MIFF 2010 Preamble

After years and years of watching films as obsessively as possible, I've finally decided to mouth my thoughts, ideas, opinions on the subject of Film/ Cinema, however dilettantish these may be. The best place to start is now – at the beginning of the 59th Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF 2010). I've haunted this event for the past 6 years, and each year since 2004 I've measured the two and a bit weeks of the Festival purely through film – days operate around session times, food becomes somewhat irrelevant, dreams start having end credits, and by the end of the festival my complexion has turned a pasty grey and I've become half-man, half-celluloid.

Due to limited time each day, these little mini-reviews for each film viewed at the festival will be dashed out as quickly as possible. Not that this is intended as an outright disclaimer regards the quality of the reviews - these reviews need to sprint to the page as quickly as possible due to my annual attempt to cram as many films into the festival as possible. Some days, (actually most days), I'm slavishly viewing 5 films in a row, running from one to the other. God knows why I do this – sometimes a film I've rushed to see is ultimately rewarded with a nice wee doze. In the past I've dozed through some great films, and woken up near the end wondering why it was only 30 minutes long. Other times, my cine-narcolepsy is caused by the film boring me to sleep. I used to be dismayed at this tendency to doze in films – now I've learnt to accept it, and occasionally love it.

I thought about using a rating system based on dozing during the film – the more pillows a film gets, the worse it is. However, I've decided to base my rating system on my personal talisman. Mini-mike will be assisting with rating the films, standing in for the usual stars used in film reviews. No, I don't see this as some fey comment on the redundancy of the star-system – to all intents and purposes this the same kind of rating system as usual (Zero through to Five, with all the halves in between), and in my head I'm rating films based on a numerical 'score', but I see no reason why the rating image used in this blog can't be whatever the hell I want.


Time marches, so on with the reviews.