Tony: Sadly, Josh will not be imparting his two cents this time around(table). Being in far-off and scenic Spain’ll do that to a guy. In the meantime, Chris, I guess that makes this roundtable more of a rectangle this time out…
If you’re a fan of the surrealist cinema of Guy Maddin, it’ll be hard not to want flat-out amazement from The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Maddin, Yves Montmayeur’s new doc covering the Canadian auteur’s work. As is, it’s a capable, engaging primer that never really goes far beyond the quality of a really, really good feature-length DVD/Blu-Ray extra. Maddin comes off as surprisingly straightforward and, well, normal considering the fevered magic of his best movies, but if you really crave some batshit crazy with your filmmaker documentaries, German character actor Udo Kier (a Maddin staple and longtime veteran of European horror films) shows up to deliver a welcome pinch of bonkers to the proceedings.
Much better for me was Big Sonia, the newest documentary by filmmakers Leah Warshawski and Todd Soliday. It screened as a work-in-progress last weekend, but even in its rough state it’s an involving work. The gem of a central figure is Sonia Warshawski (the co-director’s grandmother), a 90-something tailor shop proprietor who endured the unfathomable horrors of World War II and the Holocaust with her spirit intact. I coulda followed this funny, scrappy, and all-around charming woman for hours.
People have been bouncing around Hurt Locker comparisons for Kilo Two Bravo, a fact-based drama about a team of British paratroopers trapped in the center of a live, long-forgotten minefield on the outskirts of Taliban-overrun Afghanistan. The Brit accents will likely prove a struggle for most slow Americans (even an Anglophile like me struggled), but that was the only hurdle I hit with Paul Katis’s debut feature. Tautly-constructed and yet verité raw all at once, this felt wonderfully lean and stripped-down, and it put me on the edge of my seat more adroitly than any of the other thrillers or genre offerings I’ve seen so far this SIFF.
I’ll second your very cogent earlier endorsement of Burn Burn Burn, Chris. It’s the kind of formula indie comedy that gives formula indie comedies a good name. There’s ample buddy-movie chemistry between both leads (Chloe Pirri and Downton Abbey‘s Laura Carmichael), and director Chanya Button combines belly laughs and emotional loose ends with the sting of truth. Good stuff.
Chris: I’m glad we’re in agreement on Burn, Burn, Burn. Unfortunately it was one of the casualties of the Great Uptown Power Outage of 2016 (more on that later), but the previous night’s screening at the Egyptian brought in a big crowd. I interviewed Laura Carmichael and Chanya Button, both were so lovely and so much fun to talk with. I’m excited to share the interview with SunBreak readers, but it’ll be closer to when the film gets a proper US release date.
I thought a good companion for Burn, Burn, Burn was the Renton Opening Night Film My Blind Brother, with Jenny Slate and Nick Kroll. It’s one of the more “mainstream” movies to play SIFF, but I thought it was often very funny. Both were comedies that their best moments when they had people haplessly coming up against unpleasantness from the goodwill that certain people assume from circumstances outside of their control. I thought Slate and Kroll had great comic timing between them, and made for a nice on-screen romance.
Tony: My one revival screening of SIFF 42 so far was The Bitter Stems, a 1956 Argentinian film noir about a reporter who jumps all in on a correspondence-course scam before a double-cross and murder set the merciless wheels of karma into full swing. It’s a real find–shadowy noir with a distinctive, almost European sensibility (Ricardo Yonis’s gorgeous cinematography is as much of a star as any of the actors) that richly deserves a reappraisal. Thanks to the efforts of the Film Noir Foundation (Foundation founder Eddie Muller intro’ed the movie), it actually has a fighting chance of getting said reappraisal in spades.
Catherine Deneuve and her romantic lead in The Brand New Testament.
My favorite SIFF movie of Week Two turned out to be The Brand New Testament, a Belgian-French magical realist comedy directed by Jaco Van Dormael. In it, God is a mean, slovenly dickhead who chugs beer, watches pro wrestling, and rules over His computer/the universe with unbridled nastiness. His prepubescent daughter, meantime, hacks The Big Guy’s desktop. Soon, she’s texting every smartphone-bearing human being on Earth the date of his or her demise and gathering six reluctant new apostles. Van Dormael’s crafted something truly special here–a strangely-perfect cross between Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Douglas Adams, Amelie, and Kurt Vonnegut that’s as romantic and emotionally touching as it is insanely imaginative and funny. Color me captivated, and eager to see it again.
Chris: Tony, there is so much I want to talk with you about. I am really kicking myself for not being able to see The Brand New Testament based on what you said above. I just couldn’t make it work with my schedule. I will save for next week talk about the strength of the locally-produced documentaries (though I did touch on that in our first roundtable, I’ve just been able to see every feature-length in the NW Connections program and think that with documentaries is where most of the strength lies).
Tony: Thanks to the fervent (justified) fan contingent for locally-based director-made-good Megan Griffiths, The Night Stalker has been one of the buzz films of SIFF 42.
As far as I’m concerned, Griffiths is batting 1000 at this point. Every one of her features has been good to great, and The Night Stalker rates high on the Griffiths Graph for me. Yeah, it’s another serial killer movie, but it’s neither as showy as Silence of the Lambs, nor as epic as, say, Zodiac. The movie boils down to a really absorbing two-hander zeroing in on the last days of imprisoned serial killer Richard Ramirez (Lou Diamond Phillips), as a lawyer (Bellamy Young) attempts to extract fresh confessions from Ramirez in an effort to save a falsely-imprisoned man on Texas’s Death Row.
