Tag Archives: siff2014

Film & TV

SIFF interview: Talking with the stars and creators of Time Lapse

Time Lapse is a tightly-wound psychological thriller/sci fi film that played at the Seattle International Film Festival. It involves three friends, Jasper, Callie, and Finn who find a camera that can take photos exactly twenty four hours into the future. The latter two are a couple with the former a roommate and complication to their relationship. Things are further complicated when Jasper tries to use the newly discovered camera to bet on dog races. It’s all fun and games until his bookie gets suspicious.

The film combines the voyeurism of Rear Window with the futurism-as-an-idea of an episode of “The Twilight Zone.” It’s a tense drama and character study built around three excellent actors: Danielle Panabaker, Matt O’Leary, and George Finn. As my friend Rich from Three Imaginary Girls wrote, “Bottom line: Time Lapse is one of my favorite SIFF experiences so far. The sort of thing I turned on too late in the evening and couldn’t stop watching until it was over. Which frankly is my amongst the highest praise I’ll give a film most days.”

When they were in town for two sold out screenings at SIFF, I had a few minutes to ask some questions of writer/director Bradley King, writer/producer B.P. Cooper, and stars Danielle Panabaker and George Finn. I expected to learn a lot from the Time Lapse cast and crew members I spoke to; what I didn’t expect was for the producers and actors to learn from each other during the interview.

This is an unusual film – which I mean in a good way – so can I ask you guys to talk about the genesis of it?

B.P. Cooper: Bradley and I were working on a couple of projects and they were taking too long to get going. Being that this was our first feature film, from scratch, it’s hard to raise millions, millions, and millions of dollars. Bradley kept pressing the point that we needed to do something smaller, more contained, something more manageable that we could execute on our own, without permission from Hollywood.

The genesis of the camera came up and Bradley came up with all of these guidelines of how it could work, keeping it in an apartment complex, and going from one apartment into another.

One thing that I really enjoyed about the film was that it was shot in one location and that apartment complex where you filmed it didn’t seem like it was a limitation, but a strength that you kept it confined to such a small area.

Bradley King: There are a couple of things there. First, I would point to Jonathan Wenstrup, the DP, who did an excellent of lighting, obviously that can change the space, but also change the space over time. Had the lighting not change, or the environment not felt like it was morphing to fit the mood of the scenes, it would have felt more claustrophobic and stale. But he did such a good job of making it flow.

Also, we had the full run of the place. Before we shot, we were able to go in and modify that window, cut that picture window out, and knock down that kitchen wall and put in a movable wall so we could get the camera crew in more positions. We knocked down a hallway so it could connect two apartments together. It was more claustrophobic when we first got there, but because the building was going to be torn down, were able to modify it to suit our needs.

I’d like to ask the two actors, Danielle and George, what drew them in with their characters, Callie and Jasper?

George Finn: For me, when I read the script, I fell in love with the character because I hadn’t played anyone so outgoing before. When I met with Bradley, Coop, and Rick (Montgomery, producer), I was impressed by how well they had everything figured out. They had an entire room full of photos, breaking everything down and explaining how this happens and how that affects the timeline and everything like that. I felt like I just wanted to give a lot of life to this character.

Danielle Panabaker: For me, [Callie] is so fascinating. It’s fun for me, as an actor, to play with all the different levels. She has her ulterior motives, but she’s got to put a face on everyday and try a different tactic to get there. She’s a fascinating character and in each scene, there are so many choices to how I wanted to play each moment.

I’m going to try to tread delicately to not give anything away, but I felt like watching it that the twist with her character was unexpected, but when you reflect on it, all of the clues were there.

DP: Hopefully, as Bradley has said, that there is a second viewing, when you have the information about the character, it makes the second viewing that much more interesting.

In that sense, it reminded me of the book Gone Girl…

DP: I loved that book!

…in the sense that the ending builds to something unexpected, but it’s completely consistent with the story that preceded it.

But I wanted to ask about the idea for the camera…

BK: It came from Cooper. I feel like I can take credit for a lot of things in the movie, but the seed idea for the camera definitely came from Coop, and I should let him explain what his thought process was like.

BPC: There is a Paul Walker movie called Timeline, from maybe 8 years ago. In it, his father is a scientist and creates a time machine and gets in it and goes back in time. They try to rescue him but have no idea where he went and they’re too afraid to get into it. I guess it would send you automatically and you couldn’t control where it sent you. They put a camera in it and pointed it to the sky and took a picture of the sky. Based on the constellations, they were able to determine where on earth, and what time period he was in, and calibrate the machine to send the rescue team to go get him. That’s obviously the big budget version of a time travel movie.

I thought it was interesting that they used that camera, an inanimate object, to do the time travelling, so to speak, or at least give the information. Then I thought, “What if the camera itself could take a picture of the future?” That was the jumping off point.

The apartment complex where this film takes place is so important to the film and it’s like its own character. Can you discuss how you found that spot?

