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Un Conte de Noël

A Christmas Story, in other words.  But definitely not this one.

OK, so here's the thing with this movie.

Yesterday was the first day of classes.  I had two, one big lecture class and a small seminar, which is often even more tiring than the big lecture because it's sometimes a lot of work to pull talk out of students (that said, I think I may be lucky this year--so far, I seem to have some good talkers).

This means it was a tiring day, because I do a lot of class prep on the day of my classes.  This is not out of procrastination, or anything, it's because I already have existing lecture notes and outlines written up, and I think I lecture best when my tweaking of those notes is very fresh in my mind.  I've got a good enough memory that I can look through everything before the lecture, and then spend most of the lecture away from my written notes (powerpoint helps this, of course, because it keeps me on schedule).

So, anyway, yesterday was tiring, and so was the weekend, with its four movies, plus some class prep, plus work putting my freaking tenure file together, which this weekend involved photocopying all my student evaluations and getting my teaching portfolio in order.  And looking through class evaluations is always draining, too, I find, because even though mine are generally quite good, its the couple of bad ones that always stick with me.  So, for example, the ones that say I'm awesome (a generally used term of approval among university students across cultures, it turns out) make me smile, but the one that says I hate Russia and trivialize suffering is the one that I keep thinking about, to the point that I get quite upset about it.  (Incidentally, it's now making me worry about the way that I talk about Russia--for example, I certainly hope that all my writings from Russia last year didn't give the impression that I hate the place... I was going for loving bemusement, more often than not [with, of course, as always, as about any place, some exceptions].)

Sigh.

This means that last night I was not really looking forward to my 9:15 PM showing of a more than two hour long French family drama.  I didn't bother to make a real dinner, because something I wanted to cook turned out to have gone bad in the refrigerator.  And by the time I got to the screening, I was tired and a little wet, since it started to rain right before I left the apartment.

And yet?  Once the film started I barely felt tired until the very end of the showing, but given that it was then approaching midnight, I think that's justified.  And then, I totally was happy to stay until well after midnight for the director Q&A.  In other words, my good TIFF streak continues.

The film is about a big family based in Roubaix, a small town up by the Belgian border (I looked that up later).  The patriarch and matriarch (Catherine Deneuve!) live there in a big house, and their three kids, nephew, plus assorted spouses/partners and kids all come to visit for Christmas.  Complicating the story is a series of rifts within the family, and the matriarch's recent diagnosis with a form of leukemia that might be partially cured by bone marrow donation by someone with a particular blood match.  So there's the drama of who's a match, and what that means.

It's again a very funny film in places, and a very sad one in others--at the very beginning we learn that the family had an older son who died of leukemia at age six (and we learn this in an unusual and visually arresting way).  It's big and sprawling, almost messy, and yet somehow pulls together.  The visuals are dramatic and unusual, as was the score.  I found some of the performances really touching--and I particularly adored the patriarch, played by Jean-Paul Roussillon, a roly-poly, gravel voiced charmer.  I could have sworn I've seen him in something, but based on his imdb page, I don't seem to have.

And, you know, it's funny.  This film also kind of just stopped rather than ended (though with a Shakespeare quote that gave a bit more finality), but this time I didn't mind.  The film had earned that kind of ending for me, while I don't think Linha de Passe did, somehow.  Maybe it's because the individual stories in Linha de Passe were so much more dramatic that just stopping felt like cheating.  Here everything was just toned down enough that the stopping worked fine.

Ghost Town and White Night Wedding; or, if laughter is good for the soul, then my soul is much improved

Seriously, such a good day at the festival.  Actually, such a good weekend, given that I basically quite liked both the movies yesterday.

First up was Ghost Town, which is a total Hollywood movie that's about to open in the US.  I put it on my list because I think Ricky Gervais is genius, and I hoped he'd be there.  He wasn't.  Actually, no one from the movie was there, which sort of sucked.  But despite that, it was a lot of fun.

The poster for the film says something like "He sees dead people.  They annoy him."  And that's about right--Gervais plays a misanthropic dentist who... well, honestly, you can probably guess.  It's not a particularly innovative movie, structurally, though I have to give its supporting small role actors props for being more than just stereotypes.  (Actually, I was completely amused by one of them for reasons that had nothing to do with the film.  Aasif Mandvi played Gervais' partner in dentistry.  He's now probably best known for being a correspondent on The Daily Show, where he's pretty brilliant.  But the first time I ever saw him he was also playing a dentist... on Oz.  And therefore he played not a mild-mannered dentist, but rather a prison dentist who gets revenge on a white supremacist patient by telling him he gave him a gum transplant using tissue from a person of color.  In context, it was awesome.)

