I have not been able to preview the two VIFF films that most excite me this year - James Benning's Unabomber-themed experimental film
Stemple Pass and Bobcat Goldthwait's bigfoot film
Willow Creek. But I have been previewing as many films as I possibly can, and writing reviews of most of them. Here are my top ten films of the 20-odd films I've been able to see - all of which I think are must-sees for Vancouver cinephiles, though the odd caveat may apply. Links in the titles below direct to the VIFF catalogue, where you can find information about screening times...
1.
Big Bad Wolves
There's something about having a child murderer on
the loose that tends to bring out the worst in people. If Fritz Lang's
classic
M isn't evidence enough of that, this blackly humorous
Israeli film
Big Bad Wolves (trailer
here) should close the argument. It's easily the most mainstream,
crowd-pleasing film in the VIFF's latenight series - except that
audience members need to be able to stomach some pretty extreme scenes
of torture, like toenails getting ripped off, a blowtorch applied to the
skin, that sort of thing. If you're hardy enough for that, and like a good thriller, this is a must-see. The plot: after a young girl is abducted,
molested, and beheaded - among other indignities - both a rogue cop and the
girl's father, a hard-as-stone veteran of Lebanon, focus their
suspicions on a helpless-seeming schoolteacher, who protests his
innocence even after enhanced interrogation techniques are applied. The
film is blackly funny, politically sympathetic (both in the fun it pokes
at its would-be vigilantes and at their dealings with a polite,
friendly Arab neighbour who drops by their torture-roost), and tonally
and visually similar to the Coen's
Blood Simple, though its plot bears
no resemblance whatsoever to that film. A completely satisfying
entertainment.
2.
Good Vibrations
A must-see for anyone who liked
24
Hour Party People, Good Vibrations (trailer
here) tells the story of
Terri Hooley, a
one-eyed music lover who founded an important Belfast record store
during the Troubles of the 1970's, and ended up distributing several
important early punk bands (most famously, the Undertones, the story of whose single, "
Teenage Kicks," is told herein). This film should particularly please
anyone who, while not being a musician, hopes to contribute to their
local scene, be it through journalism, gig promotion, broadcasting,
DIY-distribution of records, or through simple infectious enthusiasm. An
essential scene mid-point through the film easily stands the
greatest filmed representation of the conversion to punk that I have seen: as the
30-something year old Hooley (played by
Game of Thrones' Richard Dormer) is checking out his
first punk gig, he witnesses (and participates in) a confrontation with the
Royal Ulster Constabulary, then slowly starts to take in the music and
the vibe of the gig (where Rudi is onstage performing "
Big Time" - a
real band and a real song, here re-enacted by actors). The changes on
his face and the tangible joy he experiences as the song proceeds speak volumes and capture feelings I have felt many a time at punk gigs, but never seen put on screen before. I've talked to two other people who have had a chance to preview this film and both loved it; Hooley himself has
apparently seen the film fifteen times...
3.
Kiss The Water: A Love Story
It sounds like an unlikely subject for a documentary: a reclusive
Scottish woman who dresses as a man - complete with necktie - and lives
in a remote rural home which, for most of her life, was without electricity, whose fame lies in her skill
at tying flies - flies of the sort used in catching spawning Atlantic salmon,
that is. Add to these facts that the subject of the film, Megan Boyd,
died in 2001 (obit
here), and that the film is completely devoid of her voice, and
almost entirely absent her image (which only appears briefly at the very
end), and that most of the people who speak in the film are themselves
senior citizens, who knew Boyd in life, and you'd be within reason to
guess that
Kiss The Water: A Love Story is about as compelling to watch as a game of golf. And there you'd be dead
wrong; filmmaker Eric Steel enriches Boyd's story with achingly beautiful
footage of the Scottish landscape, apparently hand-painted animations
of salmon and rivers, and close-ups of gorgeous flies being prepared (though not by
Boyd). The stories, too, are very entertaining and revealing -
particularly when the Royal Family enters the picture; I saw this previewed with various members of the press - a jaded bunch, oftentimes - and was pleased to note they laughed aloud more than once. Frequently the
only other film that came to mind - showing a rather different sort of
eccentric's engagement with the natural world - was Thomas Riedelsheimer's
Rivers
and Tides, about British artist (and Scotland resident) Andy Goldsworthy. Riedelsheimer himself
has a film in the fest, about Japanese wind artist Susumu Shingu, but though it too is often beautiful and compelling, the truth is I preferred
Kiss The Water.
Speaking of Scotland, some of
these are very, very funny.
4.
