Late last week, SIFF unveiled the complete lineup for the 2015 festival (the 41st) on their website and in stacks of glossy printed guides all over town, complete with a full festival calendar, compact film descriptions, trailers, and all sorts of other bells and whistles.
Opening Night brings Paul Feig and his C.I.A. comedy Spy — starring Melissa McCarthy, Jude Law, and Jason Statham that maintains universal acclaim on the basis of its SXSW premiere this spring — to McCaw Hall, preceded by a red carpet festivities and followed by a huge party next door in Exhibition Hall. From there, SIFF gives cinema-bound Seattleites plenty of occasions to socialize after the credits roll with a packed slate of so many galas, parties, and events, culminating with a closing night presentation of The Overnight (a Seattle-to-Los Angeles relocation comedy starring Adam Scott and Taylor Schilling) at the Seattle’s chocolate popcorn theater mecca, the Cinerama, followed by a SIFF Soiree at Seattle’s fanciest attic, MOHAI, on Sunday June 7th. If you plan on diving deep into the SIFF party scene, clear out your Saturday schedule and consider the the “Gala and Party Pass” — gets you expedited entry into many of the films and events along with open bar privileges for $300 ($250 for members).
Yes, between opening and closing night, the country’s biggest festival is ready to overwhelm and delight with a total of 450 films from 92 countries (193 features, 70 documentaries, 164 short films). In addition to festival favorites from around the world, this list represents 49 world premieres (23 features/26 shorts), 51 North American premieres (33/18), and 18 U.S. premieres (7/11) are rolling into town. Can you ever be truly prepared for this film onslaught? I think this year’s ad-campaign answers that question directly:
Yes, even SIFF acknowledges that seeing it all requires something like voluntarily stepping inside Booth Jonathan’s torture tower or committing yourself to an extended stay in Room 23 and accepting that side-effects might include going Full Malkovich. That’s why in the coming weeks we’ll be hivemindmelding to let you know how we’re planning to allocate our precious time to “BE WATCHING” with regular follow-up to chat about what we saw, loved, and hated. And really, if you see a quarter of those, you’ll feel it your stiff legs, bleary eyes, and sun-deprived skin by the end.
If you can’t wait for our crystal ball readings and rambly debriefs, but know that you like your fims, for instance, to get romantic, induce nightmares, take you on a rocket ship to adventure, or cause you to feel horribly melancholic upon having the dire state of human rights/environmental collapse/economic atrocities/etc., SIFF continues to organize the festival into user-friendly moods (“Love“, “Make Me Laugh“, “Open My Eyes“, “Thrill Me“, “Provoke Me”, “Show Me the World“, “Sci-Fi and Fact“, “To the Extreme“, “Creative Streak“, and “Face the Music“) to let you customize your viewing agenda to how you feel like feeling on a given night.
If this all sounds too emo, you can always plan your festival around seventeen overlapping film programs including geographic groupings both international (Africa, Spain, Asia, Latin America) and closer to home (New American Cinema, Northwest Connections); time-of-day (Midnight Adrenaline); time-of-life (Films4Families, FutureWave); or dedication to secrecy (a Secret Festival that includes Sunday morning screenings of films so exclusive that an Oath of Silence is required for entry); or a sommelier-like selection of films to pair with your meal. Of course, local film lovers eager for quality time with celebrities will want to consider attending the annual tributes to film legends, in which SIFF honors a body of work with an extended interview, clip show, feature presentation, Q&A and awards presentation. First up, find yourself one degree closer to every celebrity on earth by way of an evening with Kevin Bacon on May 27th, followed by a screening of his latest film Cop Car at the Egyptian. The next week, Jason Schwartzmann will face hundreds of Wes Anderfans along with a tribute screening of 7 Chinese Brothers on June 6th at the Harvard Exit.
Let’s hash through the details. We’ll update our classic collection of tips & tricks with the latest info on queue cards and other fluctuating festival features closer to opening day. First, though, in compliance with the SunBreak’s most sacred oath of office, it is my solemn duty to inform you that iSIFF, the amazingly useful little iPhone app, remains in cold storage (as they say in sportsball, “there’s always next year”). But hey! MySIFF is still kind-of around, connected to an alternate festival universe calendar, and approximately functional (successfully adding a film to YourSIFF results in a page with nothing but a reassuring zero).
