SBIFF

Being sick forced me to abandon plans of productivity and relinquish control of my day to the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

Two negative points. Poor organization and pretentious, obnoxious, self-involved “film buffs” with dubious skills of discernment and no real criteria abound.

That said, film festivals are always a good time, though I wish I could have gone to see some shorts (one of my favorite genres and sadly, like short stories, highly unmarketable and therefore hard to view in any format – much less on the big screen)

So waiting an hour in the inclement sun, feeling woozy but determined to maintain consciousness we went to see:

http://imdb.com/title/tt0362518/usercomments-1

Corazón de Jesús (2004) the third film by Bolivian director Marcos Loayza. I admit lack of familiarity with Bolivian film, although it seems that Loayza studied at Cuban film workshop (whose name eludes me) whose sole goal was to inspire a group of young filmmakers from all over Latin America to return to their countries and found “national canons”. Indeed.

There were moments of hilarity as elements common to many countries whose economic development is stifled by the long arms of bureaucracy, the “mordidas” as Jesús, who works at the ministry of finance accepts willingly; the random shuffling of papers that can change the course of a life, the inefficiency of hospitals, the frustration in dealing with insurance companies.

In many ways this was an excellent film: it doesn’t moralize, in fact, the protagonist (with whom we identify profoundly) has only dubious moral standards: he is a victim of a society that requires situational ethics, but rather elicits, in laughter, an examination of the Institutions that bind and destroy the average person. The imagery, while not shying away from the realities of “La Paz” which include heart-breaking poverty, does not fixate on these elements. This is not a movie of social decadence or denouncement. Thank God.

However, the film’s absolute downfall was its attempt to divide, in chapters, with epigraph-like interludes by a less-than-talented trovador. There was no coherence beyond the poorly sung and repetitive lyrics whose tangential relationship to the themes was extraneous at best, distracting and painfully annoying at worst. The first interlude with the staged singer is bearable, the second leads the viewer to believe that there will be a cleverly worked meshing of realities that will neatly tie the intertwining stories together. By the third the viewer realizes that there is no intention of reconciling these two unrelated spheres and there is a sense of dread as we are forced to listen to the monotonous and imitative voice several more times throughout.

The end of the story is extremely clever but the movie ultimately fails because it closes with the camera fixing on the tomb (for far too long), not of a known character, but of an unrelated, unknown personage, whose pertinence to the story is non-existent. It doesn’t close with an air of mystery, but rather leaves the viewer thinking: what was he smoking and why did I waste my time?

Here the overall value of the film isn’t greater than the sum of its parts but rather lesser for the sum of its parts. That said, if you can ignore the bad performance (someone’s friend or lover?) the rest was quite enjoyable.

Cutie Honey
Japan (2004)
Hideaki Anno
Based on cartoon by Go Nagai

For someone who finds practically no interest in cartoons, and much less Animé this was actually a good time. Super cute actors and actresses in hyper-kitsch Japanese pop-culture saving the world by use of computer-aided reconfiguring of the human being. Isabella, who clearly cannot read subtitles was as able to follow the plot as one who could, as the words were mostly trivial and unnecessary. The point was, of course, to see the power of love. The triptych that laid itself before our eyes in super-sexy splendor had a deeper thrust which was (despite the campy power-rangers pokemonesque – as Isabella pointed out- action) that to work out of hate will leave you empty but to work out of love, to breach the limits of corporate alienation imposed on the über-developed countries of this world, and to find companionship in others is the ultimate path to fulfillment.

Definitely worth the 4 bucks at the Isla Vista theater, especially because of the audience participation and the permission to laugh at the absurdity of the very well portrayed Japanese pop culture, including evil-doers whose weapon was a karaoke microphone.

Not high art, but who doesn’t enjoy a super honey super hero once in a while.