SIFF 2015: The Good, The Bad, and The Golden SunBreak Awards!

It’s 110% official, another SIFF has come and gone: festival attendees and juries have crowned their favorites, among many awards, all of that ballot-tearing meant Golden Space Needles in the mail for The Dark Horse  (best narrative feature) and and Romeo is Bleeding  (best documentary). But what about the completely fictional Golden SunBreak Awards?  Rest assured that we intrepid SunBreak SIFFters spent the last five days of the homestretch in darkened theaters catching a few more films, compiling our thoughts about what we saw, and picking the films we wanted to see get awards.

Josh: Let’s get right to it — if we actually were presenting statues (which, let me remind any filmmakers who may be reading this:  we most certainly are not. Please don’t respond with a shipping address.), which films would get your top prizes of SIFF 2015?  And the envelope please …

Chris: My Golden SunBreak awards will go to Tig for Best Documentary, The Automatic Hate for Best Feature, and Ian McKellen in Mr. Holmes for Best Acting.

Tony: I seriously agonized over my Golden SunBreak selections, particularly the documentaries, but in a pinch (which I reckon this is), I’d go with Ewan McNicols’ and Anna Sandilands’ exquisite tone poem Uncertain as Best Documentary; Marshland as my Best Picture; and Best Acting honors to Macarena Gomez for her bravura turn as a spinster losing her grasp on sanity in Shrew’s Nest.

Josh: Over the course of the festival I saw about 33 movies. Among those, I’d give my top prizes to The Wolfpack (for mind-blowing documentary) and Güeros  (pure cinema, narrative), with acting awards for Jason Segel (for not messing up David Foster Wallace in The End of the Tour) and Nina Hoss (for a breathtaking performance in Phoenix), and a special jury mention to Me and Earl and the Dying Girl for both the exquisite and hilarious production design of the Gaines/Jackson filmography and the impeccable music supervision that has me misting up every time Brian Eno’s “The Big Ship” plays in the trailer.

Tony: With the suspense of the Golden SunBreaks behind us, let’s continue our leisurely roundtable? Were there any trends that either of you noticed over the course of SIFF 2015? I’d go out on a limb and proclaim it The Year of The Documentary. The fest always sports an ample supply of non-fiction filmmaking, but eight of the 36 films I saw this year were docs. All of the ones I viewed were solid: A couple of them were amazing. And I didn’t even see some of the more buzzed-about ones, like The Wolfpack, which I know you were pretty crazy for, Josh.

Josh: I really don’t want to say too much about The Wolfpack. It’s not that the ending is is spoilable, but unlike anything else in recent memory this documentary about six film-obsessed brothers who spent most of their young lives rarely leaving their Lower East Side apartment had a way of surprising me on a minute-by-minute basis. From the story itself of why their family spent years essentially locked away in isolation (like the Romania of Chuck Norris vs. Evil, their only exposure to the outside world was through Hollywood) to their dazzling creativity in re-creating movies in their home (an inadvertent parallel with Me and Earl and the Dying Girl), the film had a way of resisting every attempt that my mind made to grasp the situation, predict what would happen next, and make sense of my own responses. I’ve read some complaints that director Crystal Moselle didn’t explain more — from her access to the family to much of their backstory — but I found her choice of dropping us right into the apartment, unfolding revelations, avoiding external interviews or narration, and leaving a whole lot unsaid to be completely mind-blowing. (5★)

Tony: My favorite narrative feature of SIFF 2015, fortuitously enough, came during my last-minute cinematic cram session. The Spanish period thriller Marshland follows two detectives as they investigate a murder that opens up a can of worms including a nasty drug-trafficking racket and a serial killer on the loose. Make no mistake, this is ostensibly a formula genre picture, but it’s engineered to perfection by director Alberto Rodriguez with a distinctive Spanish flair (the post-facist 1980 climate is evocatively depicted), a taut script, maximum suspense, and two riveting, pitch-perfect leads in Raul Arevalo and Javier Gutierrez. Josh, you likened this movie to True Detective (a series I haven’t seen): If that show’s anywhere near as good as Marshland, I’ll need to forego food and sleep and get caught up.

