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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Haha. On the proviso that they understood that I disagree with nearly everything they stand for, and they were ok with that, why not? 
_________________
All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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Wokko 
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
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| David wrote: | | Haha. On the proviso that they understood that I disagree with nearly everything they stand for, and they were ok with that, why not? |
Works for Turnbull.  |
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Dangles
Balmey Army
Joined: 14 May 2015
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Nice work, David.
@Woko:What are the names of some of those 1% of art films that you liked? |
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Wokko
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
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| I'll have to take that under advisement Dangles and get back to you, can't think of titles off the top of my head, but they're in there somewhere. |
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Wokko
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
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Being John Malkovich, Amelie, Pan's Labyrinth and Donnie Darko all come to mind, Studio Ghibli animations, Leon the Professional.
They might be a bit more 'mainstream' that you're looking for but I struggle to think of the more artsy stuff I've seen (of which there have been a lot), it just doesn't resonate with me even when I can appreciate the nuance, technical skill, metaphor etc, the pretense tends to put me off. |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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Just bought fast and furious 7. Now that's art!
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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King Monkey
Joined: 15 Apr 2009
Location: On a journey to seek the scriptures of enlightenment....
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You went to trouble of dissecting the article quote by quote; I'd say it may have hit a nerve....... LMAO!! 
_________________
"I am a great sage, equal of heaven.
Grow stick, grow.
Fly cloud, fly.
Oh you are a dee-mon, I love to fiiight." |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Well, yeah. I thought it might be entertaining enough to stand alone, but then I couldn't help myself but provide a rebuttal. Mostly, it's just an article that's been shared around by a few cinephile friends on Facebook – there was one person who grumpily suggested that we shouldn't be giving publicity to such idiotic clickbait, but mostly we just found it too funny to resist.
Seriously, if someone wants to offend me, a few of their punches are going to at least need to connect. People on here have said more irritating things about 'arthouse' cinema than anything Susie O'Brien managed. If a good writer who's into cinema says that all the filmmakers I like are terrible, that will touch a nerve. Someone who's probably seen about five subtitled films in her life and writes a negative piece about a film festival for a lowbrow newspaper ... not so much.
_________________
All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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Pies4shaw 
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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^^^ Well, of course it hits a nerve - cultural Luddites like that are the enemy of our civilization, probably even more so than numbats like ISIS, because they attack from within and, worse still, from a position of militant, sustained stupidity. Really, who ever taste-tested cornflakes by reading the blurb on the back of the packet?
It really doesn't matter whether 99% of what is produced as "arty" cinema or "arty" static visual art or "arty" music or "arty" theatre leaves most (or even all) people cold. The struggle to produce thoughtful, creative and interesting new work is important, in and of itself.
Thus, as it happens, I have no particular interest, at the moment, in spending lots of time watching "difficult" cinema but I'm pleased that it is happening and that people do go to see it.
I imagine that my taste in cinema is now unacceptably old-fashioned but films I saw for the first time 40 or 50 years ago still live in my mind and fashion my everyday thinking. The Seventh Seal, Pather Panchali and Aparajito, Rashomon, Dodeskaden, Seven Samurai, The Hidden Fortress, Dersu Uzala and Kagemusha and virtually anything Luis Bunuel made, along with a raft of others, are landmarks in their particular art.
Personally, I don't think of it as "either or", so I'm also happy to watch Ant Man - and enjoy it thoroughly.
Thus, it's still funny to call out "Somebody just threw a bone at our spaceship" when that famous scene-change occurs in 2001, provided you remember that you're just making a joke and that your carefully-fashioned determination not to understand the film you're watching (or, in her case, reading about) doesn't make you more interesting than the film. |
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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| How much more could it be? |
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Pies4shaw
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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| "Daisy, Daisy ...." |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| Pies4shaw wrote: | | I imagine that my taste in cinema is now unacceptably old-fashioned but films I saw for the first time 40 or 50 years ago still live in my mind and fashion my everyday thinking. The Seventh Seal, Pather Panchali and Aparajito, Rashomon, Dodeskaden, Seven Samurai, The Hidden Fortress, Dersu Uzala and Kagemusha and virtually anything Luis Bunuel made, along with a raft of others, are landmarks in their particular art. |
Baby Ingmar says hi. 
I love Bunuel too. The Phantom of Liberty is still one of my favourites.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll5nK2RV8uA
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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Well I love rear window, I'm sure there is another old one tucked in there!
How about campy movies you love?
Starship troopers. I never understood why it copped it so bad, I still love it!
Deep rising! Another not cool but I love it sci fi!
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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Dangles
Balmey Army
Joined: 14 May 2015
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| David wrote: | Good to see Susie O'Brien of the Herald Sun enjoyed the festival too.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:G3ujvdyNr0QJ:www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/melbourne-international-film-festival-move-on-nothing-to-see-here/story-fni0fhie-1227493727179+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au
| Quote: | THE Melbourne International Film Festival was a roll call of some of the most depressing, obscure, God-awful movies ever made.
The festival, which has just ended, featured a huge range of movies about criminals, crazies, death and depression — just the sort of thing you’d choose for a fun Saturday night out with friends.
Not.
You, my friend, helped to pay for screening of movies such as The Assassin, which was set in ninth-century China and featured a 10-year-old trained killer stolen from her father. |
Yeah, and I bet they don't even speak English!
| Quote: | And there was Body, which featured a widowed coroner and his bulimic daughter. One reviewer called it a “darkly comic rumination on what it means to be alive … an almost cubist fruitcake comedy”. Yes, really.