Early-bird prices have come and gone, but you can still sign up for an all-you-can-eat buffet by getting a series pass or set more achievable goals with a bulk order of six or twenty slightly-discounted tickets. Aside from shopping online, the festival maintains three in-person box offices — one at SIFF Cinema and SIFF Film Center (Lower Queen Anne) and another at SIFF Cinema Egyptian (Capitol Hill). In terms of in-city programming, this year’s map remains fairly compact with most regular screenings taking place downtown at Pacific Place, in Capitol Hill at permanently-revived Egyptian and temporarily-revived Harvard Exit (for an extended wake before the beloved neighborhood theater goes the way of creative offices and craft cocktails), and on SIFF’s home turf in lower Queen Anne with three screens at the Uptown and one at the Film Center. Once again, the festival will take the show on the road to Bellevue (Lincoln Square), Renton, and Kirkland, but we have enough trouble catching everything in Seattle and don’t expect to venture too far beyond city limits.
Can’t wait? Start scouring the festival’s offerings and strategically slotting them into your social calendars, with extra credit for plotting out agendas that allow you to see multiple films at different venues while still managing to find a meal other than popcorn and soda along the way. Should the mood strike, reward yourself with a beer or wine, sold at SIFF-operated venues to accompany you into the theater. With a festival this stuffed full of tough choices and epic film sprints, you’ll more than deserve it.
This weekend, SIFF is hosting their annual Women in Cinema mini-festival. It features films from all over the world, including movies from Norway, Argentina, the Philippines, Germany, and Denmark, as well as from Seattle. Lynn Shelton’s newest film Laggies is the opening night film on Thursday evening. This all runs from Thursday, September 18 through Sunday, September 21. Tickets and more information can be found here.
Here are the official descriptions and trailers of all of the feature films playing:
Thursday, September 18
Laggies (USA, dir: Lynn Shelton; 7pm at the Egyptian, 100 minutes)
SIFF sez: “Having spent her twenties comfortably inert, 28-year-old Megan (Keira Knightley) finds herself squarely in an adulthood crisis with no career prospects, no particular motivation to find one and no one to relate to, including her high school boyfriend. Director Lynn Shelton scheduled to attend.”
Friday, September 19
Transit (Philippines, dir: Hanna Espia, 4:30pm at SIFF Cinema Uptown, 93 minutes)
SIFF sez: “This affecting and very timely drama deals with the struggle of an extended Filipino family working in Israel but faced with the prospect of separation when a new law threatens their children with deportation.”
SIFF sez: “German army commander Jesper forms a bond with his Afghani translator, Tarik, as they try to protect a village from the growing Taliban influence. Gorgeously shot on location in Afghanistan and loosely based on several real-life incidents,Inbetween Worlds honestly explores the tense plight of its characters on both sides of the fence.”
Rocks in My Pockets (USA, dir: Signe Baumane, 9:30pm at SIFF Cinema Uptown, 88 minutes)
SIFF sez: “Five fantastical animated tales based on the courageous women of Latvian filmmaker Signe Baumane’s family and their battles with madness.”
Saturday, September 20
Monk With a Camera (USA, dir: Tina Mascara and Guido Santi, 11:30am at SIFF Cinema Uptown, 90 minutes)
SIFF sez: “In this enthralling documentary portrait, Nicholas Vreeland, grandson of fashion icon Diana Vreeland, is headed for life as a high-powered photographer until he undergoes a personal transformation: next stop, life as a Tibetan Buddhist monk.”
SIFF sez: “For almost 50 years, the world’s population has grown at an alarming rate, raising fears about strains on the Earth’s resources. But how true are these claims? Producer Elise Pearlstein scheduled to attend.”
The Last Season (USA, dir: Sara Dosa, 4pm at SIFF Cinema Uptown, 78 minutes)
SIFF sez: “Amid the bustling world of Central Oregon’s wild mushroom hunting camps, two former soldiers discover the means to gradually heal their wounds of war, bonding over the search of the elusive and lucrative matsutake mushroom. Director Sara Dosa scheduled to attend.”
Kelly & Cal (USA, dir: Jen McGowan, 7:30pm at SIFF Cinema Uptown, 107 minutes)
SIFF sez: “Punk-rocker turned suburban housewife, Kelly (Juliette Lewis), is nostalgic for a life she can no longer have and intimidated by a future she is not sure she wants. Director Jen McGowan scheduled to attend.”
Someone You Love (Denmark, dir: Pernille Fischer Christensen, 9:30pm at SIFF Cinema Uptown, 100 minutes)
SIFF sez: “Thomas Jacob, a famous singer-songwriter, returns to Denmark after having lived abroad for years. After a confrontation with his estranged daughter, he is forced to look after his young grandson, and come to terms with his troubled past.”
