Tag Archives: siff 2011

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

SIFF Dispatch: Week 3

the SunBreak at SIFF 2011

Yes, we are now officially in the final week of SIFF. Before you dash off to your next screening, be sure to check the SIFF updates page to see which films are already sold out or are selling fast. Individual tickets for most films cost $11 for the public and $9 for SIFF members. Matinees are a bit cheaper ($8/$7) and those who are more willing to commit can consider all sorts of passes still for sale as well as slightly discounted packs of tickets in bundles of 6 or 20.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the SIFF films that those of us at The SunBreak have seen recently, as well as the films that we’re most looking forward to seeing over the next couple days. Note that STIFF is also in full effect, so check out their film schedule too!

WHAT WE SAW:

Tony was kinda enchanted by Jonas Trueba’s comedy Every Song is About Me, which covers the on-again/off-again romance between a would-be poet and his fiancee with a light-but-never insubstantial touch. Its combination of airy charm and melancholy feels really French (in a good way), despite its Spanish pedigree.

MvB: In Clink of Ice a bearded Jean Dujardin (OSS 117) plays novelist Charles Faulque as a thorough burn-out, clutching his ice bucket with its chilled white wine like a teddy bear, his wife gone, fed up, with their son in tow. Then his cancer rings the doorbell. Literally. It’s very French to have cancer over for arguments about life’s value, but Faulque’s passivity makes it hard to care about more than his quips, until late in the film he discovers in his maid the enabling love he’s looking for. (June 8, 6:30 p.m. @ Kirkland)

Burke & Hare is another one of those wry retellings with a possibly historical basis, goosed up with allegory to modern life, slang, and an subplot with an all-female Macbeth, and starring a host of famous Brit faces. Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis are the lead con-and-funnymen who discover grave robbing is easier if you don’t wait for the burial in the first place, as they attempt to satisfy a Scottish medical school’s demand for autopsy cadavers in 1828. It’s an easy-going good time. (June 11, 8:30 p.m. @ the Admiral)

If you remember Seattle’s Bobo the Gorilla, you can’t miss Project Nim–except you did, there are no more festival showings. Look for it elsewhere though; it’s well worth it. Documentarian James Marsh (Man on Wire) returns with this story of a chimpanzee raised to be “human,” who illustrates that there’s a lot of truth to the lives chronicled in Dickensian tales. Charting his life from spoiled infant to prodigy, to outcast to medical research subject, the film subtly demonstrates how Nim changed his teachers’ lives as well. Really a profoundly affecting film.

Josh was also intrigued by the unfortunate tale of Nim Chimpsky, beginning with his painful separation from a tranquilized mother to a life in exile among abused hoofed animals. Although I appreciated the documentary, I simultaneously wished for a different film that, instead of following the life of the chimp, burrowed deeper into the questionable world of the the family that decided to adopt a wild animal into their Upper West Side brownstone, and the culture of scientific research that allowed a behavioral psychologist with a propensity for sleeping with his research assistants (the 70s!) to set up a swinging chimp-rearing commune in a Columbia-owned mansion in the Bronx.

MvB: Snow White‘s run at the festival is also done, but it’s worth searching out. Choreographer Angelin Preljocaj reinvents the fairytale as an erotically charged thriller, with the help of costume designer Jean Paul Gaultier, sets by Thierry Leproust, and excerpted music by Gustav Mahler. If the spectacle is sometimes over the top (thinking of the Queen’s S&M bustle), it’s also inventively delightful (the Seven Dwarves as a cliff-face dancing troupe), and the scene where the prince tries to dance a dead Snow White back to life captures the brutality of heartbreak like nothing else.

Josh realized that only in Seattle and under the spell of SIFF can someone make it through one of Seattle’s nicest, long-delayed spring weekends feeling guilty about having only sequestered oneself in the darkness for five movies. In addition to Project Nim, I caught two other documentaries. Tornado Alley inadvertently brought the important lesson to potential thrill-seekers that massive storms look a whole lot more awesome from a distance than when the eye of the twister is passing right over you. Counterplaying a highly organized large scale research effort to capture billions of datapoints about tornadoes with a D.I.Y. filmmaker’s quest to drive his homemade tank straight into a tornado, the movie didn’t have a whole lot to say about science (though narrator Bill Paxton said fancy words like “tornadogenesis” a lot), but the short running time was filled with enough striking six-story images of storms to make the film recommendable.

As impressive as it was to see scientists chasing down eye-popping pictures of tornadoes, I think that I was even more astonished at how well Alex Gibney cobbled together footage from an untrained band of LSD-afflicted merry pranksters on their cross-country bus journey and turned it into coherent and enlightening story for Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place.

Josh also watched two incredibly idiotic comedies. The first, Salvation Boulevard dragged the audience through 95 minutes of an interesting premise–evangelical mega-church pastor tries to parlay his flock into a mega-development, but is derailed by an accident with an atheist–crushed under the weight of clunky plot machinations, flat performances, bad jokes, and characters with little personality or obvious motivations. The other, Detention, started with a premise so outlandish as to defy easy summary: let’s just say that a serial axe murderer, the prom, aliens, social dynamics, Hollywood slasher sequels, and a time-traveling bear are all involved. Despite all of that going against (or for) it, director Joseph Kahn and his charming cast embrace the madness and never slow down enough to let you care that it’s completely preposterousness. I left feeling won over by something that I probably should’ve hated.

Tony joins MvB in his fondness for the French comedy, The Names of Love. Only Gallic filmmakers could pull off this melange of topicality, broad farce, breezy sexuality, and visual beauty with such elan. Insert the obligatory souffle reference here.

Speaking of pulling off tough tasks, director Sean Branney succeeds at adapting the oft-unfilmable work of H.P. Lovecraft by steeping The Whisperer in Darkness in the tropes of a bygone era. The movie’s an open, highly effective homage to 1930s horror cinema, replete with an evocative black-and-white patina and expressionistic visuals. More details in Tony’s interview with Branney and members of the Whisperer creative team, posting soon.

Detention, meantime, sprints into the here-and-now with warp speed. The SIFF programming guide name-drops The Breakfast Club, Scream, and Heathers–all valid touchstones–as reference points. But this jet-black comedy’s hyper-driven aesthetic is as densely packed with pure creativity and warped humor as it is with pastiche. One of the most exhilarating surprises of the fest from this cramped perspective. (Director Joseph Kahn spoke with Tony in detail about Detention, in another interview posting soon.)

