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

“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

To Clap, or Not to Clap?

Wednesday night we attended one of a series of Classical concerts at the Sheldon.  This concert, entitled Moonlight, was part of a Beethoven series and featured two of the “Three Bs,” Beethoven and Brahms (Bach didn’t make an appearance).  The “Moonlight” in the concert title comes from the unofficial name of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-Sharp Minor Op. 27, No 2.  No wonder they call it the Moonlight Sonata.  You’ve heard this sonata, at least the first movement, whether you recognize the name or not.

We were there as the guests of Peggy and Steve Fuller, two of our neighbors.  Their children originally planned to attend but could no longer use the tickets, so Peggy and Steve very kindly invited us along.

I usually tell people most of my knowledge of classical music comes from Bugs Bunny cartoons (“Kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit!”), but that’s not entirely true.  Bugs may have been my intro, but my elementary music teacher introduced me to Pier Gynt and made me appreciate that music could tell a story more complex than The Purple People Eater.  Then there was Quaker Oats using the 1812 Overture to sell oatmeal.  I wore out the 1812 and its “B” side, Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory, before I got out of high school.  But my real exposure to classical music was from the movies: Fantasia, Kubrick’s 2001 and A Clockwork Orange, Apocalypse Now.  Woody Allen’s Love and Death introduced me to Prokofiev, though I loved Peter and the Wolf as a kid without knowing who wrote the music.  Poor Leah spent her first two years eating mashed asparagus and homemade yogurt to the strains of Prokofiev’s Russia Under the Mongolian Yoke and listening to me pick out the first few measures of Beethoven’s Für Elise over and over and over on our old out-of-tune upright piano.  She’s probably programmed by that music to do something like… eat mashed asparagus and yogurt whenever she watches Alexander Nevsky or Rosemary’s Baby.

I felt that my appreciation of classical music was wide but shallow, though.  I never got much beyond the 120 Classical Music Masterpieces pitched by John Williams (no, not that John Williams, the other John Williams) in TV’s longest running commercial.  Seeing a performance of something obscure (to me) like Beethoven’s Serenade in D Major for Flute, Violin and Viola, Op. 25 was on another level of musical sophistication altogether.  It was swimming in the deep end of classical music instead of splashing around in the “light music” kiddie pool.

There were four performers.  The two headliners were David Halen, Concertmaster (first violin) of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Peter Henderson, a talented pianist who performs frequently with the Symphony.  Halen and Henderson played two sets together, Beethoven’s Spring Sonata and Brahms’ Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano in G Major, Op. 78.  Halen was joined by Mark Sparks on flute and Kathleen Mattis on viola for the Serenade in D Major for Flute, Violin and Viola, Op. 25, and Henderson played the Moonlight Sonata by himself.

There are no bad seats in the Sheldon, but our seats were superb.  We were only about 15 feet from the performers and were able to see every motion, especially the hands and face of the pianist.  Each piece consisted of three or more movements and we experienced for the second time the awkward phenomenon of the applause-between-movements conundrum.  The first time was when we went to see the Ahn Trio in February, which somehow I missed blogging about.  I had no idea this was even a controversy.  Here’s the short version:

No one is exactly sure how it got started, but since the early 20th century, classical music aficionados have been conditioned to remain silent between movements and to wait until the end of a piece to applaud.  Presumably everybody is impressed that they know the piece isn’t over until the end of the last movement.

Classical concert newbies invariably clap at the end of the first movement and feel like doofuses (doofi?) when no one else claps.  Depending on their level of embarrassment (some conductors have been known to turn around and wag their fingers at newbie clappers) they may never come back to a classical concert.  Way to go.  Humiliate the guy who just paid money to see you.

And the musicians are left to wonder if the audience is still there when they get to the end of a movement and can hear a pin drop.

It’s too bad something so simple is tangled up in such pretentiousness.  Yet, being no stranger to pretentiousness myself, there are times when applause seems more appropriate than others.  When a movement ends on a soft, lingering note, the rapt silence of the audience seems to enhance the transition to the next movement.  But when a movement ends on a thunderous, rousing note, it just seems silly to sit there in silence.

