Seth: Hooray for SIFF!
Josh: Maybe we should start by congratulating all of the various official award winners that were presented at the annual, mostly absentee, but still endearing (via mimosas and brunch buffet) event in the Space Needle’s midsection? In particular, local filmmaker Megan Griffiths cleaned up with Eden, which won her the Lena Sharpe Award for Persistence of Vision; the Seattle Reel NW Award; and the Golden Space Needle Audience Award for Best Actress SIFF 2012. Any Day Now was the overall audience favorite and won Alan Cumming a piece of glass for being the audience’s favorite actor. Although director Travis Fine couldn’t be at the ceremony, valiant attempts were made to Skype him in for an acceptance speech as he was en route to a Bruce Springsteen concert in Florence.
Rounding out the audience awards were Beasts of the Southern Wild for best director (Benh Zeitlin) and The Invisible War for best documentary. These, and many other winners of the juried (vs. ballot tearing) prizes will be showing again at SIFF Cinemas next weekend.
I also always enjoy comparing the list of favorites between the full festival audience and the subset of obsessive pass holders who watch insane numbers of films over the course of the festival. This year, 163 “Fools” who saw an average of 71 films over the course of the festival picked their most liked films. Both the overall audience and the Fool Serious voters included the Intouchables, Starbuck, Eden, and Moonrise Kingdom in their top ten lists. Breathing, Rebellion, Xingu, Red Road, Innocence, and Secret Film 2012 #2 rounded out the Fools’ Top Ten, while the audience award winners included Any Day Now, Safety Not Guaranteed, The Chef, Fat Kid Rules the World, Ira Finklestein’s Christmas, and Recalled.
Now, I guess, onto Team SunBreak. What did everyone love or hate?
MvB: I got to SIFF late this year, and found it to be more laid back than in other years. Fewer out-and-out terrible movies, but also fewer genuinely transporting moments. Lines seemed less an issue, even though I never had to use my queue card. I only missed getting into one movie, due to my own absent-mindedness.
Josh: I kind of feel cheated that I didn’t see enough movies to really truly despise any of them. In terms of favorites: Moonrise Kingdom is far from being my favorite Wes Anderson movie, but it was at the top of my SIFF rankings along with Beasts of the Southern Wild. On the documentary side, my top two were both road movies of sorts about revealing the world in startling decline: Italy Love It or Leave It showed the country’s wide-ranging collapse from a FIAT 500; Chasing Ice found photographer James Balong and friends going to the extremes of the planet, tweaking technology, and destroying their bodies to photograph the catastrophic retreat of the polar ice caps.
Tony: Okay, my top three: 1) Kryptonite!, 2) John Dies at the End, 3) (tie) Welcome to Doe Bay, V/H/S. Bottom Three: 1) 419, 2) Wuthering Heights, 3) Trishna.
Audrey: Aww, I liked Wuthering Heights. It was so texturally rich. And it’s true to the source material, in that it’s quite SLOW AND BORING.
MvB: I’d say my top three were: Innocence, the Czech drama about an accusal of molestation that upends a family; Price Check, the Parker-Posey-starring boss-from-hell comedy that also managed to confront the productivity treadmill of the modern workplace; and Chasing Ice, an extreme-adventure-movie and climate-change-doc hybrid that lets retreating glaciers speak for themselves about the effects of (relatively small, so far) temperature changes.
Audrey: Something I’d like to see at SIFF 2013: Accurate runtimes for special events. The Spacek/Friedkin evenings were scheduled for 120 minutes, when they both ran closer to twice that.
Josh: I guess “An Evening With…” was truth in naming, if not in advertised details.
Tony: I’ve gotta agree with the consensus that both Tribute evenings dragged some. Sissy Spacek was customarily thoughtful and charming in her Q&A, but moderator Richard Corliss (a highly-revered film scholar and Time movie critic for at least four decades) was a big disappointment–unfocused, ill-prepared, and awkward.
