SIFF 2012 Dispatch: Opening Gala, Tibetan Protesters … and Oh Yes, Some Films

The Seattle International Film Festival kicked off last week, with a schedule that looks to be maybe the best overall I’ve seen for this fest — which is saying quite a lot. One of the recurrent themes of this year’s fest is the Washington state film initiative, which the film community here united en masse to support by harassing our state legislators relentlessly until they passed it (personally, I’m still holding a grudge against my own state rep, He-Who-Is-Named-Ross-Hunter, who equally relentlessly tried to cock-block it from even getting it out of his committee until the speaker of the House relieved the committee of the bill and got it on the floor in spite of him).

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!).
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SIFF 2012: SIFF Visitors Guide to Coffee, Eats and Happy Hours

If you’re coming Seattle for a few days for the Seattle International Film Festival, whether as a filmmaker, or press, or just to enjoy the outstanding programming our fest offers, you need to know where to get the best food, the best coffee, and the best happy hours, right? Seattle’s got a wide variety of nooks and crannies and neighborhoods, each with it’s own “must tries” and spots to check out. Relax, I’ve got your back. Here’s your guide to the SIFF venues and what’s near them that’s worth checking out. These are the places I tend to frequent myself, and no doubt I’ve overlooked many places other locals would recommend. If I missed yours, please give a shout to your own fave places.

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SIFF 2012: Opening Weekend Preview

It’s that time of year again when one of the best things about Seattle, the Seattle International Film Festival, is about to get underway. Press screenings have already been churning along here for the past couple weeks (unfortunately my daytime schedule has made it impossible for me to make a single press screening so far) and the fest kicks off tonight with a festive Opening Night Gala at McCaw Hall featuring Lynn Shelton’s film, Your Sister’s Sister, followed by what’s sure to be a loud, crowded party chock full of Seattle film folks networking and noshing on that holy triad of film festival parties: hors d’oeuvres, desserts and free booze.

Because Seattle’s fest is so sprawling — we’re talking 25 days of movies here, folks — I’ve decided to try something a little different this year and do weekend previews of what’s coming up at the fest and my picks each week. I’m hoping that this will allow me to focus a little more on talking up films I’m excited about seeing and what you might want to check out at the fest as it rolls along. Since Seattle’s fest is also kind of spread out geographically, one of the things I like to do myself (and highly recommend to others) is to pick a film I’m interested in seeing, and then also catch whatever’s showing before and after it at the same venue. This is a great way to discover something new at SIFF, and it saves you having to try to park your car multiple times or navigate the bus system to the various venues.

Or you can always try using the SIFFter to find something new and unexpected.

Here’s what’s in store this weekend, once we get past tonight’s Gala start:

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Tolerance and Lines in the Sand

It’s all President Obama’s fault. Last week he made his speech in which he finally openly supported gay marriage, and really, that was pretty amazing. I mean, yes, most of the people who won’t vote for him because of that one issue probably wouldn’t have voted for him anyhow, but still, wrap your head around the enormity of it: the first Black president of the United States, in his first term of office and coming up on what will likely be a tight election, had the balls to stand up and say, ALL people should be treated equally. ALL people should have the right to marry the person they love. Yes.
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Housekeeping

A brief housekeeping note: I’ve taken lately to engaging more in conversations on Twitter and Facebook lately, and only bringing them over here if it’s something that stimulates my interest enough that I feel it’s worth expending the energy on writing a full blog post and continuing to talk about it over here. This is partly due to the immediacy of back-and-forth I can engage in in those forums, but it’s more to do with time, and the reality I’ve come to face that I can neither slow time down nor create more of it, and I am juggling too many balls at once. I still use this space for reviews and curating interesting things I happen upon and occasionally longer posts about art, social issues, politics, religion, or whatever else I feel like writing about, but the day-to-day conversations are tending to happen more over there. You can find me on Twitter under @kimvoynar, and on Facebook under my full name, if you’re so inclined.

