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A film on urban chaos, and a double bill about what homes to people are my previews for today.
Disorder
Cops raid a store illegally dealing in bear paws. The owner runs off, and customers loot the shelves. A cockroach is reported floating in a noodle soup. The health inspector doesn’t seem sure it came from the restaurant’s kitchen. A man lies on the street, pinned by a car, but the driver who hit him is convinced the victim is exaggerating his injuries. Shoppers leave a market by crossing by busy street where another shopper has just been run over and killed. Meanwhile, there’s a pedestrian bridge scant metres away. It’s not Toronto. Could this happen anywhere in the West? Is China’s modernization happening faster than it can cope with? Over 58 minutes, the fascinating Disorder weaves together 20 scenes of a city gone mad: traffic chaos, bizarre behaviour, criminal acts, natural disaster, civil unrest, the aftermath of crazy accidents, all in an unnamed Chinese city experiencing severe growing pains. Weikai Huang deftly edits together so many absurd situations caught on camera, it beggars the imagination... but it’s all real, and a proof of the axiom of truth being stranger than fiction. Taken together, the incidents build to a dystopian onslaught of mind-numbing proportions. Wow. Forget silly disaster films like 2012, Disorder is the real urban dystopia thing. Amazing. Showing together: Our House and Architecture of Home An interesting double-bill: not for everyone, but if you’re in the right mood, then you are in for some surprises with this pair.
Our House
What happens when homeless hippie punk Christian vegans (not sure about the order of qualifiers there) move into an abandoned building in Brooklyn? Our House examines an unorthodox home for unlikely rebels and the recently marginalized, the community they create, and how things change when their shelter is demolished to make way for a new condo. This film is not exactly what one would expect when one first thinks “homeless squat”; if you have preconceived notions about the kind of people who take over abandoned buildings, Our House will likely challenge those.
Architecture of Home
Residents of an apartment block in Reykjavik wax eloquent about what it means to live in their complex, built in 1937 after a 1929 order to improve conditions for the working class. The building is a classic now, and everyone seems obsessed with restoring it to original fittings... except for the electrical. The residents are all quietly eccentric, down to the kids, and we are treated with a half hour of quirky insights into the Icelandic psyche.