BK: The location was a really big deal. We called it the first miracle of the shoot. It seems easy at first because it’s an apartment complex and there are plenty in California. You have tons of where it’s in a courtyard and the apartments are facing each other. But once the script was done and we started looking for locations, you realize we need to take over the whole complex. We have to be here day and night for weeks, and no one was going to go for that.

Cooper had the idea to start hunting for derelict or condemned apartment complexes. There’s a big list because you have to register them with the city of Los Angeles. We started visiting these locations.

BPC: The list doesn’t give you the owners’ e-mails or phone numbers. They only give you the addresses of where they live.

DP: Or where they think they live.

BK: That’s true. It was a big process and it took about a month, at least. We were driving around LA to the often terrible places because they were these rundown buildings.

BPC: And you broke into that one that we ended up getting.

BK: That’s right! We couldn’t get in and almost didn’t look. It was gated and locked, but my spider-sense was tingling and decided to jump the fence and wander around. Initially it didn’t seem like what we wanted. But we kept coming back to it and thought it was pretty cool. It had a nice rod-iron gate. Luckily the letter we sent got through to the guy and he called us. The fee worked out.

DP: Has it been torn down yet?

BK: I don’t know, it wasn’t a few months ago because some permitting thing got screwed up.

BPC: Yeah, a few of the PAs that we keep in touch with say they’ve been by it and it’s still there.

DP: That’s crazy!

BK: We could do re-shoots.

BPC: Or a sequel.

With the way the film went, that’s not entirely out of the question.

BK: People have talked to us about a sequel, or TV. Because TV is blowing up all over the place, we’ve definitely gotten people nibbling at it. It’s very episodic, a la “Quantum Leap” meets “Morning Edition,” that show where the guy got the newspaper every morning that told him the day’s events. Were we ever to go that route, I don’t think we’d do a hero story, like “Quantum Leap,” but something more consistent with the tone of this thing, which is someone falling from grace or getting in trouble with the machine.

I think we want to try something different before we revisit this idea.

I’d like to talk a little bit about the casting because the acting was great across the board. Not just with singling out Danielle and George because they’re here, but everyone was great. How were you able to get the actors on board?

BPC: It was both traditional and nontraditional ways.

BK: For Danielle, she was in Girls Against Boys, we were at the premiere screening at SXSW. I was totally floored. The movie was good and Danielle was really good in it. She did a Q&A afterwards and I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t it be awesome to work with her?” We didn’t write the script with her in mind, but about a week and a half in, we were both like, “You know who would be awesome for this?”

BPC: I had been thinking it but didn’t want to say anything because it jinxes things when you imagine someone in that role; it jinxes the project right away and guarantees that you’re not going to get that person. I didn’t want to say anything to Bradley because that would’ve gotten his hopes up because I knew he’d think it was a really good idea.

Literally a few days later, he burst into this office saying, “I HAVE THIS GREAT IDEA!” He does that on occasion, and they’re almost always really good ideas. They’re usually about the story. He says, “DANIELLE PANABAKER AS CALLIE!” and I said I was thinking the same thing but didn’t want to say anything to you.

We looped up with Rick Montgomery, who has been a casting director in Hollywood for over twenty years and worked on a bunch of much bigger films. He read the script and said he wanted to come on board and help, but he also wanted to produce it with you. He has relationships with talent and agents that I just don’t have. We pitched it to him, not to throw him under the bus, but he said, “Danielle? You’re not going to get her.”

DP: I didn’t know that!

BPC: Oh yeah. But he came around a day later and said, “Let me reach out and see what she says.”

BK: The worst she can say is no.

BPC: I’ll let you take it from there, because I don’t know how your agency works, but they probably have like four people read it before they even give it to you.

DP: My understanding is that sometimes agents don’t even forward stuff on. I’m very lucky that mine are amazing and they do send scripts to me. I was at a place, and I’m still there, where I was skeptical of doing another genre piece. This had some scary stuff, but, to me, it’s not a typical genre story, in terms of thrashers and thrillers, like I’ve already done. I took a look at it. When you look at Callie as an actor, it was so exciting to play a character that had so many options. It’s never just what’s on the page.

I went in and met with these guys, and that was it.

BPC: Can I ask them a question?

Of course.

BPC: It’s so interesting to me because we went into it knowing that we don’t have an entire body of work where can show you what we did. We just mostly have words on page. You guys both have bodies of work that is tangible and visceral and you can watch it. As actors, how did you make that leap of faith, where you say you’re going to trust this director knows what he’s doing? Where is that line and when did you decide to trust it?

BK: No one ever asked me for a reel, because I’ve done a zillion short films. No one asked me for anything. I expected the agents…

DP: I think there’s something exciting about working with a newer director. Particularly working with a writer/director, you’re working with someone who is passionate about the project. If you write and direct it, you give a shit. That’s what interesting to me.

Again, you guys were so prepared. It wasn’t like “I’ve got the script and we’re going to go out and do stuff.” You were very prepared so it never felt like you didn’t know what you were doing.

