Josh: Hey everyone — we’ve made it through almost a full week of SIFF. Let’s get into it!
Tony: Welcome friends and neighbors to The SunBreak’s first official Festival Roundtable of 2017! And a very enthusiastic welcome to Odawni Palmer, who’ll be joining us in our weekly dissections of what we’ve seen.
Chris: First, let me say that it’s a real delight to be back at this roundtable with Josh and Tony, and even more of a delight to welcome Odawni into our little fraternity. I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn to say that the last few years we’ve tried to find the right person to bring into the fold and it hasn’t worked out or they weren’t the right fit.
Odawni: Thank you, gents, for your warm welcome! It has been an honor to work with you all. I have had such fun as a SIFF SunBreaker so far and look forward to spending the remainder of the SIFF season with you.
Opening Night
Tony: I saw all of you at the Opening Night film and went to the gala, so let’s just cut to the quick on both counts. What did all of you think of The Big Sick, Michael Showalter’s new comedy/starring vehicle for comic Kumail Nanjiani? The film’s opening in June, so we’ve been informed that we need to confine ourselves to capsule assessments of the movie. I think that’s, like, a 90-word count from each of us (that’ll be a challenge, given how involved these forums can get).
Me, I kinda loved it. Mixing disease-of-the-week drama with a romantic comedy is a tenuous tightrope to walk, and The Big Sick does so, famously. The romance at the center is funny, genuine, and involving, and the cast really couldn’t be better. I laughed hard, I cried, and I’m sorta itching to see it again.
Josh: Agree — one of the stronger SIFF openers in recent memory as far as I’m concerned. Genuinely funny with real feels throughout is a tough balance to strike and they nailed it. Hope it finds an audience beyond the (so-far) mostly adoring film festival circuit.
Odawni: This being my first SIFF Opening Gala experience, I can’t compare The Big Sick to previous opening films but I enjoyed it. The audience burst into laughter throughout the movie – a good sign! It’s neat that it’s based on the main character’s (Kumail Nanjiani, who plays himself) actual courting experience with his actual wife (Emily Gordon played by Zoe Kazan); I wonder how much of my enjoyment of the movie is due to that fact. Any thoughts, guys? If this were a fictional story, do you think you’d perceive, experience and review the movie differently?
Josh: That’s a good question. For me, knowing that it was a true story — for more on this, check out a SIFFcast w/Nanjiani and Gordon — based on the people who got up on the big stage to introduce the film to the full house at McCaw Hall actually took some of the stress out of watching! I mean, truth is not always a surefire spoiler, but no matter what happens to the characters onscreen, we at least know that, despite relationship drama, a mysterious illness, overbearing parents, and all of the cultural obstacles in their way the real Kumail and Emily at least made it as far as the SIFF Opening Gala! Regardless of the true story nature, Nanjiani was a great leading man. And, of course, Holly Hunter (as Gordon/Kazan’s mother) makes everything better.
Odawni: Agreed. Nanjiani was fantastic. Though, I can’t not see him as the long-winded and incredibly unhelpful server (AKA mixologist) in Portlandia. I find his slight-slurring to be quite endearing.
Tony: It speaks to the movie’s strengths that it never felt like a formula ‘disease-of-the-week’ movie despite its non-fiction origins.
Josh: And how about the gala itself? The move from the Exhibition Hall basement to Fisher Pavillion seemed like a good move — not being underground made it easy to get some fresh air or wait in an incredibly long line one of the food trucks. Even though waits for snacks or signature SIFFtails were better than previous years, it strikes me that SIFF will never entirely fix the mob scene food because long lines for everything is kind of a highly-tolerated (if not oddly-celebrated) hallmark of the SIFF experience, with passholders and ticketholders alike lining up around the block well in advance of screenings just because they can. I guess it’s just another way to “gather” — appropriately enough, this year’s SIFF theme.
Tony: The change in venue was a big plus for me, too, Josh. In addition to taking things out of the subterranean Exhibition Hall (a mutant fusion of high school gymnasium and bomb shelter), it seemed to make all of the food and drink distribution go much smoother. For me, after the initial crush of the first hour, grabbing drinks and foodstuffs was a lot easier than years past. My only real complaint would be that this year’s DJ spun a way more inconsistent mix of tunes than previous. Odawni, this was your first SIFF Gala–what did you think?
