Edinburgh International Film Festival – Day 3
Friday, June 18th, 2010
Behind the Scenes: First event of the day was a 3-hour filmmaker interview, which included a board member from the British Board of Film Certificates (to talk about what they do and controversies they’ve had), a set designer for numerous Scottish-based films, Seamus McGarvey, cinematographer for movies such as Atonement, and the producer of the Australian claymation film Mary & Max (one of my favorite movies from the 2009 Traverse City Film Festival). It was a pretty nice discussion, although I secretly had been hoping Werner Herzog might have made a surprise appearance. Oh well…
Ollie Kepler’s Expanding Purple World: I was sold on seeing this film with the promise that it was a mind-bending suburban drama akin to Donnie Darko. The film I watched involves the central character losing his mind, but that should not imply that it is necessarily mind-bending. Instead it was a tedious, boring, and even a little manipulative film that follows a guy whose picture-perfect fiancée dies, and then suffers a severe mental breakdown, and we must watch as he slowly goes batshit insane, believing there are microchips in his cheese or what have you, and we must wait for his friends to make obvious to him what is plainly obvious to us, that these are all figments of his imagination. Eventually he recovers and the film is over. The opening act with the still-alive girlfriend is the part that I would call manipulative, as I saw wondering why her character seemed so perfect and happy, and then she suddenly dies from a brain tumor and I realized, “oh, poor thing, she was living her whole life blindly unaware that she was a blatant plot device”. There’s no comic effects from Ollie’s unwinding, nor is there any drama wrought from wondering if Ollie’s hallucinations might be real, nor are there any special cinematic acrobatics to present the world through his perspective. The audience just sits there on the outside, watching his character devolve while we just shake our heads and pity him, the same as his patient, long-suffering friends, and wait for him to get over it on his own. The end result is honestly just kind depressing, and it takes a lot to get me describe a film with that word. Director Viv Fongenie commented after the show that it was supposed to make us aware of the ordeal people with schizophrenia must go through when they first show symptoms, but by having us relate to not really likeable characters entirely from an outsider’s perspective, it makes this film little more than an hour and a half long public service video. Hopefully there will be some individuals out there that have use for just such a film, but I gained little from the experience.
Monsters: So the director, producers, and their cast of two came on stage before the screening to tell us about the movie, how basically it was the three of them plus a crew of another four or so people shooting video on the fly, not really sure where the script or movie was going, just hiking to the ends of the world on a guerilla filmmaking expedition for an end product that would somehow involve monsters. Okay, sounds good, so we’ve got a Blair Witch aesthetic with almost no budget or crew and hopefully a lot of campy monster fun jumping out at us when we least expected. Then the movie started up, and within the first scene I realized they may have criminally undersold what it was they had made. Where did they get all those fighter pilots and tanks from? That CGI monster on the background is pretty detailed looking. The story is pretty tight and professionally told as well, involving a cynical reporter who is tasked with escorting his boss’s daughter back home safely from Mexico, through the ‘infected’ zone leading up to the US border. We are told that several years ago an alien ship crash landed here and now northern Mexico is rife with 100 ft tall, multi-tentacle monsters. Needless to say there’s potential for a lot of subtextual reading about US-Mexican border relations and the politics of immigration, but the film wisely avoids commenting too directly on these parallels, in favor of the human story of the two leads as they brave the dangers of crossing through the infected zone with help from the sometimes sketchy locals. Save for some brief Cloverfield-esque footage at the beginning, the Jaws principle is used to its fullest effect here, the monsters always teasingly just off screen, frequently heard but never seen (at least in full) until the big climax at the end, of which I will write no more other than to comment I think it was a fitting finale. The film is obviously greatly indebted to the works of Steven Spielberg, and given the extremely impressive lengths first-time director Gareth Edwards managed to stretch his paper-thin budget, I have to wonder if his career might not follow a similar trajectory. Time will tell…
Movie clip from Monsters