But here's the thing.  Ricky Gervais is brilliant.  Fact.  I laughed an enormous amount.  And for me, that totally makes up for any predictability in the larger plot.

(That said, he needed a better makeup artist.  It's like his makeup artist decided, well, Britons are pasty, so pasty he shall be.)

(Also, I looked at the trailer after watching the film, and I think I'm glad I didn't see it first.  It includes some of the funniest bits, but without the context that makes them REALLY funny instead of just mildly ha ha.)

Then this evening I saw I think my first Icelandic film ever, White Night Wedding.  It was very good, very funny, but sad, too.  Which, as it turns out, is fitting.  The director and one of the stars came to the showing, and did a great Q and A at the end.  They had a few fun things to say about shooting the film (there are a number of scenes in which people end up in the ocean... and it turns out it was about 5 degrees when they were shooting; the men all got to wear wetsuits under their clothes, but the bride had no such luxury), and then there was this:  the film's an adaptation of Chekhov's Ivanov.  A loose one, with some very different motivations.  And a far more interestingly structured one:  it starts with a man on the eve of his wedding, and moves forward to the wedding, while intercutting with scenes from his first marriage.  It's very, very funny in parts (mostly the present ones), and very, very sad in some of the other bits.  Really, deeply enjoyable (though I'll admit I had a slight quibble over the ending, but not enough to obscure the larger piece).

And the sock?  Well, today wasn't a great day for working on the sock.  My time knitting before Ghost Town was limited by the fact that I was lined up outside in the rain, which meant juggling the sock and an umbrella.  I actually did manage that better than you might think, and this is where the sock was after that.

But then I only got a few more rows done before the second film, because I had friends seeing this one, too.  And so I was keeping an eye out for them while knitting, which slowed me down.  And then once they came, we talked, and I didn't knit.  But, still, I'll certainly (knock on wood) have a sock done by the end of the festival.  I hope!

And I did have a couple of conversations, if brief ones, about it.  Which is always a good thing, too.

The Ghost/Домовой (and other thoughts)

The Ghost was a pretty darned good straight up Russian thriller.  Again, part of the TIFF summary:

"Though The Ghost is just his second feature, Armenian-Russian director Karen Oganesyan shows the confidence of a veteran. He displays a remarkable control of mood and pacing while unfolding this story of a novelist who is drawn into the world of an assassin. Every element – the precise cutting, the cool autumn colour palette and especially the layered and nuanced performances – contributes to a gathering sense of danger. Oganesyan knows how to keep the viewer guessing."

The film had a few places where logic failed... well, actually, on second thought, it's more that there was a big motive left unexplained.  In this case, though, I don't think I minded that, because I can come up with reasons for it.  And there's one death that... well, I'm not sure who the victim was.  But otherwise, it was pretty tight, as thrillers go.

More, though, it just looked cool, and had great atmosphere.  I particularly liked the way the director used Moscow.  He shot in not very many famous, postcard places--the conservatory was probably the most famous place, but even that's not really touristy, necessarily.  Instead, he used both kind of old courtyards and buildings, and weird grassy areas between new towering apartment blocks, and also very snazzy new restaurants and offices.  You can kind of see it in the trailer.  I was perhaps a little too involved thinking "do I know that place?" or "where is that?" while watching, which is the same problem I have with things shot in Chicago.

On a completely different note, one of the fun things about knitting while waiting in lines and before the movies is that you can listen in on people's conversations.  Yesterday I heard two young guys going on and on about their various computer equipment, one upping each other with the sizes of their hard drives. And another set of young guys describing to each other their personal philosophy of film rating.  Both The Lives of Others and Tropic Thunder got very high reviews from both.   And I heard a fairly scathing mini-review of the opening film of the festival, Passchendaele, which is a big WWI drama with Paul Gross, perhaps best known as the cutie Mountie in Due South.  The review was "Paul Gross is starting to look like Norm McDonald, and I just can't take him seriously."  Damn!

Detroit Metal City

Utterly insane.

The story of a mild mannered farm boy with an alter ego who wears a cape.

Familiar?

Not quite. 

An alter ego as the lead singer of a death metal band.  Who is, I guess, kind of a superhero of sorts, so maybe the comparison's not all that far off.

