Another St. Louis International Film Festival Rides Off Into the Sunset

With the sound of children vomiting into popcorn bags and the clatter of empty beer bottles bouncing down the floors of theaters, another St. Louis International Film Festival comes to an end.  We saw twelve feature length films and two collections of shorts.  Some were great, some were OK, one was annoying, one was 45 minutes too long, all were worth seeing, if for no other reason than to think about why you didn’t like them.

We almost made it; we still had four punches left in our ticket.

Saturday, 11/14/09

Branson – a documentary about entertainers trying to make it big in Branson, MO.  The main focus was on Jackson Cash, a Johnny Cash impersonator whose voice took on an uncanny resemblance to Johnny’s after he got punched in the throat by his drug dealer while they were squabbling over money.  You can’t make this stuff up.

Made in China – Guerrilla filming in Shanghai, about a young entrepreneur who goes to China to manufacture his “humorous domestic hygiene product” and make his dreams come true.  Very good.  The Shanghai locations were interesting.

Spooner – One of the most enjoyable films we saw at the fest.  A used car salesman has been given an ultimatum by his parents; move out of the house by your 30th birthday.  An amusing and touching romance.  Great cast.

Sunday, 11/15/09

XXY – Argentine film set in Uruguay.  A sexual coming of age story where the sexual coming of age is made even more confusing for the protagonists because one of them is struggling with biological gender issues as well as emotional issues.  Beautifully made and paced with a very “real” (i.e. unresolved) finish.

Cloud 9 – A German film about sex after seventy.  It turns out there is also passion, betrayal, and heartbreak after seventy.  Lots of over-seventy nudity.  You get used to it.  And we should all be so lucky with sex in our seventies (ideally without the betrayal and heartbreak).

Helen – Beautiful but turgid film about a teenager taking part in a police reconstruction of the disappearance of one of her classmates.  The dialog was incredibly annoying:

“Line of dialog”
. . . .long pause. . . .
“Line of dialog”
. . . .long pause. . . .
“Line of dialog”
. . . .long pause. . . .

mostly recited while the actors stared expressionlessly into space.  This came across as an artifice and a cheap way to turn a twenty minute short into a feature film, though I’m sure the director was aiming for profundity.  It might have worked better if the actors hadn’t been so wooden.  I like slow movies.  I have no problem with unresolved endings.  But each conversation became so irritating I lost interest long before it was over.

Thursday, 11/19/09

We Live in Public – Riveting documentary about Josh Harris, “the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of.”  After he made his bundle in the nineties, he created several troublesome but fascinating social experiments in which the subjects lived for extended periods under 24/7 web cam observation, even during sex and on the toilet. Glad we saw it.  I’d like to learn more about these experiments.

Friday, 11/20/09

The Only Good Indian – I’ve seen one of Kevin Willmott’s films before (CSA: The Confederate States of America) and I was expecting to be annoyed.  He failed to disappoint.  The movie is a fictionalized account of a young boy’s escape from one of the late 19th early 20th century off-reservation boarding schools where the objective was to assimilate Indian children into European American culture.  In the words of the founder of the movement (Richard Henry Pratt), the goal was to “Kill the Indian, save the man.”

These schools were a perfect illustration of the old saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and it’s a story worth telling.  Many if not all of the children went home emotionally and physically scarred and unable to fit back in to their communities.  But, as in his other films, the director seems to think his mission in life is to shock European Americans with the news that racism exists and the Indians got a raw deal.  This is no longer news to most European Americans, at least the ones who will see his films.

To make sure the insidious evil nature of European culture is revealed to the audience, there is a running analogy between the attempt to assimilate Indians and Dracula’s “assimilation” of victims into the ranks of the undead.  Subtle as a brick through a windshield.  At the same time he bemoans the racial stereotypes applied to African and indigenous Americans, he lays on the Evil European stereotypes with a trowel.  His audience consists of the victims and the guilt-ridden.

Willmott doesn’t seem to be interested in healing the racial divide.  He’s just picking at the scab.  Here endeth the rant.

Absurd Shorts (and they were, truly, absurd).  There were nine.

Feeder – A mouth’s-eye view of eating.  Interesting and revolting.

