MIFF 2010 Round-Up

As I type this the final sessions of MIFF 2010 are about to be unveiled, including the Australian premiere of Scott Pilgrim Vs the World, which I am seeing tomorrow. I could have waiting until then and included it in here, but that would mean I'd have to wait and I really couldn't be bothered!

MIFF is exhausting enough doing 23 films, so I can't imagine how some of my fellow Melburnian film fanatics - Lee Zachariah, Thomas Caldwell and Richard Watts included - who see upwards of 70 feel. I plan to write more reviews of some of the other films I have seen at the fest, although some of them might come around when they receive a theatrical release (Red Hill for instance). One film you won't see me review is Clara Law's Like a Dream because it was my sole walk out of the festival. It wasn't exactly good in any way, but I was just so tired and when you're not enjoying a movie sometimes you just have to just throw in the towel.

I have ranked all 22 films and I'm glad that I was able to see so many good movies. Only at around #17 do the films truly start getting a bit iffy. And, of course, titles like Certified Copy could very easily rise even higher as the process of time works its magic.

Note that some of the "Review" links below send you to Trespass Mag where I did a few MIFF pieces. Enjoy.

1. Dreamland (dir. Ivan Sen - Review)
2. Brotherhood (dir. Nicolo Donato - Review)
3. The Illusionist (dir. Sylvain Chomet)
4. I Love You Phillip Morris (dir. Glenn Ficcara & John Requa - Review)
5. Four Lions (dir. Chris Morris)
6. Life During Wartime (dir. Todd Solondz - Review)
7. Certified Copy (dir. Abbas Kiarostami)
8. City of Life and Death (dir. Chuan Lu)
9. Jean-Michael Basquiat: The Radiant Child (dir. Tamra Davis)
10. Red Hill (dir. Patrick Hughes - Review)
11. Women Without Men (dir. Shirin Neshat)
12. The Actresses (dir. Je-Yong Lee)
13. Beeswax (dir. Andrew Bujalski)
14. Machete Maidens Unleashed! (dir. Mark Hartley - Review)
15. Cane Toads: The Conquest (dir. Mark Lewis)
16. The Myth of the American Sleepover (dir. David Robert Mitchell - Review)
17. Blank City (dir. Celine Danhier)
18. Winter's Bone (dir. Debra Granik - Review)
19. Piggies (dir. Robert Glinksi)
20. 1981 (dir. Ricardo Trogi - Review)
21. She, A Chinese (dir. Xiaolu Guo)
22. The Silent House (dir. Gustavo Hernández - Review)

Those final two are the only ones that I would consider truly terrible cinema, so all in all it was a very successful festival!


The Men:
Two performances stand out from the pack: Ewan McGregor in I Love You Phillip Morris and David Denkic from Brotherhood. McGregor hasn't been this alive on screen in years and is his best performance in over a decade (I'd have to go back to before Moulin Rouge!, even, to find a better performance from him). He's so knowing about his surroundings and balances the fine mix of flamboyance and sweetness. Denkic on the other hand is all bubbling rage, sexual longing and sadness and during Brotherhood's best scenes he is the focal point.

Other male performances that registered were Steve Bisley in Red Hill, Ciarán Hinds in Life During Wartime, John Hawkes in Winter's Bone and while William Shimell is obviously playing second fiddle to Juliette Binoche in Certified Copy he has some fine, delicate work there, too. Lastly a big - BIG - shoutout to the terrible ensemble of Four Lions, my favourite of which was probably Kayvan Novak (he's sexy too!).


The Women:
You don't win Best Actress at Cannes for just being pretty, so it's no surprise that Juliette Binoche shone brightly in Certified Copy. So many expressions go by on that woman's face over the running time of Kiarostami's movie, you'd think she was going to pull a muscle! Jennifer Lawrence was low-key in Winter's Bone, but still fine, however I much preferred her support in the form of Dale Dickey. Allison Janney and Ally Sheedy, the latter in a bizarre but hilarious cameo, were tops in Life During Wartime and, yet another ensemble, the women of The Actresses were all fantastic but my favourite was definitely Yoon Yeo-Jung.


Experiences:
There were individual moments that I will remember for a very long time. How about the meditative and 2001-inspired ending of Dreamland or the beautiful, stunning end to Sylvain Chomet's The Illusionist. I won't ruin it for anybody out there, but the card on the table? It will tear your heart open! Juliette Binoche putting her earrings on in Certified Copy, the discovery of so many long-forgetting films in Machete Maidens Unleashed! (CLEOPATRA WONG is at the very top of my must-see list), the anger I felt at the end of The Silent House, the lush 3D of Cane Toads: The Conquest or that stunning confrontation scene between Ciaran Hinds and Chris Marquette in Life During Wartime. All amazing, all unforgettable.


