A gun and a girl
JULY 29
Usually reviews of documentaries focus on the writer/director and their message. But to me the star of Workingman's Death is cinematographer Wolfgang Thaler. The photography in this film is simply stunning.
Billed as focusing onthe world's most horrible, life-endangering jobs, I was naturally expecting something pretty depressing. Workingman's Death confounded those expectations. It wasn't even particularly shocking - surprising yes, shocking no.
The film presents five vignettes of working life in the 21st century starting with illegal coal miners scraping out a dangerous living in Ukraine, then moving to Indonesian Sulphur miners working on the inside of a live volcano, then to an open air butchery in Nigeria (the most challenging viewing), then to a Pakistani ship wrecking beach and finally, and quite anticlimactically, to a steel yard in China. There is also a very forgettable epilogue.
Along the way we get to listen in to workers' conversations and hear them talk about their lives and their labours. The film is an inspring portrait of human resilience rather than an essay on exploitation - and that's where Thaler comes in. His sumptuous camerawork, willingness to linger on tiny but important details and tendency to let the camera keep rolling lift this film to another plane. Highly recommended - if it comes back. RO
JULY 23
“Man – puny yet irresistible…” So begins the first caption to Victor Sjöström’s silent masterpiece, The Wind, at the Civic. It’s virtually impossible to place this film back in its context: a world before the Holocaust, before the invention of the A-bomb. At its crudest level it’s an embryonic western, and although Lillian Gish’s expressions raise some cheap laughs today, the power of this drama (an Americanised Wuthering Heights in which Cathy gets her Heathcliff) almost prevails over even 21st Century sensibilities. The happy ending was apparently added, according to IMDb, after test audiences recoiled at the original — in which the insane Letty wanders into the desert — and it’s rather disconcerting to discover that the studios exerted such influence over Hollywood’s creative elite even then. It would have better suited the subject matter and made the story seem less twee.
This live cinema performance was accompanied by the Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Marc Taddei, although it’s disappointing to discover that the music is not original; it was commissioned for Britain’s Thames Television for Channel 4 and composed by Carl Davis. Nevertheless the orchestral dynamics were used to full effect in the culminating storm sequence. Old-country character names (Wirt, Letty, Lige and Sourdough) and the recurring image of a Great White Horse — the Indian spirit of the wind — make up for a plot that’s at times crude and fluky: Letty moves to East Texas from Virginia and finds the wind so pervasive that she almost marries the wrong man and then loathes the man she does as she washes his dishes in sand (the wind in the Mojave Desert location’s storm scenes was created by eight aircraft propellers, and the sand actually did get everywhere).
Lillian Gish is captivating, but Dorothy Cumming as Cora is almost as good. Captions ominously build up “the injuns” until you’re rapt in anticipation of a late entrance by an Orson Welles-style antagonist, but “the injuns” never materialise. Instead, the superimposed stallion stands-in for the natives and the forces of Nature. A film at the Civic is always memorable — the lions, the shooting stars, the primeval ushers — and with a full orchestra may well be unforgettable. CB
JULY 20
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Rob, hardly surprisingly, found reminiscent in theme of As I Lay Dying. It looked good, was well acted and was respectably violent. MB
Yes, you did and you are. I had to nudge you awake a couple of times. And, a piece of trivia; offline Mark likes to refer to Melquiades Estrada as Enchilada Tostado. Anyway, yes a it's a good-un but also bound to come back. Tommy Lee Jones is good and gruff and directs as well. Barry Pepper as the beat up border policeman is superb as is his mall loving young wife, played by, wait for it, January Jones.
As to Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, you could pick a lot worse models for a film. Both have a Biblical quality as the protagonists struggle against nature to take a dead friend/relative back to their home to be buried. RO
JULY 18
Tristram Shandy, the film of the unfilmable book, is a gift to reference-lovers. Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan, in alphabetical order, traipse through an army of guises and characters and personalities to tell this windy, ancient po-mo tale. Lots of fun in places, though not as much as the guffawing guy in my row thought.
We had to show our tickets to the people in our seats. They were 3 hours ahead - for the next film, the Smoking one, which I hear is very good. The old guy next to us studying his bus timetable said that's nothing - he had come 24 hrs early for a film one year.
I am very keen we install those mobile phone signal blockers in cinemas that I have heard they have in France. Screens these days are so huge it's like the person next to you has a torch. Bad form. MB
JULY 14
So Bill Gosden is taking a year off from the film festival for some well-earned hols and to do a "strategic plan" for the fest, which just opened in Auckland.
Maybe he's tired. The first-night film, Ken Loach's The Wind that Shakes the Barley, was (again, I'm told) probably not the right entertainment for what is, at least partly, a corporate-PR event for chief sponsor Telecom.
It was, at a bathroom break over two hours, probably a shade too long. A tract about early Irish republicanism, in which the Brits are all shits and the brave Oirish all have unalloyed motives, it was a khaki shade of dour. Rising star Cillian Murphy was safe hands as a somewhat reluctant leader. Technically tidy, slightly confusing, but ultimately unaffecting. MB
Usually reviews of documentaries focus on the writer/director and their message. But to me the star of Workingman's Death is cinematographer Wolfgang Thaler. The photography in this film is simply stunning.
Billed as focusing onthe world's most horrible, life-endangering jobs, I was naturally expecting something pretty depressing. Workingman's Death confounded those expectations. It wasn't even particularly shocking - surprising yes, shocking no.
