Tag Archives: siff 2014

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

SIFF 2014: Picks for Week Three (June 2-5)

Can you believe it’s already the third and final week of the Seattle International Film Festival, otherwise known as Seattle’s Most Effective Sunblock? Indeed, there are just seven more days to dive into film so start taking chances; Lake Washington will be around all summer. This week is a Very Quincy Jones week at SIFF, beginning with a screening of Sidney Lumet’s Pawnbroker, for which Jones wrote the jazz score. Next, there’s An Evening with Quincy Jones where he will be presented with SIFF’s Lifetime Achievement Award on Wednesday June 4th at SIFF Cinema, followed by a screening of his film Keep On Keepin’ On. The festivities continue on Thursday with an Evening with the Justin Kauflin Trio,  the blind jazz pianist from Keep On Keepin’ On, who will be performing in concert at the sonically beautiful Triple Door following an introduction from Quincy Jones (Thursday June 5).

In addition, this year’s “Gay-La” includes a screening of Helicopter Mom with an after party at Q Nightclub (description below).

 

 

Big in Japan

Chris’s Picks:

Ballet 422 Ballet 422 eschews most documentary conventions (like narration) for a fly-on-the-wall view of the New York City Ballet as one of its young performers and choreographers, Justin Peck, is putting on his first original ballet. The backstage access supersedes any other tenet of documentary filmmaking, so it provides an intimate glimpse of how ballets are crafted, or as close as we’re going to ever get. (Producer Anna Rose Holmer scheduled to attend).

  • June 2 Monday 7:00 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown
  • June 3 Tuesday 3:30 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown

Helicopter Mom Nia Vardalos is always fun to watch, and she stars in SIFF’s Gay-La film as a mother who suspects her son is gay, and goes out of her way to prove she’s supportive by setting up dates, and doing the usual, overbearing parent act. (Director Salomé Breziner, and actors Kate Flannery and Jason Dolley scheduled to attend.)

  • June 4 Wednesday 7:00 PM Egyptian Theater (Gay-La Film and Party)
  • June 5 Thursday 4:00 PM Egyptian Theater

Big in Japan Seattle rockers Tennis Pro have been toiling in rock clubs for at least a decade. In SXSW hit Big in Japan, they’re discovered one night by former Green River drummer Alex Vincent in a club that looks suspiciously like Chop Suey, he convinces them that their elusive fame and fortune is just a trip across the Pacific. The movie is a fictionalized account of their trip to Japan, and it’s played for laughs, hitting a high percentage of the time. (Director John Jeffcoat and Tennis Pro – David Drury, Phillip Peterson, and Sean Lowry – scheduled to attend.)

  • June 5 Thursday 7:00 PM Egyptian Theater
  • June 7 Saturday 12:30 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown
The Better Angels

Josh’s Picks

The Better Angels Terrence-Malick produced this dreamy tale of young Abe Lincoln growing up in the rural setting of young America.  Braydon Denney plays the future president, Diane Kruger, Brit Marling, and Jason Clarke appear as other Lincolns in this allegedly impressionistic portrait. 

  • June 3, 2014 Tuesday 7:00 PM Egyptian Theatre
  • June 5, 2014 Thursday 4:30 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown

The Great Museum Johannes Holzhausen provides an in-depth look behind the scenes at both the art and operations of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien (Museum of Fine Arts) during a year of renovations.

  • June 3, 2014 Tuesday 6:00 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown
  • June 7, 2014 Saturday 2:30 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown

10,000 km  An irresistible year-long artist’s residency in Los Angeles motivates a Barcelona couple’s technology-mediated long-distance relationship. Indiewire calls the two-hander an insightful, moving romance; Variety compliments the film’s intelligence and control exhibited by the balance of form and content. (First-time director Carlos Marques-Marcet scheduled to attend)

  • June 5, 2014 Thursday 9:30 PM Harvard Exit
  • June 6, 2014 Friday 4:15 PM AMC Pacific Place 11
B.F.E.

Tony’s Picks:

B.F.E.  I had the chance to talk to Seattle director Shawn Telford at length about his funny, honest, and richly-shot debut a week or two ago, and his movie still stands as one of my favorite discoveries of SIFF 2014.

  • June 02, 2014 Monday 9:00 PM Harvard Exit
  • June 03, 2014 Tuesday 4:00 PM Harvard Exit

A Masque of Madness  Norbert Pfaffenbichler’s feature mashes up fifty years of performances by screen icon Boris Karloff into one fictional narrative. Experiments like this are a crapshoot, but any excuse to see one of the great character actors of the 20th century on a big screen is hunky-dory by me.

  • June 03, 2014 Tuesday 9:00 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown
  • June 08, 2014 Sunday 8:00 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown

African Metropolis  Six different short films directed by six different directors, each focusing on a specific African city, comprise the backbone of this anthology. SIFF’s African Pictures series has been consistently rewarding for the last couple of years: This should be no exception. Tomorrow night’s 6:30 screening is on StandBy only.

  • June 03, 2014 Tuesday 6:30 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown
  • June 04, 2014 Wednesday 3:00 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown

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

SIFF 2014: Picks for Centerpiece Weekend (May 30 – June 1)

Boyhood, Richard Linklater’s long-gestating experiment filmed over thirty-nine days spread across twelve years, beginning when its star Ellar Coltrane was just six years old, is the star of this year’s Centerpiece Gala (Saturday, 5:00 PM at the Egyptian, followed by a party at the DAR Rainier Chapter House on Capitol Hill). I can hardly make it through the 90 second trailer without getting misty, I expect to be a blubbering mess by the end of the film’s whopping 164-minute running time. Linklater is scheduled to attend for a post-screening Q&A. There’s a second screening on Sunday June 1st at Harvard Exit, but both are on standby.

