That's a Wrap!

It goes without saying that by the time the end comes it is almost always bitter sweet. At least, that’s the way it always goes with me when it comes to doing something I love. Softball season, going home to Spokane for the holidays, shoe shopping, going to a concert of a favorite artist, eating Mexican Food, Seahawk football games, going out to clubs with friends; all of these give me a euphoric high I never want to see end.

That’s how I feel about this year’s edition of the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF). Twenty-five days (and a couple weeks of press screenings before that) may sound like a lot of time to be sitting inside movie theaters, but by the time it’s over every minute always seems to have gone by much too much too fast. But that, as they say, is the nature of the best, and if SIFF didn’t come to a close than I couldn’t sit in eager anticipation of next year, now could I?

As far as the 2007 edition of the festival was concerned, I couldn’t have been happier. I saw plenty of pictures to make me excited, not the least of which was what I think is the best movie of 2007, the glorious Irish musical Once. There was Oliver Dahan’s La Vie en Rose, Steve Buscemi’s Interview, Roar Uthaug’s Cold Prey, David Sington’s In the Shadow of the Moon, Luc Besson's Angel-A, Christopher Smith’s Severance, Daniel Karslake’s For the Bible Tells Me So, Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up, Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn, Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes, Seth Gordon’s King of Kong, Asger Leth’s Ghosts of Cité Soleil, Dan Klores’ Crazy Love, Johnnie To’s Exiled, David Hoffman’s The Fever of ’57, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Strange Culture, Ash Brannon and Chris Buck’s Surf’s Up, Julie Delpy’s 2 Days in Paris, Jonathan King’s Black Sheep, J-yong E’s Dasepo Naughty Girls, Cate Shortland’s The Silence, Xiaogang Feng’s The Banquet, Fredi M. Murer’s Vitus, Lainy Bagwell and Lacey Leavitt’s Blood on the Fast Track: The Rise of the Rat City Rollergirls, Timur Bekmambetov’s Day Watch, David Bruckner, Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry’s The Signal, Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s Mushishi, Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories, Taika Waititi' s Eagle vs Shark, Johan Söderberg, Michael Stenberg and Linus Torell The Planet, Daniel Waters’ Sex and Death 101 and Laurent Tirard’s Molière.

I didn’t love all of these, of course, but most of them were either very good or near exceptional, with an even handful bordering on magnificent. And while there were plenty of misfires (I doubt I need to bring up The Ten again, but, as this is the last column, I will anyways because, let’s face it, the movie is so bad it deserves to be placed in a category of mediocrity all of its very own), there were far fewer of them for me this year, I fact I thank the SIFF programmers for immensely.

As for the annual awards, The Golden Space Needle Awards showed Seattle continues to have some of the most eclectic taste in all of America, John Jeffcoat’s amusing Outsourced winning for best film, Kaslake’s For the Bible Tells Me So taking home the documentary award, Waters winning Best Director for Sex and Death 101, Marion Cotillard getting the statue for Best Actress with her stunning turn as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose and Daniel Brühl winning Best Actor for his work in Salvador (a film I wanted to see but sadly missed).

SIFF 2007 also saw the arrival of Anthony Hopkins to receive a lifetime achievement award and to premiere his directorial debut Slipstream, Robert Benton (Kramer vs. Kramer, Nobody’s Fool) came to town to talk about screenwriting, Hollywood and his impressive career, a Face the Music Rock Party celebrating the Northwest’s diverse musical talent and filmmaker Julian Temple (Absolute Beginners, The Filth and the Fury) sat down to talk about rock, punk and what it takes to make a documentary about he music industry in a constantly evolving world.

There was plenty else of interest, and even more I missed out on (with over 400 films, shorts, documentaries and programs how could I not) but that’s how it is every year. All I know is that I can’t wait to see what SIFF has in story for us in 2008. If it is anything like what we got to experience in 2007, I say call up Cinema Seattle and become a member so you can make sure and get your pass for next year as soon as possible.

The Last Saturday

It’s Saturday morning and I’m looking at my final full day of activity for the Seattle International Film Festival. I’m starting the morning with a press screening of Evan Almighty before moving on to see Eytan Fox’s The Bubble, stopping by the SIFF press office to interview Steve Buscemi (ironically for a movie entitled Interview which is about, surprise surprise, an interview) and Laurent Tirard for the closing night film Molière, hitting a fundraiser for a local nonprofit, running over to the Egyptian to see the thriller Joshua and finally ending things with a midnight screening of the French slasher pic End of the Line.

Trust me, other than going to the wrap party at the brand new Pan Pacific Hotel, Sunday doesn’t look near as crazy.

Otherwise I’m in the middle of the wind-down, finally getting a chance to put together some the interviews I’ve done throughout the festival into columns and looking at the release schedule to see when some of these numerous Independents are going to see a theatrical release. I’m also trying to make a list of my personal highlights, a best-of list reflecting my personal SIFF journey in anticipation of the audience awards which will be announced tomorrow afternoon.

Looking at the past couple of days, I got a chance to see the weird (and sometimes wonderful) 1950’s-style creature-feature homage Trail of the Screaming Forehead by The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra director Larry Blamire. It’s the story of Longhead Bay, the citizenry being overrun by squiggly aliens who attach themselves to a person’s forehead. With a cast full of recognizable nobodies (most have them have appeared in television shows as diverse as Lost, Bones, Without a Trace, Angel and The West Wing), this thing is a silly and over the top good time. It’s also nowhere near as much fun as the filmmakers obviously think it is, but at only 88-minutes it hardly overstays its welcome.