Well, here.  Even though the trailers are all in Japanese, you can kind of figure out what's going on.

Anyway, it was insane, and silly, but for the most part deeply enjoyable.  During the Q and A, someone said it wasn't stupid, but I think it kind of was.  Not in a bad way, just... it was.

My only caveat:  the lyrics to one of the death metal band's songs.  They were just so over the top misogynistic that I found it difficult to appreciate the satire.  Otherwise... heh, several times over.

Linha de Passe

I found this movie frustrating.

Again, to quote the official description of Linha de Passe,

The film focuses on four fatherless brothers and their pregnant, still unmarried mother. Living in cramped quarters amid the concrete jungle of São Paolo, they represent millions of others, struggling to make a living while flirting with the temptations thrown their way as they scramble to get ahead or simply try to survive. The result is a deeply humanistic portrait of the stresses and strains placed on a commonplace family.

I chose this film because I really, really liked and admired the other two films by one of the directors, Walter Salles, that I've seen--Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries.  They both kind of swept me up and showed me things about South America in general, and Brazil in particular, that I did not know.  This was a very different sort of film, caught up with this small set of family members and their particular trials; the mother's a maid, the oldest son a motorcycle courier, the youngest son clearly has a different father than the older three, and wants to know about his difference...

My frustration lies with the ending of the film.  Or, rather, the stopping of the film.  I don't think it ends, it just stops, if that distinction makes any sense.

On the one hand, I get that as a narrative choice.  If the film is just following these people around, showing kind of a slice of life, then, fine, life does just go on and you can make the choice to end things wherever.  There's no particular dramatic denoument in life, so why should there be in a film like this?

Except that... it is a film.  And fairly clearly the story of this family is constructed so that everyone has some big issue climaxing at the same time.  And so to just stop, without quite reaching those climaxes, or even hinting at their aftermath, feels kind of cheap.

That said, I got very caught up in the characters and performances.  Apparently most of the actors are non professionals.  (Though one of the sons is played by the little boy in Central Station, all grown up.)  (And one of them looked like some crazy cross between Jeremy Sisto and Gael Garcia Bernal, which meant... very pretty.)  They did have me caring about them, though, and I physically reacted to some events, flinching, or putting my hands up to my face.

Actually, though this may have been because CLARK JOHNSON was sitting behind me, it reminded me about how I often end up watching The Wire... absorbed, and waiting nervously for when everything goes to hell for the various characters.

I just wish the film had given a bit more closure.  I don't need a happy ending at all, I just want an ending of some sort.

Waltz with Bashir

First movie.  The official TIFF site describes it like this:

"Ari Folman's animated documentary Waltz with Bashir is a seminal entry into the canon of war films. Told from the very personal point of view of Folman himself, it is a ferociously honest exploration of the reliability of memory and the long-term impacts of violence on young soldiers."

It is, essentially, the story of Folman's efforts to clarify his memory of his service during the 1982 Invasion of Lebanon/Lebanon War.  He has a vivid image of himself and two others floating in the sea at night, seeing flares go up, illuminating a wrecked Beirut, dressing to walk into the city, and turning a corner into a sea of wailing women after the Sabra and Shatila massacre.  But the friend he remembers being there with him says it never happened.  And so, by talking with friends, former fellow soldiers, psychologists, and one news reporter, he tries to remember what really happened.

The really striking thing about the documentary is its look--it's animated, in a style that is like rotoscoping but isn't, apparently.  So we see his conversations with friends, but animated.  And we see dreams, hallucinations, and memories.  It's often really, really beautiful, in a very odd, spare, graphic novel sort of way.

I looked up various reviews before going to the showing, and one judged the film in part on the following criteria:  would anyone care if it weren't animated?  But I think that's not even a question worth asking, because the animation seems to me to be the whole point.  Certainly there's an element of the film that's about war atrocities and complicity in them, and telling truth to power, and all that.  That element particularly seems to take over in the very last moments.

But much more of the film is about the unreliability of memory--how past dreams and reality are mixed together; how single secondary moments become the most vivid and clear parts of an otherwise murky memory (there's a hilarious [and, actually, I thought there was more humor in the film than the audience was willing to laugh at] bit of animated pornography that I think shows this well); and how others' memories color our own, to the point that other stories become our own stories.  And the animation is central to the way the film explore those ideas.  I don't think they COULD be explored without it.