Sound:
I'm not sure what it was with MIFF this year, but I could fill out the Academy's Best Sound Design/Editing categories just from the movies I saw at this festival alone! The soundscapes of Dreamworld were second-to-none, the shot-blasts of Red Hill were teeth-shattering, the gunfire of City of Life and Death rattled... even the way Binoche's feet clapped against the Tuscan stone paths in Certified Copy felt blissful to me.

Music, too, played a major role in several of the films. Come February 2010 I really hope to see Sylvain Chomet's name listed as a nominee for the Oscar for Best Original Score. His music to The Illusionist was divine. Probably the best score I've heard since Alexandre Desplat's work on Birth. And if you know me that is high praise, indeed.

~-~
And so that about wraps it up. You'll no doubt be hearing about several of these titles throughout the rest of the year and next and I've had a ball. It will be good to be able to back to having a diet free of shoving KFC down by gob and being able to just relax at home in the evening instead of having to rush about hoping to get a good spot in line. And, just quietly, I will be able to get back to such things as Scream to Scream, Scene by Scene, which I'm sure you're excited about (as am I!)

{fin}

MIFF 2010 Review: Brotherhood

Brotherhood
Dir. Nicolo Donato
Year: 2009
Aus Rating: TBC
Running Time: 97mins

I'm not sure what it is that the Danes have in their water supply, but they are somehow able to churn out cinema of a better quality than almost anywhere else. I'm sure any Danish people out there will easily be able to refute such a claim - everybody has serious issues with their home country's film industry - but for such a small country they seem to pop up on the international film circuit far more often than others and Donato is another name to include on the list of names such as Lars Von Trier, Lone Scherfig, Susanne Bier, Anders Thomas Jensen and Thomas Vinterberg. And their abilities to deal with issues such as the Iraq war, religion and, in the case of Brotherhood, homosexuality in ways that put others to shame.

The synopsis for Nicolo Donato’s debut film reads like a satire on film festival movies: Two gay neo-Nazis fall in love! And it’s got subtitles, too. If they ate pudding then this would be a big comical joke. Brotherhood is, however, far more than just a typically mopey arthouse drama trying to shoehorn as many important "issues" into its running time as possible. It is a poignant, tender and ultimately destructive look at how the power of love can tear apart at anybody, anywhere. Even, it would seem, neo-Nazis.


Brotherhood stars Thure Lindhart as Lars, a general who quits the Army after he is accused of sexually harassing several of his soldiers. He soon falls into a crowd of neo-Nazis who aim to rid Denmark of Pakistani refugees, the violence from which is brutal and confronting, but Lars falls for fellow "comrade" Jimmy, played by David Dencik. Together they navigate their insular world, trying to keep this secret that could prove fatal if discovered. It’s a powerful indictment on society’s lack of understanding of gay people, and even the lack of understanding by gay people themselves, as well as a compelling look at Denmark’s hidden race issues and proves to be a stunning, teary-eyed romance between the most unlikely of characters.

Despite the fact that it's about characters as repulsive as neo-Nazis, the way the romance was told was done so delicately that it almost didn't matter. I feel the very point of the film that is you can fall in love with anybody and that no matter the personal circumstances you just can't fight it. Even if you're indoctrinated to hate gay people as they are here, and the gay bashing scene that opens the film is discomforting in its realism, there are some things that even being a neo-Nazi can't protect you from.


Performances are uniformly great with the standout being Denkic. He has mostly worked on television and had a part in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, plus a quick Google search shows he regularly looks nothing like the hulking skinhead that he does here, but his performance blew me away. Such anger and sadness within him, expressed to vividly on his face. The film has the visual look of much Danish cinema - it looks overcast and natural, but that is definitely the best way to represent the material. This isn't a romanticised vision of a gay relationship like Brokeback Mountain. When violence is committed against one of the men it shows in brutal closeup and the way these two men court each other, in their own way, is far more realistic. Brokeback Mountain played its way, Brotherhood plays another and in some ways it's even more impressive.

One might consider the neo-Nazi aspect as, perhaps, a gimmick used to rile up controversy - gay Nazis would surely arouse more interest than a mere gay romance even world, surely - but it works as a parallel to any other group of people, whether it be a sports code, a workplace or wherever. In nearly every society gay people are forced to hide their relationships and here is no different. It also helps that director Donato, who co-wrote the screenplay with Rasmus Birch, has shown the obvious homo-erotic tendencies of the movement and the hypocrisy it implies. This, too, leads to a fascinating look at the inner-workings of the neo-Nazi groups that have apparently found growing numbers in Denmark that I feel I am too uneducated about to really comment. Brotherhood slayed me, I'm not going to lie. A