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Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

SIFF 2014: Festival Roundtable (Week Two)

As the final days of the Seattle International Film Festival approach, let’s take a minute to chat about how the second week of SIFF treated us.

Boyhood

Josh: SIFF is going very well for me — above all, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was quietly phenomenal. It lived up to the audacity of the premise and beyond the “gimmick” of filming the same character growing up over twelve eventful years. I was astonished both at how effective it was and in that I wasn’t bored at all during the nearly three-hour running time. The film is about nothing and everything and I felt like almost any of the characters in it could have supported a movie of their own.

Tony: I’m pretty much in total agreement with you on it, Josh. You hit the nail on the head when you say it’s about everything and nothing: It’s great that the movie uses mostly little moments–seemingly insignificant pieces of a life–to gradually craft a really rich whole. Linklater’s also a master at stirring up empathy for his characters: Both of the parents in the movie are deeply flawed people, but in the end I was as riveted by their life journeys as I was by their son’s.

Josh: Exactly! I would’ve been comfortable sitting in the hard wooden balcony seats at the Egyptian for a few more years in the lives of these people. Aside from the current events mile markers (elections, wars), the music cues indicating the passage of time were astonishingly on-point and eerily close to my own playlists during the time period and that track from the trailer that shows up again toward the end (“Hero” by Family of the Year) has been on constant repeat on my headphones. The cumulative effect of fluidly transitioning through the annual check-ins was really something special. I can’t exactly say the same thing for the similarly sprawling The Turning. If I squint hard enough, I might find some parallels between these two epic length projects but after three hours watching the eighteen chapters I’m going to have to let those ideas gestate for a while. The online viewer’s guide did help to sort out which of the stories were connected — something like half of the short films concern an even longer period of time for one main character — which the filmmakers made particularly challenging by casting different actors and directors for each of the vignettes. I don’t entirely regret seeing it though, much of the filmmaking was beautifully done and allowing it to wash over me as an impressionistic portrait was not entirely unpleasant (I did get up to stretch and switch seats a few times!).

Tony: The original Tim Winton short story collection that formed the basis of The Turning is an honest-to-God phenomenon in its native Australia, but it’s relatively unknown on this side of the world. From what I gather, most of the directors involved skewed very closely to Winton’s writing, which was one of the problems for me: A compelling, circuitous trek in prose form can feel more like meandering when you film it. There’s a lot to respect in The Turning, but I think you need to be familiar with Winton’s writing (or Australian, or both) to really fall in love with the movie.

Fly Colt Fly: The Legend of the Barefoot Bandit

Let’s chat about the local crime caper that we all loved:

Josh: On the local true crime scene, Fly Colt Fly: The Legend of the Barefoot Bandit was so wildly entertaining that I forgave its lack of any sort of clinical distance or psychological probing into its Camano Island-born protagonist, Colton Harris-Moore. They shied away from the motivations (and likely dark past) of the crime spree kid who captivated local and national headlines a few years ago to instead prop up the mythology through re-enactments, cartoons, found footage, and interviews. Although I lived here at the time, I only remembered hearing about a small fraction of his increasingly audacious capers.

Tony: ‘Exhilarating’ and ‘thrill ride’ aren’t phrases I’d often use to describe a documentary, but they apply for Fly Colt Fly. It’s a wonderfully wrought adventure that really, viscerally connects viewers to the adrenaline rush that surely fueled Colton Harris-Moore’s exploits. And it’s so immersive and thrilling that it’s virtually impossible to nitpick at it until it’s over. That said, I for one would welcome a companion doc that takes a more in-depth psychological/storytelling path.

Chris: I will make it unanimous in our admiration for Fly Colt Fly, which really was such an exciting and tense film, particularly for a documentary, like Tony said. I watched the story play out in the local news, so I remember when Colton Harris-Moore was captured in the Bahamas (spoiler, sorry), but hearing it explained how his final chase went down likely put my blood pressure in dangerous territory. There were a lot of flaws that I was willing to overlook because the movie was so exciting to watch (and the animation was very cool). The biggest complaint I had was the use of dramatic re-enactments, which gave it kind of a hokiness that you might find on a true crime docu-drama somewhere on cable late at night. Not that I’d know, I’m usually asleep by 9.