Better is Daniel Waters’ (the writer of Heathers) latest suspenseful satire Sex and Death 101. I was ready to take Winona Ryder to task (and pronounce her career officially dead) after her appearance in the vile and awful The Ten, but with a finely attuned performance here I can’t very well do that now, can I? Simon Baker, Dash Mihok, Frances Fisher and Leslie Bibb also turn in some wickedly fun portraits, while Boston Leagal star Julie Bowen has a great moment about mid-movie a lot of people couldn’t help talk about afterwards.

The film revolves around a successful executive and ladies man named Roderick Blank (Baker) who receives a mysterious email causing his life to spin terribly out of control. It’s all due to a mysterious femme fatale (Ryder) who targets men she accuses of sex crimes for revenge, Blank’s once perfect life slowly dissolving as the screws begin to turn. There is a perverse complexity to the shenanigans here that’s creepily hysterical, Waters following up his debut Happy Campers with an equally as enjoyable genre-busting feature that’s as entertaining as just about anything I’ve had the pleasure to see at this year’s SIFF.

In other news, I finally got the chance to write up my interview with Eagle vs Shark director Taika Waititi (which you can find by clicking here). We had a great conversation about his film back at the start of the festival and it was wonderful to revisit it. I just wish I would have liked his film more. Sure bits and pieces of it are admittedly hysterical, but overall it just can’t find a consistent tone to make the low-brow love story resonate as strong as I’m sure the filmmaker intends. On the positive side of things, star Loren Horsley is a revelation, so wondrously perfect I can’t wait to see what film she gets the opportunity to appear in next.

Speaking of interviews, I sat down with Evening director Lajos Koltai (Fateless) yesterday morning, and except for a few language barriers (he’s Hungarian, and while he speaks English, I think some of my raid-fire questions might have confused him a little bit) we had a grand time discussing the intricacies of his latest star-studded (Meryl Streep, Toni Collette, Claire Danes, Vanessa Redgrave and Glen Close are just a few of gifted actors appearing here) melodrama. The film opens in a couple of weeks and you can expect to see the interview on the main site then. Until that time, here’s a brief highlight of our twenty minute conversation.

“Everything what we can do in [Evening] is follow [Ann Grant’s] memory,” says Koltai in reference to the film’s point of view. “It was the only one we could go with. Actually, I like to use this freedom of what she has in her memory, because she is totally under the control of the medicine so she goes in and out, in and out, all of the time.”

“So, I wanted to use [this device] very much to make it so it is natural that we are stepping back to entirely different era, which is fifty years ago at this wedding. I was picturing her room as if she had no walls there, no walls just her memories, so free, so she’s just trying to reach those memories and moments, let say they are the golden moments, and they’re about what happened to her [in the past]. We tried to stay with her and go with her, and that was what was most important.”

“I used a special coloring in the room and had to recreate everything even though we were on location. This is because I wanted a real colorless room, not much happening, because, what is happening here? She is trying to say goodbye to life. Everything else is just life, out of this bed, and so when you step over [out of the bed] you see a totally different color. You see the water, you see the grass, you see the sky, you see the wind, everything is just something bright and beautiful and fresh because this is her youth.”

Evening has a gala screening tonight at the Neptune Theater in the University District with the movie opening in limited release on June 29. It’s a wonderfully emotional journey filled with strong performances by its talented cast (including the best work I’ve ever seen from Blood and Chocolate and Beyond the Gates star Hugh Dancy) and definitely worth checking out.

Stretch Run

It’s Thursday morning and it just hit me that, including today, there are only four more days of film festival for me to cover. For some reason, as exhausted as I am and for as many movies as I have seen this still makes me very sad. While the last week-plus of SIFF hasn’t blown me away as much as that first glorious week-plus did (Once, La Vie en Rose, In the Shadow of the Moon, For the Bible Tells Me So, Crazy Love, Gunga Din, Knocked Up and Severance all showed within the first ten days of the festival), it’s still been such exhilarating fun I wouldn’t trade a moment of it for anything in the world.

Sure there have been some speed bumps (I’m still mad at the programmers for screening the horrendous The Ten), but not so many of them I’ve ever regretted going to so many movies (I’m up to 42) in so few days (I’ve only been covering SIFF full-out since May 30, only hitting a handful of the press screenings before then). This is still my favorite time of the year, so many filmmakers to talk to and so many different feature films and documentaries to experience the mind almost explodes just at the thought of them all.

I admit to slowing down a bit these past few days. But that’s because I’ve just been drowning in work all stemming from the festival and I’ve been working my little tail off trying to catch up. (Well, that’s not completely true. I did interview AnnaSophia Robb and Josh Hutcherson for the DVD release of Bridge to Terabithia on Tuesday, and I’m seeing Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer this afternoon at a press screening.) The big thing is trying to finish up my interview piece with Eagle vs. Shark director Taika Cohen, a column I was supposed to have up yesterday but which won’t actually go live until sometime tomorrow morning.

But my inadequacies as an entertainment writer are not what people want to read about. They want to hear about SIFF and what I’ve seen the last couple of days, and let me say quite happily very little this week has either upset me or left me feeling burned.

Topping that list of success is the independent psychological horror film The Signal. I really liked how this three-part thriller got under my skin and into my head, the three talented directors (who also wrote the playfully intricate screenplay) David Bruckner, Jacob Gentry and Dan Bush proving themselves to be an intriguing trio worth keeping an eye on to see what they have up their collective sleeves next.

Set in an average American city ominously named Terminus, a mysterious signal takes over all televisions, telephones and radios and starts rewiring people’s brains to start killing one another. Split into three distinct chapters each with a differing tone, the film follows a disparate group of characters as they try and survive both the signal and the effect it is having upon them and others, all making their way to the train station hoping to find a way to get out of town.

