Friday night (without Bruce) I went to see Passio with Bruce's mum. This was a really strange performance as quite a lot of the audience was there to see Part's Passio and didn't really know what to expect with the film alongside it. Most of them wouldn't have gone if they'd known what to expect since the film was pretty traumatising most of the time. It had a lot of old footage of science experiments.. but without knowing what it was it looked like torture. Even though it's a sort of relief to find they were medical experiements it doesn't really make it less disturbing to watch. The experiments were things like electrical shocks on dead bodies. But it originally looked like tortured, naked people outside freezing to death with other people watching. There was also eye surgery, naked people with what looked like giant pads sticky taped to them (sometimes acting as a slave so I'm not sure what that was about) and a very primitive caesarian which for some reason was reversed (or put back in?!?) at the very end. I explained ending with a caesarian birth and Bruce thought that sounded very relevant up until I mentioned it being put back in. Most people I know weren't even watching by then so no-one has many theories on the relevance of that. Is that a bit Freudian? Or is that just me?
Seriously, people were leaving in droves. Most of the remaining audience had their eyes shut. The lady next to me nearly threw up and then bolted. I've heard someone DID throw up. The poor guy to my left had brought his 15 year old son and had to take him away. It should have had an R rating.. or a warning or something. Poor bugger just paid $40 for the kid and $50 for himself just to walk out soon after it started because it was unsuitable for the teenager. Pretty rough. What's worse is that the festival had screwed up the ticketing (with lots of people apparently) so these two weren't originally seated together.. and they weren't told. They just received the tickets and they were for other sides of the town hall. We let the Dad squish in.. and if we hadn't he wouldn't have been able to get his kid out. That's nasty shit.
Apparently, the movie tied in really nicely with the meaning of the text.. but without the meaning of the text in front of me as I watched I really had no idea. I've talked to a few people about Passio and what they felt the film maker was doing.. and my best guess is that he had a whole heap of film footage he wanted to get out to the world. He created a controversial film and set it to something people would go and see. After a whole bunch of unsuspecting people see his film with the music they came to see there is an uproar. Then through that publicity the word gets out to a whole bunch of people who really want to see that sort of stuff.
That said, the music was AWESOME. Theatre of Voices have some amazing soloists.. and Chamber singers (even though most of the chamber singers had disappeared to sing in Tim Sexton's/Philip Glass' Satygraha) sounded fantastic too. It was very hard to concentrate on the music with the movie on, though. I did note that it seemed like the choir was singing whenever the movie got REALLY disturbing. I think the pieces fitted well together in that way. That's not to say that I thought the choir were disturbing.. well, whatever :P
Sunday we saw Mike Reiss from the Simpsons talk about stuff he'd written for the show. He was a pretty funny guy and a great public speaker. He did his research, too. Only a few jokes fell flat because he didn't realise Australians didn't really know what he was on about.
Then we had coffee between shows (Bruce hadn't had any coffee for three weeks and was killing for some good coffee).
Then onto The Host. That was some serious Korean Monsterlicious fun. We also had a huge bonus when we found out the director was going to watch it with us and do a Q&A afterwards. Yay us! We were stoked. The director was young and very pleased we liked his film.
The film was great. The plot was vaguely plausible in a sci-fi kind of way. The military were made to look like inefficient, power hungry wankers. A small family was shown to be completely dysfunctional but protective of their young. The monster looked like a realistic, scary monster. It made me jump and clutch Bruce's hand several times. It was great!
Now we just have to set up Bruce's house around the Sydney trip so we can have guests stay for Womad. Nothing to stress about (Hahahaha).
Tomorrow we're watching Into Great Silence which looks pretty amazing. We'll probably be too busy getting ready for Sydney to tell you all how it went.
Labels: bruce, cmax, festival, film, me, movies, moving, simpsons, tv, womad, yay
Posted at 9:19 AM # | Comments
