So, I started off the film festival on Thursday by heading off to the IMAX for a family film called All Roads Lead Home. I felt bad for the director as only about 10 people showed up to his film (and this is the freakin' IMAX). However, after about 20 minutes of watching this film I understood that word must have gotten out about how awful it was. The acting was pretty generic although I don't know if I should blame the actors since the script was so poorly written and unimaginative with lines like, "Oh, my Belle (that is the name of the protagonist's daughter). Sometimes, I'd like to ring her." Trust me, nobody was laughing. The editing was pretty splicy and jumped quickly from one short pathetic scene to another. This was actually Peter Boyle's last role in a film and the cinematography was pretty decent but overall this film wasn't worthy of the PAX channel. Now, that is saying something. I felt really guilty because I had skipped the Visual Acoustics documentary to see this. So, to redeem myself I left early (as did other people and remember there were only 10 to begin with) and headed over to the Hideout for the doc Atom Smashers.
Atom Smashers was an interesting and sometimes very funny documentary about a group of scientists looking for the Higgs boson which is some particle which endows other particles with mass or something like that. Honestly, I was just really confused as to what these people were doing and why the government funds millions for scientists to search for this elusive particle which may in fact be non-existant. Nobody has ever actually found it. In fact there is this funny moment in the doc where there is a scientific conference for the Higgs boson and the head lecturer says if your looking for the Higgs boson particle that you're in the wrong place and asks the question, "How do you search for a black cat in a dark room when there is no cat." My thoughts exactly. Even the scientists are making jokes about this but in truth they dedicate themselves night and day to finding the Higgs. The scientists themselves were very interesting, one played in a rock band, one collected Simpsons figurines (go figure!), and another was a married couple. There was an interesting interview with the two of them which was done using a web cam (the wife sat next to the computer while the director filmed her talking to her husband on the computer). I thought of Rhea when I saw this and I think it worked really well for anyone who is considering doing an interview with a long distance subject. The documentary has many engaging interviews and footage from the Phil Donahue Show is spread throughout. He had done a very extensive show on the subject at some point. Overall, it was really entertaining I just wish I had a better concept of what this was all about but then again maybe the common folks are supposed to watch this and find themselves as amused as I did with the whole concept.
Next, I preceded to Rollins Theatre (this is actually part of the Long Center) where I saw Les Ninjas du Japon. I really recommend this to anyone who desires to see excellent cinematography in a documentary (well, I mean honestly, who doesn't). The lighting was incredible especially during the indoor scenes so I'm not sure If lighting was set-up or if the cinematographer was just really keen with using natural sources. Many times, the lighting did seem to be coming from windows and other open spaces which is how good lighting should. This documentary had a very cinematic feel to it not only because of the lighting but also the variety of shots and the quality. The director used many interesting rack focus shots (something I have yet to experiment with in my own work) that really benefited certain screen compositions. The documentary itself follows a group of Japanese bicyclists who are competing in the Tour de Faso in Africa. The director follows several bicyclists as they talk about their hopes, dreams, and experiences as athletes. There are also several interviews with their families. There is actually two main threads here, the bicyclists and the African men who follow the bicyclists in cars to keep track and make sure everything goes smoothly. The two view points are interesting because you have the natives and the foreigners to Burkina Faso. The most moving theme is how important and how much it touches the community of Burkina Faso, it is more than just a race it is an opportunity to connect and to enjoy life.
