A SKIN SO SOFT - BFI London Film Festival 2017 Preview

I must admit that I struggled to get through Canadian director Denis Côté's documentary about six body builders.  There's a limit to how much footage I can watch of six men pumping iron, eating protein, getting spray tans and shaving their legs.  I know that the director is trying to show us the unglamorous side of the profession - and boy did we see that.  There's no soundtrack to the film other than hearing people work out really really hard. But I finished watching and discovered that I had no greater understanding of why someone would want to push themselves that hard, and what made these men tick. In fact, the only thing I was left with was a slightly queasy feeling about some of the cinematography which, rather than humanising the men, seemed to objectify them.  I guess one could argue that they are objectifying themselves with their chosen sport, but it felt more than a little voyeuristic and awkward. So - it's dull and potentially disrespectful - there's no reason for me to recommend this movie.

A SKIN SO SOFT has a running time of 94 minutes. It played Locarno Melbourne and Toronto 2017.  There are still tickets left for both screenings at the BFI London Film Festival.

THE HUNGRY - BFI London Film Festival 2017 Preview

I cannot think of a Shakespeare play harder to adapt for modern audiences than his early melodramatic and arguably absurd TITUS ANDRONICUS. It's an over the top bloody revenge play set in ancient Rome, with very little by way of character development or nuance, and even the language is poor by his standards. I didn't even bother watching Julie Taymor's adaptation (although this also had something to do with previous bad experiences with her work).  That said, I was intrigued by the idea of a new version of the play set in contemporary New Delhi. If ever there was a setting that could perhaps capture some of the corruption and familial super-loyalty that the play demands, perhaps India could provide it.  But I am sorry to say that while writer-director Bornila Chatterjee's film looks beautiful and has a fantastic score (DP Nick Cooke and composer Benedict Taylor) - even more impressive on a micro-budget - the film did not capture my attention.  

The first interesting thing is that Chatterjee and her co-writers - Tanaji Dasgupta and Kurban Kassam - choose to jettison Shakespeare's language. Fair enough, one might say, given that it's not his best work, but that decision further exposes the thinness and absurdity of the plot.  There's a lot of justified condensing of characters too - which should make things more straightforward - except that the non-linear presentation and sometimes strange editing choices make it hard to follow again. 

The basic plot is that Tathagat (Naseeruddin Shah - wasted) is a powerful and corrupt businessman. Two years ago he killed his business rival's son and is now set to marry his own feckless son to his business rival's widow Tulsi (Tisca Chopra - very good).  Unsurprisingly, Tulsi has not forgotten the circumstances of her son's suspicious death, and with a loyal sidekick decides to use the wedding as a pretext for some murderous revenge.  It all goes wrong from the start.  Tulsi's newly arrived son Charrag (Antonio Akeel) viciously attacks Tathagat's daughter Loveleen before the wedding. This prompts a hasty cover up and search and heightens the tension. And let's just say things get bloodier and more incredible from there. 

The problem with THE HUNGRY - and indeed with Titus Andronicus - is that it's very hard to care about any of the characters when there actions are so selfish and seemingly futile.  Sadly Chatterjee has not been able to solve the flaw in the original play, and none of her central performances are magnetic enough in their sadistic violence to captivate.  In particular, the attempt to shift the focus from Titus/Tathagat to Tamora/Tulsi fails because Tulsi - as written - is too unknowable, distant, alienating. Still, I really did love the way the film looked and felt - at its best it reminded me of the dreamy-sinister school fund-raiser scenes in BIG LITTLE LIES - and I can't wait to see what Chatterjee does with more malleable and profitable subject-matter and a bigger budget. 

THE HUNGRY has a running time of 100 minutes. It played Toronto 2017.  There are still tickets available for the screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2017.

DAVID STRATTON: A LIFE IN FILM - BFI London Film Festival 2017 Preview

Director Sally Aitken's DAVID STRATTON: A LIFE IN CINEMA is one of those films that makes you fall in love with cinema all over again.  It's a must for cinephiles and especially for lovers of Australian cinema.  I must confess, however, that I sat down to watch it never having heard of the titular film reviewer. But it turns out that he's actually something of an icon - the Aussie Roger Ebert, say.  He started out living in England, before moving to Australia, and discovering his adopted country through its cinema. Obsessed with movies, he realised he could watch films for free if he volunteered as an usher at the Sydney Film Festival. He then worked his way up the be the festival's director for many years, before working as a critic for Variety, and then hosting a hugely popular and influential TV review show in Australia. Even now his passion for cinema is undimmed, and he teaches a seemingly never-ending class on world history at Sydney university.

