The NZ Film Festival: The Wireless playbook

JUDAH: Uh, everything. As usual, the dizzying NZIFF line-up has both titles I’ve been eagerly awaiting and a bunch that weren’t even on my radar, but are now front and centre. I think my mostly hotly-anticipated film is Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin – I’ve been holding out since the raves from Venice to see a man-eating ScarJo plastered across that glorious Embassy screen, so I’m casually ecstatic to see it leading the herd. Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is another I’ve been following threads of over the decade or so it’s been shot and from all accounts it absolutely lives up to the hook of its premise.

WBU, Adam?

ADAM: Under The Skin and Boyhood are pretty key, yeah. I’m especially interested in seeing how Linklater’s 12-year experiment panned out, though I also owe Linklater an allegiance: my first-ever NZIFF film was Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly, which I saw at a small cinema in Palmerston North in 2006. A woman kept trying to sit on me at the start of the screening.

The film that’s got most of my attention, though, is Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer. I’ve been waiting for the film since it was announced in 2009/2010. That’s probably because I’ve been a Bong acolyte since my first year of uni, when I saw his monster movie/black comedy/family drama/anti-American satire The Host in a lecture theatre with three other people. Bong’s my favourite filmmaker, a maestro with a superhuman ability to tell stories with wild, exhilarating tonal shifts, and goddamn I’m stoked to see it without Harvey Weinstein carving into it.

JUDAH: Indeed. Thank the Lord Almighty that old Harvey Scissorhands is not an issue NZ audiences have to worry about. At least in this case of this particular Neo-Marxist blockbuster…

This year’s haul also seems to unreasonably fruitful in [female-centric] horror. Nicolas McCarthy’s Home has been steadily accruing some pretty promising buzz out of SXSW. We’ve also got David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, prompting similar levels of hyperbole-laden hype from Cannes, for what sounds like a pretty compelling conceit too. There’s Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, which looks creepy AF and I could hardly be more pumped for. And last, but hardly least, we have our own Gerard Johnstone’s homegrown horror-comedy Housebound to look forward to – a playful, lo-fi midnight movie which Bill Gosden himself recently declared the most fun he’s had in a horror film since he sat in the Paramount in 1984 for Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead. I won’t take that lightly.

ADAM: See, I’m a bit dubious about It Follows, if only because we’ve had decades of horror treating sex and women’s sexuality as sources of terror. Though Mike D’Angelo says it’s aiming for a more “heartbreaking” metaphor, everything I’ve read suggests that it’s tilling that field pretty faithfully. I’m totally willing to be convinced, and the monster – a force that can take human form, can’t be seen by others, and walks towards its victim at a steady, ceaseless pace – sounds amazing. But I have worries. (I have the same worries about When Animals Dream.)

I share your hype for The Babadook, though. I really enjoyed the short film it’s based on, a spooky little tale a bit reminiscent of Alison McLean’s Kitchen Sink (a flat-out modern classic) in the telling. If Kent can improve on the short’s looser ends, particularly its underwhelming ending, then Babadook is gonna be a hard one to beat.

Home and It Follows are both in the Incredibly Strange section, which is an intriguing section this year because it lacks the obvious Coffin Joe/ABCs of Death-style ‘this shit’s gonna f*&k you up’ entries. The closest I can see to it is Killers, which sounds like I Saw The Devil: slapstick, sadistic. It feels like section curator Ant Timpson’s changed tack this year, with less gross-out grindhouse and more oddball flicks. Hell, word out of festivals is that Jodorowsky’s Dune is warm, life-affirming, inspirational, the kind of film you totally don’t expect to see in that section.

On the one hand, I want to reserve my pesos for films I can’t quite easily procure on DVD, but on the other, it’s truly something else to see some of these classics presented on screens befitting of their stature.

JUDAH: I think between Killers, Sono Sion’s blood-soaked genre-riff Why Don’t You Play in Hell? and the swathe of intriguing horror on offer, there’s enough there to satiate that particular sect.

ADAM: Oh yeah, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that this makes Incredibly Strange a shell of its former self or something. I’m really keen for Sono’s Why Don’t You Play In Hell? – his four hour long Love Exposure, a whirlwind of manga tropes, Christian symbolism, teen sex anxieties and grand conspiracies, is probably one of the most bizarre, memorable films the Film Festival Trust has brought to New Zealand. Then there’s Borgman, which sounds bonkers in the best way, and Ari Folman’s first film since Waltz with Bashir, The Congress. I’m just surprised to see it less stacked with brutal, sick genre films. I mean, it’s only been three years since the lineup of Cold Fish, Hobo with a Shotgun, I Saw the Devil, The Last Circus and The Woman.

JUDAH: NZIFF’s dedication to restored classics is wonderful to see, even though I always struggle to justify splurging on seeing them. On the one hand, I want to reserve my pesos for films I can’t easily procure on DVD, but on the other, it’s truly something else to see some of these classics presented on screens befitting of their stature. After all, seeing Taxi Driver at the Embassy in 2011 still remains the best cinematic experience I think I’ve ever had.

This year, we have classics from Jean Cocteau, Orson Welles and J.B.L Noel, among others. I happen to own the Criterion Blu-Ray restoration for Beauty And The Beast so – assuming we are talking about the same print – can vouch for how essential (and goddamn gorgeous) it is, but am still tossing up whether I should reserve a spot on my calendar for The Lady From Shanghai, which I’ve never seen.