Sunday, September 21
Stray Dog (USA, dir: Debra Granik, 4pm at SIFF Cinema Uptown, 105 minutes)
SIFF sez: “From the team behind SIFF favorite Winter’s Bone comes this stunning portrait of Ron ‘Stray Dog’ Hall: a soulful warrior in the US heartland of the US, balancing his struggles to stay afloat with his commitments to his fellow combat veterans, family, and neighbors. Producer Anne Rosellini scheduled to attend.”
SIFF sez: “Upon learning that his girlfriend is pregnant, 33-year-old locksmith Sebastian begins to have strange visions about his clients.”
I Am Yours (Norway, dir: Iram Haq, 8:30pm at SIFF Cinema Uptown, 96 minutes)
SIFF sez: “A twentysomething single mother in Norway’s expatriate Pakistani community struggles with her dysfunctional relationships with her perpetually disapproving mother, her increasingly neglected child, and her not-committed to her boyfriend in this startlingly assured feature debut by Norwegian actor, singer and filmmaker Iram Haq.”
My cult cinema itch usually gets a healthy scratching from the Seattle International Film Festival, and SIFF 2014 proved to be no exception.
Between SIFF ’14’s Midnight Adrenaline series and the other genre-informed movies that peppered the festival schedule this year, anyone craving something scary, action-filled, or just plain batshit-crazy found something to love.
“If it’s in a word or in a look, you can’t get rid of the Babadook…”
I couldn’t catch every genre effort that screened at the Fest this year, which meant missing intriguing offerings like Bobcat Goldthwait’s Bigfoot horror flick Willow Creek and the Casanova-meets-Dracula arthouse feature, The Story of My Death, among many others. But nearly everything I saw that fell under the cult movie umbrella offered something worthwhile. Enclosed, please find one B-movie evangelist’s rundown on SIFF ’14’s genre cinema presentations. [WARNING: Some of the trailers linked below include solidly NSFW content. Please proceed accordingly.]
Cult Movie Comfort Food:
If SIFF ’14’s programming is any indication, genre filmmakers are realizing that there’s no shame in doing something that’s formula-informed, as long as it’s done well. Director Ben Ketai’s Beneath finds several coal miners (and one miner’s lawyer daughter) struggling to keep alive and sane after a cave-in seals them hundreds of feet below. It’s a lean, effective thriller that turns horrific (and bloody) but keeps its focus tight and direct. Best of all, it features the Lawnmower Man himself, character actor Jeff Fahey, in a (pardon the pun) meaty supporting role.
No one holds more respect for the time-honored schlock tradition of the Nazi Zombie Movie than me, so my disappointment with the competent but generic sheen of Tommy Wirkola’s shocker Dead Snow was overpowering when the movie first first hit midnight screens in 2009. Thank God for directors who learn from their mistakes. The Norwegian director’s brand-new follow-up, Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead, bests the original in every way: The action/horror setpieces fly fast and furious, Wirkola’s shambling SS undead possess way more personality, and the jokes connect with giddy precision. Best Nazi Zombie film since 1977’s Shock Waves, gnarled skeletal hands down.
Late Phases, the final movie to screen for SIFF’s 2014 Midnight Adrenaline series, follows a blind Vietnam vet (We Are What We Are‘s Nick Damici, excellent here) dealing with a werewolf infestation in his retirement community. There’s no reinvention of the wheel going on here, and the workmanlike script keeps it from broaching classic status. But Late Phases serves up a character-actor cast engineered to give genre geeks the vapors, director Adrian Garcia Bogliano plays things surprisingly straight, and it’s impossible not to root for a horror movie that eschews CGI lycanthropes for good old-fashioned prosthetics and guys in werewolf suits. Old-fashioned practical special effects also enliven Zombeavers, a retro-shocker that offers quintessential truth in titling and a rip-roaring good time several cuts above your average SyFi channel Nature Gone Amuck B-flick.
A Masque of Madness, meantime, compiled footage from the 50-year-plus career of the mighty Boris Karloff, and if it wasn’t anything earthshaking, it at least put the screen’s most silkily-menacing character actor at front and center for 80 minutes. If that ain’t cult movie comfort food, I don’t know what is.
The Hong Kong Contingent:
I was a little disappointed in SIFF 2014’s Hong Kong movies for the most part, and that’s more likely a reflection on the dearth of cohesion in that country’s recent output than on the efforts of SIFF programmers. Once Upon a Time in Shanghai, the fest’s requisite Hong Kong martial arts period piece, was handsome but uninvolving, and its insistence on kneecapping some excellent Yuen Woo-Ping fight choreography with Bourne Identity-style camera fuckery proved a major distraction. The Midnight After (discussed in one of our previous roundtables) at least showed some inventiveness and had its moments, but likewise disappointed.
