Blogging the AIFF

Blogging the film festival is totally different from blogging the trials. There are way too many movies for me to see them all. The venues are scattered around town - probably about five miles at the greatest distance (Out North to Bear Tooth) - which is ok with a car, but the schedule makes it a little tight if you want to go to another venue.

But what should one blog? Movie reviews? Sometimes I don't have that much to say, or it takes time to sort through. I thought showing preview like bits of the films, but it's hard to get the good parts and I have limited space on my camera's memory card. Show the people milling around and talking? In a lot of cases that wasn't happening that much, it was very dark, or I got into the conversation and forgot. I've tried to get people to talk about the films they saw, and that worked ok for some. You just have to get people who are comfortable talking to the camera.

So tonight is the Martini Matinee. This is for all events pass holders and $10 for others. You can see the list of shorts at the link. Maybe there will be lots of minglers and people willing to give their impressions of the festival and the films they've seen. I'll use a lower resolution so I'll have more space. I'm also restrained by a 5pm conference call I have. So I'll miss the 5:30 showing of Fat Stupid Rabbitwhich looks better than the title suggests. That leaves Taxi to the Dark Side, at 6pm, which I saw and which everyone should see, and Greetings from the Shore at 6:30 whose title sounds better than the description and would have me late for the Matinee. (I thought matinees were in the afternoon.) Depending on how long the call takes, maybe I'll just go late to the Rabbit and if it's good, try to see the beginning at the Vault - the film headquarters where all pass holders can watch all the films on their dvd players. Well you could if they were open more during the week.

But considering this is put together mainly by volunteers working off their love for movies, I'm not complaining. Just observing. So thanks for making all this happen here in the far north.

King Bhumibol's Birthday

I got the above picture in an email from Kamphaengphet, Thailand, where they celebrated King Bhumibol's 80th birthday yesterday. I taught English there long ago. This is the continuation of the ceremonies that began last year celebrating his 60 years as King and the yellow polo shirts that are seen all over Thailand honoring the King. Below is part of a Fox News report:

Devoted But Worried Nation Honors Thai King on His 80th Birthday

BANGKOK, Thailand — Thailand's 65 million people celebrated King Bhumibol Adulyadej's 80th birthday Wednesday, honoring the world's longest-reigning monarch with countrywide festivities amid concerns about his health and political instability.

Bhumibol, also the world's only U.S.-born monarch, last year celebrated 60 years on the throne, an achievement marked by an outpouring of public devotion in which hundreds of thousands of people gathered to glimpse him waving from a distant balcony at Bangkok's Royal Plaza.

AIFF - The Metrosexual

I had class tonight so we went to the 10pm movie at the Fireweed. This was the first real Hollywood type film I've seen at the festival. It was slick, it was funny at times, the acting was good, and it was a lot less interesting that most of the others. Even Oil on Water last night took me into world I'm not normally in - and despite the poor acting, it was genuine in a way this movie wasn't. The characters in Oil were all people I'd never seen before, and I had no idea what was going to happen next until the very end.

The Metrosexual is in the "we need to get out buddy [a girl, laid, married, you fill it in]..." genre. Our buddy in this case isn't a 40 year old virgin, but a 33 year old anal retentive. The movie is full of the cranked out jokes we see on television any night and there's always a movie like in the theaters. If you like that genre, it was well done. But Metrosexual? Even in Anchorage the title is two years late.

But I did run into someone I needed to see, so that was good.

Tom's First Night

If everything went as scheduled, Tom Anderson checked into Sheridan yesterday about noon and spent his first night in prison last night. And is today doing what prisoners do. Something to think about as you go about your day. (No, I'm not feeling sorry for him, just trying to give some perspective.)

To get a better sense of Tom's experience here's what Bill Bailey blogged about his arriving at prison last April:

The cabbie knew exactly where to go, having delivered 5 or 6 other inmates over the last year who were either returning from furlough or transferring from another prison. Twenty minutes and $30 later I arrived.