The film presents five vignettes of working life in the 21st century starting with illegal coal miners scraping out a dangerous living in Ukraine, then moving to Indonesian Sulphur miners working on the inside of a live volcano, then to an open air butchery in Nigeria (the most challenging viewing), then to a Pakistani ship wrecking beach and finally, and quite anticlimactically, to a steel yard in China. There is also a very forgettable epilogue.
Along the way we get to listen in to workers' conversations and hear them talk about their lives and their labours. The film is an inspring portrait of human resilience rather than an essay on exploitation - and that's where Thaler comes in. His sumptuous camerawork, willingness to linger on tiny but important details and tendency to let the camera keep rolling lift this film to another plane. Highly recommended - if it comes back. RO
JULY 23
“Man – puny yet irresistible…” So begins the first caption to Victor Sjöström’s silent masterpiece, The Wind, at the Civic. It’s virtually impossible to place this film back in its context: a world before the Holocaust, before the invention of the A-bomb. At its crudest level it’s an embryonic western, and although Lillian Gish’s expressions raise some cheap laughs today, the power of this drama (an Americanised Wuthering Heights in which Cathy gets her Heathcliff) almost prevails over even 21st Century sensibilities. The happy ending was apparently added, according to IMDb, after test audiences recoiled at the original — in which the insane Letty wanders into the desert — and it’s rather disconcerting to discover that the studios exerted such influence over Hollywood’s creative elite even then. It would have better suited the subject matter and made the story seem less twee.
This live cinema performance was accompanied by the Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Marc Taddei, although it’s disappointing to discover that the music is not original; it was commissioned for Britain’s Thames Television for Channel 4 and composed by Carl Davis. Nevertheless the orchestral dynamics were used to full effect in the culminating storm sequence. Old-country character names (Wirt, Letty, Lige and Sourdough) and the recurring image of a Great White Horse — the Indian spirit of the wind — make up for a plot that’s at times crude and fluky: Letty moves to East Texas from Virginia and finds the wind so pervasive that she almost marries the wrong man and then loathes the man she does as she washes his dishes in sand (the wind in the Mojave Desert location’s storm scenes was created by eight aircraft propellers, and the sand actually did get everywhere).
Lillian Gish is captivating, but Dorothy Cumming as Cora is almost as good. Captions ominously build up “the injuns” until you’re rapt in anticipation of a late entrance by an Orson Welles-style antagonist, but “the injuns” never materialise. Instead, the superimposed stallion stands-in for the natives and the forces of Nature. A film at the Civic is always memorable — the lions, the shooting stars, the primeval ushers — and with a full orchestra may well be unforgettable. CB
JULY 20
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Rob, hardly surprisingly, found reminiscent in theme of As I Lay Dying. It looked good, was well acted and was respectably violent. MB
Yes, you did and you are. I had to nudge you awake a couple of times. And, a piece of trivia; offline Mark likes to refer to Melquiades Estrada as Enchilada Tostado. Anyway, yes a it's a good-un but also bound to come back. Tommy Lee Jones is good and gruff and directs as well. Barry Pepper as the beat up border policeman is superb as is his mall loving young wife, played by, wait for it, January Jones.
As to Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, you could pick a lot worse models for a film. Both have a Biblical quality as the protagonists struggle against nature to take a dead friend/relative back to their home to be buried. RO
JULY 18
Tristram Shandy, the film of the unfilmable book, is a gift to reference-lovers. Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan, in alphabetical order, traipse through an army of guises and characters and personalities to tell this windy, ancient po-mo tale. Lots of fun in places, though not as much as the guffawing guy in my row thought.
We had to show our tickets to the people in our seats. They were 3 hours ahead - for the next film, the Smoking one, which I hear is very good. The old guy next to us studying his bus timetable said that's nothing - he had come 24 hrs early for a film one year.
I am very keen we install those mobile phone signal blockers in cinemas that I have heard they have in France. Screens these days are so huge it's like the person next to you has a torch. Bad form. MB
JULY 14
So Bill Gosden is taking a year off from the film festival for some well-earned hols and to do a "strategic plan" for the fest, which just opened in Auckland.
Maybe he's tired. The first-night film, Ken Loach's The Wind that Shakes the Barley, was (again, I'm told) probably not the right entertainment for what is, at least partly, a corporate-PR event for chief sponsor Telecom.
It was, at a bathroom break over two hours, probably a shade too long. A tract about early Irish republicanism, in which the Brits are all shits and the brave Oirish all have unalloyed motives, it was a khaki shade of dour. Rising star Cillian Murphy was safe hands as a somewhat reluctant leader. Technically tidy, slightly confusing, but ultimately unaffecting. MB
2 Comments:
Should have heard the whinging from earlier sponsors at some of the opening party screeners.
I'll take a punt (on my opinion & anonymity) that Bill Gosden don't never plan to pander to those sponsor heathens!
Mind you, and I don't want to whinge (too much) I recall the disdain shown the audience one year, when the epic Queen Margot (2 hours 23 minutes) had a 35 minute short slotted in before it at pretty much the last minute.
No matter how aesthetically apt that programmikng choice was, a large portion of the audience was fucked off that the total running time tooke them into the wee hours & many would miss their bus home.
I suspect you're right, Llew, about Bill.
I think I saw Queen Margot. Hopefully I fell asleep again.
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