Screw This Happily Ever After Stuff. I can’t take credit for the great title. It came from my interview with Eddie Muller which I put in the feature (who wouldn’t use such a great quote?) and the editors at The Stranger pulled it out as the headline. But I’ll take all the reflected glory. The piece is part preview, part introduction, part portrait of programmer Eddie Muller, and it was a pleasure to write.

The cracked mirror of film noir morality and desperation: He Ran All The Way

Here’s an excerpt from the feature:

What I appreciate most about Noir City is that it favors rarities and rediscoveries over the canonized classics. Muller pairs The Postman Rings Twice, easily the glossiest studio noir ever made, with He Ran All the Way. Both feature John Garfield, but where he smolders with restrained lust for platinum blond siren Lana Turner in the former, he’s all jittery paranoia as a small-time hood who shoots a cop and takes a working-class family hostage in the latter. In He Ran All the Way, director John Berry scuffs up the emotions until they’re raw and frayed and then closes in, creating a pressure cooker that pushes everyone to the edge of unraveling. And like most of the films in the series, it’s not on video.

Read the complete feature here.

The Noir City Seattle series begins Friday, February 19 and plays for a week of double feature presentations. I’m going to see as many as I can.

Seattle boasts the biggest film festival in the United States, in terms of both audiences and films shown. But Seattle filmgoers are also lucky enough to be within easy driving distance to the Vancouver International Film Festival, one of the five biggest festivals in North America. Coming on the heels of Toronto, it boasts a sampling of highlights from Toronto and Venice as well as a spotlight on Canadian cinema, an annual spotlight on French Cinema and the Dragons and Tigers series, one of the best collections of new Asian cinema in North America with a special focus on young talents and new filmmakers.

VIFF 2009

The sixteen day festival opened this year on Thursday, October 1 with a day of screenings leading up to the Opening Night Gala A Shine of Rainbows, an Irish tale with Connie Neilsen and Aidann Quinn, and concluded on Friday, October 16 with Closing Night Gala Queen to Play, a French romantic comedy of love and chess starring Sandrine Bonnaire and Kevin Kline. In between, over 215 features and documentaries (along with 160 short and mid-length films) from over 70 countries screened for audiences from Vancouver and beyond. Like Seattle, this in an international festival for the local audience. In this case, local extends south of the border to Seattle.

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More SIFF coverage at the Seattle Weekly. Next week, Seattle’s very own homegrown zombie movie ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction plays the festival. I profile the film and the filmmakers for the Seattle Weekly in “Axis of the Undead.” (My review of the film runs next week)

Also recently run: capsule reviews of Lee Yoon-ki’s My Dear Enemy and This Charming Girl, Yim Phil-Sung’s South Korean horror twist on Hansel and Gretel and Duncan Jones’ Moon.

Plus: excerpts from my interview with Kathryn Bigelow.

[published in conjunction with Parallax View]

The complications and tricky negotiations of family, as siblings grow up and leave to establish their own lives and their own families, was a central theme of numerous films at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival. Two of the best films from that festival, Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours (L’heure d’ete) and Hirozaku Kore-Eda’s Still Walking, highlight the opening weekend of the 2009 edition of the Seattle International Film Festival.

Jérémie Renier, Juliette Binoche and Charles Berling

Summer Hours is like a miniature, a small film of small dramas in the scope of large lives. Mortally once again hangs over the story of a family estate and the rich treasures of art history that goes with it. Family matriarch Helene (Edith Scob) has preserved the country home of her famous painter uncle as a tribute to him, complete with unpreserved works by French masters on the walls and rare pieces of furniture and glassworks as household items, and she drills in her eldest the list of valuables that need be accounted for and, if necessary, sold off when she dies. Frédéric (Charles Berling), who lives nearby in Paris, can’t bear to see the home broken up and sold off, but with his sister (Juliette Binoche) thriving in New York and younger brother (Jérémie Renier) settling in China, the holiday family home no longer has the same meaning to them all, let alone their children. The film moves from one decision to another and the arguments that inevitably ensue and it’s not all that subtly engineered. What Assayas brings is a generosity of understanding and a warmth of character to the siblings who love one another enough not to let disagreements change their feelings. It’s a gentle look at the way the ties to the past lose their hold on the next generations, and it closes with a pair of sequences that alone would recommend the film: one that takes you through the Musee D’Orsay from the workshops through to the galleries, and a final scene that recalls his brilliant (and still unavailable on DVD) early feature Cold Water, but with the angry, rebellious destructiveness of the earlier film replaced with a warm communal celebration. Plays Friday, May 22 and Sunday, May 24.