The film is great gobs of gory disconcerting fun, the directors playing upon both time and space with remarkably invigorating ease. Granted, with the whole thing being split into sections there is some choppiness to the picture that’s a little annoying, while some of the shifts in tone don’t always work near as well as I think the filmmakers hope. But it’s still a remarkably entertaining ride, and here’s hoping when this does finally get some sort of theatrical release from Magnolia audiences taking it will end up feeling the same.

For those wondering, I did manage to take in the Noir double-bill of The Big Combo and The Damned Don’t Cry. Introduced by Eddie Mueller, president of the Film Noir Foundation, these two were a total kick and enjoyed each and every nasty and brutal second of both. Admittedly I did enjoy the first far more then I did the second, the classic Joan Crawford melodrama not holding up for me near as well as I would have expected it to while the little-known Cornel Wilde/Richard Conte potboiler was a surprising (and far more entertaining) kick in the proverbial pants. Oh well, those are the breaks, both pictures still so enjoyable I couldn’t imagine having spent a better evening someplace else.

In other SIFF action, I was a little under whelmed by Jeff Nichol’s heartland brotherly melodrama Shotgun Stories produced by the great David Gordon Green (George Washington). It’s sort of a Texas riff on Crime and Punishment, and while I deeply admired the spectacular performance by veteran character actor Michael Shannon (World Trade Center) overall I found this Hatfield versus the McCoy’s saga of brother against brother kind of a tough slog.

It's a Noir World After All

I got the best gift yesterday morning and the timing couldn’t have been better. Every Sunday I play softball in a local league, and one of my teammate’s best friends gave me a copy of the new Criterion re-release of the 1949 Carol Reed classic The Third Man. Not only is this one of my absolute favorite films (and, to my mind, one of the best motion pictures ever made), tonight’s SIFF lineup is a salute to Noir with screenings of Joseph H. Lewis’ 1955 feature The Big Combo and Vincent Sherman’s 1950 Joan Crawford classic The Damned Don’t Cry (which I can’t wait to see).

But The Third Man towers (figuratively, literally, completely – every “ly” you can think of) above both of them. It goes without saying this complexly plotted and blissfully entertaining Vienna mystery (brilliantly written by Graham Greene) is probably one of the most influential productions of all time. Sure it was, like one of the essayists in the Criterion release proudly states, a “happy accident,” but that doesn’t make its lasting impact any less significant.

The film is the story of Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton), an American writer of novelettes entering a divided post-war Vienna with a smile. He’s there to take a job offered by former school chum Harry Lime (Orson Welles), but no sooner does he get off the train does he discover Harry is dead, killed in a freak accident. Soon Martins is embroiled in a Black Market mystery leading him to a beautiful actress (Alida Valli) who loved – loves – his late friend to the point of her own potential destruction.

There are few greater pleasures in film than The Third Man. From the performances of Cotton, Welles, Valli and Trevor Howard, to Robert Krasker’s stunning black and white photography, to the delirious plinka-plinka-plinka-plink of Anton Karas’ timeless Zither score, you’d be hard pressed to find a more stupendous example of Noir perfection than this European puzzle box. The story of the film’s production was hardly melodious or without conflict, but somehow some of the most talented (and ferociously ego-driven) personalities in Hollywood history managed to work together to craft a classic that holds up just as well now as it did in 1949.

Just for fun, here’s one section of dialogue everyone, including those who’ve never seen (let alone heard of) The Third Man knows:

Harry Lime: Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't. Why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat, I talk about the suckers and the mugs - it's the same thing. They have their five-year plans, so have I.

Holly Martins: You used to believe in God.

Harry Lime: Oh, I still do believe in God, old man. I believe in God and Mercy and all that. But the dead are happier dead. They don't miss much here, poor devils.

(Discussion continues for a couple of seconds before Lime exits the Ferris Wheel to leave but, before he does, he gives one of the single most famous speeches in all of Hollywood history)

Harry Lime: Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly.

I can’t wait to see the other two Film Noir titles this evening at SIFF. As good as both are, though, I can’t begin to think I’ll be as happy watching them as I was yesterday afternoon savoring The Third Man.

In other festival news, two wonderful events happened for me over this past weekend. The first was that I went to a midnight screening of the tense and terrific Norwegian slasher picture Cold Prey. The other was that my softball team scored 46 runs in two games only having to play nine innings in total vaulting us into first place in our local league.

The second doesn't really mean anything (other then it makes me smile) but the first is the important one here. After having to endure the truly heinous Hostel Part II, the thought of having to sit through another piece of serial killer sludge was almost too much for me, but I had friends who wanted to see this one and I couldn’t very well let them down. But, trust me, after enduring that monstrosity the last thing I really wanted to do was watch some psychopath kill people for an audience's amusement.

Thank goodness I didn’t because good-golly-miss-bloody-molly this one was great! This is as stripped down and as suspenseful as any good horror flick I’ve seen in ages. The saga of five snowboarders trapped in an isolated mountain inn after one of their crew breaks his leg, all of them stalked by a gigantic assailant armed with a pickaxe, I literally found myself glued to very edge of my seat. Not bad considering this was my fourth film of the day and the screening didn’t even start until midnight.

Kudos have to go director Roar Uthaug (if Roar isn’t the perfect name for a horror director I don’t know what is) and screenwriter Thomas Moldestad. Their picture is a lean, lithe, tense and brutally scary good time. Beautifully shot by Daniel Voldheim and with truly killer (excuse the pun) production design (no one attributed, but the IMDB lists Kristian Sinkerud as being responsible for “Production Management” so I guess I’ll give the props to her) this thriller is seriously a total kick in the pants. For true horror aficionados this, not Eli Roth’s heinous sequel, is the real can’t miss adventure, and when it hits DVD I hope everyone out there gets a chance to check it out.

