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MIFF So Far
Aug. 3rd, 2011 11:23 pm13 Assassins
A pretty good samauri flick, and it seemed to maintain a sense of humour about what it was. The big battle scene lasted for over a third of the total movie length and started to drag on a bit, but not as much as you'd expect for 45mins of unrelieved blood-letting.
Into Eternity
A doco on the permanent nuclear waste storage facility in Finland. Technically the premise was a little silly, that the film was a message to future people discovering the facility, but I liked it. I thought the slow pace and talking past us to the distant future helped bring some comprehension of the timescales involved, the fact that this waste was the only long-term legacy we're leaving, and that we are expending truely monumental effort on this stuff.
Animation Shorts
Plug, the new world
Very cute, but kind of like watching a corporate video.
Kubla Kahn
Pretty flowing animation set to poetry, quite nifty.
The Mechanism of Spring
More wierdness from the same Japanese mob who provided one of the weird ones last year. This one benefited from being a lot shorter, so you could be amused at the surreal bizarreness then move on.
Winter Poem
Wierd. I kept almost thinking I could see what they were doing, and then deciding that no, either there was a cultural divide I couldn't cross or they'd been smoking something powerful. Jaunty music and slightly nightmarish imagery.
Aww Jeez
God & Jesus in a sitcom, with Richard Dawkins as neighbour. Made by local RMIT students the humour was notabley under-graduate, but it was cute.
Self Service
Also cute, life of a supermarket barcode scanner, but the flashing light of images near the start was too much for my tired eyes.
Seven Days in the Woods
I got nothing from this one. As far as I can tell it was the tale of how the animators had dug themselves a hole and weren't sure how to get out.
Specky Four Eyes
This one was quite neat, with an actual story looking at similar themes to The Lost Thing last year. A boy who can see the magic in the world until forced to wear his glasses. I liked it.
Heavy Heads
Odd and sad. I'm pretty sure flies don't work like that.
Miss Remarkable & Her Career
Also really liked this one, although it's depiction of depression hit uncomfortably close to home.
Tales of the Night
3D sillouette animation, sounds strange but worked really well. The stories were neat, but it did feel a bit like a collection of short TV episodes strung together. Would make a good little TV series.
Slightly amused when the characters complained that the next story had no good moral, so they changed the ending. I could see the moral, although not a popular one these days perhaps. "Life isn't all happiness & rainbows, sometimes you have to make sacrifices. Failure to make the sacrifices not only destroys our way of life, but makes the sacrifices of everyone else meaningless." Sometimes as a society we all have to make our personal sacrifice to avoid everyone suffering. cf: Melbourne Water Restrictions, Global Warming, etc.
Accelerator 2
Eli the Invincible
Completely not the sort of thing I would normally watch, but very good.
Collision
Not so keen on this one, but still pretty good.
A Fine Young Man
Scary in a whole different sort of way, I could see how it was going to end a fair way out, but only because that's what I'd do. Very good.
Nullarbor
This one is the reason I picked this session of shorts to attend. Not sure why it wasn't in the animated session, but it stood up well here with the live action - which most of the animated session wouldn't have. Good fun, very Australian, recommended.
Toy Soldier
Probably my least favourite, but I suspect it would have worked well with people more familiar with the themes.
If I dance will it keep me warm?
Odd. Fun, and odd.
Meathead
Fazing and acceptance of the new guy at the meatworks. I can see the butchering would put a lot of people off, but I liked the film, and the meat on display was all in a fairly advanced and clean state of processing.
You Are Here
Loved this, far more than I expected. Like a philosophy of mind lecture splattered all over the screen in puzzle pieces. My inner archivist worked out the password fairly soon after getting the clues, and it was a lot of fun to pick up references as it went.
I want to watch it again, then read an annotated script to find all the references I'm missing so I can go look them up, then watch it a third time.
Tatsumi
Interesting, but I think I probably would have preferred to just see the original animated autobiography that was here spliced together with some of the artists short animated pieces. Maybe I was just tired, but at times I was having trouble keeping track of what was going on, and the little stories didn't seem very sophisticated.