Blessedly, there was one strange and satisfying jewel amidst the Hong Kong genre cinema on display. Rigor Mortis, a horror movie about a weary actor residing in a haunted monolith of an apartment building, sharply updates the hopping-vampire movies that proliferated in Hong Kong throughout the ’80’s, with atmosphere to spare, breathtakingly creepy visuals, and a wonderful sense of mundane normalcy living uneasily alongside dark mythic forces (it’s been on a regular run at Pacific Place this week).
Now, THAT’s Italian (-influenced): The wild primary colors, non-sequitur surrealism, balletic violence, and psycho-sexual inferences that fueled Italian horror cinema in the 1970s have wielded a sizable influence on modern filmmakers, and two SIFF presentations laid that influence bare to varying effect.
American director Jason Bognacki’s debut feature Another saw its world premiere at SIFF 2014, and it definitely owes a heavy debt to Italian horror maestros like Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci. Bognacki’s definitely got the goods as a visual stylist (he’s cut his teeth on several horror shorts over the last few years), which helps offset an admittedly shaky and sometimes ridiculous script (my interview with Bognacki should be posting soon).
French directors Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani richly re-thought the giallo sub-genre with their debut effort Amer, one of my SIFF 2010 faves (see my archival interview with the directors for some more background on the genre, on account of there’s always room for giallo). TheStrange Colour of Your Body’s Tears, the duo’s follow-up, doesn’t quite attain Amer’s dark beauty and resonance, but (in my mind, at least) it cements them as adept and imaginative keepers of the giallo flame. Like the best gialli, the movie explores the pas de deux between sexuality and death almost entirely through exquisitely-crafted visual and aural overload, and if you’re willing to go with it, it’s one visually succulent fever dream. The fine folks at the Grand Illusion evidently agree: They’re bringing Strange Colour back for a run later this year.
The Best Genre Flicks I saw at SIFF 2014:
The above-mentioned Rigor Mortis and The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears definitely clicked with me, instilling some hope that there’s still life in even the most entrenched horror sub-genres. I’ve already covered Alex de la Iglesia’s Witching and Bitching in a previous roundtable, and it still stands out as one of the most exhilarating things I saw all SIFF–pure excess engineered with impeccable virtuosity and reckless creativity. With the considerable distribution muscle of Universal Pictures behind it, cult idolatry and appreciation are (I hope) a given.
I’m not really an anime connoisseur, but Patema Inverted kinda enchanted in its own right. Ever lay in the grass on a summer day as a kid, tilting your head so it almost feels like the sky’s actually an ocean and gravity’s a tenuous safety belt that’s barely keeping you from falling up? This movie captures that sensation. It’s not quite at Miyazaki-level brilliance, but it comes really, really close.
Two of the best genre efforts to grace SIFF 2014, interestingly, both starred Mark Duplass, were feature-film debuts for their respective directors, sported two-person casts, and contain integral twists best left unspilled via spoilers. My colleague Josh and I already lauded Charlie McDowell’s perceptive and haunting The One I Love, which throws a Twilight Zone-style wrench into a relationship dramedy framework, and Creep, Patrick Brice’s extremely enjoyable found-footage horror comedy. I won’t go any further describing either, except to say that the former was one of the best-acted movies to play the festival, and the latter is a playful tweaking of the found-footage template that boasts the five of the most chilling/hilarious closing minutes of any movie I saw all SIFF long. Mad props to Duplass, who gets to explore a lot of different aspects of his persona between the two movies.
Great as all of the above were, though, The Babadook remains, in my mind, the crown jewel of SIFF ’14’s genre presentations. Director Jennifer Kent’s feature debut starts out as a resonant and very affecting drama about a widowed single mom (Essie Davis) dealing with her troubled young son (Noah Wiseman). Then it neatly segues into horror turf as a storybook in the boy’s possession starts bleeding into reality. Solidly acted by both leads, full of surprises, and crap-your-pants scary without leaning on the red stuff, it cobbles together familiar elements with wicked imagination and enough artistry to make it one of those true rarities: A classic horror film likely to captivate civilians and hardcores alike. More please, Ms. Kent. Please.
The Golden Space Needle Award, not exactly golden, not exactly a Space Needle, but handsome nonetheless.
Josh: You guys! We made it! It’s a wrap for the fortieth Seattle International Film Festival. We’ve all been returned home safely, but have been forever changed by three weeks of moviegoing.
