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2010 Melbourne International Film Festival

July 23rd 2010 04:07

This year’s Festival may have officially kicked off last evening for the elite and socially ambitious with opening night film The Wedding Party, but for those of us pinned to the lower rungs of the social ladder the true grunt work gets under way today. It’s a daunting mountain to climb, wading through film after film, battling the pretentious and the absurd to find a spot and enjoy what this is really all about: the films themselves. Within a four or five block radius in the city, Melbourne comes alive for those with a serious appetite for celluloid.

I really hope I live long enough to last the distance this year. My own undertaking is one that covers new terrain. Some 30 films are on my personal agenda over the next 16 days, with Inception and a couple more possibilities to be added to the list. 2 days off only. Did I mention work? Or sleep? Inconsequentials. The kind of peripherals that will only serve to distract my focus in the end.

Such needs are for wimps content to secret themselves away from the harsh Melbourne winter, wrapped in their cocoons of safety. Not for social misfits like us. It takes guts to do what us Festival nerds do. Not to mention lashings of stupidity. Or maybe adherence to strict kamikaze principles.

This is life, death and film - all intertwined, just as they should be. It begins today. There’s no turning back. Not from pneumonia, mouth ulcers or severely numbed rear ends. All trite ailments that will savage only the unworthy.

There are plenty of filmic highlights forthcoming.
I hope.

Tonight begins with a mouth-watering doubleheader: Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Air Doll and the Australian outback horror Red Hill.

Local director Bill Bennett returns with Uninhabited, a supernatural tale set on a tropical island.

The Korean film The Housemaid is a remake of that country’s 1960 shock classic. The original also screens at MIFF this year but dammit, I can’t make it. Let’s hope the remake isn’t a disappointment.

There’s the gritty Winter’s Bone from American independent director Debra Granik and Mammuth, a road movie with Gerard Depardieu.

There’s plenty more to be served up from a darkened and peculiar Asian palette: Paju, Poetry, Dream House, Caterpillar, and most promisingly of all, the quintessentially bizarre Japanese film, Symbol. (One of my favourite critics, Neil Young, awarded this 9/10. That's good enough for me!)

Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy and Gasper Noe’s long awaited Enter the Void are sure to be talking points too, regardless of how brilliant or dire they may be.

A comic delight could be the animated film My Dog Tulip. The synopsis alone made it irresistible. Will it be slightly twisted? (Well probably not as much as I’d like it to be!)

There are a few more films with a local bent in The Tree and Dreamland. And one from New Zealand too in Boy.

I could go on. There are plenty of others on my agenda too. If only I can stay awake.