Otherwise, the rest of my SIFF weekend was rather underwhelming. The great Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Séance) had his first outright failure with the turgid and unremarkable ghost story Retribution, while Antonio Banderas’ Summer Rain was absolutely beautiful to watch visually and completely empty on the emotional front. I missed both Lars von Trier’s The Boss of It All and Milos Forman’s Goya’s Ghosts (much to my frustration) but I did get to see Timur Bekmambetov’s Day Watch again, and while it still didn’t make a whole lot of sense I admittedly enjoyed it a heck of a lot more the second time than I did that first viewing.

I guess that’s something.

Huh?

I’ve been scratching my head a lot these past couple of days at the festival. Some of the movies are just too odd, even for me (and I tend to like odd). They’ve been either outlandish, unhinged, nonsensical or just plain all of the above, and right now I’m just not really all that sure what to say about any of them.

Leading the pack is the highly weird South Korean high school comedy Dasepo Naughty Girls. This is one of the most histrionic, all over the place, bizarrely sexual and freakishly outlandish pictures I frankly have ever seen. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it, director Je-yong Lee’s adaptation of what I can only assume (I haven’t Googled to find out yet… sorry) to be a comic book beyond anything you’ve ever imagined.

But beneath the layers of sexual innuendo, karaoke singing, dance numbers, crazy costumes, clingy stuffed animals, one-eyed outcasts and school girl cross-dressing there are actual merits and morals being discussed within this thing. For all the weirdness (and, trust me, any movie featuring a hundred-foot tall sexually ambiguous female snake, a snake which had just been vomited by an elderly male, being repelled by a legion of high school students simulating masturbation has plenty of weirdness) the movie has one of the best dialogues of what it means to be transgender I have probably ever seen.

It is a knock-out moment in a film filled with a legion of head-scratching ones, and almost by itself it raises Dasepo Naughty Girls from being an outlandish curiosity into a thoughtfully perceptive must. Granted, that’s an awfully big almost, and for the life of me I can’t imagine anyone but cult film fanatics going completely crazy over the thing. But it is certainly different, and considering we’re in the middle of the summer Hollywood silly season (Surf’s Up or Spider-Man 3, anyone?) when different is almost a naughty world that makes discovering it at SIFF worth it right there.

Bewildering in a completely different way, Xiaogang Feng’s The Banquet starring Ziyi Zhang (Memoirs of a Geisha) and Daniel Wu (New Police Story) is as perplexing an action-driven melodrama as you’re ever likely to find. A loose (very loose) adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the director makes on major miscalculation here. The main character, brooding sadsack outcast Prince Wu Luan (Wu), is an out disaster. He’s whiny. He’s weepy. He’s unbelievably one-dimensional. He’s also a spectator in his own dramatic play which makes him incredibly uninteresting.

Yet he’s the one all of the women, including the Empress (Zhang) and her handmaiden Qing Nu (Xun Zhou) are hungering for. Their the ones calculating, scheming, loving, learning and doing all they can to both ensure their love’s survival from his Uncle the Emperor’s (You Ge) murderous machinations. But why? The kid isn’t worth either their efforts or their love, his constantly downcast demeanor enough to make even the happiest Care Bear or Teletubby reach for the Paxil.

Thankfully, both women are fantastic. Truly fantastic, actually, both of them turning in such tumultuously complicated performance it is a pity this film hasn’t found a domestic distributor so I could talk about them more come December. It is also glorious filmed, Yuen Woo-ping’s (The Matrix) familiar fight and action choreography not only amazing but breathtakingly beautiful as well. All this makes for discomforting mixed bag, The Banquet filled with moments of pure poetry all of them surrounding a center of painful banality virtually impossible to escape.

Another odd one is the much-hyped New Zealand horror/comedy Black Sheep. I’ve been hearing for months that this gross-out science-gone-wrong B-movie was a true laugh-out-loud original in the vein of Tremors. It isn’t, not even remotely, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a lot of fun. The film can be a blood-soaked hoot, and the first time someone morphed from normal everyday human being into flesh-eating Weresheep I almost peed my panties I was giggling so ferociously.

But the pace is uneven at best, plodding at worst, writer/director Jonathan King not able to keep things moving even with scenes of voracious fluffy white sheep galloping menacingly across the New Zealand countryside. Even at a paltry 87 minutes this thing is far too long, and as funny as the sound of man-eating little lambs are the joke still feels a bit like a Saturday Night Live skit stretched out far past its breaking point.

Finally there was Poltergay, a French comedy about a straight couple moving into an old dilapidated house haunted by a quintet of disco-dancing gay men. The premise seems like it can’t miss, but while there are definitely a few solid laughs overall I sat in my theater seat twiddling my thumbs hoping the next movie was going to be better. It didn’t work for me, and the only thing I wanted to do while sitting in the theater was bolt out the door and see something else.

Luckily, that’s exactly what I get to do today. There’s only eight days left and I, for one, intend to try and make the best of them!

Let Me Tell You So

I haven’t been able to get director Daniel Karslake’s For the Bible Tells Me So out of my head since I saw it on Monday. What a great movie! This is why documentaries exist, to illuminate, educate and, most of all, entertain. Not only did I not get preached to by this examination of the religious Christian right and their thoughts on homosexuality, I actually started to feel like my years spent going to a Lutheran church weren’t so misspent after all.

No two ways about it, religion is a divisive subject in this country, and the irony there is certainly not lost on either me or Karslake. His film takes great pains to keep an open mind and to use an even hand. But he also never looses sight of keeping his audience watching, either, the film so much fun it’s easy to forget you’re actually viewing a documentary.

I interviewed the director the other day about his film, only a morning after the screening and just hours after he had learned his documentary had acquired a distributor. He was, needless to say, in a very good mood. Most of what he had to say you’ll have to wait until October to read, but his comments in how he managed to persuade Bishop Gene Robinson (and if you don’t know who that is then you certainly don’t watch the news enough) to be in the picture are just too priceless to wait until then to publish.