There was also Cartel Land; billed as a “chilling cross-border exploration of vigilantes trying to fight a drug war their governments can’t win on their own”. |
Bo-ring! What right does this film have to appear on our screens once or twice when the fifth Mission Impossible sequel only gets played eight times a day at every Multiplex cinema in the country?
| Quote: | | And Only the Brave, which was a Russian post-apocalyptic epic that featured a post-war migrant and his terminally ill fiancee on a desperate search for meaningful truth. (OK. Actually, I made that last one up, just to show you how ridiculous these films were.) |
That's really clever, Susie. You should definitely be a screenwriter.
| Quote: | There’s also other feel-good romps guaranteeing fun times such as Cemetery of Splendour, Chronic, The Coffin in the Mountain, 3˝ minutes, Ten Bullets and Only the Dead.
Frankly, most of these movies would be considered unwatchable by anyone other than 25-year-old female ceramicists from Brunswick. |
You know this because you've seen them, or...?
| Quote: | But it hasn’t stopped MIFF (as it’s known) billing itself as the most “significant screen event” in Australia. Indeed, it had over 370 films, 28 world premieres and 164 Australian premieres.
So what? I’ll bet the only reason for the high number of premieres is that no one else wanted to show the movies. And it doesn’t mean they will ever be shown anywhere else again. |
A gold star for knowing exactly how film festivals operate.
| Quote: | | Yes, it’s true that 200 of the 517 sessions were sold out. But did the cinema-goers enjoy them or just endure them? Was it pure art or just pure agony? |
The latter, clearly. Nobody could possibly enjoy something that Susie O'Brien would find boring. I'm presuming here that she's actually seen the films she's talking about, of course...
| Quote: | | Even the official advertisers’ guide admits the main reason people come to the festival is to “socialise and ensure they remain ‘in the know’ amongst their peer group” (note that watching enjoyable, fun movies isn’t mentioned). |
The trouble with promoters is that, at some point, they have to try to justify how artistic/cultural events earn their place in a pure free market economy (which, of course, they rarely do). If they can't figure it out, they have to come up with rubbish like this. Susie would understand.
| Quote: | In the past five years around $10 million in public funds has been spent on this festival of joylessness, primarily through the Premiere Fund. Sometimes this fund gets it right, previously supporting films such as Paper Planes, which was a feel-good, popular movie.
Sadly, they don’t seem in any hurry to repeat this success.
This year the fund has put money into films such as Looking for Grace by Sue Brooks, which was a critical success with terrific actors that no one actually saw.
And there was Downriver, described as “a dour but intensely quiet rumination of redemption” about a man who served time for drowning someone as a child.
The fund also helped pay for Early Winter, which is about a janitor in a retirement home whose “job is a daily reminder of an existence that he’s slowly tumbling towards and the yet unburied ghosts of his own past”.
Seen any of them? Heard any of them? Nope. Didn’t think so. |
If that's addressed to the typical Herald Sun reader, then, no, I don't think so either. Of course there are many complex questions regarding the Australian Film Industry and why it so often produces commercial flops (is it quality, exposure or both?), but there's also the slight problem that none of them have started their commercial cinema runs yet.
| Quote: | | Just reading the summaries makes me want to stab myself in the eye with the pointy end of a chocolate-top Cornetto, so I can’t imagine what the actual movies are like. |
She hasn't even seen any of them.
| Quote: | Roy Morgan Research, which incidentally is one of the sponsors, says that in 2014 the film festival delivered more than $9.8 million to the local economy. Well, it would say that, wouldn’t it?
Given that most of the festival attendees were privileged young people from the centre of Melbourne, I am pretty sure most of that money would be spent anyway. |
The stupidity. It hurts.
| Quote: | Indeed, figures on the MIFF website give the best insight into just who this event is for.
Let me give you the big tip: it’s almost certainly not you. |
Yeah, probably not.
| Quote: | | Half of the audience is aged between 18 and 35 and lives within 5km of the CBD (that means they’re probably half your age but can afford to pay twice as much as you in rent). Sixty per cent are female, and three-quarters have an undergrad degree (arts, I’ll bet). |
Females? Uni students? Young people? What business do they have attending film festivals?
| Quote: | | Now, I am not a total intellectual philistine. |
I'm just going to let that one sit here.
| Quote: | I do understand that some films about our culture and history need public funding in order to be told.
I am quite fascinated by some of the films involving Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil and I think they’re stories well worth telling. Sure, they’re depressing stories, but at least they’re our stories — unlike half these movies from Romania and Czechoslovakia. |
Ummm ... not to nitpick, but Czechoslovakia hasn't been a country for over 20 years. But carry on.
| Quote: | The fact that most of these movies have absolutely zero popular appeal shouldn’t be a badge of honour, it should be cause for concern.
I want to know why we don’t have a film festival full of movies that are inspiring, uplifting and make people feel good about themselves. In other words, why not have a film festival full of movies that people actually want to go and see? |
Yeah, that'd be a great idea! A film festival made up of the exact same films that are shown at multiplexes all year around! Who wouldn't go to that?
Okay, perhaps it would work. Perhaps people would be happy to go and pay another couple of dollars for the exact same new Adam Sandler movie that they could see anywhere else, at any other time, because it's a "film festival". Maybe Susie's event would actually be a financial success – perhaps nearly half the sessions would sell out, and as much as, I dunno, nearly ten million might be added to the local economy? But let's face it, no amount of money is needed to justify sticking it to all of those elitists who keep on paying to see films that they secretly hate, and that Susie O'Brien hates too. Or would, if she cared to actually watch any. |
I copied and pasted this to an email and sent it to Susie. I'll post her reply if I get one. |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Nice work. Not sure you'll get a response, though.
_________________
All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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