gunshots, gingham and greed

SFF kicked off with with a really tasty pilgrimage to Mother Chu's Vegetarian Kitchen. The miso sauce tastes like delicious gravy which I've been craving SO badly since I went vego, even more so now that the weather has turned London on me. Need to go back and check out the rest of the menu when I have more than half an hour to reverse-vomit my food. I was in a really inexplicable panicky rush before dinner; must have been generously taking on some of the opening night stress that was blowing over from George Street and the State Theatre.



We skipped the feel-good footy flick to check out The Agony and The Ecstasy of Phil Spector, and from all reports, we didn't miss out. I only heard a couple of cheerful reviews of Looking for Eric, but most people I spoke to seemed dissapointed.

Spector, on the other hand, was brilliant. I haven't laughed out loud that much in a film in a really long time. I love the feeling of being in a packed cinema and hearing all the different kinds of laughs explode at once. Spector is an incredible character with perfect comic timing, and I found his celebration of himself above all others completely endearing. The documentary itself was well paced, but i found the onslaught of information at times was irritating. If I'm reading a quote, I don't want to be listening to a voiceover and listening to a pop tune vocal at the same time. I also would have liked to have seen a bit more older footage of Spector himself rather than the media circus surrounding his trial. The constant court CU montages annoyed me after a while. Having said that, I loved the film overall, and walked out convinced he was innocent. You can taste test the first few minutes of it here.

We then made our way down to the water to see Bluebeard. A few smashed champagne glasses and a choctop disaster later, we sat back to enjoy Catherine Breillat's interpretation of the classic fable. I'd read some really good things about this film; that it was a feminist reimagining, that the director was known for dealing explicitly with sex and violence. I was expecting a glistening black fairytale told through a little girl's horrific imagination, but I was disapointed. It wasn't a feminist reading at all; if anything there was a glaring commentary on the equality of evil between the sexes. I liked the script but the art direction felt at worst forced and distracting and at best undercooked to me. I quite enjoyed the two gingham-aproned narrators but I thought that the cuts to them could have been more elegant and their inclusion in their storyworld more fantastical. The blood-skating scene missed the mark completely for me. The blood wasn't dark enough, the child wasn't sinister enough, the corpses weren't abject enough. Corpses were a bit of a problem in this film, apparently. The dead father was visibly breathing while they mourned him, which is always distracting. However, on the most part, this felt like a well acted film that in the end was poorly captured.

We collected our thoughts at Tank Stream, which is surprisingly quite nice on a Wednesday night, before we got word that OVSS was all go and we made our way over to the always horrific Est for the afterparty. The crowd was for the most part distinctively lame. Wall to wall boredom with a little bit of celebrity shine glittering about the place. Though there was this really cute girl in a ninja turtles shirt who wanted to hold my hand all night. Vic and I threw some punk technicolor on the dancefloor inamongst the superdrunk suits. And the CC and dry from the open bar lifted my post-Bluebeard funk fairly quickly. I'll augment these tales with some pictorial evidence just as soon as I decide which pictures contain the least litigious looking champagne sluz.