The three configurations of performers (violin/pianist, flautist/violin/viola, and solo pianist) all had their different charms.  When the violinist and pianist were playing together, the piano seemed to recede into the background and my attention was focused on the violin.  When the flute, violin, and viola were together as a trio, the flute seemed to be more prominent, with the violin a close second and the viola serving as a bridge and counterpoint between the two.  The trio seemed to be dancing from the ankles up; they would sway toward and away from each other in time to the music, but their feet were rooted to the floor. 

But the best part of the concert for me was Peter Henderson’s solo piano performance of the Moonlight Sonata.  The first movement was magical, and watching his facial expressions through all three movements was a joy.

It was an enjoyable night, indeed.  It made me realize I don’t want to live someplace where you can’t see a live performance of the Moonlight Sonata.

- Poppa

Free Verse and Free Books

I don’t get most poetry.  I get some, mostly the classics, the short ones anyway.  But long rambling dry-as-dust elegiac reflections in churchyards and modern free verse usually have me mentally wandering off before I get past the first few stanzas.

Lately, I’ve been reading poetry to Nan’s mother, Barbara, when we go to visit her at Parc Provence.  The shorter poems keep her attention; she laughs at some of the amusing ones and seems moved by some of the profound ones.  I’ve been reading from old English Lit textbooks dating mostly from my father’s high school days, so I haven’t read anything to her written since WWII.

Saturday night we went to the Official Grand Opening of our neighborhood Left Bank bookstore.  The featured evening event was a poetry reading.  It was interesting to try modern poetry again, much as I used to try liver every few years.  I eventually gave up on liver.

 My Persona de Event, Santa Garcia, ur-freak and retro-bohemian.

We heard a half-dozen Left Bank staffers read their poetry to warm the crowd up for the main event, a reading by D. A. Powell.  Powell is a famous published and award-winning poet I’d never heard of.  To be fair, most of the poets I’ve ever heard of are dead.

The staffers were a varied lot and I appreciate their willingness to share their innermost thoughts and feelings and admire the courage it took to bare their souls.  Only one staff reader ellicited an emotional response from me, a young woman reading erotic poetry.  It wasn’t the eroticism I responded to. Really!  (I think.)  It was the joy and passion she projected as she read her poems.  She could have been speaking in an unfamiliar language and she still would have succeeded in making her listeners react.

Powell’s reading was dramatic and memorable, though it represented the exact opposite approach.  He read in a very deliberate, quiet, and syncopated cadenced voice.  I can still hear it in my head days later.  The young woman’s style, and, particularly, Powell’s style, went a long way to confirm my belief that, in modern free verse, delivery is as important, sometimes more important, than content.

“I fear my mucus:  its endless volume and amorphous shape
a demon expelling from my lips.”

from [my riches I have squandered. spread with honey] by D. A. Powell

When you’re reading phrases like, “I fear my mucus,” your delivery had better evoke something in the audience other than snorts of derision.  Earlier in this poem, Powell uses exsiccated when he could have used desiccated.  Nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand are, like me, going to come to a screeching mental halt when they hear “exsiccated.”  He’s trying to be deliberately inaccessible.  And succeeding.  But you could hear a pin drop while he was reading.  When I re-read his poetry now, I hear his voice.

A lot (not all) of the free verse I heard Saturday night reminded me of wordwooze, colorful words and snippets of phrase strung together to produce what sounded like meaningless white noise.  The poems surely meant something profound to their authors, but if I, the listener/reader, don’t hear a message, or perceive an image, or experience an emotion without needing to have it explained, it comes across to me as wordwooze.

Powell demonstrated that you can make even wordwooze move an audience if your delivery is memorable.

If any of the Left Bank Poets read these words because they’ve followed Google here, pay no attention to the ramblings of a sometimes reactionary old man who’s trying to understand himself and his responses to art.  Follow your muse!

But work on your delivery!

Advance Uncorrected Proofs

And then we got to pillage a table of books.  These were advance reader copies Left Bank was giving away to its Friends (and Nan and I are Friends).  You got to fill up a canvas tote (also a gift) with anything you wanted from the table.  Most of the books were identified as “advance uncorrected proofs.”  Some didn’t have cover art yet, just statistics about the book on a Kinko’s-type binding.  One was bound from right-to-left, with page one being the last page of the book and page 253 being the first page.

We showed restraint and only half-filled the bag.

