The Dirties

directed by Matt Johnson (2013)

Think Columbine but with media savvy film students documenting their process.  That's giving away the story, but the beauty of this found footagey flick, is in how that unwraps. As they say, the devil is in the details, and this flick is devilishly clever in it's construction, but not so much in terms of saying anything new about the bullying and lateral violence that leads up to retaliatory spree killings.

I really enjoyed it though.  It's so very film fannish.  I didn't like how the crazy aspect was addressed, but it was accurate in how that aspect ISN'T addressed in our society too.  Crazy gets short shrift and that's exactly why these kinds of situations happen.  And it's crazy how callous we are in respecting other peoples' needs.  It's distressing to see how violence in so many of our interactions is viewed as normal.  WTF people, why can't we see that the other is our brother?  Our mother? Sister? Father? We're all connected, and when we do things to others that don't honour that fact, it hurt us too.

It's got some good musics too, and style to spare.  I recommend it.

the end credits by Josh Schonblum rock!

Dallas Buyers Club

directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (2013)

This based on a true story flick by the Canadian director of the awesome C.R.A.Z.Y.,  is one of the most entertaining movies I've seen this year.  Dallas Buyers Club is bookended with scenes of Ron Woodroof, as portrayed by a shockingly bone rack thin Matthew McConaughey, rodeo riding massive bulls, and that image so symbolically portrays the tenacious bravery of the man who battles the government, crosses borders , bluffs and bribes his way around international law, and just generally doesn't ever, ever, give up in his pursuit of health.

Ron doesn't take shit from anyone, he's a Texas tough ass scrawny mother fucker,  Rooster Cogburn type, roused up through self interest to battle at the injustices of the parasitical relationship between the FDA and Big Pharma.  The movie is part procedural, and part lionising character study, except Woodroof is an unlikely hero.  He's a homophobic, slutty cowboy; a drug selling, hard drinking, gambling man. Sure he's an ignorant trailer trashy electrician roughneck, but surface first impressions are deceptive.  Don't be so quick to judge because you can never tell how people will respond to crisis, and illness is probably the most common personal crisis around that everyone eventually becomes familiar with, granted they live long enough.

And this guy has an arc too. He has a strong moral and ethical core, but the good ole homophobe gets enlightened around his ignorant prejudice and selfishness.  Suffering can create compassion because it's hard to keep a hate on for people in the same exact situation as yourself.

Jared Leto was awesome, as the gorgeous pre-op transwoman,  Rayon.  She's dressed to the glamourous 9's for much of the film, with fierce style and sass for days.  And she won't tolerate no bullshit when she meets her hospital roommate, Mr Mas Macho, and dishes it right back. She loves Marc Bolan and the glam looks, and so tragically wastes away throughout the film.  Her looks are so important to her identity, and to see her coming to grips with their fading, along with her vitality, was so so heartbreaking to see.

The film pulls no punches in portraying these folk, they're unapologetic hedonists, just they got sick eh? And illness knows no morals - a virus has no agenda.  It's an equal opportunity villain.

Rayon was one of the "lucky" ones,  being among the first of the AIDS patients chosen for a double blind study on the efficacy of AZT, that actually received the drug instead of the placebo given to the control group.  She would have been better off with the sugar pills as AZT had serious side effects - which were suppressed in terms of getting the go ahead for FDA approval for the treatment of AIDS.   And this too is what's messed about drug testing: early days of research for human trials are hell. As Woodroof says when the nature of the study is explained to him, "You're going to give dying people sugar pills?"

Jennifer Garner does a good job as the doctor working inside the medical establishment.  She's privy to the fact that the study patients are NOT doing well on AZT, while the border crossing club patients are faring much better.  "Fuck all y'all!" The doctor echoes Woodruff's dismissal of the medicos,  when she finally bucks the broken system she's been compromising her values to stay within and be the good little doctor just following the orders she knows are immoral.

The AIDS crisis of the 80's was a crucible of fraught circumstances - a disastrous epidemic that snuck up on the populace and was at first ignored because who was it killing?  Folk who challenged the mores of the status quo - the queers and the liberals, the degenerate fucking drug users - fucking being a literal multi use term here.   Of course those with a fundamentalist conservative agenda felt good gloating over god's hand directly intervening in their hateful world view, to strike down and punish the ostensible sinner.  In fact there are conspiracy theorists, who are certain AIDS was deliberately created to eliminate undesirable portions of the population.  That's pretty out there, but in any case the sentiment that this plague was a case of just desserts, was and is very widely held, still.

