TIFF 2014: Day Seven
Sep. 20th, 2014 10:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
przedWe're up visiting my mom, but whilst she's watching one of her favourite Beeb shows (Coast), I thought I'd throw together some thoughts about two more TIFF films, one very good, one not so much. And the not so much one had the most batshit crazy Q & A I've seen in thirty years of doing the festival.
The very good film was Theeb, filmed in Jordan with members of the last nomadic Bedouin tribe as actors. It's the flip side of Lawrence of Arabia, following a young boy, Theeb, and his brother as they're given the job of guiding an English officer to the next well.
The film is gorgeous, and it's refreshing in how it focusses on the Bedouin characters, and how they're drawn against their will into the Englishman's war. The young boy who plays the lead, Jacir Eid, is a quite amazing presence. During the Q & A, the director said that they'd asked their local fixer to find a kid to shoot a test short, so he brought his son. The kid was really shy, so they hadn't really noticed him before, but as soon as they had the first footage of him back they realized they'd found their lead.
The not-so-good film was Pasolini, a film following the director Piero Paolo Pasolini on his last day, up until he was murdered by a pick up gone wrong. I was actually looking forward to this, since Pasolini is played by Willem Dafoe, an actor I adore. But it was also a risk because it's directed by Abel Ferrara, whose filmography is not exactly brimming with films I like.
The film is full of Pasolini waxing philosophical about his art as various interviewers and friends hang onto his every word, and then picking up questionable young men for casual sex. It's a good thing Dafoe is an actor I would basically watch read the phone book, because the film wasn't much better than that.
What followed in the Q & A was, in a perverse way, more "interesting" than the film itself. The session was run by a programmer I'd run into several times at the fest, and was completely incompetent every time I saw her. (She invariably failed to give the names of the guests she was meant to be introducing, she couldn't moderate to save her life, and she actually fell on the stairs going on stage not once, but twice.) This time she couldn't get the mics working, which made the audience a bit restless. But then things went totally south when the bloke right behind us started yelling, and I quote, "You stupid fucking Canadians, can't you do anything right!" The friend I was with and I shrunk down in our seats, but the guy wouldn't shut up. And he brought out the other whack jobs, because when they finally sorted out mics, the people who asked questions were almost as unhinged as Yelling Guy.
Then Yelling Guy got in on the action, which is when it got totally surreal.
Yelling Guy: I gotta question.
Ferrara: What's your question?
Yelling Guy: What does Pasolini have to do with Marshall McLuhan?
Ferrara: ::throwing up his hands:: I don't know. What does Pasolini have to do with McLuhan? (Let me just say that this question was totally from left field.)
Yelling Guy: Absolutely nothing! ::launches into a rant about how he never saw Pasolini at McLuhan's seminars in the '70s::
As much as I cringed at the beginning, by this point it was high comedy. Though thankfully, this was when Incompetent Programmer decided to call it quits.
The very good film was Theeb, filmed in Jordan with members of the last nomadic Bedouin tribe as actors. It's the flip side of Lawrence of Arabia, following a young boy, Theeb, and his brother as they're given the job of guiding an English officer to the next well.
The film is gorgeous, and it's refreshing in how it focusses on the Bedouin characters, and how they're drawn against their will into the Englishman's war. The young boy who plays the lead, Jacir Eid, is a quite amazing presence. During the Q & A, the director said that they'd asked their local fixer to find a kid to shoot a test short, so he brought his son. The kid was really shy, so they hadn't really noticed him before, but as soon as they had the first footage of him back they realized they'd found their lead.
The not-so-good film was Pasolini, a film following the director Piero Paolo Pasolini on his last day, up until he was murdered by a pick up gone wrong. I was actually looking forward to this, since Pasolini is played by Willem Dafoe, an actor I adore. But it was also a risk because it's directed by Abel Ferrara, whose filmography is not exactly brimming with films I like.
The film is full of Pasolini waxing philosophical about his art as various interviewers and friends hang onto his every word, and then picking up questionable young men for casual sex. It's a good thing Dafoe is an actor I would basically watch read the phone book, because the film wasn't much better than that.
What followed in the Q & A was, in a perverse way, more "interesting" than the film itself. The session was run by a programmer I'd run into several times at the fest, and was completely incompetent every time I saw her. (She invariably failed to give the names of the guests she was meant to be introducing, she couldn't moderate to save her life, and she actually fell on the stairs going on stage not once, but twice.) This time she couldn't get the mics working, which made the audience a bit restless. But then things went totally south when the bloke right behind us started yelling, and I quote, "You stupid fucking Canadians, can't you do anything right!" The friend I was with and I shrunk down in our seats, but the guy wouldn't shut up. And he brought out the other whack jobs, because when they finally sorted out mics, the people who asked questions were almost as unhinged as Yelling Guy.
Then Yelling Guy got in on the action, which is when it got totally surreal.
Yelling Guy: I gotta question.
Ferrara: What's your question?
Yelling Guy: What does Pasolini have to do with Marshall McLuhan?
Ferrara: ::throwing up his hands:: I don't know. What does Pasolini have to do with McLuhan? (Let me just say that this question was totally from left field.)
Yelling Guy: Absolutely nothing! ::launches into a rant about how he never saw Pasolini at McLuhan's seminars in the '70s::
As much as I cringed at the beginning, by this point it was high comedy. Though thankfully, this was when Incompetent Programmer decided to call it quits.
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no subject
Date: 2014-09-21 11:16 am (UTC)And at least by going to all sorts of things, you get the good, like the first one, as well.
I really enjoy these little reviews. Thanks!
no subject
Date: 2014-09-23 03:11 am (UTC)And the first movie was very, very good. Which was nice, because it was definitely one I was taking a flyer on, and those don't always pay off so well.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-21 11:54 am (UTC)I wonder how that Incompetent Programmer got such a responsible role? Surely not for merit.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-23 03:16 am (UTC)As for the Incompetent Programmer, I've gotta figure she's got blackmail material on the head of the fest. Because she was spectacularly incompetent at introducing films and running Q & As. She introduced the first film I saw, which was the first time she failed to provide the name of the guest and fell on the way to the stage, but I just thought "It's her first film of the fest; she's nervous." When that all continued to happen it started looking a lot less like first night nerves and more like a total failure to do a big part of her job.