 

Let’s get this part out of the way — no matter how good the festival, some films fall below average. What didn’t work for you? 

Tony: I try to make it a point to get far outside my cinematic comfort zone frequently during SIFF, so I hurtled myself into the belly of the Rom Com Beast for a viewing of Elsa and Fred. This Anglicized remake of a SIFF Golden Space Needle-winning Spanish movie stars Shirley MacLaine as a compulsive liar and Christopher Plummer as the curmudgeon who stumbles into a late-in-life romance with her. Picture one of those bootleg Calvin and Hobbes truck decals, and you’re pretty much picturing how Elsa and Fred treats its target demographic.

Josh: For me Beautiful Noise, which premiered at SIFF, was the roughest. I hate to say anything bad about this obvious labor of crowdfunded love since I really did enjoy spending time with the music from Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Slowdive, Ride, Lush along with commentary from the bands, their producers, and fellow musicians Wayne Coyne, Trent Reznor, Billy Corgan, Robert Smith. However, given the impressive efforts to assemble some presumably hard-to-get people for interviews along with what had to be a herculean effort to acquire the tons of complicated music clearances, I found it a real pity that the whole thing came together looking like a 1990s community access station production without a compelling through line around which to hang the narrative of the rise, fall, and influence of shoegaze (a genre term that goes intentionally unsaid in the film, in part because the people in those bands hate that word). I feel like in the hands of a skilled editor this could have been amazing, but instead was just decent. Tony: That’s too bad. The subjects of Beautiful Noise are resolutely up my alley. Oh, well, I’ll look for it on Netflix or home video at some point–that sounds like an ideal medium for viewing.

Chris: I’m with Tony, too. I really wanted to catch that movie because I do have such a fondness for shoegaze music (my previous music blog, Another Rainy Saturday, was named for a My Bloody Valentine song), but I’ll definitely look for it on VOD or Netflix. You’re welcome to come over and watch it sometime, Tony.

Tony: Erratic, jarring shifts in tone made the Hong Kong polyglot, The Midnight After, alternately too much and not enough. A group of passengers on a bus pass through a freeway tunnel to find all of Hong Kong utterly deserted, then the Twilight Zone set-up gives way to some oddball humor (sort of an Asian riff on This is The End), elements of Stephen King’s The Stand, and a musical number framed around David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity.’ A lot of it works really well, but the fragments don’t add up to a cohesive whole, and  the ending’s unsatisfying. There’s also an extremely wrongheaded attempt to play a rape/murder for gallows laughs: I’m fully aware that a cultural difference is at play, but it really left a bad taste in my mouth.

Girl Trouble

SIFF does a great job of stocking music-related films, both documentaries, narratives, and somewhere in between. Any highlights from the Face the Music Series?

Tony: Strictly Sacred: The Story of Girl Trouble marks the second terrific locally-grown music doc I’ve seen for SIFF 2014. A Tacoma institution for 30 years, Girl Trouble have bashed out their brand of dirty-fingernailed garage rock just underneath the radar, with a resolutely DIY work ethic totally in keeping with their hometown’s scrappy character. It’s a funny and thought-provoking examination of a dysfunctional but loving family dynamic–and it rocks like joyous hell.

Chris: Girl Trouble was the first band to really be unpleasant to me at a show, well over a decade ago. It’s a long story that’s probably best told over drinks and I know it’s petty and likely something the band has no recollection of, but I’ve been trying to ignore them ever since. Plus, all of my Tacoma garage rock needs are more than adequately filled by The Sonics and The Fucking Eagles. But I am glad you enjoyed the movie, Tony!

Josh: On the idiosyncratic musician front, the goofy Frank (*inspired* by the true story of Jon Ronson’s adventures with Frank Sidebottom) was light and delightful. It’s a shaggy story of a weird band on the rise. I get the sense that untethering it from the strict constraints of history allowed it to convey the real feelings of a struggling and confusing band while allowing you to invest in the characters without focusing on which details were fictionalized (a possible lesson that might have helped our frequent punching bag of an opening night biopic). I was also kind of amazed at just how much emotion Michael Fassbender conveyed from behind that ridiculous fiberglass mask.

