MIFFing, with reservations
Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), 7-24 August 2025.
I kind of hate MIFF.
It can be a shitfight to get half-decent seats because it's very popular and a lot of presale tickets get snapped up by people with memberships. The memberships are too expensive to contemplate and the ticket prices are high aside from that.
It also brings out the worst of Melbourne's art-wanker scene. One thing I love about the Fantastic Film Festival is that because it's strictly genre movies it can't possibly take itself too seriously. Not so MIFF; you only have to take a look at Letterboxd reviews following a screening to read all the insufferably large-brained takes as well as complaints about people in the crowd doing it wrong (like, er, laughing).
Having said this, I have to admit that MIFF has given me some good times. A few years ago they featured the Canadian director Guy Maddin of My Winnipeg fame (I love My Winnipeg). As part of that we saw The Green Fog which uses clips—glimpses, really—of films and TV shows set in San Francisco to approximate Hitchcock's Vertigo. I just loved the way it edits the clips together, it's abrupt and funny in a way that I don't know how to describe.
We also saw Maddin's The Forbidden Room which is a ridiculous fever dream of a thing. Ever since then I have always thought of flapjacks (fluffy pancakes) as an important source of oxygen should I ever find myself in a doomed submarine or otherwise in danger of asphyxiation.
While I'm on the topic of Guy Maddin, I have to note that my absolute favourite new release movie of last year was his film Rumours. Gosh I cackled through that. Don't be fooled by the bad reviews. All of those opinions are wrong.
My other massive highlight from MIFFs past was Relaxer. It is a revolting and pointless movie that I would not really recommend to anyone. But I loved it, partly because it depicts an apocalypse without falling into that annoying American habit of protagonising it. Relaxer makes the whole thing as inauspicious as possible.
The truth is that I would never have come across Relaxer without MIFF. So I just can't stay mad.
This year I'm seeing two MIFF screenings: Kontinental '25, which we saw during the week, made by the Romanian director Radu Jude (I can't overstate how much I loved his previous film Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World), and Good Boy, a dog-based horror which we're going to see tonight.
(If you desire to know my thoughts, I make notes about movies I've seen on Letterboxd.)