Odawni: I had a great time at the Gala! There were some tasty morsels from various restaurants around town and I was able to wear my sparkly cat ears whilst enjoying complimentary cocktails sans receiving funny looks. Despite the long food lines, everyone was friendly and in good spirits. Also, I’m a hardcore people-watcher so appreciated the wide array of ensembles — from silky gold gowns and salon-perfect hair to jeans, a nice sweater and stylishly disheveled hair. Truth-be-told, I felt pretty dang special as an attending press person.
What we Loved
Josh: It’s definitely always nice see Seattleites dressed up for the movies — I went with a black suit and designer t-shirt — and as you said, the lines provide an opportunity to chat about the festival agenda. And as much as I love the sparkly peoplewatching and catching up with old film friends over appetizers, SIFF is much more than just parties. Just under a week in — is everyone discovering great films? Let’s start with our high points.
Chris: I want to talk a little bit about my favorite filmgoing experience, at least so far, in the festival. I saw The Farthest, the documentary from Irish filmmaker Emer Reynolds about NASA’s Voyager program, when it was screened for press. I appreciated the ambition and Reynolds’ ability to condense so much information about such a huge project into a two-hour documentary while still making it accessible to us laypeople by covering topics like the Voyager Golden Record, why the press was bothered by Voyager 2 taking off before Voyager 1, and this:
While watching the movie, I couldn’t help but get an overwhelming sense of patriotism. Two space probes that have been in orbit for almost forty years, launched when Carter was President and left the solar system before Obama’s second term. It’ll be in space (hopefully), sending photos back to NASA for the near and distant future with no sign of stopping. When craven politicians talk about “American Exceptionalism,” this is a case where it is unequivocally true. When I left the theater, my Exceptional America buzz was killed shortly after I saw that during the screening, the Washington Post reported that current occupant of the White House was providing classified intelligence to Russian contacts. It was a letdown to be reminded of the reality of how we live now, but for the two previous hours, I got to think of this country at its very best. Short-lived as it was, the feeling remains priceless.
Josh: I wish I could’ve made it! I’ve been following those hearty little spacefarers my whole life and was really interested in seeing it, but the times never lined up.
Tony: SIFF also never fails to satisfy my archival-reissue jones, and the frosting on my Week One SIFF cake was getting to see the restored print of the 1930 Marx Brothers comedy Animal Crackers. If you’re one of those people who avoids movies made before 1990, missing this still-hysterical blast of pre-Hayes Code anarchy is your loss. Groucho’s quips sting as surely today as they did 87 (!) years ago, and you need to go forward decades for comedy this lightning-fast and surreal. The Marx Brothers’ DNA courses through everything from Monty Python’s dadaist absurdity to Cheech and Chong’s counterculture to the snarky wit of every standup who’s picked up a mic. Mild warning: One not-so-nice anachronism occurs when Harpo’s anarchy gets, well, a little too grabby. It’s not played as remotely acceptable, but it is played for laughs. Your mileage will vary depending on your acceptance of such activity as a side-effect of a less-enlightened time.
Josh: I’ve had strong (if somewhat slow) start to SIFF. Aside from really liking the Big Sick, Give Me Future is another early favorite. Ostensibly a concert documentary about Major Lazer’s concert in Havana enabled largely by the Obama-era thaws in fifty-plus-year Cuba embargo, Austin Peters’s documentary has the sense to realize that the band — with no disrespect to their success or truly laudable effort to put on a free show in a very challenging setting — is frequently the least interesting thing in the room. Of course, there is plenty of the typical music documentary stuff explaining how Diplo went from producing records for others (notably M.I.A.) to joining forces with others (initially with Switch, now Jillionaire and Walshy Fire), and a team of dancers to make their own Caribbean-influenced EDM. But the inquisitive camera often wanders away from them to remind us that there are, in fact, young people and youth culture in Cuba. Of course, this sounds obvious when typed out like that, but it’s all-too-easy to imagine the island nation as one of old cars, old people, and classic buildings frozen in time. But that image is easily shattered as we follow long takes of kids skateboarding at night, gathering on the beach with friends for concerts, and follow Diplo and friends as they talk with young musicians and venture into Cuba’s vibrant and diverse music scene. Perhaps most fascinatingly, Peters also shows how — despite very limited internet penetration due to the Communist government — all of these kids manage to maintain an acute awareness of mainstream culture by way of a semi- underground system (“El Paquete Semanal”) by which a terabyte hard drive filled with curated pirated material from around the world is rapidly disseminated via sneakernet across the country every week. From the logistics of planning such a big event with everything locally sourced, to the concert footage, to the portrait of the country itself, the documentary hit all the right notes for me.
