MIFF 2024 Round Up

HAIL AND FAREWELL!

This might be my last one. I've made MIFF a winter holiday for the past twenty-one years. I've been going since the late '80s but it wasn't until 2003 that I could afford both money and time to take at least a week off and just go to the movies. From that time this was the part of the year that felt like an adventure holiday for the mind and nerves as everything from big thrills to quiet puzzling experiments would blend together in a magic lantern otherworld. And I sat in the dark with strangers and let the work world leave my body like a sigh.

I eventually took a fortnight off each year and then, having the time banked, an extra week to decompress and watch movies at normal cinemas without the queues and seating crush. I learned, after queueing around the corner at the Forum one frosty afternoon, that if I could relax and wait for the whole crowd to go in, I'd get something like the front row seat I preferred. Also, the snickering sneak of getting all ten and then an extra three sessions out of my minipass by grabbing as many daytime sessions as I could find. That led to at least one MIFF that I'd planned so efficiently, daytime obscurities and horror in the evening, that I didn't see a single film with a friend. That was a wake up.

MIFF was an escape from the press of the normal, just as the school holidays were an escape into play, books, and all the good things the ABC used to put on for us from the U.K. in May and August. Currents and undercurrents of the flow of the moving image which moved like a whole year of cinema going in a fortnight. Every year as late July approached, I felt the magnetism resonating around the corner.

But this year was one of those where that didn't happen. It's not the first but it might well be an indicator of the future. The style of the Nugent Report that recommended the outsourcing of funding and management for arts organisations has, since its publishing in 1999, leaked into arts events and institutions in the time since. MIFF has been low in this way but it recovered with some inspired leadership. Whenever the best of that has ended, the screaming void of cost cutting and overselling. It might just sound like names but whenever the head of an arts festival goes from a director to a CEO you know someone has come in to sort things out. I miss Richard Moore and Michelle Carey and their gleeful exploratory guidance. That's gone.

And then they do make it elitist. One cheap pass was introduced but the one I usually get was hiked by fifty dollars. I could see all twelve from that just by getting four of the cheap ones and still pay less. But, really, what they wanted was to sell more memberships. These stayed about the same. A fair few perks, to be fair, but at over six hundred dollars, they were well out of range for most punters. But when you continue to reduce the value of the festival bars and meeting places, limit one of the beloved venue's use, introduce reserved seating, cut the total of new contemporary cinema titles by close to a hundred and hype up a swag of revivalist screenings in the manner of premieres, I'll admit getting a membership might well seem like buying myself out of bothering with the great unwashed. So, next year, there will need to be some really special things in the program for me to bother. I'll be spending less time and money on that aspect of my winter holiday.

THE PROGRAM

I saw some good stuff but, boy, did I have to do a lot of sifting through a line up that seemed painstakingly chosen to feel like a prestige festival without teeth. Mainstream fare rubbed shoulders with indies destined for local cinemas before the last warmth had left the Forum seats. The sold out audience members for I Saw the TV Glow would be a lot more comfortable going to the Nova to see it less than a week after the festival ended. Of the twelve I saw, I'd rate about four to recommend. Most of the others were disappointments or bland, and not arthouse bland but plain and unaffecting. Very little of it seemed to want to take any chances and put pressure on audiences to touch the challenge of living cinema. 

It wasn't quite the nadir of 2000 which was so stuffed with mainstream fare and big dollar sponsor money that it felt like eighteen Saturdays in Sadder Plenty. When the stream goes main, the genre goes south. A page's worth of horror movies was all we got. There have been more in normal cinema schedules in the first quarter of this year. The streaming section was a shrunken grab from the main program. Great idea with good intentions but dull. If it's as flavourless next year, I'll be lucky to go to two I'm interested in.

Should also point out that I went to four normal cinema screenings which I enjoyed far more than the MIFF fare and had better experiences with audiences who weren't so entitled and rude.

THE VENUES

What happened to The Forum for the first week? We've already had to put up with losing the ground floor which was the most beautiful and atmospheric meeting place and chill room of any festival. Now, it's a cordoned off strip in ACMI with a bank of Campari behind the bar. The hub is the old restaurant that was there and it seemed ok but I wasn't inclined to luxuriate in its dentist chair ambience.

ACMI is an operating theatre of a cinema. It does, however, have excellent appointments and you are guaranteed a perfect screening. This and the Forum were the cinemas that had reserved seating imposed on them. Reserved seating in the wild has become a relic of COVID's aftermath with distancing and capacity ruling the notion. It existed before then but it has since become de rigeur. It's done for people who want to sit in the middle. What it means at MIFF is that all of those who get in first everywhere, take everything they can and everyone else goes to the sides, the very back, or the front, where I am, usually with a few other deviants. This year, every seething one of them that had neglected to see that you could choose your seat for yourself ended up in the outer ring and these were the Neanderthals that spread every microbe on the soles of their footwear on to the armrests of the seats in front of them. None of this was policed to the slightest degree (not that I would expect the hapless volunteers, who hold the damn event on their shoulders every year, to be trained in this).