Les Ninjas du Japon Trailer
On Friday, I didn't get to watch any docs but instead I watched two horror films, the world premiere of 100 Feet and the U.S. premiere of Nightmare Detective 2 at IMAX. 100 Feet was about a woman who killed her husband and is sentenced to house arrest but unfortunately her dead husband's ghost is inhabiting the house. Someone asked the director why the ghost didn't just kill her if he was so powerful and he gave the typical director's answer of how much the ghost really loved her and he wanted to toy with her. I think the true answer was because the film would have been over in the first 15 minutes. Isn't this the problem with most of these horror films. It's no wonder Janet Leigh's death in the first 30 minutes of Psycho is still talked about. Anyway, it was better than most of the crappy Hollywood horror films that are put out today and honestly there were some scary moments. I actually jumped a little at one part which I usually never do. The plot was lacking in parts but the atmosphere and Famke Janssen's acting was incredible. Nightmare Detective 2 was brilliant!!! I almost never enjoy Japanese horror films but this hit me on not only a horror film level but in the level of a emotionally fulfilling psychological drama. The story is about a man a young girl who begs an anguished young man to enter her dreams using his special gifts. As a boy his mother tried to kill him by strangulation and by drowning him in the bathtub. By entering the young girls dreams he is able to come to terms with his mother's mental disorder and the realization that his few happy moments with her are only memories of a relationship that could never really be understood. Towards the end, he must take the place of his child-self but as an adult to relive the incident when she tried to drown him. I never thought I would feel like crying during a Japanese horror film but I was really moved. Anyone interested in working with digital video should check out some of the hand-held dream sequences which were out of this world fantastic. And yes there is a Nightmare Detective but no I have not seen it. I want to rent it soon though.
Nightmare Detective 2 Trailer
On Saturday, I saw another non-doc, A Quiet Little Marriage, which was a brilliant little Indie film with incredible acting. It is about a marriage that begins to disintegrate when the wife wants to have a baby and the husband does not. She begins to poke holes in her diaphragm and he figures this out and begins slipping birth control pills into her coffee. It was by a first time director named Mo Perkins. I actually ran into her and the main actor on Sunday during a screening of a different film so that was really awesome because I got a chance to tell her how great her film was outside of the Q&A setting. The film was done on a low-budget and just proves how a simple narrative with a lot of talent and hard-work can be so much better than these overblown blockbusters. The cast did their own wardrobe and used the director's apartment complex to film with a lot of support from the neighborhood.
Finally, I want to talk about a phenomenal doc called This Dust of Words which is about a brilliant Stanford college student named Elizabeth Wiltsee who eventually ended up mentally unstable and homeless. Earlier I had written a review on the doc Chris & Don: A Love Story which had the difficult task of telling the main person's story without the person being present. This Dust of Words uses a similar approach of telling Elizabeth's perspective by using diary entries and personal letters but it did a much better job. I think part of the reason why was the director's usage of landscape and related footage to go along with the audio. The shot of the lake where Elizabeth spent her final hours was gorgeously photographed and scenes of other locations were as well. Elizabeth's own writing was so moving to where you could really feel for her isolation and eventual downfall in life. She began to hear voices, believed the CIA was reading her letters, abandoned her brother and parents, and ended up at the doors of a Parish ran by several elderly women. The interviews with these elderly women were engaging especially one women in particular who first befriended Elizabeth even when other's were afraid of her (for she sometimes had terrible screaming fits in front of the church.) Amazingly, the longer Elizabeth slept in front of the church the more she opened up to the community and vice versa. Eventually, Elizabeth began taking mass and her nerves began to calm. The churchgoers believed she was driven to the parish by God. The last words she was ever known to say were, "I'm going home." The woman next to me was literally crying and I have to say this was one of the best docs I've seen in a while. The Q&A was very intimate because the original screening had broke and this was an additional make-up screening at 11:30 P.M on a Sunday so only five people showed up. For the first time, I felt brave enough to ask questions. The director actually discovered Elizabeth's story on accident through Google so he contacted her old professor who had written her memoirs then the women of the church. The story began to unfold and he decided to make the doc full-length. He spent a lot of time reading her unpublished plays and poems (many were in foreign languages, she taught herself Chinese among other languages). When he finally felt he had captured Elizabeth to the fullest that he could, he found a young narrator to read her collected works throughout the doc. I wasn't able to find a trailer on youtube but I hope this film finds a distributer so everyone can enjoy it.
UPDATE: Les Ninjas du Japon took the prize for best documentary at AFF.
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