VIFF: Sweet Food City

my rating: walkout

my blurbie:
so i didn't walk out even though rob whispered that he wouldn't mind leaving. this was horrible horrible wanna be autuer shit.

let me start with the sound: all the sound was reproduced afterwards which can sound fine IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING. in this movie, the girl's footsteps sound like men's shoes and they weren't synced up. the dialogue was all redone and it sounded like the actors spoke too close to the microphone.

then there's the visual quality. THERE WASN'T ANY. clearly shot on the cheapest consumer brand camera, all the whites were blown out and all the blacks had no detail. my eyes were burning. and the cinematography? really bad; don't be fooled by the nice film still above.

when i came home, i re-read the film outline in the VIFF book and it sure sounds wonderful: "brilliant use of cinematic space" and "director who thinks in 3D." the main girl's story took up half the screen time, the other half was made up of indiscriminate, random, unrelated (except they happen in her ghetto complex) scenes of poor people being bored, kids with no pants on, and many minutes of cute kittens sleeping.

here's a line i though was special: "a real man should smoke"

about 10 minutes into the film, all us non-mandarin speakers were wondering where the subtitles were. if you squinted and looked at the bottom of the screen, you could see the subtitles were just off the screen. suddenly, during the scene when the girl is putting on her bra, the film stops and the projector menu comes up and we all watch as the projectionist adjusts the film image so we can see the subtitles.

wtf.