okay, maybe not that uplifting. the film begins just before pope john paul ii's may 1988 visit to the town. beto, like many of melo's residents, hopes to use the papal visit to break the cycle (heh) of poverty. beto's idea is to build a toilet in his yard and then charge pope-watchers for its use. needless to say, a whole series of things go wrong, both before and during the pope's appearance.
"the pope's toilet" is a 2007 film that still hasn't come out, even after winning all kinds of awards on the festival circuit last year. most film that appear at "talk cinema" do eventually get a theatrical release. if this one ever does, i think it's worth seeing.
after the going to the toilet, i made a run back to the festival for the quay brothers sampler, a collection of seven short films by the avant garde animators, steven and timothy quay. the quay brothers are the guest of honors to this year's fest. my only exposure to their work before today was the piano tuner of earthquakes, a film i saw at the festival three years ago. i didn't like it, but i also wasn't sure whether the problem was "piano tuner" itself, or if it was because it was the fourth of four consecutive films i saw that day. (i have since set my limit at three because of that bad experience).
so this year with those quays being the guests and all, i decided to give them another chance. i picked the sampler because it would give a good sense of their body of work and figured that i might like their work more as a series of shorts than in a feature length film. the shorts spanned over 20 years of their career and were pretty different from one another. on the other hand they were all pretty much the same. the quays have a definite style, dark lighting, stop motion animation of "found art" (i.e. garbage), discordant music, no real dialogue (or at least a dialogue where you can't make out the words). there is some kind of plot, but it's often hard to figure out what exactly that is. the biggest pleasure from their work is the visual spectacle of it all. but frankly, that wasn't enough to hold my interest after the first few shorts.
i did stay for the first half of the Q and A at the end. but all that did was remind me why i don't like Q and As with filmmakers. if anything it just reinforced my impression of the brothers' pretentiousness.
oh well. i think i'm finally done with the brothers quay. it's just not my thing after all. to prove that i was at the Q and A, here's a crappy iphone photo i took.
so there.
