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

What’d we see?

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).

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)