2016 SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL.

Córki dancingu / The Lure,  Down Under, Everybody Wants Some!!  Grüße ausFukushima /Greetings from Fukushima / Fukushima Mon Amour, In the Sadow ofthe Hill, Juste la fin du monde / It's Only the End of the World,  Mahana,Magallanes,  Miss Sharon Jones & Hot Type, Mul-go-gi / A Fish,  Raman Raghav / Psycho Raman, Saint Amour, Smrt u Sarajevu /Death in Sarajevo, Toni Erdman. 

What the good citizens who put up the few hundred quid it took to set up the first Sydney Film Festival with the help of the films societies (remember film societies?) more than half a century back would say about the current event is speculative, with their two
hundred plus movies in a dozen venues and flags flapping on civic lamp posts. Once the total gets past fifty movies of course it is impossible to take in everything. It becomes half a dozen film festivals. I picked my way through the program and probably saw more worthwhile material than ever at one of these - until I got into the ten dollar dazzlers they were selling off. This is not they way to get the best value out of the event. Often the best material and the films that justify film festivals are surprise discoveries. I checked my selection against the prize winners and the Herald coverage and there was minimal overlap - In the Shadow of the Hill which I saw for a comparison with Tropa de elite.

The couple of films with Madman’s logo on the front should show up at popular prices and quite a bit of the material I ignored is gone for ever. Trouble is that those arrive without documentation and you make expensive mistakes if you just wade in.

Also though the festival is now the only local organisation with the dollars to handle this, they continue to ignore the chance to offer the ground breaking retrospectives that still surface from time to time in international Cinematheques. Maybe it’s just as well, as the ability to screen vintage material correctly is fast fading here without anyone much worried. Also it looks like there still are people who haven’t seen all Martin Scorsese and they are a better financial risk. The great man was not freighted out to present his work though the film maker introductions were one of the more agreeable features of the event.

Agnieszka Smoczynska’s Córki dancingu/  The Lure proved to be a handsome ‘scope production mixing punk numbers, excess and fantasy, with Splash and “The Little Mermaid” mashed in. Not what you might expect of a Polish film with Agnieszka Holland’s consultant credit buried in the titles. 

Córki dancingu : Michalina Olszanska, Marta Mazurek denurely poised.    

At night mermaids (or more accurately Sirens) Silver Mazurek and Gold Olszanska surface to do their duet, causing to the musicians playing on the shore to invite them out of the water before Preis (Four Nights with Anna) lets out a scream. Back at the decadent night club, the duo are accepted as back-up singers and there’s a demo of pouring water on their legs which transform into long fishy (undivided) tails.

The club acts include a stripper, Preis’ songs and eating the head off a budgie. Things get rough with Olszanska coming in covered in gore which she passes off as a victim cow, though we know better. She bites the thumb off one of the clubbers who displeases her and the sisters get dumped off a bridge wrapped in rugs.

Menacing mermaids must be in at the moment with this one and Stephen Chow’s Mei ren yu. It’s kind of unsatisfying that the makers can’t come up with something more involving than the fairy tale story line that they keep on losing in gross out detail but having a couple of appealing young women go topless for a large part of the action does get attention.

An ocker comedy about the 2005 Cronulla riots - maybe - but that needs real finesse. Think the Farrelly Brothers.

With Abe Forsythe’s Down Under we kick off with the actual text message that called for patriotic Australians to drive the menace of the Lebanese off  the Beaches sent the day before, and we get into actuality or re-staged actuality of the streets engulfed with rioters in “Ethnic Cleansing” shirts and police driving back hoon attackers.

The film’s action takes place the next day, with Ockers and outraged Lebs recruiting (“There’ll be fuck loads of cars”) to patrol the streets that night. The Aussie lead is more worried about his missing brother and looking after the high functioning Downs Syndrome kid cousin who just slammed the family car into the garage roller door. Uneasily enlisted by a gung ho friend, they are given a WW1 303 with one bullet and a grenade held together with Blutak. A Lebanese car lot do better, scoring a hand gun from a luxury meths lab. who demand the driver’s trousers - “to make sure you’re not wearing a wire.”

The film is planting the elements for the ending rather obviously at this stage. There are a few successful blackly comic moments, like the new car load of hard case racists demanding the boy beat up a passing Leb (he turns out to be the Chinese news agent they know, out walking his dog) or the car diverting from it’s Patriotic mission with the takeaway kebabs the driver’s pregnant girl friend demands, under the penalty of three maintenance orders.

