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Wednesday, March 24, 2010
CIFF: Day 5
Can you believe it’s already been five days of CIFF?
Our first film of the day was Adrift, out of Vietnam. The description made it sound like it was an interesting story of infidelity and unrequited love. What it turned out to be was a very slow, very long story of infidelity that was mostly implied and unrequited love that was barely established. If I hadn’t known that was what it was supposed to be, I wouldn’t have caught it. It was really only okay. Nothing very impressive.
After that we had planned to see Fire in the Heartland, but owing to the fact that we missed Disco and Atomic War due to last-minute changes, we went to see that instead. It was totally worth the change. It was a documentary, but it was an interesting style which kept things interesting through the end. I also learned a lot. I was born during the cold war, but it ended a few years later, so I know really very little about it. (I also know little about the Vietnam war – apparently my generation was not meant to learn about it except from movies.) Now, I know… well, something about it. From an Estonian perspective. That’s something!
We had a long-ish break between the two movies, so we headed up to Hospitality Headquarters for a while. Then it was time to see Black Sheep. This one was on Johnathan’s list so I wasn’t super stoked about it. It was about a guy who worked on a sheep farm. He is at odds with the owner’s son, who is spoiled and vindictive, and in love with Maria, a girl who pretty much has the world at her fingertips and could have whoever she wanted. The story moved fairly slowly at first, but it seemed to pick up by the end. I liked the story and its plot twists. It was funny and kind of exciting at the right points. I really enjoyed it. Interestingly, Johnathan was a bit underwhelmed. Go figure, right?
Then we had another long break, so back to Hospitality Headquarters. My biggest “shock” was to see how empty the headquarters were during the day versus on the weekends or even in the evening. It was nice to walk in and know we could easily find somewhere to sit, and that the sandwiches wouldn’t be voraciously devoured before we even had a chance to get over to them. Our next film was Inside Hana’s Suitcase, which was a documentary about a little girl whose suitcase survived the Holocaust even though she didn’t. It was mostly a bunch of kids telling her story which was both charming and aggravating, at times. I had heard someone say that she cried her way through the film, and I thought that she was just prone to crying. Well, I… kind of did the same thing. It was a very interesting and emotionally-charged documentary. It was quite good.
Our next film was Japanese: The Bare Essence of Life. I knew it would be a little bit weird from the description, but I believe the description grossly understated the movie’s bizarreness. It was… too much. Too weird, too slow, too… too. We ended up walking out after about an hour of the two-hour film. At that point, we still hadn’t hit the crux of the story or even established what the central plot was supposed to be. So we left. First film we’ve walked out of – though not the first we wanted to leave. I hear it got a little less weird, but there doesn’t appear to have been anyone who was blown away by it.
After that, we went home. It was worth it to get home a little earlier than we had been in days. Didn’t go to bed earlier than usual, really, but it was nice to be at home for a little bit before we needed to be asleep. Also nice to have some milk again. I feel like as far as day 5 goes, it was kind of a “meh” day. Nothing really catastrophically bad, but nothing outstanding, either.
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