Salmon Confidential
Salmon Confidential (that links to the official site) is rousing and upsetting. It follows one woman's
attempts - against administrative muzzling of scientists and a general
climate of terminal Speak No Evilism - to demonstrate that there is
something very wrong with BC salmon farming, way beyond the increase in
sea lice: that it is bringing deadly European fish viruses, like the
dreaded Infectious Salmon Anemia, to our coast and killing off healthy
wild salmon in masses as they pass through on their spawns. I can't
speak to her methods or conclusions, but based on what one sees in the
film, Alexandra Morton presents as passionate, outdoorsy, outspoken, and
highly lucid; and her conclusions are very disturbing, as is the
implication that the provincial and federal governments are deliberately
obfuscating the facts so that there is no panicked worldwide
marketplace reaction against BC salmon (the doc also deals with the BC Liberals'
Bill 37 Animal Health Act, that would have made it criminal for
whistleblowers to speak out about farm animal diseases, and that may yet
make a comeback). Not just your average eco-doom doc, the film is
attempting to draw awareness to an issue that every BC'er should be educating themselves on and taking action to remedy. Interestingly, the film has already spawned - no pun intended - a debunker's website,
Salmon Confidential Exposed...
5.
Let The Fire Burn
This is an astonishing, essential, sobering work - one of the most compelling historical documentaries I've seen, and a film not to be
missed for those interested in U.S. race relations, radical activism,
and the state response to dissenting groups.
Let The Fire Burn is
constructed from news reports, police camera footage, and the testimony
before a public committee held to inquire at to how the police siege of a
radical compound in Philadelphia in May 1985 went so horribly wrong. A
back-to-nature, anti-technology black liberation group known as MOVE
were repeated targets of police violence - as when MOVE member Delbert
Africa was clubbed over the head with a helmet and then kicked and
beaten on the ground by police during a 1976 raid. MOVE may or may not
have helped incite a negative response to their cause - they certainly
don't sound like they were ideal neighbours, as suggested by the
testimony of both black and white residents of the area they chose for
their second home. They had fortified bunkers on the roof, mounted
bullhorns blasting profanity-laden political rants, members appearing on the
streets and rooftop with weapons, and what certainly appears to have
been a generally confrontational, in-your-face attitude. Radicals can be
like that. Still, the 1985 Waco-like, police-initiated firestorm that
killed eleven members, including five children, and destroyed many
adjacent homes, seems clearly to have been both an atrocity - an act of
unpunished government mass murder - and one of the greatest instances of police incompetence in recorded history. I confess that I had never heard of
MOVE before watching this film, but was utterly gripped by the story and
am glad to be less ignorant now. Depressing stuff, but a chapter of
American history that should not be forgotten.
This is a smart, rational, beautifully-crafted and even occasionally inspiring
look at the great therapeutic value to be found in the controlled
medical use of psychedelics, taking in both past research - like the
benefits of treating alcoholics with LSD - to present applications (like
giving psilocybin to cancer patients, or treating post-traumatic stress
disorder with Ecstasy). BC experimental filmmaker
Oliver Hockenhull
deftly interweaves talking-head testimonials, both from his own
interviews (including local notables like Wade Davis and Gabor Mate) and
archival sources (including Richard "Ram Dass" Alpert and Aldous
Huxley), with beautifully-shot, trippily-designed approximations of transcendental
states. Anyone who has not fallen victim to hysterical sensationalism
and fear-mongering about how all drugs are bad (unless patented and
mass-produced by corporations) should give the film a look; I've only
seen the 69-minute edit of the film (screening October 1st as a matinee, with Gabor Mate in attendance)
and recommend based on it that people seek out the longer
version screening elsewise in the fest, since the 69-minute version is
so bursting with testimonials (from responsible medical professionals)
for re-scheduling psychedelics that it comes across as somewhat
breathless and over-generalized. While I have not seen the longer version of the film, I fully expect it to be even better...
7.
The Kill Team
The Kill Team - official site
here - is every bit as compelling as films like Brian DePalma's
Casualties of War or more recent fare like Paul Haggis'
In The Valley of Elah,
but has the distinction of being a documentary. It tells the story of how
a group of US soldiers stationed in Afghanistan go rogue and start murdering random
civilians, planting weapons on the bodies afterwards and backing up each
other's stories. One would-be whistleblower, Spc Adam Winfield,
objects, and is threatened and bullied into uncomfortable silence,
leaving him in the role of observer and uneasy participant. The
documentary tracks Winfield's court martial, and features strangely
shameless interviews with two convicted murderers who were part of the
"kill team" - young soldiers apparently lacking any moral compass
whatsoever. Whether you feel sympathy or not for Winfield - whose own
role in events falls far from heroism, and whose eventual testimony came
too late to save at least two lives - you'll feel sympathy for his
parents, and be wholly compelled by the drama on hand, and what it
reveals about the state of contemporary warfare. Note: the film contains
some upsetting images of murdered Afghan citizens.