The night time suburban beach atmosphere is quite well set up with the observation that it’s Gallipoli, except this time it’s our turf, but the development is marred by that familiar movie character ability to take beatings undamaged and the fact that the people fronting it remain fugitives from local sitcoms in which they were recruited.

Music is particularly destructive to the balance between cautionary tale, movie suspense
and knockabout they are trying to establish.

Even writing about a film using the Cronulla riots as a subject is a delicate task. TV director Forsythe  (the “Ned Kelly was Irish” gag recalls his earlier Ned) needed to bring more than the sensibility of a Housos episode to pull this off. It will be interesting to see what sort of a response his  film gets.

Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! ( Dazed and Confused 2) opened the next week and doesn’t really require comment. It kicks off  like a slicker 1980 edition of Porkies, complete with gross out banter among the arriving college baseballers and a scene of girls mud wrestling.

 The film’s got an off putting mood of endless competition - “practice as you play” while the undercover scout may be painting the roof outside the fence. It also runs to technical
flourishes like the one take (?) gross out scene in the locker room or a nice split screen ‘phone call. Everything is a bit too shiny and clean.

However Linklater shows in the relationship between jock Blake Jenner and theater major Zoey Deutch, who he suspects may have taken a faked interest in him to put down the louder guys in the car. Nice common ground scenes in knowing the difference between Rod McKuen and Walt Whitman and being used to being the best at what they did in college, suddenly finding themselves surrounded by other people with that same experience. The film is genuinely likeable.

Anything from from Doris Dörrie is an event though her new film Grüße aus Fukushima /Greetings from Fukushima / Fukushima Mon Amour is not her best work. It repeats her attempt to come to terms with Japanese culture that we saw in Erleuchtung garantiert/ Enlightenment Guaranteed  and Cherry Blossoms but moves us into the new area for her, scary ghost movie, done in striking ‘Scope black & white.

After a disaster that leaves her trying to hang herself in her bridal gown, very blonde Rosalie Thomass leaves Germany for what proves to be a gig as clown entertainer in a hostel for aged refugees from the Fukushima melt down. Unlike her Japanese mentor’s plastic bag ballet, Thomass’ Hula Hoops exercise routine fails to engage the oldies. One gives her a demo and comments “Bullshit.”

Our heroine is about to give up when she’s recruited by another resident, Kaori Momoi (Memoirs of a Geisha, Sukiyaki Western Django), into driving her into the “safe” zone which has now been re-opened, though no one wants to be there. Turns out that the ex-geisha has repeatedly tried to move back into her old, derelict house. The hostel people are angry but Thomass does a U-Turn seeing her new mission as working with the Japanese woman on restoring her home.

There is complication in the form of the girl spirit of  Momoi’s former pupil who sheltered with her on the one leafless tree during the tidal way. Momoi’s blames Thomass for her grief attracting the spirits and puts salt on her shoulders to drive them off. They are like the ghosts in Kyoshi Kurosawa’s eerie Kishibe no tabi/ Journey to the Shore refusing to believe they are dead - why didn’t we score that one here? 

Turns out that there’s more to Momoi story than she’s letting on.

The spooks, done in stretch printed high contrast, are effective and the film carefully emphasises the striking imagery it places in the frame - the fields of black bags filled with contaminated soil, white compressing gates with arrows, the sash still hanging on the tree branch, Thomass’ dress dwarfing Momoi’s daughter when she holds it up to put it in the wash or the cat headed man. 

As always Dörrie manages to make her bumbling characters endearing (the saki drinking session with the bald priest is particularly nice) though here the veneer of charm over disturbing material is stretched thin in a couple of places.

Australian Dan Jackson’s In the Shadow of the Hill is a handsome documentary and effective special pleading. Following FIFA’s World cup and anticipating the Olympics “one stupid white man with a camera”, as he characterises himself,  is drawn into the affairs of  Rocinho the Rio hillside favella  in the process of a “pacification” program.   A local man last seen being taken away by the police becomes the subject of a campaign by his family, run despite police threats and parliamentary offers of protective custody.