The Intruder, meantime, delivers precisely what it promises–thousands of killer cobras infesting an apartment building in Thailand and making snake food of the complex’s gaggle of stock characters. It’s pure junk, with plenty of Dumb Movie Characters doing Dumb/Irritating Movie Character Things, and a few chuckle-worthy gaffes (the plot makes much reference to the building’s fifth floor, even as one exterior shot displays an obviously three-floor building). Still, the movie’s mounted with a lot more imagination than your average Sci-Fi Channel killer-animal opus, and the well-engineered scares had The SunBreak’s resident schockologist jumping out of his seat with frequency. (June 8, 9:30 p.m. @ the Neptune)

Angel of Evil tells the fact-based story of Italian gangster Renato Vallanzaca, a charismatic career criminal who staged robberies and kidnappings throughout the 1970’s with reckless, go-for-broke flamboyance. Slug for slug, it’s one of the best crime flicks of the fest–executed with relentless energy and ravishing sensuality by director Michele Placido. Kim Rossi Stuart, the actor playing Vallanzaca, cauterizes the screen with a wiry energy that never stoops to scenery chewing (think Alain Delon by way of Ryan Gosling).

On the other hand, the Spanish experimental flick Finisterrae left much of the audience scratching their heads (choice quote from college-age girl exiting one screening: “I hate movies where you have to try so hard to figure out what the fuck they mean.”). If you’re in the wrong mood, it probably plays like an absurdist con job, as two guys with sheets over their heads tromp around amidst some lovely Spanish scenery. But this odd, glacially-paced fable about two ghosts trying to find their way back to corporeal existence yields beauty, intentional deadpan laughs, and thought if you’re willing to go with it.

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION:

  • The Off Hours This Northwest Connection has the requisite Lynn Shelton angle: she acted in the truck stop drama, while fellow female local director Megan Griffiths took the film reins. (4:30 p.m. @ Neptune)
  • Bobby Fischer Against the World In which the chess champion takes on everyone, on and off the board. (7 p.m. @ Harvard Exit; Wednesday, 4:30 p.m. @ Harvard Exit)
  • Love Crime Any psycho-sexual thriller with Ludivine Sagnier and Kristen Scott Thomas is fine by me. (8:30 p.m. @ Admiral)
  • PressPausePlay ranked highly on the programmers’ consensus list. With good reason: the digital media revolution doc includes appearances by Olafur Arnalds, Hot Chip, Robyn, and Lykke Li. (9:15 p.m. @ SIFF Cinema; June 10, 4:30 p.m. @ Neptune)
  • High Road is no mere stoner film, considering it includes such comedy talents as Abby Elliott, Rob Riggle, and Ed Helms. (9:30 p.m. @ Egyptian)
Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

Ken Kesey’s Long, Strange Trip: An Interview with director Alex Gibney

The formerly-staid genre of documentary filmmaking has emerged from its dry talking-head ghetto in the last decade, and you can partially thank Alex Gibney for that. Gibney’s non-fiction features crackle with the kind of energy and storytelling techniques normally ascribed to fiction films, whether he’s exploring the lives of a troubled genius in Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, or laying out the labyrinth of corruptive hubris threading through Wall Street in Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer.

Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place (screening for SIFF at the Egyptian at 3:15 p.m.) chronicles the infamous, LSD-fueled cross-country bus tour undertaken by author Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters in 1964, winnowing down some 40 hours of the Pranksters’ 16mm footage to a little under two hours.

On the face of it, this latest effort sounds like a nostalgic detour from the hard-hitting work that’s made Gibney’s reputation. But he and co-director Alison Ellwood combine the footage with spoken accounts from the Pranksters and impeccably-executed re-enactment sequences to create a wholly-immersive road movie; one where the viewer stands alongside a fascinating cast of characters at ground zero of the 1960’s American Counterculture explosion. True to form, Gibney and Ellwood subtly show the powder burns that accompany that dazzling flash, too. Gibney sat down with me to offer some choice insights on the nuts and bolts of his new film, as well as some of the driving forces behind his overall body of work.

How did the project begin for you? Was this something you’d been working on for a long time, or did it just drop into you lap?

Well, Alison and I have been working on it for a long time. It was one that we spotted when we were going out to Sundance for Enron. And I just saw an article in The New Yorker, by Robert Stone, who had been on the bus briefly. He had mentioned in that article that there were forty hours of 16mm film; and I thought, “Wow, wouldn’t that be great….” The subject was interesting, but if you’re making a movie, there’s got to be the materials to make it with. So I thought, the idea of having that much footage from that trip; that’d be something.

What was the process like, paring down that forty hours of footage into a workable feature film?

Well, it was more, almost, than just paring down. First, we had to put it back together and then pare it down. The footage really needed to be restored. It was originally shot in 16mm reversal, which meant–like slide film–you could watch it. The bad part about that was: That meant they could project it. So it had developed a lot of scratches.

They [The Merry Pranksters] tried to cut it themselves. Unfortunately they were using hot splicers. A hot splicer means you actually lose a frame every time you make an edit. So, by the time we got the film, it was badly beaten-up. We got a grant from the Film Foundation, which was founded by Martin Scorsese and A & E. The Film Foundation restored the film, and A & E restored the audio. We went in and slowly but surely tried to put the pieces together. I have to give a lot of credit on that to my co-director Alison Ellwood, who kind of found a style for the film by just working with the material. It was shot in a way that was pretty chaotic [laughs]. They didn’t bring a cameraman or camerawoman with them. They thought, “Well, we can just do this ourselves.” Well, that’s not something you can just pick up.

I know you’ve worked with Alison in the past a lot as your editor. I was wondering about her role on this film.

On this film, she was very much determining the style by going in and searching through that footage and finding a way to work with it; in such a way, so that it could be told coherently from frame to frame, and also from scene to scene. So it was very much about setting the style.

You could almost see this movie as a bit of a continuation of your exploration of counterculture figures that started with Gonzo. Kesey was kind of a well-adjusted guy–he married his junior high sweetheart, settled down on a farm–so he wasn’t quite the grandiose figure that Hunter S. Thompson was. Did that present any narrative challenges for you?

I don’t think so. I think that, in his way, just like Hunter, Kesey was a tremendously charismatic figure. I think the star of the [film] is Kesey. He’s different than Hunter, and did end up inhabiting, in some ways, this very traditional Western family…. He was a traditional Western family man: rugged, individualistic; but not so much a ‘wacky counterculture character’ in some ways–even though, in some ways, he was that, also. I never thought of him as not being as wild or as interesting as Hunter. He was different; in some ways, much better adjusted than Hunter, but in some ways more anarchic and wild in terms of his ideas. He’s like the quarterback of the football team: He uses that metaphor in the movie, actually. He said, “I don’t want to be the ball. I want to be the quarterback.”