On ticketing: a very good feature was added that reduced the clicks and fol de rol if you wanted to exchange one session for another. It only cost a buck but that's also what you had to do if you wanted to change your seats in the same session. Not. Thought. Through.

Hoyts I love as a MIFF venue as I can sit in that raft at the front where the longest legged seat kickers can never reach. Also, very good projection and audio. Ditto, Kino but their capacity cannot compete with Hoyts so a sold out session there can be a trial. 

Didn't go to the Capitol. The one session I'd booked there sold out. I've done that before and never will again. I went to the new Cronenberg instead and had a better time at Hoyts.

I didn't see any streaming titles. I was exhausted from the main program, the choice was way down on previous years and wasn't tempting. One good thing. The decision to start it at the same time as the main one was welcome. Beginning streaming almost as the cinema festival was ending was idiotic.

The Program:

It was down compared to recent years. MIFF has varied in overall quality in the decades I've been going. One of the worst featured opening and closing films of such shamelessly mainstream character that not only were they both in cinemas before the festival was over but reflected the dullest of approaches from the goose who was directing at the time. It was late '90s early '00s and made it look like MIFF was sinking into flavourless tourism.

This year the title count was down by about a hundred (but still advertised as though the number was impressive). 

The App:

Updated in good time. Normal first use glitches aside, it was all go. I made one exchange and it was reflected immediately. Also, the sales status was kept up instantly. That exchange went to Standby rapidly and I was able to swap it for another on the site. This has become one of the pleasantest features of the festival. It's where you store your bookings and wishlists and manage your experience as well as check on how full something will be (I avoid sold out sessions). A consistent winner.

Staff:

They remain personable and helpful. Didn't have a single problem (one thing that has consistently improved since the "good old days"). This festival depends on the work of volunteers. No shade on the people I dealt with. However, I don't know what the margins are these days but I bet this could improve (i.e. they could start paying them).

THE MOVIES

HIGH

ODDITY

Real horror with atmosphere, scares and quirk that works. The single most enjoyable film of the festival.

MADE IN ENGLAND: the Films of Powell and Pressburger

Martin Scorsese celebrating the works of the Anglo-Hungarian duo as they made masterpiece after masterpiece. Depth of commentary and a poignant placing of his own life story and the films' effect on him. 

A TRAVELER'S NEEDS

Hong Sang-soo only needs to keep making films like these to make me feel happy about living in the world. This despite some of the darker revelations about the human way that come out in conversations. Exposure without judgement.

TOLL

Kitchen sink melodrama from Brazil that works without resorting to anything more than committed performances of a deceptively simple screenplay. This got the fest off to a great start.

MIDDLE

THE HYPERBOREANS

I used to jump at films like this that based their approach on Brecht's ideas to tell historical stories. While this example had its charms, its coldness prevented me from looking deeper into it than I did. It shames me to admit that the Guy Maddin style denouement was the only thing that really got me engaged. Should it shame me, though, when the Guy Maddin entry in the program was so flat? 

BLACKOUT

Great idea about an alcoholic's blackouts being directly analogous to his blackouts when he becomes a werewolf. This is allowed to get sidetracked (despite some great kills) by a little man vs big man in a small town story that happens during the day. The two threads are left unsatisfyingly unresolved.

THE DEMON DISORDER

Wastes screen time  going in circles until things firm up for a fun second half that also delivers the poignant notes about the family condition.

RUMOURS

Guy Maddin has been blanding out since the wonderful The Forbidden Room a few years back. Is it collaboration with the Johnson brothers? We must all develop but, boy I miss, that misty old world cinema with the contemporary sass.

THE SHROUDS

Yes, this long term Cronenberg fan is putting a D.C. movie in the middling section. Everything about the film works but I didn't get what I was expecting.

LOW

THE MOOGAI

In which a highly effective short film is expanded with a bigger budget and bungled all the way through. Little to no empathy possible for the persistently unlovable lead character, the good idea of equivalence between the folkloric monster and the government snatching children left in a  gooey mess, and a showdown with an impressively realised creature fizzles. 

THE DAMNED

The conceit of putting Civil War soldiers in for the many conflicts and dodgy incursions performed by the U.S.A. is a good one but ends up as a Malik style mood piece. It's not terrible but nor is it particularly engaging.

EPILOGUE

Farewell to what will I think be my last full festival. With so many other such institutions flinging their caps out to dominating donors and philanthropy and CEOs where curatorial directors once stood, and pricing for elite tickets and reserved seating for people who can't organise themselves to arrive on time and behave considerately to others, and a raft of other unpleasant things and moments, my favourite time of year has become tokenistic movies for people who think that that's what Netflix is, and gab loudly through it as though a parliamentary decree has allowed them. From now on, I'll just go to the movies.