Let’s begin with the awards. My desperate plea for an invite in our roundup of weekend picks did not fall on deaf ears! So I woke up bright an early on Sunday morning to rendezvous with Chris to attend the annual Golden Space Needle awards where the results of 90,000 torn ballots and hours of jury deliberations were revealed while we enjoyed a delicious buffet from the comforts of the Space Needle’s low altitude observation deck.
For the audience awards, the People of SIFF chose their favorite movies of the festival and Richard Linklater cleaned-up with a Golden Space Needle for best film and best director for Boyhood, for whichPatricia Arquette also won a best actress statue. Dawid Ogrodnik was the audience’s favorite actor for his role in Life Feels Good; Keep On Keepin’ On was the won the documentary prize; and Fool’s Daytook the prize for best short film.
Grand jury prizes went to 10,000KM (dir. Carlos Marques-Marcet) for Best New Director; Marmato (Mark Grieco) for Best Documentary, and Red Knot (Scott Cohen) for Best New American Cinema. Panels of youth juries named Dear White People(Justin Simien) the best FutureWave Feature; Belle & Sebastien (Nicolas Vanier) the best Films4Families feature, and awarded the FutureWave Wavemaker Award in Youth Filmmaking to Malone Lumarda for Black RockCreek. The full list of award winners is online; and while the food and view were great, the nicest part was that a handful of the winners and recipients of special mentions were in the house to accept their awards.
Now that the audiences and juries have spoken, it’s our turn. After a long nap and some time to reflect, what are your top films from #SIFForty?
Patricia Arquette in Boyhood, which also took Best Director, Best Picture, and Best Actress audience awards.
Josh: For once, I don’t disagree with the wisdom of SIFF crowds! I have to admit that as I heard the runners up for the Best Picture award being read off at the SIFF Awards Brunch Breakfast on Sunday morning, I breathed a sigh of relief when Seattle collectively managed to make Boyhood(one of my favorite films of the festival) this year’s Golden Space Needle awardee over runners-up How to Train Your Dragon 2 and The Fault in Our Stars. Not to snobbishly discount the wild enthusiasm of kids and heartbroken teenagers (or the justifiable local affection for Big In Japan, the fourth runner up), but selecting Linklater’s ambitious and affecting triumph as seems to add a note of more serious but still accessible film credibility to our little city’s giant festival.
In stark contrast to Boyhood‘s loose and sprawling indie epic aesthetic, my other contender for best narrative was Ida. I would’ve been thrilled just to watch a silent presentation of the beautifully composed still camerawork from this film. That Pawel Pawlikowski fits a story of spirituality, familial and historical revelations, a little romance, and an examination of the multifaceted personal consequences of war into an 80 minute package is an astonishing achievement. My favorite documentary was Ballet 422 the slim documentary about young (ascendant) choreographer Justin Peck’s creation of a new piece for the New York City Ballet. Running just over an hour, it captured almost every facet of a diverse and unfamiliar (to me) workplace with incredible economy: no talking head interviews or explanations, just a lot of watching a range of seasoned professionals doing their jobs. Putting the spotlight on the creators rather than the creation made their collective success all the more engaging. Plus, I just find it fascinating to see how things & people work.
Life Feels Good won a best actor Golden Space Needle Award as well as Tony’s Golden SunBreak.
Tony: It was a relief that SIFF audiences got it this year re: Boyhood. I shuddered at the prospect of Henk Praetorius’s slight Leading Lady following up his equally slight 2013 effort Fanie Fourie’s Lobola to a Best Picture Golden Space Needle.
Whatever the reason, whether fate was on my side or the overall programming was extra-sharp this year, many of this year’s festival entries actively captivated me, so I’m fudging a bit and giving out 5 Golden SunBreak Awards, in order.
Life Feels Good: Don’t judge this Polish drama by its forced, feel-good trailer. This fact-based story takes a tougher and much more satisfying route, with hard-earned emotional epiphanies that literally had me fighting back tears (sometimes unsuccessfully). That it does so with considerable artistry and its own distinct flavor just amplifies its effectiveness for me.
My Last Year with the Nuns: Local boy Matt Smith’s incredibly evocative, hilarious snapshot of mid-60s Seattle was a masterpiece of monologue, seasoned by director Bret Fetzer with just enough visual ingenuity to make it feel like a real movie.
The Babadook: Even with my long-standing genre jones, I’m vividly aware that not every horror movie is effective enough (and well-done enough) to recommend to civilians. This perfectly wrought, psychologically sound, and well-acted chiller is resolutely one of them. Oh, and it scared the shit out of me.
BFE: Shawn Telford’s affecting directorial debut sported one of SIFF 2014’s strongest ensemble casts, and an eerily, hilariously accurate portrait of life in the middle of suburban nowhere.
