SIFF

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

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.

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.

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.

White Tank Top is a West Side Story-Virgin No More

I’m now convinced that West Side Story is the second best update of Romeo and Juliet ever (the first is, of course, Taylor Swift’s “Love Story”). 

 If only I hadn’t watched the musical thinking about Elvis the whole time. This is Seattle Times critic Misha Berson’s fault. She’s writing a book on West Side Story and one of the nuggets she shared with us in her introduction is that Mr. Presley was the studio’s first choice to play Tony. With all due respect to Richard Beymer, every time I saw him I thought of Elvis. Though maybe with Robert Wise directing, Jerome Robbins choreographing, Leonard Bernstein composing and Stephen Sondheim providing the lyrics, the biggest stars were always behind the camera.

Read the full review after the jump.

Edward Norton in Leaves of Grass

Edward Norton's bouncing back from his post-Hulk funk!

He'll take home the SIFF Golden Space Needle this month, and he plays an Ivy League prof and his own evil twin in Tim Blake Nelson's new Leaves of Grass (a SIFF biggie). Since Ed's a Yalie who got famous playing a two-faced fellow in 1996's Primal Fear, it's got to be great.

But if we could have anything we wanted at SIFF, we'd want to see Ed's movie about his ex-Seattle ex, Courtney Love.

Imagine the OPENING SCENE:

COURTNEY [crawling down a hotel corridor]: Someone gimme some CHOCOLATE!

ED: Shut up and get back in the room, you lunatic, it's 3am.! Who do you think you are?

COURTNEY: I...am...MY OWN EVIL TWIN!

Norton will make appearances at the following SIFF 2010 screenings: American History X on June 3 (he will take part in a post-show Q&A); Fight Club on June 4 (he will introduce the film); Leaves of Grass repeat screening on June 5 (post-show Q&A); 25th Hour on June 5 (he will introduce the film).

For more information, visit siff.net.

A White Tank Top Movie Review

As I pondered whether I was experiencing the worst Memorial Day weekend weather of all time, it cheered me yesterday to know I was going to see a documentary about Brazil, where it was undoubtedly warm and sunny. Perhaps because of the Folk Life festival going on right next to SIFF Cinema, I was joined in the theatre by a number of bearded older men, wearing talismans around their necks. Fitting, since Beyond Ipanema is about music that bridges generic and generational gaps.

Director Guto Barra is obliged to start from the beginning of Brazilian music in America, which is Carmen Miranda, who tried to sneak as much Portuguese as possible into her albums and films. After Carmen came the (slightly) less exoticized export Black Orpheus, which turns the myth into a musical set during Carnival. The bossa nova soundtrack and samba dancing came to the States with the film in 1960 and are influential still.

While I’ve already heard “The Girl from Ipanema” enough to last me a lifetime, the film offers some great tidbits on the song. Did you know that Astrud Gilberto only sang on “The Girl from Ipanema” because it was late and she just happened to be in the studio with her husband João and everyone was drunk and thought it could work because she spoke some English? 

Read the full review after the jump.

White Tank Top Learns to Stay Off That Dirt Road (and Not Mess with Serious SIFF-goers)

I knew Winter’s Bone was going to be a pretty big deal when I saw the SIFF movie-going pros waiting in front of the Egyptian. Their elbows looked sharp from many an armrest skirmish. They spoke knowingly about the improved opening night buzz in Everett. One guy had, somehow, already seen 69 films in the festival and had decided to see Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone for a second time because he liked it so much at a press screening. The quantity of films in such a short period had sadly blurred his memory though. When asked for specifics on films he liked, he turned into my stepfather: “you know…what’s it called…the one with that guy who was in…” 

The pros dispensed other insights fast and furious. Apparently no one is into the “SIFFter” app (sample dialogue from one critic to another who was flipping through a catalogue: “Why don’t you use SIFFter?”  *general laughter*  “Yeah, right—SIFFt this!” *subtle hip thrust*). 

The SIFF buffs also do not appreciate in-theatre smart phone usage by “the bloggers”: “I told him, ‘Hey kid, turn off your fucking iPhone for five seconds!’” (Note: this comment did make me look up from my iPhone, momentarily.)

When patrons of The Owls streamed onto Pine to make room for us, they also noted admiringly that director Cheryl Dunye can bring out impressive quantity of lesbians.

Inside the delightfully cool theatre (SIFF organizers clearly read my complaint about the heat in my Night Catches Us review), Winter’s Bone gripped us from the opening credits and didn’t let go for 90 minutes. As the film progressed, I felt more and more confident in my longstanding belief that there’s no good reason to turn off a country road onto a dirt track.

Read the full review after the jump.

The writing/directing debut of Viennese Feo Aladag is the most engaging tale of oppressed Muslim women I’ve seen since Panar Jahafi’s The Circle.

But instead of an inside Iranian story filmed by an oppressed and imprisoned director, Aladag gives us a dual view of the immigrant Turkish foreign-worker population in Germany. Sibel Kekilli is luminous as Umay, an Istanbul beauty who flees with her young son from a wife-beating conservative guy. Her family has German roots, and she’s cosmopolitan, able to land on her feet as a single mom (with a good German friend’s help) and find work in a restaurant. The authorities in both countries protect her, but they can’t conquer the anti-woman mindset of her extended family.

The setup is necessarily schematic, and the film doesn’t completely transcend its limits: it’s an issue movie about colliding cultures and the chilling shadow of honor killings. What’s interesting is the depth and feeling of Kekilli’s character and the vivid interplay of her family, ranging from outright cartoon brutality to wounded sympathy. When she keeps crashing weddings and trying to force her family to forgive and acknowledge her, she’s like a teenager in a slasher flick. No! Don’t open that door to the basement!

Yet palpable emotional realism redeems formula suspense. One incomprehensible mistake is the translation of the original German title, Die Fremde, which means The Aliens or The Strangers or The Foreign – any of which would beat the flat, senseless When We Leave. It’s the worst movie title translation since Fast Times at Ridgemont High played Switzerland under the title I Think I Just Got Kissed By a Moose.

When We Leave
May 29, 4:00pm
Pacific Place