Almost halfway

It's just after 11.00pm and I just got back from Late Bloomer. I bet there'll be a few people doing searches for world's end girlfriend when they get home. They did the freakily sublime soundtrack. This is a bit of an outsider debut for Shibata Go, who was a guest of the festival and who stayed after the screening for a Q&A, assisted by a translator. It was the story of a handicapped guy in a wheelchair who turned mean when his crush on his cute new college girl caregiver turned sour - firstly killing his other (male) caregiver (who was started to cosy up to his colleague), and then going on to knife total strangers in the street. It was shot in grainy black and white digital and was edited with mad genius, sometimes with sudden explosive frenzies of chopped up images echoed by mad rushes of distorted electronic music, courtesy of the aforementioned soundtrack artists. This has been one of the highlights. What a shame the audience wasn't bigger.

I can't say the same for the film I saw last night - Pin Boy. I wouldn't go so far as to say it was no good - for what it was, it was quite lovely. It's just that what it was wasn't really very much! A quiet, sparse story teamed with some authentic characters with little dialogue and long long shots. A young man from the sticks who has moved to the city to stay with his cousin and work as a "pin boy" in a blowling alley. SOD slept through it and really I could have missed this one. Still, as I say, I didn't really dislike it, it just didn't move me much.

Wednesday night was 3-Iron, a Korean film about a young guy who broke into people's houses while they were on holiday, ate their food, watched their TVs and generally made himself at home for a day or two and... washed their clothes, tidied up and fixed broken appliances. One of the houses isn't empty though and he meets a young battered wife of a rich bastard of a husband... and we have a quirky little love story. I enjoyed the quiet humour of this film and the minimal use of dialogue. Nice.

Today I went to see Mysterious Skin. I feel uncomfortable about this film. I guess it's thhe one that David Lane (Society for the Promotion of Community Standards) should have gone for if he had any brains. 9 Songs may have included explicit sex, but it was straightforward sex between consenting adults, unlike Mysterious Skin which included descriptions of a paedophile instructing an 8-year-old to fist him. I get what the filmmaker is trying to say. There are two kids, each sexually abused at the age of 8 by their Little League coach. One is a sensitive little guy who is emotionally scarred by the event, the other is a sexually precocious little boy who is already finding something attractive about grown-up men and who looks back with a strange fondness towards the man who abused him. He sees the summer of his abuse as a defining time in his life, and in a positive way. The other boy blanks out his experience and concludes from the bits he can recall that he was abducted by aliens. The film culminates in his realisation of the truth. So, different people are affected differently by their childhood experiences. But what bothers me by this film is that when a paedophile sees it they may feel somehow vindicated by it - that maybe their victims really enjoy it and that an 8-year-old can participate willingly and enjoy the experience. I don't know the statistics, but I can't imagine that very many 8-year-old molestation victims would fit into this category. I dunno, I have to think about that one some more. It was a good film, and having had conversations in the past with gay guys, I know that they came to the realisation of their sexuality early, and also had sexual feelings really early, but I just feel uncomfortable about the message that the film could be giving to sexual predators.

Well, that's me for now. I'm off to four films tomorrow. Still nine days to go!