After a hiatus shaped like Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (which I produced), my viewing journal returns with a typical mix of artistic expression and popcorn nonsense. On Wednesday night the third edition of Iberodocs – Scotland’s only dedicated documentary festival and a celebration of Ibero-American cinema – opened at Filmhouse in Edinburgh to a packed audience. Begun as a way to showcase the work of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin-American filmmakers, Iberodocs has quickly developed a dedicated audience, supportive sponsors and a robust and carefully selected programme of films. A lively and welcoming reception at Traverse bar preceded the opening film, Gabo: The Creation of Gabriel Garcia Márquez, a sincere and affectionate biography of the Nobel prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Directed by Justin Webster, the film brings together interviews with Márquez’s friends (Gerald Martin, his biographer; Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, writer and Bill Clinton no less), peers, family and inspired writers (Juan Gabriel Vásquez), to reflect on the extraordinary life and politics of one the world’s most celebrated literary talents.
A young Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Relying mostly on talking heads interviews, archive and television footage, Gabo chronicles the writer’s early life, student days, journalistic career, romances, his great friendship with Fidel Castro, which seemed to run counter to his anti-communist politics, and is most engaging in the use of interviews with the man himself, which demonstrate his sharp wit and idiosyncratic perspective on life. On receiving the Nobel prize for literature, a journalist asks him, “is this the greatest moment of your life?” to which Márquez replies, “No, that was the day I was born.” Such moments go some way to answer the film’s central question; how did a boy who was born into poverty grow up to be a writer ‘who won the hearts of millions?’ Márquez’s charisma, dedication, and importantly, self-belief emerge as the defining characteristics that allowed the author to have such an impact.
Iberodocs runs until Sunday 8 May and includes the remarkable and very moving, All of Me (Friday 6 May), by Arturo González Villaseñor about the Patronas, women in Mexico who prepare and distribute food to the migrants who pass by on the freight train to the US. The short film programme Looking From Afar (Sunday 8 May) also looks to be an exciting collection of highly personal works from such sharp artistic talents as Salomé Lamas and Ana Vaz.
Anton Yelchin and Alia Shawcat in Green Room
Elsewhere in my viewing, Jeremy Saulnier’s third feature as writer/director, Green Room surpassed my expectations, which were based on some buzz around Patrick Stewart portraying a skin head Nazi in backwoods America. Stewart certainly is suitably chilling in the role of Darcy, but what’s most interesting about Saulnier’s work, as with Blue Ruin, is how, unlike many a director of dark and violent films, he appears not to celebrate violence, but rather, violence occurs due to ingrained social expectations and justifications of power, and is horrific and visceral in a very authentic, non-stylised way. Green Room cinematographer Sean Porter creates a dank, dark atmosphere using very little light, whilst editor Julia Bloch uses neat and clever cuts to keep the pace fraught and the horror efficient.
l-r: Anthony Mackie as Falcon, Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye, Chris Evans as Captain America, Elizabeth Olsen as Scarlet Witch and Sebastian Stan as Winter Soldier in Captain America: Civil War
Finally, this week I saw Captain America: Civil War, which gleefully allows members of the Avengers A and B team (and some other ‘enhanced’) to shine, within excellently choreographed and edited action set-pieces. The film somehow doesn’t convey the ethical complexity of the Civil War comic books, despite the presence of a menacing Daniel Bruhl. It’s also still deeply frustrating to see only three female characters with speaking roles in these films (where’s Cobie Smulder’s Agent Hill?!) and only two women a line-up of super dudes. I’d love to see a Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) origin story, but the possibility of that seems nil.
