SIFF '09: Other recommendations
Also very good and worth recommending:
- Morris: A Life with Bells On - fictional documentary about the dark, competitive world of traditional English Morris Dancing. This one probably decays a bit as you get farther from seeing yourself and your friends in it: there were a ton of jokes that the (many) Morris dancers in the audience were clearly getting. It worked well for me, with a background that includes both ECD and 18th Century re-enactments. I think many of the people on my Friends list would also enjoy it, for example...
- The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle - I expect some disagreement on this one; it was surpassing strange and quite a few people felt it went off the rails entirely. It had very cool (one might cautiously say "overly" cool) dialogue from several memorably-drawn characters - which is fun, but often leads to films that get so wrapped up in how cool their writing is that they "tell" rather than "show". It also got very trippy and experimental with the visuals - which is fun, but often leads to films that get so wrapped up in how avant garde they can look that they forget to make the characters interesting human beings. You can see where this is going: take two films that would otherwise be fatally flawed in exactly complementing ways and pull them together into one, and they can prop each other up in ways that less mature filmmakers don't manage to achieve.
- I'm No Dummy - documentary about ventriloquism, prominently featuring several popular vents such as Jay Johnson ("Soap"), Jeff Dunham, and Lynn Trefzger, as well as a ton of archival footage of classics.
- Moon - more SF. Sam Rockwell won the audience award for best actor for this one, playing a blue collar guy coming up on the end of his three-year shift at a lunar mining base where he's only had a HAL-like computer for company. Filmmaker Duncan Jones cited influences like Outland and the first Alien, where the protagonists were working joes rather than bright, shiny astronauts, and (while there was obviously a certain amount of digital work in the film) there was very heavy use of old-school model sets for the external shots. Definitely good to see them making the movie on the strength of story and a number of very subtle effects rather than on a ton of very flashy CGI. I was also very impressed with the computer in this one; it succeeded much more for me in feeling like software that had been designed to express a personality for HCI reasons but which occasionally had very alien behaviors when its programming didn't cover an edge case, rather than just an pathologically-calm voice behind a camera lens. (Although scoring Kevin Spacey as the pathologically-calm voice of the computer was inspired; the dude really achieves exactly the effect you want for this story.)
- The Beast Stalker - one of two Hong Kong cops n' gangsters films from Dante Lam this year, and the stronger of the two: the protagonist is an archetype you've probably seen before, but Lam manages to create one of the most interesting and memorable antagonists I've seen in this sort of genre piece. Hollywood would do the basic plot with Jason Statham and some eastern European Dolph Lundgren wannabe who spends the entire movie being implacably threatening. "Implacably threatening" is an important part of Beast Stalker's bad guy, but you'd never make the climax work nearly as well. (Sniper, his other movie in the festival this year, was fine for what it was but never wavered meaningfully from the standard tropes.)
- The Hurt Locker - tense look at a bomb disposal unit in Iraq, weeks before the end of their rotation, when they're joined by a disarming specialist who's very experienced but quite the loose trigger. Fiction, but drawing from accounts by an embedded reporter. I always second-guess my reaction to Iraq war fiction, because I have to keep in mind that I'm seeing it through the filter of someone who really has no clue how accurate it is. I got to compare notes with a couple of vets, one of whom had worked in a unit that coordinated with the bomb guys around the time this movie portrays, and they said it simplified a number of things - "missing security elements" was a phrase I heard a couple of times - but that what it showed did a respectable job of getting the atmosphere without falling into the more common clichés that they've seen.
- Short Term 12 - a fictionalized day for a teen short-term detention center, raw and powerful at 22 minutes in length.
- Wallace and Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death - the 800-pound gorilla in the "Family Picture Show" shorts package.
- One Night - locally-produced short, an intense look at the before and after for a brutal moment of violence
- Utopia, Part 3: The World's Largest Shopping Mall - documentary short on the South China Mall, planned to be the largest mall in the world when it was originally opened in 2005, with room for over 1500 stores - a Vegas Strip-like ghost town with over 99% of its spaces vacant, but too embarassing to fail. Many of the scenes reminded me of Edward Burtnsky's Manufactured Landscapes
- Welgunzer - darkly wacky time machine SF. This is a subgenre that risks getting overdone - between last year's SIFF and the SF Short Film festival in February I've seen several treatments of the basic premise - but this one goes far enough out onto its limb that I can happily watch it again. And hey, how can you not just love the Welgunzerettes, showing up in support of the screening:
- Lowland Fell - it's not just any erotic coming-of-age drama that can work in an iron age bog mummy. Almost certainly not what you're expecting from the description.
- Finding Bliss - earnest but unemployed film school grad trying to make it in Hollywood finally gets a call back from a studio excited about her resumé, only to discover that they're a hardcore porn studio. Initially freaked, she realizes that they have a perfectly good sound stage... and nobody will probably notice if she quietly uses it at night for her own dream movie... There's a RomCom element that actually is necessary for where they want to go with the character, but it's the least autobiographical element (the filmmaker edited for Playboy in her younger days) and the part that did the least for me. Still very, very funny. Interesting to see Denise Richards (in a co-starring role) play interesting games against her typecasting. Plus, I'd love to hear if my sister ends the movie with the same questions the editors in the screening audience had :)
- A Generation of Consolidation - won both the juried and audience awards for best youth filmmaker short, a ten-minute documentary short on media consolidation and the FCC Town Hall meeting in Seattle. The entire video is now up at their website: www.generationofconsolidation.org
- If U Want 2 Get Technical - another FutureWave short, 16-year-old Riaebia Robinson introduces us to her Brooklyn family. Awarded a Special Jury Prize "for its timely and important subject matter portrayed with exceptional familiar intimacy." Also online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgfLbO_kiNU.
- The Spy and the Sparrow - retired spy, estranged from his wife and daughter, struggles to reconnect with the latter but may not be able to leave his life behind entirely. OK, I hear you, this sounds oddly familiar so far, but this the movie Taken would be once it got over the jingoistic testosterone poisoning and grew up. Another local production.
- The Other Bank - Georgian movie (albeit with a highly multinational crew) about an "internally displaced" Georgian boy who decides to make his way back into Abkhazia searching for his father. A quiet, unflinching trek through all the shades of grey in a part of the world where national cultures and official borders don't line up especially well.
- Every Little Step - documentary about A Chorus Line, moving back and forth between the origins of the original production and the multi-month casting process for the 2006 revival. I know I have several families on my friends list with young kids who are fans of musical theater, so here goes: more excerpts than entire numbers; it's not a concert film. Lots of emphasis on the auditions, which is good for "this is what it looks like behind the scenes, where it's a job." Language and topics are what you should expect if you know A Chorus Line, from which they do not shy, but it doesn't generally get more salty than that (and "I don't give a #&$#! about The Red Shoes" almost becomes a running joke as otherwise-earnest readings toss in different euphemisms, although there's at least one in the clear).