The world wide “Where is Amarildo?” campaign finally unites the slum dwellers, the  media and the aware population in a massive demonstration in front of the parliament.“All Brazil is come together.” A police Captain and twelve of his associates go to jail.

While this is happening, a local artist stages his Via Sacre / Way of the cross street theatre piece despite being told that all available funding is going into the Sports Events, and a dispossessed healer with cancer makes herself over into Miss Passionfruit, a recognised public entertainment figure dragging herself out of poverty.

Interviews include Amarildo de Souza’s family and civil rights lawyer Jao Tancredo who are seen facing off the police. Jackson manages to include a shot of a dog walking over a “Where Is Amarildo” poster, an actual fire fight, one distant view of Christ the Redeemer on his hill and a single night time glompse of  advancing black beret BOPE troops, the only police force which carries no handcuffs.

Put this to gether with José Padilha’s alternate view Tropa de Elite movies, which are briefly excerpted, and you still only get an incomplete account of the favellas but it’s enough to leave you profoundly disturbed.

The event’s most hyped film was Xavier Dolan’s Juste la fin du monde / It's Only the End of the World based on a play by one Jean Luc Legrace previously filmed in 2010.

This kicks off in a plane taking Gaspard Ulliel to the family he hasn’t seen for twelve years. Arriving by cab he is immediately assailed by complaints that he should have had them drive him and manages to get into close over the shoulder two shot dialogue with each member of the family in turn - sister in Law Marion Cotillard, mother Natalie Baye in a red wig, sister Léa Sedoux and resentful tool maker brother Vincent Cassel. It would be hard to make a bad film with this cast but Dolan gives it a go.

There’s muted colour, some Goddard (Jean Luc not Paulette) style driving with thecamera in the back seat behind the silhouettes of the brothers, a misleading flashback, a ‘phone call that sets up the disturbing information that the family don’t have and a bird appears to fly out of the cuckoo clock. The most exciting thing to happen is serving desert.

I found myself dozing, which meant I missed a key plot point.

Dolan is agro about the bad notices his cast have received and with him getting the Cannes Grand Prix you’ve got to wonder what came in second.

Hispanic film is always the major tradition we know the least about.  Salvador del Solar’s Magallanes is remarkably assured for a first film. This one kicks off  with chauffeur lead Damián Alcázar driving wheelchair bound Colonel (the great) Fedderico Luppi and, with his “Taxi” sign stuck back on the windshield, picking up Magaly Solier (Blackthorn) taking her to what proves to be a product rally for a something called U-Life where, like a hot gospel preacher, the MC flogs the cosmetics line she can’t sell in her beauty salon. We’re just getting interested in this when it turns out to be a misleading digression.

In his rat hole cellar home, Alcázar has a sketch of the girl and a photo of her with a younger Luppi. This triggers an intriguing low tech. scam which evokes sequences by Kurosawa (Tengoku to jigoku / High and the Low) and Brian de Palma (Body Double). The most audacious set piece however, even if it doesn’t fully succeed, is Solier giving Alcázar a haircut and shave. His schemes unravel with rejection and violence leaving him increasingly isolated.

The ugly portrait of seedy Lima in its growing prosperity, after a period of Shining Path terror and ferocious military reaction, is effective but the movie’s strongest moments are it’s shots of the characters’ faces. Alcázar, Solier and the support are exceptional but it’s aged Luppi who dominates each of his brief scenes, projecting unquestioned authority run to seed. The cut to him with a chock ice is beautiful. The progress of the yellow envelope of in the final reels is also great story telling.

Remarkably articulate on film and in person, Del Solar’s proposes art as the way to address the area’s violent past rather than polemics or the courts. He uses talents from across the “Ibero American Industries" is an attempt to reach a wider public.

Intriguingly the film has the same conclusion as John Lvoff’s also remarkable and under screened 2001 L'homme des foules - the secret policeman denied punishment. It would be interesting to know if  del Solar was aware of the precedent.

Mahana proved to be New Zealander Lee Tamahori’s best movie - to date - and his most memorable effort since Once Were Warriors launched him and its star Temuera Morrison as internationally recognised  personalities.

We’re soon into the vintage car race between the Mahana and the Poata Maori families. There’s tension between Morrison and grand son Akuhata Keefe, who was fourteen when he was cast in the part. Morrison has him slopping out the barn at the house rather than going out with the older members shearing distant farms.

