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Bleeding Cool At London Film Festival 2012: Here and There, Save Your Legs!, And Doomsday Book

Published Thu, 27 Sep 2012 08:23:34 -0500

Last updated Thu, 27 Sep 2012 08:32:26 -0500

Yesterday being the first day of London Film Festival where both Bleeding Cool writers were there for all three films, we decided to do a joint report that reflects our shared experience. The offerings were a mixed bag from all over the globe: family drama Here and There from Mexico, road trip cricket comedy Save Your Legs! from Australia, and sci-fi trilogy Doomsday Book from South Korea.

Hannah Shaw-Williams: The easiest way to recreate Here and There would be to take Bicycle Thieves, insert a metaphorical pump into it, suck out all the structure, charisma, plot, character and subtlety, empty the metaphorical dust bag and then flip the reverse switch to fill the thing with dead air. The film demonstrates a gross and disastrous misinterpretation of the art and value of realism, as writer-director Antonio Esparza shies away from any kind of structure (because life has no structure), editing (because life is unedited) or drama (because apparently life is mind-numbingly boring). The subject is a musician called Pedro who returns to his pregnant wife and two daughters in Copa, Mexico after failing to find success in New York. He tries once again to start a band in Copa, but struggles due to the poor local economy and personal finance troubles. All this is conveyed by uniformly bloated scenes wherein the camera is plonked down in a corner of the room and several non-actors are shoved in front of it, then forced it engage in awkward, stilted dialogue broken up by endless pauses. The end result is shallow, lifeless, directionless, unengaging and, somewhat ironically, feels very removed from reality. Here and There takes 110 minutes to state two simple facts: Mexico has poverty, and poverty is a bad thing.

Patrick Dane: My review essentially boils down to this scene from Adaptation.

Hannah Shaw-Williams: Next up was Save Your Legs!, an Australian sports comedy which follows the exploits of small-town cricket team the Abbotford Anglers as they finally get their big break in the form of a tour in India. After the enormous bowl of stodgy two-day old porridge that was Here and There, Save Your Legs! was like a bag of Haribo: sweet, inoffensive, and ideal for cleansing the pallette. Speaking objectively, the film is a fairly standard example of its genre, with characters to fill every stereotype led by the bumbling-but-loveable team President Ted. Most of the jokes are chuckle-level funny, the cast are all entertaining and bring real life to the somewhat tired subject material, great use is made of the locations, and the whole thing has a minimal-angst, feel-good air. My main criticism is that the film's love interest, played by the talented but underused Pallavi Shardi, is used as little more as a prop, and since the only other female characters are a nagging, selfish wife and a couple of infatuated groupies, the fairer sex is treated as little more than a necessary nuisance. Having seen it immediately after Here and There, however, I came out of the auditorium yelling drunkenly, "Best film of the year! Five stars! Did you see all the things that were happening? There were so many characters, and they actually had character! They even used multiple camera angles and I think I saw some editing in there! Brilliant!" Context, it seems, is everything.

Patrick Dane: Lastly we have the Doomsday Book. A collection of three smaller sci-fi(ish) films entitled Brave New World, Heavenly Creature and Happy Birthday, that are completely separate from one another but all come packaged into a nice South Korean present. The first film, Brave New World, highlights a zombie outbreak and is brilliantly put together by Yim Pil Sung. With a focus on consumption, the origin of the virus is very nicely told with almost no words. The second story, Kim Ji-woon's Heavenly Creature, is a great demonstration of what happens when you tell and don't show. What starts off as a fantastic concept, that a robot achieves enlightenment whilst serving at a buddhist temple, simply falls apart by the end. It's not that what the characters are saying aren't great ideas, it's that it is only told to us. No matter how you film it, people standing around in a room talking about interesting ideas will never be compelling because it is underselling film as a medium. The final chapter is sees a return of Yim Pil Sung for Happy Birthday. It's hard to talk too much about the story with out giving too much away, so I won't. Instead I will just say that it is a story about a commet that is going to hit earth. Often odd but just as often hilarious, it is a very nicely told story about a family banding together at the end times. Doomsday Book is largely an entertaining watch. I certainly had my fun with it but it begs the question why Yim Pil Sung didn't end up making all the films? His two stories were great retreads of old stories, while Kim Ji-Woon's contribution was a half-baked version of a great new story. Such a shame…