Apparently my audience is bigger than one person (who, on average, was, last Thursday, in his black hat and jacket, lined up outside the new Apple store). And they want to know what else I saw, so, here:
The Square (Nash Edgerton/Australia) .. Joel Edgerton (Nash's brother) walked into the State Theatre in front of me, he didn't have a pass. I remember liking this film. Noir.
Hope (Stanislaw Mucha/Poland) Cool story.
The Band's Visit (Eran Kolirin/France, USA, Israel) Funny, charming.
About Water (Udo Maurer/Austria, Luxembourg) Three different stories about
various places on the planet affected by water (lack of, too much of,
redirection of). Fasinating, depressing.
The English Surgeon (Geoffrey Smith/United Kingdom) Documentary. Brain
surgeon. Humanitarian. Interesting.
I Always Wanted To Be A Gangster (Samuel Benchetrit/France) A cool, funny collection of ganster stories intersecting at a roadside cafe.
Buddha Collapsed Out Of Shame (Hana Makhmalbaf/Iran) Very disturbing. Has
the look of a documentary shot on HD video, but it's a drama about a -- I'm
going to say -- five year old girl living in the hills of Afghanistan (I think)
where the Taliban (I'm pretty sure) destroyed those huge Buddha statues. She
wants to go to school, and spends a lot of the film trying to get there only
to be thwarted by older boys playing terrorist and/or soldier games. The
games. Are terrifying. I want to talk about the images from the end of this
film, but I'm not going to coz I don't wanna spoil it for anyone who might see
it. Someone see it, so I can talk to you about it.
Night And Day (San-soo Hong/South Korea) Korean runs away to Paris.
Attempts to hook up with the most attractive Korean he can find while he's
there, and while still calling his wife back home every night. I think I
missed what this was really about.
Girl Cut In Two (Claude Chabrol/France) A young TV weather girl, an
older author and a young playboy (who doesn't much like the author). There's
a bit of a love triangle. The first two thirds of the movie are, I think, supposed to mislead you into thinking you know what's going on, and the last third (in which everything pretty much falls apart for everyone) is there to point out what you missed. Interesting enough.
Sparrow (Johnnie To/China) Can't remember.. there was a bird.. and there
was a happy guy in a suit.. I think I liked this one too.
La Zona (Spain, Mexico) Nice. A gated community in Mexico trying to cover
up a crime. Solid story.
A Very British Gangster (Donal MacIntyre/United Kingdom) Documentary following a gangster and his followers around Manchester. Felt strange and uncomfortable.
The Last Continent (Jean Lemire/Canada) Another documentary about Antarctica. Loved this one.
Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz/France) Ponderous, too much talking, not enough happening. Got interesting when the protagonist starting losing his mind towards the end, but I'd given up way before then.
Egg (Semih Kaplanoglu/Turkey, Greece) Think I slept through bits of this. Never worked out why the egg was so important.
God Man Dog (Singing Chen/Taiwan) Intersecting stories in Taiwan. Okay.
The Cool School (Morgan Neville/USA) Doco about the art scene in LA in the '60s. I missed the start, wouldn't have minded missing entirely.
The Pope's Toilet (France, Brazil) This one might need a bit of an
explanation. The Pope is about to visit a small poor village in Brazil,
thousands of people are expected to attend from all over the country.
Fast thinking villages spend whatever they can find on food to sell to the
expected crowds. Our hero manages to keep his wife
and daughter fed by smuggling. Whatever the local shop owners need he brings across the border on his bicycle. He decides he can make his fortune by building a toilet and charging the expected crowds for its use. You can probably guess how it turns out. I enjoyed this.
Young@Heart (Stephen Walker/USA) A doco about a choir of senior
citizens singing rock'n'roll. Pure joy with a couple of tragedies thrown in. Got audience favourite documentary (for sessions at the State Theatre).
Helen (Joe Lawlor, Christine Molloy/Ireland, United Kingdom) All the way
through this film I kept thinking of Elephant. I've never seen Elephant.
Tea & Sympathy we were supposed to get *Stranded: I've Come From The Plane
That Crashed In The Mountains* which I was really looking forward to (only
based on the name, I dunno if that was a doco or drama), but they needed to
shift around some of the Deborah Kerr films because of the projection system.
T&S is hard to take for the first half hour or so, but once you get over the
cringes it's not so bad. I could relate.
River Of No Return (Darlene Johnson/Australia) The story of one of the
actors in Ten Canoes. Cool.