I’ve made it back alive. In the last forty-eight hours, I’ve watched a Finnish film that made me wish for antidepressants, a Peruvian film that made me question human nature even more than I usually do, and the sixteen short films by college students that were voted the best in the state. And I went to Ben & Jerry’s somewhere in there.
The Finnish film, Laitakaupungin valot (a.k.a. Lights in the Dusk), tells the story of the lonely Koistinen, security guard at a Helsinki mall (they have Subway restaurants there, by the way), who is seduced by a gangster’s beautiful, Grace Kelly-ish girlfriend and becomes the unwitting accomplice in a bold robbery of said mall. If this film is anything to go by, Helsinki jails are terrible. Also, everyone there smokes. Everywhere. All the time. They smoke in police stations, prison cells, break rooms, and while mopping floors. You know those trailers that people fix up as mobile diners, selling hamburgers and snacks? They smoke in those, too. That’s got to be a health code violation.
Peru gives us Madeinusa (pronounced May-din-OO-sa), the title character being a teenage girl who lives in a remote Andean village and longs to see the world — or at least Lima, where her mother supposedly ran off to long ago. Judging by what I saw of the girl’s father, I don’t blame the woman for leaving, but she really should have taken her kids with her. The arrival of a young man from Lima, temporarily stranded in her village, sparks the hope that Madeinusa’s dreams might become reality. Set against the surreal backdrop of the village’s Holy Time festival, a sort of compressed reenactment of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, with our heroine playing the Virgin Mary, things quickly get out of control. The villagers believe that during this celebration, God is literally dead, and there is no such thing as a sin. So you can imagine what kind of parties they have. I’d tell you the story of how Madeinusa got her name, but the movie didn’t cover that. I’m sure it’s very interesting, though.

Madeinusa, her creepy father, and her jealous younger sister after she is crowned the town’s reigning Virgin.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to try to review sixteen short films, especially since several of them defy explanation, seeing as they don’t have plots. I’d just like to mention that the Coen brothers might want to put an option or something on Pinmonkey. It’s that classic boy meets girl, girl dies, boy refuses to notice and falls in love with her anyway kind of plot that they really like.

In the past, I’ve had a hard time classifying the music I do. Now I have a piece that fits into 2 categories: African, and Electronica. Problem is, I only built the database with the ability to put pieces in one category.
I encourage you to listen loud.* You’ll need to in order to hear the toke bell part.**

• Blue Scorpion

* Please don’t sue for any hearing loss.
** I know, I know… the toke can go much much louder than that… I think it is being played with a coat hanger.

I’ve been getting a lot of requests for marching band music recently… actually, no. I haven’t. But I did write a piece for a theater production. It is set in a small town, with a small town marching band, so that’s what you get! A bare minimum of 23 musicians, not all of whom are very good. Each part was recorded individually, and no mistakes were fixed in post.

• Waunobe March

I know, a minute thirty doesn’t seem like much… but you try to play all those parts over and over again while arranging them in your head! (it isn’t that difficult – I just enjoy complaining)

Okay, ‘live’ isn’t exactly the word, but I will be there, watching all sorts of foreign and independent films that you will probably never see at your local theatre. So I’ll be reporting from there next weekend, though probably a little late, and you won’t be getting any reviews from me of of Halle Berry netsexing in Perfect Stranger or the kids running around Disturbia. I have a hunch that anyone wanting to see the latter should just rent Rear Window instead, actually, though I’ll bet David Morse does a great deranged villain.
In other news, I saw a trailer for 28 Weeks Later today. Now, I like 28 Days Later. I own the DVD. And I was very excited to see the huge cardboard display they had in the theatre lobby. But I’m nervous. Not only do they not have any actors from the first film, they’ve added two adorable children in danger and a bunch of random Americans, since apparently the English can’t handle rebuilding their own country. Also conspicuously absent are the director and writer of the first film, at least in those capacities — they’re both listed as executive producers for the new one. It does at least have Idris Elba (see my review of The Reaping) playing one of the random Americans, but still.
Very, very nervous.