Karaoke Show – A naked man (the director) dances in a stop-motion style while singing what can best be described as the Sounds of Flatulence.  An obvious ploy by the director to show off his courting tackle.  Amusing for thirty seconds.  Lasted four and a half minutes longer.

Welgünzêr – A terrific short about a man who invents a time machine so he can travel into the future to kill himself.  Why doesn’t he just kill himself now?  Because he thinks his wife might return to him if he puts a pool in the back yard.  Outstanding!  And funny!

The Attack of the Robots from Nebula 5 – Starts out as quirky and amusing, then leaves you with the uncomfortable realization that you’ve just had a glimpse inside the mind of a schizophrenic.  Very good.

The Taxidermist – A very surreal film.  I thought it was great.  See this if you get a chance!  And keep an eye on the lamp.

Naïade – Magical short combining stop motion with live action and animation.  Mesmerizing.

Out of the Blue – A touching story about a man finding love in a water-logged TV.  Very good.

Cattle Call – Four minutes of fun with auctioneers and spinning cowboy hats.  Like I said, fun.

The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar – Excellently creepy version of Poe’s classic short story.  Riveting.

That night I found myself sharing the restroom at the Tivoli with TV’s Frank.  The place was jammed, so I didn’t yell “push the button, Frank!“

Saturday, 11/21/09

Three Monkeys – Slow but intriguing Turkish drama, looking as though it was filmed in the cinematic equivalent of Blu-Ray.  I loved it, Nan hated it.

The Way We Get By – A documentary about three retirees who spend almost every day at the Bangor Maine airport greeting and saying farewell to troops deploying from and to the Middle East.  Touching.  The three provide a lot of insight into the fifth stage of life, service to others.

The Hollywood Cartoon, with commentary by Michael Barrier, author of “Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age” and “The Animated Man: The life of Walt Disney”
- Who Killed Cock Robin?
- Woodland Café
- Book Review
- Fresh Airedale – One of my all-time favorites.  For a change, the cat is the good guy.
- Beep Beep – Early Road Runner, the second made.  It doesn’t get better than this.
- Little Rural Riding Hood – OK, but I never liked the Tex Avery stuff as much as the Warner Brothers toons.

The best part about this program was the fact that little kids in the audience were laughing and giggling at material created up to eighty years ago.  Timeless stuff.

Sunday, 11/22/09

Song From the Southern Seas – A non-Borat film from Kazakhstan that I can’t resist subtitling Desperate Yurtwives (sorry).  We meet two families, a young Russian couple and a young Kazakh couple, and are introduced to their methods of marital conflict resolution; the Russian couple chases each other around the farmyard, screaming, throwing objects, and threatening each other with billets of firewood.  The young Kazakh husband and his wife have a calmer style, he whips the “devils” out of her on a regular basis, she meekly submits.  The families live next to each other for years, drinking vodka and eating gherkins with no problems until the Russian wife gives birth to a dark-haired baby who grows up to look more Kazakh than Russian.  The Russian wife and the Kazakh husband both deny any hanky-panky.

Mongol East has meet Slavic West in Kazakhstan for hundreds of years.  There has been a lot of intermarriage between Slav and Kazakh.  It turns out there are reasons for the child’s appearance that have nothing to do with the neighbors.

This whole region has a history largely unknown in the United States, which is unfortunate.  There are a lot of parallels with US history.  The Czars and the Soviets expanded east into the steppes in much the same way the US expanded westward, but with considerably more bloodshed.  The Russians didn’t have disease working in their favor; they had to shoot more people.

***

I have to say, as much as I love movies, seeing this many in such a short period of time was a strain.  We probably won’t try it again next year.  We barely scratched the surface of the movies we would like to have seen if time and money were infinite and we could be in five or six places at once.

But it was fun to try.

The Pi North Beach Classico – mozzarella, berkshire pork sausage, mushrooms, onions, hold the green bell peppers

Gotta have the food shot.  You knew there’d be food, didn’t you?

Moonlight on Brown Hall at Wash U. Looks Dracula-ready.

One of the film festival venues was Brown Hall at Washington University.  It made for an atmospheric setting.

