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  • Girl

    I’d heard some of the criticism of Girl, that it focused too much on the trans body and placed too much emphasis on medical transition. Then I saw it, and boy howdy! Does it ever. I mean, wow. Yeah, not difficult to see why folks had problem with it.

    This is very much a trans story told through a cis lens. There’s even an element of gawking in much of the camera work, and it does feel very objectifying, which works against its central drive. I mean, you see her genitalia so many times, you see her put on or take off her tuck tape so many times, you see her morning glory. A lot of the shots having the feeling of the cis gaze looking in on the trans experience.

    And it’s almost every third scene. You can almost count off every scene in this order: transition scene, ballet scene, family scene, transition scene, ballet scene, family scene. Just same content round and round.

    I feel the director really did intend to develop a three-dimensional trans girl as the main character but where are her friends? This teenage trans lassie doesn’t know a single other queer person. In a major city. Doesn’t have a single conversation with a queer person online or engage with any community space. Who ever heard of that? This is so a cis idea about the life of the one trans person you know.

    And I genuinely do feel the director came to this movie with good intentions, but its portrayal of the trans experience is that it is isolating, lonely and sad. In many ways, it’s a big step backward from the more diverse storytelling about a range of experience we’ve seen in recent years.

    I’m not saying don’t go see it, because it is a worthwhile film in many ways, but don’t be surprised if you find yourself cringing at some of the shots.

  • Thunder Road

    Thunder Road is amazing! Funniest movie of the festival so far. Really, bleakly dark humour. It follows Jim, a buttoned-down, dorky, Texan, beat cop as he has the worst week of his life. If you ever wondered what it’d be like if a stereotypical, yes-sir, thank ya-ma’am, policeman took a total nervous breakdown, the answer is it’s hilarious.

    It starts with him giving the eulogy at his mother’s funeral. For anyone who’s seen the BoJack Horseman eulogy episode, it’s like that, but worse and ending with a dance number.

    And the main guy, the actor who plays the lead, just has such perfect timing, like absolutely nails it. Almost none of the humour in the movie is in actual jokes with a setup and punchline. It’s all the character’s manner of speech and the absurdity of watching him try to maintain a veneer of calm politeness as he rapidly spirals out of control. And it has to be delivered so exactly, it’s just done beautifully.

    And it hits all the dramatic moments as well, the reality of the loss and anger and terrible loneliness and regret is so real. The humour is there but doesn’t try to detract from the poignancy of the moment. Really this is one to go see. It’s not a laugh a minute like some constantly turning barrel of one-liners, but a real heartfelt drama with causticly black humour about the misfortunes of life and the flaws in our character. 

  • Stop Motion: Life Between Frames

    A live talk with 3 animators who have worked on films including Isle of Dogs, Kubo and the Two Strings, and Fantastic Mister Fox. It was really interesting to get a look behind the scenes and hear firsthand about all the work that goes in to every shot. Given how labour intensive it is, it’s amazing they still get made. But in fact, there seems to be a kind of renaissance right now, and the industry’s booming. Good news to hear, looking forward to seeing more of their projects. 

    One animator credited this creepy as fuck short film as the one that inspired them to go into stop motion:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjgHbRrnjhU&feature=share

  • The Man Who Surprised Everyone

    The Man Who Surprised Everyone is a queer film out of Russian. A well-respected family man at the centre of his rural community is diagnosed with untreatable terminal cancer. He makes preparations for his family once he’s gone but his wife begs him to go for last-ditch efforts, even seeking out a traditional healer. This is an awesome Baba Yaga-looking pagan in a blackbird headdress. She performs a healing ceremony and tells him a folktale of how one man cheated death by disguising himself as a duck so Death could not find him. So the main character gets a dress and some makeup and begins living as a woman.

    The main character doesn’t speak another line after this point, because the movie’s not really about having them justify if they are disguising themselves to hide from Death or if they are living the last few weeks of their life the way they’ve always wanted to. They don’t owe anyone, including the audience, any explanations. Instead what we see is that, without changing forby a dress and some lipstick, everyone’s reactions to them change. After fundraising money for their treatment, the whole community turns on them, beats them and drives them from the community. This movie does depict verbal, physical and sexual violence. But it does make the point clearly, rather daringly for a Russian film, that it is ridiculous that a little cloth and a bit of rouge should be enough for people who esteem you, respect you and even love you to think any differently or any less of you. 

  • The Public

    The Public is an American movie about homeless people occupying a public library one night during winter. Before the occupation starts, the depiction of what it’s like to work in a library is TOO TRUTH. Defo recognisable to anyone who’s worked in one.

    The occupation starts out of humanitarian need, but becomes politicised during the city’s mayoral race. It’s lead by Michael K. Williams (that’s Omar from The Wire to you and me) and aided by the librarian, played by Emilio Estavez, who also wrote and directed the movie. Despite an A-list cast including Jeffrey Wright and Alex Baldwin, the performances are flat and feel fake. It also doesn’t help that almost nothing that happens makes sense. The librarian spends the evening negotiating with the police despite not having any leverage. No one is armed, no one is a hostage, this is exactly the time when the polis just boot fuck out you and drag you outside. Like every American movie with an explicit left-wing political message, it’s heavy-handed and overly long. 