ADAM: I’m also really keen for The Lady From Shanghai, assuming it gets to Dunedin. The old prints have always been a bit of a gamble for the smaller centres, and it’s already a definite that we’ll be missing the live cinema offerings in Auckland (Prix De Beauté) and Wellington (Show People).

I’m also hoping we don’t miss out on Goodbye To Language 3D, Godard’s latest. I’ve always found his work to be hit and miss (and the way certain friends tell it, liking Bande à part and Le petit soldat the best is ‘doing it wrong’), but I can’t imagine anything more essential than Godard experimenting with and breaking apart the language of 3D. 

It’d suck to lose that opportunity because the 3D screens in town are being hogged by Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s latest stab at Hollywood (The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet 3D) and a nature documentary (Amazonia 3D), no matter how good they are.

JUDAH: I locked in my ticket Goodbye To Language this morning: as inconsistent as grumpy late-Godard can be, I still do not want to miss the one-off Wellington screening on offer (and the theoretical ramblings about the state of art and culture that’ll presumably come with it).

The thing that got me to look twice, though, was a friend raving about Diao Yinan’s previous film, Night Train – the power of viral marketing or something.

Have any films that you were not previously anticipating popped out from the programme for you, Adam? I hadn’t heard anything about Anna Odell’s The Reunion, but the comparisons to Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen have piqued my interest. Also, The Mule sounds amazing – the blurb had me at “howls of protest”, and since there’s rarely a year I don’t see something uncomfortably tense and Australian, this might prove to be the ticket.

ADAM: What, not The Rover lol?

JUDAH: Unfortunately, R-Patz disqualifies the Aussie cred.

ADAM: Well, Black Coal, Thin Ice is the main one that jumped out at me, for a number of reasons. For one, the programme compares it to the films of long-time role model and aspirational figure Bong Joon-ho (its description even makes it sound like a Chinese Memories of Murder). I’ve also had pretty good luck with the Festival’s Chinese entries recently – A Touch of Sin was my favourite film of last year and 2012’s 11 Flowers was a great Cultural Revolution bildungsroman. The thing that got me to look twice, though, was a friend raving about Diao Yinan’s previous film, Night Train – the power of viral marketing or something.

There’s also Force Majeure (a weirdo European black comedy built around rich people and a controlled avalanche? Count me in) and Orphans & Kingdoms, Paolo Rotondo’s psychodrama. The Film Commission’s Elevator Scheme has had a pretty good hit rate so far – chilly sci-fi Existence and Sophie Henderson’s Fantail – and Rotondo’s a New Zealand theatre veteran with the kind of scene cred to make me excited to see what he does, a la Dean Hewison’s How To Meet Girls From A Distance in the 2012 Fest.

But what about stuff missing from the slate, Judah?

JUDAH: Films missing from the line-up are both blessings and curses; I have no idea when I’ll eventually catch things like Sundance-winner Whiplash or Berlin-favourite ‘71, but if anything else got added to my schedule at the moment, I’d probably be too fatigued to enjoy it. That said, I had crossed fingers for Xavier Dolan’s Mommy. It was NZIFF that introduced me to his earlier works in the first place (which I didn’t really like, so go figure), but the better his craft has got, the less our shores have seen of him.

I had the pleasure of catching 2012’s Laurence Anyways when I was over in Melbourne, but was hoping either his Tom At The Farm (a psychosexual Highsmithian thriller that wowed Venice last year) or his aforementioned Cannes Jury winner might grace our programmes. Perhaps that damned French-Canadian wunderkind is just too prolific to bother keeping up with?

ADAM: True. I’ve had a rocky relationship with Dolan’s films, but Tom At The Farm looks aces.

At the top of my list for mourning is Dear White People, which looks hilarious, sharp as a knife, and production designed to the hilt. I’m banking on that getting a limited release now, being an American comedy whose visual language is easily sold to the Wes Anderson set, but maybe that’s a long shot.

I’ve also been hanging out for The Voices, which had everyone saying all the right things at Sundance (those things being ‘Marjane Satrapi’, ‘talking cat’, and ‘Ryan Reynolds playing a lunatic’). And then there’s Pascale Ferran’s Bird People, which played Un Certain Regard and got the kind of reviews that go “See this film but see it knowing as little as possible about it”, which is exactly the kind of film I want to see at NZFF. But can’t this time.

So that’s all of that stuff. I guess we can end with what the people came here for – lists.

JUDAH’S TOP 10 MOST ANTICIPATED: COLD IN JULY; FORCE MAJEURE; AT BERKELEY; THE BABADOOK; KUMIKO, THE TREASURE HUNTER; HOUSEBOUND; MANAKAMANA; TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT; BOYHOOD; UNDER THE SKIN.

ADAM’S TOP 10 MOST ANTICIPATED: And mine - GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE 3D; BORGMAN; WHITE GOD; HOUSEBOUND; CONCERNING VIOLENCE; THE BABADOOK; BLACK COAL, THIN ICE; THE TALE OF THE PRINCESS KAGUYA; WINTER SLEEP; SNOWPIERCER.

This content is brought to you with funding assistance from New Zealand On Air.