Review: Dark Shadows

On paper, it must have sounded good. Dark Shadows, the 1966-71 supernatural soap opera, while dark, was also melodramatic and campy, and who better to mine that material for a new generation than that master of melodramatic camp, Tim Burton, working with frequent Burton flyer Johnny Depp as Barnabas Collins? It must have seemed like a dream project. Unfortunately, this is just not a good movie. I don’t know how you take this source material, with the budget they had to work with and the overall level of talent involved in this project, and still manage not to make something good, but somehow they’ve pulled it off. By the time Alice Cooper shows up, it’s like the band bravely playing on as the Titanic plunges into the icy ocean. Maybe it’s time for Johnny Depp and Tim Burton to take a long break from each other, or perhaps Burton just seriously needs to consider surrounding himself with more people who will be honest and call him out when his emperor has no clothes.
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Review: I Wish

I Wish, a tale of two young brothers separated by their estranged parents who wish for their family to be reunited and happy, is a rare gem of a little film, the kind of film adult cinema lovers will enjoy for its quiet beauty and keen understanding of childhood, but that older kids might appreciate as well. While writer-director Hirokazu Koreeda has clearly made a film about children intended for adults, I Wish could also be a great choice for introducing older kids to a film with subtitles — and to the concept that a story about kids doesn’t have to be action packed or have aliens or zombies or lots of explosions to be worth watching. The themes here around family, loss and forgiveness are universal, and kids from any culture can easily relate to the ways in which we grownups complicate their young lives.

Koichi (Koki Maeda) and his younger brother Ryu (Oshiro Maeda) have separated for six months, with Koichi living with their mother on one end of the island and Ryu on the other with their father. The two boys maintain communication via cell phone conversations which are so well-conceived they could be used in a master class on how to write this kind of dialogue. It’s heart-rending and lovely, as is almost everything about this film. When a new bullet train line is built, the two brothers get it in their heads that at the very moment the opposite trains pass each other for the first time, you can make a wish and it will come true. With a pack of friends eager to make their own wishes, Koichi and Ryu try the only way they can think of to reunite their family.

It’s a simple enough story, but Koreeda’s writing makes it delicately complex as he interweaves subplot and character to create this realistically flawed, yet hopeful family. I always think it’s rather ballsy for a writer-director to filter a feature-length film through the perspective of a character who’s a child. It’s a tricksy thing to pull off, relying on a kid (or kids) to carry your entire film, but Koreeda also displays an able hand working with his engaging young actors, who charm in every frame.

Review: Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish

Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish feels like it wants to be a big, sprawling, artistic statement on art and religion and big life lessons and the chasms that divide us. Unfortunately, while it’s certainly sprawling, it’s also often unruly and chaotic and all over the place, keeping itself from being as profound as it aspires to be by tripping over its own ambitions. I found myself frustrated frequently by writer-director-actor Eve Annenberg’s frenetic approach to integrating classic Shakespeare and Orthodox Judaism with a tale of midlife crisis and faith, even though at times the very things that I found most exasperating were also kind of charming, in their way.
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Are Beauty Pageants Archaic, Demeaning and Sexist?

A friend posted on Facebook this morning that he’d just seen the Miss USA contestants on the Today Show and he can’t believe such an “archaic, demeaning and supremely sexist” thing still exists. Predictably, the men were quick to chime in with comments like, “It will exist as long as men enjoy watching beautiful women…and women enjoyed being watched” and “no body (sic) forces these ladies to be in these things. They want to do it. It is their freedom of choice.”

Perhaps equally predictably, I chimed in with: “Kinda like how nobody “forces” a woman to work as a prostitute/have sex on camera in pornographic films/stay in a abusive relationship, right? So long as men enjoy exploiting women … and women enjoy being exploited by them. Not demeaning or misogynistic at all, nope. Right-o.”

Because goddammit, I hate beauty pageants. No matter how much emphasis they try to put on scholarship and being smart and thoughtfully answering serious questions about world problems, there’s just no getting away from the fact that beauty pageants are first and foremost about putting the bodies of young women on display for men to judge as beautiful, or not. The fact that many of these young women have been training for tiaras since toddlerhood, honing and shaping themselves into some bullshit testosterone-driven sexual fantasy of the perfect Barbie doll woman, that they actually take this competition seriously and try to posit it as anything more than the purely misogynistic, hyper-sexualizing of the female body that it is, makes it that much worse. Why do we let beauty pageant standards define how our daughters have to look in order to be thought (or to think of themselves as) beautiful?

