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?