1971@50: COLD TURKEY

Big tobacco takes a risk for a better profile by challenging any town in America to give up smoking for thirty days. If they do it they get a very cool twenty-five million in 1971 dollars. If they don't, smoking wins. The pastor at the small town of Eagle Rock, Iowa leads the local campaign and his charismatic ways prevail but will everyone go the distance? The air force is also knocking on their door for a use of the town that will expand the community and bring the government contracts.

This enemble satire comes at the end of a decade packed with social revision and a newly feisty protest culture faced off against a digging-in conservatism. It's 1971 and everyone, right or left, smoked. Remove the gaspers and you have a community going through a kind of Lord of the Flies series of transformations, from cranky, to violent, to horny to anything else that was kept under control with the hit of nicotine. Things thicken up as the media gets its foot in the door and parodic versions of figures like Walter Cronkite appear. There's even a kind of representation of Richard Nixon. In the town itself the local radical right are given the jackbooted role of policing the abstinence as the packets and cartons fill the collection pen to be taken away forever. The young left leaners stage a kind of generalised protest for the sake of it and the new normal emerges as a kind of short-fused control is achieved. The pirze money is counted pre-hatch and everything starts tightening up again. This is the USA of the future as it looked in the past: no jet packs or ray guns, just amped up versions of everything already on the ground.

Norman Lear's only feature film was held up for two years post production and perhaps had more to say about the America or Woodstock and My Lai. The year after its release was Watergate and everything changed after that, even the movies. In this corridor of time you could not only still have the kind of Frank Capra poke set among the common folk but you could make it more grown up. Lear was a career tv writer and director with work on the Alf Garnett clone All in the Family at around this film's production time, and the bizarre Mary Hartman Mary Hartman from the mid '70s. He also worked pretty closely with the Parker and Stone team who gave us South Park. The gags of acceptable addiction are constant, the media circus has an almost psychedelic zing to it, the baring of the extremities of human good and evil are paraded with what starts to feel like pageantry. While it's kept to the better side of cute but just short of alienating earnestness, the control over this massive allegory is impressive and reliable. By the time the final image takes its place in the landscape we're allowed to feel a little crushed under our laughter.

While the writing and performance is consistently ensemble Dick Van Dyke at the centre of operations gives us a fallible good man. Careful to add some grown-up stress to his small town preacher he brings what might have the Jimmy Stewart role in the 1930s version he's also not above shoehorning this concept or sweeping this incorrigible character out of town for a "vacation", and is clearly interested in his church's brass promising a cushier position. Everyone is needy and greedy just like the whole nation clamouring to get out of the '60s. While he's in no danger of assassinating his musical comedy roles here he seems grateful to get the chance to expand on them.

From the Randy Newman theme song to the full page magazine cartoon image at the end this one works. Big cast satires weren't as much on the way out as heading for the change that the likes of Robert Altman would render. The Mad Mad Mad Mad .... World era could no longer squeeze American life after Manson. If you wanted your satire more sharply focused you hunted it down among things like Network, Smile or Shampoo which could get very tough; no one wanted to see Magic Town take another beating and the post Watergate nation was readier for the shadows of The Parallax View and the outright horror of The Exorcist. If Cold Turkey's machinations feel on the gentle side it's worth recalling any time you had to keep your cool when you felt like exploding. That's what's on screen here.

This is currently on available on Stan.

MIFF 2021 Wrap Up

THE TIMES

July. Hey great news! MIFF's going to be in cinemas this year. And look at this program, everything good from the plague year is here, Cannes, Asia, Europe, you name it.

August. Lockdown. Sorry, it's only half cinema, the rest of it will be streamed. Oh, and we're swapping the weeks around so all your cinema sessions will be transferred to the following week. Well not ALL but anyway ... enjoy the online program.

August. Lockdown still. Nope, all online now. We know it's not the same program but we'll be adding more. When? Yes, when. Enjoy. Everyone who wants a refund can ask for it at the box office, yes the one you can't get through to. Enjoy the festival.

