SEATTLE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Damaged Good: “Spark of Being” at SIFF

June 4, 2011 at 1:35 PM | Rachel Shimp

It’s alive! Experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison, known in the art world for his collage film Decasia, stitches together a patchwork of old nitrate films in Spark of Being, a 2010 homage to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Each sequence in the 68-minute trip of a movie is announced via title card, as in the silent movie era. It’s said to be a fairly faithful recreation of Frankenstein’s flow, but I was unfamiliar with the original and managed to figure it out anyway.

“The Creature in Society,” in particular, was a long, spooky look at a crowd of somber faces, who peered back dispassionately at the camera—a thing perhaps no more familiar or comforting in the early 20th century than a monster. Brief and chilling, it was one of my favorite segments.

The opening scene involved “The Doctor’s Journey,” here interpreted through tattered film of a ship navigating glaciers and breaking through icepack. Filmed in black and white, the black water sloshes against the jutting monoliths to the syncopated rhythms of composer Dave Douglas’s score.

Douglas’s sound is highly experimental itself, and sometimes the electronic bleeps and the high cacophony seemed to distract from the decaying filmstrips fading in and out. Other times it was a dazzling combination. Burnt, blasted shards of glass and splatters of reddish paint seemed to vibrate over the screen for long minutes, resembling the photographic abstractions of Wolfgang Tillmans.

Once or twice, I wanted to shout “Woo!” as if I were watching a live electronic musician and accompanying VJ at a moment when the music and visuals line up just right. This got me thinking: Decibel might do well to get a tentacle into SIFF next year. (Last September, hundreds of attendees packed into Benaroya Hall to watch audiovisual meditations just as, if not more, experimental and intriguing).

White Tank Top Decides Best of SIFF 2010

June 17, 2010 at 9:31 AM | Kirk Michael

I only saw a portion of the films featured at SIFF 2010 (cursed day job!), but will that stop me from handing out Golden Tank Top Awards to my favorites?

Of course not.

Best Supporting Actor
John Hawkes, Winter’s Bone (below). The chilliest of the chilly. Teardrop is a reluctant participant in the search for his brother, but also the only one who commands enough respect to find him. Hawkes ghosts through the film with an understated power that makes your hair stand on end.

Favorite Song to Listen to Get Me Pumped Up for Late Night Blogging
“Prove It All Night” (Bruce Springsteen). I’m pretty sure the Boss had film festival blogging in mind when he wrote: “baby you pay the price / to prove it all night.”

Best Supporting Actress/WTT #1 Crush
Bang Chau (below). I adored her so much in Upperdog that I was compelled to visit bangchau.com, where there’s links for passable Europop (for which she’s been nominated for several Danish Grammys!).

Top Secret Real Favorite Song to Get Me Pumped Up for Late Night Blogging
“California Gurls” (Katy Perry ft. Snoop Dogg). I’m loving the song in equal measure to how much I’ll inevitably be loathing it in about six weeks. I can also report that the Candyland-inspired music video is brilliantly conceived. 

Best Actor
Luis Tosar, Cell 211. I didn’t see this film but I love Luis Tosar (impeccable in Miami Vice and The Limits of Control) and will trust Golden Needle voters on this one.

Worst Actor
James Franco, Howl.  In the words of Charles Barkley: Mr. Franco, your Allen Ginsberg was turrible, just turrible.

Favorite Festival-going Mystery
Why did the Inside Out pre-screening animation change about a week into the festival?  The first few times I watched the excellent short I enjoyed the bit (it comes right before we pull back into a movie audience) that appeared to be a version of the crucial diner scene in (500) Days of Summer. Then I noticed that animated Zooey and Joseph had disappeared. Were they edited out for some copyright reason? Or was I just having a fever dream that they were there in the first place? I can only hope there’s some rational explanation.

Best Actress
Tilda Swinton, I Am Love. The Douglas Sirk-style “woman’s picture” continues to be a great genre for redheads in the millennium — like Julianne Moore in Far from Heaven before her, Ms. Swinton gives the performance of a lifetime in I Am Love. She drags the film by the scruff of its neck with chiseled force of will. (Congratulations to SIFF audiences for picking Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone, though — another worthy choice.)

Most Egregious SIFF Award
The FIPRESCI Award for Night Catches Us. The International Federation of Film Critics really got this one wrong. While their blurb praises the acting and cinematography of Night Catches Us they leave out the fact that the characters are grossly underwritten, delivering stiff lines through a flat climax. Apparently they had to select an American film. Why not Holy Rollers or Cyrus or Morning or one of many more worthy choices?

Best Director
Henri-Georges Clouzot, Inferno (below). Sure, he never completed Inferno, but in the Serge Bromberg documentary we saw just how committed he was to making a film the likes of which we’ve still never seen. I want a screensaver of his kaleidoscopic camera experiments with Romy Schneider.

Best Venue to Be a Passholder
The Neptune. Loved the side door entrance for passholders, away from the ticketed riffraff. Plus, when I walked in, a volunteer asked me if I needed anything! That’s the kind of VIP treatment City Arts ought to afford.

