film fest!

This weekend was the North of Superior Film Association 13th annual Northwest Film Festival (http://www.nosfa.ca - sorry, Safari doesn't support Blogger's HTML link button... yet), featuring such well-known box-office smashes as The Lost Embrace, The White Countess and Metal: A Headbanger's Journey. None of which we saw, however. Here's what we did see, with a few thoughts.

Cache: A French film with English subtitles. Not good, not good at all. A man and his wife start receiving videotapes of their house, they freak out, the man gets paranoid that it's revenge for something he did to a childhood friend in Algeria, and then he goes home and climbs into bed. Slow and boring (except for one hideous moment), with excessively long clips of the thrilling footage of their house. Woweee, a car drove by. I had a nice nap during this one; it was the first film we saw and kind of killed some of my anticipation for the rest of the festival. Fortunately, we perservered.

3 Needles: A film about HIV on three continents... Africa, where three nuns arrive at a missionary and realize that the type of help they intended to provide is not what's most needed... China, where a woman sets up a blood donor clinic with disastrous consequences, and a man whose village is wiped out wants to find out how it could have happened... and Canada (Montreal, to be precise), where a man becomes a porn star to support his parents but has to deceive his employers to keep working, and his mother ends up exploiting the situation to provide them with the only financial security they've ever known. Very good, well acted with just enough time to think about the stories.

Paradise Now: A film in Arabic with subtitles about the last day in the lives of two Palestinian suicide bombers. It's a very interesting contrast between the two men, who are passionately committed to their mission, and a woman who does her best to talk them out of it. It's a thinker, and an eye-opener for those not familiar with the longstanding conflict in the Middle East... or familiar with only one perspective on it.

Neil Young: Heart of Gold: A concert film from 2005, featuring Neil Young with 30 or so of his closest friends on stage performing his latest album, Prairie Wind, as well as some classics (Old Man, Harvest Moon, etc). Fabulous. The songs are powerful stories about life and its stages, and the film is incredibly intimate, with mainly close-up shots of Neil's face. I hadn't realized that Neil Young was such a devout prairie boy -- maybe because he hardly ever plays here. This was my favourite movie of the festival.

Brothers: A Danish film with subtitles. Michael is a stand-up family man who is a professional soldier, while his brother Jannick is an alcoholic bum who has just been let out of prison. Michael is deployed to Afghanistan, where his helicopter is shot down and he is presumed dead. Back home, Jannick steps in to help Michael's wife Sarah with her two daughters. Jannick and Sarah become close but are not willing or able to betray Michael's memory. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, Michael does what he needs to do to survive until he is rescued. When he returns to Denmark, he is unable to confide in anyone about the atrocities he was involved in and lashes out at his family. This was an amazing movie... no big surprises or anything like that, but deep and well-developed characters (even the kids!) with a heart-wrenching, gut-twisting story.

The Life and Hard Times of Guy Terrifico: A Canadian "mockumentary" about a country singer. This is just about the funniest movie I've ever seen, and I'm not even going to try to describe it.

I thought they did a nice job selecting the films that they showed (with the exception of Cache, which I firmly believe was critically acclaimed because all the critics fell asleep and were too embarrassed to say that from what they saw, it sucked). We saw movies we'd never otherwise see, and they were far better than pretty much any of the old-tv-show-turned-into-a-movie shows I've seen at Famous Players recently. (Okay, to be fair, there have also been a remarkable number of comic-book-to-movie adaptations as well, which have also been pretty much universally bad.) These movies were well-written, well-developed, well-acted, and pretty much never heard of outside of the film festival circuit. Man, that Guy Terrifico... I'm still laughing.