“We’d like to do a song, ladies and gentlemen, about how love kind of disappears after about 3 days… and you sort of like think ‘I kind of like you but maybe it’s not really working’. You decide that you’ll lock yourself away in a room and fill yourself with as many drugs as you can. And you do this, ladies and gentlemen, and you have such a good time that you forget that you don’t actually love them anymore and it doesn’t matter. You’re walking along one day, and because you’re sort of like this indie rocker, you sort of like hear this Weezer song that says ‘Oooh I look like Buddy Holly and she’s Mary Tyler Moore’ and you think you’re Buddy Holly and she’s Mary Tyler Moore and you kind of like start to think ‘That’s pretty cool.’ Then you kind of look in the window of the shop that you’re going into to buy some bread and you realize that you are actually … Burt Reynolds … and she’s Sally Fields … and you’ve been cast in Smokey and the Bandit 98. You have a toupee… and she’s not The Flying Nun anymore. So that’s kind of bummed you out and you think ‘We really didn’t find love, but we had a lot of fun on the drugs … but if it’s going to make me look like Burt Reynolds and you look like Sally Fields maybe we have to look at doing something else or maybe take another drug that makes us feel, like, kind of better than that.’ But you know in this time, ladies and gentlemen, you know in this time that … Everything Is Fucked.”—Warren Ellis (source))

Thank you Mr Ellis. Oh, and gentle reader, if you want to listen to a fantastic soundtrack, go pick up the work that Ellis did with his friend Nick Cave for the film The Assassination of Jesse James. I’m listening to it right now, and it’s stunning.

Some film history has disappeared. The warehouse containing all the sets for the Wallace and Gromit films, plus Creature Comforts and Chicken Run has burnt to the ground. Some Wallaces and Gromits perished in the blaze, because they’re made of clay and can’t run unaided.

True to form though, Nick Park, credited as the creator of all that wonderful stuff, said that the recent earthquake in South Asia helped put the loss into perspective.

“Even though it is a precious and nostalgic collection and valuable to the company, in light of other tragedies, today isn’t a big deal,” he said.

Good on ya, Nick. It’s sad, but not tragic.

The Guardian is running a very rare and far-too-short interview with one of the best film directors ever to walk the planet. Hayao Miyazaki, director of My Neighbour Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, plus the new Howl’s Moving Castle and many others, sat down for a very quick interview – allegedly the first in ten years. He talks about New Orleans, computer graphics, and the end of the world.

Robots is the uninspired story of the kid that leaves the family home in the small town, travels to the big city, and triumphs against great odds (yawn). He falls in with a rag-tag group of down-and-outs who help him defeat the evil corporate drone who is killing people. Oh, sorry, not people. They’re all robots. That’s why the movie is called Robots. That alone will show you the level of imagination in the storytelling here. Even though it looked new, I felt like I’d seen it all before. The story was tedious, the gags were stale and obvious, and there was very little joy in the production. The filmmakers didn’t seem to care, so neither did I.

That being said, there are two brilliant sequences, one that had my jaw drop. The “Crosstown Express” that the robots take to get, well, across town, is a wild Rube Goldberg device of ramps, pulleys and a giant hammer. Fairly cleverly done there. The really amazing bit started with the simple push of a domino. One hits another, which hits another and so on. This was a tremendous and clever display of what can be done with simple one-thing-hits-another animation. After jumping and flipping and showing off the physics engine of the rendering software, we pan back for a view of the entire room, where a huge image of one of the main characters is revealed, using nothing but rows of dominoes dropping. Very cool.

Unfortunately, at that point, formula takes over, and we have a surfing-on-dominoes scene involving a bunch of the robots, and the discovery that the kind inventor has become a recluse, building domino structures in his house. We found this out because he swooped down and started surfing on a giant domino. Sigh. Don’t even get me going on the elasticity of the walls, and complaints about how all that stuff could fit into the room, and why the characters never saw all these dominoes all over the place before.

It being Easter, I’ve been eating a bit more chocolate than usual lately. I finally saw The Incredibles the other day, and that was like biting into a small piece of exquisite chocolate, delicately flavoured and lovingly handcrafted. Robots, on the other hand, was factory-produced, sugar-enhanced, formulaic crap chocolate that one would buy from the discount bin at K-Mart, a week after Easter.

Miike Takashi tries to make a Japanese version of The Godfather and, well, fails. I like Miike’s work, really I do, and there were moments of brilliance in this film, but someone should have come through and give it a bit of an edit. It’s at least an hour too long. Making a long film does not automatically make it an epic.

Making it to the end of Graveyard of Honour is an ordeal. It’s difficult, painful, and not even rewarding – we saw how it ends at the beginning. Our “hero”, if we can call him that, must be one of the stupidest Yakuza – he keeps killing the wrong people for the wrong reasons. There was nothing to like about him, and quite a bit to dislike. About an hour before it finally stopped, I was muttering under my breath for him to “hurry up and get caught so we can all leave”.

I was bored.