Odawni: I was actually thinking that a mental health film category would be cool, but I’m a biased advocate for reducing mental health stigma so it would essentially make the process of choosing films to watch easier for me – ha! On that note, I was super excited to see Crazywise in the lineup. Phil Borges and Kevin Tomlinson direct this mental health documentary centered on demystifying the Western interpretation and treatment of mental health. In fact, “mental health” is a Western construct that’s led us to categorize and diagnose ourselves without consideration of the spiritual realm. The film follows the journey of two Americans (Adam and Ekhaya) who are “survivors of the mental health system.” Each finds spiritual meaning in their experiences with what we know as symptoms of mental health illnesses. Along the way, we learn about other cultures where a psychotic break, for instance, is deemed a calling to become a healer or Shaman. Borges is a photographer as well, so throughout the film we see beautiful stylized monochromatic images of people all over the world. They’re films like these that can bring greater awareness to more community-centered and humane ways of treating ourselves and each other. I can’t say enough about this movie. It’s an important film that everyone should see!
Not Getting Our Golden Space Needle Votes
Tony: Both Future and The Farthest are high on my SIFF wish list. The only doc I saw was Bill Frisell, A Portrait. It was probably the closest thing to a disappointment for me so far. It’s a solid enough documentary, with generous helpings of Frisell’s incredibly versatile and nuanced guitar playing, and there’s a wonderful moment where Frisell and fellow genius, artist Jim Woodring, discuss the virtues of communicating art without words. But it runs a bit long, and it’s most definitely a formula music doc (talking head testimonials, musical exerpts, lather, rinse, repeat).
Josh: Oh good, we’re getting into the “disappointments” section! Often more revealing than a list of successes, talking about festival misfires is one of my favorite topics of in-the-trenches chatter.
Chris: For the most part, I think I’ve had a pretty high batting average for the quality of films I’ve seen. I don’t think there’s one yet that I’ve seen that I’ve thoroughly disliked, though there are a few, like Gholam (a slow-burning character study of an Iranian cabbie trying to keep his previous life firmly in the past) and Forever Pure (a documentary about the racism two Chechen Muslims face when they’re acquired to play for an Israeli soccer team) that are good-to-great movies but ones I’m not in any rush to watch again.
Odawni: I wasn’t a huge fan of Fermented. It’s a great documentary topic but I felt it could have been executed in a more entertaining and effective way. For instance, the film starts with a man in a field who dives right into talking about fermentation. Though we can later deduce that he is the host, he has no introduction; I found it a bit jarring as a viewer. Is he a chef? A fermentation expert? A random guy who likes cheese? Also, the graphic illustrations used to enhance the educational segments were more chemistry-class teaching tools than fun documentary infographics, but I think I’m spoiled by Alton Brown. He uses props and quirky camera angles on his cooking show. Overall, I enjoyed it, though. I’m a curious nerd and like learning. Fermented is chock full of information about different foods and their fermentation processes as well their historical and cultural associations, and we meet chefs and food experts across the world. You don’t have to be a foodie to enjoy this film.
Josh: That’s one thing about documentaries — even if they aren’t great, so long as the topic is somewhat interesting, it’s a bit harder to go completely off the rails!
Chris: The movie that I think I found the most disappointing was The Hero, the Sam Elliott vehicle that is bringing him to SIFF for a tribute. The movie is good, overall, with a great cast around Elliott, who was playing an exaggerated version of himself (an aging on-screen cowboy that does commercials for barbeque sauce) but I thought the May/December romance between Elliott and Laura Prepon was an unnecessary trope that felt cliche in a movie whose self-awareness is its best selling point.
Josh: For me, after trekking to Ballard to see Give Me Future and catch the Q&A with director Austin Peters I stuck around to watch Struggle For Life out of curiosity and transit inertia. A quick search turned up a ghost of festival’s past in SIFF’s web transition suggesting that it was part of this year’s “official competition”. Throughout the increasingly broad French farce I kept wondering what could possibly redeem this idiotic story of a thirtysomething intern being sent to Guyana to sign off on an indoor ski resort following EU standardization requirements. Let’s just say that if you find any of the following of hilarious, the film might be for you: France’s love-and-hate relationship with the long persistent arm of the state, the niceties and absurdities of multinational financing, blindness to rationality or practicalities in enforcement of the rules, indigenous peoples’ mischief, misguided warlords, or just the constant threat of jungle animal attacks. I left mostly scratching my head, regretting that I spent a couple hours watching a comedy in the tropics instead of getting direct exposure to the weekend sun.