The kid is at “that damn Pakhea school” where he’s memorised George Bernard Shaw’s “A family is a tyranny dominated by it’s weakest member” as well as a suitable John Wayne quote and he speaks out against the severity of the justice system, instead of thanking the judge, on the class excursion to the courts where no Maori is spoken. White settlement gets a mixed report card in this film but it’s not the subject. This one is about holding families together in the face of the change that new culture, the impending shift to cities will bring.  Morrison is the man who kept his own from fringe life and digging
roads, giving him an ambivalence like the one Jake the Muss had.

The climax comes when the boy defies him and his father defends the kid against the old man’s brutality. His family are banished but grandma gives them her run down house and land (communing with digital bees there). After an impressive storm rips the sheet iron off the roof and his dad is injured young Keefe takes charge, getting shearing work and entering the Golden Shears competition against his own and the rival clan - another set piece. It would be interesting to know if Tamahouri taught his actors to shear or found shearers to act.

These characters were watching The 3:10 To Yuma and Flaming Star the same time that I was, which has a personal relevance to go with all the unfamiliar material. The flying wedge formation making their menacing haka like entrance to the Tungee funeral at the community hall (which contrasts with the white man’s church) is particularly disorienting.

Mahana Temuera Morrison

Mahana has an exploratory feel like The Learning Tree, where Gordon Parkes became the first black American to direct a Hollywood movie. It is not without self consciousness and the occasional irritation (why don’t they clear the cobwebs before they hang curtains at the rundown house) but his is a great looking film and it is saying something about families that has a whole lot more conviction than Juste la  fin du monde.

In there with Michael Moore and Ken Burns, Barbara Kopple has entered the Brahmin cast of the documentary world with her two Oscars, (Harlan County USA & Wild man Blues) and thirty productions behind her. She got two films into the current even.

Miss Sharon Jones covers a performer called a female James Brown who was told she was “too fat, too black, too short and too ugly” to be a singing star, but managed to run up a three decade headliner career.

We start of  with Jones holding a handful of her own hair as her head is shaved in preparation for the treatment that may save her life from pancreatic cancer with the question of her recovery for the demanding world tour that has been booked for the following February looming. “I’m responsible for everybody’s pay roll.” 

Intercut with performance and interview footage, we see her receiving chemotherapy and home care. The film weaves back through her life, starting in a district where the store had a parrot trained to scream “nigger stealer” when a black customer came in. After entry level jobs (including a run as prison guard) she managed to work up star status. She gets a float in Macy’s parade and her dream of dancing on the show with Ellen is realised (with minimal coverage.)

The people around her seem devoted and there is no hint of resentment when one of her musicians gets a regular spot in the Jimmy Fallon Show’s band. Jones performance energy is extraordinary.

A handsomely mounted film, to a soul music fan this one would be a treat.

Also on show is Kopple’s three year filmed coverage of Nation Magazine Hot Type, which has been stating the anti establishment case in the US since 1865, a subject with a built in following among her potential audience. Foreground are the magazine’s current editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, and her predecessor and mentor Hamilton Fish.  Heuvel describes her experience of guidance from Fish as Talmudic ”You’d leave the office more confused than when you went in.”

The film emphasises the internship program (apparently everyone there started as an intern) and shows them following the advise that they were given about not having a professor write about Venezuela instead of sending a reporter to Venezuela, showing their journalist (and Kopple’s crew) on the ground in Haiti, (three hundred thousand still homeless after the earthquake) Wisconsin and North Carolina where the Civil Rights campaign is struggling to hold the ground won in the sixties - protesters with duct tape over their mouths.

This comes with a historical sketch showing that the magazine began as the voice of the
Republican party speaking for the dispossessed after the civil war, shifting to it’s present
stance in WW1 and getting up steam about “(Senator) McCarthy’s disloyalty to the
truth.”

As revealing as their treatment of the Big Issues, are marginal touches like the complaint that editorial passed copy with the question mark, that should have been inside the quotation marks, outside them or the writer who wants to do Breaking Bad saying cultural criticism is  relevant too.

The film is amusing and holds attention. The craft aspects, cutting, recording, graphics and  narration by Susan Sarandon and Sam Waterston impress. It makes it’s subjects seem smart and appealing. You’ve got to feel recruited when you see one of their ten year olds leading protest chants on a bull horn. They double this up by closing with the clip of vanden Heuvel leaving the normally super articulate John Stewart at loss for words when she lists the shifts in attitudes the magazine has seen.