I read some discussion on the Internet concerning the value of these odd books with their errors and strange bindings.  People in the know take the position that, unless they are signed by the author, or stained by the author’s tears, they’re worth less than a regular copy because (duh) they contain errors.  People probably thought the same thing about the Inverted Jenny.  Now they’re worth $300,000 a pop.  Heh!

 Big fun.

- Poppa

Things to Do With Your Hat – Part 1, the Wearing of the Hat

Those who know me, know I’m a diehard galeaphile (hat lover). I’ve always mourned the death of hatwearing.  Up until the 1950s, for a man to go outside without a hat or head-cover of some sort was about as unlikely as him leaving home without pants.  A hat did more than keep the rain and bird crap off your head, it was a statement of style and character, even social class.

I was nine during the Civil War Centennial in 1961 and everyone was getting into the spirit.  The men grew beards and there were all sorts of commemorations and ceremonies.   I got my hands on a cheap replica of a Union kepi and wore it everywhere until I outgrew it.  Throughout much of the ’70s and ’80s I wore a black leather “Tevye” cap I found in Aspen in 1973.  And my old friends from The Atlanta Pipe Band are still carrying the emotional scars left by my unrelenting pith helmet campaign.

Shortly after we moved to St. Louis in 1999, and what with needing to deal with those Midwestern winters again, I purchased a winter hat at a local outdoor recreation store called The Alpine Shop.  The hat met all my criteria; unusual, stylish, black (but with colorful accents), covered the ears, soft, and non-scratchy.  I was happy with both its appearance and feel.  It never entered my mind that there was any question about how it should be worn.

I wear it with the flap toward the back and the brightly-colored vertical panel centered on the forehead (as in the left-hand picture below).  Since I purchased it, I’ve seen two others, and in both instances they were worn with the flap to the front (as in the picture below on the right).

At first glance, it doesn’t appear to matter any more than someone wearing their baseball cap backwards.

But when the wind begins to blow and the ears get cold, the method on the left (mine) has obvious advantages.

a). the ears are covered, and,
b). the likelihood of walking into trees is reduced.

I don’t know who those guys think they are, walking around with their hats on backwards.  I’m going to continue to wear mine as I have been until someone in authoritah informs me that form is required to triumph over function.

- Poppa

Dances With Dingos

It’s been a grueling week here in the Loo.  Dianne, our Atlanta friend, was here from Thursday to Sunday, and we spent our time chatting interspersed with trips to some of our favorite eateries; Tucker’s for pork chops, Lulu for dim sum, City Diner for Cuban sandwiches, and India Palace for saag and butter chicken.

Monday night, Nan, Jan, and I went to a 5:15 showing of Australia, a two-hour forty-five-minute Down-Under Romance set in 1939… wait for it… Australia.   It stars Nicole Kidman and some beefcake named Huge Akman.  Huge plays a drover named “Drover,” and based on this naming convention, the other characters should have been named “Snooty But Kind-Hearted English Lady,” “Plucky Half-Caste Urchin,” “Sneering Fly-Torturing Villain,” “Aged Inebriate With Heart of Gold,” “Mercurial Chinese Cook”, “Trusty Sidekick,” and ”Saintly Mystical Aboriginal Patriarch.”

The first thirty minutes were quite unusual and I liked them immensely, then the movie became cliche-ridden, though beautifully photographed.  The Aboriginal-Australian hooey rating was almost off the scale, what with all the animal controlling and psychic GPS capabilities whipped out by Plucky Half-Caste Urchin and Saintly Mystical Aboriginal Patriarch whenever required by the plot.  There’s no question which side of the Australian History Wars the movie supports.

I must say I enjoyed it over all, in spite of the things I’ve cranked about here.   The two-hour forty-five-minute running time was mitigated by the comfy leather couches of the Moolah Theatre.  I give it three out of five kangaroos.

After the strinefest, we went to BB’s Jazz, Blues, and Soups for a late supper (yes, they have all three and it’s ALL good).

Poppa

The Saint Louis International Film Festival, Part Three – We Power Through

Saturday was our last trek to SLIFF.  It was a light day, we only saw three films.

