So this weekend a bunch of peeps headed to Marrakesh to enjoy the International film festival which is being held there until the 12th. As I'm sure is sufficiently obvious, there are few things more Peace Corps-like than watching overly artistic western movies in gaudy showrooms surrounded by [gasp] white people. I would seriously be lying if I said that such overexposure to chicks, brew and lighter skin tones did not shock me a bit.
Within a few hours of arriving I was in an eerily clean (and yes this bears mentioning) shuttle bus which was blasting old Akon tunes ( a Moroccan favorite) when something I had yet to experience happened. Some French lady asked the driver to turn it down, and he actually listened. The thought that someone in this country would not want to listen to three year old hip hop on repeat for hours had never occurred to me, and yet here was this lady demanding the culturally sacrilegious, and being obeyed. If the fact that this was a WTF moment for me isn't an indication of what life is like in my town, I simply don't know what is.
Regardless, we get to the theater just in time to catch a Spanish movie in the contest titled "Woman without Piano." Apparently, this film was just a bit too indie for articles. This fact should have raised questions as to the overall quality of what we were about to watch, but nevertheless we sat awaiting our first film festival experience. Anyone who has seen the Simpsons episode where Springfield hosts a similar festival would know almost exactly what this piece of artsy trash was like. First off, there was maybe a total of one page of dialogue in the entire hour and a half. Even then, most of the lines were spoken by an autistic Polish man who repeated himself nearly every time he spoke (again, not a common occurrence). Secondly, a large bulk of the movie consisted of either the main character chain-smoking or prolonged shots of time passing on various clocks. Thirdly, the official summary which referred to the woman's banal wanderings as "fun, dark... and absurd" could not have been any less accurate. Unless of course by fun they meant tiring, by dark they meant it was nighttime and by absurd they meant that it would be completely ridiculous if anyone actually sat through the whole thing. Perhaps the only thing the film delivered was an apt title. The woman did in fact not have a piano.
The following day we watched a 1950s post-war black and white South Korean movie about a "country bumpkin," his gangster brother, and a whole slew of hookers. Obviously, this was a better film. Due to some translation errors, however, the film's title also has some issues with articles. It was listed in different spots as either "A flower from Hell," "Flowers in Hell" or various other permutations of flowers and Hell. Perhaps the movie's best scene featured one of the main gangsters chasing down a triflin' ho through a mud pit and stabbing her to death despite having just been shot in the chest. Classic. Also, one of the dudes was called Dong.
In short, 1950s South Korea makes better movies than present day Spain, films are often improved with the presence of sound, and bitches ain't shit but hos and tricks.