Josh: Grace and charm, indeed. Spacek’s sparkling presence made the otherwise unfocused evening worthwhile, but maybe my simultaneously most and least favorite part was the oddball parade of the audience Q&A portion. Sure, the guy who sat next to her in middle school algebra rising to say hello bordered on a sweet surprise. But things got weird when multiple audience members started standing up, making speeches, and presenting Spacek with offerings. If you thought that the well-worn paperback book was a strange gift, just wait for the handmade flying pig. Not to mention the terrifying statue held up by a guy camped in the front row.
It was telling that the most film-focused question was from a kid who asked about the technicalities of all of the prop blood in Carrie.
Tony: I almost forgot about the gift-exchange weirdness at Spacek’s tribute…wtf?
Friedkin’s retrospective, by contrast, was pretty damned rip-roaring despite its length. The director held court on stage with the gusto of a Catskills comic, and Movie City News critic David Poland handled his panel duties gracefully.
And Killer Joe, William Friedkin’s latest, screened at the director’s tribute on Saturday. Friedkin still directs with rabbit-punch immediacy, and his cast’s terrific, though Tracy Letts’ script (an adaptation from his own play) is never as profound as it thinks it is.
Audrey: I thought Killer Joe was deliciously wicked. Nice to see Matthew McConaughey be so good at being so bad.
Tony: The final midnighter of SIFF was Excision, a warped black comedy about a young woman with an unhealthy fixation on surgery. It takes a lot of (maybe too much) sick pride in grossing out its audience, but it’s also a surprisingly affecting teen flick–Think Sixteen Candles with gory amateur-hour surgery.
MvB: Kudos to locally grown Eden for refusing to reenact the exploitation inherent in its sex-trafficking topic. And honorary mention to Five Star Existence, which is one of the most effectively cinematic documentaries I’ve ever seen–though its dreamy visual poetry may also leave you kind of open to, you know, whatever, I mean, what is technology really?
Audrey: While I also appreciated that Eden didn’t linger lasciviously over the girls’ degradation (credit female filmmaker Megan Griffiths), for me, in the third act, the plot went from harrowing to far-fetched to downright unbelievable, after which I couldn’t fully take it seriously.
Josh: Please allow me a quick diatribe of not entirely answered questions (perhaps the commenters can chime in) on closing night world premiere, Grassroots:
First, was this movie any good? As a local, I loved that the festival opened, closed, and centerpieced around legitimate local films. But as someone who lived here in 2001, I just couldn’t objectively assess the quality. I did feel like it was entirely acceptable, sometimes funny, and definitely less embarrassing than previous SIFF opener Battle in Seattle. Which, is not intended to be as damning with faint praise as it sounds.
Who is the hero of this movie? It took me a while to realize that it must be Phil Campbell, given that he wrote the book upon which the film was based. There’s also the matter of Joel David Moore’s portrayal of Grant Cogswell. Intentionally or not, for most of the movie the character–an unlikely candidate for city council who challenged McIver on an all-monorail agenda that year–reads as egomaniacal, possibly insane, and definitely emotionally unbalanced. (I don’t know how many of these personality characteristics are even remotely accurate to the real life Cogswell). This rather broad performance is in sharp contrast to Jason Biggs (Campbell) and Lauren Ambrose (his at-the-time girlfriend Emily Bowen) who appear to be playing actual humans with nuanced personalities and understandable motivations. Even Cedric the Entertainer as political rival and supposed villain Richard McIver comes across more sympathetic than his rival. I’m not sure that any of this enforces the film’s apparent celebration of the power of grassroots politics. It is probably no accident that Cogswell’s press availability had some pretty strict limitations.
Audrey: Speaking of Phil Campbell, his take on the film (that it was not true to his book, but he didn’t mind) appeared in The Huffington Post. But back to Josh’s diatribe:
Josh: Next, and related to by inability to know how I feel about this movie: will this be more or less appealing to a non-Seattle audience? My initial guess is “significantly less” given that, for me, its small pleasures relied on:
– understanding the particular weirdness of our local politics;
– the dull ache at any reminder of the hopeful early days of the monorail project, before the dream was repeatedly crushed to dust through the dreaded initiative process;
– identifying local landmarks;
– particularly those strangely re-purposed for the film (see, the Comet recast as a coffee shop where everyone drinks from Victrola-branded mugs) or that didn’t exist in 2001 (a touring production of Rock of Ages, for instance);
– and, also, for its probably very accurate re-enactment of an out-of-nowhere Stranger shitcanning.