First was Carny, a documentary about, you guessed it, carnival workers.  When I was little, my parents wouldn’t allow me to camp out in our back yard while the Kossuth County Fair was in town because, “There are weird people hanging around the fair, carnival workers.  They’re like GYPSIES, and they might steal you!  Or do something else to you.”  I didn’t figure out what “something else” was until much later.  In the summer of ‘69, at the ripe old age of 17, I was helping my friend David and his sister Karen run a concession stand at the fair.  David and Karen realized none of the other food stands were opening until the fair started, around noon, so they fired up the grill early in the morning and cornered the market on carny breakfasts.  I got to meet a lot of carnies while they were off duty.  None of the carnies tried to steal me, but I think one tried to pick me up.  I’m can’t be sure, I was pretty naive about that sort of thing back then.  That must have been the “something else” my parents were trying to warn me about.

Since I figured my grades were going to rule college out, becoming a carny was one of the two ways I could see to get out of Algona that didn’t involve joining the Army and going to ‘Nam.  The other was becoming a railroad worker and living in a caboose.  I’m glad I didn’t do either.  Certainly the documentary makes it clear that the Military Industrial Complex Dental Plan is vastly superior to the Carny Dental Plan.  And I’ll bet those cabooses weren’t air conditioned.

Then we saw a short documentary, Letter of Thanks, the heartwarming story of how a letter written on the eve of Desert Storm to Elvis Costello by a young female soldier became a song.  Lots of footage of dogs being washed (really), but we never got to hear the @#%$*! letter OR the song.

Next was As Slow As Possible, an emotional account of a young man about to loose the last of his vision after 15 years of slowly going blind due to retinitis pigmentosa.  The documentary portrays his 2004 pilgrimage to Halberstadt, Germany to be present for the first note change in a 639 year-long organ performance of John Cage’s As Slow As Possible.  The performance started in 2001 with a 17 month rest.  The first audible note was heard in 2003.  The documentary was good.  The thought of a 639 year-long musical performance blows my mind.

So that’s it for this year’s SLIFF.  We saw some good stuff and some not so good stuff.  Next year I might take some time off work to volunteer and attend some films on the weekdays.

Sunday we were back at the Touhill Performing Arts Center to see Explosions, a ”percussion festival” put on by members of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra.  The first half of the performance was Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion.  I first encountered Bartók while watching old episodes of The Ernie Kovacs Show.  Kovacs used a Bartók composition as background for a silent sketch.  It was wonderful.  But I don’t think the Bartók composition we heard today is very accessible.  The Sonata seems to wander eratically all over the place with percussive bits occurring seemingly at random.  It’s apparently one of his most frequently performed compositions, but my theory is that it’s popular because the technical expertise required to play it appeals to musicians and audiences comprised of musical mathematicians bored with rhythmic pulse and melody.  It is to classical music what pìobaireachd is to bagpipe music; you can’t dance to it or march to it, and you surely don’t want to make love to it.

The second half of the performance was three musicians playing the sort of traditional North African Arabic music that inspired the Bartók work.  One man was playing an oud, the Arabic predecessor to the European lute.  Two percussionists were alternating between tars (simple frame drums), riqs (a sort of tambourine), and a dumbek (a goblet-shaped drum).  They produced a greater variety of tones with these three instruments than the performers from the symphony with all their tympani, snares, cymbals, bass drums, gongs, and xylophones.  At times it sounded like there were more than two drummers because I couldn’t tell who was producing all of the tones I was hearing.  They were playing extremely complex polyrhythms, there was nothing simple about what they were doing.  But there was a major difference between what they were playing and the Bartók sonata.  I felt something besides bewilderment while I listened to them.

That’s enough culture for a while.  I’m going to veg out with some EC Comics Weird Science reprints I picked up on Saturday.  To those unfamiliar with EC Comics, in the ’50s they were considered responsible for the Seduction of the Innocent.

To those familiar with EC Comics, “Spa fon!“

Poppa

The Saint Louis International Film Festival, Part Two – Our Butts are Getting Numb

Saturday morning we settled in for a full day of keeping our butts planted in theater seats.

At noon, we went to Song Sung Blue, a documentary about a couple who call themselves Lightning and Thunder and perform a Neil Diamond/Patsy Cline tribute act.  Never have I been whipsawed back and forth between distain and admiration so fluidly.  The documentary reminds us that sometimes when you scratch what appears to be a lump of clay, you find gold inside.  (Ha!  You thought I was going to say Diamond, didn’t you?)  Nan and I both gave this the highest rating possible.