The still-English accented Stratton takes us through his life and the development of Aussie cinema by highlighting movies that he thinks are exceptional but also personally important to him.  So we get Aussie classics like PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK and recent films like MURIEL'S WEDDING by way of fan favourites like STRICTLY BALLROOM.  But he also subtly teaches us about the first time we saw an Aussie female director, or Aborigines take lead roles, or when Geoffrey Rush was the first Aussie to win an acting Oscar for SHINE.  He takes us through the Ozploitation trend and into the birth of arthouse cinema. And we even learn that the first ever feature film in the WORLD was an Aussie film about the Kelly gang. 

What I loved about this film was seeing actors and directors from Peter Weir to Nicole Kidman to Russell Crowe to David Michod discussing their films with Stratton - the insights and the debates. The most controversial of these is over the white supremacist film ROMPER STOMPER, starring Crowe, that Stratton thought was well made but actively dangerous.  The director hasn't gotten over the slight but Crowe is surprisingly gracious.  We also see Stratton change his mind over the Aussie classic THE CASTLE. 

Having watched this film, I desperately want to buy a compilation of Stratton's written reviews, to sit alongside those from Sarris, Kael and Ebert. He seems like such an insightful, historically literate critic.  This documentary has also given me a list of Aussie films recommended by Stratton that I can't wait to watch. To that end, it's a great doc insofar as it has deepened my understanding of old favourites and provoked a hunger to get to know more about Australian cinema.

DAVID STRATTON: A CINEMATIC LIFE has a running time of 97 minutes. It played Cannes 2017 and opened earlier this year in Australia. There are still tickets available for both screenings at the BFI London Film Festival. 

BAMSEOM PIRATES SEOUL INFERNO - BFI London Film Festival 2017 Preview

BAMSEOM PIRATES SEOUL INFERNO is amazingly mischievous fun for about the first hour of its running time. Two kids form a shitty punk band in the great tradition of The Sex Pistols. They're self-consciously bad at playing their instruments, but have a lot of attitude.  In a vague, kind of post-modern way, they're too cool to actually have an ideology. They're post-ideology. They're against tuition fees and privatisation and authoritarianism and boring middle-class stuff like learning to play an instrument.  When people claim they can't understand their lyrics, they do a gig with a powerpoint presentation, but then claim they deliberately made the lyrics un-understandable. They come across as very smart, very funny and creating their own mythos on the fly.  The one thing they're not, is, truly subversive. In the same way that The Sex Pistols ruffled a lot of insecure people in the UK, Bamseom Pirates are deliberately provocative but neither are enemies of the state.  The Pistols said they were the antichrist, but they weren't satanists. So when Bamseom Pirates mention North Korea, or Kim Jong Il, that doesn't make them North Korean spies. This seems so obvious you wonder why I'm saying it until you realise that the Pirates' manager was prosecuted under South Korea's National Security Law for, effectively, treason, for retweeting a North Korean tweet. And when he went to trial, the band and their lyrics effectively went on trial too.  

This latter half of the movie was absolutely fantastic in its philosophical and emotional impact.  I was forced to reassess my dismissive views of the band as CLEARLY as funny and OBVIOUSLY not spies. After all, if I lived in Seoul, tens of miles from the North Korea border, in range of missiles, would I be so confident and tolerant of dissent and satire? Would I perhaps become as intolerant and impatient as the serious young men on the debate programme on TV questioning why we should tolerate such childish behaviour?  Emotionally, watching this lighthearted prankster turned into a shy, submissive, apologetic wreck by a disproportionately serious and angry trial was heartbreaking.  The manager keeps speaking of being confused. He hates authoritarianism and was always so proud to be satirical in the South, knowing this behaviour would not be tolerated in North Korea. So when he's prosecuted under the easily abused National Security Law, it's as if the border doesn't exist. I could've cried for him and his crushed spirit.  In that, BAMSEOM PIRATES SEOUL INFERNO became an exceptionally good doc - because it not only shone a light on an issue I didn't know existed, but it provoked me and moved me too.

BAMSEOM PIRATES SEOUL INFERNO has a running time of 120 minutes. There are tickets available for both screenings at the BFI London Film Festival. 

SHORT FILM AWARD PROGRAMME 1 - BFI London Film Festival 2017 Preview

The following short features are  showing as part of the BFI London Film Festival Short Film Award Programme 1.  Tickets are still available for both screenings.

THE RABBIT HUNT opens at sunrise on a beautiful landscape shot of Pahokee, Florida, before we cut to a factory belching out steam, and then to a large extended family preparing for some kind of excursion in near blinding sunlight.  A sugarcane field is set on fire and the smoke obscures the landscape and in its ruins the family catches wild rabbits, stringing them up onto their belts.  We then see the rabbits skinned and cooked and sold, making this an inappropriate film for the faint-hearted or vegetarians. (Conversely, meat eaters should not watch this hungry as those rabbit thighs dripping in hot sauce look SO good!)  Patrick Bresnan's 12 minute is beautiful shot and framed, and does what all great documentaries do - it takes into the heart of something obscure that we would't otherwise have a chance to see, understand or be provoked by. I look forward to seeing his feature length treatment of the same locale, now in post-production.