Bound: Africans versus African Americans: My favorite doc of SIFF 2014 (and the winner of this year’s Lena Sharpe Award, which goes to the female director’s film that receives the most votes in public balloting at the festival) found director Peres Owino approaching an eye-opening issue with a personal stamp that felt absolutely integral. It’s a movie that finds a lot of universality in an ostensibly narrow topic.
I’m really with you on Boyhood, too, Josh. If I had a Top Ten, it’d be there.
Lucky Them was among Chris’s favorite narrative features.
Chris: I share your enthusiasm with My Last Year With the Nuns. I loved Matt Smith’s monologue and his sense of storytelling. It was funny and provided a nice history of Capitol Hill that was before our times. I think I’ll give it a Golden SunBreak award too.
My top three are:
Regarding Susan Sontag:The best documentary I saw (and I saw plenty). Nancy Kates did a remarkable job of making one of the twentieth century’s greatest public intellectuals seem both human and accessible.
Lucky Them: Megan Griffiths’ fourth feature film features Toni Collette, who I always love seeing on screen, and Thomas Haden Church, who always makes me laugh whenever he’s on screen. I don’t think it’s an accurate portrayal of music journalism (or at least it doesn’t resemble my experiences), but it’s a well-crafted film that made it easy to overlook its shortcomings. It’s not a perfect movie, but I don’t think I enjoyed a narrative feature at SIFF as much as I enjoyed Lucky Them.
My Last Year With the Nuns: I hope this film spurs a higher profile for Matt Smith because I can’t wait to see his next monologue, whatever it’s about.
Tony: It speaks to the voluminous depth of SIFF programming that the first two of your Top Three were super-high on my must-see list…and I didn’t get a chance to catch either.
Chris: If it makes things any easier, Lucky Them begins a week-long run at the Northwest Film Forum on Friday.
Elisabeth Moss in The One I Love, which closed SIFF (in her absence).
Having crowned our own bests of the fest, let’s not forget about what we saw during the final week. First, there’s the matter of the Duplass-a-palooza during the closing weekend:
Tony: Josh, we both caught two Mark Duplass genre flicks with twists, Creep and The One I Love. What’d you think?
Josh: I basically saw then back-to-back on Sunday and really liked them both! Duplass sure seems to relish being a part of these these lean filming operations — both had approximately two-person casts, small crews, and were shot on location in nice places outside of LA. Although they got a lot of scary mileage out of the limitations and quality of found footage with Creep, I definitely preferred the polish of The One I Love.
Tony: Yeah, on the balance, The One I Love rates higher, but I was also impressed with Creep, which gave the hoary found-footage horror format a funny and genuinely surprising shot in the arm.
Josh:The One I Love also worked within the framework of a clever “concept” [not sure how to say much more about the Twilight Fantasy Island Zone couples retreat premise without getting into spoilers — just see it as soon as you can!], but the way that they revealed it and continued to find ways of letting the plot take surprising turns was really well handled. At post-screening Q&A at the Cinerama for closing night, Duplass won over the hometown crowd byrecognizing the involvement of a lot of Seattle’s filmmaking community in the making of The One I Love, even providing the office of Film & Music a free motto: “super tech acumen at an affordable price”.
Also, if we’re looking for a tiebreaker between these two, Elisabeth Moss is a terrific actress who elevated the whole project beyond its gimmick with impressive levels of emotional depth. I was a little bit disappointed that she didn’t make it to Seattle with the rest of the crew for the closing gala.
What else did you manage to see in the closing days of the festival?
Patema, Inverted.
Tony: The last week of SIFF always ends up being my Cram Week, so I saw a lot. My strongest runners-up for Top Five status were Stefan Haupt’s wonderful period romance/documentary hybrid The Circle(4 of 5 stars); Patema Inverted (4.5/5), an anime just shy of Miyazaki-level greatness in its visual brilliance and emotional pull; the quiet, funny, and just-right love story, Sam and Amira; Boyhood; and Ryan Worsley’s scrappy and smart Funhouse doc, Razing the Bar.
In addition to those we’ve already mentioned, my list of week 3 viewings, with accompanying 1-to-5 star ratings: Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead (3.5/5); Lady Be Good: Instrumental Women in Jazz (3.5/5); Beneath (3.5/5); Helicopter Mom (1.5/5); To Kill a Man (3.5/5); Leading Lady (2/5); Once Upon a Time in Shanghai (2.5/5); A Masque of Madness (3/5); Finding Fela (3/5); Gold (3.5/5); B for Boy (3.5/5); To Be Takei (4/5); Rigor Mortis (4/5); Late Phases (3/5).