GF: When I read the script, and I try to read anything I can, I was really happy with it. I could tell that there was going to be a twist and that something was going to happen. I didn’t really have any problems with it. I liked it so much and thought, “This is a movie I would like to see.” With Jasper, it didn’t play with any stereotypes. It was a very realistic approach of what would happen if these three people had this encounter. You sent me this pitch packet and everything was really detailed and broken down. There was heart in it and I could tell you both knew what you wanted to do and how you were going to get it done. When I met with you guys, I tried to ask a few questions, and your confidence came through and I really wanted to be a part of it.

But, as you say, it really is a leap of faith.

BK: The pitch packet helped. That’s good to know.

But to circle back to your question. That’s how we found Danielle. For George, he was in LOL and I had seen him in some short films. There was something about his work that kept pulling me back.

BPC: He had this really interesting short on his real where he said something like, “I’m a motherfucking fuck.”

GF: That was my first I made with my brother. It’s called The Harsh Life of Veronica Lambert. That was one scene that was on my reel.

BK: That was with your brother? That was the one that moved me. I expressed a real attitude and fierceness. I think that’s what started drawing us towards George.

Finn, Matt O’Leary’s character, was the hardest. We almost had to push the movie because had we met with a lot of people and none were working out. I had been accused of writing a lot of myself into that character and maybe that’s why I was so tangled up in the decision making. But we met Matt and he was great and it all worked out.

Is there anything you want people to take away from the film, either after it plays here or beyond?

DP: I want people to watch it again after they see it the first time.

BPC: Debate it with however you came with, friends.

BK: We want people to drag their friends.

BPC: Buy a hundred copies of it, mention it on Facebook, Twitter…

BK: I hope people will want to see it again, but in the best sense. You see movies where you think, “I need to see it again but don’t want to, just to understand it.” I hope with this one, it’s clear but they’re curious to see what Danielle does on a second viewing, and see George’s descent all over again.

GF: For me, given the opportunity: don’t fuck with time.

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, 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.

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

SIFF 2014: The Search for General Tso (and Other Food Flicks)

I like to think that my love of Chinese food dates back to my childhood days, when I salivated at the thought of eating at Dragon Island restaurant in Centereach, NY—the town adjoining mine on Long Island. My favorite dish back then was shrimp with lobster sauce. When I later learned to make it, I realized that it contains no lobster, and that it’s not really a Chinese dish.

So I laughed when shrimp with lobster sauce came up in today’s screening of The Search for General Tso at SIFF. There will be two more opportunities to see the film, which uses General Tso’s chicken to show how the Chinese created a cuisine customized to American taste buds in order to survive and thrive in the United States. Chop suey would be the breakthrough, with cashew chicken, honey-walnut prawns, and my beloved shrimp with lobster sauce being similar adaptations. Now it’s General Tso’s chicken that’s the ubiquitous dish around America. But bring that dish to China, and no one knows what it is. Most find it a bit bizarre, much like the fortune cookie, which one Chinese person in the film questioned in terms of edibility.

The Search for General Tso traces the roots of the General Tso’s chicken, ultimately finding its inventor in Taiwan, who calls the Americanized version “crazy nonsense.” Meanwhile, Jennifer 8. Lee (co-producer of the film and author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles) describes the dish as contrary to everything Tso stood for: preserving Chinese culture and tradition.

The Search for General Tso is a fun and interesting ride for food lovers and non-lovers alike. It’s transporting, making you think about your relationship to Chinese food, just as it took me back to that “exotic” Dragon Island restaurant. And it will likely make you hungry.

As SIFF is again featuring a number of food-related films, this food writer would like to offer you some pairings. Like wine for food, this is food for films. For The Trip to Italy, how about splurging for dinner at Altura? In honor of Sweden’s Love and Lemons, I’m tempted to suggest the IKEA cafeteria if you’re going to the screening at the IKEA Performing Arts Center in Renton; otherwise, try the Swedish Cultural Center. For the conservation-minded Seeds of Time, try Tilth. For cooking competition-focused Final Recipe, go to Aragona, where Seattle’s most recent chef contestant Carrie Mashaney is cooking. Thinking about Cannibal, I tread lightly. Maybe the smoked pig head at Whiskey Radiator?

As for combining food with the The Search for General Tso film, I don’t have a recommendation for General Tso’s chicken. Like many of the “experts” in the film, I don’t order the dish. (If you have your heart set on it, my friend Surly Gourmand joined other friends in doing a General Tso’s chicken crawl a couple of years back.) Given that General Tso’s chicken is to real Chinese food what much of Seattle’s ramen (what I call Wramen) is to real Japanese ramen, I went American after the movie and marched over to Loulay for a French-influenced burger.