I suppose that Attila Marcel, Sylvain Chomet’s transition from animation to live action also counts as a music film. Almost a live-action cartoon, it has Guillaume Gouix in the role of a thirtysomething sheltered, mute, pianist living with a pair of over-coddling aunts in a Parisian apartment whose encounters with a rogue gardener and her psychedelic memory-recovering herbal teas. The candy colored palette and abounding eccentricities were tempered by the requisite drops of sad orphan sadness into a sweet and light comedy that seems to be real charmer on the festival circuit.

In Jealousy, Louis Garrel’s hair and the charm of this child actor are miracles.

Other standouts?

Tony: When I saw Sam and Amira, Shawn Mullin’s indie comedy, I wanted to grab Michael Radford (director of the aforementioned Elsa and Fred) by the scruff of the neck and yell, “THIS is how you make a romantic comedy!” The central plot (US veteran and Iraqi expat fall in love) is pure formula, but it’s winningly acted by leads Martin Starr and Dina Shihabi and it navigates familiar waters with a welcome touch of organic ease, smarts, and unforced wit. Color me surprised…and utterly charmed.

Josh: Also in the Coasts of Passion program, but not nearly as comedic,  I really loved Jealousy, Philippe Garrel’s latest entry in directing his son Louis through troubled onscreen romances in slow crisis. Told in two loosely structured moody vignettes, this rambler makes the lives of volatile artists falling in and out of love while taking care of an adorable daughter look gorgeous in high-contrast black & white.

I found two others from this category to be less successful but still interesting. Through soft-focus close-ups of Vincent Kartheiser and Olivia Thirlby juxtaposed with wide shots of the dazzling scenery of an Antarctic summer, Red Knot provided strong advice for newlyweds with poor communication about the perils of a hastily-planned honeymoon aboard a three-week research expedition on the Southern Ocean captained by sad soulful Billy Campbell. Aboard, beyond the beauty of whale songs and the magic of penguin breeding rituals, their voyage of discovery includes the revelation that maybe they have different goals for themselves and aspirations for their marriage. The film was great to look at, though it was perhaps so preoccupied with its own loose tone and moodiness that I’m not entirely sure what happened in the end. Similarly, Grand Central also gets points for putting a fairly conventional romance into an unfamiliar setting: the summer camp-like environment around a French countryside nuclear reactor where young workers without prospects and low levels of pre-existing radiation exposure get hired on to keep the plant running until their doses hit the maximum allowable limit. Even though the situation wasn’t unique (young love, infidelity, etc), the performances were strong enough to quickly create the transient world of what felt like the modern corollary of a coal mining story, still dangerous but more obsessed with cleanliness.

Time Lapse

Chris: One movie I really enjoyed was Time Lapse, which I think Tony might enjoy, too. It’s a low-budget, one location, psychological, sci-fi thriller where three friends discover their elderly neighbor has invented a camera that takes photos 24 hours into the future. It’s sort of Christopher Nolan-meets-Rear Window, but it really was a great film and I hope more people get to see it. I’ll expand more on it when I get around to transcribing my interview with the visiting guests for the film.

Tony: I didn’t really get to chime in about it during the last roundtable, but Bret Fetzer’s My Last Year with the Nuns continues to stand out for me. Fetzer’s deceptively breezy directorial approach adds just the right amount of playful imagination to Matt Smith’s hilarious, honest, and bracingly universal storytelling.

B.F.E., another local entry, really impressed me, too: It gets a little Afterschool Special towards the end, but its evocation of soul-deadening suburbia is pitch-perfect (and beautifully realized visually). The young people populating B.F.E. look and feel like real teenagers, and the movie manages to be funny as hell while still maintaining a core of emotional truth. I can’t wait to see what first-time feature director Shawn Telford does next. Several horror and genre flicks really floated my boat as well, but I’ll save any blathering about them for a longer ramble later this week/early next.

