Just Left

Human Rights Film Festival

The Human Rights Film Festival (http://www.humanrightsfilmfest.net.nz/) is happening next month around New Zealand. You can see it in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch cinemas.

It looks like a good lineup and a worthy event to support. I'll be reviewing the programme in the next few days and choosing a few to head along and see.

The Wellington series is happening at the Paramount Theatre on 9 to 16 May, and I hope that the attendance is good. Wellington does seem to have a good record of attendance at such festivals (there are a lot of them!) and being the liberal city that this is, I'd expect a festival on these themes would be popular.

If you are interested in human rights, I encourage you to share the news about the festival. Have a look at the programme, talk about movies you'd like to see (or have seen), tell your friends and head along.

Star Wars test

I too did the Star Wars test, have not done it before now because I guessed what I would be in advance...

Bourne Conspiracy

Saw this in Nelson over the weekend. It was pretty good. A review I read said it was like a Bond flick but not so shallow and boring. The reviewer was right. The only dodgy thing was the moving camera stuff, all over the place - made you feel seasick just watching it!

Worth seeing if you haven't.

PS - no blogging yesterday because I was sick in bed. More of the same today, I might just do a quick post on the Auckland mayoralty.

Fahrenheit 9/11

I saw this movie last night at the fundraiser I had organised.

It was quite interesting. I have read enough of the reviews to understand where the manipulation lies in the film, and there is manipulation there. Probably the most blatant is the shot of George Bush at that elite dinner party, about the haves and have-mores - if my memory serves, that was at a National Press Club fundraiser where everyone was saying stuff like that, it wasn't a speech to the Republican Party. (That said, it was still pretty funny.)

Despite the problems with the film, it is worth seeing. Not because of the plot - not the direct plot anyway. I don't have much time for people who think the Bushes and the Bin Ladens are conspiring together.

What I did like was the personalisation of war: it was a good movie to remind you that wars kill real people, and the leaders who order the wars - and their families - are never on the line. That's a powerful statement about power and how it works.

The other interesting point was that war is working people fighting each other, at the bidding of the fat cats. The United States armed services are predominantly people we might call 'white trash' and Latin-American and Black Americans; the poorest and most deprived communities provide most of the troops for the Empire's wars. This has always been the case in every empire, but in something which calls itself a democracy is pretty chilling.

Ironically, such people join the armed forces because they're often the only way out of the poverty and lack of life chances they have. The scenes with the two Marines recruiting in Flint, Michigan were spinetinglingly creepy. And having gotten out of poverty through this great institution, they are then sent off to kill other people rather like themselves.

I don't like blood either, so the shots of people injured or killed were not too great. They had to be there though, as part of the personalisation thing. Some people seem capable of believing that the "enemy" aren't people - well they are, and watching them die helps remind you of that.

It was a pretty subdued crowd who came out. But definitely worth seeing.

Latter Days

This was on at OutTakes, and is a film about a Mormon missionary who falls for a gay guy while on mission in LA. He tries to come to grips with his feelings, gets disowned, etc.... all the love and tolerance you might expect from a happy congregation of Mormons. :(

Very disturbing film, in some ways. I saw it with a friend who has a direct stake in these issues and it was more disturbing to them than it was to me - but disturbing anyway.

It's pretty sad the level of hate some people and some groups have for something which is just innate in people's lives. This film is about homophobia, essentially, and the inability of the guy's family to deal with it.

Why do churches who proclaim justice and help for the disadvantaged continue to hold to an obsolete social convention of 2000 years ago? Why in God's name do they persecute this, and only this, section of the community without any rational or logical basis?

I just cannot get my head around it.

Makes me very angry, and it stoked the fires set alight by the new head of the Anglican Church, blathering away on the front page of the Weekend Herald.

More on that tomorrow.

Jordan

Goodbye Lenin

I saw this on Sunday at the Penthouse Theatre up in Brooklyn. It's one of my favourite Wellington theatres, because of the atmosphere and the vibe. The irony is that in the year I lived up there, I only visited it half a dozen times. Seems silly in retrospect.

Anyway, "Goodbye Lenin" is a German film with subtitles, and is really rather good. The reviewer who said it was a comedy should be shot though. It's a film which centres on the story of a woman who goes into a coma around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and wakes up eight months later with a heart condition, unable to deal with shocks of any sort.

Obviously being a socialist activist and then missing the destruction of your society would be a pretty big shock. Finding out capitalism had won after all would conceivably have finished her off. Her son then, played by someone who reminded me of an Italian guy I know, decides to construct a world unchanged for his mother. The film is about the unravelling of this, and how he infuses his fake socialist world with his own dreams of how it could have been.

It's a touching look at family, and a reminder of how corrupt and brutal the East German regime was, even towards the very end. It's also a nice explore through what an alternative humanist socialism might have looked like, from the writer's perspective. There are elements of comedy but it's not a comedy. It's too, well, German for that.

All in all I'd give it an eight out of ten, and recommend it as a film worth seeing.