On the other hand, I admit that I don’t tend to feel the same about burlesque, in part because burlesque tends to celebrate a much wider spectrum of what constitutes female beauty, and in part because when I watch a burlesque show, it feels like watching women who are in active control of their sexuality, whereas beauty pageants seem to be just about passively offering female bodies up for display and ogling. I guess other folks might disagree, though, and find burlesque to be more exploitative because it’s inherently more sexual in nature than just parading around in a pageant.

Rebecca Black’s Friday (In Hell)

This needs to be edited about in half, but that aside, it’s still pretty awesome.

Happy Monday!

Getting Stripped

Very excited to share the news that my good friend John Wildman, formerly director of PR for the Dallas Independent Film Fest and current Senior Publicist at Film Society Lincoln Center, is finally getting his long-gestating “post-feminist” horror-thriller project, Stripped, off the ground. Initially planned to film in 2010, the film stalled out for a while over funding concerns but is finally getting made. I read a version of the script, which was co-written by Justina Walford, a couple years ago, and I’ve been hoping ever since to finally see it get made. Stripped will film in and around Dallas in June; you can read the complete press release right here.

RIP Adam Yauch

I hate words like “gone” or “departed” or even “passed on” for someone who’s died. Adam Yauch’s physical body may have expired too damn young, but his spirit and legacy live on through his contributions to the worlds of music and film. And isn’t that sort of immortality, that desire to create something that will exist long after our physical bodies give out, at least a part of why we struggle and work to create art to begin with?

Yauch was an inspiration. Let’s not wallow in tears at his death, but celebrate the life he lived and what he did with it. And then get off our asses and go lay down that album or paint that canvas, or finish that script and shoot that film, because this physical life is short, and time’s wasting.

Review: The Avengers

Warning: Potentially minor spoilers here, but nothing that should ruin anything for you. Still, if you want to be totally blind going in, come back after you’ve seen it.

Comic geeks can collectively sigh with deep relief: Joss Whedon has taken their beloved Avengers and given them back a well-directed, action-packed, brilliantly written film. Note that I say “film” and not “movie,” a distinction I don’t always make with genre films, but it’s worth making the point here that The Avengers is not just action-explosion-capes-and-tights-and-muscles popcorn fare. If you are a Marvel fan, a fan of The Avengers, and a fan of Joss Whedon’s style of writing-directing, you are pretty much guaranteed to walk out of The Avengers feeling supremely satisfied. I don’t know that it’s definitively “the greatest superhero ever” but it comes pretty damn close for me, particularly for the Marvel properties.

This is a smart, well-crafted superhero fare that’s worthy of its source material, while taking advantage of adapting to film to enhance its storytelling. And you might argue that the superhero bar was never very high to begin with, but Whedon certainly raises it here. While he doesn’t frame his shots with quite the meticulous frame-by-frame, religiously adherent comic panel precision Zack Snyder used in The Watchmen, Whedon brings a crisp, brisk, graphic novel feel to The Avengers in the composition of shots and especially the use of light and shadow, while maintaining a flow and energy Watchmen sometimes lacked. And before any of you rabid Marvel fans jump down my throat, I’m not trying to piss anyone off here by comparing Avengers to a DC adaptation. It’s just a reference to the composition of shots, and Whedon’s obvious love of the comic genre, not a debate about Marvel vs DC. (But for the record? Marvel, of course. No contest.)
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Marvel-ous Nerd Words

Why couldn’t we have had vocabulary lists like this back when I was in school? In honor of this weekend’s opening of hotly-anticipated-by-comic-nerds-everywhere The Avengers, Wordnik has culled together a list of Marvel vocabulary words. The cool thing about homeschooling my kids is that they get to have cool spelling and vocabulary words like this because their mom is a geek. See how many of these you can work casually into your own conversations this week, and whether people who don’t know what they mean nod knowingly as if they do.

Here’s a sampling of Wordnik’s Marvel Vocabulary list, the full list can be found over here.

