confessions of an amateur cineaste

I hadn’t seen The Wizard of Oz since I was a little kid, and so I was most happy to trade in a volunteer voucher for it down at SIFF Cinema this month. And here’s the thing: We all know the story and the songs, and there are countless lines from it that have grown a bit moldy in the pop culture lexicon. But the damn thing still works, every bit of it.

The music’s still great, the effects are startlingly good considering their age, and the dream logic of it all was fantastic for me to revisit with my obsession with Where the Wild Things Are.

The day after I saw it, I threw Return to Oz and The Wiz into my Netflix queue. Return had given me nightmares as a child, where the Wheelers were racing after me, of course. Thankfully, that doesn’t hold up as an adult. And I’d never seen The Wiz before, so that was fun. I very much liked the concept of moving it to New York, since more Americans were living in cities (then and now). Take that, real America.

* Man on Wire is just crazy amounts of fun. It’s a documentary, with a wee bit of recreation, of Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in 1974. It’s structured, appropriately enough, like a heist film, and Petite is the master teller of his own story. It’s marvelous filmmaking too, in that there’s great tension even though we know exactly how it ends.

* Be Like Others was my second documentary of the day, and utterly heartbreaking. It takes us to Iran, where homosexuality is punishable by death, but gender reassignment surgery is legal, even encouraged. It is painfully clear throughout that the vast majority of these people would never make this choice if they lived anywhere else. They’re undergoing this brutal procedure (brutal in that it is gender reassignment in *Iran*, that is, I don’t mean this to be a commentary on truly transgendered people or Western methodology) so that they can fit into the rigid societal/religious definitions of gender. Not so they can fulfill who they really are. The only thing I wish is that there had been further inclusion of women. There is one lesbian at the start of the film, and we never encounter her again. It seems like a huge gap to me. Painful & unforgettable.

* I added Becky Sharp for the form rather than the content, and was pleasantly surprised by both. It’s a Vanity Fair adaptation (obviously), and the first film done in three strip Technicolor. The color is gorgeous and the dialogue is hilarious & snappy. Good times all round. Ignore the IMDb reviewers. They’re idiots.

* Somehow I had got it into my head that XXY was a Canadian film. I blame it on mid-festival pudding-brain. It’s from Argentina, and is the story of a 15 year old hermaphrodite under increasing pressure to choose a gender. It’s just beautiful, and Inés Efron is luminous as Alex. I never remember to vote for the other Golden Space Needle categories, but I’ll try to put in a ballot for her.

* Finally, last night I had scheduled a 9:45 movie, Sukiyaki Western Django. Perhaps because I am insane. I gave serious thought to selling my ticket to someone in the rush line, and I’m glad I didn’t, because it was on copious amounts of crack. More, even, than I had anticipated. I knew it was a Japanese Western, and that Miike is kind of a nutcase director, but I did not know that it had a cameo by Quentin Tarantino, or that it was in English… phonetic English, which sounds a lot like the red room Twin Peaks scenes. It’s an excellent terrible movie, and great fun to see with a packed house.

The Lady Vanishes is, I think, the only Hitchcock in the Janus festival. The majority of the film takes place on a moving train, and is surprisingly funny, but that doesn’t make it any less suspenseful. I hadn’t seen it before, and I would be interested in seeing it again, not only because I enjoyed it immensely, but because I’d like to see exactly how tight of a script it is, the significance of other throwaway-looking moments.