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?

Fly Me to the Moon

It's pretty much impossible not to like David Sington's documentary In the Shadow of the Moon. The documentary speaks with ten of the surviving Apollo mission astronauts, eight of whom who actually walked upon the survace of the moon. Think about that for a second. There are over 7-billion people on the planet earth and only a handful of them have ever set foot on a different planet. Pretty unfathomable, huh?

I spoke with Sington this morning, and while the bulk of the interview won't run until ThinkFilm releases the picture in September, some of his words are certainly worth relaying now. "Nine have set foot on a different world and looked back at the [Earth]," said the director, "and I was very interested in talking about what that experience was like. What it felt like, what they thought it meant - both at the time and then later - and what it all means to them today."

"And that, really, is what the film is all about. It's not really about the history of the Apollo Missions, it is about a group of men who had an extraordinary human experience which sets them apart from the rest of humanity."

"What they have, is a very clear perspective on the Earth and the human condition. They have seen our context in the universe in a way the none of the rest of us have. And the effect of that, actually, is that it makes them, excuse the bad pun, more grounded as individuals. I think they understand the ground that they tread quite literally for the rest of their lives in a way the rest of us don't quite. They've seen our place in the universe, our one very small place. I think that makes them more profoundly down to earth about what we are and where we are then the rest of us."

Needless to say, In the Shadow of the Moon is a spectacular marvel both intellectually and spiritually. Again, the rest of my interview with Sington won't appear until sometime in August, but his film is just so good I felt it would be almost criminal if I didn't share a little bit of it with you all now.

On the negative side of things, I saw my first outright SIFF stinker this evening. I've viewed interesting disappointments (like Angel-A), oddly unsatisfying enigmas featuring strong performances and frustratingly inane narratives (like with Outing Riley) and even nonsensical visual spectaculars impossible to dismiss even if I didn't know what the heck was going on (like in Timur Bekmambetov's sci-fi sequel Day Watch). But no total failures. None, that is, until tonight. (In regards to that middle one, if Waitress and Serenity hadn't already proven it, Nathan Fillion is a total stud. He's also a mighty fine actor, too.)

David Wain's The Ten is absolutely wretched. Mostly known for writing for television comedies like Mad TV and Strangers with Candy, he's also appeared as an actor in movies as unvaried as Reno 911: Miami and The Baxter. Featuring an all-star cast including Winona Ryder, Paul Rudd (deserving of so much more after is splendid work in Knocked Up), Liev Schrieber, Adam Brody, Jessica Alba, Oliver Platt, Famke Janssen, Justin Theroux and Gretchen Mol, this has got to be one of the unfunniest sketch comedies I've ever had the misfortune to see. This might even be worse than SIFF 2006's Awakening from the Dead, and for anyone who remembers how much I loathed that one you can imagine then what I'm feeling about this.

Thankfully the rest of my festival has been far more wondrous. While I haven't seen as much as I would like to at this point, what I have seen by and large I have really enjoyed. Heck, last night's documentary Crazy Love was absolutely fascinating. Director Dan Klores' look at a seriously f**ked-up nearly four decade love affair is one of the most seriously twisted good times I've had in ages. Linda Riss and Burt Pugach meet, date, get engaged, break up, get back together and break up again. Then, after 14 years apart, they get together again and finally get married.

Oh, yeah, in the middle of all of this Burt hires some thugs to blind Linda, the whole thing talked about daily on the front pages of papers all over New York. It's the most hysterically unnatural love story this side of Jerry Springer. When they say truth is stranger than fiction, this is exactly the type of thing they are talking about. No matter how you look at it, though, stories like this one sure make for great cinema and that, my friends, is definitely just fine with me.

SIFF 2007 Gets Rolling!

(This is a reprint of the preview article originally posted at www.moviefreak.com this morning.)

It’s a little late in coming, but for those who didn’t know the 33rd Annual Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) started last Thursday with the screening of Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith’s Son of Rambow. Running through June 17, SIFF is the largest festival of its kind anywhere in the world, more than 400 films and programs showing at locations throughout the Seattle metropolitan area over a full 25 days.

I’ve covered this festival for Moviefreak every year since 2001. It is, without a doubt, the highlight of my entire year. With 60 different countries represented, 48 World Premiers, 39 North American Premiers and 20 U.S. Premiers, there are certainly choices available a person simply couldn’t see elsewhere.

All that said, I regret it took me so long to finally run a preview for this year’s event. With so much to choose from, I admit to being more than just a wee bit overwhelmed. On the plus side, I haven’t seen one bad film so far, the glorious musical drama Once easily the best picture I’ve seen in 2007. Even better, I had the opportunity to sit down with the entire creative team behind that masterpiece’s production, the interview only one click away.

Other highlights? How about Olivier Dahan’s masterful Edith Piaf biopic La Vie en Rose, David Sington’s Apollo documentary In the Shadow of the Moon, Judd Aptow’s hilariously profound Knocked Up, Christopher Smith’s amusingly horrific Severance or Luc Besson’s engrossing (if uneven) Angel-A. Only the closing night feature, Laurent Tirard’s Shakespeare in Love-like comedy Moliére, has disappointed, and even that had so many positives stewing over the negative aspects of its maudlin narrative seems almost insignificant.

As for what’s coming up, there is certainly plenty to get excited about. From the U.S. Premier of Milos Forman’s Goya’s Ghost with Natalie Portman and Javier Bardem, to Lars von Trier’s latest experimental comedy The Boss of it All, to Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s cops’n’robbers spectacular Confession of Pain, to the star-studded Lajos Koltai weeper Evening, there is plenty to get excited about.

This year’s crop of Emerging Master’s include France’s aforementioned Dahan, Mauritania’s Abderrahmane Sissako (Bamako), Franco-Iranian Rafi Pitts (It’s Winter) and Israel’s Eytan Fox (The Bubble), each of whom are showing films I’m on the very edge of my seat waiting to see.

Anthony Hopkins stops by for a visit (tonight, actually) to present his directorial debut Slipstream, while Frank Oz (Death at Funeral), Dante Spinotti (Slipstream), Taika Waititi (Eagle vs. Shark), Doug Pray (Big Rig) and Robert Benton (Nobody’s Fool) are just a handful of the big-time guests hitting town to talk about their latest efforts.

And there’s more. Much more. One heck of a lot (including potential Hollywood blockbusters like Surf’s Up and Superbad, as well as Timur Bekmambetov’s Day Watch and the New Zealand mutant horror comedy Black Sheep), but I’m not about to get into it all here. Like 2006, Moviefreak is proud to offer my own personal blog adventure at the 33rd Annual Seattle International Film Festival. Starting tonight, I’ll be updating almost every evening (or, at the very least, every other evening) at http://siff-2007.blogspot.com.

Other than that, check out www.seattlefilm.org for a complete lineup of events, screenings, movies and forums. And, as always, have a great time at the movies!