“I had figured out how to get through all of [Gene’s] lines of security,” stated Karslake, “because he was so widely protected. There were a couple things that were incredibly fortunate. First he has seen some of my work on In the Life, and that was a very huge thing, and then we sort of spent 10 minutes getting to know one another a little bit.”

“It was then he looked at me and asked, ‘So, why are you here.' And so I said I have these three things I would love for you to help me with. One is not a lot. The second is a lot. The third one you are probably going to throw me out, but, let me just ask you.”

“So, then I asked him the three things: sharing email stories of people with me for the film, help us by coming to this fundraiser in Los Angeles so we could raise a million dollars for [the production] and start to appeal to the gay and lesbian audience because I knew that is where we were going to get our money and to let me tell his story and follow him for the next 18 months and shoot everything. And, through the whole period where I was asking him these three things he was looking increasingly bothered.”

“He looked at me and said, 'Okay, you want one, two and three,' recounting what I had asked and saying them in a real disdainful disconcerted sort of way and I was sure he was about to throw me out his window. And, then he said, taking his time, ‘Well, let me just answer with a blanket… yes.’ And I, didn’t burst into tears, but I know I did start crying.”

“Not uncontrollably, but I was just so shocked! I asked him if he really said yes and he said giggling and with the rye little smile he has, “You thought I was going to say no, didn’t you?’ And [this] is what made this film a reality. Not only did he say yes to doing the film, he also said yes to helping raise the money. He’s become an incredibly dear friend and advisor and we talk about a lot of what is still going on, talking about other ways to talk about the really ridiculous crap that’s in the Anglican community now.”

“But, if there is one person who is clearly responsible for making this movie happen then it is [Gene].”

Again, you’ll have to wait for the rest of the interview in October. Until then, keep For the Bible Tells Me So in the back of your mind. This is certainly one motion picture no one no matter what their political persuasion should miss.

Speaking of not missing, I took a break from SIFF last night to take in Ocean’s 13 and I am so happy to report George Clooney and company have breezily returned to form making this the first part three of the summer I was actually glad to have seen. While not as winning as the first film, it definitely makes up for the rather lackluster second chapter, the whole gang returning to whip up a frothy Champagne brew of giggly good times I couldn’t help but smile about. Check out my review on the main site Friday.

As for SIFF, I’m still trying to figure out why the film festival cheered Korean director Sang-soo Hong as an Emerging Master in 2003. Not that his latest Woman on the Beach is bad, it actually had some amazing moments of dramatic impact, it’s just that it tends to sort of sit through ambling on neutral. Almost nothing of interest happens in this two hour drama of a film director trying to write a screenplay over a weekend while messing up the lives of some of the pretty young women he meets. It’s boring and not very imaginative, the insights found in the director’s script fairly obvious and not terribly interesting.

Oh well. C’est la vie. Hopefully tonight’s screenings will be more interesting.

14 Days Left

I figured out last night that I've seen 21 films so far at this year's festival. Considering I took the first weekend off to go play softball in Minneapolis, that's not too bad a total if I say so myself. Granted, as press screenings started about three weeks before the festival, and some people have already seen more than 50 films, a case could definitely be made I've been a bit of a slacker.

But then, they're not having to still make time for all those press screenings for Hollywood blockbusters, too, now are they. It's not my fault I had to go see the wickedly delightful Mr. Brooks the better-than-expected-but-still-not-anything-to-crow-about Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, I can't help that I have to run to screenings of Ocean's 13 and Ratatouille this week, it's just the way things work. As much fun as running around a film festival is, the reality is most of all this doesn't pay the bills, and if it wasn't for the big theatrical releases I'd probably not be getting this opportunity in the first place.

That doesn't mean I'm not going to revel in every second of it. I've been having a blast so far. Just tonight I got the opportunity to see a remarkable documentary called For the Bible Tells Me So. This is quite possibly the best analyzation of religion and homosexuality I have ever seen. So much here just simply blew my mind. Better, the conservative friend I went to it with actually had their own thoughts on it all rearranged a bit, too, the whole idea that being gay isn't a choice but is rather something you're born with more profoundly fleshed out and explained then any clinical discussion ever could have been.

What else have I seen you might not have heard about? There was Johnny To's latest Hong Kong tragi-comic potboiler Exiled (a film that made me wonder if I might actually be over my asian action phase), the Hungarian Bánk Bán (a beautiful filmed version of the famous opera gorgeously photographed by the legendary Vilmos Zsigmond) and the nightmarish Lynn Hershman Leeson sort-of documenary Strange Culture (a truly shocking story reminding me just how much I'm still mad at the Democrats for going so hog wild with the Patriot Act).

One of the best times I've had was seeing Michael Curtiz's immortal Errol Flynn classic Captain Blood on the big screen. Sure it was too long, and yes some of it was more than a wee bit dated (it was made in 1935 after all), but dash it all if the whole thing was just so blissfully energetic and evertaining I could have cared less. Is it my favorite swashbuckler? Not remotely. Is it one I could watch over and over again without growing tired of? Most definitely.

Best of all, it boasts some of my very favorie dialogue in almost all of Hollywood history. The movie is filled with delicious bits like:

Dr. Peter Blood: Nuttall, me lad, there's just one other little thing. Do you think you could find me a good stout piece of timber? About so thick and so long?

Honesty Nuttall: Yes, I think so.

Dr. Peter Blood: Then do so and lash it to your spine - it needs stiffening. Courage! We'll join you at midnight.

Or, how about these two delightful passages between Flynn and costar Olivia de Havilland:

(1) Dr. Peter Blood: Do you suppose I'd be grateful for an easy life, when my friends are treated like animals? Faith, it's they deserve your favors, not I. They're all honest rebels. I was snoring in my bed while they were trying to free England from an unclean tyrant.

