BANFF Film Festival Day 2 Review

The BANFF Festival is a yearly film festival that showcases short nature films from around the world. My friend's band, Redleg Husky, played during the opening and during the intermissions. One of the members scored me an extra ticket, so I decided to check it out. Even though I was a little disappointed that it was all short nature films (my friend just said "film festival", so I wrongly assumed it was day 2 of a feature-length film festival. Oh well). Anyways, here are my poorly written blurbs on each film that I had the pleasure of seeing:

The Gimp Monkeys
This was a film about the first all-disabled ascent of Yosemite's iconic El Capitan. It was only eight minutes long, but I got fairly bored with it. With the short run time, you don't get any feel for anyone in the film except stuff like "this is the guy that doesn't have an arm" or "this is the guy who tried it last year but he gave up because he leg fell off". The score was generic outdoor-action rock music which was really detrimental to what the film was trying to achieve emotionally. Even so, there was one quote that I took away from it: "We aren't doing this for charity or to raise awareness. We're doing it because we're climbers."
Score: D

Unicorn Sashimi
This film was six minutes long and was comprised of slow motion alternating shots of skiing and Taiko drumming. It was quite poetic and just cool as shit. However, it was really pushing its run time. Six minutes of skiing and drumming was cool and all, but had it went on for any longer it would have just gotten silly.
Score:B-

Mountains in Motion
This was a ten minute time-lapse film. It had some kind of lame narrative that got really annoying really fast about a traveler from 1812 talking about mountains that had power lines over them. The time-lapse was interesting but the narrative really killed any enjoyment I took away from it. The score was pretty lame too. It was just too much. The film makers could have done a better job had they made it more minimal.
Score: D-

Crossing the Ice
This was the big one - it won the grand prize in best film exploration and adventure. It's about two Australian adventures, James and Jones, who attempted to cross Antarctica to the South Pole and back again completely unaided. Spoiler alert: They succeed. But they aren't the first ones to do so. Another Norwegian fellow, doing a solo crossing, wins. The whole film was a celebration of the friendship of James and Jones - but the Norwegian guy did it by himself. Everybody was giving these guys all the praise but damn - I have wayyy more respect for the Norwegian guy. I enjoyed that they showed what the extreme cold did to the human body - it was almost gore porn in a way. All in all it was pretty entertaining, and I recommend it to everyone here just to see the incredible journey.
Score: B+

Ernest
Five minutes of a guy without teeth talking. Uh.
Score: F

Huck
About a loser who lives in a shitty house who dives off huge waterfalls in a kayak. You don't really ever need to watch this, but as Evan, the main character, is talking about how he feels like he is missing out in life because he only enjoys doing the thing he loves the most - kayaking, he says "Be careful what you wish for. It might come true". Then there is a shot of him falling into the bottom of the waterfall and being enveloped by the water - cut to credits. After the credits are over, it shows Evan being pushed, perfectly okay, to the side of the river and is totally fine. I hate that last shot so much.
Score: F

Highway Wilding
A pretty cool documentary about animal bridges and wolverines. Not much else to say about it
Score: C

Strength in Numbers
People go mountain biking to skate punk music. Is this the late '90s bro?
Score: F

Wide Boyz
A film about two UK friends who decide to conquer the hardest off-width crack climbs in the US. Really cool - really fun. I'd recommend watching this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq6hBRo5KBs

Persona - 8/10 - What the fuck?!...I feel like I need extensive knowledge about shit like philosophy and mental illness to even begin to understand this.

Alien - 8.5/10 -Full disclosure, Ian scared me more than the Alien.

Blade Runner (Final Cut) - 9.5/10 - Is this the correct version to watch? There definitely was some weird editing cuts, like when Leon shoots that Blade Runner in the beginning it cuts away before you even realize what happened. Still, loved it.

Rushmore - 7/10 - I think I like Wes Anderson's quirky adventures (Fantastic Mr.Fox, Moonrise Kingdom) better than his 'romances' (this and Royal Tenenbaums).