As part of this guy’s downfall, he gets addicted to heroin. But he runs out of money! Yay! Now the movie can end! He finds more money. Okay. More heroin. More shots of him and his girlfriend shooting up and acting stupid. Then there’s no more money so the movie can end! Oh. They found more money. And bought more H. Fantastic. So they shoot up, get high, act stupid. Repeat. Repeat. How much of this does Miike expect us all to take of this? I nearly walked out. And I don’t walk out of films.

A few years ago, Ishii Sogo wowed me with the best boring film ever. If you want to see a boring film, I highly recommend Angel Dust, (I think that’s the one) as it’s the most entertaining boring film I’ve ever seen. Since then, I’ve seen a couple other films by Ishii Sogo, and they’ve all been at least noteworthy.

This one is a neat parcel of three similar films. When I say “neat parcel” here, what I really mean is “pungent spikey noisy bright-coloured tasty parcel”. This is a movie that knows you’re watching it. We’ve got, in order, one dead girl who sings Broadway tunes, the world’s longest guns-pointed standoff, and a mute suicidal hostage. It took me a little while to get into the films, but once I got into the dual-paced nature of his storytelling, it was quite an enjoyable spectacle. The film appears to be very quick. To put it another way, it looked like a music video. Quick cuts, digital effects, shakey camera. The stories it told though, were very slow.

It’s just after midnight, and I’m afraid I won’t be able to do this film justice. I’m also afraid I won’t be able to sleep.

This film makes David Fincher’s excellent The Game look like a friendly game of lawn bowls. A man is kidnapped, then locked up for 15 years. Then he’s released, given a new set of clothes, spending money and a mobile phone. He doesn’t know who locked him up, or why.

Once released, he sets about to answer a few questions he’s had, and exact revenge on the person or persons who locked him up. Revenge, however, is a double-edged sword, and soon our hero finds out that while his answers were correct, the questions he asked were wrong.

This film is very full-on. There are some very graphic moments in here. The festival director said during his introduction, by way of preparing us, that we wouldn’t look at octopus or dentists in the same way again. True. We are shown a novel method of tooth extraction. In the midst of this mindfuck thriller, there were some brilliant comedic moments, mostly at the expense of our poor hero, and they provided welcome relief to the tension. The seamless blending of styles reminded me in some ways of a Miike film, but Old Boy was much more single-minded in its storytelling. A few scenes are even reminiscent of what would happen if Peter Greenaway were to direct and choreograph a fight sequence.

I want to say more about this film, by way of convincing you, gentle reader, to see it, but I don’t want to spoil anything. So far, this is my personal pick of the festival. It’s that good.

We got an unexpected (to me anyway) surprise before the Studio Ghibli produced main feature, in the form of an Aardman short film!

Creature Comforts: What it’s all about

This is a wonderful little followup to the seminal Creature Comforts – this time, the animals are asked questions about evolution. It’s interesting to compare the changes in the quality of the clay animation over the past 15 years or so. Everything is so smooth and clean-looking, it’s as if the entire short came out of Pixar rather than Aardman. Not sure if that’s good or bad.

There was as much action in the background as in the foreground, so much so that it’s difficult to figure out what to keep an eye on. From the walruses talking about weight loss and keeping fit, to the gerbil who wants wings, to the well educated amoeba, this is an hilarious short film, sure to be shown endlessly at animation festivals for years to come.

Aside: When The Wrong Trousers debuted in Vancouver, the entire audience (myself included) burst into spontaneous applause and cheering at the end of the chase scene. It just felt right.

The Cat Returns

There’s nothing all that wrong with this film. It’s cute. It’s funny. It’s short. The characters are clever and original. The animation is pretty, but a bit uneven. I think I’m damning it with faint praise.

A girl saves a cat from being hit by a car. Much to her surprise, it thanks her formally before running off. The night, she’s visited by a delegation of cats, who lavish gifts upon her – you see, she’s saved the life of the Prince of Cats. They try to convince her to follow them to the Kingdom of Cats to receive the Prince’s hand in marriage to honour�

Ah never mind. It’s not important. Stuff happens and it’s all fluffy and even Disney-esque in its tacked-on blatant moralising. In case you weren’t paying attention, that was an insult. While it’s a good enough film, it doesn’t hold a candle to other Ghibli productions, like Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke or even My Neighbour Totoro. It’s a lowball thrown at younger kids, without much respect to their intelligence. But hey, it’s funny and cute.

Zero Patience is a campy Canadian musical comedy about AIDS. It was brilliant. The Adventures of Iron Pussy is a campy Thai musical comedy about a crossdressing secret agent. It was okay.

They’re most definitely going for the “it’s so bad it’s good” genre here. If I’d known how far they would go into this genre, I would have had more to drink before the film. Two drinks just didn’t work. I recommend about 5-7 drinks, and then perhaps you’ll be in the right frame of mind to enjoy this odd, entertaining yet slightly boring film.

The evening started with a screening of Noon Gun, a short film.

