The same resources might have been better used to finance a catalogue with actual critical essays justifying and contextualising the various programming strands it was possible in the 1990s, when I started attending MIFF, and ought to be so again.
Expertly curated by Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, the Dante program represented the most successful fusion of MIFF’s populist and avant-garde impulses at worst, the festival seemed masterminded by an overreaching entrepreneur like the eager-beaver billionaire played by John Glover in Gremlins 2, whose idea of progress entails sponsoring an updated version of Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1943) “in colour, with a happier ending.”Ĭertainly there was no excuse for the worse-than-usual MIFF trailer aired before every session, bizarrely equating auteurs with warring snack foods duking it out in a back alley it’s hard to fathom what neurosis compels the festival to trumpet its lack of cultural snobbery so insistently to viewers who have already paid for their seats. It seemed especially apt that MIFF should devote a retrospective to Dante, a true “vulgar modernist” consistently fascinated with images that bust out into the real world: little monsters taking over the projector booth in Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990), a tank crashing through a screen in The Second Civil War (1997), the ultimate special effect prompting the audience to flee the cinema in Matinee (1993). There were drive-in double features, IMAX presentations, screenings of Despicable Me (Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud) in 3D for the kids, experimental light shows at the Melbourne Planetarium, a 50th-anniversary revival of Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) at the Town Hall with Bernard Herrmann’s score performed live by the Norman Bates Orchestra… In Joe Dante’s satirical Small Soldiers (1998), a range of high-tech action figures is marketed under the slogan “Everything Else Is Just a Toy.” Perhaps this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival should have used a similar line: “Everything Else Is Just a Movie.” In his final year as festival director, Richard Moore seemed intent on going out with a bang, or as many bangs as possible, as if cinema had already ended and we were waiting for the Next Big Thing to take its place.
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