Respect your body

Respect your body, because you live your life in it.

So simple, yet I was not able to do this for the past month or so, and as a payback I have been sick twice. Not pleasant. Really, all that's needed is to sleep, eat, and be active. Not much. The sleeping part I'm good at, and I like being active, so no problems there. Surprisingly, it's the eating part is what took a hit recently. I've been so busy that I've just eaten whatever was accessible and easy, fast, and cheap. No wonder I ended up with some sort of stomach flu that lasted over a week.

New plan: take the time to cook! To this end, I've been thinking a lot about food... and there is nothing in my current repertoire that I really feel like eating, so I've decided to try out new recipes! Hopefully this will make me hungrier and more motivated to eat well!

More Film Fest

Continuing with the list of movies I watched during VIFF...

The Wind and the Water - Panama

This was a fiction movie that was based on an agglomeration of real events and situations. The indigenous people in Panama live in an archipel of 365 islands, most of which are hardly lived on, and all have gorgeous beaches... Surprise, surprise, rich Americans want to build hotels! The movie also contrasted the upbringing of two kids, one raised in Panama City, and the other raised on the reservation. All in all, it was very informative and entertaining!

Antoine - Quebec

Documentary about a 5 year old boy that's blind but that goes to regular elementary school. The whole movie seemed to be filmed from his perspective, as he investigated the disappearance of an imagined woman. There were also a few heartbreaking scenes of him at school, showing the differences between what he was learning and accomplishing compared to what the "regular" kids were doing. Very moving.

Beyond the Game - Netherlands

After Antoine, Cory and I thought "Well, we are already downtown, might as well just go and watch whichever movie, it's free after all!" and so we ended up here. This was a documentary about guys that get paid to play World of Warcraft, and about other guys that watch them play. They fly all over the world for such matches... there was a lot of scenes with a guy watching a screen and typing/clicking very quickly. This got old after a few minutes, and after waiting patiently for 20 minutes for the movie to pick up (it didn't), we left.

The Damned United - UK

During another shift, I got to watch this. It's a fiction piece based on the live of Brian Clough, a legend in England for coaching football teams (that's soccer over here). I had never heard of him, but I enjoy soccer, so I thought, why not? There was a lot of screaming, and swearing, but really Michael Sheen (Brian Clough) and were Timothy Spall (Peter Taylor, Brian Clough's assistant) were hilarious and the movie was a riot! This is a definite must-see if you know anything about British football!

Rembrandt's J'accuse - Netherlands

The catch-line for this movie is what sold it to me. It went something like: "The Da Vinci Code of Rembrandt's The Night Watch. I was expecting some kind of secret conspiracy movie with plots within plots, etc. But really, it was just a documentary about different mysteries the painting created amongst scholars, with a few partial explanations, no real intrigue, alas! Then again, I hadn't ever heard of or seen the painting before hand, and I don't know anything about art, which might explain my lack of enthusiasm, but still, I expected more!

Everyone Else - Germany

During yet another volunteering shift, I didn't see the entirety of this, but what I did see I didn't really enjoy or understand. All I remember is that there were two inappropriately long and graphic sex scene that kind of made me nauseous...

Rocaterrania - USA

Another documentary, and very impressive one! This old man, from his youth, made up a whole country, this citizens, laws, intrigue, upheaval, art, language, history, and politics! He has drawings, notes, sketches, blueprints, everything! I really enjoyed this film because it strengthened my faith in imagination. I think it was the only documentary I saw that made me feel good about being a human at the end.

Tibet in Song - USA/Tibet

This was the only movie I saw that got a standing ovation. It was also the only one that made me cry. The director (who was present at the screening, and hosted a Q&A session afterwards) fled Tibet with his mother when he was two. He decided to go back to collect folk songs to take back to India, in order to keep the Tibetan culture alive. The Chinese government caught him and imprisoned him for 18 years! Due to an international campaign led by his mother, he was freed after serving six years. This story was interspersed with Tibetan history and songs. If you have the chance to see it, please do!

Nora - USA/UK

A short film, screened before A Blooming Business, Nora, a dancer, barely addresses her audience, and through different contemporary dances and scenes, tells us the story of her life as a dancer from Zimbabwe. She also tells of the struggle of her country for freedom, and the repercussion of that freedom on its people once granted.

A Blooming Business - Netherlands/Kenya

Yet another documentary about the sad state of affairs in developing countries. Lake Naivasha in Kenya used to be huge, clean, and full of fish. A few years after the opening of flower factories, it's 1/2 it's original size, unfit for human consumption (though everybody from the surrounding villages still drink it as it's the only source of water around)

Burma VJ - Denmark

Horrible, sad, somewhat nauseating, and simply painful to watch at times. The subtitle tells the story: "Burma VJ - Reporting from a closed country." I remember hearing all about the demonstrations, and the monks protesting the military regime back in 2007, back since then it all went the the back of my mind, and I haven't thought about it at all. This documentary brought all the bits and pieces of footage back together, and though you know it will end badly, you still hope for some glimmer of good news, to no avail.

Battle for the Xingu - Brazil

Dirty Paradise - Switzerland/France

It was basically the same story we have all heard a hundred times, but still don't get tired of hearing: the indigenous people are living a simple live close with nature, the white man arrives and pollutes the nature, and the indigenous people are trying to survive after the pollution. White men realized that by putting mercury in the water of an amazonian river, it would react with the gold present in the water and make mercury-bubbles. Then, when you heat these bubbles, the mercury evaporates are you are left with little gold pellets... BUT not all the mercury reacts with the gold, and the leftovers poison the fish which then gets eaten by the indigenous people that live along the river, causing a whole lot of havoc. This inspired me to choose French Guiana over Chile for my destination of choice for volunteering at next year!

