auditorium a solid current.

Next, Morris injects two other tropes, a series of tabloid fonted statements which flash over the image like Fleet St headlines, adding irony to, often contradicting and now and then very cheekily correcting what is being claimed behind them.

The second device is the use of campy old footage from various sources to the same effect as the headlines. This can fall like a lump of granite through a frog pond but here the choice of material is so sharp and precisely timed that it serves to support the form AND luxiuriate in the embellishment and fabrication that we are experiencing. The central turth alluded to above, thus is rendered curiously inviolate, however little we can eventually credit the speaker.

This was an all but full house which roared along to its mastery. That's another reason why I love MIFF: I can wash and bash around in the cinematic equivalent of a mosh pit in front of films that I might otherwise quietly enjoy at home accompanied by few or all on my lonesome.

You could easily point to the timeliness of this project, given the current story of the stories, but what it damns and celebrates are timeless things: sin and human curiosity.

MIFF session 4: A Stoker

Modern urban folktale about a humbled aged warrior who rises up against the evil he has seen around him when it gets personal. Ex-Major Ivan Skryabin stokes the furnaces in the basement where he works and lives and taps away at an old typewriter, telling a tale from the history of his Yakut people. Other ex-soldiers who are now gangsters regularly bring corpses in for informal cremation. Ivan's daughter is involved with one of them who is two timing with the gang boss' daughter. You see where it's going. And it does.

So, a lean 'n' mean crime story? No, it really is a folk tale dressed in post-Soviet garb. Action sequences, particularly kills, happen swiflty and decisively with an almost naive neatness. Ivan's realisation that leads to his vengeance is done quietly. We see his emotion but he never been in the habit of showing more than a hint of it. So, lean, at least? Well, no, apart from the kills we are presented with continual evidence that it takes a lot of time and effort to walk anywhere in St Petersberg. Add to that the four easy listening latin guitar tracks that are plastered end to end on high rotation until the climax, after which a new one is introduced. This at first looks sloppy and cheap but the repetition of the music is so unignorable and patterned that is clearly intentional; a kind of bullish muzak as authentically Russian as the Yakut furs are Yakut that Ivan's daughter sells in the shop where she works.

But through all this hard surface we can yet see the heart beating and it is that of Ivan and his lost tradition. A silent but narrated coda delivers the story he has been writing about a Russian's oafish assaults on a simple Yakut family.

If what we have seen seems naive or shallow we are best to remind ourselves that the account we have just been through is not meant to be sophisticated but a true and heartfelt rendering of events by a (mostly) gentle soul who could relate them in no other way.

This won't be my favourite from the fest ... but it's working its way in.

MIFF session 3: End of Animal

A young woman is taking a cab form her flat in Seoul to her mother's house. She repeats in a whisper what would be mantra were it not a description of a preparation of pork. She is talking to her unborn baby. The cheery cab driver stops to pick up another fare on the lonely country road they have come to.The stranger quickly reveals a wealth of knowledge about the driver and the woman and then starts talking about a cataclysm that is about to take place within minutes. It does. A massive flash of light. The woman awakes in the back of the cab alone in the desolate landscape. A note from the driver explains that the car has broken down and he has gone to the rest area for help. She is to stay put and wait for his return.

As that is as good as seeing a sticker on a shop door saying "back in five minutes" she embarks on her own trek to the rest area. From this point she meets a small number of characters mostly unrelated to each other. Each encounter leaves her a little worse off until she is hobbling through the desolate landscape persistently failing to get to the rest area even when she has a map to follow. Weird animal voices rise, bellowing from the distance. The stranger from the opening scene occasionally contacts her through the sole electrical device that still works. He gives her survival advice that is not always timely in a manner that is both enigmatic and throwaway. Theft, bullying, attempted rape and a series of further interpersonal atrocities later, our pregnant heroine finally arrives at the troubling reason for everything she has been through which I shall not reveal.

Shot mostly in determinedly distressed video, a sickly amber tint dries every character into constant discomfort, the film uses its scant resources in a way with confidence rather than apology. A few hi-def sequences surprise with their clarity but also reassure by their control. At first the restlessness seems like a lack of overall direction but a little patience later, once it's clear that this is how this story will be told, like it or not, this film is here in front of you, resist it at your peril. We are in the hands of a filmmaker who knows what he wants to say and what he needs to say it AND NO MORE. This is a debut feature!

This extraordinary film is why I go to MIFF on a mini pass every year: the chance to see something
fresh and powerful and individual. 10/10 on all three counts. I'm loath to call this film post-apocalyptic as its purposes are more complex than that usually suggests. I initially compared this to The Quiet Earth, Geoff Murphy's extraordinary 80s entry but that's because this one is so difficult to compare that any point of similarity suggests itself as a relief. But I think End of Animal is happy enough to be out on its limb and stay there. Even if the rest of the sessions are middling to poor (unlikely with two Sion Sono films to come) I will consider this MIFF a hit because of this one film.

I this has been released, I'm hunting down my own copy.

PS -- I saw this with a hangover so I was constantly hydrating myself. By the time I got to the session my bladder started sending some very urgent pages which made me seriously check the exits and plan on a quick dash. I kept watching while scheming but within 20 minutes I was so aborbed by the film that the urgency subsided and I forgot all about it. The only more gruelling hold-in was another MIFF title from a ew years back: Inland Empire.

