While you watch four films in a row, the world goes on around you.

When you go to your first film, it is daylight and conservative MPs are crossing the floor in Parliament over the Migration Bill. When you come out, having seen a slow Iranian film, an animated Richard Linklater film, a nature film, and (accidentally, wrong cinema) an Australian film about kids in a small town... there are cabs all up and down the streets of Melbourne and the city rings with the voices of angry cab drivers on the steps of Parliament.

After eight hours of movies, the Migration Bill has passed. A man has been charged with the death of the taxi driver he (allegedly) threw from his cab. And you've turned another year older.

It's all a bit much to take in, really.

By the way, as well as the above, I'm adding to my list of films seen so far: Detour de France (about cycling but actually about Aussie blokes being disgraceful), Music in Exile (supposed to be about New Orleans musicians post-Hurricane-Katrina, but just a bit too full of white people telling about their pain for my liking), Tough Enough (German gangsters) and You're Gonna Miss Me. This last one was a corker. Docco similar to Capturing The Friedmans in many ways only with broader subject-matter and made by a first-time director.

Massive week for Standing There Productions. Deadlines, Film Festivals, weekend film shoots and yes, as you may have read in all the important newspapers, it’s my birthday on Friday.

Rita, Stew and Robin (who all worked on I Could Be Anybody ) shot a film on the weekend while I did a fair bit of writing and a fair bit of swearing at my computer. August is always stupidly busy, but who would have known that the annual festa that happens on August eleventh would be thrown into doubt…

I think I might celebrate my birthday some time in September. Meanwhile:

MIFF update

On Saturday I saw:
Iraq in Fragments, which was described as a poetic documentary about Iraq in three parts. It certainly was poetic, wonderfully shot. It was astonishing really, but I think I probably got more out of In The Shadow of The Palms . Iraq in Fragments was still shattering, which it would be hard not to be if you were a documentary about Iraq.

I then saw Hunt Angels , which was about the Australian film industry (in other words it was a snuff film) (shoosh no it wasn't).

Sunday:
Linda Linda Linda, which was Japanese. So far the Japanese are winning the "best country" category (aided by the fact that I have only seen two Japanese films so far and they were two of the best I've seen). This one took a while to grow on me but I can still sing you the main chorus of the song sung by the band all throughout the film. Also, it made me want to go to high school in Japan. How much FUN were those kids HAVING exactly!?!??! I remember high school being fun and all, but there wasn't a daytime festa and a fluid sense of time and a pancake baking session during lunch time and stuff. Massively robbed.

Then saw the hideous (in a good way?) Longing , which had a fairly high walk-out rate, many of them women. Interesting in that it was a film about infidelity on the part of a man who can't communicate in a relationship with two women, in a film directed by a woman. (And the only reason Claire and I didn't walk out was that we were engaged in an ongoing dialogue with the screen, each other, and anyone else we thought might benefit. Sorry about that).

Then, Lunacy. The title pretty much sums it up. Check out the photo on the website. It's an Eastern European horror film where the director appears at the start of the film to tell us it's not art, and then disappears to make way for an insane asylum and a whole lot of raw chops having meat-sex.

Monday: In Between Days (about a Korean girl living in America. Gentle and real but the highlight for me was the sound - the snow crunching, the breathing, the wind). Mutual Appreciation was great for any writer to see because the dialogue and the characters were so unbearably true. Cringe-makingly true.
Then The Willow Tree, about a blind Iranian man who suddenly sees again. Reminded me of an article I read by Oliver Saks once, in The New Yorker, which was about how people deal with blindness (do they still "see" in their mind's eye or do they drop the idea of vision completely and learn the world in another way. Also very interesting on how depressing it often is for people to regain site after years of blindness). The article is here.

Then last night I saw Shooting Dogs, which is about Rwanda and was made in collaboration with survivors of the events the story is based on. I found myself being annoyed by the performances of the two central white men in it, whose "acting" seemed a bit out of place in a real (and horrible) story.

Prairie Home Companion, the screenplay of which was written by Garrison Keillor (hurrah). Very funny, and also good to see from a writer's perspective because of the Robert Altman "dialogue running across itself" thing. Also, check out the cast list. Yikes. Next was The Host, which I adored despite the fact that it had a huge monster in it that terrorised the public. Usually, I hate that crap. This one was Korean. Right up there with the Japanese, the Koreans. Completely hilarious and dangerously out of genre. Yay.

I am completely exhausted. Standing There Productions is taking next week OFF. Right off. No films, no meetings, no nothing. We won't know what to do with ourselves.

After days of doing nothing but writing to a deadline, I have decided what I would like for my birthday.

A maid.

I wanted to read about the film I saw last night, "United 93" (the first film about the September 11 attacks) and I found this , which just raises so many questions I don't know where to begin.

The film was brilliantly done in many ways although don't see it before a long flight, be my advice. I left my wallet in the cinema so Standing There Productions then lost two script hours to me sitting around waiting for the guy in Row C to stop sitting on my wallet like maybe he enjoyed it. Weirdo.