Also watched:
What Happened Miss Simone? Liz Garbus, excellent documentary
Season 7 of Parks and Recreation (again)
You might have missed this weekly viewing journal of late – this writer has been engaged elsewhere, covering the Berlin Film Festival competition (and some other films) for other outlets. For CineVue, I reviewed André Téchiné’s rewarding French dramaBeing 17 (****); Alone in Berlin (**) starring Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson; the dense and deftly handled Death in Sarajevo(****), which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize; the desperately frustrating Genius (*) which starred a manic Jude Law and a tired Colin Firth; and finally Gianfranco Rosi’s Golden Bear winning documentary, Fire at Sea (****). Meanwhile for Sight & Sound, I reviewed Mia Hansen-Løve’s latest feature, Things to Come,which deservedly won the Silver Bear for Best Director. Starring the endlessly watchable Isabelle Huppert, it’s a deeply thoughtful, mature work.
Isabelle Huppert in Things to ComeOn my return from chilly Berlin, I checked out the new Quentin Tarantino film, The Hateful Eight screening from the 70mm roadshow print at Filmhouse. The 70mm differs from the digital version in that it has 20 minutes of additional footage, an overture and an intermission. I must say that the experience of viewing the film this way, with the prestige of the red curtains pulling back following the overture, the sheer beauty of the print itself, which really enhances Tarantino’s skills as a filmmaker, and the anticipation that the intermission created, was a great pleasure.
Having made that clear, it remains that The Hateful Eight is a very unpleasant film. Even considering that the film’s title makes clear the scorn of its characters, the negativity of the film permeates everything, from the characters, to the dialogue and the message, making it hard to understand what exactly Tarantino thought the audience would find fun about the film. Oh, wait – violence is really fun, isn’t it?
Tarantino loves creating puzzles for the audience to solve, and creating no-win situations for his characters, his passion for narrative and story-telling is clear. It’s just that in The Hateful Eight there’s no reason to be invested in the outcome. A note on the other big problem with the film. Of the female characters that get more than one scene, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh, pictured above) is repeatedly beaten, constrained, abused and made powerless – we’re told she’s a dangerous murderer – yet we do not see the evidence of this. By the film’s end, the male characters have done despicable things to each other, and yet, Daisy’s punishment is to be gleefully hung and laughed at, dwelling on her pain as though a relief from the horror of the past hours. The Hateful Eight dispatches violent men quickly and explosively, but a non-compliant woman must be made an enduring example of. It’s exhausting. For a more in depth review, see Matt Zoller-Seitz’s piece for rogerebert.com – his assessment is spot on.
With that, ‘My week in film’ will be a little less active for a couple of months while this writer switches from reviewing festivals to programming a festival, to produce the Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival . Aniston of the week however, will continue!
There’s been more than enough pieces written on the best films of 2015, including two lists (which include Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight, pictured above) to which I already contributed – Sight & Sound and CineVue – so here at Cinematic Investigations, we’ll refrain from adding further to what was considered ‘best’* last year. Instead, this annual review will focus on the complete year’s viewing, including television, films re-watched and those seen at festivals and at home. In a year in which I attended 10 film festivals, viewed 262 films, of which 68 were short and 125 were new** features, this is a way of considering what was personally most memorable, and not necessarily the films themselves, but the whole experience of viewing, discussing, sharing and thinking about film.
Filmmaker interviews at IFFR 2015
As I reported back in January, I was selected to be part of International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Trainee Programme for Young Film Critics. A great honour that allowed me to meet some brilliant people, and conduct interviews with Remy Van Heugten via Skype about his film Gluckauf, in person with Ingo Haeb about The Chambermaid Lynn, on the phone to Martin Radich to discuss Norfolk and via email with Nicolas Steiner for his remarkable documentary, Above and Below.
Tired Moonlight at IFFR and EFG
Britni West’s enthralling, ambiguous Tired Moonlight was the last of 31 films I saw at IFFR. By that point I was exhausted and longing for my own bed, and West’s Super 16mm shot ode to her hometown of Kalispell, Montana gradually lifted me from apathy to pure joy. When I screened it for the Edinburgh Film Guild audience in December, it temporarily made us forget there was a freezing downpour going on outside.
Family cinema trip: Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure
My favourite ‘Come and See’ screening at Filmhouse in 2015.
