[May 30th films]

(I’m pressed for internet time, so I’m going to do this a bit in reverse. Because obviously I have been so chronologically correct in this blog to date.)

Secret #2 was another foreign language drama. It was compared to another film, which I have seen before & loved, and went out and bought after the feature. (This is not a clue as there’s no one on earth who would know if I added something to my DVD collection.)

Next up was my first documentary of the festival, Marwencol. It was recommended all over the place, and rightly so. Marwencol is the name of a fictional Belgian town Mark Hogancamp created out of scraps of wood, toy dolls, and action figures, as a sort of self-imposed art therapy after a brutal attack left him with a brain injury & robbed of his memories. He populated the town with alter egos of people in his life, created an ongoing narrative, and takes flat-out amazing photographs of the stories.

It’s getting distribution in the fall, and I highly recommend it. I think it would actually be pretty interesting playing with Prodigal Sons. That’s for when I run my own theater, I suppose! The director was in attendance at my screening, which was particularly cool because he was able to call Mark to get an update on the doings in Marwencol, and we were able to give Mark himself a well-deserved round of applause. They were also selling books of Mark’s photographs at the screening. I didn’t get one since I didn’t have enough cash on me, but I plan to order one.

Finally, I had my only midnight screening of the festival: Splice. I added it for the cast (Adrien Brody & Sarah Polley) and the writer/director (who also did Cube.) I felt a little goofy about the whole thing since about five minutes after I ordered my ticket I started seeing ads for it on TV. But, I figured, there was no way any standard screening was going to beat a midnight at the festival for crowd energy, and I was right. It was a packed house, and I ran into a few more friends in line, which always improves things.

The film itself, though, man. Where to begin. Early on in the picture, I was expecting I’d be writing about how annoyed I was by the relentless gendering of the chimera. Little did I know that by the end gender issues would be the least of my concerns. Gore I am okay with, jumpy outy things are not a problem, & general mutant action is fine by me. What I did not expect was the ongoing squicky sexual content. If Splice had been a piece of fan fiction*, it would have had a list of warnings the length of my arm. That said, the movie was highly effective; I was definitely engaged the whole time. Engaged and horrified. I just think that there are some of you who will need to know going in that it has, for example, a sex scene of great horror and neverending-ness. EW. Ew ew ew.

Speaking of squick, before Splice we got a trailer for RoboGeisha. It certainly appears that anything worth seeing in that movie is in the trailer, and a few things I wish I hadn’t seen as well.

* On a related note, thank you SGA fandom for making David Hewlett’s mere existence in the movie hilarious to me. I have this weird affection for Rodney created entirely by LiveJournal icons.