Other Films We Liked
Odawni: What did you guys think of Time Trap? I loved it – watched it twice. (For more about the movie, check out the SIFFcast with Mark Dennis and Zach Matz). A sci-fi adventure film involving alternate dimensions and nice-to-look-at unknown actors is at least worth checking out, amiright? Their use of cell phone footage as a way to flesh out the storyline was reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project and their play with time harkened me back to Donnie Darko (one of my all-time favorites). Did that come up for anyone else?
Tony: I enjoyed it too, Odawni. With its fresh-faced cast, it felt like an adaptation of a Young Adult sci-fi novel, only really good. I found the taffy-stretching and rubber-band snapping of time to be really well-executed (especially on what was a punishingly low budget, I’m sure), and as you noted in your recommendation, the cast is fresh-faced and likeable. It actually kept me disoriented–in a good way–for most of its running time, which is absolutely what it needed to do to work.
Josh: In terms of fun, but a bit mind-boggling, early in the Iranian-German co-production, A Dragon Arrives!, our apparent hero, a dashing young double agent is handed a joint and instructed to smoke it so that he will understand what he’s about to be told. Similar guidance might have benefitted the audience to navigate the twisty layers of this film-with-a-fake-documentary that’s allegedly based on a (probably not) true story about an an investigation of a faked hanging of a political prisoner that turns into an investigation of a series of supernatural events in a haunted cemetery by a trio of double agent filmmakers. More than a passing fluency with pre-Revolution politics in Iran may have also helped to decode many of the metaphors, but the film was so assured and much of the scenery so visually arresting that it was more than worth the ride.
Odawni: If you’re looking for something entertaining but still in the psychological realm, I recommend the simmering psychological-thriller Moka. It’s a French film so, unless you are a francophone, sit somewhere you are able to catch the sub-titles. Renowned French film veteran, Emmanuelle Devos, plays a grieving and vengeful mother obsessed with finding the driver of a mocha-colored car that killed her son in a hit-and-run incident and ruined her life. With her marriage in shambles, she hires a private detective to track down the killer. She befriends the suspected culprit and slowly infiltrates her seemingly perfect life. Cue moody color-schemed scenes and “Moonlight Sonata.” Hitchcock fans or folks who enjoy brooding protagonists out for blood will appreciate this one, c’est vrai.
Josh: The protagonist of Beach Rats is occasionally on the broody side, but it’s not blood that he’s out for. Instead, Harris Dickinson makes an assured screen debut as the prettiest, straightest-acting, gaybro on the beach in the non-hipster outskirts of Brooklyn near Coney Island. By day, he hangs out with his posse (“they’re not my friends” is his telling, but accurate, teenage deflection to describe them to others), playing handball, vaping, and drowning their sorrows in pills pilfered from a dying father at home, and inadvertently picking up girls at Coney Island. At night, he explores his repressed sexuality on the DL via clandestine video chats with older men way out of his league (in the wrong way) as a way of avoiding people inside his peer group or social network via hookup apps. Director Eliza Hittman’s camera captures the escalating personal stakes of these summer days with supersaturated days, grainy nights, and the anxious perspective of hiding (and seeking) in plain sight.
Closing Thoughts
Chris: Josh, you like to talk about finding a “Grand, Unifying Theory of SIFF,” and, while I’m not any closer to unlocking that mystery, I’ve seen a surprisingly high number of movies written by their stars who made themselves Uber drivers (two, so far: Kumail Nanjiani in The Big Sick and Zoe Lister-Jones in Band Aid).
Josh: That’s funny — we’ll have to keep our eyes open for other emerging themes that inadvertently reveal a cinematic zeitgeist! At the press launch they talked about how many first-time and undistributed films they were showing; so it may be a real sign of the gig-economy showing up on festival screens.
For grand, if not unifying, I really enjoyed watching the film collage of twelve (or thirteen) Cate(s) Blanchett reciting influential artistic declarations as different characters in Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto. For the most part, the scenes aren’t necessary related to the statements and the characters are presented in plotless narratives — a southern mother recites Claes Oldenburg’s “Ode to Possibilities” while her family waits for their turkey dinner, the tenants of Dadaism are transformed into a eulogy at a sylvan funeral, a teacher instructs her young charges with the commandments of Dogme 95 — but in total, the experience of hearing these declarations of principles remixed, out of context, and interspersed with a rumbling electronic soundtrack from Nils Frahm somehow culminates in an generalized understanding of these movements that sprung from commandments, prohibitions, intentions, or discoveries. Don’t go looking for a plot, but sit back and enjoy the gestalt of the experience.
Which, I suppose, is also a healthy attitude toward SIFF itself. Looking forward to nineteen more nights at the movies with you all!