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“Film has always been a personal medium for me. Some people write with journals. I have always made little films that shoot right out of my soul. And I’m making them with my hands.

I profile Seattle-based film director David Russo and his feature film The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle (which plays at the Seattle International Film Festival this weekend) for the Seattle Weekly.

Morning shower, morning sickness

For more than 15 years, David Russo has been making films, short films, funded out-of-pocket or by arts grants, rarely seen by a general audience. Until recently, they have been the creation of a solitary artist carving personal visions out of the world around him. His animated shorts typically combine painting, sculpture, photography, music, poetry, and soundscapes on unique moving canvases. In Pan With Us (2003), he takes the cel off the studio animation stand and makes it a canvas floating freely through space. As his paintings are photographed frame by frame on 35mm film, then transformed into a flowing, flying image, the surrounding throngs of people become pixilated, jittery, impermanent things.

I Am (Not) Van Gogh (2005) uses the same stop-motion and animation techniques to produce a visual stream of consciousness, set to a soundtrack of Russo explaining his idea for a project that an arts organization doesn’t understand. To date, his short films have been entirely non-narrative, works of wonder and grace, chaotic and visionary, unlike those of any other artist in Seattle.

Which is why you’ve probably never heard of him. Until now.

The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle represents a major leap for Russo: his first feature, his first narrative, and in many ways his first collaborative endeavor. Certainly it’s his first picture with actors (including troubled former starlet Natasha Lyonne), a substantial budget, and the pressures and compromises that inevitably come with indie filmmaking. “It is extremely distracting at first,” says Russo of his 19-day Seattle shoot last year, “especially being the kind of filmmaker I was—that always worked by myself. It was a nightmare.”

Read the complete feature here.

Update 5/21: More from my David Russo interview at the Seattle Weekly here.

My second and final dispatch on the Vancouver International Film Festival is up at GreenCine.

Yes, VIFF ended two weeks ago, and yes, I’m late, but I owe it to the festival to get in one last piece so I can cover just a few of the North American premieres in Vancouver’s indispensable Dragons and Tigers line-up of Asian cinema. What I appreciate about the selection is that it’s focused on capturing early works and films that engage the state of their local cultures. They aren’t necessarily the greatest works coming out of the country, but they are a snapshot of the film culture and an early look into the work of directors who very likely grow into major filmmakers.

Of the 50 programs (feature films, documentaries and programs of shorts), plus bonus short films playing in front of films, well over half were shot and/or presented in some video format, many of them on what appears to be consumer or pro-sumer formats. Just like the micro-budget boom in the US, it’s opened up filmmaking to a lot more filmmakers, and just like in the US, the results vary by ambition and talent. Format is no measure of quality.

Case in point: Tropical Manila, a shot-on-video production set and shot in the Philippines from South Korean director Lee Sang-Woo. In the realm of dysfunctional families, this is perhaps the most disturbingly screwed up. The Korean father, counting down the days before he can return home, treats his Filipino wife like a hooker at best and livestock at worst. The mixed race son hates his father and identifies himself only as Filipino; with such a role model for Korean identity, it’s no wonder. It’s a brutal film and the filmmaking is equally brutal, explicit in some scenes (Lee is not shy about chronicling degrading sexual experiences or private bodily functions with point-blank directness) and circumspect in others (the father is a former gangster running out the calendar on the statute of limitations in Manila, a fact that local Korean audiences may pick up from clues but is nowhere explained for the rest of us). It’s also very exacting in its imagery and its editing, which is jarring and brutal in its own right. Lee foregrounds the emotional brutality that the father exercises on his wife and his son and churns up the humiliation and anger that simmers under the grim expression of the increasingly defiant son. After all these years I still haven’t warmed to the look of video productions, but here it adds a stark, naked quality to the imagery.

I also take a look at Blink from the Philippines, Good Cats and Knitting from China, Crossing from South Korea and Orz Boys from Taiwan.

Read the complete piece here.

My first dispatch can be read here.

My belated coverage of the Vancouver International Film Festival begins on GreenCine:

Takashi Miike is still cranking out three or four features a year (down somewhat from his absurdly prolific era of the late-90s/early-00s, surely for the better), but fewer of them seem to be making it stateside, even on DVD – and those that do often seem undercooked. Where so many of his earlier films rode a crest of creative adrenaline to carry audiences through the narrative incoherence, he no longer seems able to sustain himself and too many of his recent films play as strings of set pieces and visual ideas stitched together with halfhearted scenes to create an illusion of continuity. With God’s Puzzle, he dials down his stylistic flamboyance and erratic narratives and does something I haven’t seen him do for a while: tell a story.

