Wednesday, August 16, 2017

I'm Too Miffty

I saw seventeen films at MIFF and I liked a lot of them but I'm lazy and so I only managed to write up four of them. On the Beach at Night Alone, A Man of Integrity, The Death and Life of Marsha P Johnson and High Tide come highly recommended. The Idea of a Lake, A Skin So Soft, The Wound, Lover for a Day and Sami Blood are all worth a look.

Axolotl Overkill: Its detractors are right insofar as we probably didn't need another trawl through the Berlin drug/club scene but seeing as we got one anyway I'm happy to have Axolotl Overkill. It cuts from scene to scene with little regard for connecting tissue yet somehow this produces a hazy rhythm rather than an abrupt one. Also setting it apart from its peers is an eye for the absurd (where did that penguin come from?) and a willingness to pause all forward momentum for flights of fancy like an out of nowhere contemporary dance performance set to Me and the Devil.

Bright Sunshine In/Let the Sunshine In: Claire Denis is the greatest living director so calling this a major disappointment for me is something of an understatement. All the pieces are in place save for a script which approaches romance as an intellectual pursuit apart from the rest of life and a collection of characters (very deliberately) designed as caricatures of masculinity complete with unbearable tics. It is very much what it intends to be so if that description appeals to your sensibilities by all means have at it. I'll be over here exchanging sad high fives with the disappointed. (That is an actual thing that happened. Film festivals are strange.)

Floating Life: The sad truth of films is that for every widely hailed masterpiece that enters the canon and is forever available on a million different formats there are at least three other worthy films condemned to obscurity. The nice thing about film festivals is that such gems are occasionally dug up. Floating Life is definitely a gem. It starts out as a broad fish-out-of-water comedy set in the overexposed Australian sun but before it's done it cycles through a dozen different tones (lowkey realist drama, heartrending tragedy, sexy romance...) at least three different continents and all manner of compositions (flat with loads of negative space, deep focus, striking bird's eyes...) and yet all of it feels of a piece and contributes to its kaleidoscopic take on the immigrant experience.

Nocturama: Ostensibly this film is about terrorism and consumerism but it methodically, deliberately strips away almost all of the familiar context and rhetoric used to explain such things. Even physical space is violated in its finale as the action is viewed through banks of security screens which make it difficult - if not impossible - to know where people are in relation to one another. The cumulative effect of these choices is disconcerting, almost terrifying. There are no explanations to be found for its protagonists' deeds, no potential cures suggested for the sickness at its heart; just a headlong fall into a (richly aestheticized) void.

Sunday, July 2, 2017

Band Baaja Baaraat

Band Baaja Baaraat contains all of the usual romcom cliches including a last minute run to win a lover's affection. That said all of them are played with ridiculous energy and fervor; as if they were being invented for the first time. Anushka Sharma's hilarious mugging in the first performance of Ainvayi Ainvayi is emblematic but performances aside there's also a riot of dutch angles, jump cuts and zooms. Some of its style is rigorously consistent (like the film's bright colour palate) but some of it comes and goes as needed: there's just one scene involving characters speaking directly into the camera. All of it feels every bit as delightfully kitschy as the heroes' wedding designs. Also whether serendipitous or not the film's through-line of first timers breaking through aligns nicely with its previously unknown male lead and debut director.

Tuesday, May 9, 2017

A Brief History of Gay Zombie Porn and Australian Film Criticism

In 2010 the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) attempted to screen L.A. Zombie, the latest work by avant garde filmmaker/art pornographer Bruce LaBruce.* It didn't work out. The Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC - now the Australian Classification Board) stepped in and refused it classification, effectively banning it from being screened in Australia.**

Predictably enough the Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF - no really, that's its acronym) rode to the rescue of adventurous sickos everywhere and scheduled an illegal screening. Despite being widely advertised (with the location omitted, presumably the details were e-mailed to ticket buyers) the screening went ahead without interference.**** However the organiser's house was later raided by police and charges were laid.***

For me it's in the immediate aftermath of the screening that the real story lies. Luke Buckmaster - quite possibly Australia's most middlebrow film critic - attended and was unsurprisingly outraged. Somewhat disingenuously he supported the OLFC's decision to "...ban the film from screening in general cinemas."**** Strictly speaking that is indeed what the OFLC had done. Of course in practice the film was never going to screen outside of MIFF (with the possible exception of the Sydney Underground Film Festival) and was always going to be shown as an unrated film for 18+ attendees. However Buckmaster is not one to probe technicalities.

The Young Turks of Screen Machine, then Australia's premier journal of smarty pants film criticism, were incensed at what they saw as shameful wowserism and philistinism. The stage was set and on 13 September 2010 the curtain lifted on what I believe to be simultaneously the greatest and pettiest stoush in the history of Australian film criticism.

Ladies and gentlemen, courtesy of the Internet Wayback Machine I present to you Luke Buckmaster vs Emma Jane and Brad Nguyen. Be sure to read the comments: https://web.archive.org/web/20150423172850/http://blogs.crikey.com.au/cinetology/2010/09/13/a-different-opinion-on-gay-zombie-porn-in-defence-of-bruce-labruces-la-zombie/

*http://miff.com.au/festival-archive/film/23584/l-a-zombie
**https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/jul/21/gay-zombie-porn
***http://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-11-12/filmmaker-questions-timing-of-zombie-porn-raid/2334866
****https://www.crikey.com.au/2010/08/30/cops-didnt-show-but-maybe-they-should-have-gay-zombie-p-rno-sickens/