The Truffle Hunters is a documentary film about a bunch of old dudes in Italy who work with dogs to find truffles1 buried in the ground, deep inside forests. As a dog lover, I envy the working relationship that these people have with their dogs. My dog is great, but she’s never going to help me write any Javascript.
The film is visually gorgeous, made up mostly of static shots that are perfectly composed, lit and colour-graded. One shot that springs to mind is of a married couple sitting behind a stack of tomatoes, washing them one by one. Every unblemished tomato is a deep, rich shade of red.
While it looks great, the impeccable style makes me question the authenticity of some of the more emotional scenes. I couldn’t help but imagine the filmmakers meticulously setting up the camera and the subjects, and waiting for the perfect sun, and then saying “action” to what is supposed to be a genuine outpouring of emotion. For example, there’s one scene involving a distraught and crying truffle hunter, telling a police officer that one of his dogs has been poisoned by ruthless corporate truffle hunters trying to encroach on his territory. I felt bad for him, but still, I had to ask myself, Is he acting here?
Which brings us to the dark side of the film: because truffles are so rare and valuable, greed and competition have entered into the truffle hunters’ lives. I’ve always had a distaste for “foodie” culture because of the accompanying snobbishness, and this film pushed those buttons for sure. The Truffle Hunters depicts the middlemen and consumers of the truffles as shady characters. They haggle for low prices with the hunters in nighttime back-alley meetings, before turning around and selling to restaurants for a huge profit margin. They berate hunters for leaving a little bit of dirt on the goods. They demand attention from journalists and photographers by holding truffle exhibitions. And worst of all, they are seemingly involved in the intentional harm of innocent animals.
The cost of elevating food to a status symbol is that honest and hard-working people (and their beloved pets) are exploited and hurt.
Footnotes
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Personally, I don’t get what the big deal is about truffles. Generally, I have a strong sense of smell—I once identified blue cheese as a condiment in a colleague’s sandwich from all the way at the other end of the lunch cafeteria table—but when I’ve tried truffle-based dishes, the supposedly distinctive aroma just doesn’t hit me. ↩
It’s kind of embarassing, looking back at this previous post. It sounded like I was arriving somewhere, where in fact, those “big changes in my life” just kept rolling. I got married, got a dog, moved house, changed jobs (twice). Where I’ve landed is a place where I’ve seen my creative output trail off, enough to miss it, enough to want to return to it.
I’ll start off by describing the journey that my online presence has taken. I started this blog in 2004, publishing on a Blogger.com site called “A Logical Waste of Space,” which was shared with friend of mine. (His stuff is still there.)
Over time, the kinds of things that we wanted to write about diverged, and it made sense for me to split off. For archival purposes, I’ll keep that site around, even though I’m not too proud of some of the dumb stuff I used to write.
Then, I hosted this site on Squarespace for a while. I like the templates and WYSIWYG design tools that they provide, but felt like my data was trapped. I’m the type of person who likes to work in non-proprietary environments, so I started to look for alternatives.
The current iteration of this site is built using Jekyll, which is a geek’s dream. I’m writing this in a Markdown text file, and Jekyll takes care of compiling it into HTML. I have a DigitalOcean app pointed at a GitHub repo where these text files live, and it updates the site whenever I make changes. Sure, it takes some coding to customize the look of the site, but hey, I know how to do that stuff! It doesn’t even cost anything (unless I get an unexpected uptick in fame).
So, here I am again.
Some big changes in my life over the past few years, and fell out of the habit of blogging. This year, I have started to take my writing “career” more seriously, and I hope that it also results in my having more to say here.
Hello again!
Men at Lunch & The Central Park Five
By coincidence, I saw these two New York-centric documentaries back-to-back.
The former is about the famous 1930’s photograph of the construction workers sitting on a steel beam, casually having lunch despite the dangerous position that they’re in. The latter deals with a criminal case in the 1980’s where five teenage boys were wrongly convicted for the sexual assault of a jogger in Central Park.
Both of them portray New York as a place where many cultures come together, and sometimes clash, but I thought The Central Park Five did a better job of it. The five subjects are all very well-spoken, and through their interviews, you come to understand the racial tension that existed in New York at the time. By the end of the film, it’s a real relief that they were exonerated, but at the same time, you still feel angry and sad that they wasted so many years in prison.
Men at Lunch, on the other hand, does not have the same narrative strength. Essentially, it tries to tell the story of who those men on the beam were, but since nobody knows their identities for sure, it settles for making them into symbols of the many Irish immigrants who worked in construction at the time. That’s fine, but the film gets a little repetitive, and keeps telling us how brave they were, how hard life was during the Depression, how the construction workers shaped New York as a city, &c. I found it especially awkward when they tried to draw a connection between those men, and the men who are working now to build the new World Trade Centre tower. The 9/11 scenes seemed a bit out of place and exploitative to me.
Rating:
Men at Lunch: 5/10
The Central Park Five: 7/10
Thale
Towards the end of the festival, I get a little tired. I might have enjoyed this one more if I saw it earlier in the week. I realize that it’s a low-budget movie, and I respect what they did technically. Thale has some cool horror moments and some cool action moments, but maybe that’s the problem: it doesn’t feel like either a horror film or an action film. I couldn’t really get into the story because I didn’t know what the characters were after. But again, I was pretty tired.