Josh: Of course, many of its parallels to True Detective are what you’d expect from genre — the mismatched detectives with questionable tactics and/or shadowy pasts, the brutal crimes, and the twisty way the case develops — are those that you’d be disappointed not to find in a crime movie. Marshland is structurally much different from the HBO limited series (which reboots with a new cast, crew, and setting this summer), but the part that makes the comparison not entirely facile is the high degree of craftsmanship in the filmmaking itself. For instance, the vibrant near-abstract overhead shots open the film, simultaneously introduce the natural beauty of the small town setting, explain the choice of the english title (per the previous conversation, even though Marshland isn’t a direct translation of La Isla Minima, at least it sounds cool), and announce that for the next couple of hours you’re in the hands of an artist with a definite and stylish point of view. It was the third movie that I saw in a row, but remained interested until the very end.

Chris: I usually gravitate towards docs most years anyway, so I don’t have a basis for comparing whether or not documentaries are any better this year than previous years. Having said that, docs made up a plurality of the films I saw and I enjoyed most of them very much.

Two that I saw the last weekend and haven’t had the opportunity to discuss until seeing them were Sergio Herman, Fucking Perfect and Tig. The former is about a Dutch chef and restaurant owner who is a basically a Type A personality on steroids. Herman is an accomplished chef whose restaurant Oud Sluis is was one of the most famous in the world, and the recipient of three Michelin stars. It still continues to blow my mind that the Michelin Guide was created as a means of selling more tires in 1900.  Anyway, I enjoyed the film because it explored the familial effects of having such a domineering and perfectionist personality. Herman wasn’t always presented in the most flattering light, despite being a man of his considerable skill, because his quest for perfection can be his undoing. Herman closed Oud Sluis despite having a waiting list that stretched into the next calendar year. I pretty much watch dozens of hours of the Food Network weekly, but there is little in the way of showing what happens in a kitchen, and maybe watching this movie made me glad it’s that way.

Josh: Although my food-viewing is pretty much limited to my own meals and Top Chef, I am a complete sucker for getting a glimpse of watching exceptionally talented people at work (while at the same time being relieved that I don’t have to work with them myself). To that end, Willemiek Kluijfhout’s  exquisite 16 mm footage was an ideal tasting menu covering Herman navigating a major personal and professional transition (she lucked into the opportunity to cover this monumental moment after he was a part of her previous film, Mussels in Love). I was surprised to be so emotional during the scenes depicting the last night of Old Sluis, but found myself much more spiritually aligned with Sergio’s less famous younger brother (who later re-opened the venue as a rustic breakfast & lunchroom) than Herman (who almost immediately opened a bigger and flashier restaurant abroad). Amid the mouthwatering food photography, I kept finding myself unable to decide whether culinary artists are the craziest or the most pure. The amount of time and effort spent obsessively crafting each dish into a spectacular work of art is both impressive for the degree to which it elevates materials and insane in that the work is almost immediately shoved into people’s mouths to be chewed up and digested. At the very least, the kitchen maestro can honestly argue that his or her creations nourish both the body and soul.

Chris: Tig followed stand-up comedian Tig Notaro from her famous Largo comedy set in 2012, where she announced that she had breast cancer.  What I found so remarkable about watching this movie is that Notaro was dealt such a shitty hand by fate (she developed the intestinal disease C. diff, had her mother die unexpectedly, developed breast cancer, and ended a relationship over a short period of time and just after she decided she wanted to birth a child), yet you get the sense that she completely understands the gravity of the situation and chooses her humor to be the best way to deal with it. When I got home from the screening, I was anxious to tell my girlfriend all of the hilarious lines Notaro delivered, and then she said, “This is from a cancer documentary?” I don’t want to give away any here, but I don’t remember laughing so hard and crying so much at the same movie. But mostly laughing. It probably was my favorite movie I saw at #SIFF2015.

