Festival Begins

One must feel sorry for those who have strange tastes, but never insult them. Their wrong is Nature's too; they are no more responsible for having come into the world with tendencies unlike ours than are we for being born bandy-legged or well-proportioned.
-- Marquis de Sade

Friday, May 14, 1999
One year ago: Last Seinfeld
Two years ago: Contemplating Jazz

We had a team meeting today, since we finally have a plan for what we are doing next. The team had been whipsawed for the last few months because of internal reorgs and trying to sort out what other groups are doing, but now the ducks are in a row, and Monday will kick off the milestone!

I did contribute to the meeting, in the form of the text for one powerpoint slide. I've been working with our internal tools and lab guys to clean up and revamp our intranet web site. It needed it! So I wrote a few words about what I'm doing and what will be happening on the site in the near future. I also gave credit to the useful and up-to-date pages that the lab team creates to let other folks know what they are up to. Intranet, folks! It's the wave of the future.

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I'd purposely set out on the road about a half hour earlier than my usual leaving time so I'd have plenty of time to get to the film festival, but because I'd left from the place where we'd had our meeting, which isn't our own building, I didn't check the web for traffic info beforehand. I soon regretted this. The traffic absolutely crawled! I gave up on parking near my house and taking the bus to the movie theater, and instead drove directly there. I was glad that the amount of cars on I-5 was only moderately heavy, and the speeds were low, because to get to the exit I needed, I had to cross very many lanes from a left-hand entrance ramp, clear over to the other side of the highway. I hate that!

I found a parking lot and walked a few blocks, to the newly revamped Cinerama theater. Wow! Paul Allen has done a stupendous job here. Rather than a renovation, I'd call it a polishing, at least in what is visible to a movie goer. I walked in and found my buddy A----. (We'd talked earlier this morning and settled on a Cinerama evening.)

• Here We Are, Waiting for You
  This Brazilian film was an abstract compilation of archival footage, telling the story of our century. I wasn't bowled over by it. The music was too loud! I was muffling it, closing my ears partially, for most of the movie. The running time was too long, or else the film was too repetitious.

In between the first and second feature, I went out and stood in line at the dedicated second box office, which was devoted to selling Phantom Menace tickets. Steve, another full-series-pass holder, was doing the same thing. We both chatted with another guy who was directly behind us in line, about the festival and movie stuff. We were encouraging him to sample the festival, since he said he liked movies. When he said he liked action movies, we pointed to the cool Hong Kong midnight features. But no, he didn't like subtitles! I finally got Steve to leave him alone by talking to Steve about festival stuff.

I was buying these tickets at the behest of Jack, who hadn't been successful via phone or web the first two days. He told me to get the first available timeslot! So when that turned out to be one AM, Thursday morning, I bought two tickets. Wow! I'll plan on not going in to work on that day, I guess.

• The Loss of Sexual Innocence
  I liked this! A non-linear story about love, sex, betrayal. The writer/director, Mike "Leaving Las Vegas" Figgis, said afterwards that he wanted to structure it as a group of short stories (though there were continuing characters), and I think he did succeed in giving that impression, with variations in mood and style. I liked the cast, and the look of the thing. In case you didn't get that one of the tales was an Adam and Eve variation, there was a really big snake! But most of the film was centered on Nick, an film producer, through his boyhood, teen years, and present day problems -- but not in that order, of course. That's what makes it non-linear!

• Entre Las Piernas
  This title was translated as "Between Your Legs" in the program. Is that right? In my limited Spanish, I'd render this as "Between the Legs" which has a different connotation. This was my favorite film of the night, though my festival buddy A---- wasn't thrilled with it. Every writeup calls the movie "Hitchcockian," whick is a fair statement. Lots of twists and turns in the plot, layers and shifts of viewpoint, weird undercurrents, and sex. I always like Javier Bardem (yum!), and Victoria Abril is good as well. They play two folks that cross paths at a sex addicts meeting.