In no particular order:

Drama

House of Pleasures

How can you go wrong with period French prostitutes? [Opening Gala, Feb 12 14:00]

Rundskop (Bullhead)

I’d like to see more crime movies that aren’t about beautiful people committing glamorous crimes. [Feb 5 14:00, Feb 7 18:45]

Midnight Son

We desperately need reimaginings of the vampire myth that aren’t Mormon sparkle faeries. [Feb 6 19:15, Feb 9 19:00]

Nuit #1

This could be a preachy, dull look at Generation Y, but I’ll listen to a lecture if it starts with a 12-minute-long gritty sex scene. [Feb 5 19:15, Feb 11 11:30]

Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia)

Grizzled detectives sitting in a car at night, talking – it’s like ultra-noir. [Feb 10 21:30]

Documentary

The Redemption of General Butt Naked

I thought this Liberian warlord was fascinating before I heard he’s still alive and has converted to Christianity! [Feb 4 21:30, Feb 12 16:30]

Vigilante Vigilante: The Battle for Expression

You can’t make a straight documentary about graffiti, so like Exit Through the Gift Shop this takes a different angle by looking at people who clean up graffiti in destructive ways. [Feb 9 21:30]

Sushi: The Global Catch

Sushi is the national dish of BC, and sustainable sushi is a really important issue. [Feb 4 16:30]

A People Uncounted

Normally I avoid Holocaust movies, but the Roma are an ethnic group that I’d like to know more about. [Feb 8 18:45]

Girl Model

The modelling industry is so weird, I’m sure this will be fascinating to watch. [Feb 5 21:45]

This Israeli film is full of classic tropes but it does them well and since it’s set in an exotic culture I’m sure it’s a crowd-pleaser. It’s set, of course, in the summer of 1969. The protagonist, Arik, and his friends are in the last summer of highschool before conscription to the Israeli military (a fact unfortunately never mentioned after the introduction). The main adult characters are two criminals whose hearts are so gold and crimes so victimless that they’re barely criminals at all.

The title character, whose fun-to-say name (“Yankale Bride”) is repeated over and over again, runs a matchmaking service subsidized by smuggling blue jeans or something like that. The protagonist, Arik, is taken under Yankale’s wing running background checks on suitors but kept away from the smuggling. I assumed that it would be revealed that Arik’s actually being used to facilitate smuggling, but I was disappointed. Seeing the matchmaking business in action is very cute in these days of online dating, but it’s not really more than a comedic MacGuffin to build Arik’s character.

A sideplot is that there is an outrageously hot girl visiting for the summer who is inexplicably interested in geeky Arik. Whenever I see these movies I ask myself “why didn’t I get a really hot fling when I was a geeky teenager?” and then I remember that it’s because I grew up in reality.

“The cobbler goes barefoot”: Yankale loves a woman, Clara, who is emotionally unavailable. The film has an underlying theme about the stereotype that Holocaust survivors must have done bad things to survive, but it isn’t explored in depth. There’s a line that gives the barest hint of a dark alternate reading: Yankale had to kill Clara’s infant child for the two of them to evade capture in Europe.

The opening of this film is brilliant: Ludo weaves through a club, yelling and flirting, channeling the party animal. Then you realize that he’s making his way to the exit at the front. He announces to a friend that he’s “beat” and emerges…into the morning light. The contrast in behaviour and setting is dramatic.

The film never hits that high note of directing again. The rest of the film is more subtle and much more dialog-driven. That’s okay because the dialog – or at least the English subtitles I could read – is good, but it’s high-paced, so you need to be a fast reader.

The theme of the film is a group of friends tending to their petty interpersonal issues while one of them lies in intensive care. Even though the synopsis in the Film Festival guide gives away the ending (“he lies dying”), the film is successful at pulling you into its world. I became engaged by the soap opera and forgot about the larger context.

From my perspective, the film perfectly succeeds at its goal, but I wonder if it works as well for women? All but one of the main characters are men, and she is a woman who acts like a man. Their wives and girlfriends are supporting characters, and the plot is mostly about relationships between the men.

