Thursday, May 13

Today I did something I never thought I would do... and I did it a lot. In fact, there was not one film today in which I did not fall asleep. Maybe I was just tired but probably I was just watching some rough films. Now this was not a full-on sleep but really more of a brief, respectful, in-theatre nap. The first of which was taken in Dan Baron's Basmati Blues, a musical, and this is a real thing, about GMOs. I guess this was supposed to emulate a Bollywood movie, being set in India, but none of the splendor and joy of Bollywood was there.  This should have been such a better film. The acting should have been better, the cinematography should have been better and the storyline should have been better. Oh, yeah, and it shouldn't have been a musical. The movie made almost no use out of the beautiful setting of India, the capable and actually talented cast including Brie Larson and Donald Sutherland and the writer's interesting take on the content. The writer's ability to explain the manipulations of corporations regarding genetically modified organisms in a way that was effective and interesting was wasted in such a joke of a film. Also, I don't know who Donald Sutherland owed a favor to, but he had no business being in this movie.

My second and third naps were both taken during Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin Féminin, a 1966 film features as a Cannes Classic. Obviously this was a wonderful and important film but it was also very long and very French. 

After seeing this film I went to the American Pavilion to pick up my badge and found myself standing frighteningly close to Woody Allen. I felt entirely unprepared for such proximity but he was so small that it kind of set me at ease. 

From the American Pavilion I went to approximately 15 minutes of an embarrassingly bad vampire film called Manhattan Undying. I don't remember the director and it honestly is not worth it for me to look into it. It was like a pilot for a late-to-the-party sexy vampire show on the CW or something that just wouldn't end. 

The only movie I regret falling asleep in was Nijyuu Seikatsu's A Double Life, a poor translation for a movie about a philosophy graduate student in Japan who becomes obsessed with trailing her neighbor while writing her thesis about his life. It was beautiful, enthralling, and, unfortunately, about 45 minutes too long. I missed a small chunk of exposition in the middle because I dozed off but it was drawn out so much that I was able to piece everything back together in the end. It was a great film but it wasn't finished, many scenes needed to be cut. I was pleased with this film being my first new foreign language film of the festival. I still find the subtitles distracting, they take me out of the story and obstruct some of the cinematography, but it didn't turn me off from seeing future foreign language films.

This feels obvious now but a real night's sleep is required to actually devote yourself to a full day of watching films critically, or at all.