Rating: 5/10
Tai Chi 0
This, on the other hand, was a much more suitable pace for a weary festival-goer. It’s basically a Chinese kung-fu film, mixed with the style of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (e.g., whenever someone does a kung-fu move, the name of the move is shown in stylized text on the screen), with some steampunk thrown in. Cartoonish action at its finest. It’s the first film in a 2-part series, so structurally, it’s a bit off: what you think will be the final battle is actually just setup for the sequel, which makes the previous battle the actual final battle, and a little unsatisfying.
Rating: 7/10
TIFF 2012: Part 4
Disconnect, Antiviral, As If We Were Catching a Cobra, The Bay, Smashed, Much Ado About Nothing
I’m going to go with a shorter, “rapid-fire” format today. I’m just tired, okay?
Disconnect
Reading the description, I was a bit concerned that this would turn into a morally unsubtle “the Internet is bad” type of story. I was pleasantly surprised that it doesn’t focus too much on the Internet itself; the Internet just a device to incite events and get the story going, and then mostly stays out of the way. The focus stays on the characters, which is as it should be. The characters sometimes behave in unrealistic ways in order to increase the drama, but I thought it was effective and was caught up in the film.
Rating: 7/10
Antiviral
A lot of the pleasure of watching this film comes from trying to figure out how the premise works. I didn’t read the description beforehand and I don’t know what it gives away, but I’m glad I went in not knowing anything. Unfortunately, once the premise is set up in the first act, the movie didn’t do much to keep me interested. There are some cool and creepy visual moments, but I couldn’t really understand any of the character motivations, and I didn’t really care what happened to them.
Rating: 5/10
As If We Were Catching a Cobra
A documentary about political cartoonists working during the Arab Spring sounded like an interesting premise, but the execution was a bit lacking. All the film is is a series of talking-head interviews with various cartoonists and artists. There was nothing really visual or cinematic going on, so it’s just watching people talk and reading lots and lots of subtitles. It was too much for me for an early morning screening, so I walked out, which is a rare occurrence for me. Maybe this material would make for a good book, though.
Rating: waived because I didn’t see the whole thing. But really it’s like a 3 or a 4.
The Bay
I keep telling myself that I’m tired of the whole “found footage” thing whenever I see one (I keep watching them though), but this one felt like a fresh experience. Usually, found footage films have to jump through hoops to justify why there are cameras present, or they just don’t justify it and everyone is left thinking “why don’t you put down the camera?!” the whole time. The Bay avoids this by mixing different camera sources, e.g. A TV news crew, security cameras, police car dashboard cameras. Because of this variety, it often feels more like a well-edited suspense film than a found footage film. It definitely kept me in suspense, although in hindsight, the “monsters” themselves are a little bit silly.
Rating: 7/10
Smashed
Good performances all around, but I thought this story about a young woman with a drinking problem oversimplifies its characters. I didn’t feel like there was much depth to them beyond whether they are drunk or sober, and what they think about other people being drunk or sober.
Rating: 5/10
Much Ado About Nothing
Wesley and Fred. Enough said.
Rating: 8/10
Blancanieves
I’m going to have trouble talking about this film (actually talking, verbally, I mean, not writing about it), because I can’t pronounce the title properly. It’s Spanish for “Snow White.” Maybe I’ll just call it “Snow White,” okay? Okay. So anyway, the movie is an adaptation of the Snow White story, transplanted into 1920’s Spain, and in particular, into the world of matadors. It was the “Golden Age of Bullfighting,” the director said in the Q & A.
The fairy tale reference is both a benefit and a detriment to the film, in my opinion. While it does add an other-worldly quality to the characters (especially the bullfighting dwarves), some elements felt like they were shoehorned in, like the poison apple, and the eternal slumber. I thought the story was strong enough to stand on its own without having to hang it on the framework of an existing fairy tale.
Rating: 7/10
Byzantium
There’s something a bit cheesy about the whole vampire thing, and how they’re supposed to be all mysterious and ethereal and romantic. Byzantium has that cheesiness, especially during the flashback scenes, which tell the origin story of the two main vampire characters. The Victoria-era costumes and sets are well-produced, but they’re, you know, cheesy. I think it might have bothered me more if I hadn’t recently been watching a lot of similarly historical scenes done with a lower budget on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (lower budget = more cheesy).
Stylistically and visually, I enjoyed the film, but I had some problems with the narrative. The aforementioned flashbacks are interspersed throughout the film, and the origin story arc is supposed to parallel the modern-day storyline. But about halfway through, I had already pieced together the mechanisms of how the characters became vampires, and after that, I was just waiting for what I already knew would happen to play out. As a result, I thought the flashbacks were starting to get in the way of the present narrative, and slowed down what is already a deliberately-paced movie.
Rating: 6/10
No
Speaking of cheesy, the 80’s were. Cheesy. Specifically, the media output of the 80’s (e.g. TV commercials, movies, etc.), when watched today, can often evoke cringes and bursts of awkward laughter.
The subject matter of No could have made for a very dark film—it follows a group of advertisers as they create TV commercials encouraging voters to vote against the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile’s 1988 referendum—but the fact that the commercials they create are 80’s commercials adds a lot of humour. There is a real danger involved (any election organized by a dictatorship is going to be fraught with corruption and threats) but when the anti-Pinochet “No” advertisers express their incendiary political ideas of freedom and democracy through commercials featuring dancers dressed in Day-Glo Spandex leotards, backed by synth-pop beats, it’s hard not to laugh at the contrast. The filmmakers behind No have perfectly achieved a balance between humour and solemnity.
Rating: 8/10