Arabella Bishop: I believe you're talking treason!

Dr. Peter Blood: I hope I'm not obscure.

(2) Dr. Peter Blood: It seems that you're continually doing me favors. Faith, I don't know why.

Arabella Bishop: Neither do I. Yes I do. It's because you're so very grateful and always thank me so prettily.

Dr. Peter Blood: Sure now, you don't blame me for resenting you and your favors.

Arabella Bishop: This is interesting. I've had men tell me they had reasons for admiring me... and some few have even laid claims to reasons for loving me. But for a man to store up reasons for resenting me... how refreshing!

I watch modern movies that try to recapture this spirited type of dialogue, films like Failure to Launch and Gray Matters and I tend to just cringe. Only one of late, the splendid Hugh Grant/Drew Barrymore confection Music and Lyrics had gotten it even close to right in my mind. There were moments in that one I was practically rolling in the aisle eating up the intelligently invigorating witticisms passing between the two stars. While I'm not about to say it is as good, or as timeless, as Captain Blood, it's still pretty darn good. Now that it is out on DVD I suggest you give the film a look and discover so for yourself.

Back to SIFF, let me just say once again I'm having a fabulous time. It's been a great festival, and with only 14 more days to go part of me is starting to think it's all going by much too fast.

Catching the Fever

Being that I write for a movie website that usually tends to specialize in talking about the latest theatrical releases and new DVD’s, SIFF gives me a great opportunity to experience a whole slew of pictures I might not otherwise get a chance to see. That is definitely the case with David Hoffman’s documentary The Fever of ’57 which had its World Premiere at the festival just the other night.

The film covers the events surrounding the Russian launch of Sputnik in 1957 and the subsequent American response. What is most remarkable, to me at least, is watching how people so quickly went from happiness to terror in regards to what the Soviets had accomplished. The paranoia gripping the country, paranoia fueled by military and political leaders, leading newspapers and television journalists, so pervasive it almost seemed to color everything people said, thought and did.

On the flip side, to film also offers an intriguing and thought-provoking look at both President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Both me, especially Khrushchev, are talked about and examined in a way I had never seen before, no discussion with my history-buff father or college Political Science class ever dealing with these men in quite the way this picture does.

Normally I wouldn’t take the time to sit down and talk with a director like Hoffman before his documentary has been picked up by a distributor for theatrical distribution. In the case of Fever of ’57, however, I have found I can’t get the darn thing out of my head. So it was with great pleasure I spent some time with him early this morning at the downtown Seattle W Hotel, our brief twenty minute conversation as fascinating and illuminating a chat as any I’ve had in quite some time.

“You know most of the documentaries I’ve made in my life are labors of work,” explains the filmmaker. “I’m a working documentary guy. I’ve made a 135 television documentaries. This is my fifth feature doc, although I haven’t made one of those in 13 years. So, you either get paid by somebody – which is the labor of work – or it is a labor of love. For me, this was a labor of love.”

“I started off making a documentary about Sputnik because I lived through it, remembered it and [thought] it was a good story. Then I uncovered what I thought to be the real story, which was a surprise to me, and once I did I moved it from a documentary to a movie.”

“I was just at D-5 in San Francisco, the great conference sponsored by The Wall Street Journal, and George Lucas spoke there, and he did it just right. His position was about movies. He said, ‘There is art and then there is circus.’ Circus, he said, is YouTube. You put the camera on a tripod and stick it in somebody’s window, you hope you get something and then you call it facts of a documentary.”

“Art, he said, is the truth behind the facts. What does the thing really mean? If you can put that in a powerful movie, almost like Shakespeare, then you’ve got yourself a movie. And, well, that is what happened to me about Sputnik. Uncovered, was the fact that story wasn’t about Sputnik, it was about what happened in America. In a short period of time the radical changes in America make for an unbelievable story.”

“Everybody told me after the premiere [the film] was relative to today. You think about today constantly when you look at this story that happened fifty years ago that involved war and peace. That involved international relations between people who could love us or hate us (and were predisposed to hate us). Our own blunders. The way we dealt with a shock as great as say Pearl Harbor or 9/11.”

“So to sit there and watch a premiere to a movie I had devoted myself to where I had no idea [what] anybody else would think other than me and my cronies who made it, was incredible.”

Speaking of the filmmakers, there weren’t many behind the scenes on this one. “There were only three [of us],” laughs the director. “I don’t think there has been a doc made by fewer people. There was myself, a fantastic editor [John Vincent Barrett] out of Santa Cruz who had never made a feature and 24-year-old producer [EricReid] who had never made a movie but had been my colleague through his college years at UC Santa Cruz.”

“So, the three of us, back up by Paul Dixon who had written the book [Sputnik: The Shock of the Century] that was a best seller and had spent four-and-a-half years doing the journalism so I didn’t have to, made this movie. I could go to [Paul] and say, ‘Wow! Did you find that secret memo?’ ‘Did you find that Russian footage?’ And, once I had that, I elevated the film from a documentary, which I would call the facts as I saw them, to a movie, which I would call the story.”

I ask Hoffman about why he thought people went from being elated by the Sputnik launch to absolutely terrified in such a short amount of time, the paranoia fueling their reactions feeling eerily similar, to me at least, to America’s collective state of consciousness after the 9/11 attacks. “The government leaders,” comments Hoffman, “particularly the opposing party, Democrats, military leaders who had other interests and [media] pundits changed public opinion because the background was already there.”

