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.