We like these guys.  The fliers and ground support of Red Tails, also fictional, are mostly war movie types some with colorful tics or descriptive nicknames, like Declan “Winky“ Hall (Leslie Odom. Jr.), Leon “Neon“ Edwards (Kevin Phillips), Andrew “Smoky“ Salem (Neyo), Antwan “Coffee“ Coleman (Andre Royo) and Samuel “Joker“ George (Elijah Kelley). Among the more notable of the bunch, for personality and screen time, are squadron leader Marty “Easy” Julian (Nate Parker), who likes whiskey; Ray “Junior” Gannon (Tristan Wills), who’d rather be “Senior” and whose back row status makes him chamf even more at the bit; and Joe “Lightning” Little (David Oylelowo), the charismatic star pilot, daredevil and lover-boy of the group. (Lightning, a great magnetic character, played with lots of swagger and pizzazz by Oylelowo, is the equivalent to someone like Steve McQueen as “Cooler King” Hilts in The Great Escape, the guy a lot of us wanted to be when we were kids and saw that movie.)

There’s no suspense about what’s going to happen in Red Tails overall, except over who lives and who dies. (Suspense enough for some, I guess). We know who won the war and we aren’t really worried about the Tuskegee group as a whole. So our pleasure in the movie comes from following characters we like though hazardous situations that we know not all will survive.Howard’s Bullard, who’s no go-along guy, keeps up the pressure to get his men their shot and make nonsense out of that “report.” And finally, the brass relents, and the Airmen get to fly (in special signature planes with red-painted tails), and of course they prove themselves magnificently. Some die, some live, and almost all get their moments in the sun and in the exploding skies, in Lucas-style dogfights that look like William Wellman’s Wings crossed with Star Wars. Those fights are, all by themselves, almost enough to recommend this movie, especially if you were a kid who loved the better buddy-buddy war movies like  The Great Escape. (If you did, there’s an escape here too, by impatient Junior, from “Stalag 18” — the one after Stalag 17, of course.)

Writers John Ridley (U-Turn) and Aaron McGruder (Boondocks) don’t try to give these characters, either the officers or the men — or their sometimes supportive white colleagues (played by Bryan Cranston, Gerald McRaney and others) — too much depth or nuance. They try to make them all likable or pungent movie star or character types. They do. It would have been nice if the movie achieved great drama as well as great action. It doesn’t.

Still, Lucas and company — the writers and director Anthony Hemingway (TV‘s well-liked The Wire and CSI:NY) try harder in those areas, psychology and sociology and history,  that most action films tend to skimp on. (Here, Lucas reportedly pitched in on some of the action.)  But,  by telling even a part of the Tuskegee Airmen story, and putting it in a big movie package pitched toward a big audience, with a huge gallery of characters, multiple storylines and dozens of speaking parts, Lucas, and Hemingway and the others, are showing more ambition, trying harder, maybe failing sometimes, but still deserving of that ordinary people’s applause I heard at the screening. I may have wanted to be a Cooler King when I was a kid, so why should we begrudge all those kids today who’d like to be Lightning?

By the way, here’s a salute to the Tuskegee Airmen. They deserve our best — which is probably the whole point of the arguments about the movie. The box-office  argument too.

THIS MEANS WAR (Also Blu-ray) Two Stars

U.S.: McG, 2012 (20th Century Fox)

Let me try to do this one in 25 words or less:

McG’s This Means War: Reese Witherspoon torn between CIA super-agents and ex-pals Chris Pine and Tom Hardy. Ultra-slick. Techno-happy. Obnoxious rom-com. Overblown action. Don’t bother.

There. That’s 25 — counting hyphenated words as one-word. Betcha thought I couldn’t do it.

Extras: Commentary by McG; Three alternate endings with commentary by McG; Deleted scenes with commentary by McG; Gag reel; Trailer (with no commentary by McG).

Much as I admired director Megan Griffiths’ last feature, The Off Hours, when I heard her next project was a film based on a real story about a young girl abducted into the sex trade, who survives by cooperating and allying herself with her captors, I wasn’t convinced that was the best project for the rising director to tackle next. Partly this was because I’d just seen The Whistleblower at last year’s SIFF, and I found that film’s graphic depiction of the sexual and physical torture and abuse of young girls disturbing and gratuitous, and partly it was the question of what value there was in making another film about the illegal sex trade so soon after that one. What more could there be to say?

Turns out, in Griffiths’ capable hands, quite a lot.