Tony: One of my last SIFF 2015 Sophie’s Choices turned out to be either a screening of Tig, or the only showing of Que Viva Mexico, Sergei Eisenstein’s part-documentary/part-dramatic narrative feature. I chose the latter, though I did not catch the Peter Greenaway biopic about its making, Eisenstein in Guanajuato. Que Viva didn’t connect with me emotionally the way Tig probably would have, but Eisenstein’s masterful compositions (Mexican peasants are often shot in profile, looking as regally beautiful as Aztec gods) and forward-thinking experimental structure shone through. Lousy canned score, though.

Chris: One thing I found disappointing was that there were a few local movies that only had one public screening. I understand programming and scheduling is a big undertaking that I would never want to do myself and that not everyone could be pleased and that programming a film festival requires all kinds of sacrifices. I just wanted to catch Bodyslam: Revenge of the Banana and Faces of Yesler Terrace, but found it impossible to fit their only screenings into my calendar. I suspect I wasn’t alone.

Tony: No, you weren’t. I really wanted to catch both as well, but was once again faced with too damned many Sophie’s Choices this time out.

Chris: I was also very lucky, I thought, to have caught the screenplay reading of Rebel Without a Cause, put on by Ryan Piers Williams and starring his wife and Ugly Betty star America Ferrera and Raul Castillo, plus a cast of Seattle actors (including the always-great Charles Leggett). It was a great way to pay tribute to Stewart Stern, who wrote the script and who had died earlier this year. It was great fun and a unique way to enjoy a great movie. I was surprised that the Harvard Exit was only about 2/3 full, but it was the ideal way for me to spend my very last moments in the theater I saw so many great movies in before. (I talked to Ferrera and Williams last year at SIFF, and you can read the interview here.)

Tony: Damn, am I gonna miss the Harvard Exit. I saw some great movies there as well, and was happy to catch The Glamour and the Squalor within the Exit’s wonderfully old-school walls during SIFF 2015. That neighborhood really needs something in that space besides another bar, restaurant, or coffee shop.  Here’s hoping the developer at least does that much.

Josh: I’m so grateful that SIFF gave it one last hurrah, but the closing Harvard Exit still breaks my heart. My understanding is that it’s slated to become a mix of office and restaurant space. I live fairly close to it; so aside from appreciating its old year-round programming, it made neighborhood film-hopping during SIFF a little less Uber-dependent.

Tony:  On the subject of documentaries (sort of): Love Among the Ruins, a US/Italian effort co-produced by Seattle U Film Professor Richard Meyer, attempts to present a faux documentary and the entire (fake) lost silent film it details in just over an hour. That too-svelte (anorexic?) length means that neither the mock-doc nor the faux-silent movie portions get fleshed out sufficiently. That said, the conceit’s still fun, and mad props to the filmmakers for creating a convincing-looking faux-vintage silent film on one-bazillionth of The Artist’s budget.

Josh: My foray into fictional recreations of the past was Eden (no, not that one), in which we follow a normcore French Garage (dance, not rock) DJ stumbling through life into  occasional moments of success. At least eighty percent of this movie is watching French people playing or listening to music, the rest is pretty equally divided between eating mountains of drugs and recurring jokes about the members of Daft Punk not being able to get past doormen. Although there’s hardly enough plot to justify the more than two hours of running time, the cast, style, and settings are appealing enough to just float through it all. Plus, it’s kind of interesting that dance music has been around long enough to get fit into a story that lasts twenty-some years. (3★)

Tony: I doubt Experimenter, a biopic about the life and work of social psychologist Stanley Milgram, will follow in the box office footsteps of other recent scientist biopics like The Imitation Game or The Theory of Everything, but I liked it better. Milgram’s studies didn’t help end World War II or open up minds to the wonders of the universe: They were controversial experiments that shone a harsh light on humankind’s unfortunate tendency to conform and obey.  As played (very well) by Peter Sarsgaard, Milgram’s coldly clinical surface conceals the extremely personal slant that informed his studies. It’s not perfect (like a lot of historic dramas, it feels episodic in places), but Experimenter engaged me intellectually  on a much higher level than I expected, and it’s terrifically acted from stem to stern.