10,000 km won a best new director jury prize, was one of many SIFF films to feature a Game of Thrones alum.
Josh: I didn’t squeeze quite as many movies in! For the sake of time and space, the other things I saw but haven’t yet mentioned, with star ratings and tweet-length reviews:
10,000km: Introducing the film with a special balance of humility and confidence, the director described his unbroken 20 minute opening shot that starts with a sex scene and ends with a long-distance airline ticket as “kind of boring at the beginning”. From here, the technologically enabled long distance relationship remained compelling enough that there was no need for the audience to accept his invitation to take a siesta during the middle. (4/5)
West:paranoia, justified and otherwise, for a mother and her son in a West Berlin refugee center decades before the fall of the wall. (4/5)
Big in Japan: Lynn Shelton says: “Lost in Translation meets Hard Day’s Night meets the Monkees.” A beautifully-shot local charmer that showed a lightly fictionalized version of Tennis Pro on the rise in Tokyo. (3.6)
Boys: shot like a Dutch Abercrombie catalog it’s a SIFF BINGO: small town, foreign, gay, sports, single-parent, coming-of-age movie with culturally-relevant mopeds as a symbol of danger and freedom! Yet the gauzily shot track & field romance of self-discovery remained evocative and not cliche within the PG-13 constraints. (3.7)
The Great Museum: displaying all the cogs in the intricate clockwork of maintaining a vast Austrian cultural institution. (3.5)
Alex of Venice: Chris Messina’s multi-faceted debut has a great look, laconic pace, and strong performance from Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Plus, Don Johnson as aging actor struggling with Chekhov. (3.5).
The Better Angels:If one must make a little messiah Lincoln movie why not in black and white Tree of Life outtakes. (3.2)
What is Cinema: Demonstrates that it takes more that great clips, quotes, and interviews to make a decent documentary about film. (2.5)
They Came Together: I definitely needed to eat more drugs before watching this rom com parody that had its absurdly funny moments, yet played like an overlong skit from the State. (2.5)
A look behind-the-scenes of the most-watched short film at SIFF 2014 from World Famous on Vimeo.
General Comments about SIFForty — what left room for improvement?
Tony: I still miss the dedicated SIFF App from a couple of years ago that allowed you to cobble together your own schedule in advance. It was a great, forward-thinking service for festgoers. The interface on their regular site seems to be a bit more mobile-friendly at this point, but I’m still a little nostalgic and misty-eyed for that app.
Chris: I’m not even an iPhone user, but it is my understanding that wishing for a return of iSIFF is official SunBreak policy.
Josh: Someday our beloved will return to us as long as we keep the dream alive! But at least they figured out that the mobile website’s calendar by time of day and list the location of the screenings; so hope springs eternal.
I’ve got one entitled gripe: most films had at least five SIFF-related ads per screening, plus two coming attractions trailers. At an individual level, it’s only a few cute minutes, but by the end its hard not to calculate that you’ve seen enough commercials to fill a feature length film or two. Plus, I still don’t understand the humor of “501”.
Tony: There seemed to be an attempt to address this with the slight variation in the ‘Emotional Calibration’ bumpers and the SIFF Flashback spots, but even more variety would help deflect passholder burn-out. 501, by the way, is riffing on the colloquialism for a tax-exempt non-profit, 501(c). Non-profit joke! Non-profit joke!
Josh: Ah. I thought it was something more complicated than that! On a slightly more substantive point,at multiple closing night speeches, Artistic Director Carl Spence voiced some reservations about the wisdom of running a film festival for more than three weeks. Assuming that SIFF decides to keep its “biggest” claim-to-fame, my suggestion would be to use the long duration of SIFF as an asset: I would love it if the festival was able to spread a film’s run more evenly across the festival. Many times, a film played twice in a couple days, allowing little time for buzz to build an audience between screenings. With rights, permissions, guest availabilities, and other commitments, the logistics of scheduling are a headache that I don’t even want to imagine; so this could be a complete pipe dream.
Quincy Jones at the SIFF Red Carpet for the screening of Keep On Keepin' On.
Photo by Tori Dickson.
Quincy Jones at the SIFF Red Carpet for the screening of Keep On Keepin' On.
Photo by Tori Dickson.
Director Alan Hicks at the SIFF Red Carpet for the screening of Keep On Keepin' On.
Photo by Tori Dickson.
Director Alan Hicks and producer Paula DuPré Pesmen at the SIFF Red Carpet for the screening of Keep On Keepin' On.
Photo by Tori Dickson.
Producer Paula DuPré Pesmen at the SIFF Red Carpet for the screening of Keep On Keepin' On.