MIFF session 2 : The Solitude of Prime Numbers

A surprise. The copy in the festival guide led me to expect a kind of Miranda July draught of fine warm quirk. The opening scenes don't disabuse this impression. A boy and girl in separate scenes coping with odd family life. A girl copes with a competitive father who wants to turn her into a competitive skier. A young boy copes patiently with his retarded twin sister. You know they will meet and it will be odd. What we need is style to support the oddness and some gravity to support the style. Well we get all of that.

The overall story plays out in three time zones, childhood, adolescence and adulthood (though this last is itself split up). Basic arc? A boy and girl, unrelated, start out in life as perfectly functioning beings until meeting with their own personal cataclysms which send them plummeting into withdrawal. But the arc is fractured. You get to know these two better as adults first and then when the time is judged right to reveal the shaping disastrous experiences we get to see those.

Between those experiences and the pitiable adulthood this pair attains we get quite a lot of the adolescent experience. Alice is cruelly bullied but her National Geographic Afgan Girl stare breaks through (subtly and credibly) to the bully in chief, Viola who then takes the frail outcast under her wing. At a party where the big kiss is meant to happen between Alice and the geeky Mattia this goes sour when Viola's gaze after her protege reveals a kiloton of homoeroticism and basis for near future self loathing. So, Alice either kisses Mattia or doesn't and will still go back to victimhood. The party sequence where this takes place could be from a Gaspar Noe film (acid lighting, eardrum shattering bass and human beauty in dirty colour.

I'm going to stop describing the plot now. Not for fear of spoiling it. I'll stop there because this film is less about plot than the revelation of important experiences and their often saddening results. This is a film about unhappiness but draws a lot of its audio visual inspiration from genres which feature little sadness, horror and giallo thrillers. Long slow tracks down school corridors, the Carrie-like bullying scenes, and Gaspar Noe's teen shindig all contribute to a film filtered through another type of film. The director and female lead were present at my screening and I was itching to ask about their effective use of Morricone's la-la girl voice music from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage but then saw that Mike Patton had been in charge of that (and someone else asked, anyway).

The strength of this film is in its performances. The players in each time zone go to the ends of their parts, convincing at every moment. Isabella Rosselini is particularly strong as Mattia's mother. The two adult leads, Luca Marinelli (Mattia) and Alba Rohrwacher (Alice) take us down into their pendulum pits with unflattering concentration. We follow because we are compelled by their bravery. Not fun. Not meant to be. But sincere without the apologetic cuteness. Not Miranda July, in other words.

PS-- the Q&A session after this screening was not heralded well enough to prevent the outflow of most of the audience. This was a pity as the interaction was pithy if brief and well worth the trouble. Alba Rohrwacher began answering a question in English (which was fine) and explained something humorous but took the responding laugh to be directed at her use of English. It would have been too awkward to have corrected this so she finished her answer in Italian. Pity.

MIFF session 1 : The Silence of Joan

A young woman with a ponytail stands at the parapet of a castle wall. She asks for forgiveness and then lets herself fall. Oh ... she's Joan of Arc. We then see her on a stretcher being led to a cell where she is manacled to a bed. She takes an angry vow of silence. "Including you," she spits. It's 15th century France. When people address god they don't know they are talking to themselves.

The voices which led her and France to military victory over the hated English have also gone silent. If she has become reviled since the victories have dried up her own silence spooks her captors. What follows is a number of  associations which illustrate a range of sanctification. Her prison physician sees her as a force of nature as essential  to his life as the bees whose honey he delivers to his patient. The English captain charged with delivering her to his superiors bows to her as one warrior to another. Then, as the inevitable conclusion at the stake approaches we find two religious figures, a monk and a pilgrim, pragmatic and ethereal by turns failing to save her from the flames.

The sole needless material in the film is that which shows her treatment at the hands of the English. A number of informative titles appear throughout which provide minimal background to what we are seeing. What we are seeing is the very kind of thing Kubrick referred to as non-submersible units: sizeable scenes, even in weight and depth that give a sense of witness to an audience rather than more conventional emotional empathy. The scenes around the trial, the cruelty and mockery of the English are possibly there to contrast with the awe in the other units but they take a trip down biopic lane which feels like the lights going up at closing time. Still...

Clemence Poesy in the title role is continuously impressive. It took me half the film to work out why she was so familiar. She'd already compelled my eye by making a lot of the scanty role she had in Phillip Ridley's superb Heartless. As Joan she starts at the deep end by acting without words (and makes it look like real determination). As her physician delivers a eulogy of her victories her supine profile is like a sculpted Christ on a sepulchre come eerily to life. When the English captain gives her her first sight of the ocean, the peasant girl who has known the Boschian hell of mortal combat is shocked into white faced terror at this force she must compare to the god of her voices. Her delivery of the statement demanded by her English judges has an anger and sadness that has the cool quiet of the cloister but also the hiss of the flames that await her.

M. Night Shamylan's Signs was a strong thriller/family drama that pulled the plug on its own power by a screamingly oafish character reversal at the end. The Silence of Joan would not allow such a thing as it finds the notion of sanctity so fascinating (not just useful). In the end here, after the big event, are two moments of consecration, one earthly and compulsive but sweetened with ritual and the other bafflingly ascetic, performed using water from the same river. Roll credits. Beautiful.

Don't sit through the credits for the gag reel. Not worth it.