full frame film festival,
DAY 2the flying shepherd - a half hour or so film with almost no dialogue about bored shepherds in romania hanging outside their tiny shacks, talking at picnic tables, and watching mesmerized as ultra-lite plane/glider things take off from nearby fields. i would like to see this one again as it had a very nice editing rhythm, but the problem was it was programmed first thing in the morning and nobody is ready to watch people sit around and be bored that early in the morning. this sort of thing has to be taken into account when scheduling films. people were falling asleep during this one, i'm sure.
owning the weather -
this one was by a local guy, and it's about humans' attempts at manipulating rain patterns and the ramifications of our feeble attempts to control weather on global warming and etc. i thought it was mostly done well, and robert greene, who went to school where i currently go to school, pulls off the errol morris "let everybody have their say and don't show your hand until the very end" thing of giving both sides of the argument a chance to lay out their take on the subject. a minor nitpick, but i think the font of the title and the title cards inside the film is so lame. i'm normally one to make fun of font nerds, but that font is one of the 7 or 8 fonts that come with every bad clip art program. can't you think of something more interesting to use? anyways this one was amusing and i hope it shows up on television somewhere and gets some attention.
the kinda sutra -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZfvpbIgiZAthis was a very short, amusing film about what kids think about how babies are made. that link is about 40% of the entire film that i saw.
saint misbehavin' -
warning: boringyikes, that interview makes me kind of rethink how i felt about the film. i really liked the film. i didn't know much about wavy gravy before watching it, but it was a perfectly adequate biography of him and his phases and his connections to various important pop culture movements in the past 40 years. he was there with a fish on a leash and i got to say hi to him in the lobby during the festival. the crowd was definitely positive for the movie, as it was very emotional and you really root for the old guy who can barely walk due to bad back due to many police beatings due to counter culture fight the power attitude through clowning and acting silly.
camp diaries - a short somewhat experimental soundscape powerpoint ken burns effect photo exposition through film medium thing. i liked it, for the most part. it didn't really tell me anything i didn't know about the japanese internment camps of the 1940's, but it is a fascinating sample of showing japanese americans from years past as just as american as anybody else, and mostly through photographs.
california company town - a looooooooooooooooong 77 minutes of talking about various towns in california that were more or less incorporated and run by corporations and then abandoned. this one shouldn't have been programmed. it was amateurish, boring, monotonous, not profound, boring, poorly focused, and boring. 75% of the crowd walked out, and it wasn't one of the --good-- walkouts, know what i'm saying? if a film is being provocative or abrasive and people walk out, that's one thing. but if everyone is falling asleep or feeling insulted by a filmmaker's lack of skill at presenting information (no matter what stylistic stamp they want to put on this information), that is a totally different situation. the director was sitting in the audience--by the end i was watching her slink farther down in her seat as people kept streaming out one by one, each less careful to make noise than the one before. if you are going to talk about abandoned company towns, how many towns do you think you should focus on? 3? maybe 4? 5? it had to have been at least 15 or so. and each was given the exact same treatment. show the title card of what the city name is. for TEN SECONDS. EVERY TIME. (i counted). i don't know about you, but i can read the name of a city in a second or less. two seconds, tops. if you are going to chop up your film into that many pieces, do not have the same pointless 10 second segment of lost time, white text on black background, people checking their watches and blackberries, reading the festival program when the daytime footage finally follows the long title card (!), et cetera. you get my point. keep pieces of shit like this away from paying crowds.
zidane: a 21st century portrait -
i had read a lot about this one in the past couple of years, and i'm really glad i got to see it on a big screen. i really don't care much at all for football (soccer), but this is a fascinating documentary that illuminates things about zidane that would never be realized in a conventional documentary. basically the premise is this: 19 HD cameras pointed at zinedine zidane for the entirety of a football match a few years ago. there are little experiments with manipulating the soundtrack, which i thought worked great. at a few points there were zidane's own words talking about how he feels about playing the game, but instead of doing a voice-over, they are showed in subtitle form. the soundtrack is by mogwai, whom i normally think is a thoroughly uninteresting band, but i didn't mind their music in this case. i think i'm going to hunt down and buy this dvd for my collection. more excellent editing rhythm. i would like to learn more about what sounds they used and how they produced them.
anatomy: skin, heart, muscle - a kind of triptych of films about bodies and how they can be a manifestation of a mental or philosophical state of a human being. 3 different ~27 minute films focusing on different subjects in australia. all of the subjects are in some way or another on the outskirts of mainstream society. the first is an older gay man who is getting a wonderfully intricate full-body tattoo of various flora as he gets older, with the ultimate plan of having his skin removed and donated to display in a museum after his death. the second is about two women, former lovers, one the artist and one the muse, who reunite several years later to try to recapture their passion for art and love. the third is about a small family of traveling acrobats, one of whom is hiv positive, one of whom is a working mother trying to balance a ton of responsibilities at once, one of whom is a proud trapeze artist trying to work his way back from a devastating leg injury. i thought the first film about the tattoo was the most compelling. i couldn't get what was supposed to be so interesting about the women in the second film. the frustrations of the family in the third film were very well represented. the films as a whole were very exhibitionist, which i suppose isn't that surprising. all three of the films had different directors so perhaps that is why they didn't seem to fit together perfectly. this was my twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth hour of film viewing that day so i could have been too tired to appreciate it fully.
to be continued some more.
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joshuavorbis's journal