Always with the “The” titles. I would’ve shaken it up this week, but I’ve seen the trailer for Grindhouse four times, and it doesn’t make me want to see the film so much as to send a sympathy card to all those involved. So I went to The Reaping. I mean, Hilary Swank’s good, right? It can’t be that bad.
Well, yes and no.
Hilary plays Katherine Winter, a professor of… something at Louisiana State University. It isn’t clear what she teaches, but she spends her spare time visiting miracle sites and debunking them. The movie starts out with her in Concepción, Chile, discovering that people who think they’re being cured are actually having whacked-out hallucinations because they’re inhaling toxic waste. Now, I looked up Concepción on the web, and it’s actually a city of over one million people, with three major universities and several museums. But if all you know about it is from this film, you’d think it was a tiny, poor farming community where no one ever gets past fourth grade and bacteria are things only heathens worry about. I don’t know if Chile plans to sue, but they’ll have to get in line behind the Sudan.
Idris Elba plays Ben (no last name, poor guy), her former graduate assistant and now some sort of academic in his own right. I’m not sure what he does, either, besides help Hilary debunk. Ironically — and they make sure you notice this — he’s a true believer. Helpful local science teacher Doug (also no last name), played by David Morrissey, does ask Ben how he ended up with that job, but we never quite get an answer.
Helpful local science teacher Doug has asked our heroes to come to the town of Haven, Louisiana, to investigate why their river has turned blood-red, just as in the first of the ten Old Testament plagues of Egypt. (For those like me who aren’t up on those whacky plagues, the remaining nine are frogs, gnats (though the film goes for maggots instead), flies, diseased livestock, boils, fiery hail, locusts, darkness, and the one everyone remembers, the deaths of all firstborn children.) The kicker that gets Hilary to agree: the state of the river is being blamed on 12-year-old Loren McConnell, whose older brother was found mysteriously dead just at the time the river turned red.
Hilary, we learn, once had a daughter herself, who died while mom was working in the Sudan as a missionary/minister. I can’t go into detail here without giving away too much, but I am pretty sure that the Sudanese ambassador lodged a formal complaint somewhere on how his country was portrayed. Anyway, hubby died, too, Hilary lost her faith, etc. So now she wants to save this girl.
Sadly, it would have been better all around if she’d just stuck with teaching whatever she teaches. (Does LSU offer courses in debunking?) Once she starts looking around, the ending quickly becomes painfully obvious, and I just sat there and waited for the film to catch up. If you’re looking for something to kill your appetite, though, this is it: some of the plagues are pretty gruesome. And there are plenty of things leaping at the screen to make sure that you jump every ten minutes, though I always felt embarrassed afterward, they were such cheap shots.

Hilary wonders if she’s left her career in the basement.

There were some good things, though they kind of made the bad parts worse. Hilary Swank is a good actress, and likeable, and she carries off the film with her dignity intact, which is pretty much a miracle right there. The other actors all do pretty well, especially Idris — there’s a great, sweet camaraderie between him and Hilary that was quite refreshing. Movies so rarely show male-female friendships that sometimes you kind of forget they exist.
But aside from that bright spot, the film fell into nearly every imaginable movie cliche by the end, and it was all just vaguely uncomfortable. Stephen Rea is wasted in a throwaway part as a minister friend of Hilary’s that could be edited out entirely without anyone the wiser; and apparently he and Hilary both inhaled a little too much of those toxic hallucinogens from Chile, because they have some whopping daydreams. Hilary does all the traditional stuff — she investigates dark cellars and swamps at midnight, without a flashlight and sometimes even without shoes, and likes to wander off by herself. Ben, the voice of reason, suffers through it with much the same sort of reactions I’d have.
One and a half idols is the best I can do here. Even allowing for the always shaky logic of Biblical prophecies and such, the plot, like the plagued livestock, can barely stand up on its own, and I rolled my eyes so many times in the last ten minutes that I got dizzy. Maybe I should have gone to see Are We Done Yet?. It looks like a remake of Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House, with Cary Grant and Myrna Loy, but at least there you know they’re starting with good material.