  • Angel

    Angel is the story of a Belgian professional cyclist hiring a Senegalese sex worker for the night. He is the most unbearable self-pitying, braggart, blowhart, drug-addled, misogynistic, abusive, utter cunt. He is as likeable as Joffrey. I genuinely spent the movie hoping he’d die soon. For all his privilege, wealth, fame and talent, he is the architect of all his own problems, and has the gall to moan about them and blame everyone but himself.

    He spends the evening talking shite in her ear, then turns on her after some more coke and smack. Weirdly the film doesn’t seem to realise he’s just the worst cunt and the title Angel is actually for him, his nickname. Indeed, the lassie seems to actually be taken in by his shite, which it is difficult for me to imagine any woman, especially a sex worker, not seeing through this immediately. 

  • All Creatures Here Below

    All Creatures Here Below starts out as a road trip crime caper when two simpletons abduct a baby in order to start a new life as a family elsewhere. The light humour gives way to something much darker as the movie goes on. Actually grim as fuck.

    Bailed on the Q&A because picking over something that brutal was a big Nope.

  • Erased,____Ascent of the Invisible

    Erased,____Ascent of the Invisible is as much activist art as it is a documentary. It examines the legacy of the disappeared during the Lebanese Civil War (a part of history I am woefully ignorant about).

    It looks at how the photographs used to find the missing became part of a conglomerate whole, and the search for answers to their individual murders disappeared into a symbol of the unsolvable injustice of war. Instead of identifying them, it anonymised them.

    17,000 people went missing during the war according to activists, but the government only admits to 2000. Those who are politically expedient to find are found. Those killed by the Israeli army were quickly found. Citizens of European countries whose governments could bring pressure to bear were next. As the Syrian regime waned in power, those killed by them have been unearthed. But for those killed by Lebanese forces, some of whose leaders still retain power to this day, they are mysteriously difficult, if not impossible, to find.

    In another example of art being used to obscure rather than uncover the truth, a memorial is installed over a mass grave, a crime site. Concrete with frescos depicting dancing dolphins. A memorial to martyrs of the war ensure no one can dig or excavate the bones of those that lie there unidentified.

    The irony comes at the end from bureaucracy. It cannot be admitted that the disappeared are dead. That they were abducted, tortured and murdered. So their family registers still contain their names. 35 years after their disappearances, they are the surviving members of wiped out families. And in the necessity of denial of the crime, the victims are made immortal in the bureaucratic machinery that has no mechanism to let them die.

  • Loro

    Is Loro a biopic or a satire? The trouble is Silvio Berlusconi is such a mad, revolting bastard that it’s hard to tell what elements are fictionalised and what are just the truth presented so grotesquely that it seems unbelievable.

    The film follows Berlusconi pouting after he goes into opposition in the late 2000s and pouting after he regains power and it cuts into his whoring/partying time.

    If it wasn’t an Italian movie, you’d almost think it was anti-Italian propaganda. Every man is an old, fat, greasy, repulsive leche. Every woman is essentially just a series of shots of tits, ass and vag – utterly interchangeable and utterly disposable. Everyone has a grift, everyone has an angle.

    The films covers Berlusconi in his own style – it is gratuitous, garish and repulsive. It’s shot like a music video for some banging beach beats. All gyrating women, cool locations and shagging. Yet it allows him to be the smiling calm at the eye of the storm. No mean feat when you look like a gonk troll with shoe polish for hair. And weirdly, in a world as grotesque as him, the humour he brings is oddly humanising.

    Not that he would be pleased with the depiction. He is clearly painted as a grinning second-hand car salesman, shaking your hand as he steals your watch. And beneath, an immature little boy who desperately needs people to like him, who wants only to be the centre of attention so as to never be alone. The actor who plays him is amazing and all the best things about this movie.

    It was such an O-T-T start I didn’t think I would like it, but by the time I was watching Berlusconi standing in a tornado of butterflies in his backdoor butterfly garden like a ludicrous goon, I found myself endeared to it.

    Unfortunately I now have stuck in my head the really catchy campaign song he makes them all sing in the scud. Skip to 1 min in to hear.

  • Tell It To The Bees

    You wouldn’t think you could make a lesbian love story set in 1950s Scotland boring, but somehow Tell It To The Bees manages it. And this is me, someone who could like nothing more than queer women in period dress in raunchy sex scenes. And yet.

    And what is meant to be a sexy love story, it is punctuated by the most awful scenes of sexual violence, from a woman forced to watch her lover gangraped in front of her, to a woman being held down and have a forcible abortion performed against her will for carrying a mixed race child, to a woman struggling to fend off a beating and rape while her child hammers on the door to stop it.

    I’d give it a miss.