The Tribe
4. Brutal cinema part 1: The Tribe
Being a fairly miserable Ukrainian drama in which the only dialogue is un-subtitled Russian sign-language, Miroslav Slaboshpitsky’s The Tribe was a hard sell to the friends I asked to accompany me, but I suggested it could be unlike anything we’ve seen before. It certainly proved more divisive than anything else, sparking a heated debate about whether such depictions of violence are deliberately and unnecessarily provocative.
Orange is the New Black series 3
Particularly episode four, Finger in the Dyke written by Lauren Morelli and directed by Constantine Makris, in which Big Boo’s (Lea DeLaria) backstory is revealed; where an initially playful persuasion by her father to get her to wear a dress as a child, develops into complete parental rejection of her lesbian identity. This series frequently deals with characters struggling with who they are, and this episode showcased DeLaria’s ability as a performer to convey someone who courageously asserts herself, in the face of those who would prefer she pretend to be someone else.
Asif Kapadia’s expertly made documentary about Amy Winehouse just about broke me.
I stay with you (me quedo contigo)
Brutal cinema part 2: I stay with you (me quedo contigo) at IFFR and EIFF.
At IFFR, I saw Mexican artist Artemio Narro’s I stay with you, a deliberately deceptive, willingly provocative experiment in putting female violence on screen and right in the viewer’s face. In an upcoming issue of the Slovenian journal KINO!, I discuss the film and violent women generally with fellow writer Tina Poglajen, but on first viewing I really didn’t know what to make of it. When EIFF Artistic Director, Mark Adams, selected it to screen at EIFF, I looked forward to meeting with Narro again and talking more about the film, having allowed its brilliance and flaws to fully sink in. Narro proved to be one of the best guests at the festival – he’s certainly aware of the challenging nature of the film, and was prepared to lose a good proportion of the audience during the screening.
With Artemio Narro during the Q&A at EIFF
At his Q&A, I asked him about the film’s wider reception, about his intentions for the film, and the audience too, quizzed him on the random appearance of a horse (actually a unicorn, Narro loves them, even has a unicorn tattoo, which went down well in the country for whom they are the national animal), and the film’s unsettling tonal shifts. It was a film that inspired what any artist can hope for – passionate, thoughtful (and in this case, angry) engagement from the audience.
EIFF’s Doc of the Day: Stand By for Tape Back-Up and other special events, including Haskell Wexler himself.
As programme coordinator at Edinburgh International Film Festival last year, I had the pleasure of planning and delivering a lot of truly special events; a gig reuniting legends of the Scottish post-punk/indie music scene following Grant McPhee’s Big Gold Dream; a Skype Q&A with the Angulo brothers, subject of Crystal Moselle’s incredible The Wolfpack, and In Person events with Neil Innes and Barry Purves. One of my films of the year however turned out to be Ross Sutherland’s Stand by for Tape Back-Up, an autobiographical, semi-experimental documentary that plays with time and memory and incorporates The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air into musings on the afterlife. It’s a film that’s now deeply embedded in my mind as one of the most intriguing and moving I’ve seen.
Also at EIFF, I met again with award-winning cinematographer Seamus McGarvey (High Fidelity, Atonement, The Avengers, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Godzilla) who had brought legendary cinematographer Haskell Wexler to the festival to discuss his work and the issues most important to him. Wexler wanted to spend most of his onstage time praising Seamus, but the latter carefully persuaded him to share some of his experiences from his life’s work, which includes One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Medium Cool. Sadly Wexler passed away in December aged 93, I’m privileged to have met him.
10. Cats Are Cinema: Noel Marshall’s Roar
In which Noel Marshall and wife Tippi Hedren spent eleven years bringing to the screen a film they were sure would raise awareness of the poaching of African big cats and the unfair treatment of big cats in captivity. The result was a shoot with over one hundred cats – lions, tigers, jaguars etc. – seventy injuries to the crew and several near death experiences. The film itself is a completely bonkers and terrifying tribute to the cats, and Marshall and Hedren’s foolhardy commitment to their cause. A late night at EIFF, in which I laughed long and hard.