Either a lens flare or a UFO over Wash U. I'm going to assume it was a UFO.

- Poppa

I Promise You, This Will Be One of the Weirder Things You’ll See Today

- Poppa

Segways Over Forest Park – 2009

It Takes a Viking to Raze a Village

We went to our first Renaissance Festival in Atlanta in the 1980s, back when it was a simple little thing held at a pavilion at Lake Laneir.  There were some members of the Society for Creative Anachronism bashing each other on the head with padded swords and a few artisans selling period clothing and jewelry.  Over the years it grew and grew until it covered several acres, involved hundreds of characters, thousands of visitors, and consumed turkey legs by the ton. 

This year we visited the St. Louis equivalent, the Greater Saint Louis Renaissance Faire, which, not surprisingly, has a French flavor.  The grounds were beautifully wooded; the booths and performance areas seemed to wind forever through the forest.  There are serious exhibits, such as the charcoal burner’s encampment, and downright silly places, like “Arrbucks Coffee” (there’s a huge overlap with the current pirate frenzy).  The men frequently indulge their fascination with weapons; the above gentleman greeting people at the gate was armed with a rapier, a short stabbing sword, a dagger, a fighting axe, and a flintlock pistol, all peace bonded with zip ties.  The women frequently indulge their fascination with breast presentation, cramming them into corsets that display them in all their jiggly glory.

The Faire is mostly family friendly, but every now and then, you encounter something that’s not quite Disney.  Some of the leather artisan’s products cross the line into S&M territory, you have to be over 21 to buy some items, and there are usually several booths selling fully-functional edged weapons.

There is a huge overlap between the SF-Fantasy community and the Renfest folks.  It’s not uncommon to see the same people in the same costumes at SF conventions and the same bumper stickers in the parking areas (“Republicans for Voldemort” “It Takes a Viking to Raze a Village”).  There’s an oft-stated sentiment that Renfest participants are creating “The Middle Ages as they should have been,” meaning: no open sewers, burning witches, flogging peasants, or putting the boot to the scullery maid.  It’s also come to mean elves with pointy ears and fairies with wings.

Both SF Cons and Renfests are for people who’ve never grown up or accepted the limitations of so-called “reality,” people like me.

And here’s the obligatory food shot, California Pizza Kitchen’s Wild Mushroom pizza: Cremini, Shiitake, Portobello and white mushrooms, Fontina and Mozzarella cheeses with a wild mushroom walnut pesto.  . . . .mmmmm. . . .

- Poppa

“What Light Through Yonder Airlock Breaks?”

Saturday night Nan and I accompanied Joe and Marie (Nan’s brother and his wife) to see a performance of New Line Theater’s Return to the Forbidden Planet, a version of the 1950s SF classic movie Forbidden Planet, itself based on/inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  Like the Worm Ouroboros, the snake swallowing its own tail, Return to the Forbidden Planet loops back to the original source.

It’s not every day you get to hear the term “klystron generator” embedded in Iambic Pentameter.  New Line Theater’s Return to the Forbidden Planet is a glorious hodgepodge of Shakespearian bombast and kitschy 1950s references; Miranda’s/Altaira’s Poodle Skirt has a rocket instead of a poodle and Ariel/Robbie the Robot zips around the set on carhop roller skates.  There were even a few Star Trek phaser shout-outs thrown in for people under fifty, though everybody knows the crew of the C-57D was armed with neutron beam blasters.

Seeing (actually, hearing) Forbidden Planet is a vividly remembered event from my youth.  I saw it in on TV in the late ‘50s, not knowing what it was called, and it scared the bejabbers out of me.  I fled to the top of the stairs and listened to the sounds of the “Monster from the Id,” afraid to look, but too fascinated to turn off the TV.  It wasn’t until years later, while looking through a coffee table book on Science Fiction films, that I learned what had frightened me so as a child.  When I watched it for the first time as an adult, it was a cathartic experience.

The entire cast was good, but Zachary Allen Farmer, playing Prospero/Morbius really stood out. He was channeling Walter Pidgeon, and I mean that in a good way.  We’ve enjoyed him (Farmer) before as Barry in High Fidelity, and Barry is about as far as you can get from Prosporo/Morbius.

