Carmel in Oz in NZ

Quick post as I'm on the road -- travelling round New Zealand with my Dad. We've been here for four days now, each day we're driving across the country, staying in a different hostel, exploring and generally following our noses.

Tramping in Kaikoura

We've done plenty of tramping (the Kiwi word for hiking) and we've seen seals basking on the rocks, heard some crazy bird calls, sampled lots of local beer, watched a rugby match (mandatory) and stumbled upon an open mic night in a small town! We almost got stuck on a mountain in a hail storm but escaped just in time. One of the most awesome sights was in Kaikoura where the snow-covered mountains ran down into the sea. The terrain is awesome, and there are millions and millions and millions of sheep everywhere -- it's true! Haven't stumbled upon any Hobbits yet but will let you know if we do...

NZ Valley

I'll blog more about it when I'm back home in Sydney, but here are some pics for now. Today we're off to Lake Takepo and we're going to climb a mountain called Mount John, in Dad's honour.

John the explorer

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Toronto part 1

Wow, I've been back from Toronto over a week now and I still haven't recovered enough to find five minutes to blog about it! There's so much to write but I'm exhausted, still battling jetlag, and now my dad's in town so I just want to blog about showing him round Sydney and our impending New Zealand trip. Drat! Ok I'll try to bash out three quick Toronto posts before we set off to Kiwiland, then I'll be offline and incommunicado for a couple of weeks, but laden with snaps of glaciers and mountains when I return...

So, first post, what films did I see? Not the primary reason for my trip, unfortunately, as I am not a programmer, but between meetings, research and snooping I did manage to fit in a fair few movies. The great thing about not having the constraints of programming upon me was that I could just go and see whatever I felt like. Although I missed some of the films I was dying to see (there were over 300 after all) here are some I caught.




O’Horten – Norway, Bent Hamer
A slow moving delightful film following a train driver who retires and goes about his retirement with a sense of child-like discovery. Well-acted and sparsely-scripted, the film has some excellent moments of dry Scandinavian humour and some amusing visual touches. 8/10




L’Heure d’Ete – France, Olivier Assayas
A woman dies leaving an extensive collection of valuable art and furniture as well as a sizeable house in the French countryside and her three children have to deal with the implications of breaking up her life’s work. The first third of this film was wonderful – well-scripted with realistic overlapping dialogue true to the bickerings of a family get-together, and intricately-drawn characters with deeply-depicted relationships and histories. The film didn’t live up to its promise, however, and became repetitive and dull – eventually I didn’t care what happened to them or the house. 5/10





Waltz with Bashir – Israel/Germany/France – Ari Folman
This animated story is about a man tracing his own history as he has blocked out some of the horrors of war in the middle east. Powerful and mesmirising, the film looks at the recent history of the Arab-Israeli conflict as well as the issue of memory and its fallibilitiy, in an innovative way. 6/10




Appaloosa – USA, Ed Harris
A Western starring Viggo Mortensen, Ed Harris, Jeremy Irons and Renee Zelllweger, this is an enjoyable romp through the tale of two gun-slingers who attempt to bring peace to a one-horse town in their own inimitable style, Some great dialogue. 8/10





Slumdog Millionaire – UK, Danny Boyle
An 18-year-old boy from the slums of India gets on Who Wants to be a Millionnaire and miraculously finds himself one question away from the 20 Million Rupee question. Told with flashbacks which explain how he has known each answer despite his lowly upbringing. The children bring the slum to life in effortless realism and the older characters depict a violently real gangster lifestyle but through all, love and goodness prevail in this warm, well-acted feel-good film. 9/10





Genova – UK, Michael Winterbottom
Colin Firth plays the father of two girls whose mother dies in a car accident partly because of the foolishness of the younger girl. The film expertly deals with the issues he faces bringing up a young girl with an over-active imagination and a moody teenager on the brink of adulthood. The tension built for the viewer is reminiscent of Don’t Look Now, and the helplessness the father feels is palpable, as well as his own struggle with grief. 9/10