But even if your luck fails in the standby line, there are plenty of movies to keep you out of the sun this weekend. Some suggestions from the SunBreak’s film prognostication squad below:

 

Chris’s picks:

Aaron Schwartz, the Internet’s Own Boy

Hellion Breaking Bad‘s Aaron Paul stars as a slowly imploding, Texas father who is watching his family fall apart. He has custody of his two children, but his oldest is the neighborhood troublemaker and the other might be better off with his aunt (Juliette Lewis). It’s a nice character study that unfortunately descends into predictable melodrama, but the first 90 minutes are compelling to watch. (Director Kat Candler scheduled to attend.)

  • May 30, 2014 Friday 9:45 PM Pacific Place
  • May 31, 2014 Saturday 3:30 PM Pacific Place

The Internet’s Own Boy Brian Knappenberger made a very even-handed and fascinating documentary about “hacktivists” at SIFF 2012 (I interviewed him here). Here he delves into the life and death of Reddit founder Aaron Schwartz. Initial reports say that the press screening was an emotional experience for some filmgoers. Press materials call it “A must see for anyone invested in the future of the freedom of information on the Internet.” (Director Brian Knappenberger scheduled to attend.)

  • May 31, 2014 Saturday 3:00 PM Kirkland Performance Center
  • June 1, 2014 Sunday 5:00 PM Harvard Exit

X/Y I fell hard for Ryan Piers Williams and America Ferrera’s first film together (they’re married; he directs, she stars) The Dry Land when it played at SIFF 2010. It was a probing character study that explored Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome after coming home from serving in Iraq. X/Y seems to be of a slightly lighter fare, exploring the romantic entanglements of six New Yorkers. With their knack for developing fully-formed characters, I can’t wait to see this sophomore effort from Williams. (Director Ryan Piers Williams is schedule to attend both screenings; America Ferrera scheduled to attend Sunday’s screening.)

  • June 1, 2014 Sunday 6:30 PM Pacific Place
  • June 2, 2014 Monday, 4:15 PM Pacific Place

Tony’s Picks:

Frank features Fassbender behind a mask.

Frank Michael Fassbender, currently starring in this week’s highest-grossing movie blockbuster, swaddles his head in a giant papier-mâché mask as an eccentric musician in an avant-garde rock band: Domhnall Gleeson plays the band’s fill-in keyboardist in this reputedly daft but very well-reviewed comedy.

  • May 30, 2014 Friday 9:30 PM Egyptian
  • May 31, 2014 Saturday 2:00 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town Kevin Costner still wants to be Gary Cooper when he grows up. Exhibit A for the prosecution, your honor: This Frank Capra-directed Cooper starring vehicle from the Golden Age of screwball comedy, which gets a handsome restoration from the original negative. This just might be the oldest movie you’ll ever see on a screen at the shiny, multiplex-y Pacific Place, and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t still hold up.

  • May 31, 2014 Saturday 1:00 PM Pacific Place

Lady Be Good: Instrumental Women in Jazz I’m a complete sap for music docs that unearth overlooked figures in popular music, so this chronicle of the unsung heroines playing jazz and big-band swing throughout the 20th century has me as happy as a little girl with a shiny new Easy-Bake Oven. (director Kay D. Ray and co-producer Cathy Wadley scheduled to attend)

  • June 1, 2014 Sunday 5:30 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown
  • June 2, 2014 Monday 4:00 PM Harvard Exit

Josh’s Picks:

God Help the Girl

God Help the Girl Belle & Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch makes his debut as feature film director. Although he claims that it wasn’t intentionally autobiographical, it’s about the start of a twee chamber pop in a town that looks a lot like Glasgow while dealing with personal issues related to health and spirituality. Oh, and it is a musical whose look and feel owes a lot to French New Wave. I saw it at SXSW this year and was so utterly charmed and delighted that I might try to see it again at SIFF.

  • June 1, 2014 Sunday 1:30 PM Egyptian Theatre
  • June 3, 2014 Tuesday 7:00 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown

The Trip to Italy Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon hit the road again, this time entertaining each other on a culinary tour.

  • May 30, 2014 Friday 4:30 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown
  • May 31, 2014 Saturday 8:00 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown

The Red Knot Vincent Kartheiser (Mad Men’s Pete Campbell) and Olivia Thirlby make the unconventional decision to honeymoon on an Antarctic research vessel and find that things are “not great, Bob“. The photography, which pits the majesty of nature as context for mere human concerns, is getting strong reviews. (Director Scott Cohen scheduled to attend)

  • May 31, 2014 Saturday 6:00 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown
  • June 1, 2014 Sunday 2:30 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown

Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead The sequel to 2009’s hilariously gory take on what happens with a cabin full of Norwegian co-eds accidentally rouse an army of undead Nazis picks up right where the the original left off. This version features an unfortunate surgical mix-up, American zombie nerds, and as the title suggests, a vengeance grudge match that has reanimated Soviets against those pesky frozen Nazis. Even the pans praise the film’s craftsmanship, which might be enough to stoke your midnight adrenaline.  Actor Martin Starr scheduled to attend

