Friday, April 8, 2016

In Brief: Poet on a Business Trip (2015) Art of the Real 2016

A poet travels and writes 16 poems along the way.

This  a kind of glorified home movie that is either going to thrill you or not. Filmed in 2002 in black and white the film follows Shu as he travels, drinks, eats, talks and screws his way across China. Lots of driving, lots of eating and drinking and some poetry that left me cold.

I hate to say it but in someways this is one of the two typical Art of the Real films, The typical films for the festival are broken into point and record films with long takes of beautiful composed shots but little action or, in this case small personal documentaries that are never ever going to see a big release either because their subject is limited or because they are too ragged to find wide acceptance. POET is this last one. Its a ragged film that seems to have been a step or two up from being a home movie with lots of shots of Shu standing around the road.

I suspect that some people will love it, especially its wicked sense self awareness, but for me it never clicked and I wanted out after 20 minutes

The film plays April 9 at Art of the Real

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