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi - 8/10 - May be the best of the original trilogy. Still don't get why there is such a huge fandom for this series. I guess you have to watch it in your childhood to fully get into it.

The Princess Bride - 9/10 - Instant favourite.

2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967, Godard)
Well, the scene with the coffee bubbles is fun to watch?

yo dawgs, what chris marker movie should i watch first?

Probably not La Jetée. An interesting film and idea, but it never really progresses beyond just that. I haven't seen it in a while, but I doubt there was anything of true substance to gloss over.

Sans Soleil is the masterpiece. La Jetee is important and not to be dismissed though.

excellent post! ta.

Say Anything
9.4/10

Singles
7.8/10

Jerry Maguire
9.4/10

Vanilla Sky
10/10

Elizabethtown
8.4/10

We Bought A Zoo
8.4/10

Almost Famous
My favorite movie/10

Dreww what did you not like about Ain't Them Bodies Saints? I saw it on my trip to NYC last week and I didn't think it was that bad. The VO narration was terrible (those letters being read - wtf) and the ukulele score or whatever grew on my nerves but for the rest I have no real complaints. Good acting, good outlaw story. Good enough for me.

It's not actually horrible or anything. Just for me totally unmemorable to the point of completely forgetting as soon as I walked out of the theater why I was supposed to care about anything that happened, or about why this or that artistic decision was made. For me the chief sin of the film is that the story itself wasn't very interesting, which I can't really defend at this point because I've totally forgotten it. Beyond that, generally I am not a fan of films which are a confluence of trendy aesthetic arthouse choices for the sake of being trendy aesthetic arthouse choices and not for enriching the possibilities for the film creating significant experiential meaning. As a counter-example take Upstream Color which, like Ain't Them Bodies Saints, uses a similarly trendy elliptical presentation and derivative-of-Malick-style of shooting, but it uses those cinematic tools (imo) to great emotional effect: it puts you deeply in the characters' place of not-knowing (balanced by a tantalizing accretion of clues and details), and captures that drugged-out perception of everything looking beautiful, but with a sedated, unecstatic effect. It puts you through the phenomenological meat-grinder, while being beautiful and totally in line with current trends in indie cinema, and potentially provoking reflection about questions of metaphysics, ideology, etc. Meanwhile, it seems to me like Ain't Them Bodies Saints just looks pretty and rubs its sparse articulation of drama in your face to let you know that it is more serious than a more conventionally narrative film, when an actually good film of this sort could have, like one of its inspirations McCabe & Mrs Miller, presented the drama in a related genre-subversive, matter-of-fact manner while also having rich, interesting characterization and associations with interesting spiritual/political/cultural/ideological implications. And because of this lack of interest in the story and directorial decisions, the fact that it was well acted and well photographed (and Mara has a great mouth) didn't really carry the film for me. It was emptily beautiful but unengaging and uninteresting, other than as a case-study in how to make a mediocre but critically successful indie film.

So what are some of the best films from this year? I really need to catch up and I have been more focused on watching tv shows rather than watching 2013 films. Give me a list - enlighten me so that I may become one of you.

Of what I've seen, in order of how important I think it is to see them: Upstream Color, Blue Jasmine, Before Midnight (requires viewing of previous films in series), Monsters University, Only God Forgives, Behind the Candelabra, This is the End. I would say that only Upstream Color is a truly great film, though all are legitimately worth seeing.

One of the things that's different about movies and music in terms of coming up with "end of year lists" is that with movies--unless you live in New York or LA or are going to big festivals--you often really have to wait till the next year to see most of the really good films from the year you are living in, because the more adventurous arthouse/indie/foreign stuff takes longer to get on home video/the internets.

You liked This Is the End more than World's End?

Haven't seen The World's End yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if I still ended up liking This is the End more as I'm only a moderate fan of the Pegg/Wright stuff generally.

i love both of them. kinda sad that they had to come out the same year and get compared to each other, cause they are extremely different movies in every way except for the title.