Another World Cinema Showcase has come and gone. I saw five movies this time round. Three were brilliant, one was so-so, and one was a complete waste of time.
The Reader. This was a strange movie. The first third was a sexual awakening story about an affair between a 15-year old lad and a 30-year old woman. It was quite explicit, and was basically arty softporn. The lad was played by an 18-year old guy. How on earth does someone get self-confident enough by 18 to do full-frontal nudity scenes and sex scenes with Kate Winslet? Crikey.
A third of the way through the movie it suddenly switches to a story about post-Holocaust guilt in Germany. This was much more interesting.
Kate Winslet was very good, but it was strange seeing her first as a hard-bitten middle-aged woman, and then later as an elderly and depressed woman.
Gomorrah. A movie about the Italian Camorra. Given the subject matter, I was surprised by how unremittingly dull this movie was. It was shot in the style of a fly-on-the-wall doco. While this might seem a good idea in principle, it had two very unfortunate consequences. Firstly, there was almost no music soundtrack. It made me realize just how important the music in a film is to setting the emotional scene. The film without it was just flat and dull. And secondly, it meant that there was almost no story to it. The movie basically just followed four or five threads, each showing a poor person or a low-life going about their life doing terrible things to people or having terrible things done to them. The threads never intersected, and only one of the threads had anything like a satisfying conclusion to it.
In a sense it was probably quite ‘realistic’, with life on the streets portrayed as a dull depressed normality punctuated by sudden acts of unspeakable violence erupting out of nowhere and being over in a split second, but this didn’t make for a good movie experience on any level.
Dull, disappointing, and a complete waste of time.
Religulous. In this doco US stand-up comedian Bill Maher travels about the place talking to religious people and mocking them for their beliefs. Mocking the batty things that religious people believe is of course like shooting fish in a barrel, but what made this movie special was that Maher was so funny that quite often (but by no means always), the people he interviewed didn’t take (much) offense at their cherished beliefs being attacked.
Here’s an example of Maher’s style. At one point he interviews one Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda, who claims to be a descendant of Christ and/or the second coming of Christ. (The fact that he didn’t seem clear on the difference between these concepts didn’t bode well.) Maher said to him, “Isn’t this just because you have ‘Jesus’ in your name? You’ve got ‘Miranda’ too – perhaps you’re actually the second coming of Carmen Miranda? Perhaps you should have fruit on your head rather than fruit in your head?”
For the most part the arguments he puts to his victims are standard atheist fare, although there were a few arguments I hadn’t heard before. Like when he asks a believer if she is confident that she could always tell a Biblical story from a fairy story. For example, if Jack and the Beanstalk had been in the Bible and Jonah and the Whale not, would she have been able to tell that Jonah was Biblical and Jack a fairy story?
Right at the end Maher suddenly switches from mocking people to a fairly fiery polemic, calling for atheists to rise up and make their opinions known. He ends by pointing out how crazy it is to have people in power who not only believe the end-times are upon us, but who actually want the end-times to be upon us.
Salt/Solo. This session consisted of two unrelated docos – one 30 minutes long, the other 60 minutes – shown together. For some reason it was billed as Solo only, with Salt mentioned in passing only as a supporting act. Which doesn’t do it justice, as these two docos are each among the best I’ve seen.
Salt is an extraordinary little piece about a man cycling across a vast salt pan in Australia called Lake Eyre. For some reason he lugs around a huge old-style tripod-mounted camera with bellows and big photographic plates – the sort of thing you see in Westerns. You wouldn’t think there was much scope for photography in such a flat, flat, flat place, but this doco contains some of the most amazing cinematography I’ve seen.
Solo is the utterly heart-wrenching story of Andrew McAuley who died trying to cross the Tasman in a kayak. I hadn’t realized that some of the footage he took of himself was recovered. At the time it happened I remember being outraged that this guy would choose to place himself in such danger when he had a young son, and I think he eventually realized his folly too. In some of the footage he’s clearly cracking up, realizing plainly that he’s taken on more than he can cope with and might well die. At one stage he sobs into the camera, promising his wife and kid by proxy that he’ll never do anything so dangerous again…
Synecdoche, New York. Wow. This is one strange and trippy film. It starts off as a fairly ordinary story of a man in middle life whose life seems to be collapsing around him. Even this ordinary stuff is worth watching just for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance. Even early on, there are slight oddities, like a strange man always watching Hoffman’s character. As the movie winds its slow way through the man’s life, things get odder and odder and more self-referential. By the end of the two hours my head was spinning. When I come out of movie theatres I often have a moment of slight disconnect as I plug back in to the real world. It was much more intense this time around: in the corridor outside I met Yalini and Robert, and talking with them was slightly trippy, as if I wasn’t completely sure that they and the conversation weren’t actually still part of the movie…