Most of your documentaries have been more investigative and hard-hitting. People on the outside who haven’t seen Magic Trip may look at the subject matter and say, “Oh, this is just going to be a nostalgia trip. This great documentarian is just coasting,” How would you respond to that kind of initial perception?

Well, it sure wasn’t coasting [laughs]. This one took six years, so it was hard labor. We wanted it to be an immersion trip. But I think with the benefit of hindsight, we can include materials in the story that reflect the more contradictory view of the [decade of the] sixties. There’s something wonderful about it, there’s something sort of wide-eyed and idealistic about it, and free about it. But there’s something that’s also fraught; you can feel the dark undercurrents to come. And in the search for freedom you can see the kind of ruddering against human nature that is ultimately going to cost everybody, big-time. So, there’s a lot in there. And there’s a lot of self-indulgent bullshit as well, really….

One of the things that I like about the documentary is that you present both of those aspects…

Right.

You see fucked-up people acting fucked-up; then you see people–oftentimes, those same people–really, truly exploring themselves and the world around them…

Yeah, the idea of them as explorers is a good one. Kesey was a big Melville nut; so the idea of these people on the high seas in some way…that, I think, registers. But explorers generally make some pretty stupid mistakes. When that territory–that trail–hasn’t been blazed before, you’re going to bump into a lot of trees, to mix our land and sea metaphors. That was important to me. I think one of the key characters in the film is Jane; this woman who’s pregnant on the trip. A lot of the time she’s very tired. The trip itself is exhausting, and you can feel that exhaustion at times in the movie. But she has this very sardonic sensibility, and she’s always showing the kind of self-indulgence that these characters inhabit.

A lot of these folks passed away long before the completion of the movie. Did you have a lot of direct interaction with the Merry Pranksters?

Sure…we started out this project in a much more traditional way. We filmed interviews with people who would look back on the events that they’d taken part in and reflect on them. We tried that a little bit, and were disappointed with the results. We found that some of the stories had been rehearsed over and over again; in some ways the Pranksters were bored with telling them. There was also, inevitably, a sense of looking back; and kind of a creeping nostalgia, even in those people who were critical about some of the events. There was kind of a reinventing of some of [those events].

To me, one of the appeals of doing the film was that footage, because it was there. You were in the moment. And then we found these other audio tapes of the Pranksters, not too long after the trip, reflecting on it. That somehow seemed like a much better way in.

It lends an immediacy to the project that your standard-issue talking head documentary…

…would not. It would constantly be taking you out, then putting you back in. There’s something about, “You’re along for the ride.” At times, that ride gets very tiring, as it must have been for them. And at times, it’s exhilarating. Because you feel like, Whoa, I’m here.

We’ve had four or five decades of the media enforcing this idea of the counterculture movement as all long-haired, unwashed freaks in wild clothes and love beads. It’s really interesting to see how ‘normal’–straight, even–the Pranksters looked.

Yeah, they look like they’re straight out of the fraternities and sororities in Animal House; consciously. Kesey had this thing about the red, white, and blue. They’re wearing these red, white, and blue-striped shirts.Their hair is all cut very close. And they’re all gorgeous-looking, I must say. Very handsome, very lovely people.

You struck it lucky with some very beautiful documentary subjects.

Yeah, wow [laughs]! They just exude a kind of sensuality and youth that’s tremendous. Even Neal Cassady, the famous hero of On the Road, was older than the rest of them were, but still, most of the time he’s got his shirt off; he’s still ripped and very handsome.

He’s like this great character actor at the front, driving the bus…

Yeah, he’s like something out of a Budd Boetticher western.

Were there any bits left out of the final cut of the movie that you would’ve left in if you’d had, say, ten more minutes of screen time to play with?

Oh, sure! There was this wonderful sequence of them going down to Tijuana, Mexico, watching a bullfight. It’s just a beautiful, beautiful sequence. It was also not that-much-used by them. They had tried to make this movie many times. And as a result, it was very pretty to look at. I’ll give them credit on one thing: This was film, so you never know what you’re gonna get until you put the film into the lab. One thing they had down was their exposure. You would’ve had to do that with a light meter, and that, they had down. Most of the footage was very well-exposed. Boy, that Mexico stuff would’ve been great to include.

Did your perception of any member of this cast  of characters change appreciably over the course of completing the film?

I think I saw Cassady in a rather different light. I both appreciated his greatness and his charisma, but also his complete nuttiness. And I think in some ways, a kind of speedy desperation. There’s a lot about what Jane says in the film that’s correct. He was a kind of action hero for very famous writers and poets, but he couldn’t create that notion himself. It must’ve been a weird existence for him, where he almost felt like a creation of other people. And I think that opened my eyes.

Have you gotten any feedback from the Pranksters or their families?

Yes. We showed it in Eugene, which was a magnificent night, at a film festival run by Richard Herskovitz there. It was great. A lot of the surviving Pranksters showed up. Mountain Girl was there. The theater was packed; there was a lot of psychedelic memorabilia [laughs]. And they loved it. George Walker said, “This is the film we set out to make,” and nothing could be a higher compliment. Alison and I, I can tell you, were terrified, because we had these big [dramatized] drug sequences in it. What are these veteran drug explorers going to think of those? But they loved them, so we felt pretty good about it.

One of the hallmarks of your style is that you don’t make dry documentaries. There’s a real cinematic-quality narrative driving them. It seems to point to your background editing trailers and working on fiction features…

I think that’s right. Let’s face it: There are a lot of talking heads in my films. But they’re usually surrounded by a lot of other stuff. I think a lot about style when I make a movie. I don’t think there’s an individualistic style for me, but I think a lot about how each film should have a different style according to the subject. This one, Magic Trip, was a very different kind of thing. Client 9 has a much more classical look: It’s meant to be sort of a sophisticated mystery thriller. And it was shot like that. [Magic Trip] is wildly different. It’s kind of an archival cinema-verite project.

You won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, and made documentaries that have left a strong impression on the public consciousness. Is it easier for you to get projects off the ground now? Do you have total freedom in terms of choosing subjects?

I wouldn’t say total freedom; and choosing subjects usually doesn’t work that way. To be honest, most of my films–not all, but most–are films that are brought to me, and financiers tend to like that more. “This is a film I’d like to do. How would you do it?” Then I have to think, well, is this something that would be interesting to me? And if it is, I take the gig. It’s usually easier to get films made that way.

What would be an example of one closer to your heart, as opposed to one that was inspired or imposed by an outside source?

