SIFF - 5/27/05

Films Today: 3
Running Total: 5

Nice to be able to sleep in and catch a late breakfast at Silence Heart Nest. Unfortunately its up early tomorrow for Secret Festival.

Pusher III was the first film on the agenda, and sadly it was the weakest of the series. This was unfortunate, since it followed Milos who was one of the more interesting characters from the original. The film started off really well as Milos is juggling drug deals and making food for his daughter’s birthday party in a series of scenes heavily reminiscent of the Bad Day sequence from Goodfellas. However as his day moves from bad to worse things start slowing down and kind of falling apart, culminating in a series of fairly gruesome scenes which didn’t serve the story at all as far as I could tell. I mean, if you want to show some realistic gore be my guest, but it would be nice if it had a point somehow. A highlight was the return of Milos’ memorable henchman Radovan from Pusher, in a part that dovetails nicely some elements of the original. As a whole the Pusher trilogy is similar to the trilogy Lucas Belvaux did several years back (On The Run, An Amazing Couple, After Life) in that it takes ancillary characters from one movie and brings them to the forefront in interesting and unexpected ways (although Belvaux tied the plots together way more than Refn does.) I was happy to be able to see these all in a row, as that is really the ideal experience since all the elements and characters remain fresh in your mind.

Refn did another enlightening Q&A afterwards, he has a theory that violence in Denmark and the USA is two sides of the same coin. In the USA, violence is born out of desperation. When someone’s luck runs out it is seen as their only option. In Denmark the social safety net is so broad and far-reaching that you don’t usually see that level of desperation, and instead the violence there is born out of boredom. An interesting theory whether you buy it or not. He also said his next film follows the Vikings landing in America, and although this last episode of the Pusher trilogy was a disappointment, I am looking forward to seeing what the future brings since he is obviously very talented.

Second on the list was the new Chris Marker documentary Case Of The Grinning Cat. However this was preceded by two shorts. Chronicles Of A Professional Eulogist was a nicely animated short however it was also fairly pretentious and didn’t grab me in any way. This is too bad since I actually find the whole concept of a professional eulogist kind of cool. Souvenir was somewhat more interesting, but still nothing special, aside from the fact that it was shot on a PXL2000 Pixelvision camera which is admittely a cool concept.

The Marker was fun to a certain extent, although I wish it had been a little more focused. It followed the mysterious appearance of yellow graffiti cats painted throughout Paris following the 9/11 attacks. It starts off great, watching the cats as they appear, looking for them and drawing parallels to French life. Unfortunately around the midway point it starts getting heavily bogged down in French politics and ignoring the whole cat thing entirely before briefly picking it up again at the end. Certainly my un-familiarity with the French political situation didn’t help my view of this film at all. It also looked pretty blah, shot on location with handheld digital video for French television. This probably isn’t the best thing to try and fit into my conception of Marker, which ranges from brilliant (La Jetee) to interesting but not mind-blowing (Remembrance Of Things To Come) to blah (this.) I still really want to see some of his acknowledged classics like Sans Soleil and see if I get my mind blown or not.

We ended the day with This Film Is Not Yet Rated, a raucous and immensely entertaining expose of the MPAA movie ratings system and how it is totally fucking stupid. A movie like this is pretty much an easy slam dunk when it plays to a crowd like this, but it really is educational and hilarious. Kirby Dick maintains a light tone throughout while exposing all the things that make the rating system so incredibly horrifying to anyone who loves films - the raters are anonymous thus they cannot be held accountable in any way, there are no standards of any kind by which films are judged, studio releases are consistently given preferential treatment over independent releases, and finally the undeniable fact that giving a film an NC-17 rating essentially dooms its future because at that point its marketing and distribution options are extremely limited. Intentional or not, this is a form of economic censorship and when you combine it with the lack of accountability and preferential treatment it leads to a system that is hoplessly misguided. I honestly think the raters have their hearts in the right place, but this is no way to run a railroad.

I could go on and lay out the arguments myself, but I urge everyone who loves movies to see it. As a film, you know, its a little too snarky for my taste and the DV looks pretty blah. Still, the “so absurd is funny” tone that Dick takes throughout is often gut-busting, in particular the fantastic interviews he gets out of people like John Waters and Kimberley Pierce. His Q&A was highly entertaining too. Apparently there will be a big promotional campaign around the movie when it premieres on IFC in the fall, describing what people can do in order to make their feelings known.
It sounded like they were going to do a theatrical release as well, which is pretty amazing considering the large amount of graphic footage contained in the clips from movies that have been done wrong by the ratings board.

So, another pretty decent SIFF day under the belt. Will 5/28 continue the luck? Stay tuned!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 30th, 2006 at 12:55 pm and is filed under Movies, SIFF 2006. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.