A pretty good samauri flick, and it seemed to maintain a sense of humour about what it was. The big battle scene lasted for over a third of the total movie length and started to drag on a bit, but not as much as you'd expect for 45mins of unrelieved blood-letting.
Into Eternity
A doco on the permanent nuclear waste storage facility in Finland. Technically the premise was a little silly, that the film was a message to future people discovering the facility, but I liked it. I thought the slow pace and talking past us to the distant future helped bring some comprehension of the timescales involved, the fact that this waste was the only long-term legacy we're leaving, and that we are expending truely monumental effort on this stuff.
Animation Shorts
Plug, the new world
Very cute, but kind of like watching a corporate video.
Kubla Kahn
Pretty flowing animation set to poetry, quite nifty.
The Mechanism of Spring
More wierdness from the same Japanese mob who provided one of the weird ones last year. This one benefited from being a lot shorter, so you could be amused at the surreal bizarreness then move on.
Winter Poem
Wierd. I kept almost thinking I could see what they were doing, and then deciding that no, either there was a cultural divide I couldn't cross or they'd been smoking something powerful. Jaunty music and slightly nightmarish imagery.
Aww Jeez
God & Jesus in a sitcom, with Richard Dawkins as neighbour. Made by local RMIT students the humour was notabley under-graduate, but it was cute.
Self Service
Also cute, life of a supermarket barcode scanner, but the flashing light of images near the start was too much for my tired eyes.
Seven Days in the Woods
I got nothing from this one. As far as I can tell it was the tale of how the animators had dug themselves a hole and weren't sure how to get out.
Specky Four Eyes
This one was quite neat, with an actual story looking at similar themes to The Lost Thing last year. A boy who can see the magic in the world until forced to wear his glasses. I liked it.
Heavy Heads
Odd and sad. I'm pretty sure flies don't work like that.
Miss Remarkable & Her Career
Also really liked this one, although it's depiction of depression hit uncomfortably close to home.
Tales of the Night
3D sillouette animation, sounds strange but worked really well. The stories were neat, but it did feel a bit like a collection of short TV episodes strung together. Would make a good little TV series.
Slightly amused when the characters complained that the next story had no good moral, so they changed the ending. I could see the moral, although not a popular one these days perhaps. "Life isn't all happiness & rainbows, sometimes you have to make sacrifices. Failure to make the sacrifices not only destroys our way of life, but makes the sacrifices of everyone else meaningless." Sometimes as a society we all have to make our personal sacrifice to avoid everyone suffering. cf: Melbourne Water Restrictions, Global Warming, etc.
Accelerator 2
Eli the Invincible
Completely not the sort of thing I would normally watch, but very good.
Collision
Not so keen on this one, but still pretty good.
A Fine Young Man
Scary in a whole different sort of way, I could see how it was going to end a fair way out, but only because that's what I'd do. Very good.
Nullarbor
This one is the reason I picked this session of shorts to attend. Not sure why it wasn't in the animated session, but it stood up well here with the live action - which most of the animated session wouldn't have. Good fun, very Australian, recommended.
Toy Soldier
Probably my least favourite, but I suspect it would have worked well with people more familiar with the themes.
If I dance will it keep me warm?
Odd. Fun, and odd.
Meathead
Fazing and acceptance of the new guy at the meatworks. I can see the butchering would put a lot of people off, but I liked the film, and the meat on display was all in a fairly advanced and clean state of processing.
You Are Here
Loved this, far more than I expected. Like a philosophy of mind lecture splattered all over the screen in puzzle pieces. My inner archivist worked out the password fairly soon after getting the clues, and it was a lot of fun to pick up references as it went.
I want to watch it again, then read an annotated script to find all the references I'm missing so I can go look them up, then watch it a third time.
Tatsumi
Interesting, but I think I probably would have preferred to just see the original animated autobiography that was here spliced together with some of the artists short animated pieces. Maybe I was just tired, but at times I was having trouble keeping track of what was going on, and the little stories didn't seem very sophisticated.