As much as her skill as a film maker, you’ve got to admire Kopple’s ability to get her work out to an audience.

Also a first film Mul-go-gi / A Fish  comes from Hong-min Park it’s Korean director who spent a year preparing, absorbing the atmosphere of the location.

It’s a mistake to try and construct a plot out of the non consecutive glimpses of a Professor whose wife has left him and a private detective claiming to have located her as a Shaman, intercut with two fishermen in a fog bound studio row boat having a  Beckett like conversation about the stupidity of fish. When that pair decide to sashimi the catch, it chants in protest and the characters all get to meet in a shack where the reflections in the mirror are wrong. Throw in a bit of Cocteau (the character looking over the side for the one who isn’t in his boat anymore) and some Buddhist ritual.

Well, weird can be all right and there are a few moments and images that do intrigue in this one but not enough to reward viewing at length. The 3D photography makes the textures of  waves & straw matting striking and achieves the floating image quality we don’t get much now, making it the film’s major feature. 

The Indian Raman Raghav 2.0 / Psycho Raman is a grim mash up of Crime & Punishment and le
Juge et l'assassin in greenish, grainy colour from the director of Gangs of Wasseypur .

Nawazuddin Siddiqui is doing it tough, eating garbage and having nowhere to stay so he retrieves a bent iron bar and moves on his sister who has escaped his advances and started a family - which he promptly offs. The (fuzzy) image of him running in his bike helmet dragging the pipe along the floor is genuinely disturbing.

Detective Vicky Kaushal recognises his photo as the man who used to hang round the police station confessing (“I am God’s own CCTV camera”) to his previous murder and not believed. His associates fail to trap the fugitive in the back alleys when he kills a police informer, and hides under the surface of a fetid pool emerging covered in muck.

Kaushal proves to have problems of his own getting dope from the Nigerian whose side kick he doesn’t hesitate to blow away and treating his attractive socialite mistress badly.

Siddiqui offs the Dhulipala’s maid, getting her house key, and when Kaushal brings a girl he picked up at a festival to her flat, the cop ends up killing the mistress observed by his quarry who permits himself to be brought in and explains that they are now in a symbiotic relationship determined by the Death God and the only thing which can prevent him taking the blame for the cop’s killing is the testimony of the festival girl. Ends with Kaushal at the witness’ door.

It’s really too nasty to be entertaining and too ritualised to be convincing but it does have atmosphere and menace. The division between the poor who sleep out of doors and the well off with cars and well furnished homes is obvious.

Benoît Delépine &  Gustave Kervern (Aaltra, Mammuth) are among the best we have now. They have become the heirs to Marco Ferreri and Bertrand Blier, doing their great balancing act between art movie and Grands Boulevards big picture.

The pair’s Saint Amour has an univolving start with farmer Gerard Depardieu grooming his giant cow while son Benoît Poelvoorde goes drinking round the regional wine pavilions at the agricultural show. He alarms Picardie region hostess Marthe Guérin Caufman, who he failed to pick up the year before, and ends up sleeping in the straw with penned pigs. 

It’s fascinating to watch Depardieu and Poelvoorde meshing, - stars from different generations and traditions. Father and son soon pile drunk into the taxi driven by  stroppy Vincent Lacoste and start out on a two thousand Euro cab fare tour of the real French countryside route that is till now only represented by wine bottle labels stuck on their map. This sets up sets up misleading comparison with the agreeable local Paul Hogan - Shane Jacobsen Charley and Boots and a few more. However it’s not long before the film escapes into the funny-quirky zone where we find Delépine-Kervern

The first clue is that Lacoste reproaching Depardieu for his raucous snoring in the hotel room proves unjustified when they go into the next door garage and find a complete family in sleeping bags. Benoît enters the W.C. where his recently widowed dad is making an intimate phone call from one of the stalls and the film’s cell ‘phone becomes one of  its best inventions.

Their travels get to involve Benoit getting picked up as “Mr. Misery” by a car full of green wig drunken merry-makers and waking in drag. Lacoste detours to find old flames disastrously. He has the travelers confidently charge a hotel breakfast to a random hotel room number and as they tuck into the lush buffet, the aged diner at the next table (Andréa Ferréol no less, confirming the Ferreri connection) rumbles them. It’s her room number they picked.

