We’re a week into the festival — how’s your SIFF so far?
Josh: Either SIFF’s done a great job with programming or I’ve done well in selecting how to spend my time. I’ve had a pretty great run so far, basically everything’s been a 4 or above on the audience ballots.
Chris: I’ve been moving (with most of it was on Tuesday), so I haven’t been able to make it to too many screenings, but I’ve been keeping up with it by press screenings I can make and movies provided by the press office, and I too have been pleasantly surprised with the quality of films I have seen. I thoroughly enjoyed Regarding Susan Sontag, and interviewed director Nancy Kates while she was in town, and I’ll have that posted once I find time to transcribe it. It makes me happy to hear so many of my friends and peers are responding so well to it. I’ve also enjoyed My Last Year with the Nuns, Lucky Them, Razing the Bar, Fight Church, and Ballet 422.
Tony: I’ve also been indisposed with a project that’s taking up a lot of my waking hours (though mine’s doubtless more fun than yours was, Chris), so I won’t be able to hit the SIFF banquet as voraciously as I’d like to ’til after Memorial Day. My Scorecard in a nutshell isn’t quite as consistent as either of yours: One masterpiece reissue, two flat-out disappointments, one pretty good oddity, four really good movies.
How much do you love/hate the litany of intro packages?
Josh: I don’t entirely despise them yet, which is really saying something, particularly since it sometimes feels like SIFF heard we liked SIFF and put some SIFF advertisements in the middle of our SIFF advertisements. I get it — they’re a non-profit, this is their biggest outreach opportunity of the year, and they want to sell people on SIFF being more than just a film festival. But does that really merit ten minutes of padding before the movie rolls? People who see a few films probably don’t even notice, but it cuts into planning for those of us weirdos who show up early enough to get a Queue Card and who are strategizing more than one film per night!
Chris: I think there has been a real trend for piling on commercial after commercial before movies in cineplexes, so it doesn’t surprise me that SIFF would use the several minutes before screenings as an opportunity for establishing their “brand” because we’re already expecting it, but I do think it can be really heavy-handed if not handled delicately. Plus, it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t know about SIFF, or #SIFForty. Maybe if #SIFForty trends, it’ll all be worth it?
Tony: I really sense the creative fun thrown into the new spots, but it seems like every year SIFF forgets that anyone going to more than one or two films is going to get burnt out on them. I do think the SIFForty Flashbacks are an attempt to maybe ease the numbing monotony of the repetition.
Josh: That, or the #SIFForty flashbacks might be meant to remind us of just how jarring some of the trailers used to be back in the day. I’m still waiting for the “35 is a Very Special Number” fund-raiser for the year that they were building the SIFF Film Center, which basically everyone in the audience could quote verbatim by Closing Night.
So, any clear standouts?
Josh: It’s hard to pick! My favorites so far are probably Ida and Chinese Puzzle, but I’ve found a lot to like in the first week of the festival.
As usual, the documentary series is always a safe bet, particularly when you’re in the capable hands of HBO films, an organization with an excellent track record of connecting talent with great stories. By introducing us to the families at the heart of the case and the unlikely alliance between the two high profile lawyers who famously faced-off in Bush vs. Gore, The Case Against 8 managed to be engaging even though everyone in the audience knew what happened in the series of court decisions leading all the way to the recent Supreme Court’s decision on California’s Proposition 8. Occasionally tear-jerking, the applause at the end was well earned (4.5⭐️).
Taking an entirely different approach, Regarding Susan Sontag was a travelogue with a beautiful original soundtracks, interviews travelogues, and gauzy abstract images that charted a course through her life and work. Luckily for the filmmakers, in addition to being a prolific and influential writer, Sontag was also one of the most photogenic and photographed public intellectuals of the modern era. (4⭐️)
Chris: Josh, I so agree with you. It is hard to pick! I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries, but I do agree with you about Regarding Susan Sontag. I think Nancy Kates deserves a lot of credit for creating a movie about a writer that I’ve found incredibly daunting at first but feel accessible.
I was also impressed with Bret Fetzer’s My Last Year with the Nuns, which is filmed as a monologue from local guy Matt Smith, about his eighth grade year, his last at a Catholic junior high, on Capitol Hill. I didn’t know about the presence the church had on the Hill. Smith has a distinct voice for holding our interest for almost 90 minutes, and I liked how he would give his friends nicknames and circle back so that you always remember “David Shields, king of the dirty jokes” (but not that David Shields).
Tony: The only two docs I’ve seen so far were keepers. Ryan Worsley’s doc Razing the Bar finds the universality (and a genuinely lovable cast of characters) in Seattle dive The Funhouse’s closing (anyone who’s seen a beloved rock club die unceremoniously will be moved). And #ChicagoGirl – The Social Network Takes on a Dictator is nothing short of staggering–a sharp and utterly involving account of Chicago-based Damascus expat Ala’a Basatneh’s usage of the internet and social media to expose the shattering brute-force dictatorship in her native Syria.