Best Documentary
This Way of Life. I already need to see it again, to marvel at the scenery and puzzle over how Peter Karena (below) can be a real person, living in the same 2010 as me. We have such different instincts, it’s like we’re two separate species. I think it’d be particularly fun to collect all of his profound thoughts on responsible parenting and send them to my dad for Father’s Day.

Favorite SIFF Volunteer
I wish I knew his name!  (He probably thought it was strange that I kept glancing at his hips to try to read his badge….) Anyway, my favorite volunteer was the main man at the Egyptian. He had awesome worn-in boots and an authoritative mien. To call in the passholder line, he simply stood at the head of the queue, stretched his arms forward then brought them to his chest. A man of few words, the Gary Cooper of SIFF volunteers. Once, on my way to the restroom, we had to pass close by each other. As I recoiled awkwardly, he stretched his arms wide and slid by me against the wall — the closest I’ve ever come to a chest bump...this has kind of morphed into an “I Saw U” message. My apologies.

Best Feature Film
Winter’s Bone. The only can’t-miss classic I saw at SIFF 2010 (which is still one more than I expected to see). Did everyone see how A.O. Scott stole all my ideas for his review in the New York Times?  White Tank Top was all over the Greek myth in the Ozarks angle!  If mass critical opinion is any indication, we’ll be hearing about Winter’s Bone all the way to Oscar time.  

 

SIFF's over. But you can follow White Tank Top movie reviews year-round at whitetanktop.blogspot.com and here on the CAB.


Still thinking about SIFF movies: A Review of Cargo

June 15, 2010 at 10:33 AM | Corey Kahler

The film Cargo appears to be scary as hell. It has all the great accoutrement of a sci-fi horror, but its follow through is a let down.


In space no one can hear you complain about corporate irresponsibility....actually, they can.

The film opens on a young woman walking on a gorgeous field of green grains. This is RHEA, a new paradise light-years from Earth, which unfortunately has been irrevocably devastated by environmental degradation. Most of humanity lives on a massive corporate-owned space station, where disease outbreaks and political uprisings are a daily occurrence. The only escape is RHEA, but it's not a right, it takes money — a lot of money.

Money Laura can get, when she accepts a post as a cargo ship's doctor aboard the ship Kassandra for an eight year trip. Crew members are in hibernation for most of the trip, except for eight months, where they must man the ship alone. There are no windows, the ship automatically changes its artificial light from day to night mode and it's cold. 

Images of the ship in space are very reminiscent of 2001 — majestic and powerful — while inside it looks like the ship from Event Horizon and Alien, claustrophobic, dark and containing endless corridors.  

Read the full review (with spoilers) after the jump

SIFF Review: Ondine

June 14, 2010 at 10:50 AM | Kirk Michael

A White Tank Top Movie Review

Neil Jordan’s Ondine is presented as modern fairy tale of a man, Syracuse (Colin Farrell), who finds a selkie, Ondine (Alicja Bachleda), in his fishing nets.  His daughter, Annie (Alison Barry), teaches him that the selkie is a creature of the sea that can take off her seal coat and live with humans. This is nice, quaint premise for a film.

I detect quite another fantasy at work though. Say you’re a down-on-his-luck fisherman of about 35 years with a precocious daughter who’s confined to a wheelchair because of kidney trouble.  Say you’ve broken off with her mother because she drinks too much and you’ve gotten on the wagon yourself. Then, from the depths of the sea, you pull out a woman as gorgeous as Alicja Bachleda and she’s practically obligated to sleep with you, sing lobsters into your pots and cheer your daughter. Did I mention that this woman, a selkie after all, also insists on constantly swimming around in her lingerie? In other words, Ondine seems a particular kind of male fantasy. And I want to know where can I sign up for Syracuse’s life.

Read the full review after the jump.

SIFF Review: Howl

June 14, 2010 at 8:56 AM | Kirk Michael

A White Tank Top Movie Review

The SIFF volunteers at the Egyptian had to shoehorn in all the poetry lovers who wanted to see Allen Ginsberg’s Howl immortalized on screen. Cheek by jowl, we watched as James Franco did his best Ginsberg impersonation, beginning at the beginning: “I saw the best minds of my generation…” This segues right into a jazz riff credit sequence — be bop e dee!

Howl oscillates between four storytelling modes (this, we are told, somehow mimics the four sections of the poem). There is a black and white restaging of the first public reading of “Howl” at Six Gallery in October 1955. Another thread features Ginsberg, now bearded and in full color, undertaking a long interview in New York City. Then there is a self-contained courtroom drama of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s obscenity trial for publishing “Howl.” The final, ill-advised motif is a series of animated sequences based on the poem’s imagery.