(Also, someone asked the director "why animation" at the end of the film and he essentially said that he never thought of doing it in any other way... and then noted that, anyway, if it weren't animated it'd just be a bunch of 40 something guys sitting around talking, and who'd want to sit through that?)

My interpretation of the film was perhaps also influenced by an odd triad of things.  Before the screening, the director gave a little introduction, in which he noted that in many ways the story could just as easily be a story from Vietnam, or the Soviet war in Afghanistan, or Iraq today.  And then one of the TIFF pre-movie ads had a little funny thing about making movies on cell phone cameras and distributing them through youtube.  And right before I left for the screening, I watched an episode of Generation Kill, in which one of the marines spends a lot of time videotaping everything he sees, and there's an journalist recording everything he can about this particular small group, and a number of the real marines portrayed in the film ended up working on the production, and in one case even playing himself.

And I thought about one major difference between the various wars Folman referenced and Iraq now--the almost relentless self-documentation that technology and e-technology have brought (like, for example, this blog).  And I wondered what that does with memory.  Does it better preserve it?  Or does it alter it in other ways, by exacerbating the tendency for memories of single moments to overwhelm the whole?  Or by bringing in an element of self-censorship, or perhaps more to the point, an already polished literary version of reality?

A toe and ten tickets

So, I've decided that this year I will again work on socks during the film festival.  And so, when I went over to the box office to pick up my tickets, and to exchange two of them, I cast on and started knitting as soon as I got in my first line.

And this is how much I got done--nearly a toe.

I bought this yarn in late winter when I was yearning for spring to come.  Instead, they're going to turn into end of summer socks, holding on to the greenness even as fall comes creeping in (seriously, while driving back from Chicago I noticed bits and pieces of leaves turning colors already... and far too soon!) and the students come creeping back (well, yelling back).  I think the socks are going to be more or less these, though knit toe up and with separately shaped toes, and a short row heel.

The only reason I got so much done is because I decided to exchange two of my tickets.  When I looked at my schedule I realized that I'd put three French films in my top 10, which didn't seem right.  Not that I have anything against French cinema, but given the range of films here, I didn't want to devote nearly a third of my views to France.  And one of them also made a fairly tight connection between two movies--I'd have had to race from one theatre to another fairly quickly.

So, I did an exchange and lucked out.  While in the line people around me were talking about what they did and didn't get, and no one, even someone in box 37 (they started at box 9), got into a Russian movie, Domovoi (which they're translating as The Ghost, though a domovoi is really a house spirit).

But, when I got to the exchange counter, I asked after it anyway... and a ticket had just freed up.  So, I exchanged two of my French films for one Russian and one Brazilian.  So, all in all, I'm seeing Waltz with Bashir, Linha de Passe, Detroit Metal City, The Ghost, Ghost Town, White Night Wedding, Un Conte de Noel, Il Divo, Gomorrah, and Apron Strings.

I am pleased.

Various other knitting things

I am attempting to keep my knitting down to two projects on needles at one time.  I've allowed myself a bit of swatching or winding or planning for future projects, but no real casting on.

There's not a real reason for this, other than hoping to keep myself a bit focused, and also to keep my knitting basket from going chaotic.

(Actually, I'm a fairly ordered, organized person, at least for my job profile.  People are perpetually amazed at how neat my office is at school--there's much more of a norm of the crazy, messy professor than the relatively neat one.  I'm just like, I've got a huge file cabinet, so why not use it?)

So, I finished off my Noro socks this week.  For those of you who aren't knitters, Noro's a cool Japanese company that's particularly famous for deep colors and self-striping capabilities.  And they just came out with sock yarn (i.e., a thinner weight yarn than any they've produced before).  It's kind of a big deal--or at least a deal that people (knitters) are paying attention to. 

I bought some, and in particular a colorway that screamed spring to me.  The pinky purples, the greens... lovely. 

The sock pattern is more or less the broadripple pattern, here.  Except I added in some ribbing.  And knit them from the bottom up.  And I gave them different toes, meant to fix my toes poking through problem.

When I finished them, I started up something new.  Here we have the first pattern repeat and then some of a shawl I quite like, Lily Chin's reversible rib shawl from Vogue American Collection.

Basically, it looks like this on the other side, with the cables swirling the ribs a bit.  And it's just going on like this for a long time, until it makes a long rectangular shawl.  It's exactly the semi-mindless, semi-thoughtful knitting I'm in the mood for right now, as classes end and the term comes to a close.