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

SIFF 2014: Picks for Opening Weekend (May 16-18)

Although we weren’t crazy about SIFF’s opening night selection, aside from throwing a fantastic party (complete with Hendrix music missing from the film, hundreds of well-dressed Seattleites, remarkably efficient bar queues, and the feeling of a Film Prom), the festival still kicked off with some exceptionally great news.  SIFF announced that they are now the proud owner of the Uptown (thanks to the “Angels of the Uptown”) and that they have officially secured the lease to operate the Egyptian as a year-round theater (thanks to an agreement with Seattle Central Community College). As exciting as it was to hear that the Egyptian would be part of this year’s festival, it’s a tremendous relief to know that SIFF will be permanently unshuttering the Capitol Hill movie palace. In addition to re-opening the venue, they’re planning substantial renovations. An anonymous donor has promised matching funds of $150,000 dollars; those with less deep pocketbooks can join the campaign by texting “SIFF” to 501501.

 

Spend an Afternoon with Laura Dern and Wild at Heart.

SIFF’s opening weekend is packed with special guests and events, perhaps none more special than Laura Dern, most recently of Enlightened, the brilliant and deeply affecting HBO dramedy that she co-created with Mike White. Unfortunately, SIFF isn’t marathoning the glorious series from beginning to (too soon) end, but on Friday afternoon, Dern will greet hundreds of sobbing teenagers for the film adaptation of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. The next day, she’ll spend the afternoon at the Egyptian for a retrospective, Q&A, presentation of SIFF’s Outstanding Achievement in Acting, and a screening of David Lynch’s Wild At Heart

The Saturday party series also kicks off this weekend with with Dior and I followed by a gathering at Pacific Place.

Finally, Sunday’s program includes a screening of Serenity along with Chiwetel Ejiofor. He’s in town for An Evening with Chiwetel Ejiofor where he’ll also be receiving one of SIFF’s Outstanding Achievement in Acting awards. The presentation and conversation is accompanied by his new film, Half a Yellow Sun.

WEEKEND PICKS

Start your weekend with Ida and/or pray for a great movie forecast.

Even if you don’t go to any of these events, your first weekend of SIFF can still be extra-special. Below, we list a few of the films that we’re most excited to see. Caveat emptor, many of these picks are made on hunches, affinity for a director’s previous work, or just general buzz. Please use the comments to dispute our selections or highlight missed gems!

Ida  Writing for the New York Times, A. O. Scott calls Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida “one of the finest European films (and one of most insightful films about Europe, past and present) in recent memory”. The main risk of starting your SIFF with this story of a Polish novice discovering difficult truths in post-War Poland is that it might set an impossibly high bar for the rest of the festival.

  • May 16, 2014 3:30 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown
  • May 21, 2014 7:00 PM Harvard Exit

Venus in Fur : Roman Polanski adapts the contemporary stageplay about adapting a novella for the screen, casting Mathieu Amalric against his [Polanski’s] wife (Emmanuelle Seigner) for psychosexual shennanigans in a Paris theater. There’s some of the usual front-row awkwardness with plays transferred to film, but the two person show remains compelling onscreen as writer/director and goddess/actress read, workshop, comment on, and become the shifting-power-dynamics theatrical performance.

 

  • Friday May 16 (4:00 PM) @  Harvard Exit;
  • Saturday May 17 (6:30 PM) @ SIFF Cinema Uptown

 

Skeleton Twins : Craig Johnson’s True Adolescents was one of my favorites from SIFF 2009. He returns to the festival this year SNL-alums Kristin Wiig and Bill Heder playing estranged twins who reunite for some melancholy humor in upstate New York. 

  • May 16, 20149:30 PM Egyptian Theatre

 

The Double : Richard Ayoade (The IT Crowd, the utterly delightful Submarine) drops Jesse Eisenberg into a Dostoyevsky novella, playing two versions of himself, the brash one coaching the timid other through a courtship with Mia Wasikowska.

  • May 16, 2014 9:30 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown
  • May 18, 2014 9:30 PM Lincoln Square Cinemas

 Tom at the Farm : I’ll watch anything Quebecois filmmaker Xavier Dolan puts on the screen. He casts himself at the center of his own movies and has enormous confidence in his ability to realize his own particularly saturated cinematic vision; so I’m beyond intrigued to see how his shift away from his “trilogy of impossible love” to this suspenseful noir set at a country funeral plays out.

  • May 16, 2014 9:30 PM Harvard Exit
  • May 20, 2014 4:00 PM Harvard Exit

Chinese Puzzle : In a somewhat lighter Euro parallel to Richard Linklater’s monumentally affecting Before ____ series, Cédric Klapisch checks-in for a third time with the characters that we fell in love with in a crowded Barcelona international student sharehouse in L’Auberge Espagnole. This time, we catch up with Romain Duris, Audrey Tautou, and the rest of the gang in New York where they face more grown-up problems. [In a strange convergence, this is not the only Duris–Tatou feature at the festival this year, but more on Mood Indigo later.]

  • May 16, 2014 4:00 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown
  • May 18, 2014 8:30 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown

Chris’s Pick:

Fight Church: director Bryan Storkel had a SIFF hit a few years ago with Holy Rollers, a documentary about a team of Christian, blackjack pros who specialize in card-counting. Here he details not just how mixed martial arts seems to be a fixation among a lot of Christian men, but how some churches actually host their own underground fight clubs.

