"The Choir" world premiere at the Sydney Film Festival

"The Choir" opened at the Sydney Film Festival yesterday in a simultaneous world premiere with an event in Los Angeles. By a twist of fate, I went to see it along with my lovely wife and another friend. Twist of fate in that it was the one film that both drew our attention in the write up, and was shown at a time we could attend.

It is a feature length documentary about the choir at Leeuwkop Prison in South Africa. In order to make it an engaging narrative, it focuses on two main characters - Jabulani, a youngish guy convicted of housebreaking with intent to steal, and who joins the choir to escape the worst of the prison environment; and Coleman, an older guy convicted of armed robbery who is the choir leader. Other members of the choir are occasionally brought forward from the chorus; however building the story around Coleman and Jabulani gives the documentary a human element for the audience to connect with.

In a way, it is a fairly typical narrative of redemption. The choristers are all in prison for transgressions against society - not one claims innocence or wrongful conviction. Coleman, for example, describes candidly his oddly gentle technique for holding up a bank - with a roll of toilet paper. Jabulani also describes his induction into life as a criminal, starting with his mother's arrest for stealing. The redemption comes through Coleman's leadership of the choir, exhorting his charges to behave themselves and be good - naturally to rehabilitate for their eventual release from prison, but also so that the choir has a fighting chance at the biannual prison choir competition, where choirs from around South Africa challenge for the honour of being the best.

It is a pretty stark film whose eye roves over depictions of violence, poverty and desperation that I'm very fortunate never to have experienced personally. Against that backdrop, the characters in the film claw back their humanity through the music and experience of the choir. It is moving, without being saccharine.

We (the audience at the showing) had a bit of a treat, as one of the producers was on hand for a QnA session after the movie. Here, we learned that it took a year of negotiations with the South African corrections to allow the cameras in - they didn't want to look bad in front of the world; it was one guy with a camera doing the shooting and that the amazing sound was the work of a talented sound engineer working from those tapes; and both the main characters are still on the outside and doing well.

The depths of poverty and violence are profound. On a couple of occasions the film takes us on a tour of Jabulani's home turf - haphazard shacks, unemployed people all around, children playing with broken appliances at the side of the dusty road and cooking on an ancient gas stove are all repeated emphases of just how meagre their lives are. Jabulani recounts the different wounds he's sustained - stabbings, gunshot wounds, and a scar from a crowbar attack by a rival gang - and how he has shot in self defence; all in a calm tone in much the same we we in Sydney resignedly recount the different delays on the public transit system.

I have three friends whose life stories begin in South Africa; and their stories of the hazards of life there are incredible to me, a small town Canadian lad who lived the myth of unlocked doors day and night. Those stories - a locked gate inside a house between the living and sleeping quarters (to discourage thieves from going any further into the house); ducking for cover on the way to school - are brought to life in this documentary.

I Am Legend, starring Will Smith, and a German Shepard

We rented and watched I Am Legend last night.

ZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

As far as cautionary tales against the genetic modification of viruses to treat diseases go, this one is rather bland and boring. After fiddling a strain of measles so that it cures cancer, in 10,009 of 10,009 cases, the world is overcome by the wonder. But, and no one saw this coming, the virus mutates (who'd'a thunk!) so that it turns people into hairless, slavering, light-intolerant grey ... well, in the movie they're called 'Dark-Seekers,' but for all intents and purposes they're just zombies with a bit of problem solving ability.

The scariest bits of the movie were sudden rattling noises as Will pulls the steel shades at sundown in his zombie-resistant lair, and that's just because they always come in a sudden scene-cuts from something quiet.

The best part of the movie (incidentally, proudly brought to you by Ford MoCo and Apple!) was chasing deer through New York while driving a GT500, and Sam the German Shepard. I liked Sam...

But, to recap. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

The great global warming swindle

Martin Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" is on the ABC as I type. Cool... Aunty's living on the edge. This is the film that was released at the same time as the 4th asessment report of the IPCC, in February this year, and was shown on the BBC.


The big deal about this is two parts: First, Durkin's flying in the face of received wisdom around the human effect on climate change - specifically global warming - by arguing that, essentially, nah, human's haven't got much to do with it at all. The second thing is that the argument isn't terribly well supported, and may even have (shock, horror) some conveniently 'rearranged' or 'innovatively presented' data.

I had a listen to a podcast from Aunty yesterday - the Science Show (it's like Quirks and Quarks, but seems a little more serious) and it covered off the whys and whatfors around the argy-bargy about the show. It seems that the interpretation of the data that Durkin is working with is dodgey, and indeed, one of the scientists interviewed noted that the clip utilised actually presented the diametric opposite of his position.

Right now it's the argument that the sun is the arbiter of changes in climate, and some fellow in the UK just related how he won money betting against the Met Office using his own sun-watching technique.

Sunspots are intimately linked to temperature changes - it's not greenhouse gases after all. Cool. I can lust after my 370kW 7-litre Holden HSV sedan again.

Now they are putting up charts correlating sunspot activity and temperature, but I am not terribly sure about how the data was charted (I spend many of my days putting numbers into PowerPoint decks, and it's not hard to present perfectly accurate charts, which can be read any number of ways.).