The yarn is the black alpaca I bought from Laura before I left Colorado that has tried to be various other things.  Like, first it was going to be a top-down raglan cardigan.  Then I decided that was going to be too heavy and just not right, so I frogged it.

Then it was going to be the Union Square pullover, but then I decided that I so rarely wear pullover sweaters anymore, it would be a lot of boring work for very little reward.

Now, it's going to be this.  It'll be a significantly heavier shawl than the pattern describes, because the yarn's a bit heavier.  But I sort of love the idea of a big, black, alpaca cozy wrap, even as it starts to get warmer, and less cozy wrap-weather-like, outside.

The second thing I have on needles right now is a totally reconstructed version of the hex coat, which I started last fall.  It was far too big and long and wrong.  So I frogged the whole damn thing, which was a pain in the tuchus, because I'd knit a bunch of the hexagons AND started the process of weaving in the ends before deciding it wasn't working.

But, I did it.  And I reknit the body all in one piece, cutting WAY back on the size, like this would be an XXXXS according to the pattern as written (OK, a slight exaggeration).

I think I'm happy with the length and the size, generally.  It'll be kind of an open jacket in the end, which is what I wanted in the first place.  I should perhaps have made it a touch larger, but I think I'm going to decide that I need to trip my hips a bit, which is totally a fact, instead.

I've got three more hexagons to knit, and then I have to tackle the sleeves.  That does require a little tackling, mostly because I have to do a little calculating before I do them.  Particularly for the sleeve cap.  I hate refiguring out sleeve caps, because the geometry of how the armscye and the sleeve cap fit together is not entirely straightforward.

But, tackle it I will.  Yeehaw!  Math ahead!

Apologies, Colorado folk

My Colorado relatives have been singing the praises of Crocs since before I left.

And I just yesterday finally acquired my first pair.  (Costco!  Woohoo!)  I know, I know.  So late!

But.  They are, indeed, great.  I've barely had them off since getting them home.

So, thanks for the recommendation, and sorry it took me so long to convert!

I have another foot-related thing to show, a pair of socks in the new super fancy Noro sock yarn.

Pretty!  The color way, with the purple/pinks and the greens made me think of spring, which is actually coming now.  Despite my "blah" post from Friday, the weekend was quite nice and sunny.  There's still little in the way of blooming anything (hey, I haven't seen any forsythia here, which saddens me), but I'm sure that's coming.  At least, I assume that Canadians plant bulbs and the like.

Anyway, the pattern I'm using is a variation on the "Broad Ripple" pattern; I'm doing them toe up, which changes the orientation of the chevrons.  And I'm purling a few stitches to give it a bit of ribbing.  And, biggest new thing for me, I'm attempting to make them footed.  That is, there will be distinct left and right foot socks--I'm hoping this will help solve the problem of holes in the toes that I've been having.

OK, and one more thing.  This totally and completely amuses me. 

Knitterly things

I did actually buy a bit of yarn on my travels.  Not much, but a bit.

I felt like there was a lot more yarn in central places on this trip to Helsinki than the last time I was there, four years ago.  I could just have noticed it more (though I did notice some last time), but... I'm claiming it as a change.

Anyway, there's this building right in the center, by the cathedral, that's been transformed into something of a crafts market.  And one of the shops has a lot of yarn and knitted things.  And they had this yarn, hand dyed Finnish wool.  I liked it.  No clue what I'll make, but I liked it.

I think one reason I liked it is because I'm hankering for green.  I'm very ready for spring to feel like it's actually come, not just come on the calendar.

A month or so ago I bought some green sock yarn, because I was then already prepared for spring to arrive, which of course it hasn't.

Now, though, I'm kind of wanting to make socks from a new knitty pattern:  Posey.  They're kind of insane, but I also kind of love them, for some totally uncertain reason.

So I'm thinking of combining the green sock yarn with some grey-blue sock yarn I bought last year to make them.

Except I have to finish the shawl first, because I need to use the needles from it.  And because I'm trying to be more monogamous in my knitting, which is problematic for picture taking, but sacrifices must be made.

(Sacrifices?  What am I talking about.  Whatever.)

So, I wound all this yarn last night, and printed out the pattern, and am raring to go... once I finish off the last 15ish rows of that shawl.  Which will actually not be that fast of a finish, because the rows are getting really long now.  The shawl has 32 pattern repeats, and they're up to around 22 stitches each now.  So... that's a lot of stitches.  It's still very pleasant knitting, but not fast.