Well, Enron was my idea, but one of the films that’s closest to my heart is Taxi to the Dark Side, which someone suggested that I do. It’s hard to tell: Client 9 was one that was brought to me, and I had a ball making it. I felt like I was at the top of my game with that, if I may say so myself [laughs]…in terms of the storytelling. It’s a complicated story. For me, at least, it doesn’t work that […] the only [films] I care about were the ones I thought of first. Sometimes, you take a journey. Magic Trip would be a classic example. That is one that, when Alison and I were reading that article, we thought that it’d make a great movie. But it didn’t turn out to be the movie that we set out to make.

I would almost liken your work to that of Robert Wise, a director who made a lot of great, varied films; yet there was no overt, giant hand-stamp on his work like, say, Alfred Hitchcock.

That’s fair. I think that’s my thing;  just to find a way for form to marry content. Each film gets reinvented according to the story you’re telling. The other thing I learned from doing the fiction projects was not only a sense of paying attention to visual style, but also the importance of narrative. I think that’s been the freeing thing in the last ten or fifteen years of documentary filmmaking. It’s the willingness to make documentaries more than reports. They’re stories, like good non-fiction books, really.

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

SIFF Dispatch: Week Two

the SunBreak at SIFF 2011

Friends, we have reached the point in the epic Seattle International Film Festival where the count of days left has entered the single digit. If you squint, you can almost see the finish line, but there’s still plenty of popcorn and cinema to enjoy. Before you dash off to your next screening, be sure to check the SIFF updates page to see which films are already sold out or are selling fast. Individual tickets for most films cost $11 for the public and $9 for SIFF members. Matinées are a bit cheaper ($8/$7) and those who are more willing to commit can consider all sorts of passes still for sale as well as slightly discounted packs of tickets in bundles of 6 or 20.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the films Team SunBreak has watched in the past couple of days as well as the films that we’re most looking forward to seeing over the next couple days. Note that this weekend the Festival celebrates having made it past the halfway point with a gala presentation of Service Entrance, in which a bourgeois French couple hires a Spanish maid who’s good at cooking eggs (Friday, 6:00 p.m. @ Egyptian + party following at the D.A.R. Hall) .

WHAT WE SAW:

MvB hopes you saw Bibliothèque Pascal already, because its festival screenings are past. Hungarian director-writer-actor Szabolcs Hajdu has created an exuberant work of cinema that somehow connects Ken Loach with Fellini–it’s at once a fable about the sex trafficking of Central European women, a profound critique of the use of story, and a picaresque exploration of “getting by” in Romania. Moments of visual delirium jostle with its unprejudiced perspectives on its all-too-human characters. Accept its leisurely pace, and you’ll be rewarded.

The Names of Love is actually even better than its screwball set-up suggests. Baya is an Algerian-French leftist who has decided to seduce right-wingers into gaucherie, realizing that rational argument gets you nowhere. But screenwriter team Michel Leclerc and Baya Kasmi find troubling real-world antecedents for Baya and her Jospiniste love, Arthur Martin, and use a stinging comedy to probe the old wounds that still disturb new France. (June 3, 1:30 p.m. @ Pacific Place).

Chances are very good that your heart would be thoroughly melted by Simple Simon, a Swedish film about a matchmaking young man with Asperger’s. Feeling responsible for his brother’s recent break-up, Simon designs a questionnaire and scours the town for his brother’s match (Must Like Aspies). Son of Stellan, Bill Skarsgård keeps Simon somewhat true to Asperger life, though the film’s plot does not–unless very hot, impossibly sweet Swedish women really do go for extra-socially withdrawn types, in which case, MvB’s flight departs in 3…2…1. (all screenings passed, but it’s so popular, it has to show up at an arthouse theater near you in the future)

The Russian Men of a Certain Age, Gromozeka catches up with three men who used to have a band in high school, in increasingly embattled middle age. One’s a taxi driver who thinks his daughter has quit college for porn, another is an adulterous surgeon, and a third is dead wood on the police force and also in his marriage bed. Sometimes intersecting, their stories define diminishing expectations, so that a resigned fatalism comes as a sort of uplift. (today, 4 p.m. @ Pacific Place; June 4, 8:30 p.m. @ Kirkland Perf. Ctr.)

The impact of The White Meadows, out of Iran, is hard to separate from the jailing of its director (Mohammad Rasoulof) and editor (Jafar Panahi) for being critical of the regime. Slow-moving and enigmatic, it’s an allegory for the constraints and persecutions of belief systems that not all may share. A man travels around the shores of a salty sea, collecting tears from people who live there, and observing deaths, sacrifice, and scapegoating. The surreal salt formations of Iran’s Lake Urmia are stunning, but it’s the film’s quiet outrage that leaves the theatre with you. (June 4, 6 p.m. @ Kirkland Perf. Ctr.; June 8, 4:30 p.m. @ the Neptune)

Tony: Flamenco Flamenco presents almost two-dozen performances by some of Spain’s finest flamenco guitarists, singers, and dancers. It was listed as a documentary on SIFF.net, but it’s really pure performance bliss. Carlos Saura directs with unobtrusive fluidity, and Oscar-winning cinematographer Vittorio Storaro shoots the performers with enough voluptuous beauty to induce swoons at fifty paces.

The slick and stylish German vampire flick We Are the Night grafts Near Dark or The Lost Boys with the Euro-chic sensibility of La Femme Nikita, as a young street urchin becomes a va-va-voom vampiress. It’s paced like lightning, incredibly entertaining, and done so well that some committee of U.S. hacks is sure to co-opt it for the requisite crappy Americanized remake.

Like Audrey, Tony also took in Shut Up! Little Man: An Audio Misadventure. The story starts out surreal and amusing, then dredges up a lot of interesting issues regarding intellectual property and the nature of art itself (is selling a Xerox of a foul-mouthed alcoholic’s death certificate through the mail art, just plain icky, or both?).

Yeah, you can pretty much label the Canadian import Vampire a horror movie, but it’s way more interested in the psychological workings of serial killer Simon as he lures already-suicidal girls into giving him their blood…all of it. This spiritual kin to George Romero’s underrated 1976 film Martin sports a surprisingly good performance by Gossip Girl’s Kevin Zegers at its center, and Japanese director Iwai Shunji covers the territory with leisurely artistry. That said, it contains one scene disturbing enough to allegedly clear half-a-house during one SIFF screening, though the SunBreak’s resident B-movie evangelist has seen much, much worse. (Sunday, 8:30 p.m. @ Admiral)

Serge Gainsbourg spent his childhood as a Jew living in Nazi-occupied France; achieved meteoric superstardom in his native land as a singer and songwriter; influenced a couple of generations of musicians; bedded one of the most mythically-beautiful women to walk the earth (Brigitte Bardot); and lived a life of quintessential excess. That’s plenty of fuel for the biopic fire. Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life pretty much gives its subject the Cliffs’ Notes treatment, but Eric Elmosnino absolutely nails the title role, the period details are right-on, and the music remains unimpeachably cool. (today, 4 p.m. @ Admiral; June 7,  8:30 p.m. @ Kirkland)

You can’t accuse Bellflower of adhering to formula. Writer/director/star Evan Glodell’s debut feature throws slacker romance, laughs, Mad Max references, Memento-style chronological hopscotch, and bursts of sex and ultraviolence into one sun-bleached and fascinating package. Messy, riveting, and unpredictable stuff.