Chris: Right now, I think Lucky Them is my favorite narrative feature. I think it might over-glamorize music writing (a problem that started at least with Almost Famous), but it’s a fun movie that has Toni Collette (who can do no wrong, if you ask me) and Thomas Haden Church (who is great, as always), trying to find an elusive, former rock star. There’s a big cameo that I didn’t see coming and it solidified the movie as a can’t-miss for me. I do think Megan Griffiths should be talked about in the same way that we talk about Lynn Shelton, as both seriously elevate the quality of films coming from the Northwest (though they are both very different filmmakers).
Josh: On the narrative side, I started the festival with Ida. Austerely shot and photographed in lustrous black & white, Paweł Pawlikowski follows a novice on the verge of committing to a life in the convent. Before taking her vows, Mother Superior sends the orphan into the city to meet her considerably less holy (and surprisingly Jewish) aunt. Together, they drive around Communist Poland revealing family secrets, war horrors, and a sexy saxophonist. The camera remains still and the characters often slip partially out of its frame, a visual metaphor that could’ve felt heavy-handed the if the shots weren’t so breathtakingly gorgeous.
Tony: On paper, Venus in Fur feels like one of those quirky, quiet side projects that big directors do between big ones. But as executed by Roman Polanski, it’s a sharply intelligent, succulently cinematic adaptation/riff on the iconic Sacher-Masoch story and a total acting tour de force for Mathieu Amalric (as the playwright adapting the book) and especially Emmanuelle Seigner as the actress attempting to audition for Amalric’s audience of one–she’s like Christina Applegate, Judy Holliday, and Audrey Tautou rolled up in one. The instant I finished watching it, I wanted to see it again.
Josh: I typically have mild allergies to filmed versions of plays and was worried that this one, about adapting a novel to the stage where all of the magic realism takes place in a theater in which the playwright and vengeful goddess / miraculous walk-on actually perform the play while commenting on the deeper meaning of it all, would send me into hives. But you’re right — the performances were so compelling that I fell under its spell fairly quickly (4.5⭐️)
Speaking of Audrey Tautou, I learned that there’s almost nothing funnier than watching her speak Mandarin to a table of stern-faced buisnessmen. In Chinese Puzzle, she, Roman Duris, Cécile De France, and Kelly Reilly reprise the roles that they originated twelve years ago in L’Auberge Espagnole. I have such deep affection for these characters that these repeated chances to check in on them feels like a gift. Like the more focused Before … project from Richard Linklater, Cedric Klapisch returns to find gang facing much more appropriately grown-up problems than when we first met them in Barcelona: crumbling marriages, raising and conceiving children (it helps that the kid actors are every bit as charming as the adults), the intricacies of the American immigration system, the horrors of apartment hunting in New York. But it’s handled with a light and inventive touch, occasional flights of fancy, and a few high-wire callbacks to the original. The whole thing was effervescent and delightful, I love this trilogy so much that I’d be happy if they kept checking back on them until they were all in a shared retirement home.
Due to the continued intolerable absence of a Capitol Hill to Queen Anne express gondola service, I skipped Last Year at Marienbad in favor of Obvious Child, the rare abortion-related romantic comedy that featured Jenny Slate and Gaby Hoffman (who’ve I’ve seen most recently in funny but limited-depth television roles) given the chance to shine playing three-dimensional humans with real struggles, complex emotions, and very funny stand-up routines.
Tony: Not to incur your envy, Josh, but I did catch the revival screening of Alain Resnais’ strange, haunting, masterful 1961 film, Last Year at Marienbad. I’d forgotten how innovative the movie’s structure and visual style were, and I love how Resnais jostles all that experimentation with flashes of awkward emotion.
Witching and Bitching, despite its inane (and big surprise, American/English-language-imposed) title, is terrific on its own distinctive pulp-art plane. Alex de la Iglecia’s films are always studies in genre excess, executed with a master’s touch. This one starts out as a failed-caper film a la Reservoir Dogs, shifts into some astonishing action scenes, then wanders down the dark-fairy-tale pathway trod by Tim Burton, then forces Nicholas Roeg’s The Witches to chug some Red Bull. If it sounds erratic, it is. But it’s also so full of unfettered creativity it’s damn near irresistible, and rife with enough action/horror/fairy tale set pieces for five lesser movies.
Josh: My brand of “thriller” is typically a bit less gory, but I saw quite a few genuinely suspenseful films. The Double, adapts the Dostoyevsky novella into a depressingly dingy retro-future, with Jesse Eisenberg playing both the timid-but-capable and charismatic-but-slackery clerks at a statistics factory. The production is necessarily darkly farcical, but Ayoade has exceptional style and Eisenberg does a whole through small gestures as doppelgänger relationship runs from confusion, to friendship, to nemeses, building to a feverishly paranoid finale.
