A conversation with Seattle
SOMM opens at the SIFF Film Center tomorrow night (tickets here). It pulls off that oft-attempted but seldom-achieved goal of … Continue reading Talking Sommeliers and Cinema with the Director of “SOMM”
“From a consumer standpoint, SIFF 2013’s consistency was a great thing. But that consistency almost became numbing sometimes. Very few of the films disappointed, but conversely that meant fewer surprises, pleasant or otherwise, for me.” Continue reading Post-SIFF 2013 Reflections, or Suggestions for SIFF 2014
“The writing […]helped me escape the mental battle. How do I use the time I still have left? Writing was a great way as well to build a bridge to the world, to be a little bit less alone in my experiences and my feelings.” Continue reading A Chat with the Real (and Reel) “Girl with 9 Wigs”
Without ever making the criminals sympathetic, Sofia Coppola nevertheless captures the way that the heady romance of new friendship, hunger for thrills among the entitled rich (but not super-rich), and a lack of impulse control combine to almost make their actions understandable. Even though it’s based on a true story and is told in interviews and flashbacks, The Bling Ring still held plenty of suspense, particularly as the clique of Hollywood strivers get more and more brazen with their string of celebrity robberies. Continue reading SIFF What We Saw (The End)
Well, friends, the finish line for Seattle’s annual marathon of film is in sight. From tonight’s event featuring the Maldives performing their new original score for the Wind to the festival’s closing night gala for Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, we provide a few picks for how to spend SIFF’s last three days in a film-consumption sprint. Continue reading SIFF 2013 Closing Weekend Picks
MvB: For sheer cinema, Laurence Anyways from Xavier Dolan takes the SIFF 2013 cake, so far as I’m concerned. At 160-some minutes, it’s a grand opera of a film, replete with arias from leads Melvil Poupaud and Suzanne Clément, enacting an amour fou. Dolan tells a gripping, affecting story about the costs of being true to thine ownself — if a quirk of nature has mismatched your gender identity with secondary sexual characteristics — but he also tries his hand at motion portraiture Continue reading SIFF 2013: What We Saw (Part 3)
Among this week’s special events are two benefit screenings of Decoding Annie Parker, about current UW (then Cal) geneticist Mary-Claire King’s discovery of the BRCA1 gene’s role in breast cancer. Helen Hunt takes on the role of the scientist and Samantha Morton plays the title role patient. Tickets cost $25 and benefit the King Lab at the University of Washington. Continue reading SIFF 2013 Week 3 Picks