8.
Gold
Cinephiles, wanting to like Thomas Arslan's gorgeously-shot
Gold - about German
immigrants seeking their fortune during the goldrush, trekking through the BC wilderness en route to Dawson - will wait nervously for signs that the film is not just a variation
on Kelly Reichardt's
Meek's Cutoff, perhaps cross-pollinated with
Aguirre the Wrath of God (and with a bit of Jim Jarmusch's
Dead Man thrown in, especially as pertains to the soundtrack, by Earth's Dylan Carlson - he does an excellent job of doing exactly what Neil Young did for Jarmusch's movie). Perhaps I can reassure you, so you will be able to appreciate the film without worrying that it is a mere knock off:
Gold distinguishes itself from its forbears quite admirably in the last quarter. Admirers of last year's hit film
Barbara, by Christian Petzold, will recognize Petzold's leading lady Nina Hoss as the central figure; people who like movies about strong, independent women will be hard pressed to find one stronger or more independent than her character here, and Hoss' performance is just great...
9.
The Closed Circuit
Followers of this blog know that I'm somewhat obsessed with Ryszard Bugajski's 1991 film
Clearcut, a feature he made in Canada when the political climate in Poland (and the government's response to his earlier feature
The Interrogation) made his working there impossible. I just discovered that my dubious-provenance "public domain" DVD of it, which meshes pan and scan sequences with stretched ones, actually looks pretty good if I adjust the aspect ratio of my TV! Watched it for the umpteenth time tonight and loved it, as I always do. I also really liked Bugajski's new film,
The Closed Circuit, which screens in this year's VIFF. It's a grim political thriller about former Party members, now with government jobs, who conspire to contrive charges against three young businessmen, imprison them, and take over their newly founded electronics firm. The scheme is somewhat nasty and labyrinthine, but works quite well, and people who enjoy movies about corporate espionage - even those with no real knowledge of Poland's history - will enjoy watching it fall together.
The Closed Circuit may pull its punches a little bit at the end - it allows for a glimmer of hope for a couple of its characters that seems mostly to be about letting the audience off the hook without subjecting them to a thoroughgoing bummer of a movie, but the film is just angry enough elsewhere that a viciously cruel, cynical, hopeless ending would have been entirely appropriate. Still, anyone with a grudge against the abuse of power under Communist rule will appreciate the bleakness of this film, which shows that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The Closed Circuit has proven popular with Polish audiences, though one suspects the Polish government won't be the film's biggest fan...
10.
Borgman
Not to be confused with
Manborg, Borgman belongs to a peculiar subgenre
of cinema: stories about a stranger who comes to a home,
subjects the family to an ordeal, taps into repressed or dormant energies,
and by doing so, transforms the family radically - though whether this
transformation is a liberation or a destruction is a matter of debate;
often it contains elements of both, with destruction usually centering
on the man of the house and liberation focusing on the women and
children, should they survive.
Teorema, The Shout, Brimstone and
Treacle, Visitor Q, and maybe Michael Haneke's dark and nasty
Funny
Games - which gets namechecked in the VIFF calendar description of the
film - count
as the purest examples I've encountered (it's possible Polanski's
Cul-De-Sac belongs on the list too but its been some time since I saw
it).
Distinct from standard home invasion films like
The Desperate Hours,
which end with a member of the household eventually repelling the
stranger,
these films often are quite surreal and seem to contain elements of a
social critique, showing that the family somehow needs the influence of
the stranger - who ingratiates himself with at least some members of the
family, and who generally appears as a cipher for the filmmaker.
Indeed,
Borgman's filmmaker, Alex van Warmerdam, plays one of the lackeys of the
film's eponymous messiah, whose infiltration of the home, methods and agenda
are perhaps a little bit more obscure than those of the messiahs in the
other films mentioned; you're really not sure where things are going
until they've gotten there. Still, you'll enjoy some of
Borgman's
surprises along the way - which include a singularly cinematic method of
disposing of corpses (jaded filmgoers who demand that totally novel,
permanently memorable images be emblazoned in their cortex on leaving
the cinema should take heart:
Borgman has at least one, and returns to it a couple of times). Fans of
contemporary surrealist fare like
Dogtooth will probably want to catch
this, as well as any middle-class masochists who want to suffer for their privileges...
The big VIFF catalogues are now available, and the free guides you see contain a complete schedule of the films, though not all are given write-ups. The Granville cinemas are no longer functional, so the VIFF is spread out amongst a few more cinemas this year - including the Rio and International Village. I'm actually surprised that I have enjoyed as many of the films I've previewed as I have; it looks to be a very, very strong festival this year! Get excited - and start grabbing tickets for the films you most want to see...
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