Perhaps it’s a spoiler to even mention Tom at the Farm among the “thrillers”. In the title role, Xavier Dolan shows up at his dead lover’s mother’s dairy for a funeral and is forced to constantly improvise through his own grief as funeral plans reveal just how deeply in the closet his boyfriend was back on the rural home front. An still-at-home, tending-to-the-farm, insanely repressed brother complicates the situation tremendously, and the tension escalates exponentially as the plot veers in unexpected directions without losing touch with the emotional stakes. It was fascinating to see Dolan working with a more muted color palette, in a different mode, and adapting someone else’s source material. His productivity is mind-boggling — while we were watching this one in Seattle, he was premiering a new film at that “other” May festival — and I’m on board for whatever’s next.
Finally, I can’t remember the last time I’ve laughed at so much bloodshed as I did during the darkly comedic In Order of Disappearance. Very little of the story is overtly funny — the senseless death of his son transforms Stellan Skarsgård from a snow-plowing Citizen of the Year to a determined instigator of a string of revenge murders almost overnight — but bleak humor in the snowy Norwegian town, the sprawling cast of characters, and the matter-of-fact treatment of the deaths somehow offsets the violence.
Worsts?
Chris: I mentioned it in the first roundtable, but Jimi: All is By My Side, the opening night film, is unforgivably bad. I don’t want to keep beating a dead rock star, but when I left the screening at the press launch, I was privy to a lot of the arguments made here, first-hand, that explained why the movie got so many important things wrong. But, it’s sort works where you can go to opening night and say afterwards, it very much gets better.
Josh: What I don’t get about Jimi was: without the music rights or an apparent interest in the facts, why even make the movie about Hendrix? Maybe a more obviously fictionalized story about an expat ascendant musician would’ve worked. Even better if the story was more compelling or the protagonist was more charismatic. But, as you said. It’s opening night, which is always hit or miss, and griping about the film made for good gala fodder.
Tony: I don’t think I despised Jimi: All is By My Side as much as you guys, largely because I think Andre Benjamin’s Hendrix worked for me. Regarding the age disparity between Hendrix and Andre; Benjamin is a 39-year-old who looks young for his age, while Hendrix was a twenty-something whose hard living made him look old for his age, so that evened out for me. And Benjamin didn’t seem to be descending to imitation, either.
But there are moments in the movie so patently show-biz bio they make your teeth hurt, and there’s no ignoring the firestorm of controversy about the movie’s fast-and-loose interpretation of facts. I had the chance to interview Ridley (and his leading lady Hayley Atwell) for City Arts, but nearly all of my 15 minutes with them were eaten away before I could really ask him about the issues with inaccuracy. When I did (as handlers were literally scooting me out the door because time had run out), I think there was some miscommunication between us: When I mentioned ‘the phone incident,’ I think Ridley thought I was referring to Jimi’s awkward conversation with his dad on the phone in the movie, not the specious incident in the movie where Jimi clocks Kathy with a phone. Ah, for another 15 minutes…
Great guests?
Josh: The Laura Dern interview was just completely delightful. Among the highlights, her longtime friend Eddie Vedder showed up to give a heartfelt presentation of the award. But most importantly, the conversation was conducted by Elvis Mitchell. No matter how charming the guest, these onstage interviews can quickly get painful in the wrong hands, and Mitchell seemed like a complete pro: genial, well-informed, and deeply interested in her work. Over a compelling hour or two Dern recounted stories of growing up in the cinema (19 takes of eating ice cream for Martin Scorsese), the abrupt life transition that was going from the classroom to filming the Fabulous Stains (“one day we were reading the Diary of Anne Frank, boys giggling uncomfortably at references to menstruation, four days later my head was shaved and I was with the Sex Pistols and going to Boomtown Rats shows at night … send your daughter to Vancouver for 12 weeks with the Sex Pistols and she’ll never be a drug user for life!”), to the many wonderful oddities of working with David Lynch (an unreleased 70 minute monologue that “explains” Inland Empire; his cow-on-a-leash campaign to get her an Oscar nomination), and her view of the role of an actor (“the job of an actor is to find empathy where you might have had judgement”). It also helped that the time for the audience to ask questions was limited, and that the crowd did a really great job of not being creepy.
Chris: I’m jealous, Josh, of you going to the Laura Dern interview. She’s a national treasure, but I just couldn’t make any of her appearances fit with my schedule. I think one guest that should be highlighted, though, is Ala’a Basatneh, the young girl featured in #ChicagoGirl: The Social Network Takes on a Dictator. She’s a 19-year old girl in Chicago who was instrumental in helping protesters in Syria by coordinating with them to take on Bashar al-Assad. She’s really inspiring, and kudos to SIFF for bringing her to Seattle with the film.
Other surprises?
Chris: I’m not sure if this counts, but when I watched Fight Church, the story of mixed-martial arts among devout Christians I recommended last week, I did a little bit of poking around the internet for what I can learn about the movie. One of the pastors featured prominently in the film was reportedly accused of sexual assault and trying to cover it up. It put watching the film in a whole new context.
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