Beloit International Film Festival Day 2

Day 2: Friday, January 18, 2008

Day 2, as far as I remember, probably began with coffee, and was interspersed with visits to the Pleasant Street Coffee Shop.

And now, the films:

Taming Tammy
This was a low-budget relationship comedy, somewhat stiff and telegraphed in places, but overall not bad. This looks, potentially, like the first steps on the road to professional filmmaking. Not bad, and the filmmaker could get better.

Flood Street
An outstanding documentary about a youth boxing program in New Orleans, pre-Katrina (though it of course ends with an epilogue on the aftermath of Katrina). Some of the spotlighted kids are interviewed around age 12, and again around age 17, and the progression and their comments are compelling and insightful. Outstanding black-and-white cinematography too.

Short Slot 1

Coucou Clock: a computer-animated wordless slapstick kitchen romp, a la some of the Pixar shorts that precede their features.

The Job: *SPOILERS* hilarious gag short featuring an Hispanic man driving a pickup truck looking for day laborers... for such jobs as CEO, software engineer, HR director, etc.

Holm Away From Home: a documentarian takes a guy who's never been outside the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to the big city, Chicago. Amusing, good but not great.

Carmichael and Shane: outstandingly funny short about a father with twin boys, and his novel approach to parenting with limited resources: choose one as your favorite, throw all your attention on him, and let the other fend for himself.

Diggers: gravediggers speculate on the cause of death of their latest subject. Not nearly as good as it should have been.

Black Rockfordians: a horribly bad documentary that drains every bit of life and interest out of its featured subjects, prominent black citizens in Rockford, Illinois. Even the interviewees seem bored, and there's literally no information conveyed other than a string of names you won't remember.

Small Talk: food items begin to talk to a teenager. Cute, not great.

The Lives of Others
A fantastic movie, probably the best of the festival. The East German police (Stasi) monitor a writer with potential sympathies for the West, and the monitoring agent begins to get personally interested in his life. Stellar performances, writing, and concept. Restrained when it needs to be, and only a small deus ex machina mars the script.

We were shocked to find out the lead actor, Ulrich Muhe, died of cancer in 2007. He did leave a very rich film legacy, one we're going to pursue - he was extremely good.

La Cucina
Three women discuss their relationships. Incredibly talky, even for a film of this type. Flawed by the staggering volume of dialogue, countless too-cute and too-insightful answers, and a flawlessly wise character who gives flawless advice to her flawed friends.

S.B.D.

From the delightful tome Depraved and Insulting English:

feist: A silent fart.

Thank you, Peter Novobatzky and Ammon Shea. I knew there had to be a word for it.

However, there's also this, from dictionary.com:

feist: a nervous belligerent little mongrel dog

The combination bodes ill for her: http://www.listentofeist.com/

Beloit International Film Festival Day 1

Charlotte and I attended this year's Beloit International Film Festival (January 17-21, 2008), and while we experienced organizational and logistical problems we didn't last year, it was still quite a lot of fun. Seeing my hometown as the site of an international film festival is a touch surreal, but encouraging.

To start, here's a list of all of the films we saw. Some will get individual commentary, some not; this probably depends on time.

Day 1: Thursday, January 17, 2008
We arrived on the bus from Chicago too late for the first available slot, at 12 PM, so got settled in and zipped off to the 2 PM.

Short Slot 2
Our first slot was one of our favorite types of venues: a compilation of short films.

The Good Husband: A common story - husband has mistress, wants to kill wife, tries to kill wife, merriment ensues. Decent, but far from great.

Kujira: an abstract illustrated film about a young girl leaving home, and her attendant fears and the shadow of her mother. Perhaps too abstract for the room, or at least for me.

Girls Room: Clever, suspenseful, funny, and touching story of going to the girls' room. Probably the best of these shorts.

Ride of the Mergansers: a short documentary of merganser ducklings about to leave the nest. Cute fun, surprisingly engaging - also maybe the best of these.

Train Town: Two managers of a train / hobby store, one a right-wing control freak and the other a drug-loving ex-hippy, vie for control of the large display train town. Amusing.

The Space Burger: A grim cartoon of patrons at an intergalactic burger joint, and the creatures who police the place. Well-done low-budget mayhem.

