SIFF '09: My Faves
SIFF has wrapped up for another year, which means I'm likely to be more visible with something other than updates on what movie I'm seeing today. Over the course of the last three-and-a-half weeks, I saw a total of 40 feature-length movies and ten packages of shorts (plus one feature and one shorts package outside the festival proper).
I had faint hopes for a while of daily LJ updates, followed by marginally more realistic hopes of summaries every week or so, but ended up doing silly things like work and sleep when I wasn't otherwise at films. As a result, I'm going to try and skip exhaustive completeness for two or three posts worth of highlights, starting with my personal faves, those for which I feel obliged to actively fanboy a bit. (Please note that I make no pretense that these are any sort of objective "best of..." even taking into consideration the fact that there were far more movies I didn't see at all.)
We Live in Public
The story of Josh Harris, who founded a "new media" online video network with echoes of today's G4 in the 90s when it still raised eyebrows, created an underground panopticon/Stanford Prison Experiment "performance art experiment" that went way off the rails, and (with his girlfriend) wired his apartment for webcams and chat windows everywhere (yes, everywhere - ewww) until keeping up with the "site hits" on their life (and losing a fortune in the dot-com meltdown at the same time) drove them nuts enough that they broke up.
I went back and forth a bit on whether this one would make this shortlist or go into the "other very good" pile. On the one hand, Harris is very clearly an opportunistic master of the sensational, and even as the subject of the doc it leaves the feeling you're being played as part of another, upcoming scheme. On the other hand, it raises such interesting coffee topics: it clearly anticipates both reality TV and blogs/facebook/twitter, although it's open to questions about how much the psychological effects of the original "art" can be generalized (Harris clearly has more issues than average). It also begs a lot of comparisons to issues of intellectual property around "community-generated content". After a couple of post-breakdown Walden's Pond exercises, Harris has made attempts at a comeback, and clearly seems to be trying again, but it's interesting to speculate as to whether he can get out in front again or if he's trying to cling so hard to his old fortés that he's unable to overcome being lapped. Intriguing counts for a lot.
Dodsworth
A 1936 archival based on the Sinclair Lewis novel of the same name, it holds up remarkably well despite very clearly being a product of its time, as the life of American ex-pats in Europe increasingly pulls a couple in different directions. Doubly impressive when you consider that, at this time, movies discussing topics like adultery and divorce "simply couldn't be made" in Hollywood.
2081
One of the shorts from the Shorts Fest opening night program, an adapation of Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron. The filmmaker, Chandler Tuttle, said he chose to film this story because it was well-suited to a short - it was a very well-contained story that wouldn't come off feeling like a frustrated feature. That's still a tall order to deliver on: there's so much going on at once for much of this story that it's very hard to give all of the puzzle pieces the attention they need, both for effect and to avoid big gaps in why things happen, without bogging down. Tuttle acknowledges that his early drafts ran into exactly this problem, but he did an incredible job of distilling it down to exactly what he needed. If you know the story, you also know that the central premise is intentionally absurd, which could make it hard to get the necessary gravitas by the end, but Tuttle does a good job of acknowledging that and running with the humor early, only to increasingly sucker-punch you as it plays out. One of a number of very good examples this year of the short film at its strongest, rather than just as a demo reel for a feature, as well as one of several examples of how this was a good year at SIFF for thoughtful, literate SF.
Blessed Virgin
Another short, this one from Mexico, on the village craftsman who carves religious figures, and the frailty of human judgement.
Humpday
Locally-produced story of two guys who, in a moment of intoxicated poor decision making, decide to a) enter local free weekly The Stranger's Hump! amateur porn festival, and b) knock it out of the park by using themselves (both straight guys) as the two principals. Having come up with this, of course, they both have far too much macho pride to be the first to back down. Plus, there's the matter of what (and when) to tell the one gent's new wife exactly what they have planned for their Sunday night. The comedic chemistry is consistently spot on and frequently fall-down-funny (the dialogue, and even much of the business, was a combination of workshopping and improvisation rather than being strictly scripted, and the principals are absolutely brilliant at it). Unflinching in skewering much of what can be mocked about the male ego. And utterly, utterly not worksafe.
Cold Souls
Paul Giamatti plays an actor named, well, Paul Giamatti who, struggling with the psychic weight of getting into character for Checkhov's "Uncle Vanya" decides to go through a process worthy of P.K. Dick in which his soul is extracted and put into storage. The results of this play out against the back-and-forth of a "mule" at the center of the grey-legal movement of Russian souls into the US (where they can be rented by those who've had their own souls put in storage). There are a few holes here and there if you push hard enough - clearly, you have to accept that there are whimsical aspects to the central mechanic and just run with it - and I have serious doubts about how it would have done with, say, Keanu in the leading role, but this is the sort of deadpan dark humor Giamatti was born to play.
Sweet Crude
[See also: http://www.sweetcrudemovie.com/] Another local filmmaker, but this time with a documentary that started filming several years ago as the story of a new school being built in Nigeria and turned into an account of the rapid militarization between the oil industry and the local communities of the Niger Delta. There are a couple of points where the cynic might accuse the filmmakers of naivite (especially with 20/20 hindsight) but their core point is still evident: attempts to squash dissent through heavy-handed crackdowns are leading to even more people turning to violence, it's poised to get much, much worse, and this may be the last window where a third-party could provide the neutral mediation and monitoring that may be the only way to get past the distrust and defuse the situation.