That the animations are stylistically inconsistent is a secondary issue — the parade of writing process clichés is the larger problem. Ginsberg is just typing words on his typewriter when — lo — they become musical notes!  He begins pecking more frantically and the words are so incendiary that the page is set on fire! There are literally stars dancing in his eyes when he writes! The animated sequences are kind of like going to the Pacific Science Center to watch Laser Howl.

Read the rest of the review after the jump.

SIFF Review: This Way of Life

June 14, 2010 at 8:05 AM | Kirk Michael

A White Tank Top Movie Review

Not all of us know our fathers from the distant sound of his gun going off, but Llewellyn Karena says, “that’s Dad!” after hearing the crack of a rifle in the first scene of This Way of Life. 

When Peter Karena arrives back home it’s hard to know where to look — there’s the pile of deer with, in the words of another child, “their faces cut off,” and Peter himself, who is laughably good-looking (the closest comparison I can come up with is Val Kilmer as Madmartigan in Willow).  Peter quickly dispenses what has to be the tagline for the film: “What do I do for a living?  I live for a living.”

Read the full review after the jump.

SIFF Review: Stephin Merritt's 20'000 Leagues Under the Sea

June 10, 2010 at 2:04 PM | Robert Ham

The 1999 release of the three-CD magnum opus 69 Love Songs by the Magnetic Fields brought a wealth of critical and commercial attention for the band's principal songwriter Stephin Merritt. As well, Merritt began to receive a variety of offers to translate his musical and lyrical brilliance for other media.

In the eleven years since, he has written incidental music for film and helped adapt a trio of Chinese plays and the Neil Gaiman book Coraline into stage musicals.

More recently, Merritt was commissioned to write and perform a live musical score for a 1916 silent film adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, which played to rousing response at this year's San Francisco International Film Festival.

Maintaining their fine track record for adding unusual and exciting events to the calendar each year, the organizers of the Seattle International Film Festival — who are friendly with the San Francisco fest — brought the entire 20,000 Leagues experience to an nearly packed Paramount Theater on Wednesday.

Joining Merritt was accordionist Daniel Handler, better known to bibliophiles as Lemony Snicket, author of the Series Of Unfortunate Events books; Daniel Hegarty, the senior organ player at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco (where this event was originally held in 2009); and a horn player who alternated between baritone and trumpet.

Merritt didn't take great liberties with the material he was scoring — adding a few fantastic songs to accompany certain scenes, a smattering of dialogue (with Handler taking on the few female roles in the film), and plenty of ambient noise and sound effects to fill out the lilting music that his small ensemble kept up throughout.

The same can't be said for the makers of this film adaptation. They stuck closely enough to Jules Verne's original novel that focuses on a group of castaways who, after being sent to investigate an evil monster that is sinking ships in the Atlantic, are rescued by Captain Nemo and taken onboard his submarine.

Read the full review after the jump.

SIFF Review: The Wild Hunt

June 8, 2010 at 1:40 PM | Corey Kahler

Before the screening of The Wild Hunt, director Aleandre Franchi described his motivation for making the film as a rejection of modern cinematic mythology, wherein heroes are perfect beings "out of touch with the human condition," in contrast to ancient mythology, which had flawed gods and hereos.

The characters of Hunt pretend to be heroes of ancient mythology — Viking warlords, Celtic shamans, King Arthur, elven princesses — and Franchi hits the modern human condition on the head, as these characters have many flaws, their attempts to escape to these mythological worlds being chief among them.

Read the rest of the review after the jump.

SIFF Review: Upperdog

June 8, 2010 at 9:31 AM | Kirk Michael

A White Tank Top Movie Review

You never know when you’re going to walk into a slick Hollywood movie made in Norway but that’s what happened with Sara Johnsen’s Upperdog. While it may seem disappointing to see standard fare romantic comedy at SIFF, I was buoyed. It’s not like Hollywood itself is turning out any good films in the genre (hello: Killers).

The biggest difference is that the Norwegian actors are much better looking than their American counterparts. You can keep Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl. Give me the somewhat-tall, dark and handsome Hermann Sabado as spoiled Axel and Agnieszka Grochowska as his family’s new maid Maria (picture a Norse-Pole Zooey Deschanel). Give me the radiant Bang Chau as Axel’s long lost half-sister. And, for the love of god, give me Mads Sjøgård Pettersen as the ex-soldier Per, who must have walked onto the set straight from an Abercrombie & Fitch shoot.

Read the full review after the jump.

SIFF Review: Seattle's own Morning

June 7, 2010 at 12:01 PM | Kirk Michael

A White Tank Top Movie Review

The rapidity with which we become acquainted with Andrew Ramaglia’s stomach bile and mucus is a sign of things to come in Joe Mitacek’s Morning.

Ramaglia plays Mike Hade (one letter away from hell!), a man for whom rolling out of a pickup and vomiting seems like regular occurrence. These escapades would be more charming if he didn’t have a wife, Sara (Emily Cline) and a two-year-old son, Jack (P.J. Caniff) at home.

But since this is film shot in Seattle, my focus was: where is he throwing up? Is that Ballard pavement? 

Read the full review after the jump.