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

The Cacophone Concert and Dribbly Falls

Friday night we were back at the Touhill for a performance of the Thailand Dance Troupe.

The dancers were mesmerizing, the music was evocative of fingernails on a blackboard.  The dancing was like Tai Chi set to music but every song but one had either a string or a woodwind instrument that  qualified as a Cacophone.

Saturday morning we had an early lunch at my other favorite deli on The Hill, Gioia’s.  My favorite is the hot roast beef, one of the top two sandwiches in St. Louis.  The other is the Daddy at Eovaldi’s.

We burned off some of the calories with a four-mile walk around Creve Coeur Lake.

Creve Coeur Lake is the home of the locally famous Dripping Springs, “Scene of the tragic death of the lovelorn Indian girl whose broken heart is said to have given the lake its sorrowful name – Creve Coeur.”  Spooky stuff described here.

Nan sits under the Page Overpass, waiting for me to catch up.  I kept stopping to take pictures as things caught my eye.

Oddly enough, Nan had never been to Creve Coeur Lake in spite of growing up in Creve Coeur.

After paying a visit to Nan’s Mom, we hit Lulu to satisfy our Mu Shu Pork craving.

- Poppa

Bohemian Tragedy

Poster for the 1896 production for Puccini's La bohème. Artist: Adolfo Hohenstein (1854-1928)

Wednesday evening Nan and I went to the Touhill for a performance of La Bohème, our first hard-core arm-waving baritone-bellowing opera, the kind where the fat lady sings, though neither of the ladies in this performance were fat.   The kind where everything’s in a language you don’t understand, and even if you did understand the language, you might not understand the words because they’re sung in such a stylized manner.  I knew nothing about this opera, didn’t associate it with any music I was familiar with, and had the vague notion it had something to do with cows.

Now that I’ve exhibited my usual lèse majesté, I have to tell you, I liked it.  A lot.

Part of it was the great seats Nan purchased, third row behind the orchestra pit, twenty feet from the performers.

Part of it was the thrill of seeing the magic created before mine very eyes, much the way I felt at the St. Louis Symphony last weekend.

Part of it was the lecture we went to before the performance where an enthusiastic young opera student, eyes shining with excitement, not only presented a synopsis, but suggested nuances to look for and explained why it made her cry every time she listened to it.

Part of it was the supertitles projected above the stage allowing the non-cognoscenti to appreciate the subtle humor in the story as opposed to just getting the gist in the synopsis (spoilers *).

Without the supertitles, about all you could tell was: she’s angry, he’s happy, they’re sad.  And what are those guys with the brooms hollering about?  I’ve always thought of opera as all grandiose all the time, but the supertitles allowed me to appreciate the occasional banality.  There was a scene between Marcello and Musetta where the supertitles make it clear that, in spite of the histrionic gestures, elaborate vocalizations, and incomprehensible Italian, what’s happening on stage is the 19th century French equivalent of a domestic dispute on a Cops episode.  (Mauvais garcon, whatcha gonna do?  Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?)

Before the performance, I told Nan I couldn’t understand how something so staged and stilted could make someone cry in spite of hearing it over and over.   By the time the curtain came down, I understood.

La Bohème at the Touhill was performed by Teatro Lirico D’Europa.

- Poppa

* They meet.  They argue.  They separate.  They reunite.  She dies.

Tchaikovsky’s 1812 and the Canon

This weekend found us attending a concert of the St Louis Symphony Orchestra on Friday night, buying a new camera on Saturday, and spending hours hanging out in Bellefontaine Cemetery on Sunday.  In between, we found time to eat good things, sleep as late as we wanted, and watch several episodes of The Wire.

Photo by Dan Dreyfus

The concert was at the Powell Symphony Hall.  We splurged for seats in a Grand Tier box where we were sealed off and protected from the hoi polloi in the audience (those symphony crowds can be such louts).

We had our own lounge serving as an additional buffer between us and the masses, though we shared our little drinking room with two other boxes.  We wrote down our beverage orders before the concert started, left wads of money, and the staff brought us our requests right before the intermission started.  Very civilized.

