Woman on the Beach, A Conversation With Julien Temple, Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten

I've noticed an increasingly negative slant over the past few entries here during SIFF that has become a little unsettling. Today's selection thankfully breaks that trend a bit.

Woman on the Beach's director Sang-soo Hong has had movies shown at SIFF before, all of which were consistently rated the lowest each year. This probably served to lower a lot of peoples' expectations of the movie, though there was still quite a large number of walkouts during it.

The movie follows a film director's attempts to write a script, in the midst of meeting a woman and struggling with his feelings about her. It starts off very casually with a lot of humorous conversational moments. The first half of the movie was really great to watch, and Hong definitely has the ability to capture dialogue very naturally. The latter half of the movie though struggles to keep up with the momentum, possibly because it delves more into the drama of the love triangle and it is at times very difficult to understand the motivations of the characters. Overall, it probably could have been cut a bit shorter and worked very well, and indeed there seemed to be several false ending shots that would have sufficed perfectly. As far as the technical aspects of the movie, it was visually pleasing and had a nice little soundtrack. There were a few instances when the camera did a close push as a moment of dialogue from a character got a little more personal, and this in any other person's hands would have been very effective, but the zoom-in was very abruptly done as if part of a home movie or documentary-style and looked very amateur. I noticed this style got a little bit better towards the end of the movie and speculated that perhaps the camera person was new or was working with new equipment. In any case, overall it was an enjoyable movie and only serves to increase my interest in more films coming out of South Korea.

Julien Temple is the director of such infamous things as The Filth and the Fury, Earth Girls are Easy, The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, and various music videos when MTV was just starting up. He primarily rose out of documenting the punk rock scene in England, and still somehow manages to carry these ideals forward into his works of today.

The conversation was really just that -- no Q&A by the audience, and moderated entirely by Sean Nelson who asked various questions about his career intermixing them with demo reels of some work he has done. It wasn't so much informative as it was humorous hearing Temple's little stories and generally getting a sense of his snarly english punker attitude which is endearing. Temple's answers during the conversation as well as the Q&A after the Strummer documentary were always dodgy with kind of a "screw you" subtext (or overtly) which was pretty fun to watch. I'd always been curious about how someone like that thought of themselves as pretty much spawning the MTV generation, and his attitude seemed to be essentially he had to do those things to generate the money to work on the films he really wanted to do.

It is interesting comparing the films that he is most proud of (punk rock related) to things such as the slightly more polished looking music videos -- you can really tell he has the skill to adapt to these very different visual styles, and his own work looks specifically unpolished for good reason and not just neglect or uncaring.

This was a good segue into Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten which definitely has the same Temple frenetic-random-collage style that seems to emulate a lot of the print art that comes from the early rise of punk rock DIY practices. The documentary is a journey through Strummer's beginnings, his interest in various styles of music and relationships with people, and on through the years with The Clash, then the period after The Clash and eventually his death. It's a long movie, but it never really has any dull moments because of how finely cut each clip is. One very noticeable aspect very early on is none of the interviewees are identified, yet you sort of get an idea of their relationship to Strummer through their words. Later at the Q&A, Temple responded to a question about this by essentially stating he didn't believe in celebrities, which I thought was a totally great way to really pay tribute to punk rock because all of the interviewees are suddenly equally important even if they weren't a celebrity (which in some cases was true). Though one might argue that if celebrity wasn't so important, the title credits would not have repeated Temple's name several times.

Audience Watch: As mentioned above, there were a lot of walkouts during Woman on the Beach in succession which was a little distracting. In addition, Pacific Place tends to seat people fairly late into screenings more than any other theater I have seen at SIFF, even though there is a supposedly strict late seating policy. The audience for the Julien Temple conversation was very sparse, but seemed to grow threefold for the Strummer documentary which is entirely opposite to what I would have predicted.