When I haven’t been catching up on work recently, I’ve been watching film festival films. The weekend has been particularly rewarding: I highly recommend Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth about climate change and global warming which I saw yesterday, and the three films I saw today: C.R.A.Z.Y., a Quebecois production about a family of five boys, with the fourth one, Zac (the Z in the title) dealing with his sexuality and a homophobic father as he grows up through the 60s and 70s — the soundtrack is superb; Zizek!, a mad, rambling documentary of everyone’s favourite Marxist Lacanian as he travels the world on a lecture tour; and the utterly brilliant Global Haywire, Bruce Petty’s animated/live action doco about where the world machine managed to go from what seemed like a relatively good idea (borrow some science from the East, start the Enlightenment and throw off the shackles of Catholic fundamentalism) to the utterly catastrophic shemozzle we have today. The detours through excellent theorists and writers (George Monbiot, Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Gore Vidal, Arandhati Roy) are compelling and well put together, the metaphor (the freedom machine) is great. A must-see film.
In between I’ve been stealing every second to work, so I apologise to those whose social functions I didn’t make it to. I *did* make it to qamar‘s hen’s night, which was amazing — divine dinner at Soul Mama and then ritual on the beach followed by karaoke — and to Matt’s party last night.
Matt’s party was fun, and it turns out, bizarrely, that a guy there from The Age who was pointed out to me but who I didn’t end up chatting to is the guy our new ad manager mentioned to me as a good friend. Small world!