I had faint hopes for a while of daily LJ updates, followed by marginally more realistic hopes of summaries every week or so, but ended up doing silly things like work and sleep when I wasn't otherwise at films. As a result, I'm going to try and skip exhaustive completeness for two or three posts worth of highlights, starting with my personal faves, those for which I feel obliged to actively fanboy a bit. (Please note that I make no pretense that these are any sort of objective "best of..." even taking into consideration the fact that there were far more movies I didn't see at all.)
We Live in Public
The story of Josh Harris, who founded a "new media" online video network with echoes of today's G4 in the 90s when it still raised eyebrows, created an underground panopticon/Stanford Prison Experiment "performance art experiment" that went way off the rails, and (with his girlfriend) wired his apartment for webcams and chat windows everywhere (yes, everywhere - ewww) until keeping up with the "site hits" on their life (and losing a fortune in the dot-com meltdown at the same time) drove them nuts enough that they broke up.
I went back and forth a bit on whether this one would make this shortlist or go into the "other very good" pile. On the one hand, Harris is very clearly an opportunistic master of the sensational, and even as the subject of the doc it leaves the feeling you're being played as part of another, upcoming scheme. On the other hand, it raises such interesting coffee topics: it clearly anticipates both reality TV and blogs/facebook/twitter, although it's open to questions about how much the psychological effects of the original "art" can be generalized (Harris clearly has more issues than average). It also begs a lot of comparisons to issues of intellectual property around "community-generated content". After a couple of post-breakdown Walden's Pond exercises, Harris has made attempts at a comeback, and clearly seems to be trying again, but it's interesting to speculate as to whether he can get out in front again or if he's trying to cling so hard to his old fortés that he's unable to overcome being lapped. Intriguing counts for a lot.
Dodsworth
A 1936 archival based on the Sinclair Lewis novel of the same name, it holds up remarkably well despite very clearly being a product of its time, as the life of American ex-pats in Europe increasingly pulls a couple in different directions. Doubly impressive when you consider that, at this time, movies discussing topics like adultery and divorce "simply couldn't be made" in Hollywood.
2081
One of the shorts from the Shorts Fest opening night program, an adapation of Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron. The filmmaker, Chandler Tuttle, said he chose to film this story because it was well-suited to a short - it was a very well-contained story that wouldn't come off feeling like a frustrated feature. That's still a tall order to deliver on: there's so much going on at once for much of this story that it's very hard to give all of the puzzle pieces the attention they need, both for effect and to avoid big gaps in why things happen, without bogging down. Tuttle acknowledges that his early drafts ran into exactly this problem, but he did an incredible job of distilling it down to exactly what he needed. If you know the story, you also know that the central premise is intentionally absurd, which could make it hard to get the necessary gravitas by the end, but Tuttle does a good job of acknowledging that and running with the humor early, only to increasingly sucker-punch you as it plays out. One of a number of very good examples this year of the short film at its strongest, rather than just as a demo reel for a feature, as well as one of several examples of how this was a good year at SIFF for thoughtful, literate SF.
Blessed Virgin
Another short, this one from Mexico, on the village craftsman who carves religious figures, and the frailty of human judgement.
Humpday
Locally-produced story of two guys who, in a moment of intoxicated poor decision making, decide to a) enter local free weekly The Stranger's Hump! amateur porn festival, and b) knock it out of the park by using themselves (both straight guys) as the two principals. Having come up with this, of course, they both have far too much macho pride to be the first to back down. Plus, there's the matter of what (and when) to tell the one gent's new wife exactly what they have planned for their Sunday night. The comedic chemistry is consistently spot on and frequently fall-down-funny (the dialogue, and even much of the business, was a combination of workshopping and improvisation rather than being strictly scripted, and the principals are absolutely brilliant at it). Unflinching in skewering much of what can be mocked about the male ego. And utterly, utterly not worksafe.
Cold Souls
Paul Giamatti plays an actor named, well, Paul Giamatti who, struggling with the psychic weight of getting into character for Checkhov's "Uncle Vanya" decides to go through a process worthy of P.K. Dick in which his soul is extracted and put into storage. The results of this play out against the back-and-forth of a "mule" at the center of the grey-legal movement of Russian souls into the US (where they can be rented by those who've had their own souls put in storage). There are a few holes here and there if you push hard enough - clearly, you have to accept that there are whimsical aspects to the central mechanic and just run with it - and I have serious doubts about how it would have done with, say, Keanu in the leading role, but this is the sort of deadpan dark humor Giamatti was born to play.
Sweet Crude
[See also: http://www.sweetcrudemovie.com/] Another local filmmaker, but this time with a documentary that started filming several years ago as the story of a new school being built in Nigeria and turned into an account of the rapid militarization between the oil industry and the local communities of the Niger Delta. There are a couple of points where the cynic might accuse the filmmakers of naivite (especially with 20/20 hindsight) but their core point is still evident: attempts to squash dissent through heavy-handed crackdowns are leading to even more people turning to violence, it's poised to get much, much worse, and this may be the last window where a third-party could provide the neutral mediation and monitoring that may be the only way to get past the distrust and defuse the situation.