Wednesday, July 09, 2008

More film festival films!!

So this week I bought four more tickets for the film festival - now we have half the tickets associated with our final 10:)

These are the tickets I bought - I can hardly wait for the festival to begin!

DONKEY IN LAHORE

There's no shortage of crazy love at this year's Festival, but Brisbane filmmaker Faramarz K-Rahber's account of his Aussie friend's five-year courtship of a beautiful Pakistani woman is out on its own. Brian, a sometime Goth and fulltime lonely heart in his late 20s, encounters 17-year-old Amber while visiting Lahore to perform at a puppet festival. When she kiddingly proposes he marry her, he's dazzled and makes it his purpose to do just that. His conversion to Islam is the first step on a long road fraught with obstacles, not the least of which is the impossibility of the couple's ever properly getting to know each other without first marrying. Brian persists through despair and discouragement, while the filmmaker fills us in on the changes of heart and perception undergone by Amber's perplexed family. The cross-cultural assumptions are sometimes so preposterous that you may want to laugh and weep at the same moment. Donkey weighs up the choices and chances that shape its unpredictable tale with touching insight.

TEETH

Mitchell Lichtenstein’s fiendish, black comedy-horror Teeth updates the ancient myth of “vagina dentata” into a high-concept social satire with a razor-sharp script, outlandish gore and a phenomenal comedic performance by the hypnotic Jess Weixler. As the leader of a school chastity movement called The Promise, virginal Dawn is pushed to go “all the way” by seemingly nice guy Tobey. Unfortunately they both discover, rather messily, that she has another set of chompers between her legs. As her sexual awakening blossoms, the arterial flowering is close behind and Dawn deals with the profound changes in her life. When Dawn’s creepo heavy metaller brother begins to act on his disturbing and lifelong obsession for her, we know that this probably isn’t going to end prettily. Teeth is possibly the worst date movie of all time, or the best: it depends on how perverse your date’s sense of humour is.

THE WAVE

This cautionary tale about the seductive power of fascism opens with a rush of energy and doesn’t let up. Based on a real experiment which took place in 1960s California, the film transposes events to a modern-day German high school, where charismatic teacher Rainer Wenger hastily devises a class assignment in autocracy. This is project week, and though Wenger, an ageing hipster with unconventional teaching methods, would rather be teaching anarchy, he prepares enthusiastically to teach the opposite. When his students won’t engage with the topic – “The Nazis sucked. We get it”, they moan, with believable antipathy – Wenger styles himself as a Führer and devises a set of social rules to give them a taste of life under a dictatorship. Those who belong to “The Wave” wear uniforms, adopt a secret salute and subscribe to an ideology of superiority. Those who don’t are outcasts. To Wenger’s surprise, “The Wave” takes off in a big way. What follows is a textbook case of how fascism starts and takes hold – and how it can very quickly lead to violence and devastation.

We are also seeing a film called "Timecrimes" but there is no description of it on the website, only the book!

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