The Festival is on again. Starting two days earlier than usual. And with more films in the subscriber programme than I can ever remember sitting through (I think it's 48 films for my money this year).
It started with...
Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh/United Kingdom) I was looking forward to this.. not sure if it lived up to the hype. Maybe a bit long. Started off really disliking the main character, but she'd kinda won me over by the end. It's not really a happy film.. but it is a film about a person who's happy.
There was a short film from Singapore that I thought was about a brother and sister skipping school, but I was wrong. And then Wonderful Town (Aditya Assarat/Thailand), a Very Slow film about a man who wants to get away from life in the city (Bangkok) and volunteers for a job supervising a construction (possibly a post-tsunami reconstruction) project in a village in the south. Not on the coast. I slept through bits of this, but, after talking to a woman as I left the theatre to get my four-minute between-film exercise, maybe I didn't miss that much. The film is slow to point out that life in the village is slow (didn't miss that point), the man has issues with his father (they didn't get along, not sure why), he ends up in a relationship with the maid from the hotel, the maids brother doesn't like the idea of someone from outside getting near his sister, and the kids in the town don't have very much to do and don't like outsiders either.
Last film of the day was Revanche (Spielmann/Austria) -- executive director Claire said this was a "thriller" -- with my expectations thus set, I expected something thrilling.. and I guess this was, kinda sorta.. I didn't really feel the tension the story needed. It felt like two different films one after the other.. the first half was a lot more thrilling than the second.
I'm not recommending any of today's films. Not to say you wouldn't like them, it depends a lot on who you are (on average, you've got kids, you don't see as many films as you used to, and your first name is Matthew). Don't fret, I'm expecting to see better films in the next two weeks, maybe I'll recommend one or two of those.