MIFF
I saw two wonderfully enjoyable films last night. The first was Encounters at the End of the World, a film about the people who work out of McMurdo base in Antarctica and the things they do. Amongst the support staff there are some real fruitloops with some great stories to tell.
It never occurred to me that McMurdo was big enough to have bars, yoga classes, a bowling alley and a gym. But apparently it does! The big surprise for me in this film was Werner Herzog’s amusing and witty commentary. His wit seemed enhanced by compression into English (he’s German).
Barry McKenzie Holds His Own was a sublime-to-ridiculous counterpoint to my Antarctic odyssey. This film is an absolute classic. The print we watched included the original trailers at the beginning (both highly pornographic, including one for Felicity- I actually thought these were part of the film!) The plot is a ludicrous romp in which communist-vampire Transylvanian spy-assassins mistake Dame Edna for the Queen, abduct her back to Transylvania, leaving caricature Australians to find her. BMHHO is billed as “The First Film in English with English Subtitles”, probably just as well because there were times when the “Australianisms”, mock or not, became almost incomprehensible. Deliciously racist in parts, it has numerous references to “tinted people” and “abos” – Barry Humphries has never been shy of lampooning bigotry, although the PC set never seem to get it. It also features what must be some of the worst segues into musical numbers in the history of film. My personal favorite moment is when a group of Australian yobs gatecrash a polite party in an English country house (really just a poorly laid excuse for a musical number), the piano music playing in the background is (improbably) the first movement of Beethoven’s seriously monumental (and very non-background) Hammerklavier Sonata Op 106!
Of other films I’ve seen, a couple of docos, one good, one bad. The good one, Alone in Four Walls, is about the Russian juvenile justice system. Definitely worth seeing. Where do 13 year-old murderers, boys whose voices have not even broken, come from? What happens when they rub shoulders with boys who are only in for stealing jam and pickles? The film visits their parents, ramshackle dirt poor rural homes. It also explores their life in incarceration, surprisingly docile and free from violence (at least as portrayed in the film). Poignantly, Alexandra Westheimer (the film’s director) leaves it to the final seconds to tell you that 90% of the boys pictured in the film will end up in the adult justice system.
The bad documentary was Yasukuni, more-or-less about Japanese ultra-nationalists, their supporters and opponents. Way too long, unfocussed, badly edited, incredibly badly shot, full of poor questions, this film is as much an embarassment for its maker as it is for the loopies portrayed. Pity because Yasukuni’s controversies are an interesting topic but this was no way to go about it. Unsurprisingly this film was made by a Chinese director Ying Li, probably accounting for the polemic tone of the film (there’s no moderates.)