August lockdown still and maybe forever. Ok, everyone's getting a refund minus the booking fee because. Oh, here are some more titles on the streaming program. 

Ok, so ... The times are still too volatile to try something like this and MIFF was brave to try. The idea of staving off the cinema sessions by changing the week they were on felt a little reckless and indeed the massive confusion from punters as the total sessions on their passes shrank daily (mine was down to five out of an original twelve by Wednesday. I guessed that tougher limits on seating were the cause of this and preference was given to first-ins. But I had to guess that. MIFF only made a statement about the change, not the fallout. They could have done that without having to commit to anything more detailed than to say they were sorry if some bookings were removed but the regs are the regs. But nothing. This created the fatberg in the box office communications. People had spent their money (and it wasn't cheap) and the people who'd taken it weren't talking. Advising us to contact the box office sounded like that dick from the coalition who went on Q&A last year and innocently asked a questioner why she didn't just call Centrelink.

But then by the middle of the first week this had been dealt with and I'd settled in to the online program, not cancelling my leave as I needed to defray as much stress as I could. Bugger it, lockdown holiday it was. And once I'd settled and everything was in order I did take time to marvel at how rapidly MIFF had regrouped and solved the crisis. I have clear memories from the days of physical passes of much worse stuff ups at the box office (days which also allowed idiots to make their choices when they were buying their passes with hours of queues standing behind them).

THE PROGRAM

Considering the ambitions of this year's fest it was a surprisingly rangey lineup. New Ben Wheatley, celebrated UK horror Censor, a swathe of European and Asian titles and some very enticing doccos. 

High 

La Veronica: Works because we not only get eased into the high concept but become part of it. Magnetic performance from lead. Rises above its own cleverness. My favourite of the festival.

Sisters With Transistors: Does what good documentaries should do, interests its audience from the first moments and probably gets them searching for more after the credits have rolled. I've already ordered music first heard in this film.

Dear Comrades: Lean and mean tale of political difficulty as hard ethics confronts political allegiance. seldom has a two hour running time felt so swift. Delayed heart rending from the closing lines.

The Nowhere Inn: Metamockumentary might falter here and there but is brought off with such pizzaz and blunt commitment that it really can't lose. What happens when you add magnetic talent in your leads to a good, sparky idea.

Poly Styrene I Am a Cliche: Several lengths above the usual rock doc as the personal angle of the co-director, the star's daughter adds a compelling context. Not just a glorified powerpoint. 

Middle

Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: Frequently birlliant celebration with gorgeous packaging of examples and interviewees but suffered from having to pack too much in past the halfway mark. I'd prefer it as a series (hint hint, Shudder) 

Queen of Glory: Warmth doesn't have to mean soft as this strong and personable comedy proves. Even at only one and quarter hours it did feel too long, though.

Ninjababy: The quirky comedy worked well and the tansition did, too, just might have needed to be a little earlier or a longer crossfade. Impressive at the end for some risks taken with character that paid off. See Playlist for how to really get this wrong. Liked this a lot but its competition was fierce.

In My Own Time: A Portrait of Karen Dalton: Solid attempt at telling the tale of an under recorded musician who influenced everyone she met but whose personal demons kept her from the spotlight. Poignant but undercooked. 

Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time: Stalkercom lifts itself above the '90s thriller promised in the premise and treads a fine line well. I think I just needed a little more sharpness in the protagonist's focus.

Freaskscene: Competent rockumentary about noise melodists Dinosaur Jr works as well (and the same way) all of them have since the early 2000s when the subjects lives were well covered by home video, recording etc. This is the way they appear now. This is a notch above many but does only what it needs to.

The Night: Lean and effective redemption horror in compelling setting might have turned up the eeriness.

Hopper/Welles: Enjoyable but non-essential record of the meeting of two cinematic mavericks exceeded low expectations.

What Do We See When We Look at the Sky: Romcom meets magical realism in post war Georgia with pleasing results but what a slog. The film suggests its own intermission which I took it up on.