11. There’s how many teaspoons of sugar in one tablespoon of ketchup?! The influence of That Sugar Film.
There’s four. Four teaspoons of sugar in one tablespoon of tomato ketchup. Thank you Damon Gameau for making That Sugar Film and forever changing my feelings about the sweet stuff. When I met Gameau at EIFF I learned I was the eighty-fifth person to host a Q&A with him – he said I did a good job. What a pro.
12. Family Cinema Trip: Magic Mike XXL
My sister was ssshhh’ed for whooping during the opening credits – those Edinburgh Cineworld audiences take their fun seriously! And it was, seriously fun.
13. Singing and crying: Hedwig and the Angry Inch at Filmhouse
Only the second time I’d seen John Cameron Mitchell’s cult musical (the first being a Blockbuster video rental sometime around 2002) but this time it was a sing-a-long screening and I soaked up the film’s emotion and wit, impressed by my friends lyrical knowledge and shared sensitivity to Hedwig’s identity crisis.
Finally finishing The West Wing brought with it the satisfaction of seeing it through and the sadness that there were no new episodes to see. When we first started it, we found W.G. Snuffy Walden’s score unbearably patriotic (what did we expect?!) but by the end it felt triumphantly appropriate. Other highlights of viewing: assessing Josh’s hair, loving and then missing Sam Seaborn, doing impressions of Bruno’s ‘kelp’ speech, noticing which episodes had a Parks and Recreation version, saying ‘Blues explosion’ during the credits when John Spencer appears.
16.Jess-i-caaaaaaaa!!!! Jones
A superhero show in which the villain is literally the patriarchy? Yes please. A thousand times yes.
17. All in one night: Master of None
So many brilliant episodes in this series, I loved how each was themed, I loved the compassion and honesty of it, I loved its representation of friendship and millennial anxiety. I loved that it was flawed.
18. Aniston forever and ever and ever
In case you didn’t know, 2015 brought you the blog series you’ve always wanted: a critique of the megastar that is Jennifer Aniston. Watching her films has so far been a mix of irksome, joyful and hilarious, more coming soon.
19. Carol
I summarised what makes Todd Haynes’ latest so special, and my film of the year, for CineVue, so I’ll simply quote myself here: ‘That it’s so highly lauded is assuredly deserved, as Director Todd Haynes and screenwriter Phyllis Nagy have created a richly realised depiction of romantic love that envelops the viewer completely in its characters’ world. Both Rooney Mara as shop clerk and aspiring photographer Therese, and Cate Blanchett as the titular married woman, falling in love in 1950s New York, give exceptional performances, and have a chemistry palpable in every glance. The result is a film the very texture of which, highlights Carol and Therese’s relationship as one defined by both their unnameable intimacy and the distance between them, agonisingly reconciled in the film’s last, brilliantly tense final scene.’
20. Finally saw Frozen and understood its genius (see video below)
21. Best Christmas film: Sean Baker’s Tangerine.
*For the record my official Top Ten, offered to CineVue is:
1. Carol
2. The Diary of a Teenage Girl
3. Spotlight
4. Stand by for Tape Back-Up
5. Dreamcatcher
6. It Follows
7. Arabian Nights
8. The Forbidden Room
9. Anomalisa
10. Force Majeure
** Any film that had its first screening in 2015, internationally.
![201609145_3[1]](https://cinematicinvestigations.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/201609145_31.jpg?w=648)
A note on the other big problem with the film. Of the female characters that get more than one scene, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh, pictured above) is repeatedly beaten, constrained, abused and made powerless – we’re told she’s a dangerous murderer – yet we do not see the evidence of this. By the film’s end, the male characters have done despicable things to each other, and yet, Daisy’s punishment is to be gleefully hung and laughed at, dwelling on her pain as though a relief from the horror of the past hours. The Hateful Eight dispatches violent men quickly and explosively, but a non-compliant woman must be made an enduring example of. It’s exhausting. For a more in depth review, see 
cinematicinvestigations.com 