The Off Hours demonstrated Griffiths’ keen understanding of subtext and portrayal of relationships and character arc, and she’s used those same skills here to find the angle on this story that would make it reverberate with tension and emotion without being gratuitous or exploitative. On the surface, Eden is about the abduction of young girls who are held captive in the Nevada desert and forced to work in the sex trade; the subtext is that this is a story of survival and the resilience of the human spirit, which Griffiths achieves by keeping her lens squarely focused on Hyun Jae (Jamie Chung, simply terrific here), a 17-year-old girl, renamed “Eden” by her abductors, whose minor moment of rebellion against her traditional Korean-American parents results in her getting abducted into the sex trade, and the complicated moral choices she has to make in order to survive as her situation grows more desperate.

The script, credited to both Griffiths and Richard P. Phillips, firmly keeps the sexual degradation these young girls endure in the shadows of our imagination, rather than voyeuristically serving it up to the audience. We know going in this is based on a true story, that these young girls, roughly aged 12 to 18, were kept in a storage facility and forced to have sex with the kind of men who pay to engage in sex acts with underage girls. It’s a truly reprehensible tale that delves into the murkiest side of human nature, but Griffiths treats her female characters with dignity, respect, and empathy, making Eden a sort of post-feminist perspective on what happened to the real girls these actors represent here.

This smart directorial choice allows Griffiths to focus on her lead character, and to allow Eden’s moral conundrum to serve as the fulcrum around which the story revolves as we see her go from bewilderment to rebellion to a surface acceptance of her circumstances, underscored by a watchful determination to find a way out. How far would you go to survive, if you found yourself caught in a trap? What would you — could you? — do in order to escape? The complexity of Eden as a character requires an incredibly strong and compelling performance by Chung, and she’s more than up to the task here, delivering a career-high turn in this coming-of-age, loss-of-innocence tale.

I suppose I should note that the male characters here, for the most part, are pretty one-note; then again, this is a movie about the kind of men who kidnap and hold young girls captive in order to sell them for sex, and the kind of men who buy young girls to have sex with them. How much is there to say about people like that? The most nuanced and interesting male character here is #2 man Vaughn (Matt O’Leary, who’s having a spectacular run with Eden, Fat Kid Rules the World, and Natural Selection), an ex-Mennonite drug addict who seems to have stumbled into the only job he’s capable of doing. He doesn’t like it, always, and his hair-trigger temper seems always on the edge of an explosion, but he accepts the ugliness of his job with a grim detachment born of a desperate desire to succeed, if nothing else in his life, at this one thing. Griffiths uses the captive Eden and the captor Vaughn as to explore two people both wrestling with moral dilemmas: Eden has to make morally questionable choices in order to survive, but Vaughn, up to his neck in this unsavory job, has to make moral choices as well.

It’s Chung, though, who grabs at your heart and won’t let go, from her first frame as a cute, slightly rebellious, Asian-American teenager with an innocent smile and braces, through her terror at being abducted, her gradual surface acceptance of her fate, and her fierce determination to find a way out when all the other girls around her have long since given up hope. Eden is a solid entry on Griffiths’ already impressive resume, and hopefully will also get Chung enough attention that someone will realize she’s a terrific young actress and give her more roles.

[Click twice.]

And his “Zeigfeld.”

  The tweets after the first screening: c’est incroyable!

Epigraph to the press kit: “History adds that before or after dying he found himself in the presence of God and told Him: “I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself.” The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: “Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.”  Jorge Luis Borges, “Everything and Nothing”

“From dawn to after nightfall, a few hours in the life of Monsieur Oscar, a shadowy character who journeys from one life to the next. He is, in turn, captain of industry, assassin, beggar, monster, family man… He seems to be playing roles, plunging headlong into each part… but where are the cameras? Monsieur Oscar is alone, accompanied only by Céline, the slender blonde woman behind the wheel of the vast engine that transports him in and around Paris. He’s like a conscientious assassin moving from hit to hit. In pursuit of the purely beautiful act, the mysterious driving force, the women and ghosts of past lives. But where is his true home, his family, his rest?”

HIM Jean, there’s something you don’t know. HER About you? HIM About us. Denis Lavant (monsieur oscar / banker / beggar woman / motion capture specialist / monsieur merde / The father / The accordionist / The killer / The victim / The dying man / The man in the house) Carax: “Like cinema itself, Denis comes from the stage, the fairground and the circus. His body is sculpted like those of the athletes chronophotographed by Marey. and when I film this body on the move, I feel the same pleasure I imagine Muybridge felt watching his galloping horse.” Carax: “Holy Motors was born of my incapacity to carry out several projects, all of them in another language and another country. They all ran into the same two obstacles: casting and cash. Fed up with not being able to film, I used Merde, which had been commissioned in Japan, as inspiration. I commissioned myself to make a project under the same conditions, but in France—come up with an inexpensive film, quickly, for a pre-selected actor. All of it made possible by digital cameras, which I despise (they are imposing themselves or being imposed on us), but which seem to reassure everyone. There’s never any initial idea or intention behind a film, but rather a couple of images and feelings that I splice together. For Holy Motors, one of the images I had in mind was of these stretch limousines that have appeared in the last few years. I first saw them in america and now every Sunday in my neighborhood in Paris for Chinese weddings. They’re completely in tune with our times—both showy and tacky. They look good from the outside, but inside there’s the same sad feeling as in a whores’ hotel. They still touch me, though. They’re outdated, like the old futurist toys of the past. I think they mark the end of an era, the era of large, visible machines. These cars very soon became the heart of the film – its motor, if I may put it that way. I imagined them as long vessels carrying humans on their final journeys, their final assignments. The film is therefore a form of science fiction, in which humans, beasts and machines are on the verge of extinction—“sacred motors” linked together by a common fate and solidarity, slaves to an increasingly virtual world. a world from which visible machines, real experiences and actions are gradually disappearing.”