  • May 17, 2014 1:00 PM Pacific Place
  • May 18, 2014 4:00 PM Lincoln Square Cinemas (Bellevue)
  • May 26, 2014 12:30 PM Rention IKEA Performing Arts Center

Tony’s Picks:

Desert Cathedral: This combination of found footage, archival clips, and newly-filmed narrative bits uses the true story of real estate developer Peter Collins’ disappearance (and the enigmatic pile of VHS tapes that formed a metaphoric breadcrumb trail) as a springboard for a pretty unusual fiction/fact hybrid. I have no idea if Travis Gutierrez Senger’s shot-in-Seattle feature debut will be as fascinating in execution as it is in concept, but I’m mightily intrigued.

  • May 17, 2014 9:00 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown
  • May 18, 2014 1:30 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown

The Lusty Men: The Lusty Men hasn’t acquired the cult cache of director Nicholas Ray’s two most famous movies (1954’s subversive western Johnny Guitar and James Dean’s signature starring vehicle, 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause), but it’s a great 1952 drama revolving around the love triangle between a cocksure young rodeo rider (Arthur Kennedy), his spitfire of a gal (Susan Hayward), and the long-in-the-tooth pro (Robert Mitchum) who comes between them.

  • May 18, 2014 5:30 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown

Witching and Bitching: I’m a total sucker for Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia’s feverishly-imaginative takes on genre tropes (The Last Circus emerged as one of my SIFF 2011 faves), so this horror comedy about a group of costumed burglars running afoul of a coven of witches looks utterly, sublimely batshit crazy–in other words, typical de la Iglesia.

  • May 17, 2014 Midnight Egyptian
  • May 20, 2014 9:30 PM Egyptian

White Shadow: Many of the films in SIFF 2014’s African Pictures series look exceptionally promising, none more so than this reputedly shattering thriller about a young Tanzanian albino on the run from superstitious locals.

  • May 17, 2014 8:30 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown
  • May 18, 2014 2:00 PM Pacific Place

Another: The trailer for Jason Bognacki’s feature debut about a young woman with a possibly Satanic lineage promises heady, disorienting chills, with 70s-vintage British and Italian horror as jumping-off points.

  • May 17, 2014 5:30 PM SIFF Cinema Uptown
  • May 18, 2014 2:00 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: Pre-Festival Roundtable


Here we are again, on the verge of the annual marathon known as the Seattle International Film Festival. (Keep track of The SunBreak’s ongoing festival coverage on our SIFF 2014 page.) SIFF 2014 officially kicks off this monster of a film festival for the 40th time beginning with an Opening Night Gala tonight at McCaw Hall featuring Jimi: All Is By My Side (Oscar-winning writer/director John Ridley will be on the red carpet, but don’t count on Andre 3000 playing the afterparty). By the time all all is said and done with The One I Love on closing night, the 40th annual SIFF will have run a full 25 days, and that’s not even counting the weeks of media/uber-passholder screenings in advance of the fest (and the “best of SIFF” showcase that’s likely to follow). So get ready and don’t show up to the festival looking like a n00b. SIFF like a pro, courtesy of our time- and fest-tested tips.

OPENING NIGHT CHATTER

Josh: Let’s start with Opening Night. Chris, in your Face the Music roundup, you mentioned that you stayed to see Jimi: All Is By My Side. What’s your verdict?

Chris: Oh I hate to say this, but it is bad. Really, really bad. First of all, it had to be rewritten because Kathy Etchingham said that her portrayal was way inaccurate. Hendrix also hits her in the face with a telephone in the movie and she swears that never happened. There are a lot of “artistic liberties” taken here.

Tony: I’m reserving my judgment until I get a look at it, plus Hendrix is one of my music-nerd Achilles Heels, so I likely won’t be able to speak to all of the movie’s inaccuracies. But the polarizing reaction from you and others has me massively curious.

Josh: At least you get to hear some great Hendrix music?

Chris: Oh, actually they couldn’t secure any of the rights to use Hendrix’s music, which is kind of necessary in a movie about Jimi Hendrix, no? Instead, they try to cover up this fact with Hendrix performing a Beatles cover, which, admittedly is pretty cool in its execution.

Tony: It is really strange that a lot of great ’60s artists–The Who, Small Faces, even US garage-punks The Seeds–surface on the soundtrack, but no Hendrix. Then again, securing those rights would’ve likely decimated the movie’s budget.

Chris: And they’re not even really an ancillary part of the movie the way that The Rolling Stones, The Animals, or The Beatles are.

Josh: Well, at least there’s Andre 3000?

Chris: I consider myself a big Outkast fan, but I think Andre 3000 was miscast. He never really looks comfortable trying to replicate how Hendrix played guitar and this movie covers Hendrix in 1966 when he was 23, and Andre turns 39 in a couple of weeks. He just doesn’t look like a 23 year old in this movie.