Noon Gun

How to recreate The Noon Gun in the privacy of your own home: Wait until late at night, turn on the television to SBS, PBS, The National Geographic Channel, or whatever TV station is showing a National Geographic documentary of the Middle East in the 70s. Sand. Camels. Dusty roads. Peasants telling the camera crew to piss off. Fiddle with the brightness and contrast until the picture appears washed out and blurry. Now take some speed. As soon as it kicks in, call your telephone company. (I use Primus but pretty much any of them – or any company with bad, repetitive hold music will do). Now, with the hold music in your ear, and the speed rushing through your brain, watch the National Geographic special on TV. Congratulations, you are now experiencing something very much like the distastefully-edited, colourless, senseless, hyper-kenitic, poorly-soundtracked Noon Gun.

The original material, shot in the 70s by a hippie-turned-filmmaker-turned-glazier who now lives in Portsea, is really quite good, as far as I could tell. Unlike that last sentence. The problem is, two people with no taste came into his glass shop one day, and decided to do something with this nice man’s home movies. So they digitised them, wiping any trace of colour from the film, broke out a copy of iMovie, and went to town. They also provided the music, which sounded kind of like what the AfroCelts would do if all they had to work with was a copy of GarageBand and some free “world music” loops they downloaded from the Internet. The “message for peace” that gets ham-handedly ingested into this too-long short film is in the form of doves and a cannon.

Lagos / Koolhaas

I always feel funny writing about documentaries, especially ones as academic as Lagos / Koolhaas. Should I talk about the film, or the ideas presented? Okay, I’ll do both. It’s good in this case, because one does not overshadow the other. They’re interesting ideas, presented in an appropriate way.

The film itself (or, more correctly, the video) follows Rem Koolhaas on a few of his trips to Lagos, the capital of Nigeria, and Africa’s most populous city. In recent years, Lagos has had a pretty rough time. In the 90s, the military government let the existing infrastructure pretty much rot away, while not provisioning anything new. Simultaneously, everyone moved to the city, pushing the population numbers well past anything that anyone had ever planned for – and it’s still growing. These facts are shown very clearly, mostly taken from a lecture Koolhaas did at university. There are dramatic still pictures of absolute chaos in the city, plus revealing helicopter shots of the concrete jungle – literally – that Lagos has become. There’s an amazing floating bridge linking, um, something, to, um, somewhere else, bypassing yet another place. It literally curves around some land, like oil from water. My only complaint with the movie itself is that while much of the source footage appears to be DV or better, there is some that looks like it was taken from NTSC VHS masters that spent too much time in the sun, or near large magnets. Not pretty.

The ideas themselves were very interesting as well, and I’d welcome a chance to sit down with Mr Koolhaas and talk them through more fully. Please, gentle reader, take this section with a grain of salt, for I’m relying on my often-flaky memory here, and I haven’t actually read the report that Koolhaas apparently wrote on his time in Lagos.

I think he might be suffering from a bit of tunnel vision when it comes to cities and technological progress. He asserts that the people have a way of organising themselves in interesting ways to overcome the not-so-good things about the city. They sell items in the streets, they have “incredibly efficient” markets literally on the train tracks – they have to pick up and move when the train rolls past. I agree that this is people organisation, but I don’t think it’s necessarily due to progress or technology. Certainly technology is an enabling thing, but I don’t think that people en masse will gravitate to technology just because it’s there. Witness “3G” mobile phones. Only a small percentage of people with access to a 3G network actually have a handset capable of using it. Of that percentage, only a tiny number actually use the expanded features (like video chat, etc) that the network allows. My computer would like the extra bandwidth, but I don’t need it.

He raises a very interesting point just briefly at the end of the film, when Koolhaas talks with a reporter. She talks about how useful it is to know the “big man”. The person that, with a simple phone call, can get you out of jail. The person who can get you tickets to the football game. The person who can talk to the people at the power company and get your power back on more quickly. In short, the person with money and power. There’s a scene a few minutes earlier where a group of young men are chatting up Koolhaas, asking for his business card, introducing themselves: networking. It’s second nature to the people here, as it’s the only way to get a leg up, even the only way to survive. Humans are social animals. In chaos, we bunch together in groups, it’s where we feel safer. If we can trust the other people in our immediate group, we will be safe. If we can’t turn the power back on, we know someone who can. When we’re more comfortable and less threatened, we tend to be more aloof and self-reliant. I believe, unlike Koolhaas, that technology is not the end-game here, it’s the vehicle. People don’t gravitate towards technology because it’s technology. People gravitate towards technology because it enables communication.

The end of the movie seems to suggest that Lagos is well on its way to becoming a “normal” city. Big, yes; but “normal”. Water that works, sewers that work, electricity that stays on for a good long time. Koolhaas states that over the several years he’s been visiting the city, it’s been getting more and more “normal”. My question is, has Koolhaas simply been getting used to Lagos? Further: is Lagos becoming more like other cities, or are other cities becoming more like Lagos?