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Last year's festival was bursting at the seams with headline-grabbing documentaries exposing the evils of big corporations - Super Size Me, Fahrenheit 9/11 and of course The Corporation. There's a couple this year, but the most high profile is definitely Alex Gibney's remarkable Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Along with writers Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind (who also wrote the book of the same title), Gibney doesn't just make an incomprehensible scenario comprehensible, he tells a fascinating story about hubris and greed. He finds grand villains in Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, respectively Enron's former Chairman and CEO, but surrounds them with a bevy of equally fascinating supporting characters and even manages to implicate Arnold Schwarzenegger. Sort of. Gibney's directorial style doesn't deviate too much from traditional documentary techniques of photographs, talking heads, graphics and news footage, but he does make persistent creative use of extreme sports footage (motocross and base jumping most notably) to represent the stratospheric heights and plummeting lows the energy company and its executives experienced. Plus it's a remarkable achievement of editing that a film about such an inherently baffling subject makes any sense at all, let alone be actually captivating. But as much as it often comes across like a John Grisham novel, Gibney hasn't had to sex up the events at all - like all the best documentaries, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, once again proves the old adage about truth being much more you know what than fiction.
I had been very curious to see High Tension leading up to the festival. It's a French thriller that received a general release in the US, and utilised a marketing campaign that painted the film as a broad appeal horror film while cleverly failing to reveal the presence of subtitles. Plus, director/co-writer Alexandre Aja is currently filming a remake of Wes Craven's classic 70s backwoods brutality horror The Hills Have Eyes, a job he apparently garnered partly on the strength of High Tension. Suffice to say, this wasn't your typical French melodrama. As the lights went down in the cinema, I readied myself for some nice shocking gruesomeness. But what played was wholly not what I was expected at all. As in, it wasn't even the film High Tension, but a documentary entitled My Flesh & Blood, which tells the story of a Californian woman who adopted a massive brood of kids with a variety of special needs. Some are missing several limbs, others have extensive scarring from burns. I initially thought this was a short film paired with High Tension with some sort of sick ironic juxtaposition in mind, but the film festival organisers, bless 'em, were delivered the wrong print - ten minutes into this screening the lights came up and we were all sent home with refunds. You gotta feel for the organisers, who clearly didn't have time to view the print before the screening. This conveyed to me just how down to the wire the festival planning is, and conjured up romantic notions of a lone courier motorcycling through the city with a film print strapped to his back. Like I said in my preview, I love the film festival.
Note: The Film Festival people have posted a statement regarding this incident on their website and are adding an extra screening on High Tension to the Auckland programme on Sunday July 24 at 8.30pm, in addition to the already planned screening on Friday July 22 at 4.15pm.
The Film Festival has been generous towards fans of celebrated Japanese animator Hayao Miyasaki in recent years. We've been able to see the majority of his past works on the big screen at the last few festivals, and this year we are presented with his latest film, Howl's Moving Castle. The film tells the typically weird story of Sofi, an unconfident teenager who is magically aged 70 or so years by the Witch of the Waste, who has unclear motivations for doing so. Unable to talk about her predicament, she travels out of the small Victorian-ish town she lives in and ends up inside the titular structure, a magical dwelling on four legs with a front door that can open in multiple cities moments apart. Quickly adopting the role of cleaning lady, she takes remarkably well to the bizarre furnishings and inhabitants of Howl's Moving Castle. Around the same time a war has broken out between two neighbouring kingdoms, which the enigmatic Howl (a kind of man/hawk/monster/wizard) is being drawn into. Scenes of odd magisterial wonderment, brightly coloured vistas and a message of youthful empowerment are present in most Miyasaki's films, and they all show up here. But once again, he manages to surpass any expectations. Howl's Moving Castle achieves what few modern films are able to - it actually takes you to places you've never seen or even imagined. The film feels at times like a magical fable, but at others like a surreal rumination on war and self-confidence. Sort of. Miyasaki's films are always beautifully designed, and in addition to the castle - a whacky almost Rube Goldberg-esque metal structure (see picture) - we also get a variety of super cool flying machines and numerous lush settings. Previous works such as Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away felt otherworldly in that they in no way catered to a Western audience - this was part of their appeal. That said, Billy Crystal lends this film a certain cultural common denominator in his voicing of a fire demon - a very Miyasakian character which he makes seem familiar with his borderline Borscht Belt line readings. The stellar dubbing job (overseen by Pixar's John Lasseter, creator of the Toy Story films) is also helped by Lauren Bacall as the Witch of the Waste and Jean Simmons as the aged Sofi. There is nothing like seeing a Miyasaki film on the big screen, and Howl's Moving Castle seemed very much at home in the opulent Civic.
Dominic Corry