The One I Love, starring Elizabeth Moss and Mark Duplass closes SIFF on Sunday night.

Anything you’re looking forward to in the last days of the festival? Chris: On Saturday afternoon, I’m going to try to make it to the Future of Film Criticism panel at the Film Center. It’s an issue I think about often (and arts criticism in general), plus one of the panelists is our friend Kathy Fennessy.

Tony: The reissue of Dan Ireland’s The Whole Wide World is high on my list, as are several of the African Pictures series. One of the final Midnight Adrenaline entries, the Aussie thriller The Babadook, is generating much buzz around the geek campfire. Mark Duplass could practically be considered an honorary Seattleite given his long history with SIFF and Seattle filmmaking: The two movies he’s starring in (Creep and The One I Love) look promising. And I’ll always give any documentary by Alex Gibney a look, so I’m hoping for good things from his latest, Finding Fela.

Josh: I still haven’t made it to a midnighter; so maybe Babadook will be the one to keep me up late. I guess I’m just hoping to squeeze in a few more great films between now and closing night. The film looks solid, MOHAI is a great place for a party, and it really feels like this year’s festival has a lot to celebrate; I’m hoping to make it out of the festival without too much of a hangover, filmic or otherwise.

Keep track of the SunBreak’s SIFF coverage on our SIFF 2014 page, plus news updates and micro-reviews on Twitter @theSunBreak.

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

What We’ve Seen at SIFF 2013 (Week 1)

Keep track of all The SunBreak’s festival coverage on our SIFF 2013 page. 

What’d we see?

F. Murray Abraham in Goltzius and the Pelican Company

Josh: I started the festival by learning that I’m the type of filmgoer who walks out on a Peter Greenaway film a little after the halfway mark. It’s not that I was offended by nudity or lewdity, just that a few episodes of Goltzius and the Pelican Company‘s eroticized provocations (enumerating biblical sexual taboos) felt like just about enough. While I’m not curious about how the film ended, I do sort of wish that I’d stayed for the Q&A to find out about the conversation that convinced F. Murray Abraham to sign onto a film where his first appearance is using a chamber pot in front of a 16th-century Italian court and surrounded by a half-dozen servants in blackface.

Chelsea: So far just Mistaken for Strangers, the doc about The National….

Josh: What did you think? First, I’m not sure that it’s entirely fair to call this movie, which was produced by the National’s lead singer Matt Berninger (with support from the rest of the band) and filmed by his younger brother Tom, documentary about the National. In his Q&A, the director talked about deciding to put in the funny parts, but throughout I felt like I was watching an inadvertent horror movie about the dangers of hiring your little brother to be your roadie and self-imposed documentarian, shot from the perspective of the oblivious monster. Which, I guess, is a sort of cinematic innovation. Even more amazing is that even after watching the younger Berninger fumble his way out of a nepotistic job after driving the professional crew and band insane, fail at making and even exhibiting a rough cut of his concert film, and turn the whole thing inside out into a meta making-of-the-movie-we’re-all-watching magic trick, I still was susceptible to a tender moment near the end of the film that captures the director assisting with the microphone cable and tagging behind as his big brother parts his way through the crowd in a state of music-induced mania. (3/5)

MvB: I made a beeline to The Deep, the only Icelandic feature film in this year’s SIFF. It’s director Baltasar Kormákur’s (Jar City) retelling of a true story about a fishing boat that foundered in the frigid Atlantic, and the sole survivor Gulli (played with woebegone appeal by Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) who swam miles home in the 41-degree water. It’s partly a survival tale — for the actors, too, who jumped off a real sinking boat into the real Atlantic — but it’s also about Gulli’s Icelandic toughness, hidden in his “seal fat.” (I was delighted to see Kormákur has also picked up the rights to Halldor Laxness’s Independent People.) Scientists want to know what makes superhuman Gulli tick, but Kormákur understands he just wanted to get home. To emphasize that, the movie keeps flashing back to the 1973 volcanic eruption that only temporarily evicted residents from their Westman Islands home.  4/5