Finally, Alex Gibney of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room fame continues his documentary winning streak by co-directing Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place, an immersive and slyly-engaging chronicle of the Sixties Counterculture’s hallucinogen-stoked birth on a psychedelic school bus. Stay tuned for more details in Tony’s interview with Gibney, posting soon. (Saturday, 4:15 p.m. @ Egyptian)

Josh: returned from Sasquatch Music Festival exile in time to catch a screening of Wasted on the Young, a hyper-stylized morality play. Existing in the heightened reality of an Australian private school apparently devoid of adult supervision, the film finds swim team stepbrothers on opposite sides of the popularity spectrum. The central conflict of arises at a loud party, booze, and date rape drugs at the sprawling house ruled by the swim captain brother. Consequences, maintenance of the social hierarchy, and prospects for vengeance play out in a fragmented narrative that hops seamlessly through time and fantasy elements. An interesting, if not entirely successful, take on the serious business of surviving adolescence in an era heavy with social media. (June 4, 1:30 p.m. @ Harvard Exit)

Roger: Last Saturday at Harvard Exit, director Richard Knox Robinson took the stage to introduce his SIFF entry, Rothstein’s First Assignment. “It’s an, uh, unconventional documentary, but stay with it,” he said. “It’s very personal to me.” Robinson attempts in this short film to recap the oft-told story of a Depression-era resettlement of several West Virginia families to make room for Shenandoah National Park. There is no doubt that this particular case, and that of the Tennessee Valley Authority resettlements, were handled in a way we now, with hindsight, bristle at. Robinson feigns outrage and starts swinging for someone to blame. The direction is spotty and the whole feel is amateurish, due in part to a vast misreading of intentions and sources. And why in heaven’s name is the director using scenes of Beverly Hillbillies? Are they to blame?

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION:

Friday, June 3

  • Route Irish Neither Irish nor routine! A former member of Britain’s elite S.A.S. fighting force discovers and seeks to uncover the particulars of a civilian murder in post-invasion Iraq and the suspicious death of his friend in an I.E.D. attack. (7:00 p.m. @ Admiral; Sunday, 11:00 a.m. @ Neptune)
  • Project Nim Whenever you bring a monkey into your home — even if it’s for science — hijinks, hilarious and unsettling occur. A documentary on the 1970s experiment to see if raising a chimp like a child would turn it into a human. (7:00 p.m. @ SIFF Cinema; Sunday,  1:30 p.m. @ Egyptian)
  • Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life see above. (4:00 p.m. @ Admiral; June 7,  8:30 p.m. @ Kirkland)
  • Salvation Boulevard Pierce Brosnan plays an evangelical pastor with real estate dreams. Ambitions of parlaying his mega-church into a mega-development get sidetracked with an accidental killing and zany attempts to pass the buck to Deadhead Greg Kinnear. (9:15 p.m. @ Egyptian; Sunday, 1:00 p.m. @ Admiral)
  • Small Town Murder Songs Murder among the Mennonites as solved by a born-again sheriff, mysteriously estranged from his former community. (9:30 p.m. @ Harvard Exit; Sunday, 1:30 pm @ Harvard Exit)
  • Detention A high-school horror caper, featuring all of the required meta-humor, romantic polygons, and suspenseful intrigue. The description warns of bloody violence, nudity, and strong language, which sounds like a selling point for a adrenaline and comedy hungry Friday night at the movies. (9:30 p.m. @ Neptune; Sunday, 9:15 p.m. @ Egyptian)
  • The Whisperer in Darkness is another H.P. Lovecraft adaptation from director Sean Branney. Branney’s excellent silent film Call of Cthulhu can be viewed on Hulu, and if Whisperer‘s half as good it could provide the Festival’s finest burst of Gothic retro magic. (Midnight @ Egyptian; Sunday, 9:00 p.m. @ Neptune)

Saturday, June 4

  • Tornado Alley A timely look at the destructive forces that made Twister a hit and the American southeast a disaster zone. Narrated by Bill Paxton (of course) and presented in eye-popping IMAX. (11:45 a.m.; also: June  6, 7:15 pm @ Pacific Science Center)
  • Fire in Babylon Cricketeers of the Caribbean! A documentary of the rise to prominence of the 1970s West Indies cricket team. (11:00 a.m. @ Neptune; June 6, 6:30 p.m. @ Kirkland)
  • Norman Another shot at this story about a kid pretending to have cancer to solve all of his social and romantic problems.  (1:00 p.m. @ Neptune)
  • Amador Another chance to see a desperate pregnant woman taking care of a dead man. Nods to Almodovar abound. (1:30 p.m. @ Pacific Place)
  • Wasted on the Young (June 4, 1:30 p.m. @ Harvard Exit).
  • Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place (Saturday, 4:15 p.m. @ Egyptian)
  • Clink of Ice If you like the French OSS comedies, you might like this one about a guy who hangs around with the spirit of his cancer. Like Waiting for Godot with more metastasis? (4:30 p.m. @ Pacific Place; June 8, 6:30 p.m. @ Kirkland)
  • Who Took the Bomp? Le Tigre On Tour At SIFF last year, Kerthy Fix followed around Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields. She’s back this time with a documentary of Riot Grrl punk trailblazers touring the world in 2005. (9:30 p.m. @ Neptune; June 7, 4:30 p.m. @ Egyptian)
  • PressPausePlay The digital revolution is changing art and making it more accessible, but no one’s sure whether that’s such a good thing. Explore within. (3:30 p.m. @ Kirkland; June 7, 9:15 p.m. @ SIFF Cinema; June 10, 4:30 p.m. @ Neptune)

Sunday, June 5

  • Killing Bono After you see U2 at Qwest Field on Saturday, look back at the story of the band’s beginning as “the Hype” and their crosstown rivals “Yeah! Yeah”. One band became one of the biggest on the planet, the other spawned this memoir. (1:30 p.m. @ Neptune; June 8, 9:15 p.m. @ Admiral)
  • The Green Wave A multimodal document of the fallout following the 2009 elections in Iran that had people from all over setting their Twitter location to Tehran. (4:00 p.m. @ Harvard Exit; June 6, 7:00 p.m. @ Harvard Exit)
  • Snow White A modern ballet takes on the classic story of a girl, a prince, and her tiny housemates, all dressed up in Jean Paul Gaultier. (6:30 p.m. @ Neptune)
  • Vampire (8:30 p.m. @ Admiral)
Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