Photo by Tori Dickson.
Director Alan Hicks, illustrator Peter Chan, and producer Paula DuPré Pesmen at the SIFF Red Carpet for the screening of Keep On Keepin' On.
Photo by Tori Dickson.
Quincy Jones at the SIFF Red Carpet for the screening of Keep On Keepin' On.
Photo by Tori Dickson.
Quincy Jones shaking hands with Chan, Hicks and Kauflin on the SIFF Red Carpet for the screening of Keep On Keepin' On.
Photo by Tori Dickson.
SIFF Managing Director Mary Bacarella, Pesmen, Jones, Hicks, Kauflin, Chan, SIFF Artistic Director Carl Spence on the SIFF Red Carpet for the screening of Keep On Keepin' On.
Photo by Tori Dickson.
Film critic Elvis Mitchell and Quincy Jones on the SIFF Red Carpet for the screening of Keep On Keepin' On.
Photo by Tori Dickson.
SIFF artistic director Carl Spence presents SIFF Lifetime Achievement Award to Quincy Jones.
Photo by Tori Dickson.
Quincy Jones receives the SIFF Lifetime Achievement Award.
Tony: At the risk of sounding like we’re sucking up, we as press interact with SIFF’s PR team more than probably any other festival staff members, and they kept things especially streamlined, efficient, and unfailingly pleasant.
Josh: The whole SIFF team –paid staffers, concessions crews, ticket sellers, and the legions of volunteers alike –maintained consistent composure, great attitudes, and obvious enthusiasm for film throughout. That they were still standing on closing night is a real miracle.
Chris: Content-wise, I thought that the local filmmaking was particularly strong. Maybe it’s because there wasn’t a Lynn Shelton movie to lean on, but a large sampling of the films I caught were from local filmmakers and I enjoyed a large percentage of those, including My Last Year With the Nuns, Lucky Them, Razing the Bar, and Fly Colt Fly. I was initially disappointed that SIFF didn’t get Laggies, for whatever reason, but maybe it was stronger without it?
Josh: I do think that it was a good year for SIFF! I never see as many films as I had hoped to, and tallying my list, I was surprised that I saw just over 30 despite feeling like I’ve done little other than watching movies during the 25-day festival.
Aside from being out of town for Memorial Day weekend, I tried to make it to at least one screening per day, yet when the credits rolled for The One I Love and it was time to head over to MOHAI for the closing gala, the festival wrapped without me feeling terribly exhausted and mostly enriched by having seen a lot of good movies and a few that will probably be my favorites of the year.
Optimistically, I like that this indicates some combination of me knowing how to choose films I’ll like and SIFF doing a great job with programming.
Chris: I also think SIFF did a remarkable job in who their high profile, out-of-town guests were: Richard Linklater, Laura Dern, Mark Duplass, Isaiah Washington, and Chiwetel Ejiofor. By the time they paid tribute to Quincy Jones during the final week, it felt appropriate and long overdue.
My final count was sixteen, but I enjoyed a high percentage of those, only really being disappointed in JIMI: All is By My Side and A Brony Tale. There were a lot of fims that I am kicking myself for missing but I’ll hope to catch them on Netflix or in general release.
Already Feeling SIFFdrawal? Dive back in to the Best of SIFF Programming?
Of course, just when you thought you were done with SIFF, they pull you back in. This weekend, they’re running a Best of SIFF spectacular at SIFF Cinemas at the Uptown to give you another chance to catch: My Last Year with the Nuns (June 12), Red Knot (June 12), Marmato (June 13), Keep On Keepin’ On (June 13), 10,000 KM (June 13), Borgman (June 13), Belle & Sebastien (June 14), I Am Big Bird: the Caroll Spinney Story (June 14), Dior & I (June 14), Life Feels Good (June 14), The 100-year-old man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (June 14), Boyhood (June 15), the Nightengale (June 15), In Order of Disappearance (June 15), and a Best of SIFF Shorts program (June 15). In addition to these special screenings, How To Train Your Dragon screens in 2D and 3D starting June 12 and Ida opens on June 13.
It’s been a great pleasure to attend and cover SIFF with you guys! In total, we must have seen nearly a hundred features during the festival, did our best to make the #SIFForty hashtag a thing, and probably all added dozens of films to our must-see lists on the basis of these reviews and recommendations. Hope everyone in the home audience had as much fun as we did.
Until next time, revisit the SunBreak’s SIFF coverage on our SIFF 2014 page, plus stay tuned for news updates and micro-reviews on Twitter @theSunBreak.
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 wasTime 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.
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 MuseumJohannes 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.