  • May 30, 2014 Friday 11:55 PM Egyptian Theatre

 

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

Film & TV, Literature

“We didn’t want to make the film a handmaiden to the printed work”: Regarding Susan Sontag director Nancy Kates talks to the SunBreak

Regarding Susan Sontag recently screened at the Seattle International Film Festival, where it was one of the most talked-about films. After a few dozen SIFF films, it stands as my favorite of the festival. It’s a brilliant documentary that makes the daunting author and critic accessible for readers who are both familiar and unfamiliar with her work. Director Nancy Kates does a brilliant job of making sense of Sontag, a literary giant I’ve found intimidating, even when absorbing her (somewhat more accessible) essays like “Notes on ‘Camp'” and “Fascinating Fascism” (her 1975 essay in the New York Review of Books about the films of Leni Riefenstahl).

Regarding finds a common ground in providing an overview of an artist from curious non-fans and in-depth discussion for more devoted readers. Yet almost all viewers will want to find a bookstore or library and pick up something to read from her vast bibliography.

When her film was in town for SIFF, I jumped at the chance to talk to Nancy Kates about Susan Sontag, eager to learn more about the literary giant.

Let me start at the beginning of this project, if you don’t mind. What was it about Susan Sontag that made you interested in making a film about her?

This film is kind of a middle-aged person looking back at herself. When I was 20, which was in 1982 that was the year The Susan Sontag Reader was published. If you were reasonably intelligent and curious about things, you were into Sontag. She was definitely a big part of the intellectual firmament when I was younger. When she died, I was very saddened by her death. I wasn’t sure why I was so sad because I didn’t know her.

A few months later, I was having an argument with someone. I said Susan Sontag was gay and my friend said “no, she wasn’t.” After the argument, I decided I should make a film about her. It was one of those Rube Goldberg moments where something falls from the sky and hits you on the head. I went home and I had seven of her books, out of the sixteen that she wrote when she was alive. I took that as a good sign. I’ve always been interested in her. That’s how this happened. I just had this idea. It wasn’t because of this argument, but I had one of those hot moments. It was really because I had been interested in her ideas for so many years. A hot moment also happened in March of 2005, a few months after she died, that if I did this, I could be the first one to make a movie about her.

I didn’t realize it would take so many years to make the film. I didn’t start working on it until 2006, but it’s been a long a process.

Could you please talk a little bit about what you learned from making the film and diving into her work more, versus what you thought you knew before starting the project?

It turned out that I knew almost nothing, which usually turns out to be the case. As a filmmaker, I’m actually interested in what we think we know. My first film was about American women who served in Vietnam. What we know about Vietnam, just talking in very general terms, is that a lot of soldiers died in Vietnam. We think of men running around in rice paddies. But there were 58,000 women there as well. But they were such a tiny percentage.

But my interest is in looking beyond what we know. With Sontag, it was a journey with a lot of ups and downs. Sometimes I really admire her; sometimes I’m annoyed with her. That came out of the admiration, but it’s a lot more nuanced than that. I think that her diaries and papers reveal her fragility. She was such an iron lady in public, but she was also a normal person in her own head or in her own life. She was extraordinarily intelligent. I was interested in the disparities between the iron lady and the person with frailties, and her unwillingness to admit those frailties. I wanted the film to be both about her work and her life. It’s hard to make a film just about her work; it’s not the right medium. I think some people want it to be more about her work, but we did as much as we could. I do think trying to show someone who could be considered heroic or an icon as a real person is something I came to.

There is also a big disparity you explore a lot in the film with the quality of her novels not being on the same level of her nonfiction writing and criticism.

There are a number of American writers, probably in other countries as well, whose genius is in nonfiction but they don’t think that nonfiction is worth bothering with. She was one of those people. She was a semi-tragic figure in that sense because she was unable to fully embrace what she was good at. She was trying to go for something that she thought was more important but she wasn’t as good at. I’ve read all of her novels and it was a painful process. A couple of her short stories were great, but I would only say a couple. That’s me and I try not to editorialize in the movie. It’s not my opinion of her. I think it’s hard to write fiction.

One thing I didn’t get to say because no one said it out loud is that I think she kind of shot herself in the foot with fiction. I’m not sure she had the talent to write fiction, but by not being open about her passions, and to access her sexuality in her writing, she cut herself off from the deepest stuff in her. I don’t know how to write a novel so I’m sort of talking out of my ear here, but if you can’t put your passion into your fiction, how can it be any good? The thing she most wanted was to be a great novelist like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. She did not have access to her desires. She said “I can’t talk about that.” Even if she had been able to do that, I’m not sure she could have made it as a novelist, in my sense of making it; she did win the National Book Award. I just don’t like her fiction as much.

That’s why she becomes a tragic figure to me because kind of cut off her ability to do what she wanted to do by limiting herself. Another novelist I talked to about this said that you have to have a lot of empathy for other people and your characters, and Sontag wasn’t a wildly empathetic person. I’m not sure even if she had been able to talk more openly about her passions and her desires in her fiction if she would have become a great novelist.

I was going to bring this up later in our talk, but I’ll ask now that you brought up Sontag not being a terribly empathetic person and writer, do you think that had anything to do with the firestorm she found herself in shortly after September 11 because of the very short piece she wrote in the New Yorker? It was the very first thing shown in the film.

