The film festival is coming around and I couldn’t be happier. If you aren’t sold on it yet, (yes the movies are a bit more and yes, there are more crowds), perhaps I can share some unique reasons why the Film Festival is one of Cleveland’s unique treasures.
- Even the bad movies are good. When you see a bad Hollywood film, you know what happened. Too many script writers, bored actors, overblown budget on special effects, none of which helps make a movie good. A FF movie can also be a klunker, but it is never due to indifference or lack of focus. A few years back, the movie “Flight of the Red Balloon” was supposed to be this great homage to the original Red Balloon a movie for children that is timeless The sequel failed miserably, but am I glad I saw it? Yes. I also ran out to see the original again.
- These movies go where Americans fear to tread. “Bad Boy Bubby” is an Australian comedy that begins with the adult son being sodomized by his parents in a basement that looks like a dungeon. Yes, its a comedy. After he escapes and sees the world, it is non-stop laughter. I saw this movie nearly 20 years ago and I still think of it to this day.
- You never know what may pop up. About 5 years back, I saw a Russian film “House of Fools”, that is a true story about Russian troops bombing a Chechen mental hospital and the patients are left to fend for themselves. A typical gritty foreign film? A Bolshevik cuckoos nest? Then, out of nowhere, singer Bryan Adams appears in the film because he is the object of a patient’s obsessions. Many celebrities love to make these appearances just for the effect.
Here are a few more movies worth checking out.
- Caterpillar – Japan. This one was given high marks by both John Ewing and Timothy Harry at the Cinematheque. Director Koji Wakamatsu is known for tackling taboo subjects head-on. His new film, a rabid indictment of militarist nationalism, deploys Japanese propaganda as wicked satire in a discourse on war crimes, disabled veterans, spousal abuse – and sexual perversion. It is the late 1930s and Japan is embroiled in the second Sino-Japanese War. Lieutenant Kurokawa has committed atrocious crimes against Chinese women. Now he’s back in his village, horrifically mutilated, yet designated a living War God. Limbless, scarred, mute, and nearly deaf, the only thing left to him is sex with his long-suffering wife. Repulsed by this new duty, yet clinging to the prevailing idea that the home front is the last line of defense, she does her best for her husband and the Empire.
| Monday, March 28 |  9:10 PM |
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| Tuesday, March 29 | 4:35 PM |
- Farewell – Netherlands. A giant shadow glides across wheat fields, cities, open plains. As it passes silently overhead, the faces of thousands of people turn skyward. The Graf Zeppelin, the granddaddy of all airships and a behemoth of 776 feet, is on its first round-the-world flight. Sponsored by American newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, the Graf took off from New Jersey in August 1929 with English reporter Grace Drummond-Hay on board. An actress reading for Lady Hay, the first woman to circumnavigate the globe by air, narrates FAREWELL. Told in the form of an invented diary set to breathtaking documentary images of the zeppelin’s majestic flight, the film brings to life Lady Hay’s vivacious personality and the buoyancy of the 20s, when technology seemed to be ushering in a new world of tomorrow.
| Saturday, March 26 | 4:20 PM |
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| Monday, March 28 | 11:20 AM |
- If I want to Whistle, I Whistle – Sweden. This one is filling up fast. The whistler in question is a deeply unhappy teenager named Silviu, in Romanian juvenile detention for theft. He gets by as best he can, trading cigarettes for favors and trying to avoid being manhandled by other boys. When a pretty young psychology student arrives to do research at the prison, he’s smitten. A few days before his four-year sentence is up, Silviu learns that his mother intends to take his little brother to Italy. Desperate to keep his brother from suffering the same fate as he did, at the hands of a self-centered mother with indifferent parenting skills, Silviu begs her not to take the boy.
| Friday, March 25 | 8:20 PM |
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| Saturday, March 26 | 11:20 AM |
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| Sunday, March 27 | 9:30 AM |
- The Arbor – UK. There are few existences more drab than those lived out in the Buttershaw Estate in Bradford, England. “Estate” is a British misnomer for the post-war council housing blocks that are hotbeds of family violence and drug addiction. Inconceivably, a playwriting genius emerged from this bleak world in 1982 when Andrea Dunbar’s “Rita, Sue and Bob Too” took London’s theater world by storm. Andrea was 18 and a single mother at the time, and her work spoke of rampant drug use, crime, and casual sex among England’s lower classes. THE ARBOR is an unusual meditation on Andrea’s life and that of her unhappy daughter Lorraine, who grew up similarly unable to shake her addictions to drugs and violent men.
| Monday, March 28 | 7:10 PM |
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| Tuesday, March 29 | 11:45 AM |
- There was was an Island – Papua New Guinea. I am reasonably certain that I have never seen a film from Guinea, but you will be in for a treat. Once upon a time, there was a beautiful tropical island in the Pacific. The Polynesian clans of the Takuu atoll in Papua New Guinea lived the same way for a thousand years, weaving fibers for huts, harvesting taro roots, and fishing for subsistence. With no shops and no electricity, the islanders relied on an unreliable boat from the mainland to provide them with supplies. But now trouble has come to Takuu. As a result of the industrialized world’s carbon dioxide emissions, the sea is rising and the islanders’ gardens and homes are threatened by salt water. Three clansmen allow us into their lives as they explain what the creeping tides mean for their way of life. The community invites scientists from Australia to evaluate the situation, hoping they might help hold off the water. Already the government is recommending they relocate to Bougainville, 250 km away. A film forum is included on Friday’s film.
| Friday, April 1 | 4:15 PM |
w/ FilmForum | |
| Saturday, April 2 | 2:05 PM |
See you at the movies!!!!
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