Wife of a Spy: Too long innured to the softer, post-horror KYoshi Kurosawa to mind that he still hasn't gone back there but this drawing room intrigue did suggest some of the old parallel universe the best of his horrors featured.

Low

Playlist: If you really expect us to empathise with sociopaths like this one you really need to do more work or people will just wish the movie was about her friends. Pointless cover version of Noah Baumbach, Wes Anderson and that lot.

Coming Home in the Dark: If you are going to learn from people like Hanneke, Noe or Miike you really need to go the extra kilometre and offer a reason to sit through your extremity horror. 

Rose: A Love Story: If you are going to go for an iconoclastic depiction of a classic horror monster look at a few others and note how hard it is to get working. Fell over itself trying to avoid genre until a too sudden finale risked everything it had worked for.

THE APP ... s

The standard app updated as soon as I fired up the old one in July. Easy to use, if you didn't mind exploring the program on a small screen that was all you'd need. For almost ten years this aspect of MIFF has added a lot of ease to proceedings. While I haven't bothered with the printed one for ages I still prefer having a larger screen and multiple windows to organise my sessions. The calendar view of the wishlist on the website does this really well. I can see at a glance if one day is too busy or there is too big a gap between screening days etc and I can also use it to maximise my favourite venues (I like to start and end at The Forum)

The MIFF Play app could not be used to buy tickets but your selections appeared instantly in there once you'd paid. As this was the only way of getting to the festival it had to work. Work it did and how. I hasten to add here that my home setup includes a new smart TV plugged directly into the ethernet and has a built-in chromecast. Last year I lugged a laptop into the lounge and connected via HDMI to a TV with wifi. If I closed the laptop the screen shut down (that's a laptop setting but I have to have it that way most of the time) and if I wanted to pause it took some buggerising around. This time I turned the TV which activated the soundbar, opened my phone, tapped the app, tapped casting, tapped the thumbnail of the movie I wanted and it started with the best quality I was likely to get as the TV and its connection took over from that point. Completely trouble free. If these two apps could be integrated in the future it would be a dream.

EPILOGUE

Well, that's it. A bunch o' good MIFF at home films and the inevitable handful o' stinkers. No queues to worry about but also no Forum or Capitol, no meeting friends for coffee on freezing afternoons or wine-quaffing after movie pub sessions. Despite my whingeing I did appreciate how quickly and effectively MIFF dealt with the crisis that threatened to shut it down but will still whinge about the poor communication in that crucial period when the really drastic changes were effected which might have been explained quite simply and openly, assuaging the stress that the punters were also feeling. Anyway, a good time was had by me. Now if we could stop those Neanderthals marching in protest at lockdowns their plague-spreading demonstrations are extending we might get to see next year's MIFF in real cinemas where it needs to be. 

MIFF Session 18: QUEEN OF GLORY

Sarah is getting through her PhD in Oncology and excited to move states to Ohio with her married lover when her mother dies, leaving her a Christian bookshop and a house. She has to organise the "white people's" funeral and then the Ghanaian one before she can uproot and leave and some of this is proving difficult. Harder still, she goes to the bookshop to look around before listing it on the market and meets the mountain-sized and face tattooed ex con her mother hired to help out. It's just easier to keep the shop open until everyone has paid their respects and the mourning is over. Her estranged father arrives from Ghana and moves into the house until the funeral is done. They have one of the subtlest awkward hugs I've seen.

Subtly awkward is a good description for this whole film, actually. Comedian, writer and director (and star) Nana Mensah takes us through her observational  tale at a gentle pace, allowing all of her characters breathing space where even those with few lines (like her father) can develop until they feel lived in. Sarah's struggle with her circumstances, including the increasingly hopeless plans of moving away, are played quietly but that is not to say they are under-attended: she has clear trouble coping with both the intimacy she craves from her closest and the demands of her extended family and cultural community which she fears might consume her. She'd rather be American as it's easier but easier starts looking shallower.