Tiny Onata Aprile plays a different kind of survivor in What Maisie Knew. Of co-stars Julianne Moore, Steve Coogan, Joanna Vanderham, and Alexander Skarsgård, only Moore is on a slightly level playing field with Aprile, going for broke as an aging rock star-monster. The film, an “updating” of a Henry James story (the title’s the same, anyway), is about Maisie being a child of divorce, but experiencing it through a little girl’s field of vision, toys being continually thrust into view. For a privileged kid, Maisie’s life is pretty miserable — she’s shuttled back and forth, an excuse for arguments and screaming, but Aprile is somehow unsinkable, which makes her one actual breakdown even more affecting. 4/5

Josh: What I took from this movie is that Julianne Moore hasn’t met a monstrous mess of a human that she’s unwilling to play. As absentee self-involved parents, both she and Steve Coogan are in such a race for the worst, that it’s a complete mystery how their kid has turned out so alright. Once I got past expecting Skarsgård to sprout fangs and bite his young charge, I came to appreciate that some of his and Vanderham’s comparatively idyllic step-parenting can be attributed to much of the film’s being influenced by Maisie’s point of view. Whether the casual hand-offs and looseness of child protection laws reflect this or the novel’s original setting remained unclear. Overall, that such a loosely plotted moody piece remained so captivating is a real accomplishment. (4/5)

Audrey: I’m sure that little girl was preciously precocious, but late-life dramedy Bwakaw features some of the strongest acting to be found at the festival. Veteran Filipino superstar Eddie Garcia delivers a subtly powerful performance as Rene, a grumpy old gay man dealing with a lifetime of self-loathing and paths not taken. But the title of the film refers to Rene’s only friend, a female stray, and Princess, his canine co-star, is an acting partner of the highest order. You’ve got one more chance to see this foreign flick Thursday.

Josh: In terms of cranky older men and their endearing female strays, Brady Hall’s Scrapper covers broadly similar territory with perhaps a lighter touch. As Hollis Wallis, Michael Beach spends nearly every waking hour driving a beat-up pickup truck around Beacon Hill in search of scrap metals that he sells to support his ailing mother. His life’s single focus widens ever so slightly when he picks up an assistant and tenant who he initially meets while she’s tied-up in Aidan “Littlefinger Carcetti” Gillen’s S&M basement. A few bizarre dream sequences, light comedy, and awkward exchanges keep the story more endearing than treacly. (3.5/5)

MvB: So you pretty much know what you’re going to get from Storm Surfers 3D. 3D’s foreshortening makes some of the longer shots look like storybook pop-ups, but the filmmakers capture an astonishing amount of you-are-there impact by dropping an assortment of people with cameras up and down a wave’s length, as well as handing its star big-wave fanatics Ross Clarke-Jones and Tom Carroll what looks like a camera embedded in a dog’s ball-throwing stick, which they hold behind them as they slide down waves taller than your house. The graphics work illustrating weather patterns is terrific, but the “chase for big waves” drama comes to feel forced for the camera. More compelling is Tom’s “a surfer looks at 50″ angst, as he weighs his family’s happiness against the risks he takes to do what he loves. 3/5 (4/5 for the camera work)

I don’t really have a good surfing segué into Neil Jordan’s Byzantium. It’s determinedly not like the last vampire film you’ve seen, presenting a markedly different mythology. Not only are Clara (an other-kind-of-vampy Gemma Arterton) and ethereal Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan) a mother-daughter “sucréant” duo, but they prey differently: Clara pretends to be a prostitute to get men alone, while Eleanor has taken up mercy killing. Fleeing to an English coastal town, Clara sets up shop as a brothel owner, while flashbacks ensue that explain why they’re being hunted down the centuries. Though blood is sucked — and spurted and firehosed — one of the more arresting scenes has to do with anticoagulants. 3/5

Audrey: Speaking of blood-suckers, Our Nixon is an all-archival documentary, built from home movies shot by three Super8-happy White House aides turned Watergate conspirators H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Dwight Chapin. As the narrative follows the scandal, the footage allows us access to everything from television address postmortems to first drafts of talking points attacking Nixon’s media enemies. It didn’t trigger any sympathies, but there is something fascinating about the behind-the-scenes glimpses of an administration at its most venal and its most banal.