Tony: One not-so-great trend that affected me more than either of you, I’m sure, was an uncharacteristically so-so year for SIFF Midnight Adrenaline selections. Of the ones I saw, I genuinely enjoyed Deathgasm and The Astrologer, but the rest that I caught were a mixed bag. Two that I didn’t mention earlier definitely fell into that category. The entertaining but slight Electric Boogaloo: The Wild Untold Story of Cannon Films chronicled Menachem Golan and Yoram Globus, the ’80’s trash-film equivalent of the Weinsteins and Miramax. Director Mark Hartley’s fast becoming the Ken Burns of schlock filmmaking, and his two previous docs (the Ozploitation history Not Quite Hollywood and Machete Maidens Unleashed, about the run of American B-flicks shot in the Philippines in the 1960s and ’70’s) are terrific. This one was just pretty good.

On the narrative midnighter front, I was also kinda disappointed with When Animals Dream, a Danish weld of Let the Right One In and Ginger Snaps that follows a young woman navigating the lycanthropy that surfaces within her once she reaches her twenties. One of its liabilities, ironically, surfaces thanks to one of its assets: The realistic yet creepy environment that it establishes gets undercut by gaps in character motivation and plot structure. Still really beautifully shot and acted, however.

Josh: I have great memories from the midnight adrenalines of years gone by (Tucker and Dale vs Evil, Babadook, Otto, Dead Snow, Trollhunter) from previous years, but didn’t make it to any this year. Your disappointments at least make me feel better about getting more sleep.

Tony: The remainder of stuff I saw ran the gamut of subjects, and it was all worthwhile.

The last locally-shot film I saw, Beach Town, really grew on me. At its core, it’s an unassuming little love story about an unnamed beach town and the romance that develops between one of the punk-rock musician locals and a gun-shy young new arrival. It possesses a roughness and an ambling quality that turned off some of the viewers at the screening I attended, but I really took to the two likable (and nicely-un-movie-star-like) leads, and writer/director Erik Hammen nails the dynamics of a risky-dink music scene in a small town nicely (kudos also to the great original songs, many composed by Hammen).

My closing-weekend SIFF binge finished out with three foreign narrative films, all good to great. Greek director Syllas Tzoumerkas’ drama A Blast utilizes seamless, effectively disorienting editing to tell the story of Maria (an excellent Angeliki Papoulia), a wife and mom driven to flee her responsibilities by a philandering husband and enormous debts incurred by her family.  I don’t know if everything in the new wave of Greek cinema is as well-crafted, relentlessly-paced, and sexually-spiced as this, but if so, I need to do some catchup at Scarecrow Video in the immediate future.

Virgin Mountain, meantime, sports one of the stupidest American-imposed titles that’s ever been attached to a really good foreign film.  Fusi, the movie’s original Icelandic moniker, is the name of the lead character, an overweight and awkward 40-something mama’s boy living under mum’s roof. His humdrum, borderline-depressing life receives a jolt when he meets an odd young woman at a country line-dancing class and he becomes enamored. This is the kind of movie that would degenerate into tooth-aching schmaltz in the hands of US hacks, but in the hands of director Dagur Kari it’s an honest, funny, and really satisfying character study, stunningly acted by leads Gunnar Jonsson and Ilmur Kristjansdottir. This one really won me over.

Josh: I caught that one in our previous roundtable — glad you got a chance to see the second screening! I’m with you on the stupidity of the American title: I almost skimmed right past it in the program guide!