The biggest problem in the film was not so much AIDS, but rather, how the pharmaceutical industries operate in their pursuit of profits.  The drug companies have an unhealthy relationship with the FDA where the agenda around legitimising some treatments of illness and discrediting others, is entirely suspect due to the incredible amounts of money to be made if a drug gains approval.  The FDA, which is supposed to be an independent body protecting the interests of a populace that has expectations of their health being paramount - that ideal is entirely compromised, when the FDA is made up of former drug company CEOs, with lobby groups and their fat pockets petitioning for laws that favour the companies bottom line interests.  In truth, the FDA function is more lapdog lackey to Big Pharma, and its practical operations are all about restricting access to alternatives to the Big Pharma offerings.  The FDA is the dog in the manger of treatment options barking at the behest of the pill pushers who want to keep their possible markets as far far away as law can mandate, from accessing alternative forms of therapy.

Health is so NOT the primary concern, when you look into the shenanigans the developers of new drugs get up to in search of FDA approval.

Last spring, on a flight back to Van from Montreal,  I sat between two guys who oddly enough ended up being from the same small town in NB, as we discovered in the course of conversation, but I mostly spoke to the one who worked for a Canadian pharmaceutical company.  His specialty was getting contracts for analogue drugs for distribution in Canada.  Mostly this involves tweaking an existing drug so that its patent life and money making window is extended.  It's a fairly complicated legal process, but the most important aspect of our conversation relates to the fact that the profit imperative directly opposes health.  There's a lot of older drugs that may be very effective, but are considered worthless in terms of distributing, because they are longer able to produce the revenue shareholders demand.  He was proud of how his company was continuing to produce some drugs for "orphan diseases", in spite of the fact that they weren't making money off of them, and he explained too how for some of these effective drugs that weren't profitable anymore, they were still viable commodities in terms of dumping them in 3rd World Nations. Probably getting a big tax write off to balance their end of the year bookkeeping too, as it's not cheap disposing of medical waste.  So yeah charity!  And yeah, it's still all about the money eh?

Even more disquieting are the results of a recent sting operation where a bogus cancer study was sent out to a number of peer reviewed scientific journals to test the level of thoroughness in inspecting the veracity of any submission. 70% published the fraudulent study!!!

The game is rigged. Too much authority and power in the hands of too few, and too much money at stake, means peoples' health is sacrificed to the almighty dollar.  Greed is definitely not good in this area, and profit being such an unregulated factor in this industry increases the probability of corruption, and flies in the face of peoples' quest for wellness.

First do no harm is the hippocratic oath, more like hypocritic oath seems like.

In any case it's a good film, and I predict if not Oscar wins for Matt and Jared, at the very least they'll be nominated.

And here's a couple great interviews:  Jean-Marc Vallée talking up Matt and his movie, and McConaughey doing his take on things.

And here's an article about the FDA going after a walnut company because the packaging referenced the omega 3 fats found in the nuts as being beneficial.  Something is nuts there and it sure ain't the walnuts.

VIFF Recap 2012

I got in 7 flicks during the media screenings:

Love In Medina

We Were Children

Little Trips 2 (shorts program)

The D Train

Double Shift

Dunas

Good Karma $1

Home

Never a Shade of Gray

No Where No One

Punched

The Return

Voice Over

Persistence of Vision

The Unlikely Girl

When The Night

Day 1

The first day, I got in Last Friday before my shift, and snatched a section from these 2 documentaries:

Far From Afghanistan

The Flat

After that, went for a Frankenweenie promo

Day 2

Twilight Portrait - great scene where she fucking pierces the hypocrisies of her husband and friends at her birthday party

The Comedy - bleak and hilarious.  kinda deep.

part of Werewolf Boy - sweet and silly

The World Before Her  - feministic!

Day 3

5 movies + 1 short + 1 cartoon = fully entertained. Stellar flicks from around the world: Cuba -Una Noche, HK - McDull: The Pork of Music, Korea - The Blood Seller, Indonesia - Postcards From The Zoo, Spain - As Luck Would Have It, France - Rust and Bone, and New Zealand - Two Little Boys.

 Postcards From The Zoo, dreamy languid, slowwww, the animals were superb, but the footage wasn't as crisp as I thought it would be.  

Una Noche, anti Castro but compelling none the less.  

 McDull: The Pork of Music, sweet and cute and funny, nice message on the importance of music

 The Blood Seller, vampire story that you could see coming

 As Luck Would Have it - funny pointed stick in the face of greed and media fame

 Rust and Bone, I could see this being remade and having a simpler happy ending, not that the ending wasn't happy, just that it was a little too unhollywood happy.