Well…I think that also had to do with her being in Berlin when 9/11 happened. I happen to personally agree with her.

I do too.

Arundhati Roy wrote a much longer piece in the Guardian. Sontag’s piece was like three paragraphs. Arundhati Roy’s piece is very, very long but said a lot of the same things, that Americans do not realize that what we do in our foreign policy creates a lot of enmity around the world. We think we’re always the good guys but it isn’t necessarily true and it’s not true to literally millions of people around the world who are subject to sanctions and bombings, and the number of Iraqi children who died, etc. I don’t want to get involved in the politics of that. I think it was very hard for people who loved her because she couldn’t always see things from their point of view.

9/11 is a bit more complicated. I don’t think Sontag was unaffected by how many Americans were killed. She says, “Let’s mourn together but let’s not be stupid together.” I think that’s so classically Sontagian. She didn’t want anyone to be stupid, but the pabulum that was coming out of the mouths of politicians and commentators was just BS. “Go shopping.” What is that?

Right. I try to read that short essay at least once a year for that reason. It reinforces something I want to believe about how we conduct discourse. One of the things I think Craig Seligman mentions in his book, Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me, is that she didn’t use any of her word count to denounce Al Qaeda. But you have a clip from “Nightline” where Sontag is debating someone who says she’s part of the “Blame America first crowd.” I know exactly what she’s saying and agree with her, and I know the guy she’s arguing with is way overmatched intellectually, but it doesn’t play well on television.

He’s from the Heritage Foundation. Todd Gaziano.

One thing I should mention with that clip is that Susan Sontag was interviewed a lot. She made a lot of literary and other pronouncements, but she was not a pundit. She was put in this punditry situation on “Nightline.” It’s a ridiculous situation where there are four people, but the guy from the Heritage Foundation is a pundit and that’s what he does all the time. It was a ridiculous situation. It’s not that Susan Sontag couldn’t hold her own but she’s normally interviewed like how we’re talking: talking to one person who is probably not particularly hostile to her and is interested in whatever she was doing, if she had a new book or AIDS or whatever it was. The person was essentially on her side, or at least not hostile to her. I don’t think that “now you can be a pundit about 9/11” was an easy position for her.

I want to add that I think she also assumed that any intelligent person reading the New Yorker would understand that she felt terrible about the number of deaths and the tragedy of it and was not happy that it happened. It’s just assumed, you would have to be an evil person or a moron. But the level of the intellectual discussion was kind of ironic because you had to say that you were really upset about this. She took it as everyone understands that. Since she was only given two or three paragraphs, she thought she could skip the introductory material, but she was lambasted for that.

I want to talk a little bit about logistics with the film. How many people did you talk to in shooting the film, and was there anyone you really wanted to talk to that refused to cooperate?

We talked to a lot of people. There were a lot of people who wouldn’t talk to me, and that was very hard for us. One thing I will say, though, is that if they had, it would have made making the film even harder. We have footage of David (Reiff, her son) and Annie (Liebovitz) but neither of them wanted to be in the film. There were other people where it was more of a logistical problem.

We also cut out a section about Salman Rushdie and the fatwa. He didn’t want to talk to me. It was another thing like with Leni Riefenstahl* where there was a lot of information about something that was very, very important at the time, but now might have been forgotten by the average American. It took so long to explain what happened to Salman Rushdie, and then explain that Susan Sontag was the president of PEN at the time and came in to help him in a very heroic way. Even explaining this to you is talking a lot of time. You have a certain amount of running time for a film and you can’t include everything.

There were a lot of things that were heartbreaking when someone said no to me, but I also knew that the film would be okay without any one person. It was a sort of blind faith on my part.

I tend to think that it’s more acceptable for a feature film to have a long running time than a documentary is.

The first draft of this movie was over two hours long, and that was just too long. We had this joke that we should’ve made a miniseries. There were so many things I would have loved to have gotten into. My favorite metaphor for the film is that forget the documentary, we should have made an opera. All of the girlfriends could have had these grand arias and then come together at the end and have this group wail when she dies. All of the lesbian drama would have been perfect for opera!

I would fly to see that anywhere in the United States.

It was just a joke but I thought, “I should talk to people.” I don’t know if her son would be any more pleased with that idea than the film and I don’t necessarily think intellectual work translates well into the opera.

Did you find that other pieces, like “Notes on ‘Camp’” didn’t need the same introduction that “Fascinating Fascism” or the Salman Rushdie incident did?

Early on in making the film, I realized that it could very easily be the illustrated Susan Sontag. It’s very odd that On Photography and On the Pain of Others were published without photographs. There are hundreds of references in “Notes on ‘Camp’” to all of these cheesy movies. We let ourselves go loose with the ‘Camp’ section because it was so much fun, but I was very aware we weren’t making a lecture with slide pictures that were missing from On Photography. We didn’t want to make the film a handmaiden to the printed work.

There are a lot of notes that are about Oscar Wilde. That’s the dark side about making a film about a writer. You can’t include most of the interesting things. I put the picture of Oscar Wilde and told the editor not to take it out because people who know the essay know that it’s about Oscar Wilde. 95% who watch the movie don’t know that. It’s almost inside baseball.

But yes, obviously “Notes on ‘Camp’” and On Photography, and Illness as Metaphor are more accessible to a quick treatment in the film than the (Antonin) Artaud introduction or the Genet essay.

I don’t want to be the CliffsNotes for her work, but I do think that it will allow people who would never read her work to have some entry point.