I found the close-knit, urban group of friends who vacation together for a month every year (yay France!) to be unrealistic. I think you couldn’t get that level of cohesion with such variety (raising kids vs doing coke at clubs), but I’ll forgive it as a narrative device. The two character ages mentioned are 35 & 37, which made me meditate on the position of that age in society.

The soundtrack is overly-familiar American rock songs, which seemed a little odd but not so much as to be annoying.

I missed the start and end of this film, but given the lack of a narrative structure I believe I saw enough to write a review.

Circo is a series of interviews (with English subtitles) and genre scenes of a family-run travelling circus in rural Mexico. Although there’s no larger narrative, the documentary is a series of chapters that each explore a theme with a few pieces of footage. They also employ foreshadowing, for example all the little girls announce they want to do the hula hoop act far before we meet the big girl and see her do it. The film does a good job of weaving together their bits of footage without imposing an artificial narrative.

No documentary is without bias, but I was left wondering what amount of interpretation of the carnie’s lives was done by the people, what amount by the filmmakers and what amount by myself. For example, they are stressed about the debt load of the non-incorporated business, but how many Mexicans (or Canadians) aren’t stressed about money? The most objective judgement is that the children are too busy learning acrobatics and lion taming to become literate – given that Mexico has a 93% literacy rate, it seems like this will jeopardize their ability to take over the family business. On the other hand, the delight of little girls at having pet tiger cubs is shown without any focus on the conditions in which they’re kept.

Whenever I watch documentaries without narrative nor obvious ideology, I am left wondering “what’s the point?” I already could have guessed that these situations existed and there’s nothing particularly enlightening or engaging in the showing of them. So although this documentary is as well-done as possible given the subject matter, I hesitate to recommend it to anyone without a particular interest. Mostly it made me miss Carnivàle.

I have heard it said that Western palates cannot appreciate the subtlety of Japanese cuisine. I don’t think I appreciated the subtlety of this slow-moving Japanese movie.

This film is based on a personal essay by the chef of an Antarctic research station and it shows: there isn’t a narrative so much as the passage of time, and characters besides the chef don’t develop, they just have events. This would be great as a documentary and fine as a biopic, but it just feels like a lazy adaptation.

The food porn was decent, but I would have liked more details about the difficulty of cooking in that environment, not just the crew’s emotional reactions. In particular, I was hoping for scientific ingenuity in making the most of their resources. Instead all we got was off-hand serendipity about kansui.

Despite not living up to my expectations, the title character was very cute and this can be considered a sophisticated feel-good movie. It gave some interesting insight into the plight of the team’s situation and the nature of scientists. There were a few stand-out scenes that captured emotional nuance. Most of my friends had a more positive reaction than me.

The film felt quite long to me at 125 minutes – definitely don’t arrive hungry! Perhaps even a creative edit could make this movie great.

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.

I used the printed program to choose films. The website doesn’t offer the ability to filter out shorts (and there’s so many of them that they clog any sorting). The iPhone app is fixed alpha-sort with no filtering = useless.

Here’s what I’d like to see, in order of showtimes:

Rule #1

The X-Files as directed by David Lynch, filmed in Hong Kong instead of Hongcouver. Normally the film festival has one or two horror films that are not splatterpunk (I call these “terror films”), which are always a good bet, but this is the closest thing this year.

Lebanon

A whole movie set inside a tank! I usually avoid Israeli/Palestinian films because they’re either preaching or gnashing of teeth, but this one sounds like a more straightforward war film like Generation Kill.

The Brothel Project

Victoria feminist leader Jody Patterson founds a co-op brothel. This is educational because most Canadians don’t know the legal status of prostitution and most Victorians have no clue what the local industry is like. I’d watch this even if it were filmed in St John’s.

Beyond Gay

A look at the lack of gay rights in many countries through the eyes of pride parade organizers from relatively homophiliac countries. I’m hoping it also talks about the history of pride parades, which few in the straight community are aware of.

The Wild Hunt

A film adaptation of a live-action roleplaying game, starring the players. This is brilliant model for casting. It vaguely reminds me of the live-action Star Trek episodes being made by fans and posted online. It’s probably cheesy, but I’ve got to see it for myself.

Food Design

Every year the film festival has a cool foodie film. I guarantee it’s not Slow Food propaganda film Focaccia Blues.