SIFF Dispatch: Mid-Week Two

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the SunBreak at SIFF 2011

Here we are at the exact midpoint of the marathon Seattle International Film Festival. Is everyone still in this to win it? Before you dash off to your next screening, be sure to check the SIFF updates page to see which films are already sold out or are selling fast. Individual tickets for most films cost $11 for the public and $9 for SIFF members. Matinees are a bit cheaper ($8/$7) and those who are more willing to commit can consider all sorts of passes still for sale as well as slightly discounted packs of tickets in bundles of 6 or 20.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the SIFF films that those of us at The SunBreak saw so far this week as well as the films that we’re most looking forward to seeing over the next couple days. Note that the festival expands into Kirkland this week with a gala presentation of Bon Appetit (party at 6:30, film at 8:00 pm.) and celebrates the music of last year’s big SIFF hit, Winter’s Bone, with a live performance of its rustic score at the Triple Door (7:30 pm).

WHAT WE SAW:

MvB hopes you saw Bibliothèque Pascal already, because its festival screenings are past. Hungarian director-writer-actor Szabolcs Hajdu has created an exuberant work of cinema that somehow connects Ken Loach with Fellini–it’s at once a fable about the sex trafficking of Central European women, a profound critique of the use of story, and a picaresque exploration of “getting by” in Romania. Moments of visual delirium jostle with its unprejudiced perspectives on its all-too-human characters. Accept its leisurely pace, and you’ll be rewarded.

The Names of Love is actually even better than its screwball set-up suggests. Baya is an Algerian-French leftist who has decided to seduce right-wingers into gaucherie, realizing that rational argument gets you nowhere. But screenwriter team Michel Leclerc and Baya Kasmi find troubling real-world antecedents for Baya and her Jospiniste love, Arthur Martin, and use a stinging comedy to probe the old wounds that still disturb new France. (June 3 ,1:30 p.m. @ Pacific Place)

Seth: Surrogate Valentine isn’t unwatchable, it’s just unsatisfying. You leave the theater thinking that your time would’ve been better spent if, instead of surrounding singer/songwriter/actor Goh Nakamura with preposterous characters and a half-baked story, the makers of the film had just filmed him playing his Beatles-inspired folk rock tunes. The tunes are great, and the scenes that contain them the best in the movie. There is some good stuff in the script, but you wish they’d saved it until they came up with a story and characters that weren’t so ridiculous. No blame to the actors, who do a uniformly excellent job. They just don’t have much to chew on.

Audrey delved into two very different documentaries. Shut Up Little Man! is a look at how recordings of crazy San Francisco neighbors went viral before “going viral” had been invented by the internet. Of course, things are never that simple, especially when you get into competing movie projects and arguments over who owns the intellectual property rights to audio tracks. Meanwhile, things get equally complicated in Marathon Boy, an HBO documentary following the wunderkind child runner in India over his battles with his families (both biological and adopted), his body, and the government over his right to run long distances. Is it nurturing a child’s natural talent to make a three-year-old run dozens of miles at a time? Or is it yet another form of child labor in India, a country well known for its exploitation of children? There’s a lot of issues at play, and while the documentary runs long (98 minutes) to do so, you end up wishing that some of the material had been split out into a separate film or miniseries. (June 5, 7 p.m. @ SIFF Cinema; June 8, 4:30 p.m. @ the Egyptian)

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION:

Wednesday, June 1

  • Lesson Plan documents the story of a 1967 teaching experiment that brought fascism to Palo Alto. (4:30 p.m. @ Harvard Exit)
  • Vampire finds an emo bloodsucker getting his fix by meeting depressed girls from the internet and teaming up on one-sided suicide pacts. (6:30 p.m. @ Egyptian; also June 2, 4:00 p.m. @ Egyptian; June 5, 8:30 p.m. @ Admiral)
  • Saigon Electric dance battle mania and cheeseball teenage romance in a cross-sectional look at teen culture and hip-hop competitions in Vietnam redeemed by Stephane Gauger’s kinetic, highly stylized dance scenes. (6:30 p.m. @ Everett)
  • Simple Simon Sweden’s top Asperger’s comedy. (7:00 p.m. @ SIFF Cinema),
  • Karate-Robo Zaborgar Tony loved Robo-Geisha director Noboru Iguchi’s latest over-the-top riff on the Japanese live-action TV that thrilled the midnight masses last weekend. (9:30 p.m. @ the Neptune)
  • Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life chronicles the life and times of France’s most important sexy singer songwriter from the Nazi-occupied streets to glamorous liaisons with Brigitte Bardot. (9:30 p.m. @ Egyptian; also June 3, 4:00 p.m. @ Admiral; June 7, 8:30 p.m. @ Kirkland)

Thursday, June 2

  • The Last Mountain as if things aren’t tough enough in the Appalachian Mountains, residents also have to deal with a “federally-sanctioned” apocalypse as mountains are exploded to access the coal within. (4:00 p.m. @ Pacific Place)
  • Amador Spanglish meets Weekend At Bernie’s? In this contemplative film an immigrant maid takes a job caring for a dying man, but forgets to tell his family when he dies. (6:30 p.m. @ Pacific Place; also June 4, 1:30 p.m. @ Pacific Place)
  • The Importance of Being Earnest was filmed LIVE on Broadway in high definition; now you can reduce your carbon footprint by watch it in a movie theater. Note, tickets for these screenings are more expensive and entry isn’t included with most SIFF passes. (7:00 p.m.; also June 5, 1:30 p.m.; June 12, 6:00 p.m., all @ SIFF Cinema)
  • Love Affair with the Big Man girl goes into the woods, falls in love with a telepathic Sasquatch. You know, just normal nature stuff. (9:00 pm @ Everett; also: June 10, 6:30 pm & June 11, 4:30 p.m. @ SIFF Cinema)
  • Spark of Being tells Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein story experimentally with found bits of archival film and a new jazz soundtrack from Dave Douglas. (9:30 p.m.; also June 3, 5:00 p.m. @ Harvard Exit)
  • Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Cool Place all of the magic schoolbus, none of the LSD in your popcorn. (9:30 p.m. @ Egyptian; June 4, 3:15 p.m. @ Egyptian)
  • Norman finds an unhappy outcast kid claiming his father’s terminal cancer as his own ailment as a way of gaining sympathy among his classmates, earning friends, and charming a cute girl. A soundtrack from Andrew Bird and a performance from Richard Jenkins as the dying dad lead me to believe that all of these deceptive shenanigans won’t just be zany good times, but might also include some melancholy and life lessons. (10:00 p.m. @ SIFF Cinema; June 4, 1:00 p.m. @ Neptune)
Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