1. Adamantium

Use it in a sentence: “Hugh Jackman reprises the role that made him a superstar, as the fierce fighting machine who possesses amazing healing powers, adamantium claws, and a primal fury known as berserker rage.” (“Wolverine Movie Extended Synopsis,” Comic Book Movie, April 16, 2009)

Definition: Adamantium is, according to the Marvel Universe Wiki, “an artificially-created alloy of iron that is the most impervious substance known on Earth.” The term first appeared in July 1969 in Avengers #66, and may be a play on the noun form of adamant, “a name applied with more or less indefiniteness to various real or imaginary metals or minerals characterized by extreme hardness.” Adamant comes from the Greek adamas, “unconquerable, hard steel, diamond.”

2. flame on

Use it in a sentence: “Instead of giving them terrible illnesses [the cosmic radiation storm] of course turns them into Übermenschen of various sorts, though only Johnny’s new abilities are an unmixed blessing: by shouting “Flame on!” he converts himself into a flying ball of fire.” (Peter Bradshaw, “Fantastic Four,” The Guardian, July 21, 2005)

Definition: Flame on is the catchphrase of Johnny Storm, also known as the Human Torch. Storm first appeared in 1961 in The Fantastic Four #1.

3. Legacy Virus

Use it in a sentence: “In the well-established and often convoluted ‘X-Men’ lore found within the Marvel comic’s continuity, Pyro was a rambunctious villain with the ability to control fire who was a onetime ally of Mystique. He eventually succumbed to the Legacy Virus, a mutant-only disease that posed a danger to all of the series’ main characters.” (Ryan J. Downey, “New Mutants Added to X-Men 2,” MTV.com, May 30, 2002)

Definition: The Legacy Virus is “a deadly disease that attacked the mutant gene, causing its host’s powers to flare out of control before death.” The virus was “based on one that was used 2000 years in the future.”

4. mandroid

Use it in a sentence: “Hammer created the Mandroids with the assistance of the evil genius Ivan Vanko, aka Whiplash (Mickey Rourke), and plans to mass produce them for the military.” (“New Iron Man 2 Stills, Viral Mystery, and Interactive Content,” Reelz, May 4, 2010)

Definition: The mandroid is “battle armor designed by Tony Stark [Iron Man] for use by S.H.I.E.L.D.,” and is a blend of man and android. The mandroid first appeared in December 1971 in Avengers #94. The word android, “an automaton resembling a human being in shape and motions,” was coined in 1847, and comes from the Greek andro, “human,” and edies, “form, shape.” The Online Etymology Dictionary notes that android was “listed as ‘rare’ in [Oxford English Dictionary] 1st edition (1879),” and was popularized around 1951 by science fiction writers.

5. Spidey-sense

Use it in a sentence: “Spider-Man, you will recall, has a ‘spidey-sense‘, which alerts him to impending disaster and gives him time to react suitably.” (Giles Coren, “I had my Spider-Man moment. And I failed,” The Times, May 29, 2010)

Definition: Spidey-sense refers to Spider-Man’s ability to sense danger before it occurs. It “manifests in a tingling feeling at the base of his skull, alerting him to personal danger in proportion to the severity of that danger.” Spidey-sense also refers to intuition or instinct in general.

Adventures in Filmmaking: Bunker Goes to SIFF

I can finally announce that my short film, Bunker, will be premiering at the Seattle International Film Festival in their shorts competition. Can I get a huzzah?! I’m over the moon to have my film screening at SIFF. It’s a tough fest to get into, and it’s Oscar-eligible in the shorts categories. My cast and crew are mostly here in Seattle, so I’m hoping we’ll have a solid hometown turn-out when we screen as part of the SeaTown Stories section during Memorial weekend’s Shortsfest at SIFF.

Huge congrats to my terrific cast, Rachel Delmar and Stefan Hajek, my husband and business partner Mike Hodge, co-producer Melanie Addington, DP Sam Graydon, editor Joe Shapiro, sound wizard Vinny Smith, colorist John Davidson and composer Ken Stringfellow, and the entire, enormously talented crew who helped take my little script and make it into a little movie that we can all be proud to have our names on. You guys rock.