What do you think are the best entry points for beginning to read Sontag?

I think the things I just mentioned. I think Regarding the Pain of Others, is her last book. By rethinking her ideas about photography and asking us to think about images of war and torture, I think it’s the most “of the moment.” I think On Photography anticipated the world we live in now with Instagram and people taking selfies all day. She had this idea and now that idea is on massive amounts of steroids in our culture. She called for ecology of images, but now we need a mega-curator of images. But “The Way We Live Now” is an extraordinary short story about AIDS written at the height of the AIDS crisis. I think it depends on what your interests are. There is a wonderful essay she wrote that was the introduction to a book of Cuban poster art. The art is amazing because Cuba is known for graphic design. It’s a fantastic essay but no one is going to read it. It was never anthologized. It’s part of a huge book that you’ll need to get out of the library.

We could have spent ten years just reading stuff and never made the movie. That’s why she’s such a great subject, and a really challenging subject is because the homework is endless. I would have them read [Sontag and Kael] and then read some of her work.

I want to ask about your narrator, which is Patricia Clarkson, who I just love.

I love her too. She was my first choice. I don’t watch “Entertainment Tonight” or know who most famous actresses are, but I wanted someone who had a great voice, classy, and extremely intelligent. I felt like the subject and the film deserved that. I think there are other actresses who are equally classy but she was always my first choice.

I couldn’t really do a casting call, and I wanted someone who is a well-known actress. I wanted to hear what someone sounds like when they’re not playing a role or trying to be a certain character. This is so awful. I spent three days watching endless YouTube videos of daytime talk shows, like Laura Linney on “Oprah.” I felt so bad for these poor people because they have to go talk to Ellen about their charity work, or whatever. Being a prominent actor or actress involves so much nonsense. After that, I was more and more convinced that she was the right person. The other person I thought of was Catherine Keener because her voice is so deep.

I got in touch with her agent and sent her a rough copy of the film, a copy of Reborn (her journals), and a jar of jam because I make jam and it couldn’t hurt. I think she thought the material was interesting and she got a kick out of doing it. It is a role, if you will, of a person of supreme intelligence. It was fun. It as a little daunted by her. Afterward, I thought maybe I should have directed her more. I don’t direct actors, I make documentaries. It was really great. One thing I can say about acting is that she’s so good at it. Somebody who is not as skilled would have had a much harder time. She makes it look effortless and it’s not.

She worked hard during the short amount of time we spent with her. I was very, very happy when she said yes. She has this thing that Sontag had; this elegance and intelligence to the movie and her voice.

I don’t understand why Meryl Streep gets cast in everything because Patricia Clarkson is just as great of an actress. That’s nothing against Meryl Streep, but she’s been anointed the goddess of American cinema. I don’t understand how that all works.

What’s coming up next for the film?

I’ve been beating festivals back with a stick. I’m very touched by the interest in the film. I’m going to Sheffield documentary festival in England next month and lots of other festivals. It’s going to be broadcast on HBO, probably in December. HBO has been really great to work with. I hope people see it at a film festival in their area, but if not, it’ll be on HBO. It’s very nice to see it on a big screen.

 

 

* When I told Kates at the start of our talk that Sontag’s essay “Fascinating Fascism” was one of my favorite pieces Sontag wrote, she told me that a section about it had to be cut out because too much time would’ve been necessary to explain Leni Riefenstahl and who she was and set up the historical context of the piece.

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

SIFF 2014: Picks for Week Two (May 27-29)


Well, friends, we’ve just passed the halfway point of this year’s Seattle International Film Festival. Over the weekend, the festival celebrated short film, awarding jury prizes to Cedric Ido’s Twaaga (live action), Amanda Harryman’s Maikaru (documentary), and Erik Schmitt’s Rhino Full Throttle (animated). Hope you’ve been pacing yourself, because even though we’re halfway through, there are still nearly two weeks of film-watching left. Note, In addition to all of the in-city action, on Thursday SIFF celebrates their stint in Kirkland with a party and screening of the Grand Seduction (Brendan Gleeson tries to woo, Northern Exposure-style, Taylor Kitsch); films run at the Kirkland Performance Center through June 1st. Below, some suggestions for your mid-week watches:

The Legend of the Barefoot Bandit opens on Thursday night.

I Am Big Bird: the Caroll Spinney Story the behind-the-feathers documentary of the person who’s played iconic and beloved Sesame Street avian for the last forty years has one last screening tonight with the director in attendance.

  • May 27, 2014 Tuesday 7:00 PM AMC Pacific Place 11

Attila Marcel Sylvain Chomet (The Triplets of Belleville) jumps from animation to live action with this charmer about a mute pianist unlocking memories through music. Overbearing aunts, flashbacks, and festival buzz ensue.

  • May 27, 2014 Tuesday 7:00 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown

Jealousy  Philippe Garrel’s long-running collaboration directing his son Louis continues, this time with the son in the role of an actor shuffling between lovers. Shot by Willy Kurant (Godard’s Masculin Féminin), Variety calls it “charming in a new New Wave sort of way, particularly for vocal fans of his 2005 effort Regular Lovers (among which I count myself).

  • May 27, 2014 Tuesday 9:30 PM AMC Pacific Place

Razing the Bar Ryan Worsley’s valentine to Seattle’s The Funhouse, filmed in the final days before the Seattle punk club was demolished to make way for density.