Blindness – Canada/Brazil/Japan – Fernando Meirelles
This apocalyptic film is written by popular Canadian Don McKellar and stars Julianne Moore, Danny Glover, Mark Ruffalo, Gael Garcia Bernal and Sandra Oh. It deals with the chaos and inhumanity which follows an outbreak of blindness in a town in America. Literally, people start going blind everywhere, infecting each other, so are locked up in huge disused prisons and hospitals and guarded by vicious members of the military prepared to shoot any infected person who strays from the facilities. The blind people descend into warring factions and display the most base of human traits. Not exactly uplifting stuff. 6/10



Me and Orson Welles – UK, Richard Linklater
Set in the thirties, this film has a charismatic impersonation of Orson Welles at its centre, with a young boy joining Orson’s theatre group as they perfom Julius Caesar, learning about the famous man while he learns his lines and some of life’s lessons. I didn’t like the heavy-handed sentimentality of the two love stories around the lead boy, nor the kookie self-conscious nod to cool with the anachronistic converse trainers and zips on the boy, nor the usual self-aware intellectuality of Linklater's dialogue. I could see what Linklater was trying to do here but was not impressed. It divided the group I was with, with two of us loving it and two of us hating it. I fell into the latter camp. 3/10




Three Blind Mice – Australia, Matthew Newton
Having missed this film when the SFF had the World Premiere it was a pleasure to view the 35mm print at Toronto, and again meet the cast and crew and congratulate them on their film. This low-budget feature was shot digitally on the streets of Sydney, with an excellent local cast and was written, directed and stars Matt Newton. I was a little skeptical at first of the hand-held cameras and over-reliance of close-ups, but was soon swept away by the story and felt the action built to a powerful crescendo, with some witty repartee along the way. I enjoyed seeing my city on film in all its gritty grungy glory, rather than the Sydney of Tourism NSW commercials. 7/10




Three Monkeys – Turkey/France/Italy, Nuri Bilge Ceylan
I caught the first hour of this film before leaving because I was so bored! The film told the tale of a mother and son left to fend for themselves during trying times, as the husband/father serves time in prison for a crime his boss (a politician) committed. The mother begins an affair with the boss, but the film unfolded slowly and laboriously, with too many unnecessary shots and predictable dialogue. 2/10



Synecdoche, New York – USA, Charlie Kaufman
I loved Being John Malkovich but hated Adaptation, so entered this film with an open mind. Starring the always-wonderful Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Katherine Keener and Michelle Williams, the film is about a hypochondriac writer who creates a world within a hangar, falls for his assistant, develops several illnesses, and other things completely irrelevant to the plot. The performances are consistently brilliant throughout, the first third is witty and sets up a promising set of storylines and characters, but ultimately Kaufman descends into an absurdist world losing the bulk of the audience. 2 parts brilliant, 4 parts mindfuck, 4 parts rambling incoherence. 6/10




Medicine for Melancholy – USA, Barry Jenkins
This low-budget indie played at SXSW in Texas earlier this year, and was shot in San Francisco on two digital cameras with a cast of two leads and a bunch of extras. It concerns a young guy and a girl who meet at a party, and the film follows them over the ensuing day, examining urban lives, loves and the issue of being Black in contemporary America. Avoiding any Linklater-esque tendencies to sentimentality, the film unfolds in a gentle, unforced and poetic way, part homage to the city of San Francisco and part lamentation of the impacts of gentrification on the city. The characters are richly drawn and the two lead actors are real finds. 8/10





Fifty Dead Men Walking – UK/Canada, Kari Skogland
The ever-watchable Jim Sturgess plays a young Catholic boy in Belfast who is enticed by both the IRA and the British government to work for them, and enters into dangerous territory as a servant of two violent and unpredictable masters. Slickly-scripted with some shocking violence and a typically solid performance from Ben Kingsley, I ultimately felt dissatisfied with the film for turning a very real and troubled time in Ireland’s history into a run-of-the-mill gangster flick. 6/10




Hunger – UK, Steve McQueen
Again, I missed the screening in Sydney so saw the winner of the Sydney Film Prize in Toronto instead. An incredibly powerful film, Steve McQueen’s directorial debuts bears all the marks of his day job as a visual artist – the dialogue is sparse (apart from one amazing scene between Bobby Sands and a priest) and the images are impeccably drawn and harrowing to watch. I almost had to leave the cinema in squeamishness, but held on in time to see it to the end. Awesome, but very difficult to watch. It was interesting seeing this juxtaposed with the film I’d seen the night before, as both dealt with a similar part of history in a very different way. McQueen was not trying to be didactic in his storytelling, yet his enforced distance from the issues made the film even more resonant. 8/10