Anyway it's the third and my birthday is on the eleventh so you guys still have heaps of time to make me a prize. Lastly, a special thanks to the guys out the back of my house who made it so much more challenging for me to write to a deadline, by sawing and grinding with the loudest machines in Melbourne all afternoon for the last two days in a row. You guys are awesome.

Last night and tonight featured the best and the worst two films I have so far seen at MIFF, and this afternoon also delivered the worst and the best letter I have ever had the pleasure of receiving from Telstra.

Telstra, for those of you who haven't been listening, is allegedly a telecommunications company. See here for my previous mystifying dealings with Telstra this year. Now, should Telstra ever choose to entirely fund a Standing There Productions feature film, I am sure I will find it in my heart to forgive them. But I will never forget this journey:

1. Over six months ago: closed my account with Telstra
2. Since then, keep receiving bills from Telstra for 67 cents every month
3. Bills have "DO NOT PAY UNTIL NEXT BILL" written next to the 67 cents
4. Then, the next month, receive exact same bill as above
5. This happens for months
6. Call Telstra, express doubts regarding efficiency of system
7. Assured by Telstra communications expert that this problem has now been solved
8. Today, receive two page bill for $0.00
9. Written next to this "total" are the words "PAYMENT IS NOT REQUIRED".
10. There is a little graph comparing my bill totals to this time last year - handy!

... If you wrote Animal Farm or 1984 or whatever in contemporary times, I reckon Telstra would have to rate a mention.

Movies:
Most bizarre film EVER (requires sitting patiently and attempting to understand Japanese humour) is Funky Forest: First Contact . I'm certainly not running around telling everyone to go and see it, because you could love it, or you could hate it. I loved it. It was genuinely insane but it still worked on a narrative level. The dialogue was great. The images were brilliant. The ideas were whacked. The official site is here (takes a year and a half to load and lots of it is in Japanese, but who cares).

And the worst film so far? Gabrielle. French film. Tortured discussion by two tortured French people about their tortured relationship. For two hours. One of those ones where you sit there thinking "LEAVE HIM! KILL HIM! SOMETHING!". Also, almost the entire thing was out of focus. So glad I invited my friend Claire for a fun night out to the movies.

Have also seen over last two nights:
Guernsey - I've seen films like this a thousand times but it was well done.
Slumming - excellent performance in a really good film by a guy who has a genuinely fluid face. It is as though his face melts between horror, pain, joy, and mental instability, all at the one time. (Kind of like my face during Gabrielle ). Good to see a film that isn't a comedy but has the guts to be funny, too. Really liked this one.

In other news - one project deadline down, two to go. Such a good feeling to get your homework in on time.

The Standing There Productions guide to the Melbourne Film Festival continues despite my "wagging" an apparently brilliant film, Crimson Gold on Saturday. A disgraceful black mark against my name, I admit.

I did, however, see the following films this weekend:

Grbavica. Excellent film in the Women's Film section, which is an interesting section actually. This film is post-war and it's gorgeously done. It opens on this group of women who are encouraged (in fact paid) to tell their war stories and talk about their grief as part of the healing process. At first glance, all of them appear to be dead.

Anyway, others:

Summer 04. German film summarised as follows: what tangled webs we weave (sorry, but you see so many and the capacity for meaningful analysis diminshes hourly).

An Inconvenient Truth. Really excellent film made by Al Gore about global warming...

I know, I know!

Seriously, though. This film is a very well-made documentary that can't really be accused of bias. It's an excellent lesson in climate change (literally), as well as being fairly revealing about Al Gore, which turns out to be quite surprising. What's more it understands its own role as a film...

Which is more than I can say for Al Franken: God Spoke, which apparently thought it was a film about how brilliant Al Franken is and how he should be the next President of America. Al Franken is a comedian from Saturday Night Live , who wrote an often hilarious booked called Lies and The Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair And Balanced View of The Right in America. He is, however, one part political analyst and nine parts comedian. Not the other way around. His targets in the film are, well, everyone who isn't talking to him right at that very moment (one of his foes correctly points out in the film that he sucks up to people in person and then mocks them in the car on the way home). And he doesn't mind what he picks on them for, either. Poofy impersonations, ever so slightly sexist asides, and a searing analysis of a Senator's dog poo. Again, maybe comedy ain't my thing at the moment. I could smell the ego from the second back row.

Also saw a Danish gangster film, Pusher, which was excellent but which was a gangster film (yeesh!). Straight after that I saw a Hong Kong musical called Perhaps Love. Also very good although richly bizarre transition from gangster film to dancing in streets.

Lastly, The Wind That Shakes The Barley. Irish. Good LORD those poms have a lot to answer for. Extremely well written.

So, thirteen films down, many bijillions to go. Good thing I've got nothing else to do with my time (gulp).

I am so exhausted that I just wagged my first film in the Melbourne Film Festival.

It was a good one, too. Iranian.

I'm going to have a bit of a nap.

Update-wise, last night I saw The Way I Spent The End of The World, which was a lovely, slow, Romanian film. I then saw Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic, which I almost fell asleep in, which is a documentary kind of thing about Sarah Silverman, a Jewish-American comic. I think, after the Comedy Festival, I might have reached saturation point with stand-up.

Let's see how I feel about film after the six I'm seeing in a row tomorrow.

Yikes.