While hardly inspired, God’s Puzzle is an amusing drama of a rocker and part-time sushi chef (Ichihara Hayato) who takes the place of his brainy twin brother and ends up floundering through college physics and teaming up with a reclusive 17-year-old girl genius (Tanimura Mitsuki) on a theoretical project to create a universe with our own universe. The film sprawls over more than two hours, and much of it is dedicated to quantum physics and metaphysical debate, which Miike manages to make interesting (he directs one lesson as an action movie, with Ichihara leaping through a lecture and breathlessly delivering his summation). The finale turns into a kind of WarGames with a metaphysical foundation and a God complex, which Miike leavens with a little humor, courtesy of the amiable goofball Ichihara. Throughout the film he launches the flashbacks and fantasy scene with the click of a “button” dropped on screen like a website link, and for the end, he transforms an action thriller into a rock musical. Miike lets the cheeky humor bubble up through the film, as if reminding us not to take the science-babble too seriously. After all, it is a film that concludes with a contemplation of the theory of sushi relativity. It’s almost refreshing to see Miike loosen up so much, but he’s still marking time.

Takeshi Kitano’s Achilles and the Tortoise premiered at Toronto to general indifference and hasn’t found any champions since. Ostensibly the final film in a trilogy inaugurated with Takeshis‘ and continued through the fragmented mess that is Glory to the Filmmaker!, this tale of a frustrated artist sends a confused message. The young son of a passionate art collector and artist patron is inspired to become a painter. The early scenes of the boy and, later, the young man learning his craft and exploring possibilities are full of the excitement of creative potential and artistic expression. He’s feeling his way around, looking for affirmation and latching on to every minor encouragement of an art dealer with overzealous intemperance. His dedication is admirable but the attempt to find his voice gets lost in his efforts to find success. The film turns into glib parody by the time Takeshi himself takes over the role as the middle-aged failure so obsessed with making a name for himself that he lets his family sink under his neglect. It’s a sour satire of the commercialization of the creative impulse and Takeshi’s portrait of the artist as an unfeeling obsessive falls between emotional apathy and amoral neglect. When he looks on the corpse of a loved one (dead from his own failure as a father and a human) and sees only a new idea for a conceptual piece, the body merely raw material for his use, he’s no longer pitiable, he’s just despicable. If this is some metaphor for his corruption as a commercial artist, then his message is lost on me.

I also review The Good The Bad The Weird and Hansel and Gretel and report on a near-disaster averted.

Read the complete piece here.

I don’t attend many film festivals, at least not with any regularity. I work Seattle every year and for all the great films it has brought to me, every year it becomes more of a seven-week slog that, but for the bright spots, is just more work. I’ve covered Toronto for the past two years and while I get a charge out of it (and appreciate its brevity), it too is a working festival, where I juggle screening schedules and interview times and try to find time to eat and maybe even write between screenings. I attend Le Giornate de Cinema Muto (better known as the Pordenone Silent Film Festival), my favorite film festival in the world, whenever my budget can accommodate it (which isn’t that often). And I’ve sampled other fests big (Venice) and small (Port Townsend, WA) and in between (Portland, OR). But as any freelance writer quickly learns, when you have to pay your own way to a festival, expenses demand that you pick and choose, and I always like to choose at least one festival for me beyond the working fests. Pordenone aside, the Vancouver International Film Festival is the most enjoyable festival for me to attend, a 16-day event just a few hours north of home. Some of the comfort comes from proximity and price: it’s easy for me to drive to and from and inexpensive to attend. But it’s also a great balance of relaxing environment and busy film schedule, and it’s beautifully compact: every theater but one (The Ridge) is within a six-block radius and seven of the screens are within a single multiplex, making it easy to jump from one theater to another as your impulse takes you. And the process for passholders to get tickets is very civilized and organized, if sometimes a little frustrating. Passholder line up in the morning and in the evening to pick up door-tickets for the films they pick, and know then and there is the passholder allotment has been exceeded. Even then, there’s the rush tickets option.