Josh: Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?  Any redeeming qualities if you can ignore all of the inaccuracies?

Chris: I did enjoy the film as a snapshot of what London was (maybe) like in 1966. I’m just really particular about biopics and how they treat their subjects, so this one really bothered me. This has been a controversial one from the beginning.

I don’t want my antipathy for the film to overshadow SIFF itself, which has a lot of movies I really am excited for and a handful of great movies I already have seen. Plus, the opening night party is always a lot of fun. I do understand that programming the opening night movie is difficult, and it seems like an obvious choice for SIFF (directed by Academy Award-winning screenwriter John Ridley, it’s a biopic of a Seattle-born music legend, this screening is just before Outkast plays Sasquatch), but the movie just has too many problems to overlook.

Josh: Hmm. Thanks for braving this one for the team. Perhaps I’ll head straight to the party to get a jump on the food and drink lines.

 

MISCELANEOUS FORECASTING

So, what are your must-sees at SIFF this year? [and/or most highly recommended]

Josh: Ever since I starting reading about Richard Linklater’s 12-years-in-the-making project, I’ve been super excited to weep openly during Boyhood, so I’m very excited that it’s getting the Centerpiece Gala treatment. I also squealed audibly in a cafe when paging through the SIFF guide and seeing that they’ll be doing a screening of a recently-restored print of Last Year at Marienbad. It was mind-bendy on DVD at home, watching a gorgeous print in a theater is high on my list. I’m always interested to see what Xavier Dolan’s up to; so Tom at the Farm is high on my priorities list. Similarly, like Linklater’s Before Sunrise, Sunset, and Midnight series Cédric Klapisch is revisiting the exchange students that we first met in 2002 in a Barcelona boarding house. L’Auberge Espagnole is a weirdly foundational movie for me, and the follow-up Russian Dolls was incredibly sweet, so I’m perhaps unreasonably thrilled to check back in with these characters (this time in New York, in Chinese Puzzle).

Tony: I’m totally with you on Boyhood, Josh. The trailer took my breath away at the SIFF press launch, and Linklater’s pretty damned consistent in the first place.

In addition to the Marienbad reissue, I’m also excited to see Nicholas Ray’s 1952 rodeo drama The Lusty Men in pristine 35mm. There’s also the revival screening of The Pawnbroker, which showcases one of Rod Steiger’s most controlled and brilliant performances.

SIFF 2014’s doing an awful lot to inflame my genre-nerd glands to the point of bursting. The Midnighters look super-strong: The Aussie chiller The Babadook has been generating much great buzz around the geek campfire, Why Don’t You Play in Hell promises an energetic wrinkle in the usual Yakuza fireworks, Zombeavers serves up (yup) living-dead dam-building mammals, and as for Willow Creek–well, it’s a Bigfoot movie directed by Bobcat Goldthwait. Sold.

A lot of the strongest-sounding genre entries play beyond the Midnight Adrenaline alleyway. Sabu’s Miss Zombie, with its nods at social satire sharing space with the gut munching, should be interesting, and there’s always room for another elegant historic vampire flick in my book, so Story of my Death, in which Casanova hangs out with Dracula, has my interest piqued.

The horror flick I’m most excited to see, though, is one that I suspect will only appeal to a niche crowd (even more so than usual). It’s The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears, a Belgian/French co-production by Bruno Forzani and Helene Cattet. I fell head over heels for the directorial duo’s debut, the 2010 giallo-influenced dark fairy tale Amer, when it played SIFF that year. Its strangeness–too arty to appeal to horror hounds, too gory and feverish to capture the art house crowd–reportedly emerges fully-formed in this new effort. I’m expecting atmosphere and style dense enough to cut with a knife, and I can hardly wait to see it.

Chris: I think the film I’m most excited to see is Lucky Them, the new movie from Megan Griffiths, who is a local treasure. Her last movie, Eden, was one of my favorite films of SIFF when it screened in 2012. It was such a compelling, and well-directed film. Plus, she was wonderful to interview when Eden played at SIFF, so I couldn’t help but be excited for her next project, whatever it might be. That it’s about a music journalist (played by Toni Collette!) and a documentary filmmaker (Thomas Haden Church) looking for a music legend that seems to have disappeared means I really can’t miss seeing it. The Egyptian will be packed on May 23 but I’ll be getting there early for that one.

SIFF always does a really great job programming documentaries, and I could very easily see myself watching dozens of them this year. I really enjoyed Nancy Kates’ Regarding Susan Sontag. It’s a really great story of the author and how she became one of the twentieth century’s leading cultural critics. Sontag was always worth paying attention to, and her Notes on “Camp” was hugely influential on me when I read it, as was Fascinating Fascism, which I only read more recently. Patricia Clarkson narrates, too.

