SCHEMA REVIEW: October 01, 2004
Splendid Float
DIR: Zero Chou | Taiwan | 2004 | 73min
In Taiwanese with English subtitles.
Preceded by Cut... more on that later.
SHOWTIMES:
Thur. Sept 30 | 7:30pm | Granville 7 Cinema, Theatre 1
Fri. Oct. 1 | 3:00pm | Granville 7 Cinema, Theatre 1
The fiction debut of documentary filmmaker Zero Chou is a story about grief bridging the double life of Roy/Rose. By day, Roy is a Taoist priest whose family owns a funeral service business; every night though, Roy becomes Rose, a beautiful drag queen who travels and performs elaborate shows with her friends on the back of their loud rainbow truck (the 'splendid float'). Roy/Rose soon falls in love with smalltown fisherman named Sunny and things are great until Sunny drowns suddenly. Through the rest of the film, Rose must deal with her grief amongst her friends since she'll never be recognised as Sunny's widow.
There isn't a lot of plot (i've covered about 80% of it) and the what plot remains gets stretched out over most of 73 minutes. Needless to say, the film, though touching and funny at times, gets very repetitive.
*****
However, there is something about this program that makes it a not-to-be-missed fun machine - Royston Tan's short Cut, which immediately precedes Splendid Float. Tan's 2003 feature 15 was apparently hacked to bits by censors in his home country Singapore, and this campy little bit of cheek was his response. It's a political film and a hilarious dancy, musical. We should have more of these. I think i may even make my way back to the first 15 minutes of this program again...
History aside, the almost universal opinion that one's own religious convictions are the reasoned outcome of a dispassionate evaluation of all the major alternatives is almost demonstrably false for humanity in general. If that really were the genesis of most people's convictions, then one would expect the major faiths to be distributed more or less randomly or evenly over the globe. But in fact they show a very strong tendency to cluster...which illustrates what we all suspected anyway: that social forces are the primary determinants of religious belief for people in general. To decide scientific questions by appeal to religious orthodoxy would therefore be to put social forces in place of empirical evidence. by free online poker
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Oy, Splendid Float dragged on and on and was spread way too thin. Everything happens within the first ten minutes and the rest of the film is in mourning.
The short film Cut definitely was the only thing worth seeing here. Drop in for that, and then leave for your next film would be my advice!
Posted by: alan at October 3, 2004 01:43 AM