“Think about it. The whole 1950’s was the first time we had to deal with the possibility of national extinction. Prior to that, there was no way to take us apart. There was no way to remove us from the planet. Hydrogen Bombs, an enemy that said they were going to bury us (although that isn’t what they ended up meaning it sure was what it sounded like to us at the time), Fallout Shelters, communists under beds, [Russians] opening up plants that had secrets in them, we believed that we could become extinct.”

“Eisenhower, the President at the time, had to deal with that. So that was the underlying tone, and then this beautiful thing happened, so gorgeous, and people cried. Millions upon millions of people just stood outside with their parents. Whole communities, my community in my hometown of Levitown, long Island, everybody was standing out in front of the house looking up.”

“And then to be told that [Sputnik] wasn’t the issue floating up there, but the rocket that put it there which could carry a bomb that could kill us in every city, it’s like 9/11. I remember that the big news, on national television, on 9/10 was sharks in Florida. And my wife always said, ‘What happened to the sharks in Florida on 9/12? They’re gone.’ And the same thing happened with Sputnik.”

You really get a sense of Hoffman’s passion sitting there with him. He’s animated, full of energy and life, his face breaking into a cavalcade of smiles the deeper we get into the conversation. I tell him I find it ironic that we currently live in the age where the Democrats are seen to be in the right by so many Americans right now, while the Republicans who led us into war are, by and large, held in just the opposite opinion; quite a contrast to the state of affairs just a half century ago.

“What I concluded and what I show,” states the director, “is that it is all about politics. Not exclusively, but if a politician can knock the other guy out with an opinion most of us believe than they are going to do that, and certainly most of us believe the Iraq War is wrong and not getting us anywhere and the bad guys are the guys that put us there and are trying to keep us there, it’s the same thing. If the other guy can hit you, and in this case most Americans agree, that’s [what happens].”

“I’m not saying that this makes the issue wrong, but the motivation might not be so pure. It could be about gaining political power, and that was certainly the case then. I saw thousands and thousands of feet of film, and I didn’t see a single foot of film where the Democrats supported the idea some of this might be a little hysterical, this ‘Missile Gap.’ The threat was never real.”

“And Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev’s son, said his father was very happy when America was afraid because it meant they wouldn’t be attacked. But, in fact, they didn’t have anything. They didn’t have the thousands of missiles, the thousands of weapons. They didn’t have anything. It was a myth.”

It is this view of the former Russian Premier, the villain in so many history classes, documentaries and Cold War stories, where Hoffman takes his biggest gamble and forces people to rethink their opinions of the man. “Military guys,” says the filmmaker, “say to me, ‘This guy killed thousands of people. Hw can you make him anything other than a Hitler?’”

“I don’t know about the thousands of people, but let’s assume it is true. He still had an enormously powerful military, more powerful in the government than even the American military was with Eisenhower. Both [governments] led by men their militaries felt were their leaders. Eisenhower was a military man. Khrushchev was a military man. And then both split with their militaries during their administrations, meaning they learned. They evolved.”

“They always said presidents would learn. I haven’t experienced that with George W. Bush or with Bill Clinton. I didn’t see that with them. Certainly Kennedy changed in his time. Certainly Eisenhower and Khrushchev changed during their times when they realized, apparently, the true threat to the world and that their economies would explode if all they did was build weapons. They backed away. They changed. So, this guy may have been one rough Russian, but he changed.”

The documentarian may have nice things to say about the former Russian Premier within the context of what his film covers, but his real praise is saved for the man many affectionately called Ike. “As I did my movie,” smiles Hoffman, “I came to the conclusion [Eisenhower] deserves my movie and more. He was the son of a Quaker, he was a staunch anti-war advocate speaking out about the growth of the military way before anyone else. This guy came into office saying I don’t want a single weapon we don’t need; I don’t believe there should be an arms race. Then he comes across this guy Khrushchev whom he meets as President.”

“And these two guys are kids of farmers, they are blue collar people, they had been through the greatest war in the history of the world, both of them. Eisenhower, as we know, led Allied forces, but nobody really realizes responsible for the defense of Stalingrad. Millions of Russians died. So, neither of these two guys liked war and each felt it was a huge waste of money.”

“So, when they came across each other, that is the story of my movie and I didn’t know it. And neither did anybody else. It’s not in anyone’s book. In anyone else’s movie. It wasn’t even in this movie until Sergei said during an interview, which is in my film, that his dad got together with Ike and he said, ‘My military is pushing me,’ to which Khrushchev replied, ‘My commandants are pushing me, too.’ So, Eisenhower turns to Khrushchev and says, ‘Well, maybe we have a private agreement we don’t listen to them?’”

“And that’s unbelievable. So I checked it out. Sergei had said he had heard it from his dad, and David Eisenhower, Ike’s son, confirmed yes it was [true]. And that’s a major piece of American history right there. What does it teach you? To me, at least, it teaches you that you have to talk to your enemy, if the enemy is sane, and in this case the enemy was.”

“Who knows what would have happened if you would have had a guy in Russia who really did feel if only a third of the world was left [alive] and it was all communist that would be okay? Who knows what would have happened. These two guys deserve honor and I give them honor in my movie.”

Watching the film, one can’t help but come away wondering to themselves, especially in a current state of affairs, if conversation really is the best weapon of them all. “I think that is the message of the movie,” states Hoffman emphatically. “If Aunt Millie is telling her relative why to go see the movie, she’ll say because it is a first-rate story, it’s a true story, nobody knows it and it changes our perspective on the President when we’re dealing with similar issues that involve risk, danger, national extinction and nuclear weapons.”

“Just this past week AOL did a poll of its members after Russia announced they had a missile we couldn’t defend against, and 62-percent of Americans were ‘extremely worried.’ It’s just like [1957]. Back then, the Gallop Poll showed 70-percent of Americans believed nuclear war was likely and that three-quarters of the population would die. That isn’t just a minor thing. That’s a major thing.”

