MentalPolyphonics

This film is about the industrial design of food. It’s structured around interviews with people in the industry, from psychologists to product designers. Interspersed with the talking bits are incredibly-fun shots of food, often having something weird done to it in slow motion to demonstrate a concept like crunchiness.

The food porn is worth the cost of admission and the interviews have lots of interesting tidbits. The problem with the film is that it doesn’t commit to just covering industrial food design, or psychological factors in food enjoyment, or how our senses perceive food. It’s a shotgun approach that will leave you feeling unsatisfied.

For example, Food Design opens with a shot of fishsticks and eventually discusses them in depth. But they don’t mention the history of fishsticks: they were developed as a control for product testing. Fish sticks are explained as appealing to people who don’t really like fish but they don’t interview anyone who’s actually involved in the design of fish sticks or go into any depth about how we experience eating them differently from a fillet of cod.

It is mentioned that food design is as old as agriculture; for example, the Dutch bred carrots to be the national colour. But the film mostly focuses on contemporary food design. In order to cover the breadth, the interviews with industry insiders are about the philosophy of their business. I’d be interested to see a documentary about the process of actually designing a new product, like this excellent Gladwell article.

Food Design dismisses organic food and raw vegetables in general. Consumers are framed as being concerned with pleasure above all else and therefore easily manipulated by food design. This would be fine for a focused documentary, but is odd when insightful industry professionals are asked to wax philosophical.

This film is a piece of original fiction centred around a high-fantasy live-action roleplaying game (LARP). It was filmed at a LARP amusement park called Duché de Bicolline, which is in Quebec although the film is in English. The main actors are professional actors, playing characters that are in turn playing LARP characters*. The extras are real-life LARP players playing their LARP characters on screen.

The first half the film is a fun fish-out-of-water tale about Erik accepting that he has to play along with the LARP to get back the girl. The girl, Evelyn, is a flakey disposable woman with no features worth fighting for besides her “wonderful ass”. It’s tolerable because she’s used as a living MacGuffin to explore Duché de Bicolline and the emotional relationship between the viking brothers. This half is why the film won an audience award at Slamdance.

The second half of the film is all about perpetuating the myth that role-playing makes people go psychotic. I can only assume the Duché de Bicolline players had no idea this was in the script when they supported the filming of The Wild Hunt. Although this segment is well done (eg: it doesn’t glamorize violence), it’s exploitative and cheap. The script had enough subtlety that the brothers’ relationship provided a compelling conflict.

Kyla theorizes that the film makers were worried that regular audiences wouldn’t get into the high fantasy camp. I think that having Erik as the audience surrogate alleviates the need for such a dumbing-down. I’d love to see a documentary about Duché de Bicolline that trades the high production value of The Wild Hunt for a more engaging portrait.

* Notably, Mark Antony Krupa’s character Bjorn is in-LARP-character the entire film. Does that mean that Mark never played Bjorn-the-21st-century-guy? Discuss.

The film starts as cheap but quite scary gotcha-horror. Although it relies heavily on the soundtrack, the director shows significant technical ability in setting up the gotchas.

The film develops into a flat-out monster-hunt action movie. I find the disconnect between these two acts to be quite disconcerting: how could the writer-director be so unclear on what kind of movie he wants to make? (But maybe consistent style is an Occidential thing?)

Interspersed in these two acts is noir satire, which includes some very clever scenes. The development of the main characters is pretty ineffective and quirky supporting characters fly in and out of frame – it feels as if Rule #1 was written as the pilot to a TV series. (Perhaps this is what reviewers meant when they compared it to the X-Files?)

Normally when a protagonist discovers that he is battling previously unseen supernatural forces, he is simultaneously given some weapon that is effective against them. Not so in Rule #1. There is no way to put benign ghosts to rest and the only way to fight malicious ghosts is to kill the innocent bystanders they’ve possessed. The film has a unsettling and unenjoyable theme of hopelessness and inevitable failure.

The third act presents two alternate endings, one bad and the other worse. I know that happy endings are a Hollywood thing, but why not make one of the alternatives cathartic to give the audience a sense of closure?

It’s implied at the beginning that the protagonist could simply be suffering from post-traumatic stress – that alternate explanation is quickly discarded. A well-written script would have allowed the audience to maintain this alternate or even presented it as a third alternate ending.

Kelvin Tong should stick to directing and stay far away from his typewriter.

The stuff I heard in advance suggested that the users of hourly motels they interviewed were despicable with an undercurrent of intense sadness. I would classify the crimes of these people as sad, but the crimes are not evil and not all of the six seem that sad.

The saddest people are the women sex trade workers. Their stories are cliche (hooker with a heart of gold and a stripper trying to get her kids back) but the delivery, editing and location keep it poignant.

The drug-addicted men treat the women in their lives as poorly as they treat themselves. They have a calm acceptance of their situations that makes me neither despise nor pity them. I’m particularly interested in high-functioning heroin addicts because heroin is generally presented as being so damaging to society, particularly the Vancouver of my childhood.

The other two characters, a giglo and a swinging woman, don’t seem sad at all: they’ve discovered unconventional sexualities that work for them. You could argue that they’re repressing existential loneliness, but who isn’t? Their lives would probably be most improved if the rest of the world didn’t make them sneak around in high-privacy motels.

There’s also Mr R, who isn’t fully fleshed-out. From what I gather, the director knew him in advance. His scenes are shoved into what is otherwise very tight editing.

I didn’t put Love at the Twilight Motel on my wish list, because I was worried that it would be too Miami-centric. But the purpose-built motels in Miami are just used to provide establishing shots for atmosphere. The people could just as easily live in any city in North America: you’ve heard these stories before but this is an engaging way to hear them again.