To call this film warm might also undersell it but its determination to make its viewers feel welcome inside it is unmistakable and never cloying. Warm might also not account for the constantly funny observation gags that leave a treat in almost every scene: this is a very funny film but it's also a very personable one. It reminded me in tone of Smoke or one of those gentle reconciliation movies from the '60s that I'd see on tv of an afternoon off Uni back in the '80s. The control and assurance to produce moods like this is massive as is the talent to make it appear easy. The scene where Sarah can do nothing but finally accept her mother's death is told largely in one long closeup as she is dancing at the Ghanaian funeral and the wisdom of playing it warm rather than quirky is obvious as it means there is less of a reach between the comedy and the poignancy so when the latter happens it feels all the more powerful. That is the way of this film and it is a joy because of it.

MIFF Session 17: WOODLANDS DARK AND DAYS BEWITCHED

The term folk horror goes back to the nineteenth century. More recently, it has been applied to cinema and exemplified by a trio of films known as the Unholy Trinity: The Blood on Satan's Claw, The Wicker Man and Witchfinder General. But, as this documentary is here to tell you, it goes well beyond those titles and their time ('60s-'70s) and is indeed alive and well in the already creaky feeling twenty-first century. I am a fan of this sub-genre and was eager to see this vaunted showcase. I was, however, concerned about its running time, a bum numbing three and a quarter hours. Sitting in a Forum seat for that long was not my idea of fun so it was after weeks of umming and erring that I chose it as it might be the only chance to see it. Then the lockdown took the pain from that decision and I was happy to rent it as a streaming feature.

We get right on it with some spooky sounding folk music and virtuoso montage and collage (the latter courtesy of outrider auteur Guy Maddin) and a mix of murmuring soundbites and a final introductory image of little Thomasin from the witch floating naked in the night among the wintry trees. I was in! This documentary is niche enough that it doesn't care that much in conversion, it's made by people who love their subject and are eager to talk about it. It felt like meeting strangers who sounded like life long friends and as the montage kept coming and the discussion kept rolling along with new titles to pursue and old obscurities to celebrate in an extended screening of mighty orgiastic joy.

So what happens then? What happens has to do with the problem of the running time. While great service is given to the Unholy Trinity and a good grab bag of context and theorising it just keeps going and starts (a little after the halfway mark) feeling crushed. It's like those people who begin writing signs without realising they won't have room for all the letters at that size. This is such a bold and sincere effort it pains me to pick at it but I would happily sit through ten hours if the kind of depth of the early chapters were given to the later ones. This would be a perfect mini series for the likes of Shudder. But as it is the later chapters that touch on intriguing issues like race and class in folk horror that are left mentioned more than examined. On the other hand ninety minutes of depth on a declared limited scope might turn the specialised audience off lest they pay to see something they already know. The superb American Nightmare (2000) kept to a decade but its point had to do with the times as much as the content but the material in Woodlands Dark is so far ranging that it wouldn't work so well in the first place. So, break it up, folk, let's have a series.

That said, this will still be hanging around the top of my best of the fest list for the expertise it offers and the luxuriant presentation. And if it does end up on Shudder I'll take it in bits, copying down titles and allowing more time for full absorption. And it will keep me going for years. Celebrations as refulgent as this come seldom and feel like great occasions. If you like your Wicker Man or The Witch you'll dig this like a prize garden.

MIFF Session 16: COMING HOME IN THE DARK

A small family enjoys a picnic in some breathtaking New Zealand scenery until two men stroll up and take over. Then it's a road trip at gun point and things are revealed. This film is spoilable from about the fifteen minute mark so that's as detailed a synopsis as I'll give here. But you will recognise that opening as being a hijack story, albeit on a skirmish scale. What is expected is character development which will inform plot development but neither will need to be particularly deep if the action is there to balance it or some deep revelations. This film doesn't quite do what is expected of it, though, and not necessarily in a good way.

