With the first weekend of SIFF under our belt, there’s only three more weeks of film festival to go! 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; note that matinees are a bit cheaper ($8/$7), and “stimulus matinees” (first two shows of the day before 2:30 p.m. on Fridays) are cheaper still ($6). For the more committed, there are 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 opening weekend, and the ones that we’re looking forward to over the next few days.
Outrage inaugurated Tony’s SIFF 2011 experience with squib-induced spraying plasma and zen cool to spare. After a few years of not-always-successful experimentation, Japanese director Takeshi Kitano returns to the Yakuza gangster sub-genre that established him internationally, and this brand of crime drama–spasms of violent social Darwinism, punctuated by long stretches of silence and dashes of gallows humor–fits him like a glove. He’s still a singular, deadpan-riveting onscreen presence, too. (one more screening May 27, 9:30 p.m. @ Everett Performing Arts Center)
A packed midnight crowd devoured Trollhunter. Andre Overdal’s extremely entertaining fantasy follows a group of Norwegian college students as they document the exploits of a mysterious asskicker-type who’s actually hunting trolls for the government. With its engaging mix of verite grittiness, impish wit, and untethered imagination, it looks a lot like what might result if Terry Gilliam directed The Blair Witch Project. (May 24, 9:30 p.m. @ the Neptune)
I’m always willing to give genre auteur John Carpenter a chance, so it’s a relief to report that his newest, John Carpenter’s The Ward, ain’t half-bad. Amber Heard persuasively plays a young amnesiac remanded to a psychiatric ward bric-a-brac with creepy–and violent– secrets. The first half is old-fashioned effective creepiness, with Carpenter using atmospheric lighting and elegant tracking shots to turn the facility into a shadowy character of its own. Unfortunately, when the spirit menacing Heard and her fellow inmates starts graphically slaughtering people (and the not-so-surprising twists kick in), the movie loses steam. Bonus points for Jared Harris’ mellifluous, ambiguous turn as the head shrink: I’d love to see him become the new-ish millennium’s Boris Karloff. (May 26, 9:30 p.m. @ the Neptune)
LOVE sounds utterly insufferable on paper–like a vanity project/extended-length music video for arena-ready alterna-supergroup Angels and Airwaves–but it’s a surprisingly engaging science fiction opus in which an astronaut (Gunnar Wright) trapped on the International Space Station faces the mental labyrinth of his isolation; a psychic prison alternately alleviated and exacerbated by his discovery of a Civil War soldier’s journal. The pace is more Kubrick than Avatar, thank God, and if it’s not executed as masterfully as, say, 2001: A Space Odyssey or Moon, it still balances intellect and sentiment far better than most modern sci-fi. Wright carries the lion’s share of the movie solely on his shoulders, and he’s excellent. (June 11, 9:30 p.m. @ the Egyptian)
Seth: Red Eyes (Ojos Rojos) is less about soccer and more about what soccer means to a nation. It follows the Chilean national team’s attempt to qualify for the 2010 World Cup, sprinkling in hi-def, close-up game footage with interviews of fans and intellectuals. You’ll find yourself rooting for Chile and reveling in the game’s final scene, when fan and team become one. (today, 4:30 p.m. @ Harvard Exit)
Josh: Starting with the best, my Saturday and Sunday were an inadvertent trilogy of mortality that included some of my favorite things I’ve seen at SIFF in years.
How To Die In Oregon examined death with dignity laws in the Northwest on interwoven parallel tracks: the 2008 initiative to bring the law to Washington, along with profiles of Oregonians making use of the law to gain some control over their last days. In the first track, we follow Nancy Niedzielski as she campaigns on behalf of Washington’s Initiative 1000 to fulfill a her husband’s dying request. The second part of the film includes several terminally ill patients, but centers on Cody Curtis, from her diagnosis of terminal liver cancer, to her decision to acquire medication to end her life at a time of her choosing, through the highs and lows of her last months of her life. Cody is a brave and radiant presence, and Peter Richardson handles her family’s journey with outstanding grace. The film will appear on HBO on Thursday.
Miranda July and Mike Mills (who are married to each other) both screened movies featuring talking animals at SIFF over the weekend. Intentional or not, the films felt like thought-provoking companion pieces. July’s The Future was the pricklier of the pair. Narrated in interstitial segments from a veterinary hospital by Paw-Paw, a terminally-ill feral cat rescued from the streets of Los Angeles, the movie shows how serious a pet adoption can be to a hipster duo emotionally and vocationally stranded in their mid-thirties. Faced with the prospect of caring for a cat once it returns from its convalescence, the couple quit their jobs, cancel the internet, and spiral apart with the newfound freedom and impending responsibilities. The whole thing exists in a heightened reality of tricky time that is both emotionally devastating and almost constantly hilarious. (today, 4:30 p.m. @ SIFF Cinema)
Mills’s Beginners, is a semi-autobiographical story about a son whose father steps out of the closet weeks after his mother’s death. Ewan McGregor plays Elliot, the Mike Mills stand-in (shelving his own Scottish brogue for Mills’ flat Angeleno affect) and Christopher Plummer appears as Hal, the father who discovers gay romance, house music, and lavender sweaters at age 75. Shuffling between scenes of Hal’s last years, flashbacks to Elliot’s childhood, illustrated civil rights historical snippets, and grief-stricken Hal’s romance with a French actress, the film is a lyrical, affecting, and moving delight. It co-stars Cosmo, as an impossibly adorable Jack Russell terrier who occasionally speaks to Elliot through subtitles. (Tuesday, 4:30 p.m. @ the Neptune)
Meanwhile, there were a few nice moments in Hermano, about soccer playing brothers from a Caracas barrio being recruited by the city’s professional league team, but overall it played like slightly elevated telenovela punctuated by surprising and senseless violence. Although I may have been was too spoiled by ESPN’s outstanding 2010 World Cup coverage to find the amateur soccer footage compelling I was glad to learn that, in Venezuela, if you find a baby in a garbage heap he automatically becomes your son.
