Category: non-fest

A documentary movie about Palestine’s first judge in Sharia law, Kholoud Al-Faqih. So inspiring. She is a stalwart of bravery and defiance in the face of both patronising sexism and more concerted misogynistic disregard for women’s lives. She defies tradition, endures discrimination and champions other women in the field. To watch her sew seeds of hope, be a hero and an icon for anyone who had never realised just what women can be, and persevere with grace and humour, is so uplifting and nourishing.

For me, it gave me more insight into what Sharia law actually is, what it actually codifies, and how, like any other law, its application in the hands of a male-dominated industry is more the problem.

There was also a really interesting Q&A after with Amina, the Muslim Women’s Resource Centre here in Glasgow. It was interesting to see the similarities, coz hey, patriarchy’s global, but also the differences, such as the double discrimination to stay silent lest you bring more scorn upon an already-vilified minority. Really thought-provoking. Highly recommend you see it if you get the chance.

The new movie by the guy that did Garth Merenghi. It’s an almost entirely dialogueless psychological horror.

The main character is a haunted house of a man, who himself haunts the decaying urban landscape of this nothing English town, surrounded by ever-encroaching scrub brush, marshland and woodland, pushing to reclaim it to purposelessness. He carries with him a puppet in a brown leather bag. It is an invincible psychological construct meant to carry him through some past unspoken trauma, which he is now trying to outgrow as he tries to stand up to his past. But both the trauma and the puppet will not stay buried.

The title refers to the name of the puppet, and also the act of ‘playing possum’, pretending to be dead to avoid danger, which is very much what the main character has done emotionally as a coping strategy.

Reminiscent of silent horror films, but also I thought it had a touch of David Lynch, where a character is allowed to simply walk for the duration of scene, allowed the time to convey their entire psychological journey just in their pace, their gait, their stance, the tension of their muscles.

It is a film about the often obscured secondary effects of trauma, the lasting stuff that must be lived with long after the event has passed. For the main character, the abuse has never really ended, because it continues to keep him silent, it continues to keep him invisible, it continues to keep him isolated and it continues to cause him shame and suffering. And it also inflicts upon him the unjust sense of responsibility and complicitness that the silence that he carries may have enabled his abuser to be unhindered in gathering more victims.

The character has no language for this and his only outlet is this vessel he’s made out an image of his own face attached to a set of spider legs. It is the archetypal smothering hand and his own in ability to express or speak.

If I had one criticism of this film, I would say it could lose 20-30 minutes and still be a great film. At some point you are just like, I get the imagery of the black balloons, move on. But it is actually really refreshing to watch a film that is just one act, largely lacking in dramatic event and dialogue, just become a whirlpool soup of one man’s psychological nightmare.

A gap year, Humanitarians of Instagram, selfie-stick of a film. It’s a movie that, without irony or self-awareness, would tell you that the Third World people it’s visited were sooo poor but they were sooo happy.

It’s a barely disguised piece of advertising for an ‘adventure’ firm that caters to the super-wealthy, and does not deserve to be called a documentary.

The film’s synopsis boasts that it follows the stories of people who come from all over the world to take part in the Mongolian Horse Derby, the world’s longest horse race, taking place over 1000km and 7 days. In fact, it follows the stories of people who all come from the same rich, white background, to take part in a British adventure company’s extreme tourism stunt. The track follows the same path of the postal service which ran by wild horse from the time of Ghengis Khan until the early 1940s, and some British guy thought that was cool so used it for a gimmick to set up a horse racing tourist event.

As for the riders, these are the most unbearable shower of cunts you can imagine. Every one of whom you know has gone back to bore the tits off people at a canapé-strewn dinner party in Islington about what a marvellous and deeply spiritual experience it was to be riding out on the Mongolian steppe as the sun started to fade over the horizon. They all have jobs like Interface Director, Developer, Adventure Company CEO. They say things like, “I expect it to be a profoundly spiritual experience to be out here surrounded by nothing”. You’ve really got to have a supreme arrogance to look at a landscape teeming with life and think of it as nothing.

The film let go unchallenged the otherisation of Mongolia as a state of mind for white people, rather than an actual place. It was very much treated as a canvas onto which could be projected anything the tourists wanted, and no counterpoint was made as to the reality of the place. No Mongolians were interviewed. One was trotted out early on to say, “Tourism is good” and promptly put back in his box as the only named speaking Mongolian in a documentary entirely set in Mongolia.

The only poor bastard I liked in this film was Monde, a horse trainer from South Africa who had actually come to the race to learn more about horses and see how they performed in this environment. As the only black guy, he was treated almost as a sort of pet. Maybe that’s too harsh, but it’s hard to judge if the curiousity of the Mongolians who wanted their picture taken with him would have seemed less objectionable, were it not for the voiceover from another competitor in a plummy, Gosford Park accent, saying, “Well, you know, with him being black, he’s probably from a far less privileged background. So for him, the opportunity to come to Mongolia, it might as well be Mars.”

The Mongolians give Monde progressively more and more difficult horses to ride each day, until on his final lap, he is given a filly that has never been ridden before and he has to break her in from scratch. The voiceover tells us that this is because Monde’s skill with the horses is so good, the Mongolians are curious to see how he does. Maybe they do. Or maybe that’s a really nice spin to put on the fact the only black guy who turned up got given all the shittest horses to ride, and ended up coming last after having to break in his final horse. Maybe if you spoke to some of the Mongolians, you might find out, but since the movie didn’t, we’ll never know.