Now we're getting to the question of why, in the face of this data showing that human generation of CO2 is irrelevant to climate change, are we bombarded by the media with stories of doom and gloom? It seems to be related to the energy crisis of the 70s and the British miner's strike which convinced Margaret Thatcher that nuclear was the way to achieve energy continuity (so she wouldn't have to rely on miners or Arabs...) and it was HER! She told the scientists they could have money to prove human-produced CO2-induced climate change in order to support nuclear from the environmental side, rather than just the economic rationalist side.

I see. Now it is the Left and the Communists/Marxists/Socialists/anti-capitalists/anti-globalisationists who didn't have anything to wring their hands over after the fall of the Berlin Wall and of Communism. So, rather than get a real job, they started adopting greeny stuff.

Oh, now it is the money... US spending went from $170 million to over $2 billion. Righty-oh.

Heh heh, that was brilliant: they talk about climate models while the screen shows Star Wars fans dressed up and wandering around under a model of the Space Shuttle. Beautiful. Now it's climate model bashing time. "The appearance of rigorous science." I suppose the fact that any prognosis is based on assumptions... oh, hang on, it's the media's fault again, blaming 'every storm or hurricane on global warming.'

Okay, so it's normal climactic patterns of warming and cooling, nothing to do with humans.

Wow, this guy's hitting all the buttons he can find: political lefties and right wingers, capitalist greed, bad science, hysterical media reporting. Very impressive.

This is starting to remind me of 'Where the bleep are we' or whatever it was called... 'what the bleep do we know' - that infuriatingly superficial, inane, tiresome, ingenuous waste of time warbling on about how quantum mechanics lets ordinary humans do really amazing feats of time/space manipulation. The current show does the same trick of leaping from expert to expert, argument to argument, without really fleshing out what the argument is, nor with backing up the claims with data.

Wow... they just said that challenging the 'global warming business (religion)' has invited death threats.

And now the global warming brigade is killing poor people in the Third World (sorry about the worn out shorthand for the world's poorest) by hamstringing development.

Alright, that's enough of the blow by blow report. Just as well: it's over.

There's something underlying this whole 'dialogue,' and many other ideologically grounded arguments for that matter, and it frustrates me. I really, really get tired of people jumping up and down saying 'you're wrong because you believe something different from what I do! Therefore you are motivated by malevolent and malicious intent, so I must take battle unto thee and unleash all the rhetorical weapons at my disposal, including but not limited to deriding your capacity for reason, misrepresenting others views, concealing information that doesn't help my side, and essentially jumping up and down like a child.

My last question is, then, why, if one's argument is so convincing that one is willing, indeed compelled, to attempt to convince a wide audience of it, would one present it by omitting bits and bobs that might call into question what I am saying.

If you have a compelling argument, share it. If your argument falters, acknowledge it, accept that maybe something else is more compelling, and get over it. Deep belief in something doesn't make it so... and it is okay if a belief is challenged.

Incidentally, why don't we make the argument to reduce emissions based on how they smell? The emissions may or may not warm or cool the planet, but they smell bad. So let's get rid of them for the olfactory concern.

Monsieur Ibrahim

Saw a promo for this movie a while ago, and we just rented the DVD and watched it.

It's pretty understated and cerebral; the humour is the same way. It's a bit of a thinker, what with the Sufi storekeeper befriending the young Jewish boy and passing on all sorts of bits of wisdom about life and happiness and so on.

Children of Men

What an...odd movie. It's not really an escapist exercise at all, this one. It reminded me a little of 'V for Vendetta', in the blatantly obvious links between current world affairs and a dystopic future.

I really didn't like all the spattering blood and random dying. You know, after the first dozen or so the point's pretty well made.

Simmo's just made the point that it is pretty '1984-ish' with Clive Owen's character starting off all jaded and not caring about the miserableness of the world but rather believing that he just has to go along with it.

The other thing was the backstory: there was none, beyond 'the entire world's gone to crap, and the human race has been infertile for the last 18 years.' Yep, I feel a real connection to this story. Bah.

Apparently it's based on a book by P.D. James. I hope that this is a case of the movie being a lousy manifestation of the book.

So: it's great in that it's an indictment of the conflict-laden paradigm of contemporary foreign policies, and of painfully xenophobic mentalities. It's not so great in that it's gross, blatant, and a little unengaging.

Sydney African Film Festival

Well, Simone's gone and done it again and made me just a little bit more cultured and aware of the world.

We attended the opening of the Sydney African Film Festival, put on by a bunch of folks from the University of Sydney, and proceeds from the festival go to Hands of Help, which is one of those charitable organisations that sends caring wealthy(ish) Westerners to go and build schools and other civil infrastructure that governance-challenged dicators don't seem willing to spare funds for out of their corrupt practices.

So, it's all a good cause. We saw three featurettes, also known as short films, which were written, produced, filmed etc., by African filmmakers. Just a little confronting, particularly "Noura's Summer" starring Noura who's just done really really really well at school and is pretty much set to get a scholarship to university. As an added bonus she's been promised in marriage. WARNING: PLOT SPOILER. She suicides.

And that set the tone for the evening - stories of how crap life is in the poor parts of Africa (I know, that's most of it, but there are undoubtedly a delightful corrupt elite who are doing alright).