I’m also anxious to see The Search for General Tso. One of my favorite books in my collection is my signed copy of Jennifer 8 Lee’s history of Chinese food called The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (she signed it, “May the fortune cookie be with you”). This movie expands on the chapter on General Tso’s chicken from the book as Lee produced this documentary (with Ian Cheney directing). The challenge for me will be making it to one of its three screenings. I know Jay will have a lot more to say about the movie in the coming days.

Weird Convergences? 

Josh: Well, there’s a movie called Belle & Sebastien and God Help The Girl (directed by Stuart Murdoch of Belle & Sebastian) that are entirely unrelated. I saw God Help the Girl at SxSW this spring and found it just impossibly charming. It felt like an alternate universe story of the beginnings of a band that I love, set in the world of Tigermilk, with girl-group inspired musical numbers. I’m going to try my hardest to see it again since it has a couple of SIFF showtimes.

There are also two Romain Duris–Audrey Tatou vaguely romantic comedies, the aforementioned Chinese Puzzle as well as the oppressively whimsical Mood Indigo from Michel Gondry. I wanted so badly to adore Mood Indigo that I was bummed for days about not falling in love with it.

Josh Takes a Deep Dive into the Programmer Picks

One of my favorite source of guidance about what to see at SIFF is the data provided directly by the programming team. For the last several years, they’ve published a document that shares each programmer’s favorite films at the festival. Of the 271 feature films in the program a whopping 127 merit a “pick” from at least one of the nineteen members of the programming team (from Assistant Programmers all the way up to Artistic Director Carl Spence; Managing Director Mary Bacarella remained silent on her favorites).

You’d have to be a Fool to contemplate seeing 127 films in 25 days. But applying the wisdom of crowds, the runaway favorite among the “programmer picks” Ari Folman’s animated-live action hybrid The Congress, which showed up six lists. Anything with that broad of support among the programming crew merits a spot on my festival agenda. Tied for second-most beloved, with four votes each are: The Babadook; Me, Myself and Mum; and Tangerines. 

If you’re filling up your cinematic 20-pack, twelve films — 20,000 Days on Earth (Nick Cave!), #ChicagoGirl – The Social Network Takes on a Dictator (teenager vs. al-Assad!), The Double (Jesse Eisenberg vs. Jesse Eisenberg), Grand Central, Jealousy (Père Garrel directing son fils, encore), Of Horses and Men (the mighty & tiny ICELANDIC horse! not a pony.), Rags and Tatters, Seeds of Time (crop diversity heroics!), Starred Up (Cook from Skins goes to jail!), A Street in Palermo, Tom at the Farm, We Are the Best! — secured the affections of three different programmers.

Another way to navigate the festival is just to movie-stalk a programmer whose judgment you trust. Maybe they give great intros or recommend a film that works for you. Although we haven’t built the Buzzfeedesque quiz to determine your compatibility with a given programmer, if we setting up a movie date among the programmers, Assistants Virgile Heitzler and Camille Madinier are the most cinematically compatible: both included Abuse of Weakness, Jealousy, Longwave, Me, Myself and Mum, A Street in Palermo, Tangerines, and Tom at the Farm on their lists.

Geographically, the programmers were fairly equitable with their picks. Although the United States (n=42),  France (n=11), and the United Kingdom (n=9) among the most represented, but not significantly out of proportion with the overall festival composition. However, when we turn to the geography of the imagination, programmers were fittingly most fond of the “Oasis of Originality” — collectively 71% of the movies in the Creative Streak Mood were picked as at least one programmer’s favorite while “Sci Fi and Fact” was perhaps a bit underloved.

 

OK, We could look at data all week, but there are movies to see. Let’s get to those time-tested pro-tips:

PLANNING

  • Seattle is a town that loves a line; so plan at least a little bit ahead. Get to know the new SIFF website well (Go ahead and add a calendar link to your home screen). For extra credit, check to see if guests will be at the screening for a Q&A, for timing and scheduling purposes, if not for celeb-watching, and monitor the various SIFF feeds regularly for updates, so you’ll have the heads up before a screening sells out.
  • The festival is stuffed with galas, parties, and events; if you want an occasion to wear your fancy filmgoing outfit, splurge on a party ticket and spend some of your SIFF time mingling over cocktails instead of whispering over popcorn.
  • In terms of choosing what to see among the 435 films from 83 countries (198 features, 60 documentaries, 163 shorts), you can navigate through the the festival’s official programs and competitions, or take a touchy-feely approach and follow your heart to a programmer-curated set of “moods destinations“.
  • If you’re still stumped, take a look a the Programmer’s Picks. These are the people who watched all of the movies at SIFF, plus hundreds that didn’t make the cut. Anything that remains memorable to them after months of immersion, scheduling, and tough choices have to be pretty solid choices.
  • SIFF has a ton of information on its website and lets you create an account to buy tickets and build your own festival agenda. However, My SIFF is pretty much an isolated island as far as social networking goes. If you want to share your schedule with friends, you can send it to them by email, but that’s about it. At this point, SIFF’s resilience to networking has almost attained a sort of retro-charm.
  • While your schedule and your online presence might not be b.f.f.s, SIFF hopes you’ll interact with them on Facebook & Twitter, where we can all work together to make #SIFForty happen.
  • Free printed guides should be at your friendly neighborhood Starbucks. Luddites can use the guide’s two center pages, which contain the whole festival’s schedule, a 25-day strategy manifesto.
  • Once the festival starts, you can buy a commemorative catalog. The glossy pictures and longer descriptions make almost every film look more compelling, and the giant book makes a nice souvenir/scorecard/autograph book.