  • May 27, 2014 Tuesday 9:00 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown

Mood Indigo Michel Gondry’s adaptation of Boris Vian’s novel L’écume des jours finds Romain Duris and Audrey Tautou falling in love in an alternate-reality Paris that’s overstocked with handcrafted whimsy and bizarre tragedy. Maybe intentionally, the onslaught of unchecked eye-candy, hyperactive inventiveness, and litany of precociousness quickly began to feel more oppressive than delightful. I wanted to love this much more than I did, but can’t entirely write it off: if you go, expect bucketloads of striking images, not substantial character development.

  • May 28, 2014 Wednesday 7:00 PM Harvard Exit
  • May 31, 2014 Saturday 11:00 AM SIFF Cinema Uptown

Fly Colt Fly: the Legend of the Barefoot Bandit Locally-launched true crime gets the big screen animated treatment, as directors Adam and Andrew Gray tell the story of Camano Island teenager Colton Harris-Moore and his two year international crime spree that ended with a stolen airplane, the Bahamas, and a federal prison.

  • May 29, 2014 Thursday 6:30 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown
  • May 31, 2014 Saturday 11:00 AM Egyptian Theatre
  • June 8, 2014 Sunday 11:00 AM SIFF Cinema Uptown

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

Arts & Entertainment, Music

SIFF 2014: Festival Roundtable (Week One)

We’re a week into the festival — how’s your SIFF so far?
Josh: Either SIFF’s done a great job with programming or I’ve done well in selecting how to spend my time. I’ve had a pretty great run so far, basically everything’s been a 4 or above on the audience ballots.

Chris: I’ve been moving (with most of it was on Tuesday), so I haven’t been able to make it to too many screenings, but I’ve been keeping up with it by press screenings I can make and movies provided by the press office, and I too have been pleasantly surprised with the quality of films I have seen. I thoroughly enjoyed Regarding Susan Sontag, and interviewed director Nancy Kates while she was in town, and I’ll have that posted once I find time to transcribe it. It makes me happy to hear so many of my friends and peers are responding so well to it. I’ve also enjoyed My Last Year with the Nuns, Lucky Them, Razing the Bar, Fight Church, and Ballet 422.

Tony: I’ve also been indisposed with a project that’s taking up a lot of my waking hours (though mine’s doubtless more fun than yours was, Chris), so I won’t be able to hit the SIFF banquet as voraciously as I’d like to ’til after Memorial Day. My Scorecard in a nutshell isn’t quite as consistent as either of yours: One masterpiece reissue, two flat-out disappointments, one pretty good oddity, four really good movies.

How much do you love/hate the litany of intro packages?

Josh: I don’t entirely despise them yet, which is really saying something, particularly since it sometimes feels like SIFF heard we liked SIFF and put some SIFF advertisements in the middle of our SIFF advertisements. I get it — they’re a non-profit, this is their biggest outreach opportunity of the year, and they want to sell people on SIFF being more than just a film festival. But does that really merit ten minutes of padding before the movie rolls? People who see a few films probably don’t even notice, but it cuts into planning for those of us weirdos who show up early enough to get a Queue Card and who are strategizing more than one film per night!

Chris: I think there has been a real trend for piling on commercial after commercial before movies in cineplexes, so it doesn’t surprise me that SIFF would use the several minutes before screenings as an opportunity for establishing their “brand” because we’re already expecting it, but I do think it can be really heavy-handed if not handled delicately. Plus, it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t know about SIFF, or #SIFForty. Maybe if #SIFForty trends, it’ll all be worth it?

Tony: I really sense the creative fun thrown into the new spots, but it seems like every year SIFF forgets that anyone going to more than one or two films is going to get burnt out on them. I do think the SIFForty Flashbacks are an attempt to maybe ease the numbing monotony of the repetition.

Josh: That, or the #SIFForty flashbacks might be meant to remind us of just how jarring some of the trailers used to be back in the day. I’m still waiting for the “35 is a Very Special Number” fund-raiser for the year that they were building the SIFF Film Center, which basically everyone in the audience could quote verbatim by Closing Night.

So, any clear standouts?

Josh: It’s hard to pick! My favorites so far are probably Ida and Chinese Puzzle, but I’ve found a lot to like in the first week of the festival.

As usual, the documentary series is always a safe bet, particularly when you’re in the capable hands of HBO films, an organization with an excellent track record of connecting talent with great stories. By introducing us to the families at the heart of the case and the unlikely alliance between the two high profile lawyers who famously faced-off in Bush vs. Gore, The Case Against 8 managed to be engaging even though everyone in the audience knew what happened in the series of court decisions leading all the way to the recent Supreme Court’s decision on California’s Proposition 8. Occasionally tear-jerking, the applause at the end was well earned (4.5⭐️).

Taking an entirely different approach,  Regarding Susan Sontag was a travelogue with a beautiful original soundtracks, interviews travelogues, and gauzy abstract images that charted a course through her life and work. Luckily for the filmmakers, in addition to being a prolific and influential writer, Sontag was also one of the most photogenic and photographed public intellectuals of the modern era. (4⭐️)

Chris: Josh, I so agree with you. It is hard to pick! I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries, but I do agree with you about Regarding Susan Sontag. I think Nancy Kates deserves a lot of credit for creating a movie about a writer that I’ve found incredibly daunting at first but feel accessible.