For Your Consideration: Memorial Day Weekend at SIFF

the SunBreak at SIFF 2011

The long holiday weekend is a good opportunity to make some quality time for SIFF-going. Be sure to check the SIFF updates page to see which films are already sold out or are selling fast. Individual tickets for most films cost $11 for the public and $9 for SIFF members. Matinees are a bit cheaper ($8/$7) and those who are more willing to commit can consider all sorts of passes still for sale as well as slightly discounted packs of tickets in bundles of 6 or 20.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at what SIFF films all of us at The SunBreak saw lately as well as the films that we’re most looking forward to seeing over the next couple days. Note that this weekend is ShortsFest Weekend, SIFF’s exploration of mini-masterpieces, which ends with the closing night shorts event tomorrow at SIFF Cinema.

Tony saw so many movies over the past few days that his raves could not be contained to one post. Check out his SIFF pig-out here, with his takes on a bunch of films still running at SIFF this weekend: Jucy, The Whistleblower, Hit So Hard, Karate-Robo Zaborgar, and The Last Circus.

Audrey appreciated Above Us Only Sky, a sexy and adult look of how one moves on when a relationship ends, even if your new lover really reminds you of the old one (last screening today 4 p.m. @ Pacific Place). Rothstein’s First Assignment showed the fiction that simultaneously existed with dark fact in famous Depression Era photographs, though the documentary’s storytelling was somewhat disjointed. Meanwhile, Saigon Electric too often goes by the book, as if there were a checklist (star-crossed lovers, small-town girl, damaged old man, a teen center that needs saving), but all those flaws disappear in Stephane Gauger’s kinetic, highly stylized dance scenes (Monday, 3 p.m. @ Pacific Place; June 1, 6:30 p.m. @ Everett).

MvB braved the epic run time (without intermission!) to see Saturday’s screening of Mysteries of Lisbon, 4.5 hours of a Proustian fever dream in a Portuguese translation, making for gorgeous streams of costume-drama cinema. A young boy in the care of the church wonders who his parents are, and this unlocks a Pandora’s box of adulterous intrigue, as tale after tale (This is a long story, says one character, who starts up about halfway through) unspools. Sadly the screening was a one-time event.

Steam of Life is notable for the nakedness, physical and emotional, of its mostly male cast. An exploration of the Finnish male confessional, the sauna, men, usually in pairs, unburden themselves of experiences of abuse, divorce, custody battles, unemployment, drug addiction, and more–it’s not something you probably want to walk in blindly too, but if you’re in the mood, this In the Company of Nordic Men is a powerful rejoinder to LaButean dyspepticism–and the bear and Santas keep it surprising. (June 7, 6:30 p.m. @ the Admiral)

Sunday, May 29

  • We Are the Night You can’t go wrong with sexy German lady vampires. (6 p.m. @ the Egyptian; Monday, 1:45 p.m. @ the Egyptian)
  • Backyard One more chance to see live performances by some of Iceland’s top up-and-coming bands, like FM Belfast, Múm, Hjaltalín, FM Belfast, Retro Stefson, Reykjavík! and Sin Fang. (8:30 p.m. @ the Admiral)
  • Surrogate Valentine San Francisco singer-songwriter Goh Nakamura stars as a version of himself, playing music and looking for love along the West Coast, in this light-heared b&w comedy. (9:30 p.m. @ Harvard Exit; Monday, 3:30 pm @ the Admiral)

Monday, May 30

  • La Dolce Vita SIFF shows a new print of Fellini’s sumptuous masterwork just once! (10 a.m. @ Harvard Exit)
  • Flamenco, Flamenco Set at Seville’s 1992 Expo Pavilion Soundstage, Carlos Saura presents 21 performances from Spain’s top musicians and dancers. (11 a.m. @ Egyptian)
  • Hooked Enter the world of top Russian gamers, who get recruited by the army to put their skills to military use. (1:45 p.m. @ the Neptune; June 3, 9:30 p.m. @ Kirkland)
  • Simple Simon But of course, a big box office draw in Sweden is this sweet Asperger’s comedy. (6 p.m. @ Everett; June 1, 7 p.m. @ SIFF Cinema)
  • Win/Win This Dutch film is also Asperger’s-y, but this time set in the high-stakes world of brokerage trading, right as the bottom of the market falls out. It has a very dry sense of humor, but its strength is its sensitive depiction of  a gifted young trader who crumbles under the pressure to achieve. (6:30 p.m. @ the Egyptian; June 1, 4:30 p.m. @ the Neptune)

Tuesday, May 31

  • Late Autumn Sunday’s screening of this Korean romance filmed in Seattle is sold out, so the better bet is to buy tickets to this showing instead. (4 p.m. @ the Egyptian)
  • Lesson Plan This documentary delves into the notorious Third Wave Project, an experiment which showed that anyone can become a fascist, under the right circumstances. (7 p.m. @ Harvard Exit; June 1, 4:30 p.m. @ Harvard Exit)
  • The Night of Counting the Years An archival showing of a remastered print of what is widely considered the best Egyptian film ever made. (7:00 p.m. @ SIFF Cinema)
  • Tilt These Cold War Bulgarian kids sure play a mean pinball. (9:30 p.m. @ the Admiral; June 6, 9 p.m. @ the Harvard Exit)
  • Bibliotheque Pascal This multiple award-winning Hungarian film is a dark sex trafficking fairy tale in Central Europe with Terry Gilliam-esque touches. (9:30 pm @ the Egyptian)
Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

Tony’s Memorial Day Weekend SIFF Pig-Out

the SunBreak at SIFF 2011

We’re just barely into the Memorial Day Weekend, and I’ve already drunk so deeply from the SIFF well that I can’t do the films justice in mini-reviews. Especially the really amazing stuff. Let’s get the just-OK things out of the way first.

I took in the final SIFF screening of Everything Will Be Fine, Danish director Christoffer Boe’s thriller, on Friday. The movie follows Jacob Falk (Jens Albinus), a screenwriter wracked with writers’ block who literally collides with fate (and script inspiration) when he runs down a Danish soldier on a dark deserted road. Among the soldier’s effects; a bag full of photos graphically implicating Denmark’s peacekeeping forces in Middle East war atrocities. The movie admirably refuses to tie its story with a neat expositional bow at the end, and Boe knows how to generate slow-burn suspense, but somehow the film fails to knock it out of the park. Maybe it’s the self-absorbed and not-very-likeable protagonist, or the ending that’s just a little too Euro-ambiguous for its own good.