 Two Little Boys, great soundtrack, dude is a sociopath!  It was funny.  He reminded me of Russell Crowe and Brendan Fraser looking, Kenny Powers.

Day 4

The Minister - "Politics is the wound that never heals."

Antiviral - "Celebrity is a consensual hallucination" 

Berberian Sound Stage - "This is not a horror film, it's a Santini film!" 

The Flat - "They want to believe in the one good German." 

Off White Lies - I don't have a good quote from this one, except maybe the sweet scene with the Supertramp song lyrics - give a little bit...but I really enjoyed it. Reminded me of Paper Moon some, and of my father. The father character and my dad were the same kind of affable bullshitter. :)

Day 5

end of Raising Resistance

beginning of Key of Life

First hour or so of Design of Death

Paradise: Love

Day 6

Tabu

first half of Street Dogs of South Central

Nameless Gangster

In Search of Haydn

Bad Weather

Day 7

The Compass is Carried By The Dead Man

Lore

Teen Tales

Zug

Yardbird

No Intoxicants Required

Bad Moon Rising

Cluck

Encounters

Sesame Theory

Skull Punch

Thirst

The Twitch

UFO

Seven Psychopaths - promo

The Hunt

Day 8

Twilight Portrait

metaphorical? woman gets raped and then she's trying to controvert the typical rape revenge plot by having her abruptly abort that process and switching gears to seduce her rapist.  Why does she keep telling him he she loves him?? Is she love in the face of evil?  Essential nurturing womanhood vs brutal male violence?  I thought the Russian cop was hot with his manly gravel voice.  Sexy perpetrator!

Best scene was still the birthday party meltdown

she lays bare the hypocrisies and lies that allow her and her friends to exploit and fuck each other over without too many problems.  

Life and Death (shorts program)

  Unmanned - military drone drama

  Crescendo  no abortion = Ludwig Van Beethoven

Francine

women gets out of jail and becomes a crazy cat lady

she lets people do what they want to her, but she doesn't really connect with them

it's like she can't relate.  It's why she loves animals so much.

Leo does a good job.  Sad story.  Does it treat mental illness with compassion or exploit it?  Not really sure.

Liverpool - missed the beginning and the end, but I enjoyed the plot and romance too.  Sweet funny flick. good soundtrack, esp Liverpool by Renee Martin?

Dom - really great macho manliness.  James Coburn looking Russian gangster goes back to rural homestead for Grandfather's 90 birthday, also to hideout from some hit men.  Things get bloody.  

Angel's Share - whiskey provides a future for a Ken Loach character, a trackie?  Tracksuit wearing thug who wants to turn his life around - his gf is preggars, but there's problems.  I spent most of the movie baffled by the accents, but it was easy enough to follow what was going on.  Missed some jokes though.

Design of Death - watched the beginning for the 3rd time!  Saw the whole thing finally.  I enjoyed it quite a bit.  Weird and visually wonderful.  Reminds me of Visitor Q crossed with the Jeunet Bros. Nie's face totally made me smile when he did, such lovely crinkly eyes!

Somebody Up There Likes Me was the surprise hit of the night.  It's very deadpan humorous, and it silly, but it left me with good feels.  Plus I really liked the soundtrack.  It has a cover of The Car's Double Life, sung by Bob Schneider backed by Quiet Company.  

Day 9

Everybody In Our Family - missed the beginning, but I think that just set up the circumstances of the flick - divorced dad on his way to pick up his daughter for a beach vacation.  It was funny, and it got crazy, but I liked it.  It got ugly and unbelievable too, but I give it license to be unrealistic in order to tell a story.  The actor reminded me of the guy who played The Minister.  Bigger and more virile looking though.

Occupy Love watched about 20 minutes of this.  It's good.  Bolivia has a pluralistic society.  "I want to live well, not better."

Monkey King 3D  - Fun.  I think it was great. But now,  I'd really like to see HIndu gods stories in cartoons.  

Liar's Autobiography - Graham Chapman died when he was 48 of throat cancer, this flick is animated in a variety of styles and was narrated by Chapman, culled from tapes he made a few years before he died.  

Armour - Micheal Haneke does it again.  Great movie about an old couple dealing with the aftermath of an accident.  Dignity is something that can be difficult to maintain as you age.

Ape - a not so great firebug comedian and his low key low rent lifestyle.  Mildly amusing.  I chuckled quite a bit.  The main guy reminds me of the younger brother who cut off his toe in Weeds.

Alternative Anime: The Next Generation

Soldier School - I liked the style - looks like a kid make it sometimes, very naive drawings.  Sorta boring though

Red Colored Bridge - super psychedelic and crazy colourful.  Escheresque at times.