GODDESS/DEVI is set in contemporary Bengal and starts in the midst of a foul-mouthed fist-fight as men cruelly taunt a woman for being gay. The girl in question - Tara (Aditi Vasudev) - is picked up by her disapproving mum (Tanvi Azmi) and brought home to the sounds of cheesy Bollywood songs with their promise of everlasting heterosexual romance.  Once inside the confines of the house, we realise that Tara is attracted to Devi (Priyanka Bose) - the maid - and these feelings are reciprocated.  However, the mother's interruption provokes so many questions that are brilliant left ambiguous by director Karishma Dube.  This 13 minute movie is outstanding insofar as it contains a fully developed, provocative story with nuanced characters within its short running time.  By the end we aren't sure if Tara's feelings really were genuine or whether she just didn't have enough courage to defend Devi.  Is she just as bad as her mother, who summons a new maid with a portable door bell, and idly eats her breakfast as she washes the steps?  What does it say about contemporary India that the rich speak to each other in English and address the poor in a different language.  Has Tara unwittingly taken on this proprietary attitude?  I could talk about this film for far longer than its running time and that speaks to its richness.

MARTIN PLEURE/MARTIN CRIES is a devastatingly dark tragicomic 16 minute film from director Jonathan Vinel about a teenage boy who wakes up one day to find all his friends have disappeared.  It's filmed as a kind of contemporary video game, opening with the guy kicking the crap out of his bedroom, and then taking out his frustration in a variety of game levels to rap music.  The most brilliant part about this film is how one realises from little clues, like the avatar like names of the friends, the fact that they somehow evaporated, the activities that they did together, that Martin is a kind of character inside a kind of Tron.  It's ambiguous as to whether he's the avatar of a real-life kid who's been ghosted by other online players. Or whether he's an AI with no-one to play with any more. Either way this is a beautifully imagined and slipper film with all kinds of strange implications for the nature of modern "friendship" and alienation.  It's frightening and bizarrely affecting and believable.

THE ARTIFICIAL HUMORS /OS HUMORES ARTIFICIAS is a delightful film by Gabriel Abrantes (A BRIEF HISTORY OF PRINCESS X) about an AI robot called Andy Coughman (geddit?!) who is being programmed by his maker to be a stand-up comedian.  While researching facial reactions to humour Andy falls for a young indigenous girl and that relationship continues to blossom when she smuggles herself to Sao Paolo to escape her strict family.  Once there, Andy continues his "sentimental education" but a bout of reprogramming plus social media fame distracts him from his true love.  She is left behind by the modern world, and her opportunities are muted - so what does it say about us and her family that the most attention and love she receives is from an AI? Provocative but also sweet, the longer-running time of 29 minutes is well used. 

BAD LUCKY GOAT - BFI London Film Festival Preview 2017

BAD LUCKY GOAT is a wonderfully unique, heart-warming, laugh-out-loud funny film set on a small Colombian Caribbean island.  It's the kind of place where everyone knows everyone; even the local bad guy isn't that bad; where superstition rules; and where your mum calls up the local radio station to call you home for supper.   It feels a million miles away from urban London, and yet its themes of angry parents, warring siblings and seemingly insurmountable odds are hugely relatable. 

In sun kissed, beautifully photographed Port Paradise, siblings Corn and Rita (Honlenny Huffington and Kiara Howard) think they've invoked bad juju when they accidentally run over a goat and ding their father's truck.  They need to find the money to pay for the repairs before their parents find out which leads them to back to get the dead goat, despite the juju, and essentially strip it for parts.  This is done with great gusto and isn't for the faint hearted. We see it part sold to the slightly sceptical local butcher, it's skin used to repair a drum, and the head kept as a kind of totem. All of this serves as a brilliant way to get to know the characters on the island, and for the warring siblings to finally work together and make their peace despite their different values are preoccupations:  Corn wants to be a musician, whereas Rita is far more hard-headed and practical.

Debut feature director Samir Oliveros has truly crafted a unique and yet relatable film. His observations about the charm and claustrophobia of small-town life, and the decibel level of being in a large family are absolutely on the nose.  And his use of editing and music cues for comic effect is confident and impressive. This film truly deserves to become a break-out success and I can't wait to see what Oliveros does next.

BAD LUCKY GOAT has a running time of 78 minutes. There are still tickets available for one of the screenings at the BFI London Film Festival.