In the afternoon, we saw another set of documentary shorts.  These were all focused on women’s stories.

Passages – An absorbing account of a young woman’s difficult delivery.  Well-done simple rotoscoped animation, a potentially tragic ending for the child who may have been harmed by a delayed Caesarean.  The woman filed a protest with the hospital and was told, basically, “Don’t have a child in July, the doctors are all on vacation and the residents are all inexperienced.”  The big picture is, the hospital saved both her life and the baby’s.  The little picture is, who can look at the big picture when your baby’s health is at risk?

The cynic in me could also point this out as a failure of Canadian socialized medicine but I’m too noble for that.  Or maybe not.

Mariners & Musicians – Slow, rambling, out of focus, fatuous, and booooring.  At 24 minutes, it was 22 minutes too long.

Unbridled – About injured women healing injured hoses.  A serious subject badly presented.  Mercifully short.

Kick Like a Girl – Empowered elementary school-age female soccer-knockers who took on boy’s teams and (mostly) won.  The male chauvinist in me feels compelled to point out that the nature of soccer prevents the boys from utilizing their main physical advantages over the girls, their upper body strength.  Still, an enjoyable film.

In the early evening, we saw the full-length film Fashion Victims, an entertaining German comedy about a fashion industry rivalry getting tangled up in a disintegrating family.  Good but not great.  Fun as always to see the day-to-day life in a foreign culture.

We closed out the day with a selection of animated comedy shorts.

Breach – Grotesque.  Thankfully, the story arc was shorter than the credits.

It Was a Dark and Silly Night – Art by Gahan Wilson.  The kids are looking for a place to have a party since their parents won’t let them play Jell-O tag in the house. They decide a cemetery would be perfect since there’s no one residing there.  They’re wrong.

The Inquisitive Snail – An amusing little claymation fable.

Chicken Cowboy – Very modern-style animation with great voice talent and a funny story line.  “I don’t want to die like a man; I want to live like a chicken!”

Botnik – Stylish classic beatnik-era animation with great music.

Codswallop – Surreal and interesting, credited to the Brothers McLeod.  I’ve seen some of these images before, but I can’t remember where.

Hot Dog – A very funny short by Bill Plympton.  His work is always worth watching.  In fact, you can watch a sample of Hot Dog right here.

In August – Slow, lyrical, beautiful, inscrutable.  I was drifting by the end of this, so I may have missed a part that made it scrutable.

Lavatory – Lovestory – Amusing and simple.

Let Them Grow – Umm… anti genetically modified corn tirade?  Anti corporate farming tirade?  Both?  Neither?

Mita – German mix of photography and claymation.  Incomprehensible.  There may be a cultural gulf at work here.

I hate You Don’t Touch Me or Bat and Hat – Weird.  And gross.  And SO weird.

The Parcel – A very short stop-motion story about a guy freezing to death.  I think.

Token Hunchback – A claymation story about an actor who’s typecast as a hunchback because he has a hunchback.  Very good.

Chainsaw – Rotoscoped.  About chainsaw safety, Chainsaw the Bull, a bullfighter, Ava Gabor, suicide by chainsaw, closes with more chainsaw safety.  Interesting.

Sunday, we began with two documentaries about local Catholic institutions.  The first was American Pioneers (35 minutes) a history of Old St. Ferdinand Shrine in Florissant, Mo.  Yawn.

The second was That All May Be One (55 minutes), a look at the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondolet and their place in the South St. Louis neighborhood where they’ve lived for more than 150 years.  This started a little slow for me, but once they got past the historical background and we started to hear the Sisters speak, it became more absorbing.

Since I was raised as a Protestant, nuns and monks have always been a foreign concept to me.  Giving up The World always seemed too great a sacrifice to understand.  The Sisters made me appreciate what they get in return, membership in a huge family of like-minded people who will cherish you your whole life.  That, and freedom from choice.  (Nan REALLY disagrees with this last comment and thinks I’m just being smarmy, but I mean this seriously and I don’t view this as a bad thing.  Freedom from choice can be liberating.  It’s why I work for somebody else instead of myself.  And I’m not suggesting the Sisters are robots.  They’re where they are because they chose to join initially and choose to stay every day.)