There’s also been lots of love for the Seattle film community generally so far at the fest, as there should be. We are blessed with a remarkable pool of film industry talent here in Seattle — indie film standouts like Lynn Shelton and Megan Griffiths and Ben Kasulke, of course, but also all the talented crew folks here who make it possible for directors to get films made here at all, and a great many talented actors who call Seattle home as well. Director of Programming Beth Barrett, who’s been with the fest for a decade, mentioned during an intro the other night that the first year she worked for SIFF they had maybe five Northwest films on the SIFF slate; this year there are 60-some Northwest Connections films. Lots of talent in this town, and we are as proud of that as we are our rain and our status as hipster heaven (take that, Portlandia and Williamsburg!).

The opening night gala kicked off with Seattle-based rockstar DP Ben Kasulke getting a well-deserved award from Mayor Mike McGinn. Kasulke maybe went a bit over the three minutes they allotted him for his acceptance speech, but it was such a sweet and heartfelt speech, and Kasulke is such a well-liked guy, that nobody cared. The opening night film was Lynn Shelton’s Your Sister’s Sister, which stars Emily Blunt, Rosemarie DeWitt and Mark Duplass. I enjoyed Shelton’s film when I saw it at Toronto, and it held up just as well on the second viewing. It’s a hold review film, which means I can’t review it until it officially opens … but wait — a loophole! I already wrote this film up at Toronto, before it was on hold-review at SIFF! You can see that write-up right over here. Shhhhh.

I almost ditched out on the Opening Night Gala Party when I had a brief moment of crowd anxiety, but we went for a walk around the block until some of the crowd cleared out. Once we did make it inside, I was glad to be there; this was the most fun I’ve had at a larger SIFF party, partly because I shot a film here last year and many of the folks who worked crew on my film Bunker were on-hand for the festivities, so I kept running into people I actually wanted to talk to. The open bar flowed freely, and by later in the night when the “I just want to go to the parties and see people who work in movies” crowd had cleared and it was almost all SIFF and film industry folks left, there were some pretty spectacular moves going on over on the dance floor. I wish I had video, but what happens at SIFF stays at SIFF, right? Right.

I was tied up with kidstuff on Friday, so Saturday was my first full day to get to immerse myself in screenings, and I had quite an eclectic day lined up. I kicked the day off with a random pick: A screening of Old Dog, a Tibetan film about an old man, his restless son, and their aged Mastiff. Old Dog is one of those quiet films, what we sometimes refer to on this side of the industry as “meticulously paced.” Not that meticulously paced is necessarily code word for bad; I’d consider Kelly Reichardt and Claire Denis’ films to fall under that heading, and I love both those filmmakers.

Here, director Pema Tseden explores the quiet tension between the old ways and the new through a simple story of an aged nomadic sheepherder and his son; between them is the family’s old dog, an ancient Mastiff the son sells as the film opens. Tibetan mastiffs, a part of the Tibetan cultural landscape as work animals helping to herd sheep and goats, as well as to protect nomadic families from harm, have become popular boutique pets, and are so rare and worth so much money that they’ve become a commodity worth stealing. The son — and local thugs — argue that the dog will just get stolen if they don’t sell, but the old man stubbornly clings to the tradition, his only concessions to the march of modernization being a television that only seems to receive some Chinese version of the home shopping network, and his insistence that his son and daughter-in-law, who have not yet produced children, go to town to see a doctor to find out why.

