Two good movies - Helvetica and Once
So I saw not one, but two good movies this weekend. It’s pretty rare that I see more than one movie in a given weekend, much less two good ones, so I thought I’d write a quick bit on them.
First I saw Helvetica, I’d been waiting for awhile to see this one - to be honest I’m not sure why, I like fonts and am interested just a tad bit in typography, but I’m definitely not a font nerd. I can’t identify fonts on sight and don’t think about them all that often, but I guess a documentary about a font was something that I didn’t think could be made so I was curious to see what it was about. The first time it came to NYC it sold out immediately, so me and Maria made it a point to see it this time around.
It was a great documentary. The director, Gary Hustwit, was there and he asked all the designers in the room to raise their hands, shockingly, well under half the people raised them. And the show was really enjoyable, I think, despite the subject matter. It’d be interesting to a lot of people who don’t care one iota about fonts. The people he talks to and about and the way he’s structured the film make the subject interesting and accessible to a lot of folks. The interviewees, are uniformly interesting and passionate about the subject which is very compelling. This was not in the least a dry documentary - entertaining beyond expectation, go and watch it. I give it a 9 out of 10 on the felix scale of 0-10.
We also went to see Once. First off, I have to say that this movie was shot on a budget of $160,000. That’s about 30 seconds worth of Transformers. What they couldn’t get with this budget, apparently, was a steadicam - the whole thing was shot handheld and if you’re like me that induces incredible head pain and nausea. Even the still shots were tough for me. Despite that I still liked it.
It’s a musical (more or less) and a love story, which would kind of be off putting for me, but I still wanted to check it out. The two leads both wrote and performed all the songs in the movie which were generally from good to great. And the movie was very sweet without being contrived or manipulative, I think. My main problem was that there was never any real tension in the movie - the emerging love between the two leads was so down played that it barely showed up and you only really thought about it during explicit moments in the movie. Other than that, everything in the movie just sails along very smoothly.
Nevertheless, despite the crippling pain I had to endure and the lack of tension, I still thoroughly enjoyed it. I’d give it a 7.5 out of 10, if it had a steadicam, that’d probably go up to an 8 or 8.5. If you don’t suffer from hand held cams, it’s definitely worth seeing - if you do, I don’t want to take any responsibility.
Now I need to find someone to go with me to see King of Kong. Everyone seems opposed to it.
