ELFF Redux

I Love Trash (Brown, 2008)
I had intended to see this one at the film festival, but decided that I’d avoided work quite enough for one weekend, so I bought the DVD (which cost the same as what my roommate and I would have paid for tickets) instead. I’m still not sure what to make of it. The filmmakers—-David Brown and Greg Mann—-embark on a three-month experiment in which they attempt to live solely off of what they find dumpster diving. They move into an empty apartment with nothing but the clothes on their backs and their camera, and the space is soon filled with furniture, clothes, food, and luxuries all collected from various dumpsters. Their efforts to convince me that my fear of germs and diseases are nothing but bourgeois illusions would have gone over much better had David and Greg been a bit more likable. I realize that’s a terrible thing to say and shouldn’t be the basis of how I judge the film itself, but I found them irritating for much of the film. I wanted to hear about the practical aspects of dumpster diving (Did they talk to store owners to find out when they dump their unsellable food? What criteria did they use to determine what they’d take and what might not be safe?), and I wanted to see more of what they’d done with it (Greg was so excited to find paint that I wanted to know what he painted!). Alas, much of their footage consisted of repetitive shots of them taking food out of the dumpster or lying on the floor of the apartment. This repetition made a fairly short film feel like it dragged on far too long, despite its interesting premise.

Rating: 2.5/5

Appetizers

Very brief synopses of the short films I saw at ELFF. Each of these played before one of the main features.

Even in My Dreams (Alves, 2008)
(played with The Edge of Heaven)
This short elicits your sympathy for an old widower who, after seeing (and purchasing) an erotic doll, struggles to regain the pleasure it initially brought him in a dream. Rating: 5/5

For A Few Marbles More(Hufen, 2006)
(played with My Winnipeg)
When a group of children are kicked out of their playground by two drunken adults, they recruit a local bully to help them get revenge. This short was funny and memorable, and I’d love to see more by Dutch director Jelmar Hufen. Rating: 5/5

Hungry God (Gokhale, 2008)
(played with The Pool)
A young Indian boy goes begging for food dressed as the god Shiva; he is dismayed to find that a statue of the god gets more offerings than he does. Simple and effective, with some beautifully composed shots. Rating: 4/5

Compact Only (Green, 2008)
(played with Trouble the Water)
The premise, which will sound familiar to Seinfeld fans, is that a man can’t get food delivered to his address, so he waits in his car in the parking lot of a shopping center across the street. While he eats, he witnesses a series of bizarre occurrences that seem both blatantly ridiculous and quite likely to occur in your average mall parking lot on any given day. Rating: 3.5/5

La Tuerca (Martinez, 2007)
(played with Treeless Mountain)
A bit reminiscent of Pan’s Labyrinth, but only because it’s a Spanish film about a little girl who, in the face of overwhelming discouragement from an adult, retreats into a world of magic. Rating: 3/5

ELFF, Day 2

Treeless Mountain (Kim, 2008)
So Yong Kim’s Treeless Mountain takes the problems of children quite seriously. Granted, they are fairly unusual problems: when their mother leaves town, sisters Jin and Bin are sent to live with their aunt—a woman who lacks the motherly affection and ability to provide for them. As Jin and Bin cope with the bleakness of their situation, they rapidly mature, doing all they can to bring their mother home. With a fairly minimalist style, the film beautifully captures both the loss of childhood innocence and the simplicity of childhood fantasy. I was especially struck by the claustrophobia of the extreme close-up shots of people’s faces as contrasted with the very open landscape shots. The story and style are simple yet powerful. An amazing and beautiful film.
Rating: 5/5


My Winnipeg (Maddin, 2007)
Surrealism tends to distance viewers rather than draw them into the film. I’m not against such distancing, and it can certainly be enjoyable, but it’s not usually so much fun. Guy Maddin’s surrealist documentary My Winnipeg, however, is just that—sheer fun. Maddin endeavors to explain what makes it so difficult for people to escape from his hometown of Winnipeg. In order to explore the lasting effects the city has had on him personally, Maddin hires actors (and his mother) to re-create memorable scenes from his childhood so that he can study them in the hopes of understanding why they stand out in his memory. The film is intensely personal and yet entirely universal in its treatment of childhood and nostalgia. This was the first of Maddin’s films that I’ve seen, and it’s a testament to how much I enjoyed it that I immediately went home and added the rest of his films to my Netflix queue.
Rating: 5/5

The Edge of Heaven (Akin, 2007)
The situations and plot are obviously quite contrived, but the characters are interesting enough that the film doesn’t feel overly forced. In fact, the first two of its three main sections begin by announcing the death of a character, yet these deaths are still startling and saddening. The characters feel utterly real, and the film succeeds at making viewers understand them and to some degree sympathize with them, even when we don’t want to. I felt completely drawn in if only because I wanted to know what each character would do next and how he/she would handle the latest devastating obstacle. Though the pacing is a bit slow, for the most part this works to showcase the characters and give us more time to get to know them. The Edge of Heaven is a solid and alluring film, and a good way to close out an incredible day of film-viewing.
Rating: 4/5

East Lansing Film Festival (ELFF), Day 1

Trouble the Water (Deal and Lessin, 2008)
If you’ve been avoiding this one because it’s a documentary about Katrina and therefore serious and depressing, I feel sorry for you. Of course, I feel sorry for anyone who doesn’t think documentaries can be entertaining and fun, but that’s neither here nor there. Trouble the Water is both serious and entertaining. Most of the footage is shot by aspiring rap artist Kimberly Rivers Roberts and her husband Scott, who survived Katrina by hunkering down in their attic with their extended family members. Kim introduces us to her neighborhood in the 9th Ward with a humorous and confident outlook tinged with uncertainty: she assures us that they’ll all come out of the hurricane okay because they have no choice—no transportation out of the city. Laughing and filming in the face of the disaster, Kim’s attitude won me over early in the film and (to employ an empty and over-used phrase) gave the tragedy a human face. The courage and compassion shown by Kim, Scott, and their family throughout the film provided a moving account of true heroism. As much as the film critiques the government and military for their failure to act both before and after the hurricane, it also left me with the feeling that we’re looking in the wrong places for help. Trouble the Water is a powerful example of the strength of community organizers and the resilience of communities. This film was a great way to kick off my film festival experience.

Rating: 4/5


The Pool (Smith, 2007)
I have the sense that I might have enjoyed this film more if I hadn’t been exhausted from a long day of teaching and emotionally drained from seeing Trouble the Water. It didn’t help that the seats in Wells Hall are anything but comfortable. So I think it’ll take a second viewing before I can really give this an accurate rating. That said, I did rather enjoy the film. Although I felt that it lagged in places, I suspect this was due to the circumstances in which I was seeing it, rather than the film’s pacing and flow, which work to introduce us to its characters and their world. The friendship between Venkatesh, a boy working in a hotel in Goa, India, and Jhangir, who works in a restaurant, is allowed to unfold quite naturally. While the slow pace initially built up my suspense as to why Venkatesh was so obsessed with the pool of a nearby house, eventually I no longer cared why the titular object was so important because I was so drawn into the relationships surrounding it. Though The Pool offers a relatively simple story, these relationships seem quite deep and moving.

Rating: 3.5/5