Day Four - Cranes.

SHOW ME A STORY

Mood before the movie: A little tired.

Ass-o-meter: All abord the train to ache town.

Comments:
Short film documentary. It's kind of a strange genre in my opinion. As a film maker I can really only conceive of two reasons why you would choose to make a short documentary, the first being that you don't have the money to make a feature length doco, or two, that the topic of your doco is very small and wouldn't have enough content for anything longer. Optimistically I would hope that because it's only going to be a 10-20 minute film that the film maker has distilled the content down to it's very essence and packed it into this short period of time to blow my mind.....

Unfortunately, this selection of Short Documentaries really didn't come even close to blowing my mind. Firstly, this morning one of the documentaries that was scheduled to play was from China and it go pulled, presumably due to pressure from the Chinese government to boycott the festival. So this film was replaced with a film about cranes, and the people that drive cranes, who as it turns out are fairly boring. Really, there was only one stand out film amongst these from Ireland, and was a little snippet of a husband and wife living on a farm. This doesn't sound too interesting but the film makers clever use of stop motion animation made it visually exciting and engaging.

Oveall Rating: 1.5/5


KISSES

Trailer:


Mood Before movie: Pretty tired.

Ass-o-meter: Low.

It seems that film festivals are magnets for films about kids copping the rough end of the stick. Set in Dublin, Ireland, this movie is no exception.

The movie follows two teenagers (Dylan and Kylie), that on the spur of the moment, decide to run away from home with only a handful of cash. Like any good teenager they immediately blow all the money on mixed lollies and wheelies shoes. After this they try and find Dylan's older brother who also ran away from home two years earlier. The rest of the film follows the highs and lows of their night on the town.

Kisses was well made and uses a nice subtle blend of black and white to colour from the first act to the rest of the movie. This film was entirely in english, however, there was points in it where I couldn't understand what they were talking about due to their t'ick working class accents. The young actors in the film did a very good job, with a special mention to the young actress (Kelly O'Neill) who I think stole the show.

Rating: 3.5/5


GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE

Trailer:


Mood Before movie: Lazy. Didn't even have to leave the cinema from the last film....

Ass-o-meter: Once again, pretty low.

Comments:
Drop a few bucks in the Soderbergh machine press the button marked “Movie” and hey presto, a new film pops out. This film was not unlike a sugar filled can of Soda either really; Looks shiny, is pretty palatable, but contains no real sustenance.

This is another story about the a high class hooker that's “struggling” with maintaining her life with her boyfriend and clients. I say “struggling” cause really there is no struggle going on here much at all. The only problem really arises when she tells her understanding boyfriend that she might leave him for a guy that she just met and had a coffee with.... I'd say this would go in most real life hookers books as being the best day imaginable...

So in the end, I didn't really care about what happened in this movie. I think the ass-o-meter was low because timeline of scenes was so jumbled up that it kept my brain busy enough trying to figure out exactly when things were happening. Which is also generally the mark of a film that the film maker has tried to save in the editing room... No such luck on this one.

Rating: 2.5/5