What it does well is build the world it lives in, a constant view of the gigantic freedom outside the windows of a car that has become a prison which closes in claustrophobically as night sets in. Some moments of suspense are also deftly handled and the playing by all the cast doesn't falter for a breath. If you've seen any of Michael Hanneke's or Gaspar Noe's films you will recognise a lot about this one and what this movie also does well is learn rather than lift from them. There are a number of direct references in some scenes (I'll let slip mention of a fire extinguisher for anyone familiar with Irreversible) but they do serve the plot rather than distract from it.

What it does poorly is keep our interest. Partly this is due to a mishandling of the transitional scenes during which the victims must deal with their rage and allow things to develop (in a practical sense: to look for opporunties). The most effective way of doing this is to maintain their fear of the heavy. While Daniel Gillies as Mandrake is a very convincing bad guy whose violence is always just under the surface of his control, the stretches of inaction drain the situation of threat and we all but forget the atrocities that have made us fear him. What is attempted here is that a different kind of threat, that of revelation, should overtake the physical one but it takes far too long to establish and is so water-treading that further acts of violence feel like a relief. When that happens we're really just waiting for the credits in hope that something will come up and wow the b'crikey out of us. Well things do happen but by that stage we're really just recognising them as they pass by.

The point about Hanneke and Noe and all them durn New French Extremity films is that they, each and all, have a point. It is almost never apparent until the end, not in plot twists but in the detail of a gradually forming picture and the journey is typically so gruelling that you never forget nor ever wish to watch them again. If it's the notion of violence begetting violence or the easy acceleration of violence into constant torment this film feels like it expects you to make a lot of assumptions. You do a lot of that in Funny Games or Irreversible but every last one of them is crushed as the purpose is revealed. If I could at least get away with calling this film nihilistic it might make me feel better but then I wouldn't let myself sleep tonight. Then again, for a story that blows its load so early and then spends the rest of the night telling us how it really loves us we should at least get a box of chocolates or something.

MIFF Session 15: FREAKSCENE - THE STORY OF DINOSAUR JR.

Dinosaur Jr emerged at a time when American rock bands seemed to be getting interesting where, for so long, they'd almost entirely been point missing and unengaging. The newer ones coming through from the mid '80s combined noise with songcraft. By the mid-'90s this kind of genuine cleverness had become so muleishly copied that it was over (even if the imitators dragged it across gravel into the next decade). Seriously, if you went to an indy gig in the '90s and watched (AGAIN) band members switching instruments so the drummer could get to the mic with a guitar and the singer could play the drums and you didn't just walk out you were very tolerant, very young or just hadn't been out much. Everyone took the freedoms of bands like this and showed how different they could be by doing things in exactly the same way as everyone else.

Before that, though, the likes of Sonic Youth, The Pixies, My Bloody Valentine etc were showing that rock wasn't quite dead even if they were all present at its death as a base of innovation. After them, the notion of forward thinking was more or less abandoned or at least propped up by unexamined assumption. They led the pullback on the glamour that had grown back after punk chopped it off back in the '70s and gigged close to their audiences. They also recorded everythign they did which is why we have highly watchable doccos like the ones on Slint, the No Wave scene, and this one.

The band started like they all do but it's worth hearing the origin story from different voices. J. Mascis barely gets the words out and sounds like Stephen Wright talking in his sleep but what he says is pithy and not a syllable too long. The other two original members are more forthcoming but he band's history is served well by a wealth of witnesses, many of whom will be familiar to anyone who sees this (Henry Rollins, Thruston Moore, Frank Black, Kim Gordon etc). And there is a trove of home and live video to add moment to the recollections. While the gluey colour-bleeding look of old VHS has become THE LOOK of these documentaries this one works because of the lackadaisical image the band seems to insist on. 

But then all bands are alike in other ways, as well. Kim Gordon speaks of being in a band as being part of a psychotic family. That gets it. Every band is composed of a god and others who want to be in bands. Sometimes the latter will also include one who would prefer to be a god. That might make them compete and enhance creativity or it might lead to the more usual implosion as it did here. Dinosaur Jr became Mascis and others for many years before reforming sufficiently grown up to play cooperatively together.

