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.

More reviews from the Seattle International Film Festival now on GreenCine Daily.

From my decidedly distant perspective, Ain’t Scared, the debut feature from French director Audrey Estrougo has echoes of Abdellatif Kechiche’s L’Esquive (aka Games of Love and Chance) in its portrait of the Paris projects, or in French lingo, les cities, but has its own sensibility and its own vivid surprises. There is little sense of racial divide or tension as we watch the young men of these ghettoized suburbs filled with minorities, the poor and unemployed, a cultural mix of French-born citizens of African, Arab, white, Jewish, and Asian ancestry, talk and play and flick shit at another (race does come up in the insults, but it is equal opportunity and decidedly non-aggressive).

But halfway through the film, which surveys a day in the life of the neighborhood as their local hero, Jo, prepares to leave to play football for Arsenal in England, the whole thing begins again, this time from the perspective of two of the young women: Julie, the white girl, and Fatima, the angry black girl who moons over Jo. Suddenly race is front and center. “Whites and Blacks shouldn’t mix,” the black girls (which, by their definition, encompasses both African and Arab) state to the camera in a scene as confrontational as anything in Do the Right Thing.

I also review Nanette Burstein’s documentary American Teen and the world premieres of the documentary Creative Nature, the feature Garden Party and Julia Sweeney’s Letting Go of God, a concert/performance film of her one-woman show directed by the artist herself:

To be honest, the cinema is at its best when it’s invisible and we can get lost in her amazing, funny, serious and moving monologue about growing up Catholic and accepting the faith without really exploring it until a bout of adult Bible study and spiritual quest through the religions of the world has her questioning what she believes and why. For all the humor (and it’s very, very funny), it’s all about answering a simple question: “God, who are you?” - and feeling comfortable and secure in what she discovers.

Read the complete reviews here.

Cannes is over but the Seattle International Film Festival is just getting underway. Here are more reviews from SIFF, which are currently running on GreenCine Daily:

SIFF welcomed the North American premiere of The Red Awn, the directorial debut of Cai Shangjun (screenwriter of Zhang Yang’s films, including Shower), in its opening weekend. The film leaves the urban cultures of Zhang’s drama for a rural story of a father returning, after five years away looking for work in the city, to his home village where his wife has passed away and his son has had him pronounced legally dead. Yongtao, now a teenager, simmers with rage and resentment toward his long absent dad, who has left a veritable orphan since his mother’s death, and the grudge continues even as they head out together to harvest the wheat fields with a local man who owns a combine. Cai is more circumspect than Zhang, both as a director and a writer of his own material, leaving us to put together what the father’s life has been like in the city and why he’s so forgiving of his son’s increasingly defiant and destructive actions.

Meanwhile, he shows us a culture in rapid transition, where the rural folk (especially the young) flee the farms for work in the city and small armies of independent combines fan out over the countryside and compete for work. There are no tidy scenes of forgiveness or explanation, only a father whose astounding tolerance and protection of his ferociously angry son is a measure of his guilt and sense of failure, and a son who slowly comes around to grasping the chance that his father offers him.

Also reviewed: Elite Squad, The Fall, Foster Child and Dario Argento’s Mother of Tears.

See reviews here.

My coverage of the 2008 Seattle International Film Festival begins on GreenCine with a review of the opening night film, Battle in Seattle (and the film’s local reception) and Lynn Shelton’s My Effortless Brilliance:

Whatever you think of the film, it may be the most apropos film in the history of SIFF to open the festival: never has an opening night film been so inextricably tied to the city. You might think that the hometown audience who lived through (and, in many cases, participated in) the WTO protests and the disastrous police response would be the film’s toughest audience for a film about their experience directed by an Irish actor who wasn’t even there. Not just because of our own immediate experiences but because of the use of fictional stories to structure the film (the fictional Seattle Mayor Jim Tobin, played by Ray Liotta, stands in for the real Paul Schell) and Vancouver, BC doubling for Seattle in principle production (there were a few days of Seattle shooting to get key landmarks, but sharp eyes will detect Canadian road signage throughout the film).

Some of the stories are frankly unconvincing (Connie Nielsen gives perhaps the least dimensional performance of her career as a superficial TV reporter transformed by the experience) and others slip into all-too-familiar ruts (the rocky romance between Martin Henderson’s passionate protest organizer and the angry guerilla activist played by Michelle Rodriguez), and the literal gut-punch of the experience of bystander Charlize Theron and the turmoil of cop Woody Harrelson is a messy way to get an emotional reaction from the audience (it works, by the way). But the film pushed all the right buttons in this very liberal crowd, who responded to key scenes and speeches and (rather repetitive) defining lines with cheers and applause.

Read more »