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.