3. How much 9/11 is too much 9/11? OBVIOUSLY let’s Never Forget that it happened and its aftermath was somewhat relevant to the campaign and law enforcement’s response to some antics, but did we need SO much footage of collapsing buildings in this movie? In particular, were hungover West Coast slackers even awake in time to see the attacks covered on live television?
4. Were we supposed to know what was up with the polar bear? I mean, I would watch a whole movie of that polar bear wandering the streets of Seattle (maybe I’d even like that movie more), but I wasn’t entirely clear about its place in this particular film’s mythology.
5. And on a related point: Why was the screening scheduled at all three Uptown theaters when the closing night party was held at the edge of downtown in the Grand Hyatt? Why, for instance, didn’t they book it at the Egyptian if the Hyatt was the only venue that volunteered their sad industrial ballroom space for the event? (Miss you, Pan Pacific).
Our best guess was that it might have all been a ploy to make us face our own demons pitting personal comfort and convenience of cars, taxis, and Ubers (who ran a SIFF special) against our better angels of using public transit? Or maybe it was meant to highlight the limited Sunday night public transit options between Queen Anne and Downtown? Alternatively, and as suggested by Jason Biggs in the pre-screening pep-talk: it may have been to to lure us all into a mass monorail ride. This last idea is super-cute, but would have been much more effective if they’d include a monorail fare in the ticket price and packed the train with canapés and champagne flutes.
Seth: Speaking as a casual festival-goer, I give a hearty thumbs-up to the festival’s communications and logistics efforts. The website made it easy to look for films I’d be interested in. Getting my tickets was a breeze.
Audrey: Everyone is entitled to an opinion, even if it’s wrong.
Josh: Well. As far as finding out when and where movies are playing, the website works just fine.
Audrey: The website is in need of a major makeover. Besides everything we mentioned in the last roundtable, at the very least, the festival should be the main page and the first tab at the top for the duration of the fest.
Seth: Possibly for the casual festival-goer the resources are sufficient. I assume festivals like Sundance have much more robust communications?
Audrey: Enough excuses! The festival is in its 38th year in a tech-savvy city full of potential sponsors to trade web work for film passes. FIGURE IT OUT ALREADY.
Margaret: Please up the tech-savvy, SIFF!
Josh: Back to the faint praise: the regular member e-mails definitely listed movies that were playing that day, even if almost all of the “must-see” films were playing during the exact same hour.
MvB: I’m glad you mentioned that. I thought it might be just me. I mean, how is it possible to schedule all the “good” films against each other? But it really felt like that was the case.
Josh: Seems like they are really aiming to make sure that the casual after work filmgoer basically can’t go terribly wrong with the 7 p.m. power hour. Although sometimes the must-sees were all at 4 p.m., which was inexplicable.
Seth: The movie I attended (The Other Dream Team) was scheduled in the perfect-sized screening room; it was full but not oppressively so. The movie itself was better than I expected; something I never would’ve got to see otherwise. As usual, my plans to see more than one movie got derailed by the emergence of pleasant weather and my existing commitments to our city’s sporting teams, but my experience was a good one and I will try to get to more movies next year. Would be great to see a baseball or (American) football movie in the 2013 festival. HINT HINT!
Josh: Maybe that theoretical Friday Night Lights movie will get made in time for a SIFF premiere.
Seth: IF THAT HAPPENED I WOULD LITERALLY DIE OF HAPPINESS.
Chelsea: SIFF doesn’t have to be over! The Best of SIFF, including many of the award winners, is at the Uptown and the SIFF Film Center starting Friday, and other festival films will be showing at Landmark Theatres (Moonrise Kingdom, Your Sister’s Sister, Grassroots) and at the new-ish Sundance Cinema (Safety Not Guaranteed, Oslo August 31st) now or in the near future!