Jucy, meantime, harbors a lot less pretense. It’s a feather-light Aussie comedy about two true-blue buddies, Jackie and Lucy (Cindy Nelson and Francesca Gasteen), who both audition for the same play, a small-stage adaptation of Jane Eyre. Changes within the play’s casting–and within the two women–put pressure on their friendship, and much female bonding, joking, and soul-searching ensues. Despite its Down Under flavor, it’s painfully formulaic stuff. But Nelson and Gasteen are utterly enchanting; their easy chemistry together provides Jucy‘s trump card whenever director Louise Allston’s occasionally heavy hand and Stephen Vagg’s wobbly script draw deuces. Jucy screens one more time at the Kirkland Performance Center on Sunday, June 12 (8:30 p.m.).

You couldn’t ask for a sharper contrast to Jucy than The Whistleblower, a harsh fact-based thriller about human trafficking in freshly-war-wounded former Yugoslavia circa 1999. Director Larysa Kondracki pulls a lot of good out of her first feature: a first-rate, utterly believable performance by Rachel Weisz as the UN peacekeeper and titular whistle-blower; sharp supporting turns from Vanessa Redgrave and David Strathairn; and a muddily-desperate visual evocation of Bosnia that pervades the movie like an ominous fog. On the downside, Kondracki and company bite off way more than they can chew in a little over two hours; the Cliffs’ Notes condensing of an impossibly complex subject and story pulls The Whistleblower away from the realm of All the President’s Men and drops it squarely into Law and Order: SVU territory. You can judge for yourself at either of the two remaining screenings–today at 1 p.m. at the Egyptian, or Tuesday at the Everett Performing Arts Center (6:30 p.m.).

A Thousand Fools views the world through the surreal filter of Spanish director Ventura Pons, presenting over a dozen disparate vignettes ranging from comedies of manners to meditations on life’s tenuous nature to bizarre and sometimes frankly-erotic riffs on period fairy tales and legends. Movies this scattershot in structure run hot-and-cold, and ironically enough, the most successful portions prove to be the ones with their feet planted in reality. Pons brilliantly extracts a core of truth, desire, and hope from the sometimes-absurdist situations faced by his gallery of modern-day characters. The willfully-ramshackle revisionist takes on Sleeping Beauty and Robin Hood, meantime, sorta pale in comparison (A Thousand Fools has completed its SIFF run).

All of the above offered pockets of satisfaction, but the good stuff I saw in the last two days was really, really good.

Hit So Hard, the tell-all documentary about Hole drummer Patty Schemel, hits all the expected rock-doc points–youthful struggle, meteoric success, too-recently-departed collaborators, drug addiction, and redemption–capably. It’s not quite a masterpiece of the form, but Schemel–down-to-earth, feisty, and self-deprecatingly funny–makes it worth the trip. The Neptune hosts the movie’s final screening at 4 p.m. today.

Good as Hit So Hard is, though, I’ll be really surprised if a better documentary than Page One: Inside the New York Times surfaces during SIFF 2011. Director Andrew Rossi and his co-writer Kate Novack do a bang-up job of honing in on the iconic paper’s attempts to stay financially afloat and socially relevant amidst a tornado of electronic media and a landscape full of the carcasses of dead periodicals (our own Seattle P-I among them). Rossi and Novack received unprecedented access to the Times‘ inner sanctum for a year, and if their chronicle leans in the paper’s favor a bit heavily at times, you can’t blame them when you hear Times reporter David Carr eloquently defend the venerable paper from a roomful of overconfident bloggers with a few witheringly honest sentences. Talk about the teacher handing the students’ butts to ‘em on a plate… (screening one more time, Monday at the Everett Performing Arts Center at 3:30 p.m.).

It’s impossible for me not to love a movie that opens with the disembodied head of a cyborg woman and a DNA-sucking Mick-Jagger-lipped samurai robot ripping the Tokyo police a new one. Amazingly, Karate-Robo Zaborgar, Robo-Geisha director Noboru Iguchi’s latest, maintains that level of delirium for 100 minutes. The movie’s an over-the-top riff on the Japanese live-action TV shows that followed in the wake of Ultraman and Kamen Rider in the 1970s, but don’t let that obscure touchstone scare you. Like Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein or Airplane, the rapid-fire gags and sheer imagination transcend the references, and the packed midnight house at the Egyptian (most of whom were zygotes when the original shows took foothold) loved every minute. You’ve got two more chances to see it: Monday, May 30 at 8:30 p.m. at the Admiral, and at 9:30 p.m. Wednesday June 1 at the Neptune.

My two favorite Fest flicks so far, though, re-invigorated shopworn genres even better. Viva Riva! is an absolute stunner of a caper film from The Congo, in which small-time hustler Riva (Patsha Bay) attempts to cash in on a stolen shipment of gasoline. He stumbles into a tempestuous romance with gangster moll Nora (Manie Malone), and an assemblage of gangsters, friends, and local military throw multiple wrenches into Riva’s best-laid plans. It’s a ravishingly entertaining star vehicle for the lazily-charismatic Bay, who generates classic movie-star fireworks with Malone. It’s brimming with colorful and vivid peripheral characters. It’s helmed and paced with ferocious, joyful assurance. And the movie turns deeply dark (and richly metaphoric) towards the end with a master’s modulation of tone. Director Djo Tunda wa Munga is a talent to watch, and then some. Bad news: Viva Riva’s finished its SIFF run. Good news: It’s due back later this year for a full theatrical run locally. In the name of all that’s holy, do not miss it.

Last but not least, The Last Circus is two-thirds masterpiece, one-third batshit-crazy, and I kinda adored the whole beautiful mess. It starts out as a faultlessly-mounted period drama, in which a young boy sees his world–and his circus-clown father–destroyed by the relentless wheels of the Spanish Civil War. The boy, Javier, grows into a portly, gentle young man (Carlos Areces) who takes up his father’s vocation, falling in love with trapeze artist Natalia (Carolina Bang) and running afoul of her jealous and violent beau, head circus clown Sergio. Director Alex de la Iglesia crafts a dark fable worthy of Benicio del Toro with the film’s first two acts: awash with surreal and nightmarish beauty, rich gallows humor, and truly affecting characterizations. The final act undeniably goes off the rails as Javier’s and Sergio’s rivalry for Natalia’s affections grows cartoonishly violent. But it’s a ride that’s as exhilarating, chilling, and utterly unique as it is bumpy. (Final Screening: Tuesday, May 31, 9:30 p.m. at the Neptune.)