SIFF 2011 - Ongoing Observations

Running Themes (new ones are starred):

• * Concerts being played on the saw.
• *People with extremely sensitive hearing.
• *People's lives getting better because someone gives them books to read.
• Couples naming their as yet to be conceived children.
• Using the word retarded to describe someone.
• The anachronistic activities of smoking and making phone calls from pay phones.
• Fathers calling daughters about relationship problems (and causing the daughters great distress)
• People quitting smoking to save money.
  
• Children in school houses.
  
• Perspectives from inside little boys' heads.
  
  Thoughts for the day:
  
  • It is very hard to eat at SIFF films because they often don't have much background music and so even small crunches in your mouth reverberate throughout the theatre...
  • A hackneyed movie device: People throwing up to express emotion.
  • Have we moved much further as a species into our thoughts becoming reality? Today, the venue host was talking about how we need to make sure our phone devices were turned off, and was going to wax on about how the sounds our devices make can be very irritating for other audience members when her microphone went out... later during the film, a character had poured bleach in his ears in order to deafen himself and the audio in the film started phasing out, so we were hearing an odd buzz and the dialog was at about half volume. It took two more scenes before I realized that the phasing was not part of the movie's audio, but a problem with the sound system. The fact that this film was science fiction made it all the weirder.
  • Something that DPs have known forever is that good scene lighting for a film, especially when shooting outdoors, almost never involves direct sun. That's why I've seen movie after movie involving mist and rain and general grayness, whether the plot depends on it or not. I've been finding myself longing for bright, washed out scenes. No such luck so far...