I was also impressed with Bret Fetzer’s My Last Year with the Nuns, which is filmed as a monologue from local guy Matt Smith, about his eighth grade year, his last at a Catholic junior high, on Capitol Hill. I didn’t know about the presence the church had on the Hill. Smith has a distinct voice for holding our interest for almost 90 minutes, and I liked how he would give his friends nicknames and circle back so that you always remember “David Shields, king of the dirty jokes” (but not that David Shields).

Tony: The only two docs I’ve seen so far were keepers. Ryan Worsley’s doc Razing the Bar finds the universality (and a genuinely lovable cast of characters) in Seattle dive The Funhouse’s closing (anyone who’s seen a beloved rock club die unceremoniously will be moved). And #ChicagoGirl – The Social Network Takes on a Dictator is nothing short of staggering–a sharp and utterly involving account of Chicago-based Damascus expat Ala’a Basatneh’s usage of the internet and social media to expose the shattering brute-force dictatorship in her native Syria.

Chris: Right now, I think Lucky Them is my favorite narrative feature. I think it might over-glamorize music writing (a problem that started at least with Almost Famous), but it’s a fun movie that has Toni Collette (who can do no wrong, if you ask me) and Thomas Haden Church (who is great, as always), trying to find an elusive, former rock star. There’s a big cameo that I didn’t see coming and it solidified the movie as a can’t-miss for me. I do think Megan Griffiths should be talked about in the same way that we talk about Lynn Shelton, as both seriously elevate the quality of films coming from the Northwest (though they are both very different filmmakers).

Josh: On the narrative side, I started the festival with Ida. Austerely shot and photographed in lustrous black & white, Paweł Pawlikowski follows a novice on the verge of committing to a life in the convent. Before taking her vows, Mother Superior sends the orphan into the city to meet her considerably less holy (and surprisingly Jewish) aunt. Together, they drive around Communist Poland revealing family secrets, war horrors, and a sexy saxophonist. The camera remains still and the characters often slip partially out of its frame, a visual metaphor that could’ve felt heavy-handed the if the shots weren’t so breathtakingly gorgeous.

Tony: On paper, Venus in Fur feels like one of those quirky, quiet side projects that big directors do between big ones. But as executed by Roman Polanski, it’s a sharply intelligent, succulently cinematic adaptation/riff on the iconic Sacher-Masoch story and a total acting tour de force for Mathieu Amalric (as the playwright adapting the book) and especially Emmanuelle Seigner as the actress attempting to audition for Amalric’s audience of one–she’s like Christina Applegate, Judy Holliday, and Audrey Tautou rolled up in one. The instant I finished watching it, I wanted to see it again.

Josh:  I typically have mild allergies to filmed versions of plays and was worried that this one, about adapting a novel to the stage where all of the magic realism takes place in a theater in which the playwright and vengeful goddess / miraculous walk-on actually perform the play while commenting on the deeper meaning of it all, would send me into hives. But you’re right — the performances were so compelling that I fell under its spell fairly quickly (4.5⭐️)

Speaking of Audrey Tautou, I learned that there’s almost nothing funnier than watching her speak Mandarin to a table of stern-faced buisnessmen. In Chinese Puzzle, she, Roman Duris, Cécile De France, and Kelly Reilly reprise the roles that they originated twelve years ago in L’Auberge Espagnole. I have such deep affection for these characters that these repeated chances to check in on them feels like a gift. Like the more focused Before … project from Richard Linklater, Cedric Klapisch returns to find gang facing much more appropriately grown-up problems than when we first met them in Barcelona: crumbling marriages, raising and conceiving children (it helps that the kid actors are every bit as charming as the adults), the intricacies of the American immigration system, the horrors of apartment hunting in New York. But it’s handled with a light and inventive touch, occasional flights of fancy, and a few high-wire callbacks to the original. The whole thing was effervescent and delightful, I love this trilogy so much that I’d be happy if they kept checking back on them until they were all in a shared retirement home.

Due to the continued intolerable absence of a Capitol Hill to Queen Anne express gondola service, I skipped Last Year at Marienbad in favor of Obvious Child, the rare abortion-related romantic comedy that featured Jenny Slate and Gaby Hoffman (who’ve I’ve seen most recently in funny but limited-depth television roles) given the chance to shine playing three-dimensional humans with real struggles, complex emotions, and very funny stand-up routines.

Tony: Not to incur your envy, Josh, but I did catch the revival screening of Alain Resnais’ strange, haunting, masterful 1961 film, Last Year at Marienbad. I’d forgotten how innovative the movie’s structure and visual style were, and I love how Resnais jostles all that experimentation with flashes of awkward emotion.

Witching and Bitching, despite its inane (and big surprise, American/English-language-imposed) title, is terrific on its own distinctive pulp-art plane. Alex de la Iglecia’s films are always studies in genre excess, executed with a master’s touch. This one starts out as a failed-caper film a la Reservoir Dogs, shifts into some astonishing action scenes, then wanders down the dark-fairy-tale pathway trod by Tim Burton, then forces Nicholas Roeg’s The Witches to chug some Red Bull. If it sounds erratic, it is. But it’s also so full of unfettered creativity it’s damn near irresistible, and rife with enough action/horror/fairy tale set pieces for five lesser movies.