Quincy & Althea: Post-Katrina, a squabbling couple tries to break up. Amusing and odd.

Aunt Tigress: Missing children - can they possibly relate to the babysitter who's just dropped by, unannounced, to care for a teenager and her younger brother? OK, but nothing special.

Diva: A man leaves his home, moves to Paris, dresses as a woman, gets robbed, and doesn't enjoy the experience. Pointless yawns.

In Spades: A too-amateurish yarn - woman loves scummy guy, scummy guy owes money, woman card-sharp plays cards to get the money, then an unsurprising "twist," sort of. Yawn.

Planta 4a
Our first feature film, about the pediatric cancer ward at a Spanish hospital. Full of life and engaging characters, this one pulls no punches and succeeds through gutsy performances and a heartfelt script, despite somewhat-obvious scenarios. A very good film.

Away From Her
A woman (Julie Christie) begins to succumb to premature Alzheimer's. Heart-renching, solid, and unexpected in many ways. A very good film.

Let's All Hate Toronto
Despite a great title and premise (do most Canadians hate Toronto, and why?), and our highest expectations, this was a huge disappointment. They had no real clue of where to go with the notion, and it ended up being a pointless collection of set-up interviews driven by "Mr. Toronto," a needless character designed to make it funny. A bad pseudo-documentary.


The day was punctuated by trips to Beloit's year-old and excellent coffee shop, the Pleasant Street Coffee Shop.

Red Statism

Without actually deserting liberalism, I'm finding more and more to like about libertarianism. This article from the Mises Institute Monthly, Red Statism, nicely sums up what's NOT to like about the Bush administration - especially if you're a fiscal conservative.

Some choice morsels below.

In four years, George W. Bush has nationalized airport security, created the largest bureaucracy in history in the form of Homeland Security, tossed our constitutional protections we used to take for granted, enacted the largest expansion of welfare in three generations with the prescription drug benefit, intruded into local schools as never before with No Child Left Behind, brought many industries under protectionist regulation, hammered corporate upstarts with antitrust law, and undertaken two major wars that have cost hundreds of billions and left only destruction and chaos in their wake. Clinton increased spending 13.4 percent in his first term and 16 percent in his second, but Bush’s first-term spending soared +29.

While I'm also finding less to like about Clinton (he still has far to fall before passing Bush on the scale), this betrayal of the conservative ideal makes it even more bewildering to me that conservatives can support him. Oh, wait - increasingly, they don't. Apparently support for his mindless foreign policy now defines the G.O.P.

This is especially sad because it means the Democrats won't have to do much to win - and like the G.O.P., they need serious reform.

Back to beating the Bush:

The "leave us alone" coalition of the 1990s had been gradually transformed into an anti-Clinton movement by the end of the decade. The right in this country began to define itself not as pro-freedom, as it had in 1994 but simply as anti-leftist, as it does today.

The very people who once proclaimed hatred of government now advocate its use against dissidents of all sorts, especially against those who would dare call for curbs in the totalitarian bureaucracy of the military or suggest that Bush is something less than infallible in his foreign-policy decisions.

The lesson here is that it is always a mistake to advocate government action, for there is no way you can fully anticipate how government will be used. Nor can you ever count on a slice of the population to be moral in its advocacy of the uses of the police power.

I put that last paragraph in to complete their thought; I don't quite agree with it. In any event, Republicans currently seem very comfortable with the notion of Big Government Action, with regard to your freedoms if not your neighborhood capitalists' wallets.

I far prefer someone picking my pocket to locking me up without charges or evidence; one of those is clearly more fundamental to liberty.

If only our Dear Leader didn't have a direct line to the Almighty, he might perhaps be tempted to pick up a book (something he's proud of rarely doing).

There is a clear and present danger to freedom that comes from the right side of the ideological spectrum, those people who are pleased to preserve most of free enterprise but favor top-down management of society, culture, family, and school, and seek to use belligerent nationalism to impose their vision of politics on the world.

And now from The Problem Of Fascism:

It is as important for libertarians to be antisocialist as it is for them to be antifascist. But first we need to recognize that fascism is a reality, not just a smear term. We see it in the economic and political program of the current administration, which seems to be advancing a distinctly right-wing style of central planning: planning in the name of family, faith, and freedom (as versus the left-wing style of planning in the name of equality, liberty, and fraternity).