And it's that as well as the refusal to portray Mascis as a misunderstood genius for the ages. He's a bloke who writes songs and plays music that revels in its quirks and delights its listeners. And after all the testimony of fans who liked it so much they bought the company we get an oddly moving montage of roads seen from the front of a tour bus as an instrumental section plays us to the fade and the credits which roll under an early take of the title track. A refreshingly pleasant, well crafted and informative rock doc.

MIFF Session 14: DEAR COMRADES

Cold war USSR. Kruschev's in the Kremlin and Kennedy's in the White House. Lyuda, careworn from war and struggle has reached a position of comfort as a Party official in her Don district factory town. The Soviet Union is suffering shortages and the price of everything has just gone up. This fills the stores with people clamouring for basics. Lyuda rises from her adulterous bed goes to the shop and walks right past the crowds to get first pick at the new supplies in a backroom. The store manager lets slip a complaint about the conditions and gets a verbal slap from Lyuda about the need to keep faith in the Party and wear these hard times for better things ahead. There is no irony in her face. She goes home, chastises her father for keeping his old Bolshevik uniform and warns her daughter to keep away from the threatened strike action at the factory. Teenage Svetka storms out. Lyuda goes off to work in the offices of the factory as the workers amass in the quad below the window.

The massacre at Novocherkassk in 1962 remains a governmental atrocity on the scale of Bloody Sunday. The army was called in but more as a presence. KGB snipers on the rooftops ensured panic and rioting. The army was ordered to lock and load and fired on its own people. Twenty-two dead and many, many wounded. The cover up was much swifter than the military action and by its close, with all the bodies buried anywhere they could be and all witnesses leaving their signatures on secrecy statements. Lyuda does that but has no idea of where her daughter is, assuming she's still alive.

The search for Svetka is a progress through totalitarian officialdom (and around it) as it is trying to plaster over a bungled action that would embarrass it internationally. What's one more young troublemaker to them? Increasingly, what's the value of hollow Party rhetoric to her? This transformation isn't what it might have been in a lesser telling. Lyuda, clearly hypocritical in her actions from the beginning of the story, is confronted with the effects of her own zeal. She had stood at a Party meeting that was to decide on miltary involvement and demanded the instigators and all rioters be punished to the extent of the law. Svetka, missing and likely buried, was one of the victims of her eagerness to please the Party. Somewhere in all of that the maternal anguish exploding within her is screaming. Letting too much of that out in the open at the wrong time could get her thrown to the corpse pile or at best in a prison where she will never have a name again. Does she still, as she has said more than once, wish Stalin were still alive?

Russian films about the Soviet era cannot afford to make missteps. Like any totalitarianism this one's propagandist culture is easily depicted as either risible or deadly. The temptation to produce statements from the other extreme and rewrite history to villify past generations must be enormous. It's not as though there hasn't been Russian cinema that sidestepped or challenged the status quo from within it. Tarkovsky always works as an example but if you really want problematic try Ellem Klimov's Come and See, a devastating portrayal of warfare set in the Nazi occupation of Belarus in which no one escapes the stain of inhumanity and even images of Hitler become problematic (you'll have to see it to find out why). Here, one of the Party faithful appears to be forced into opposition to the workings of the Party. You are not going to care about that until the stakes have less to do with Apparatchik s A, B or C being nasty pasties than the life and death of the sole reason why you struggle through. Lyuda is not confronted with the flaws of the Soviet system but her own.

Dear Comrades is shot in the ol' Academy near-square ratio and in rich black and white and is one of those instances where digital video gets to look almost exactly like film. I always wonder at this decision. The black and white of a film like Playlist is hipster like its chief source of derivation. The choice here seems guided by the tradition from the 1970s onward to depict former eras the way they would look if shot at the time. Dear Comrades is in black and white to draw the theme of its tough times close to the plainness of the treatment. Personal principles look bigger in black and white and when they are delivered in directed contradiction to the assumption of privilege that looks bigger, too.