Josh: On the topic of documentaries, I caught a couple on Saturday. I’m not sure that WikiLeaks: We Steal Secrets revealed much more about the facts of the case than the exceptional 2011 Frontline feature, but Gibney’s lively documentary did provide some worthwhile context in the form of interviews and spotlighted the degree to which Assange’s hubris in response to the sex crimes allegation derailed his organizations’s core mission. After seeing the film, I also knew way too much about both Bradley Manning’s reliance on ellipses in online chats and  also about the pores of Gibney’s interviewees, filmed in extremely tight focus. (3.5/5)

Later that day I also caught a screening of Furever, a documentary that treats its extreme pet preservationists subjects so gently that the ends to which they’ve gone to immortalize their dead animal companions—transformation of cremains to jewelry, old fashioned taxidermy, new age mummification, incredibly lifelike freeze-drying, or insanely expensive cloning—seem at least understandable, if not a little less insane.  (3.5/5).

Greta Gerwig in Frances Ha

MvB: If you don’t like Frances Ha, star Greta Gerwig will hunt you down and look earnestly at you with that slightly upturned mouth while director Noah Baumbach sneaks up on you from behind to whisper something hilariously cutting into your ear that seems to encapsulate everything about your late 20s. The struggles of peripatetic young dancer Frances to “grow up” may remind you viscerally of Baumbach’s earlier Kicking and Screaming, but this time it’s filmed in hilariously oversharing, sweetly miscomprehending Gerwig-vision. Addresses become chapter headings as life begins to happen to her — a BFF roommate moves on (her two new dude roommates are a treat), her dancing career stalls — and she regresses back to home and even a college dorm. There is a terrible missed opportunity for Eric Stoltz to show up as, you know, an architect or lawyer, but other than that, it’s everything you’d hope. 4/5

Josh: Noah Baumbach is among my Spirit Director Animals; so as much as I would have enjoyed that particular chase scene, I required no convincing to swoon over his latest chronicle of all the joys and sorrows of this awful thing called “growing up.” The best joke (of many good ones) in thoroughly-charming Frances Ha may be the sheer physical comedy of Greta Gerwig as an aspiring professional dancer who is blissfully oblivious to her actual prospects. Her unflinching optimism combined with the director’s general affection toward all of the characters definitely places this gorgeous French New Wave-inspired feature in the column of Baumbach films that you leave smiling rather than emotionally exhausted. (5/5)

Tony: Whedonverse ballyhoo aside, Much Ado About Nothing was a lot of fun, and affirmation that Joss Whedon’s TV/film repertory of actors can carry a feature film as adroitly as any TV show.

It’ll probably surprise absolutely no one that my next two SIFF screenings were the Fest’s first two midnighters. What was surprising was how much I enjoyed them both. 100 Bloody Acres is a resolutely Australian black comedy in which two yobbo brothers run an organic fertilizer business using some, um, choice ingredients. Laugh-out-loud funny (coarsely so, at several spots), tense, and surprisingly sweet for a movie that packs acid trips, old-lady sex, and graphic corpse-grinding into its 90-odd minutes. Meantime, V/H/S/2 – the sequel to my favorite Midnight Adrenaline feature of 2012 — ditches the misogyny of the original, and amps up the cartoonish ingenuity without forsaking the sledgehammer jumps that propelled the first film.

Josh: I take my thrills considerably less graphic and a lot more grounded, so The East was much more my speed than the midnight series, yet still had plenty of adrenaline. Director Zal Batmanglij and lead actress Brit Marling cooked up an indie thriller that finds up-and-coming corporate espionage superstar Marling infiltrating Alexander Skarsgård and Ellen Page’s culture-jamming, eco-terror group/woodsy-team-building retreat. Although I’m not fully convinced that all of the highwire plot details hang, but due to smart writing and sharp filmmaking, her immersion into the group, the execution of their schemes, and growing conflicts sure feel so right along the way that I was fully swept up in the cause. (4.5/5)