I’ve also taken a real liking to the Granville 7 Cinema, the central hub of the festival – all seven screens are dedicated to the fest, from the smallest house that accommodates video presentations to the biggest house of the festival, located on the top floor of the cinema. There are three levels of cinemas, and between the main floor and the big auditorium on top is a little nook where you can take a break, pour over your program guide or use the restroom (hot tip: this restroom has the shortest lines of the theater because most people forget that it’s there). There’s a labyrinth of staircases and escalators that is charming in its own right, more like a theme park than a cinema. Yes, they can get crowded and hard to rush when a film gets out and you’re dashing to the next screening, but that’s hardly an inconvenience next to crossing the city and trying to find a parking spot.

And, oh yes, there’s the films: one of the most interesting line-ups of Asian cinema in North America (not always the best, but invariably a showcase of promising directors in their formative years), a solid sidebar of French films, a dedicated section to Canadian films and filmmakers and a fine sampling of films carried over from Toronto.

I’ll be writing about the festival in the coming days on GreenCine. Until then, you can check out the schedule at the official website.

I’m back and almost recovered from the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival.

I got off to a slow start at TIFF this year, at least in terms of writing. After nine films in two days, I got hit with a bad bout of something and was knocked flat by fever, nausea, insomnia and other things you don’t want to read about, losing a day and a half of screenings. After a partial recovery, I went right back to the movies, where at least I found some distraction, though I never quite recovered the stamina that got me through an average of four films a day in 2007 (where a cold slowed me down but never actually stopped me from getting to a screening or getting something written every day).

I did however get a few things written – a mid-fest overview for the Seattle P-I and a couple of dispatches for GreenCine – and hope to get a few more things written in the next few days. But mostly I’m back to the DVD column and the film review grind, and I have interviews to work into pieces for the coming weeks.

Here’s where you can find my coverage:

GreenCine Dispatches:

September 10

Many of the films that most captured my affections at TIFF this year revolve around family, notably extended family reunited for a special occasion: a holiday, a remembrance, a celebration. Four filmmakers in particular created rich tapestries of these familiar yet elusive collective organisms, examining how the past reverberates through the immediacy of the present, even when we think we fully understand that past.

The most mercurial and vibrant and cinematically exciting is Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale (Un Conte de Noël), which premiered at Cannes and makes its North American debut here. Directing with an even more restless energy than he showed in Kings and Queen, Desplechin sketches out a family tragedy, the untimely death of a first-born, that precedes the story by decades and then only overtly references it a few times, even as the shadow of that death hovers over the film: in the cancer that family matron Junon (Catherine Deneuve) has been diagnosed with, in the fragility of her teenage grandson Paul (Emile Berling), and in the odd sibling dynamics that have caused eldest daughter Elizabeth (Anne Consigny) to, in effect, legally separate herself from her brother Ivan (Mathieu Amalric, in a mesmerizingly manic-depressive performance).

Mathieu Amalric in "Un Conte de Noel"

“Henri is the disease,” she tells us in one of the film’s direct address monologues, but perhaps the disease is in the blood – the same disease that killed Joseph at age six, the same disease that will eventually kill her mother (even with a bone marrow transplant, which will only give her a few more years; they have the mathematical formula to prove it!), and maybe the same disease that haunts her own son, Paul. For whatever reasons, Paul seeks out his outcast Uncle Henri and invites him to the family Christmas he’s been banished from for five years; this helps stir up quite a holiday nog, complete with a brutal little brawl and a bit of adultery that may come some way to smoothing over a few emotional rough patches.

I also write about Olivier Assayas’ L’heure d’ete (Summer Hours), Hirozaku Kore-Eda’s Still Walking and Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married. Read the complete dispatch here.

September 12

It hasn’t escaped anyone’s notice that the American line-up at TIFF 2008 was singularly lacking in heft and ambition. Just a year after such challenges and delights as No Country for Old Men, Into the Wild and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, not to mention the sheer fun of Juno, the absence of almost any American film striving for something with courage and conviction and evocative storytelling to match is, to say the least, a disheartening sign for a festival that is supposed to launch the Oscar season.

Read more »

I leave for the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival. I’ll be covering the festival for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and blogging for GreenCine Daily and maybe get a few pieces up on Parallax View. I’ll try to keep you up to date on all my coverage as it goes up.