The time to enter the rabbit hole had arrived.

After checking my driver's license, the guard directed me to the control center.

Just inside the entrance of the main building hangs a sign: "Through these portals walk some of the finest correctional officers in the world." The clock read 11:58a.

A man sat behind the reception window. I introduced myself and he instructed me to take a seat and announced over the loudspeaker: "New commit self-reporting at the control center."

I knew my life was about to change but I was having a hard time getting worked up over it. The place was totally non-threatening. I felt like a freshman registering for college or perhaps entering a military prep school.

As I write this it is Sunday afternoon, April 1. I have actually written over 20 pages of notes on a variety of subjects and am going back over them to write the final drafts before mailing them to my wife.

I have had 48 hours to assimilate what is going on around me (and to me). It would take forever to recap it in one long narrative. Instead, I will simply recount different experiences as separate posts.

For more of Bailey's first days in federal prison you can go to Bailey's April posts.

AIFF - No Place Like Home

Steve and Johanna called out to me as I walked into the Bear Tooth theater and I invited myself into their booth. Afterward Steve told me this film was made in 1975 and then was lost for 30 years and recently completed. The program says it's the sequel to The Harder they Fall.

Actually there are a number of stories that get crunched into one movie

• The making of a shampoo commercial at a Jamaican beach and waterfall
• A New York woman film maker staying an extra few days and getting her groove on as she learns about the friendly, laid back, community life or rural Jamaica, but also about
• The capitalist pressures to buy up the beach front and kick out the villagers who live there and the Jamaican mafia working this process.

The shampoo commercial took way too much time as the excuse to get the film maker to Jamaica. What I liked about the movie was its unhollywood pace and makeup. The sky was generally overcast, the jungle was green, but not hollywood GREEN!!!! We spent time driving along the back roads, rocking in a hammock next to the beach, meeting various locals that you wouldn't meet on a tour. This was similar to the experiencing of a different world that we had Sunday night in Vida de Circo's (Circus Life), portrayal of the everyday life at an Argentine circus as they set up the tents, fed the animals and the people, talked about their sexual conquests, and performed their dancing and acrobatic acts. Saturday night's Joe Strummer movie also pulled us into a different world. But these two were documentaries, where No Place Like Home, was a feature.

There was one magical scene - a thunderstorm explodes and the night rain becomes an abstract animation in perfect sync with the Jamaican music. And I can't forget the great music throughout. The video I've posted below is lame. I was running out of battery and didn't get much footage, but I do like the way you can see, barely, the seats and tables in this theater where every other row of seats was replaced with tables and your dinner is delivered to your table.

AIFF - Oil on Water

I don't know anything about the people who made this film, Oil and Water. Visually, it had beautiful people and beautiful settings. The beginning conversations - the students talking about the meaning of art - sounded totally scripted and unnatural. Additionally there is nothing profound about listening to amateur philosophizing. Anna's narrating sounded like a high schooler's pretentious philosophical nothings. Either I got used to it or the acting got closer to normal sounding. And eventually we realize this is someone's project to tell the world about the problems of schizophrenia. And then you fell a little guilty about having all those nasty thoughts about the movie. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out where it was taking place. We had it down to either Australia or South Africa - the speech patterns weren't as pronounced as people I know from either of those places. It turned out to be South Africa. If this was a professionally made movie, I'm unimpressed. I would say the woman who played the old family friend of Max stood out as a competent actress. If this was someone with a story who made her own movie, it's more understandable. But Autism the Musical was a much better way to tell the story of a mental health problem. [And Body/Anti-Body was an even better way - it told us about obsessive-compulsive disorder, not by telling us, but by making it part of the main character's behavior in a totally absorbing movie.]

AIFF - Autism the Musical

The power went back on yesterday in time for the showing of at Out North. (The paper this morning says a car took down a power pole nearby.)