BUYING

  • Consider buying in bulk. Ticket packages cut down on service fees and can be cheaper than individual tickets.
  • Flying by the seat of your pants and getting into a film via the standby line is a complete crapshoot — don’t count on it for a popular film. But if a miracle does occur, those tickets are full price and “cash preferred.”
  • However, it doesn’t hurt to try your luck with whatever happens to be playing on whatever night you happen to be free. Not every screening has an interminable line, sometimes those scary-looking line is just hard-core SIFFers with time on their hands and/or an ingrained sense of promptness, and many times you may walk right in to a half-empty theater. It’s the chance to experience seeing something you enjoy on some level, if only just a window to a different world/experience than what you’re used to. GIVE IN to the festival.
  • Head to a SIFF box office to get your tickets in advance and avoid an extra line at the venue for will call. If you must pick up tickets at will call, try to drop in between screenings and have them print all of your pre-ordered tickets at once.

ATTENDING

  • If you’re particular about where you sit, there’s no such thing as arriving too early. Expect every screening to have a long line and a full house. Still, as long as you have a ticket, you’ll have a seat. If you’re a passholder, you can usually show up about 20-30 minutes in advance of the screening and still get a good seat. Ticketholders, try 30 min. All bets are off in the case of movies with big buzz. In that case, take whatever seat you can get, but just sit down already. There’s not going to be some magical super-seat in the theater if you scour the entire venue.
  • Be prepared with umbrella and light jacket. Bringing some snacks is acceptable, but don’t be That Guy who sneaks in a four-course meal.
  • Find your path of least resistance. For example, at the Egyptian, nearly everyone enters the theater and goes to the left. So break away from the herd and go to the right.
  • Bathrooms! (Ladies, I’m mostly speaking to you, unless you’re a dude at a dude-heavy midnight screening.) It’s a good rule of thumb that the further away the bathroom is, the shorter the line. So the third floor bathrooms at the Harvard Exit are much more likely to be free compared to those on the second floor. Another way to avoid the line is to either head straight to the restroom as soon as you get into the theater, or wait until the lights go down and the SIFF ads start. You’ve still got about 7 minutes of ads, trailers, and announcements before the film begins.
  • Consider subtitles. If your film has them and you’re not fluent, find a seat with a clear view of the bottom of the screen. Aisle left or right is generally a good bet. The seats on the center aisle (exit row) at the Egyptian have tons of room to stretch your legs, but the raking of the theater flattens out for the aisle, so you’re likely to have an obstructed view of the subtitles if anyone of average height or above average skull circumference sits in front of you.
  • If you’re a passholder, the queue cards are back to give you a place in the passholder line. SIFF staff start handing them out about 30 minutes before showtime to figure out (and limit) how many passholders they’re letting in to the venues. Passholders who show up after the supply of queue cards have been exhausted will join the huddled masses in the standby line.

EXTRACURRICULAR

  • If you’re on foot, trying to see multiple films in a row, and want a little brisk exercise between screenings, the sweet spot is the Egyptian. It’s a walkable distance from the Harvard Exit, as well as Pacific Place. The Egyptian is also right next to a Walgreen’s, if you need water, snacks, or eye drops after 12 hours of movie viewing.
  • Alternately, if mobility isn’t your thing, Lower Queen Anne is basically a film buffet with SIFF’s three screens at the Uptown theater and their Film Center on the nearby Seattle Center. Festgoers who usually stick around the Downtown/Capitol Hill area theaters (Pacific Place, the Egyptian, the Harvard Exit) will want to plan some extra travel time accordingly: the roster of SIFF entries playing the Uptown is just too diverse and strong to ignore. However, heading to Queen Anne leaves you reliant on Seattle’s not always timely bus service. Might we suggest the monorail? OR GONDOLAS?
  • Speaking of theater eats and drinks, Bloombergites will be happy to know that most of the theaters have semi-secret human scale snack options on the menu (though the only way to get an actually small soda is often when paired with an actually small popcorn). At Pacific Place, it’s the “light snacker,” it exists at the Landmark chain under a name unknown, and at SIFF, it’s blissfully and accurately called a “small”. Maybe it’s not the best economic value, but some of us have no impulse control and limiting portion sizes is the only way to make it out of this festival un-brined.

We’ll see you at the movies! Keep track of the SunBreak’s SIFF coverage on our SIFF 2014 page, plus news updates and micro-reviews on Twitter @theSunBreak.