That works out OK for Gerard with the driver commenting “I though it was only in movies that old guys got laid.” Benoit gets action too with the well built Ovidie, the Real Estate saleslady he’s trying to scam and he performss the 12 stages of drunkeness montage. When they ask directions from red head Céline Sallette on horseback, she heads them into the tree top cabins park where they have to break the eggs for her omlette before she confides she needs the help of all of them.

Sallette riding past the Tour Eiffel is a great image and the farm work ending is a warmer variation on what we expected from Blier at his peak.

Danis Tanovic comes from the heart of Film Festival / Ethnic broadcaster land and represents a kind of film that is losing ground to Saturday Night Fever and Apocalypse Now on SBS. Why the tax payer should fund showing Saturday Night Fever and Apocalypse Now, when Insurance Companies and the Fresh Food People are only too willing to bank roll them on the commercials, is doubtful. After the fate of Channel 44, SBS must feel the need to demonstrate their importance with viewer numbers.
Tanovic's new Smrt u Sarajevu /Death in Sarajevo is from the Boznia-Hertzogovenia film
industry with which, on the other hand, we can't claim an over familiarity.

The action kicks off with trim concierge Snezana Vidovic making her way, accompanied
by the snaking Stedicam, through the corridors of manager Izudin Bajrovic’s failing
Serajevo luxury hotel. It becomes the major character. 

An E.U.congress is scheduled and their inspector is rejecting the clapped out Olympic cutlery that V.I.P.s, including Bill Clinton, used in better days. No one, including the manager has been paid for three months, and the staff are going on strike. The children’s chorus of welcome is practicing in the lounge and has to be fed cheese sandwiches while visiting French V.I.P. Jacques Webber is rehearsing his speech watched on the CCTV cam, that shouldn’t be there, by the security guy who does lines of coke off the cell ‘phone he uses to argue with his wife about buying a new couch.

Meanwhile on the roof, a TV reporter is doing  interviews for her program on Balkan history (the real life authority even gets a name caption on screen). Her next subject is Hadzovic, an agro descendant of the Arch Duke’s assassin. The discussion becomes heated to the point where she leaves her assistant to continue the recording and gets into an on-going rant with that “Chetnic Assassin” finally reaching to the stage where they seem likely to get it on.

Everything of course goes pear shaped

The dispiriting recounting of Balkan history they jam in is the most interesting element. The personal stories aren’t bad but the everybody fails ending is antic climactic and a downer.

Performances are strong and the muted greenish colour gets by. Nice to see authoritative Webber (the Depardieu Cyrano) getting top billing.

Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann  is too long and not clever enough. It’s mainly a star turn for Sandra Hüller who commands on camera, sings and gets naked.

We kick off with grey haired  Peter Simonischek joking with the German postman about mail bombs and leading his blind dog around. He goes off to visit his daughter Hüller, who is with a firm consulting on outsourcing in Romania and she fits him in around her day, taking him to the American Embassy reception where he passes himself off as a diplomat.

They have a fight and she watches him take a cab to the airport.

However at the hens’ night with her friends, where she says dismissively that his visit was because his old dog died in earshot, he turns up in a shaggy wig with false teeth and goes about with fake business cards presenting himself  in various identities to her embarrassment.

Her affair with a colleague and the meeting with the clients are all going badly. The Naples job she was promised is postponed again and she gets stuck with organising a gathering for their Romanian associates.

Back at her apartment preparations are in hand for the reception and she (for no particular reason) answers the door bare assed and tells everyone that it’s a Naked Reception sending her woman friend off hostile and her boss out to get a stiff drink before he participates. Only the well built young secretary gets with the program. At this point dad shows up in the eight foot fur man suit the Romanian family they visited had. When he goes, Hüller in a wrap follows and embraces him, leaving the Romanian guests to face the unclothed associates.

Film making is routine. Without Fraulein Hüller, the film would be super bland. The business manoeuvring and family relations are under documented. It’s the raunchy material that gets this one the attention.

The Sydney Film Festival used to be the high light of the year. Now it's hard slog. Maybe the only reason it's still about is that it turned into big business while all those now vanished enthusiast activities stayed fun. Sobering thought.