Queen to Play - France

Comic break!

Now that the craziness that was last week (which lasted all the way to yesterday) is over, I have to time catch up with all the "important" things that usually fill my hours and days... things like procrastination! So instead of writing a new program to further my research (for that little thing called a thesis that needs to get done sometime in the next 10 months), I decided to read all the xkcd comics I'd missed due to excessive business, including:

Scary

and when you put your cursor over it one the actual site, the caption is:

I'm teaching every 8-year-old relative to say this, and every 14-year-old to do the same thing with Toy Story. Also, Pokemon hit the US over a decade ago and kids born after Aladdin came out will turn 18 next year.

Scary, right?

Needless to say that feeling ancient is just another part of adulthood!

Film Fest

As per request from my father, I'll do a mini review of all the films I see during the VIFF:

Young Victoria - UK/Canada

This was the first movie I saw, quite by accident. I was asked to work at Cinema 7, and after ushering people and guarding the reserved seats, there was nothing to do... so I lurked at the back of the movie theater with the other volunteers and watched this movie, and liked it! Very Hollywoodian, even though it's not American. I learned quite a bit about Queen Victoria, and was thoroughly entertained!

Shameless - Czech Republic

Same story as the last, on my second day of volunteering. I didn't really like this one though, it seemed to be just the story of a man going through mid-life crisis, by sleeping with younger women and older women alternatively. I also sadly missed the end, so maybe it got wrapped up beautifully.

It's not amine - 12 Short Films

Cory and I sneaked into this one at the end of one of our shifts, so we saw the last 4 short films: one about wax people coming out of a big candle and going on a quest (very cute), one about how comics are cool (good for the first five minutes, and then boring and redundant), one was a remake of sleeping beauty (hilarious), and the other was a dooms-day-alien-invasion type movie that wasn't all that impressive. I'm hoping to be able to see the first eight movies at some point before the end of the festival; if I make it, I'll update here!

Homegrown - USA

Already blogged about this one yesterday, very good movie!!

The September Issue - USA

Another documentary, about Anna Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue for the past 20 years (Meryl Streep impersonated her in The Devil Wears Prada). What can I say? By the end, I wanted to go out and buy myself the September issue of Vogue, all 840 (!?!) pages of it!! If you have to chance to see it, I would most definitely recommend it to pretty much everybody, as long as you have an open mind. I didn't even know who this Anna was before seeing this film, and know nothing of fashion, but still was enthralled into that world for the whole movie. And really, that's the whole point of a documentary: providing an insight into a world that you wouldn't normally get to see, and learning something along the way!

Two tidbits

First off, I want to share what I read on some girl's shirt in the bus on Sunday:

Haikus are easy.

But sometimes they don't make sense.

Refrigerator.

Loved it!

Second, I'm just back from watching a very inspiring movie at the Vancouver International Film Festival (where I'm currently working as a volunteer in order to get a free movie pass!): Homegrown. It was a documentary about the Dervaes family, who grow 6000lbs of food on a 1/5 acre lot just 130 feet from a highway in L.A., California!! They don't buy food (except of flour and sugar), and they also own 8 chickens, 6 ducks, and 2 goats! The movie really resonated with me, since I'm currently unsettled with my life and the way we live here in North America, to the point that I'm thinking of just taking off, but here's a story about people that seem to get "it" (whatever that may be), right in the middle of the States! So, if you have a moment, check out their website:

http://www.pathtofreedom.com/

Squash!

On Monday, Cory and I decided to try playing squash. So out I went, and got myself a new used squash racket, goggles, and balls. I was very enthusiastic, as many of my friends and family enjoy playing squash quite a bit. Yesterday was the big day! In preparation, I tried to find a good YouTube video, without much luck. Then, I looked at a few websites, but all I seemed to find was professional level squash instructions, nothing for a first timer. I did manage to find out that I bought the wrong kind of squash balls: at the store, it seemed smart to buy the balls labeled with a yellow dot, which means "slow". I mean, we are beginners right? Why would we want to buy a "fast" or blue dot, ball? Well, I learned after the purchase that in fact fast balls are good: they bounce more and therefore we don't have to run as much, aim as well, or hit as hard! Still, we wanted to play, so we decided to try with the "competition-grade" ball...

No luck. Things that didn't help: not knowing any rules, Cory's height, our irrational fear of getting injured, and sweaty eyes from the goggles. We then had the brilliance of going to rent a Racquetball ball, a huge bouncy blue thing, and success! Well, if you consider success as fun. We still didn't manage to follow the one rule we did know: not letting the ball bounce more than once on the floor.

Here is the general picture of what happened:

(1) One of us would serve,

(2) if the hit was good, i.e. the ball is now coming back towards us quite quickly, we would both run away from the ball, scared to be maimed by it,

(3) The one who didn't serve would start running after the ball, once it has slowed down, and try to hit the ball towards whatever wall is most convenient,

(4) repeat steps (2) & (3) until the ball ends up in a corner, or is rolling on the ground, or almost hits one of us (which resulted in a lot of screaming and apologizing)

Still, it was loads of fun, loads of exercise (proof: our legs and butts are killing today), and we will try again next week!