A Film with Me in it – Ireland, Ian FitzGibbon
After a selection of tense and powerful films I decided to end with an Irish comedy, starring Dylan Moran. Silly, farcical but incredibly true and witty, in a clumsy Irish way, this film had the whole audience in stitches (and an industry audience at that!) and was a real charmer to end with. 7/10


So, as you can tell, I didn't get to see much, then.

More to come about thrilling TIFF behind the scenes action. Plus, the one hour I spent doing something non-work related, Shock, Horror!

cx

Carmel in Oz in Canada!

Woo hoo! I'm in Toronto! Exciting stuff.

So, my first trip overseas since I moved to Australia, after vowing never to take evil long haul flights ever again, takes me to my beloved Northern Hemisphere, where strawberries taste good, winters are cold and Autumn is about to fall. I leave behind me the beginnings of Spring, divine-tasting avocados and Mangoes, and a beautiful city that really feels like home. So it was with mixed feelings that I stepped onto my Qantas jet on Monday.

Sydney Skyline with the Spirit of Australia


Long haul flights are, it's true, evil, but there are ways of coping with them, none of which I remembered until it was too late. Any discomfort I felt on the flight was rapidly eclipsed by the horrifying and degrading experience I had while transferring in San Francisco. I didn't even want to go into the US, I just wanted to go through to Vancouver, but the whole experience was awful and has put me off ever going to the States again in my life! The American tendency towards righteous self-importance and misguided over-diligence is embodied nowhere more than in its airports. I felt like a prisoner, the accused, a pariah. I was fingerprinted, had my eyeballs scanned, asked heaps of impertinent questions, was misdirected, shouted at, selected for 'increased security measures', talked to like I was stupid, and finally, after a long run across the terminal, allowed to board my transfer flight to Canada.

Anyway, I survived, and finally made it to Vancouver. A series of email mishaps had led me to land without having made contact with any of my relatives in Vancouver, which was a little unnerving. However, Granny had emailed me her cousin Helen's address so I just hopped into a taxi and drove downtown, arriving on her doorstep unannounced! She was a little surprised to see me, as Siobhan had expected me to land a couple of days later, but there they both were, Siobhan tanned after her trip to Fiji, and Helen taking a while to recognise me. They were both very good at keeping me awake so I could survive my jetlag.

With Auntie Helen in Vancouver


Monday 1 September was the longest day in my life so far. In fact, it lasted 42 hours, as I flew over the date line and landed before I set off, despite a 14-hour flight. (Yes, I can't quite get my head around it either!). Siobhan and I took a trolley car around the city the next day, and Helen's son Bryn and his partner Stephen joined us for dinner -- they were hilarious and the banter between Siobhan and Stephen really something to behold. However, the highlight of the trip had to be our discovery of the Fluevog store in the Gab district. John Fluevog is my favourite shoe designer, and he is Canadian (in fact, we found out he actually lived on that street!). I dragged Siobhan in there and tried on heaps of shoes. She helped me choose a gorgeous pair and I closed my eyes and held out my credit card. Soooo happy.

Fluevogs!


As quickly as I had arrived, I left for Toronto. This is the real reason for my journey -- a work trip to the Toronto International Film Festival. This is one of the biggest and most respected film festivals in the world, and it's my first time here. Still not quite over my jetlag, I'm now in a whirlwind of screenings, meetings, drinks, random bumpings-into people and hanging out in the Industry Delegate Centre on the laptop. The time difference has made it a little difficult to liaise with Australia, and I'm finding I'm out all day and working all night, with little time to actually sleep, but I'm sure I'll catch my festival wind and get into the swing -- it's only Day 2 so far.

I'll blog more about TIFF in a few days, but thought I'd let you all know I'm safe and sound and loving Toronto. It's a beautiful city, with scores of cyclists and stunning buildings, and despite the unexpectedly muggy heat I'm having lots of fun.

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