Hello readers I broke my VIFF 2011 cherry today and attended the media preview of the comically named "Honey Pupu" and before you ask, no, I have no idea why it has that title. Before we begin I just wanted to mention that I was led to believe by the festival website that this film was of the cyberpunk genre although aspects of this genre ring true the dystopian quality and the counter culture aspect it in fact seems far more hipster than cyberpunk. The film overall appears to be an exercise in "relational aesthetics" and word association, a spoken language based on Taiwanese characters translated into the English equivalent on a keyboard, storytelling, children's games and re-imagined landscape are just a few examples of this. The characters are all regulars of an online message board and go by their online handles such as "Playing", "Assassin", "Cola" etc. This movie has several faults, the acting seems rough in parts and their isn't a plot. The characters seem to be adrift and attempting to come to terms with the speed at which the world is changing and find answers to what is love and how do you recover what is lost? be it in the form of your lover or your data, imagine trying to find a computer that can run a oversize floppy disk in the year 2010. I noticed a few people walked out during the film all around forty or older perhaps the film doesn't carry the same pertinence to people too far outside the age bracket of the cast... however I enjoyed it, so to each their own.