MvB seconds Audrey’s recommendations for Submarine and The Trip, and Tony’s approval of Outrage and Trollhunter. He also saw the melancholic Russian film Silent Souls (May 25, 7 p.m. @ Pacific Place; June 12, 6:15 p.m. @ Kirkland Perf. Ctr.), in which the funeral rituals of the Merjan, a Finno-Ugric tribe almost done dissolving into Slavic Russia, are the container for a meditation on love, culture, and identity. It’s also a road trip, though the two chauvinists have an unusual bond. If you want to travel without leaving home, enjoy the culture shock here.
On that note, there’s also Kosmos (June 12, 3:30 p.m. @ Kirkland Perf. Ctr.), a Turkish film by Reha Erdem that contrasts a village’s vote on opening its borders for trade with the arrival of a Sufi-sounding shaman-on-the-run. People profess to be confused by the film–it’s enigmatic at moments, and there’s that time gravity vanishes–but at its core it’s the old fable about how people welcome, then turn on their messiahs. It’s beautifully shot in a town where it seems never to stop snowing.
12 Paces Without a Head (all showings past) is a German film about 14th-century pirates preying on the Hanseatic League’s trade ships that’s reminiscent of A Knight’s Tale in some of its updatings (“Fuck the Hanseatic League!” shout the hipster pirates, while Johnny Cash plays), but evidences a more political bent in other ways (the Hanseatic League’s chief quotes Donald Rumsfeld’s “known knowns” koan). It’s fun but not too deep, and in that it’s similar to Copacabana (today, 6 p.m. @ Renton IKEA Perf. Arts Ctf.), which is really for Isabelle Huppert fans. Huppert plays a footloose aging wild-child whose daughter (Huppert’s real-life daughter Lolita Chammah) doesn’t invite her to her wedding to avoid embarrassment. Stung, she takes a job selling time-share condos in Oostende, Belgium, and the fish-out-of-water fun begins. A mis-handled ending spoils the low-key laughs only slightly.
Finally, The Pipe (May 31, 4:30 p.m. @ the Harvard Exit) is a documentary about a small Irish town, Rossport, and its struggles with Shell, which wants to run a 6-mile natural gas pipeline through their bay and underground. It’s strongest in its examination of how people respond to the pressure of the situation, and the ways in which the community is stressed, damaged, and divided, though as a point-of-view doc, you’re often left a little short on information about the project itself. That a fortuitous machinery breakdown brings a reprieve robs the actions of some participants (hunger-striking, going to jail) of some of the intended import.
Audrey thought SIFF picked an auspicious day (the non-rapture) to show two back-to-back on-the-verge-of-the-end-of-the-world films at the Egyptian: ruminations of an alternate universe in Another Earth (today, 4:30 p.m. @ the Neptune) and the emotional and physical plagues of Perfect Sense (May 25, 9:30 p.m. @ the Egyptian). Quirky, cutesy Submarine explores a boy’s coming of age and first love in Wales, while British comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon eat great meals while perfecting their dueling Michael Caine’s impersonations in The Trip (tonight, 9:15 p.m. @ the Admiral). And rom-com Four More Years shows that politics, sexuality, and love are never easy, even in Sweden. (tonight, 9:30 p.m. @ the Egyptian; May 28, 1 p.m., Pacific Place)
And a few more films for your consideration over the next few days:
- Finding Kind Female filmmakers Lauren Parsekian and Molly Stroud travel around the country to see how girls can learn to stop being mean and start figuring out how to be nice to each other. (tonight, 7 p.m. @ the Egyptian; May 24, 4:30 p.m. @ SIFF Cinema)
- Womb In this dystopian sci-fi present, a woman clones her lover to have him as her child. What could possibly go wrong? (May 24, 7 p.m. @ the Egyptian)
- A Lot Like You When local filmmaker Eli Kimaro traveled to Tanzania to meet her dad’s side of the family, she never thought she’d unearth family secrets. (May 24, 7 p.m. @ the Harvard Exit; June 12, 1 p.m. @ the Admiral)
- Shocking Blue The idyllic Dutch countryside is shattered by the death of a teenage boy. But was it murder? (tonight, 7 p.m. @ Pacific Place; May 24, 5 p.m. @ Pacific Place)
- Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow This contemplative and moody documentary is as much art on its own as it is about its subject, German sculptor Anselm Kiefer. (May 24, 7 p.m. @ SIFF Cinema; May 27, 4:30 p.m. @ SIFF Cinema)
