Despite the shocking and inexplicable decision to omit Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Ruins from this year’s Film Festival (a disaster applicable only to me I think) the actual line-up is as good as everyone says. At least I think it is from surveying about 20 out of the 160+ titles in the programme – hardly a representative sample but when most of those 20 bring such joy and only a few land with a dull thud you have to think that the rest of the programme is similarly proportioned.
Last year the big Cannes winner, Of Gods and Men, was missed by the International Festival, a situation that was remedied at Easter’s World Cinema Showcase. This year, of the big Cannes movies, only Godard’s Film Socialisme is missing in action. The great Swiss iconoclast may well have produced his most interesting work in years but it will take a trip to Amazon to find out for sure. Even the redoubtable Aro Video are unlikely to take a punt on it without the Festival’s imprimatur.
As usual, I asked the helpful Festival people to point me towards the less likely, the unheralded, the little battlers, the kind of film that is easily missed when skimming the 80 page programme. Any fool can tell you that The Tree of Life is going to be interesting. Capital Times readers want more than that.
Firstly music: two documentaries impressed me and they worked so well together I wish they were a double-feature. Merle Haggard: Learning to Live With Myself is a biography of the outlaw country star as he settles in to an uncomfortable old age. Actually old age to Haggard is no less comfortable than every other age – I can’t think of a great star less at ease in his own skin.
The Wellington Film Festival (sorry,