The music, classic ‘50s and ‘60s rock standards, tied the whole thing together beautifully.  The only negatives were the occasional Shakespearian soliloquies that stopped the tempo of the show like a circular saw hitting a knot.  Shakespeare was used to best effect when the cast mined every bad pun they could out of his work: “Two Beeps or Not Two Beeps, that is the Question!” “Beware the Ids that march!”  But I wasn’t crazy about the soliloquies.  Having them intrude on the rock-and-roll/SF fun was like finding a peppercorn in your ice cream.  They’re both edible, but they don’t belong together.

- Poppa

Veridian Dynamics – When Presidents Talk

Do Do That Hulu That They Do So Well

The long nightmare is over! Once again, we can watch (almost) current TV on demand, complete with the oh-so-essential Pause function, while ensconced in our big ol’ TV-watchin’ chairs.  But this time we’re not at the mercy of DIRECTV or any of the other Big Cable minions of the Devil.  And the best thing is, IT’S FREE!  Sort of.  Ya gotta have the bandwidth. * See the Boring Stuff if you want to know more about bandwidth.

After several months of frustration, I finally bit the bullet and had a member of the Geek Squad come out and tell me why I wasn’t able to get my HDMI cable to work between our PC and our HDTV (it turns out I was NOT supposed to use the Expletive Deleted PC setting on the TV).  Now our 1080p HDTV functions as a really high-resolution giant PC monitor.

While it’s great fun being able to blog from across the room, my real motivation for this was to watch our favorite cable channel shows on free PC TV.  Now we can enjoy new Battlestar Galactica episodes in style and comfort the morning after they debut on the Sci Fi channel.

While Erin was here last week, we watched Battlestar Galactica while huddled around the laptop, just like Neanderthals huddled around a campfire 50,000 years ago, or Hippies huddled around an old RCA Victor 40 years ago.  As we huddled, Erin told us about a site called hulu, where there is a huge amount of video content, both movies and TV, both old and new.

There seems to be some kind of Harmonic Convergence going on here.  Internet TV was the subject of a recent CNN headline story, and millions of people around the world heard about hulu during a Superbowl XLIII ad.  I’ve also tried some of the Netflix Instant Play features now that I can see them on a big screen.

There are still some down-sides.  The streaming video will occasionally hang and the quality of the images isn’t as sharp as DIRECTV high def (the Netflix Instant Play features look better and have been more reliable, so far).  There are supposed to be some HD shows available on hulu but I’ve mostly been watching old episodes of Lost in Space from the sixties, so HD hasn’t been a priority yet.

The hulu stuff isn’t commercial free, but the commercials are few in number and brief in duration, at least for now.  They are also not diverse and make hulu look like a front for the DoD.  I must have seen the same six Air Force ads twenty times each by now.  Unlike Tivo, you can’t fast-forward through the commercials, though you can see where they will be in the progress meter at the bottom of the screen.  If you try to jump beyond the next commercial, you’ll be routed through the ad before you can get to where you want to go in the program.  Gotcha!

I suspect this is going to get a lot better as additional shows jump on board and streaming reliability and image quality improves.  It’s also probably going to get a little worse as advertisers figure out this is where their rice bowl is going to be in the future.

Damn, I love being alive in this day and age.

- Poppa

* This is the Boring Stuff

Hulu requires a minimum download bandwidth of 1,000 Kbps (kilobits per second) and recommends a bandwidth of 1,500 Kbps to watch most videos.  To give you an idea where this fits into The World, AT&T Basic DSL is rated at 768 Kbps.  You might be able to watch most of the clips with this level of service, but you won’t get any sympathy from the hulu support people if you have trouble.

AT&T’s next highest package supports 1,500 Kbps.  The clips in hulu’s HD Gallery are encoded at 2,500 Kbps.  They recommend a download bandwidth of over 3,500 Kbps to stream those.  You don’t see those speeds until you get into the Pro or Premium DSL plans.  I think cable modems are comparable.

If you’re not sure what your bandwidth is, Google “bandwidth test” and a bunch of free bandwidth tests will pop up.