But The Fever of ’57 isn’t all gloom, doom and paranoia. Hoffman brings things full circle, the wonder and awe expressed on the faces of people taking in the glory of Sputnik for the first time returned as the birth of NASA and civilian stewardship of space is announced. “This is real interesting,” says the director. “Add to our current state of affairs that 30-some million Americans practiced going underground in a national drill, with school kids, policemen, people leaving their workplace, add all that. Then factor in Fallout Shelters being built around the country (and the national news covering that).”

“Compare those thing to 9/11, to the current threat that we’re going get attacked again. Just this week you had a scare at Kennedy Airport. Add all that and, just like then, you have a lot of American’s really convinced.”

“Was there a positive outcome [after ‘57]? Yes, and that’s the [lesson] of the movie. And we haven’t had that positive outcome from 9/11. It didn’t happen. Our leadership never gave us a way and, if they did, we didn’t take it.”

“But out of Sputnik came NASA as a civilian agency, blocking the military from nuclear weapons and weapons in space. Out of that came the largest education program America ever confronted where we were going to turn our system around and beat the Russians [with our brains], which we did, we built a much better educational structure. Out of this came the internet and the whole idea of miniaturization going to cell phones going to GPS mapping going to photography. All of this coming out of Sputnik.”

“If you think of the 1960’s, you have the democratization of our society where gays, the handicapped, minority groups, Native Americans, all became part of society as a direct result of this explosive period. You had the Mercury Program. The Apollo Program. All of this. It’s thrilling. It’s so thrilling, when we announced we were going to go back to the moon it was your generation, two or three generations down, that still feels [excitement]. It was your generation that said we want that.”

“And what is the direct result of 9/11? Nothing. Just paranoia.”

In the end, Hoffman can’t help but recollect about his own remarkable career as a director and were this particular feature sits in his filmography. “All my movies have been about the social experience of America, not the underlying secrets nobody knew,” he mused. “When I made Making Sense of the ‘60’s for PBS, when I made Moon Shot for Turner, they were about people’s experiences. This film, The Fever of ‘57, what I found was an experience I didn’t know Americans had. It was deep. It was profound. It changed the country and it led to so much.”

“It is the only moment in humankind that you could look up and see something that Man had put there. The second moon. It was the only moment and that’s pretty neat. This was the first object, the first time you could look up and we were there. That is very profound.”

Our talk continued for a few minutes more, weaving this way and that concerning topics both then and now. In the end, the most remarkable thing for me is that I have been given the chance to see Hoffman’s film and to be granted the opportunity to sit and discuss it with him. My only wish now, after writing about it, is that more audiences, not just those at SIFF, will get the same opportunity.

Six in a Row

Today I try something I never have before at SIFF. Sure I usually see a lot of movies in a day during the festival, but usually only three or four. Any more than that can be a seriously tough slog.

Last year I did five in a row twice. This year I’m going to up the ante by one and go fir six. Starting at 11:00 a.m., that’s about 11-hours of movies, pretty much all of it right in a row, and that’s just the time I plan on spending sitting in the theater. Getting between theaters and dealing with all the pass holder lines is, well, extra.

Why do this? There’s just too much wonderful stuff to try and see this Saturday. After all, how can I resist the thought of a stop-motion version of the Alexander Dumas’ classic The Three Musketeers? Or an archival big-screen showing of the Errol Flynn classic Captain Blood, how could I ever say no to an opportunity like that? Next up, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s experimental documentary/drama Strange Culture followed by a short discussion with the director herself.

After a quick lunch, it is three in a row starting with the World Premiere of Lee Friedlander’s Out at the Wedding, Julie Delpy’s miraculous looking 2 Days in Paris and then a midnight screening of the absolutely fantastic New Zealand horror/comedy Black Sheep. Like I said, it’s just too much good stuff, and considering the things I’m planning on missing (Doug Pray’s latest doc Big Rig, the bizarre sounding zombie horror spoof Fido, another viewing of those crazy surfing penguins in Surf’s Up, an archival screening of Oliver Dahan’s La Vie Promise, the local music documentary Kurt Cobain: About a Son) this has got to be one of the best SIFF Saturday lineups I have personally ever seen.

Speaking of New Zealand horror, last night’s midnight showing of The Ferryman was distinctly underwhelming. After the wonderfully entertaining Severance, I was hoping for great things from this supernatural stuck-on-a-boat thriller. Instead, this movie was neither scary nor suspenseful, the whole thing spinning in circles before laboriously coming to a conclusion so forgone I had it pegged less than a third of the way in.

Not that the film didn’t have its moments. I liked the whole Dead Calm meets Candyman vibe director Chris Graham is able to create, and any chance to see the great John Rhys-Davies is one I’m loathe to pass on. There is also a magnificently creepy and unsettling sequence where the mysterious killer has jumped from one body to another, the woman he has switched with staring back at him bleeding to death in the shell of her former boyfriend while he, um, pleases the extremely feminine form the killer now inhabits. The scene is everything the rest of the movie is not, the only point in the entire film where I found myself both entertained and horrified.

Otherwise, the rest of the last couple of days were spent hitting films both good (the World Premiere of David Hoffman’s documentary The Fever of ’57), bad (I still can’t get over how awful The Ten was) and frustratingly in-between (Larry Fessenden’s seriously unsettling, and just as seriously frustrating, ecological Alaska horror film The Last Winter). I also spent some time with Eagle vs. Shark director Taika Waititi, our engaging 20-minute interview (which you’ll have to read on the main site next week) one of the better conversations I’ve had at the 2007 edition of SIFF so far.

On that note, it’s time to climb in the shower, throw on a little moisturizer, grab my lip balm and head out to theater. Some say I need to get a life. I say, if you could spend your day doing what I do, why would you want to go off and do anything else?