MIFF 2011 Day Five

At the end of day five I’d attended 21 sessions
Worst film of the day – The Stoker. I found this film slow. There were also scenes that to me there was no point to them. For example early in the film the first encounter we have to the stoker’s daughter is a scene of her naked walking around her room taking on the phone to her mother. There was no point to her being naked. There were lots of scenes of people travelling from place to place, be it by tram or walking through the snow. Once or twice would have been fine, but every time a char went somewhere several minutes of the film was of them walking. Perhaps they needed to pad out the film.
One piece of music seemed to be repeated continually, especially during the travel bits. It played quite loud & you could not hear any background noise (which could have been the point of it). There was one scene in the film which purpose seemed purely to promote the group. One character visits another, playing on a tv in the background is the band playing the same annoying piece of music. One of the characters mentions liking the band, mentioning it by name & saying they were thinking of going to their concert. The other character says they’d like to as well. There were even close up shots of the TV. This scene could also have been used to establish the friendship between the two chars, but there were enough scenes elsewhere in the film to do that & it could have been handled much better.
MIFF has several people blogging about the film festival (all people that write reviews for a living) and while most of the people that have seen The Stoker appear not to have liked it either there was one or two people that enjoyed it. That is one of the things I like about the festival. It caters to a wide and varied taste.
Best film of the day – King of Comedy. I’d never seen this film before. Jerry Lewis, Robert De Niro and Sandra Bernhardt all do very good performances. De Niro and Bernhardt play the obsessed celebrity stalking fans extremely well. Being used to seeing Jerry Lewis play a goof ball, seeing him play virtually the straight man in this film shows him to be very talented.
Honourable mention to Viva Riva!, a Congolese crime thriller film. A enjoyable and interesting story interweaving the social structure and way of life into this crime story.