The 2008 Seattle International Film Festival wrapped on Sunday night, June 15, after 25 days, 191 narrative features, 57 documentary features, and 170 short films. Awards were announced Sunday morning. I posted the winners, a few stats, some observations and a few more reviews in my SIFF wrap at GreenCine:

All the familiar jokes about Seattle weather aside, it has been an unseasonably dreary June this year. That should have made it more attractive to go inside and watch a movie or three, but after two weeks straight of gray, overcast days and chilly temperatures, it tended to sap my motivation at a time when the exhaustion of unending screenings and too many mediocre movies takes its toll. I saw just over 50 films at SIFF this year, an all-time low for me. Partly that was due to having to drop out for four days to move, and then skip screenings to catch up with assignments, and partly it was due to the huge decrease in coverage from my paper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. In fact, both the usually supportive P-I and Seattle Times (a festival co-sponsor) drastically cut back coverage. Where the P-I once had bragging rights to the most comprehensive coverage and largest number of films reviewed, it was the Seattle Weekly and the Stranger that took the honors among the print media this year, while such online venues as Siffblog and Prost Amerika challenged them in terms of quantity (if not always quality).

The acknowledged wisdom of veteran SIFF-goers: when you see “American Independent” and “World Premiere” in the same listing, look elsewhere. Not all such films are necessarily bad, but they tend to be films that were passed over by Sundance, Slamdance, Tribeca and SXSW. There are exceptions, of course: Julia Sweeney and Dan Ireland chose to premiere their respective films, Letting Go of God and Jolene, in part because of their history with Seattle. Sweeney is a Washington State native and longtime Seattle resident and Ireland is, of course, the co-founder of SIFF. Then again, Letting Go of God (reviewed in SIFF Dispatch 3) is less a film than a straightforward performance recording, while Jolene is a rather disjoined character study without a sense of purpose.

Adapted (and, one assumes, greatly expanded) from the short story by EL Doctorow, Jolene (played by newcomer Jessica Chastain, making her feature debut) tells the story of a modern Candide, an orphan banged around the South Carolina foster system until she becomes a 15-year-old bride to a sweet and stupid child of a young man. Then she gets banged around some more by a succession of dubious lovers and bad situations. We’re supposed to feel for her ordeals and admire her resilience, and Chastain does a great job of igniting Jolene’s mix of street-wise survivalist instinct and romantic soul. Her performance anchors a film that has no solid grounding and her voice-over is spoken with a candid bluntness, the toughened, unsentimental honesty of hindsight with just a wistful trace of regret – but after a while I was merely shaking my head at her nearly fatal bad judgment, which does not improve with time or experience.

And a few more reviews: Read more »

My fourth report from the screening rooms of SIFF is now up on GreenCine.

There are various world premieres and the dozens of guests arriving for screenings and audience Q&As, but the highlight event will surely be the screenings of Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky at Benaroya Hall, with Sergei Prokofiev’s score performed live by the Seattle Symphony and Chorale with mezzo-soprano Kathryn Weld.

The film is undeniably a classic, and just as undeniably a bald piece of nationalist propaganda that celebrates the salt-of-the-earth heroism of Russian citizens who rise up to defeat the invading German Teutonic Knights (backed by the blessing of the Catholic Church), not just to defend their homeland but to bring glory to their national honor. It’s largely pageant until the famous battle on the ice, which is a thrilling work of cinema and illustrates just what a magnificent action painter Eiseinstein was. The epic scenes of the Teutonic Knights on horseback (looking like some unholy combination of Viking invader, aristocrat soldier and Klu Klux Klan grandmaster) overwhelmed by the onrushing armies of Russian peasant foot soldiers is as evocative a portrait of action cinema as you’ll see.

The other exciting development for the last weekend will be the three days of screenings at The Cinerama, the crown jewel of Seattle cinemas. Not that it’s necessarily showing the big screen spectaculars that should have been reserved for this venue, but it should be a kick to see the Hong Kong collaboration Triangle and the French war movie Female Agents thrown across the Cinerama’s huge screen.

Read the full piece here.

A final note: I wrote this before embarking on a day of interviews followed by screenings at the Cinerama. And I can attest that it was indeed a kick to see the full widescreen Triangle, a highly entertaining tangle of a movie, and the “Dirty Dozen”-inspired Female Agents, which delivers neither more nor less than an otherwise conventional war thriller done up with style, romanticized sacrifice and stoic heroism in the face of brutal torture, was indeed a kick. And also note that, appearances aside, the nasty Nazi tortures, which include near-drowning of prisoners, inflicted upon their French and British prisoners is nothing like the patriotic interrogation methods that the U.S. humanely applies to the prisoners held in out bases (which include the near drowning of prisoners). To even suggest otherwise would be downright unpatriotic, for as we know, the right to speak out against the injustices of our government is a principle to defended to the death, but never actually acted upon.