Josh: My brand of “thriller” is typically a bit less gory, but I saw quite a few genuinely suspenseful films. The Double, adapts the Dostoyevsky novella into a depressingly dingy retro-future, with Jesse Eisenberg playing both the timid-but-capable and charismatic-but-slackery clerks at a statistics factory. The production is necessarily darkly farcical, but Ayoade has exceptional style and Eisenberg does a whole through small gestures as doppelgänger relationship runs from confusion, to friendship, to nemeses, building to a feverishly paranoid finale.

Perhaps it’s a spoiler to even mention Tom at the Farm among the “thrillers”. In the title role, Xavier Dolan shows up at his dead lover’s mother’s dairy for a funeral and is forced to constantly improvise through his own grief as funeral plans reveal just how deeply in the closet his boyfriend was back on the rural home front. An still-at-home, tending-to-the-farm, insanely repressed brother complicates the situation tremendously, and the tension escalates exponentially as the plot veers in unexpected directions without losing touch with the emotional stakes. It was fascinating to see Dolan working with a more muted color palette, in a different mode, and adapting someone else’s source material. His productivity is mind-boggling —  while we were watching this one in Seattle, he was premiering a new film at that “other” May festival — and I’m on board for whatever’s next.

Finally, I can’t remember the last time I’ve laughed at so much bloodshed as I did during the darkly comedic In Order of Disappearance. Very little of the story is overtly funny — the senseless death of his son transforms Stellan Skarsgård from a snow-plowing Citizen of the Year to a determined instigator of a string of revenge murders almost overnight — but bleak humor in the snowy Norwegian town, the sprawling cast of characters, and the matter-of-fact treatment of the deaths somehow offsets the violence.

Worsts?

Chris: I mentioned it in the first roundtable, but Jimi: All is By My Side, the opening night film, is unforgivably bad. I don’t want to keep beating a dead rock star, but when I left the screening at the press launch, I was privy to a lot of the arguments made here, first-hand, that explained why the movie got so many important things wrong. But, it’s sort works where you can go to opening night and say afterwards, it very much gets better.

Josh: What I don’t get about Jimi was: without the music rights or an apparent interest in the facts, why even make the movie about Hendrix? Maybe a more obviously fictionalized story about an expat ascendant musician would’ve worked. Even better if the story was more compelling or the protagonist was more charismatic. But, as you said. It’s opening night, which is always hit or miss, and griping about the film made for good gala fodder.

Tony: I don’t think I despised Jimi: All is By My Side as much as you guys, largely because I think Andre Benjamin’s Hendrix worked for me. Regarding the age disparity between Hendrix and Andre; Benjamin is a 39-year-old who looks young for his age, while Hendrix was a twenty-something whose hard living made him look old for his age, so that evened out for me. And Benjamin didn’t seem to be descending to imitation, either.

But there are moments in the movie so patently show-biz bio they make your teeth hurt, and there’s no ignoring the firestorm of controversy about the movie’s fast-and-loose interpretation of facts. I had the chance to interview Ridley (and his leading lady Hayley Atwell) for City Arts, but nearly all of my 15 minutes with them were eaten away before I could really ask him about the issues with inaccuracy. When I did (as handlers were literally scooting me out the door because time had run out), I think there was some miscommunication between us: When I mentioned ‘the phone incident,’ I think Ridley thought I was referring to Jimi’s awkward conversation with his dad on the phone in the movie, not the specious incident in the movie where Jimi clocks Kathy with a phone. Ah, for another 15 minutes…

Great guests? 

Josh: The Laura Dern interview was just completely delightful. Among the highlights, her longtime friend Eddie Vedder showed up to give a heartfelt presentation of the award. But most importantly, the conversation was conducted by Elvis Mitchell. No matter how charming the guest, these onstage interviews can quickly get painful in the wrong hands, and Mitchell seemed like a complete pro: genial, well-informed, and deeply interested in her work. Over a compelling hour or two Dern recounted stories of growing up in the cinema (19 takes of eating ice cream for Martin Scorsese), the abrupt life transition that was going from the classroom to filming the Fabulous Stains (“one day we were reading the Diary of Anne Frank, boys giggling uncomfortably at references to menstruation, four days later my head was shaved and I was with the Sex Pistols and going to Boomtown Rats shows at night … send your daughter to Vancouver for 12 weeks with the Sex Pistols and she’ll never be a drug user for life!”), to the many wonderful oddities of working with David Lynch (an unreleased 70 minute monologue that “explains” Inland Empire; his cow-on-a-leash campaign to get her an Oscar nomination), and her view of the role of an actor (“the job of an actor is to find empathy where you might have had judgement”).  It also helped that the time for the audience to ask questions was limited, and that the crowd did a really great job of not being creepy.

Chris: I’m jealous, Josh, of you going to the Laura Dern interview. She’s a national treasure, but I just couldn’t make any of her appearances fit with my schedule. I think one guest that should be highlighted, though, is Ala’a Basatneh, the young girl featured in #ChicagoGirl: The Social Network Takes on a Dictator. She’s a 19-year old girl in Chicago who was instrumental in helping protesters in Syria by coordinating with them to take on Bashar al-Assad. She’s really inspiring, and kudos to SIFF for bringing her to Seattle with the film.

Other surprises?

Chris: I’m not sure if this counts, but when I watched Fight Church, the story of mixed-martial arts among devout Christians I recommended last week, I did a little bit of poking around the internet for what I can learn about the movie. One of the pastors featured prominently in the film was reportedly accused of sexual assault and trying to cover it up. It put watching the film in a whole new context.

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