Then we saw Amal, a feature-length fable of a New Delhi autorickshaw driver who is left a fortune by an eccentric millionaire.  A story beautifully photographed and wonderfully told.  We both liked it a lot.

Now we’ve got next weekend to look forward to.

Poppa

Thing I Like About Living Here #458 – The Saint Louis International Film Festival

The Saint Louis International Film Festival comes to town once a year and we wallow in movies for a week and a half.

The first film we saw at the festival was Friday night (11/14) - Late Bloomers, a Swiss/German movie that proves there’s an audience demographic for Feisty Little Old Lady films.  Apparently most of the St. Louis segment of this demographic was with us the night we saw it; the audience would erupt with laughter every time one of the FLOLs would so much as arch an eyebrow.  Don’t get me wrong, the movie was enjoyable, but the quirky-underdogs-persevere-against-the-squares clichés were layered on with a trowel.  I laughed a few times, but the most interesting aspect of the movie for me was the window it presented into rural Swiss culture.  Turns out there are a LOT of flies in rural Switzerland.  Kind of made me homesick.

Next, we attended a presentation of dramatic short films.  The first was September, a movie so artsy-fartsy and pretentious we mistook an intermittent projector glitch for just another attempt by the director to be avant-garde.  Includes gratuitous “pretend” freeze frames where the actors would stop in mid-motion, hold their position for a few unsteady moments, and then start moving again, floating girls who speak in an unknown (to me) language, the beating of cheap toy drums, and shots of beer-swilling fast food employees.  Whoo whoo!

Next was A Day in a Life, a well-done 21 minute Belgian caper film with an interesting timeline that loops back on itself like spaghetti.  Nothing cutting edge here, but intriguing enough to make me want to see it again so I can connect some missing dots.

The Adventure, an amazing 22 minute short filmed in a North Georgia park.  It’s by far the most creative concept I’ve seen in a while.  I don’t want to say much about the plot, save that it veers in an unexpected direction early in the film and then just keeps veering.  See this if you get a chance.  (Warning: This movie may not be appropriate for people who just want to see stuff get blown up.)

Song of David, a 20 minute look into a Yeshiva through the eyes of a young Hasidic Jew driven to express his faith through Rap.  Several nice bits where ambient sounds morph into Rap beats.  I don’t like Rap, but I liked this film.

More later…

Poppa

Changing My Mind Part 2 -The Death Penalty: A Good Idea in Theory, but Difficult to Execute

Back when I was young and knew everything, I didn’t need to think about the death penalty much.  It was in place, no one I knew thought it was controversial, or if they did, they didn’t say so out loud, and the US Justice System was fair and impartial (as evidenced by hundreds of movies and TV shows I watched as a kid).

I became aware of the controversies swirling around the death penalty as I grew older, but I had no philosophical objection to it.  Given the number and nature of the offenses calling for the death penalty in the first five books of the Old Testament, the Three Commandments * didn’t seem to prohibit it, either.  Of course we should only apply the death penalty where it was really, really justified.  Sure, there had been abuses and failures to apply it fairly, but those were exceptions, not the rule.

And then I was called for jury duty.

I’ve been called for jury duty three times and impaneled twice, both times for trials concerning minor altercations.  Seeing the process first-hand, even as applied to these minor matters, has made me blanch at the thought of making someone’s life depend on the less than perfect workings of the system.

I still have no philosophical objection to the death penalty.  Opponents of the death penalty claim it’s not an effective deterrent, and that too many people are sentenced to death unfairly.  They’re wrong about the deterrent factor.  Even a criminal sentenced to life in prison without parole can kill again; a prison employee, another prisoner, or a visitor.  A criminal put to death will never hurt anyone ever again.

However, they’re right about the fairness factor.  The US Justice System is fine as an ideal, but is administered by fallible humans.  The system needs to be able to correct its inevitable mistakes.  There’s no correcting a mistaken execution

If I were King of the World and did a little brainstorming with folks who knew the law, I might be able to come up with a system I could trust to put someone to death.  Until then, the only death penalty I can support is the one applied during the commission of a crime, the penalty known as justifiable homicide.

- Poppa

* The other Seven Commandments have been decriminalized and downgraded to Optional, Good Advice, and Opinion.