Odds & Ends

Monday, July 30, 2007

MIFF Report, Part I

A good start to MIFF this year, with two enjoyable sessions on the weekend. Before I get to my reports, though, it is worth noting that Paul Martin is keeping what looks to be a very helpful running list of films that are nearly sold out.

The Best of Norman McLaren

I had thought this retrospective of Canadian animator Norman McLaren might be the cinematic equivalent of eating my greens, but this was unexpectedly enjoyable. This selection of McLaren's films alternated between highly abstract animation and little comic skits done in a semi-animated style using human bodies. I'm not usually keen on abstract films, as the lack of any meaningful framework in which to assess the work leaves the artist completely unaccountable to the audience (who can ever say whether the work is of any merit?) Yet McLaren's work defied my expectations, especially surprising given that one long slog is hardly the way to appreciate this kind of film. The shorts are remarkable for the level of energy and inventiveness they achieve in an intrinsically painstaking artform: the earliest of the shorts, Stars and Stripes, felt so contemporary in its confrontational explosion of movement and colour that it was hard to believe it was from 1941 (some sources list it as 1940 or even 1939). Other highlights included Blinkety Blank and the jazzy Begone Dull Care, but the really startling film is the last, Pas de deux. It starts as a simple shot of a ballet dancer, with occasional freeze frames to give a Nude-Descending-A-Staircase kind of look, but becomes steadily more beautiful as it progresses. It left me seriously contemplating the Norman McLaren DVD set.

Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog)

Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn is one of his most mainstream efforts: a prisoner-of-war movie (from a true story) about US navy pilot Dieter Dengler's escape from a POW camp during the Vietnam War. It's pretty conventional material - even star Christian Bale has been here before, in Empire of the Sun - but it's very well done. The performances - from Bale, and also Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies as fellow prisoners - are extremely solid, and Herzog's eye for the landscape is as good as you'd expect. (I'm just glad someone had the courage to let Herzog film in a jungle again after Fitzcarraldo). It falls a bit short of greatness, though: there are enough little moments of eccentricity that you can feel it's a Herzog film, but not enough of that really off-kilter sensibility to lift it to quite the level of his best work. Last year's MIFF offering from Herzog, The Wild Blue Yonder, was a much less successful film but showed more hints of something truly brilliant (and Herzog has been wonderful as recently as 2005's Grizzly Man). Still, it's well worth catching when it gets its mainstream release, and should be Herzog's first really successful fictional film in years. It screens again at MIFF on 4 August.

Labels: animation, herzog, miff