The video shows just a snippet of this documentary. I was very impressed. If you haven't been with autistic children at all, this movie will give you a lot more understanding of what the challenges that society unnecessarily adds to the challenges the kids and their families already have. There's no sugar coating here. While there are triumphs now and then, nothing looks easy. Like all the showings I've been to, this one was about 80% full.

AIFF: A Taxi to the Dark Side

[March 2, 2008: Taxi didn't win the best doc at the Anchorage International Film Festival, but it did win the Academy Award. Gibney sold the broadcast rights to the Discovery Channel, but they decided not to show it. But they did sell it to HBO which plans to show it in September.]

I began this about 2pm Sunday but I didn’t have wifi access.

I still need to post on last night’s showing of Joe Strummer. I’m at OutNorth now where the power went out during a showing of Taxi to the Dark Side. We’d seen about 85 minutes of it so we had enough to be pretty incensed (about the content of the movie, not the power outage.)

"Taxi" discusses an Afghan villager who manages to save enough to buy a taxi. He hasn't had the taxi long when he disappears. It turns out he was arrested and imprisoned at American run Baghran prison. A reporter manages to find his family and is shown the documentation they were given with the body. Cause of death, marked by the American doctor, was "homicide."


The power has just come back on so Autism the Musical should be starting.



Many films (there were a bunch in the animation show) later:

The movie interviews guards who were at Baghran at the time of the death as well as senior military officials, journalists, and military attorneys. I try to be objective and even handed. I said to myself, “Well they could be taking things out of context, they could be slanting this” and they could. But they have interviewed enough people intimately involved in the Baghran and Abu Ghraib prisons and senior military personnel - people who would normally be thought of as pro-Bush Republicans - and what they say is consistent with other disturbing things I’m hearing.

The movie was disturbing in many ways, but I was totally sucked into it. Those who continue to deny that the Cheney administration has authorized - unofficially if not officially - torture have to be basing their beliefs on various ideological and/or emotional bases, not logic or reason. In any case, every American voter should see this movie. If it has serious holes, then go at it. But see the evidence that's out there and make your own conclusions.

The video includes the response to the film of audience member JM. I managed to get him in a shaft of sunlight in the powerless Out North.

Jonathan and Steve Talk about Movies

I caught Jonathan McIntire (I hope the spelling is close) at the Super Shorts at the Museum. He'd been at the film maker's forum this morning. I got Steve Heimel at the Bear Tooth before Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten. I'm using YouTube today because Viddler doesn't seem to be working. And it was pretty dark in both venues so I experimented with iMovie's video fx.

Anchorage International Film Festival - Super Shorts

We were supposed to watch the Shorts in Competition, but the DVD had been mislabeled so we saw the Super Shorts instead. They were good - I liked Wine Bar the best. A slick, funny movie, with great acting, and a delightful story about couples communication. Or maybe Quincy & Althea a much looser, but more genuine film of long married couple who can't find anyone to divorce them in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

[Picture from AIFF website]


Love is Love looked at the plight of heterosexuals in a world where they made up only a small percentage of the population. Saddest Little Boy in the World had all the technical stuff right, but the contrast between the intimacy the story implied and the lack of intimacy of the set and telling of the story didn't work for me - even if that contrast was intended.

I was not in a seat where I could unobtrusively use my camera, but I did get this one picture from Auto Bank where the character on the screen practices his customer greeting until that first customer drives up.

OK, I need to mention the One Minute Guides - we saw four - Mexico, Honduras, US, and Canada. Complete country guides ina minute. There were a lot of chuckles in the audience. I would say to the film makers that the ponging globe at the beginning of each guide should stop on or above the name of the country coming next. Two of us were disturbed by the fact that it didn't.

So we went to the Museum rather than see Christian's Henchmen at Out North, because the Henchmen was going to play again, but the Shorts in Competition weren't. But since they didn't show them tonight, we can see them next Friday at Out North.

We've seen a lot of shorts anthology. This was a very strong group of films.