[warning: disturbing stuff mentioned herein. if you're having a nice day, or are eating, or are of a sensitive disposition generally, you might not want to read. i would make some kind of warning gesture to persons under 18 if in fact that were not the quickest way to get impressionable young minds to read anything]

it's that time of year again, so the next week or so's worth of ranting will be pretty much exclusively about the Brisbane International Film Festival.

Having missed both the South African version of Carmen and the Peckinpah movie that i was going to see, my first film this year was Dumplings. i was suprised to find that apparently this film about people eating aborted foetuses to maintain their youth and beauty shared a writer with Farewell My Concubine.

I'm not too sure how to describe it, obviously horror was involved (not so much of the splatter variety, mostly just by transgressing so many taboos), but there was also comedy and drama/pathos. Although it was quite beautifully shot, the definite star for me was the use of sound -- pronounced chewing noises mingling with chopping noises, which flooded into my brain also during the kissy bits too. i don't know if it was a deliberate director/sound dude ploy, but it definitely scared me.

oh, and Bai Ling was great.

although there were some people walking out (apart from eating foetuses chopped up into dumplings, there is also an abortion scene), what i think i found more chilling than those straightforward bits were the more psychological things: that this woman somehow feels it is a correct choice to eat unborn children in order to stay pretty, and i can somehow glimpse an understanding of it. we live in a fucked up world!

i think the veg(etari)an part of the crowd were the happiest afterwards. alas, i was thinking that i would actually like some dumplings, but was unsure that i would in fact be able to eat them. on the train home, thought i could knock up some kind of mushroomy gyoza when getting home. this was a fine and excellent plan, but a bit lacking in anything to actually put into the gyoza. the idea of just making dough, frying it and covering in soy sauce was tempting...

missing, presumed somewhere about the place: one battered Neil Gaiman paperback, answers to the name "Smoke and Mirrors". if anyone sees it, please do sit down with a nice cup of tea and read a story or two. contact me when you're done with it. [actually, i bet i lent it to someone and have forgotten. will need to institute some kind of check-in/check-out system for these kinds of things, am always forgetting to return other peoples' stuff too.]

and in other news, have picked up the strange idea from somewhere that i have to rewrite a scene from Macbeth, making it so that Banquo's ghost keeps dropping his pants trying to make Macbeth laugh. the things i'll do to avoid selection criteria...