I don’t think the US has ever had a left-wing president as convinced as the present administration of the ability of government to work miracles.

Perhaps the direct line to god has a 1-800-MIR-ACLE call center?

How did conservative intellectuals and activists go from hating big government in the 1990s to loving it and celebrating it today? There is a bad seed in the ideology of American conservatism that spawns power worship.

Power-worship isn't isolated to Republicans by any means, but the current administration seems intent on projecting that power in all directions, not just in domestic economics.

God Bless Christopher Hitchens

I don't always agree with Christopher Hitchens, but his writing is always worth reading, and his opinions are worthy of respect. In this one, he's said nothing with which I disagree.

Here are some excerpts from Hitchens's response to the death of non-Doctor Jerry Falwell (his "doctorate" degrees are honorary and 2 of the alleged 3 are from non-accredited institutions - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Falwell for details). You can find the full article at http://www.slate.com/id/2166337/nav/tap2/.

...there is no vileness that cannot be freely uttered by a man whose name is prefaced with the word Reverend.

Or Imam, or Father, or probably Rabbi, although that seems to be much less prevalent. In the case of Islam, the silence of the "moderate" majority has dire and deadly consequences, allowing the worst forms of extremism to spread unchecked, but our Christian majority remains similarly silent most of the time, so long as the speaker of obscenities is "Christian." That this currently has no inspiring effect on violent Christian extremists is due to other factors (below).

Try this: Call a TV station and tell them that you know the Antichrist is already on earth and is an adult Jewish male. See how far you get. Then try the same thing and add that you are the Rev. Jim-Bob Vermin. "Why, Reverend, come right on the show!" What a fool Don Imus was. If he had paid the paltry few bucks to make himself a certified clergyman, he could be jeering and sneering to the present hour.

In the time immediately following the assault by religious fascism on American civil society in September 2001, he [Falwell] used his regular indulgence on the airwaves to commit treason. Entirely exculpating the suicide-murderers, he asserted that their acts were a divine punishment of the United States.

Falwell's fabricated indictment would certainly validate some of the Bush administration's policies and machinations subsequent to 9/11: since our sin is to blame (and not the terrorists'), clearly domestic changes are required to "restore" us to a Christian nation (despite the Founders' work to keep the Constitution secular).

A detail in this ghastly narrative, as adepts of the "Left Behind" series will know, is that the return of the risen Christ will require the mass slaughter or mass conversion of all Jews.

This depraved children's story certainly casts a new light on our relationship with Israel; perhaps our sponsorship is to enable a more efficient "mass conversion" when the time is right.

Men of this type, if they cannot persuade enough foolish people to part with their savings, usually end up raving on the street and waving placards about the coming day of judgment.

Most men of his type aren't quite as successful at financing lavish celebrity and lifestyle through the donations of the ignorant and desperate.

His place on the cable shows will be amply filled by Al Sharpton: another person who can get away with anything under the rubric of Reverend.

Opponents of Sharpton - a group of which any rational person should be proud to be counted a member - typically object on political or racial grounds, sidestepping this moron's religious title.

It's a shame that there is no hell for Falwell to go to, and it's extraordinary that not even such a scandalous career is enough to shake our dumb addiction to the "faith-based."

I'll follow this with a quite from Sam Harris, placing religious moderation in context:

While moderation in religion may seem a reasonable position to stake out, in light of all that we have (and have not) learned about the universe, it offers no bulwark against religious extremism and religious violence. The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. We cannot say that fundamentalists are crazy, because they are merely practicing their freedom of belief; we cannot even say that they are mistaken in religious terms, because their knowledge of scripture is generally unrivaled. All we can say, as religious moderates, is that we don't like the personal and social costs that a full embrace of scripture imposes on us. This is not a new form of faith, or even a new species of scriptural exegesis; it is simply a capitulation to a variety of all-too-human interests that have nothing, in principle, to do with God.

Christians are tolerant, nonviolent, and reasonable to the extent that we ignore most of the Bible, and embrace secularism. At least I can't remember the last time I helped execute a witch, homosexual, blasphemer or adulterer - you?

The most pithy and memorable quote from Hitchens's article is this:

All bigots and frauds are brothers under the skin.

Amen.