Deep in Reflection - I was bored by this one

Hide and Seek 0 this one was boring too.  Looked nice though

Abbau - a bunch of formulas and such = boring sciencey animations of equations and atoms etc.

The Hunter and The Skeleton - by far my fav. Totally cool style, like a Hindu god's stuff, or Katamari  good story too.  The demon/skeleton was mesmerizing and terrifying too.

Noodle Fish - 2nd love.  Much better use of noodles than just eating them. or making macaroni pictures.

Day 10 

Laurence Anyways - 1/2 hour or so of Laurence coming out as trans at work, and subsequently getting fired.

Grabbers  - holy hella fun!

Consuming Spirits - walked out in part 4 after the mom died.  Reminded me of Twin Peaks.  grotesque animation.

I, Anna - great thriller.  She's guilty of the woman crimes - being old, unmarried and mental.  She kills a kid too.  AND murders, but as one woman commented, she doesn't commit these crimes out of malice, they weren't of her own volition.  Joe noticed that she was distracted with the child when she was asking her ex husband to include her in his weekend with their daughter and granddaughter.  I asked about the music, director said he sent the music to Richard Hawley through a mutual friend and he was sympathetic to the story because his mum had an incident with an odd beau where he'd had to escort the man off the mom's property.  

Late Quartet.  good stuff, kinda white people problems, but still very enjoyable.

end of 237 - fun film theory!!!

Day 11

Camera Shy - end - really funny.  So much better than Ape.

Our Children - end - too sad.  About a woman who kills her kids.  She's struggling with too much responsibility, post partum, 4 little babies and no sympathy.  

Kinshasa Kids - snippet.  Cute kids, lovely musics, crazy poverty

Reality - beginning.  BORING wedding shit.  I couldn't bring myself to watch it.  

Anyday Now - beginning  TRITE!!!  Cummings makes a great drag queen but the dialogue was just so melodramatic bullshit.

Day 12

Leviathan - various parts - very pretty, cinematic artsy shots.  One guy said it's a deconstructed horror film

Museum Hours - various parts -  again pretty, funny, but I missed the beginning so I couldn't follow the dynamics of the narrative aspect.  The observations of the museum guard and the docent were interesting and amusing too.

Shine of Day - didn't see enough to formulate an opinion, looked interesting though - German circus performer!

City Lens, the bits I saw looked cool.

Berberian Sound Studio - the beginning I missed!  I didn't miss much at all, it doesn't establish anything about the main character! It shows the credits for the giallo he's been brought in to work on and moves right on to his observing the watermelon foley work and getting a slice of it shoved in his face.

Come As You Are - missed the beginning to get the Berberian beginning, but I could follow evertyibg.  It was funny. and sweet and even the bit I didn't like, when the two boys were bullying the chubby bus driver, that aspect was addressed and they treated her with dignity after.  Sweet movie!

Day 13

Occupy Love - my fav film of the fest.  Offers hope in desperate times.

Incident in New Baghdad - Wikileaks Collateral Damage short - very well done short on PTSD and how the military uses and exploits soldiers, ultimately sacrificing their mental health.

No Job For  A Woman - doc on women war reporters.  Ernest Hemingway was a fucking douche.  His wife was a correspondent for Collier's and he was pissed that her job kept her away, so he told Collier's he'd write for them.  They could only accredit one writer, so the wife was booted.  She had to take a freighter boat back home, and it took 27 days. or 7 weeks - a long ass time, while Papa too the press plane.  ASSHOLE.  She got hired by another paper and when she got to the hotel, he was shacked up with another woman already.  I skipped out on the end for a loser flick.

Night Across The Street - holy hella pretentious.  Dude is unstuck in time and all the characters are in his mind or some such nonsense.  Absurd magic realism.  I didn't like it, though it was well made and well acted, it just felt so masturbatory and self-satisfied.

We're Not Broke - US company's don't want to pay taxes.  One note documentary, kinda boring.

Facing Animals - first 15 minutes.  SAD and depressing how cruel we are to the animals we eat.

Rebellion - Kanaki?  Uprising in new Caledonia gets put down.  Negotiator is not allowed to do his job because elections mean the politicians, and the army are exploiting the situation for political gain.  Great speech by the leader of the Kanaki? people Alphonse.  It illustrates the principles of neo liberalism, colonialism and injustice.  It's also a great action flick.

Day 14

Come As You Are - beginning I missed

Room 237 Beginning I missed, and the rest again

promo The Sessions

Beyond the Hills - religion and superstition, poverty, queer hatred, mental illness kills a girl in Romania