The competitors treat the Mongolian steppe as their playground and the horses as their toys. They’re there to create an experience that will fit into the narrative of themselves, and they don’t much care for the people, animals or landscape that actually exist in the place they do that. One of the horses is destroyed during the course of the race. It’s like they’ve got a level of wealth that has made financial gambling meaningless, so they do activities like this, where the risk is their health, as one guy breaks 4 vertebrae in his neck and another travels 40km on a punctured lung and fractured pelvis.

All in all, this just seemed like an advertisement for an extreme tourist holiday that had fooled some people into thinking it was a documentary due to its run time. It’s like people thinking those wee stories on Mazda’s website are actually installments of an Emmy Award winning TV series. A vapid film full of vapid people.

What absolute gash.

Join the most achingly heteronormative family imaginable, with the mother barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen, and the dad whose entire character can be summed up as “No let family die”. Spent 2 hours hoping they’ll all get eaten as they plan the most infuriatingly stupid home birth since that dumb-arse bird tried to pop one out on The Walking Dead.

“Hey honey, I know our lives are put in jeopardy by the least sound, and civilisation has collapsed so there’s no medical care whatsoever, but let’s have a baby!”

“Yes, let’s! Because it’s not as if birth is dangerous at the best of times, much less under these circumstances.”

“Absolutely. I’ll knit a mobile for the baby, and display no sense of trepidation about this event which is likely to kill me. Feminine archetypes like myself are always serene in the face of self-sacrifice.”

“Fucking A doll, I’ll get back to hunting/wiring/soldering hearing aids. Whatever I can turn my hand to, which is literally anything. I have ALL the skills.”

“Yes, you do. While I do laundry. How fortunate for us. Now let’s dance to Neil Young songs.”

Eat their fucking baby!

They have a deaf daughter who they treat like a giant liability, and who they need to ‘fix’. She seems like the only halfway real person in the movie and I was hoping to see her Final Girl it over their corpses.

There’s no tension, I spent the whole film bored.

Fuck this entire movie.

Mark Anthony really is a cunt, isn’t he? No matter how much of a dick you paint Octavius to be, Mark Anthony is the architect of his own demise, a spoiled child who turns on anyone and blames them for his own bad decisions, including Cleopatra. As for her, it feels like the play should be called Anthony and Anthony’s Cleopatra, she’s almost a caricature of how he sees her. I bet she kens she’s on to a losing horse early on and just cannae shake him free before he pulls her down with him. Couple of spanners.

A black comedy about a pregnant woman who believes she is being driven to kill by her unborn foetus in vengeance for the death of her partner. Alice Lowe is great in this, giving it a Inside Number 9, British comic/horror/tragedy vibe. Loved her Halloween costume at the end, like Kate Bush from Wuthering Heights gone absolutely barmy.

I liked how she contrasted the extreme alienation of pregnancy with how you simultaneously become public property. Complete strangers want to touch you but you become no one as you body and identity is hollowed and occupied by another.

Fucking loved seeing Koyaanisqatsi at Film City Glasgow. Beautiful film in a beautiful venue. I loved it. Despite the implicit criticism in the title, meaning a life out of balance which must change, I found Koyaanisqatsi to be a celebration of life. Bookended by shots of cave paintings, the film shows the ecstatic movement of the world, from the dancing plumes of sand across the desert dunes, to the hussle-bussle hive of a cityscape. Humans on the landscape make patterns on a cave wall, make patterns on a traffic intersection, all beautiful, all in essence both simultaneously creative and destructive, all temporary. We make patterns like ants, like sand, like waves, then pass. We end. We crystalise beautiful in moments like a flock of starlings, then the world moves on without us in it. It is neither creative nor destructive, it is life. Just a lovely film.

An hour and a half, single-location, edge-of-the-seat thriller, that combines the tension and claustrophobia of something like Assault on Precinct 13, and the architectural cat-and-mouse of something like Die Hard. Three burglars break into the home of a blind man and, boy, did they ever fuck with the wrong guy. The Detroit urban prairie makes a brilliant backdrop, combining the crime and anonymity of the city with the scream-all-you-want isolation of a rural setting.

The Neon Demon is incredibly beautiful and disappears spectacularly up its own arse. It has a solid first hour, which should be the entirety of the film with the climax scene tacked on. It builds up so much capital in its first half, I was like, this can be as slow as it wants, it’s gorgeous, but halfway through I had a giant prolapse of patience and rapidly got bored. It burned through my goodwill and congealed into nothing. It unravelled into cliché and clunky obviousness.

It’s a movie whose trailer and synopsis are a lot better than it is. For a movie where a model eats a regurgitated eyeball, it is surprisingly dull. It’s like they feel the need to punctuate stretched-out, baggy, overlong scenes with bursts of violence, but all to no real effect. There are 3 rape scenes in this film, 4 if you include corpses, and they happen one on top of another as if suddenly this slow, dreamlike film is stuttering crudely towards some kind of dramatic conclusion by way of the cheapest tropes possible. Look out for Predatory Lesbian #1.

It also has Peter Jacksonesque levels of false ending where you repeatedly expect each next scene to be the closer. And with each next scene you struggle to understand what it was intended to bring to the story.

My recommendation is download this, watch it with your pals, eat crisps and talk over it when you get bored. It’s that kind of enjoyable.

Houses of Halloween is not bad for a DVD given away free at FrightFest.