Here, Nan is “enjoying” a taste of my Talisker (“The high phenol level and distinct taste may prove ‘challenging’ for the casual whisky drinker“).  It turns out that another name for phenol is carbolic acid.

The concert consisted of pieces by four composers; Korngold, Balakirev, Borodin, and Tchaikovsky.  I’ve listened to symphonic music most of my life but I’ve rarely seen it performed live.  It’s like watching a miracle occur before your eyes, to see people actually producing the sound you’ve only ever heard coming from speakers.

Most of us were there for Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, which you all know, even if you don’t know you know it (“The only cereal that’s shot from guns!” if you’re over 50).  There were no cannons since this was an inside concert, but a huge bass drum served as well.

The reference to cannons lets me transition to Saturday with a shameless pun, because we spent the day buying a Canon Digital Rebel T1i EOS 500D.  (Get it?  Cannon.  Canon.  Groan!  Sorry!)

We didn’t actually spend the whole day buying the camera, but I spent most of the day figuring out how to use it.  SLR Cameras have come a long way since I learned how to use Nan’s old Pentax in the seventies.

Nan's Old Pentax, state-of-the-art in 1965 (Photo by Erin)

The New Canon, more like an F15 cockpit (Photo by Mauritsvink)

We spent Sunday wandering around Bellefontaine Cemetery, a gigantic necropolis with thousands of interesting monuments, memorials, and mausoleums.

More of the pictures I took with the new camera are posted publicly on Facebook.

- Poppa

Beethoven and Balloons in Forest Park (and Zombies!)

The Saint Louis Symphony at Art Hill

We started the weekend early.  Thursday evening we were at Forest Park for a free concert put on by the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra.  The concert took place on Art Hill, the Huge Tract of Land in front of the Art Museum.  The Symphony performed a selection of previews from their upcoming 2010 season.  It was a great set: Copland’s Fanfare For the Common Man and Hoedown, Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, Prokofiev’s Montagues and Capulets from Romeo and Juliet, and Anderson’s Bugler’s Holiday (a showcase for trumpet I used to play in competition when I was in High School).  They paid homage to the classics in Warner Brother’s cartoons exemplify by Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries and Rossini’s Barber of Seville.  There were a couple more popular pieces, like Moon River and Some Enchanted Evening and then a rousing climax; John Williams’ Star Wars and J. P. Sousa’s Stars And Stripes Forever.  The evening was topped off by Fireworks in the Grand Basin.

It occurred to me that, although I’ve been listening to many of these pieces since I was a child, this was the first time I’d heard most of them performed live.  The weather was perfect, the music was perfect, what a night!

Balloon Glow

Friday night, Nan and I took Metrolink to see the Balloon Glow at Forest Park.  The Balloon Glow is a run-up event to the annual Great Forest Park Balloon Race.  On the night before the race, spectators are allowed to mill about as the balloons are inflated at twilight.  When it’s completely dark, a horn is sounded at intervals and all the balloons fire up their burners at the same time.  It’s a sight to behold.

Photo from HotCity Theatre

And now, the zombies.  We saw Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom at HotCity Theatre Saturday afternoon.   It was the first time I’ve ever been frightened while watching a play.

Neighborhood 3 takes elements of the classic zombie flick and seamlessly merges them with a fictional MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game).  The cast consists of two men and two women playing archetypal parents and teens (billed as “Boy Type, Girl Type, Father Type, Mother Type”).  They were outstanding.  The framing mechanism was a voiceover of the game which provided instructions to the players as they moved between levels.   The levels translated into the scenes of the play.  There was no intermission.

Each scene ramped up the level of discomfort as the interactions between the parents and the teens became increasingly dysfunctional and the elements of the game started to blend in with reality.  The transitions between the scenes were abrupt and used light and sound to contribute to the atmosphere of menace.  I have to admit, I levitated out of my seat several times during the play.

And in keeping with the spirit of Chekhov’s gun, there was a hammer introduced in the first scene. . . .

See this play if you ever get a chance.

And for the Food Shot of the Weekend, Arancini at Vito’s.

- Poppa