As a story about change and generational gaps, Old Dog works in much the same space as Kazakhstani film Tulpan, which made some critical waves a few years back. Old Dog lacks the cinematic artistry that set Tulpan apart, though I’m willing to cut Tseden a little slack given that he was shooting in his remote Tibetan hometown and probably didn’t have access to the kind of equipment and experienced crew most Seattle filmmakers just take for granted. This isn’t a technically impressive film — the sound balance feels off, with ambient noises often very loud while voices can be hard to hear, and Tseden has a tendency to frame a tableaux and then have people walk into it and out of it, which is effective when the frame is composed artistically to begin with, but feels lazy when it’s not, as is often the case here — and I can’t just blame the setting for this. Documentarian Michael Glawogger composes shots of incredible beauty and vivid color amid poverty and ugliness in films like Megacities, Workingman’s Death and Whore’s Glory, but here, everything is just dismal and depressing and blah.

Tseden does capture well the feel of a place that seems frozen in time amidst a changing world, uncovering surprising moments of gentle humor in a seemingly endless, laughably inept game of pool at an outdoor table beneath the town’s tiny police headquarters, a baby goat wandering with a herd getting distracted by blowing trash, and a sheep, separated from its flock by a fence, bleating desperately as it seeks a way to rejoin its fellows on the right side of the pasture. And the film’s tragic ending — which, I hear, spurred angry walkouts at the film’s first SIFF screening Friday night — feels very much like a statement about a dying way of life amid the march of progress and the extreme measures one must sometimes take to stand on principles. Tseden has been making a name for himself as a rare Tibetan filmmaker telling stories about Tibet, and as Old Dog hasn’t gotten official approval to be shown in China yet, the fest circuit is a rare opportunity to see it.

Often the Q&As at SIFF screenings are pretty good, but this one was heading south fast with questions like “Is the grass in that part of Tibet always brown, or is it green sometimes?” when suddenly I noticed there were some people standing in the aisle next to me. The tallish guy standing right by me raised his hand and, seemingly innocuously, asked why the director and translator were speaking in Chinese. It was all downhill from there. “You don’t even speak Tibetan, do you?” he demanded, and then he and the older gentleman next to him proceeded to accuse the director of being a Chinese agent making films that are, essentially, communist propaganda. Like many of my fellow audience members, at this point I was thinking, “Wait, wait … Here I was just thinking this movie is subtly PRO-Tibet and now the director’s being accused of being a Chinese agent? What did I miss?” I was intrigued, and really would have liked to have seen an impromptu panel to discuss these issues, but there was a programming schedule to keep, and the director was looking very upset and flummoxed, which I guess is understandable.

Then the director and the older guy started arguing back and forth in Tibetan, and I nudged the tall guy and asked him to translate, but he was distracted trying to get the Tibetan monk who had accompanied the director to the screening to back up the protesters views. “Why don’t you say something?” the man angrily demanded of the saffron-clad monk, who stoically avoided eye contact. “Having a monk with you doesn’t make you Tibetan!” the man angrily shouted at the director, while the older man’s daughter shouted “Free Tibet!” By far the most engaging fest Q&A I’ve seen since Joyce McKinney crashed fest screenings of Tabloid last year with her clone dog, and hats off to my friend Dustin Kaspar, who was moderating the screening, for handling the Q&A takeover with grace under pressure.

The protestors left peacefully enough; I was kind of hoping they’d be lurking around the Harvard Exit hoping to go after the director some more, but alas, they had departed or been asked nicely to leave. And by the bye, before any Tibet protesters jump down my throat, I’m not making light of the very real issues affecting Tibet, and I’m not being facetious when I say I would have liked to hear some more in depth discussion around why exactly these protesters had targeted this particular director and this film. If you know who they are, point them my way because I’d love to talk to them about exactly what issues they were trying to shine a light on.

After that bit of unexpected excitement, I headed over to the other side of Capitol Hill for a trifecta of diverse cinematic fare: Matthew Lillard’s directorial debut Fat Kid Rules the World, Megan Griffith’s sophomore effort, the sex-trade drama Eden, and Bobcat Goldthwait’s searingly funny black comedy God Bless America. The latter is also a hold review film, but guess what? I reviewed it at TIFF too! Reviews of Fat Kid and Eden coming shortly.

It is the ultimate nightmare of a parent – even of a 2 year old – to think they will be victims, victimizers, or perhaps worse, silent witnesses to the abuse of others when standing up for honor is only dangerous as a social abstraction.

Michel Franco’s Despues de Lucia is about this horror show. There are myriad reasons for the slide down the slippery slope. The banality and childishness of choices makes it all the more horrifying. Gaspar Noe would have a hard time delivering any more pain than is on display here. And fools like Eli Roth embody in their work the ugly carelessness shown by many of the characters here.

And yet, it is all too imaginable. Franco smartly navigates the circumstances to keep it from feeling like Grand Guignol, but horrifyingly, I fear that the truth may be equal or worse.

I didn’t see Bully, so I can’t compare. But my heart was beating out of my chest through much of the film. “Tell them! Tell them!” I wanted to scream. But I never did. And the characters in the movie… well… you’ll have to see it.