But my weekend binging was overstuffed with a bunch of indie comedies, a genre that’s pretty underrepresented in usual cinematic consumption. Part of this is explained by SIFF weekend guest Jason Schwartzman, who spent Saturday evening charming a packed house at a barely air conditioned Egyptian, first in an insightful conversation and career retrospective with with Indiewire’s Eric Kohn, and later as a depressed Austin slacker whose best friends are his grandmother’s assisted living nurse (TV on the Radio’sTunde Adebimpe) and his dog (played by his own spotlight-stealing French bulldog, Arrow). (3.5★)

The one with the widest appeal was probably Dope. In it, a three Inglewood high school geeks get inadvertently caught up in a drug caper. The broad outlines of romance, grades, and bullies are familiar to a typical typical high school coming-of-age flick — except it’s set in the inner city and centers around a trio of smart non-white kids who play in a punk band and ride BMX bikes (the sidekicks include a a lesbian drummer and the best damn lobby boy in the history of the Grand Budapest Hotel). The movie acknowledges, but doesn’t get bogged down by their differences and the real violence surrounding them, moving along a sprightly clip to a Pharrell Williams soundtrack. Among other modern touches, there’s a plotline about BitCoin and A$AP Rocky as the neighborhood dealer. It hits wide release later this month, and seems like a refreshing summer alternative to CGI dinosaurs and superheroes. (4★)

 

I also caught a few comedies (also set in Los Angeles) of sexual confusion handled in pleasantly updated and entertaining ways. First, Max Landis’s hyperactive candy-colored Me, Him, Her started with a celebrity’s coming out story, but quickly seemed to realize a love connection between the protagonist’s visiting best bro and rebounding lesbian was the story with the far more compelling characters. It ricochets through plot points with manic energy, flights of fancy, and outlandish escalations. Although it may not add up to anything incredibly deep, it found ways of making insufferable youth sorting out their messy lives into a frequently funny vision of a slightly fantastical Los Angeles. It’s also worth noting that first-time-director Max Landis was the most terminally confident and energetic festival guest I’ve ever encountered (having written a sleeper hit like Chronicle in ones twenties probably helps). Until his visit, I never would have even considered the possibility that anyone would be able to inspire SIFF-goers sing, let alone to a Backstreet Boys song on a Saturday afternoon.  (3★)

And, of course, closing night feature The Overnight provided a stark reminder that confusing sexual dynamics aren’t just For The Kids. In his previous micro-budget found-footage horror film (Creep), Patrick Brice extracted chilling results from masterful deployment of perfectly timed revelations. Here, he uses a similar strategy of playing asymmetrical information against social graces (mixed with a longing for new friendships familiar to any adult transplant to a new city) in service of a continually surprising comedy of adult sexual manners. I saw this at a pretty quiet press-only screening and found it hilarious, awkward, and awkwardly hilarious as the pizza party playdate turned increasingly confusing and bawdily revealing. I’d love to know how it played to a full house at the Cinerama, particularly when the prostheses flopped out. (4.5★) Cheers to SIFF for opening and closing strong, with plenty of laughs.

Chris: Gentlemen, thank you once again for including me in this coverage. It was a lot of fun, and I was happy to once again be back for another SIFF. It was a very special SIFF for me, not just because you guys brought me back for another year, but because SIFF let me pretend I was Jesus of SIFF this year. (Thanks, Tony, for snapping that picture while you were in the press office.)

Tony: Our pleasure, Chris. Please remember us when we reach the Pearly Gates of Film Criticism on Judgment Day.

Chris: I can’t quite give up #SIFF2015, yet. I have a couple of interviews, one with Kris Swanberg, director of Unexpected, and the other with People, Places, Things star (and former “Flight of the Concords” star) Jemaine Clement, to post at a later date. I’ll wait until those get theatrical releases. In the meantime, I need a nap.

Josh: It’s been a blast. Thanks for playing along! The memories will be forever preserved revisit our SIFF 2015 page. For others who just don’t know how to quit SIFFing,  festival’s showcasing some of the award winners and other miscellaneous favorites at a Best of SIFF weekend  that includes encore screenings of Frame by Frame, The Dark Horse, and Liza, the Fox-Fairy on Friday June 12; Messi, Behavior, and Vincent (Saturday, June 13); Paper Planes, The Great Alone, Romeo Is Bleeding, Good Ol’ Boy, Henri Henri (Sunday, June 14); and Chatty Catties (Monday, June 15).