Chris: I’m with you on Megan Griffiths and The Night Stalker, Tony. I thought it was a great addition to the serial killer genre, mostly due to Phillips’ performance as Richard Ramirez. There was a real chess match playing out on-screen between Phillips and Bellamy Young as they sized one another up and tried to use each other for their own needs. It’ll air on Lifetime Sunday night, so I think it’s a cool thing that SIFF premiered it just a week before it was premiering on TV.
The Night Stalker can see into your soul, and he doesn’t like what he sees.
Tony: The characterizations–Griffiths’ trump card as a director, I think–are what sell The Night Stalker for me, especially that of Ramirez, who feels coiled, charismatic, and strangely sympathetic at equal turns. Phillips is frequently the biggest asset in his films (even some truly lousy ones), and we’re both on the same page regarding his work here. He really runs with this (pardon the pun) meaty part, without overdoing it. And Young’s performance definitely grew on me. Initially, she came off as incredibly stiff and reserved; then, as the film progressed, that reserve felt more like the defense mechanisms of a real person. She’s really affecting when vulnerability begin betraying chinks in that armor of reserve.
Chris: I also agree with you about the direction from Griffiths, who is especially great at building a movie around one central star (Amy Seimetz in The Off Hours, Toni Colette in Lucky Them, and now Lou Diamond Phillips in The Night Stalker). No disrespect to anyone else, but Griffiths is the best filmmaker in Seattle, or at the very least my favorite.
Tony: So I missed out on the actual world premiere screening of The Night Stalker. Were you at that screening, Chris? With Megan Griffiths and Lou Diamond Phillips karaokeing during the Q&A, it sounded like one helluva shindig.
Chris: It’s funny you mention the premiere, because I didn’t put much effort into trying to land an interview with Griffiths (who I’ve interviewed before and she’s wonderful) or Phillips because you already did a brilliant job talking to Griffiths for City Arts, but also because I wanted to see it for the first time at the premiere and not on an advance screener. I bought tickets the moment I could because I thought it would be an event, and it was. The funny thing is that it almost didn’t happen because the Uptown theater experienced a power outage that lasted for several hours and canceled most of the screenings. Luckily power was restored in time. Phillips was very funny and engaging during the Q&A session, talking about the growth in female filmmakers being a revolution, and when someone in the audience asked Griffiths what her toughest decision was making the movie, he interjected, “Me or John Stamos?” And yes, they did end the evening with a karaoke duet of Jon Bon Jovi’s “Blaze of Glory.” This is not, as regular SunBreak readers know, the first time we’ve covered her singing that particular song.
Tony: I was really, epically bummed that I couldn’t be there! Fortunately, my conflicting film choice, Gleason, SIFF’s Centerpiece Gala film, was incredibly strong. It follows legendary New Orleans Saints linebacker Steve Gleason through his diagnosis of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), and the efforts of his wife Michelle to hold things together. This is the kind of documentary whose basic subject comes equipped with so much emotional power that even the most workmanlike execution would likely be affecting. That makes its brilliance as a personal drama even more powerful. This is seriously harrowing stuff, with discomfiting and messy (emotionally and physically) spots that throw a warts-and-all light on everyone involved. It’s so intense that (and this is no knock on the movie), I almost question whether I’d ever be able to watch it again. But it’s profoundly powerful, often inspiring, and brimming with enough hard-won feels to have you reaching for the Kleenexes, repeatedly.
Chris: One of my favorite movies was one I almost didn’t catch. I’m glad I made it to a Friday night screening of Agnieszka Smoczynska’s debut film The Lure. It’s this weird, Polish movie that involves twin mermaids named Silver and Golden that become the main attraction in seedy Warsaw club when they wash ashore. I’m not going to say that every choice the director made worked out, or that a few things didn’t squick me out, and I don’t think she cared, either. There really are only so many musicals about killer, zombie mermaids out there, and I’m going to go ahead and declare this bonkers film the Citizen Kane of its genre.
Tony: ‘The Citizen Kane of killer zombie mermaid musicals’ has a great ring to it, Chris. If the producers use that as a pull-quote, you get full credit. Missing The Lure during its SIFF run is one of my biggest SIFF regrets. The movie sounds so in my wheelhouse.
Gael Garcia Bernal is animated for ZOOM.
Chris: Another bonkers movie I came to really love was Zoom, a meta, Canadian black comedy that had three interlocking stories: one about an aspiring artist/sex doll factory worker who draws her ideal man, that man being a Hollywood executive who has his penis shrunken when his creator’s breast augmentation doesn’t come out as planned, and a Brazilian model who wants to write a novel (about an aspiring artist/sex doll factory worker). About a third of the movie is animated. The cast was brilliant, with Gael Garcia Bernal, Alison Pill, Jason Priestley, and Mariana Ximenes. Like The Lure, Zoom lives in a world that is expanded a clever person’s imagination.
Clea DuVall’s directorial debut The Intervention accompanied a Saturday night party, and that was one that I wish I liked more than I did. It had an excellent cast with Duvall, Melanie Lynskey, Cobie Smulders, Natasha Lyonne (who I’ll always love seeing on screen and will blindly defend regardless of the situation), Alia Shawkat, Jason Ritter, and Ben Schwartz. I could only take so much, though, of Melanie Lynskey’s twee affectations and mannerisms. The plot revolved around a weekend retreat that was actually going to be an intervention for a married couple that should probably divorce. I have an allergy to intrusive meddling so whenever Lynskey put on her I-know-best act, I started itching.
There’s so much more to talk about next week, when we can give out our prestigious Golden SunBreak Awards, talk about the final week of the festival, and welcome Josh back to the table. I can hardly wait.